Soul Boom - Adam Grant Breaks the Confidence Myth

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Adam Grant (NYT bestselling author of Think Again and organizational psychologist at Wharton) joins us to unpack why everything we believe about confidence might be backward. From navigating failure and perfectionism to learning how to detach worth from work, Adam explores why passion isn’t something you “find,” how spirituality intersects with identity, and how reframing narratives can lead to a more meaningful life. Plus, the secret to motivation might not be what you think. THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! Fetzer 👉⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.stamps.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⏯️ SUBSCRIBE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👕 MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📩 SUBSTACK!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  FOLLOW US! 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 👉 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  CONTACT US! Sponsor Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Work with Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The mistake a lot of people make, when they encounter a failure or a setback, they fall victim to three peas. This sounds like classic Adam Grant. Personalization, this is all my fault. Pervasiveness is going to ruin every part of my life. In permanence, it's going to ruin it forever. And all of a sudden, it hit me. I had the relationship between confidence and action backward. The only way I would build my confidence was...

Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Adam, I like to warm into things a little bit, and I just wanted you to know that there are three things, at least that you have deeply in common with Jason Statham. Okay, wait, I know two of them. You know two of them?

I'm bald like him. And he is a much more elite diver than I was. That's right. Oh my gosh. How did you know that? I mean, it's a sport without a lot of people to look up to who are famous. Literally the top celebrities in springboard diving are Jason's Tatham and Adam Grant. There's a long drop off from one to two if that's your thesis.

But yeah, actually before I knew of him as an actor, I had seen him compete on the international stage. You're kidding me. Three meter a springboard diver. a 10-meter platform diver. He was a British star. Yeah, he was on the British, like, national diving team. Forever. Like, he could have been in the Olympics or something like that.

I have multiple domains of envy because of him. Incredible. And you got the paint right. That was not by choice. What's the third, though? You're both Leo's. Oh, we're not going to talk about astrology, are we? Yeah.

No. You're an astrology hater? I'm not a hater. I just, you know, follow the scientific. method and therefore object to the existence of all things astrological. Okay, but let me tell you a funny story. Okay. So my wife is totally into astrology.

Uh-oh. She has her own astrologer. Oh. Okay. So every couple of months, she has an astrology session. They go over the charts and the future and the paths and this and that. And she was taking a trip to Italy, my wife, walking across big swathes of Tuscany. and her astrologer said,

right when you come back from Italy, the Pope will die. Wow. She got back from Italy the next day the Pope died. Is her astrologer involved in murdering holy figures? She's high up at the Vatican. Yeah. Okay. She's the official Vatican astrologer.

And so, no, she's... What did you learn about life from being a competitive springboard diver? And I really honestly mean that question. I learned that you should never take on a sport that requires There's no fear if you're afraid of heights and afraid of getting lost in midair. Bad choice for me. And did that happen to you? Were there times when you were like, that sounds utterly terrifying?

Like you're in midair and you're like, oh, shit, I don't know what's going to go. Yeah. In some ways, it's scarier than any other part of diving. Just, like, I've never felt that loss doing anything else. And like, the idea that you're going to hurl yourself into flips and twists and then you're going to get yourself back on axis and go in straight. on your head, it mostly works, but every once in a while, something goes haywire, and you feel like you're just cartwheeling, and you don't know if down is up or left is right,

and then the smack comes, and you don't know what part of your body is going to hit so you can't brace yourself. That sounds terrifying. Rare of that, but I actually, because of those challenges, I learned a lot from it. What gave you the impossibly lunatic bravery to undertake that? I don't know what I was thinking, honestly, but I, you know, I'd already failed at basketball and soccer. I was going through the list of sports.

And just I saw a state finalist diver one day when I was at a local pool doing flips and twists and I was mesmerized. And I just wanted to learn how to do it. Yeah. Because of my fear, I would just stand on the end of the board shaking when it was time to try a new dive. Like I would be frozen. I couldn't get myself to take the first step, let alone the leap. And this was a persistent problem for years. And I remember finally one day, I just, I froze for the last.

longest I'd ever frozen. It must have been 45 minutes. And I was supposed to do a full twisting two and a half, which is two flips, a 360 turn, and then a dive. My coach, Eric Best, just looked at me and he said, Adam, are you going to do this dive? And I was like, ever? One day, I hope to do this dive. And he said, great, what are you waiting for? And all of a sudden it hit me. I didn't have the language for it. at the time, but now looking back, I had the relationship between confidence and action backward. I was waiting until I felt confident to take the leap. Oh.

But the only way I would build my confidence was by taking the leap. And that diving lesson has been with me every time I felt fear. This sounds like classic Adam Grant Nugget right there. Does it? Yeah. Has this been in one of your books? I don't think it has. That's amazing.

So let's break that down a little bit. So rather than being at the edge of the diving board and feeling like you need to summon a certain measure of confidence. And then, okay, now I feel the confidence. And I, you know, I'm no longer shaking. I'm no longer nervous. I know exactly what I'm going to do. Then you take the leap.

Yeah. You have to take the leap over and over again to build the confidence to mail it. But the stakes are quite high because you could belly flop. Exactly. Which I didn't, thankfully, I'm not one. Yeah.

But other times, I did. And I think, you know, this is, obviously it works really well as a diving metaphor. but it applies to so many different walks of life. I remember when I got invited to give my first TED talk, I was afraid of public speaking. And I heard Eric's voice in my head. Do you want to give a talk about your ideas like this one day?

Yes, then what are you waiting for? I was really hesitant to start writing books. Is that something I want to do one day? Yes, then what am I waiting for? And I do think that generally speaking, action builds confidence. It's not the case that we need confidence to act. That's amazing. As you're saying that, I'm thinking,

because I'm trying to ready a film to take out to potentially direct. This would be my first time. I've directed some TV stuff, but I feel the same way. There is part of me that's really, I'm really reticent to, number one, like, put myself out as a director to say, hey, Rain Wilson is directing. I was like, what, the guy played Dwight once a direct?

Oh, he wants to be like Krasinski now? Like, you know what I mean? Like, I hear these voices in my head, and I genuinely feel some fear around that. But it's not even the fear of the act of directing itself, although that can be pretty intense. I mean, you're in charge of anywhere from 50 to 200 people at a time. The schedule is dependent on you,

the look and feel of the film, the performances are, you know, it all kind of comes down to one single person. It's almost like being the quarterback in the NFL. But really my fear has to do, like, how is this going to be received? So there's like an insecurity there.

What do you think? I didn't know you cared so much about what other people thought, especially strangers. I present the opposite, but I'm, I deeply, deeply care what people think about me. Why? I think it just goes back to, I hate to use the often overused T word trauma, but that's just how I grew up. I think there's, there's part of me that's kind of fused with my adolescent self that wants, you know, all actors in a, And to a certain degree, to a certain degree, all actors want to be loved and they want attention to be paid. They want to be adored.

And they want people to just like them and like, hey, look at me. There's a little bit of that. I think there's a handful. There's a certain percentage of the population that really don't operate in that sphere. But, you know, there's a, I've been in a lot of therapy to try and unpack some of this stuff. Isn't part of the joy of directing, though, that you're not. in the spotlight the same way, and it's less about you, and it's more about, can I help create

something that's loved? Yeah, but at the end of the day, if the movie sucks, it's mostly on you. I mean, people don't understand, like, there's a myriad of things that can go wrong. You know, the producers can insist on a different final cut, you know, they're going to insist on changes to the script. The lead actor can all of a sudden just have a completely different take on, you know, the story you're trying to tell. There's all kinds of ways that a movie can fall apart. It can be budgetary issues and schedule issues. And a lot of times, movies just don't gel,

but nine times out of ten, if a movie doesn't work, they're going to blame the director. So there is that fear. I mean, what if I direct my first feature film, and it flops? Okay, so I think one of the great misfortunes of becoming a director is it seems like it might be

the opposite of diving, where we break everything down into pieces and you do a lead-up. So before the two and a half with a full twist, there's a double with a full twist. all you have to do is fall on your head afterward, which you've been practicing for all the years you've been diving. Yeah.

In your case, there's no, you weren't assistant director, or for you, it would have been assistant to the director. Assistant to the regional director, yeah. Exactly. You're just going right from I was in front of the camera to now I'm running the show. Mm-hmm. Are there no intermediate steps?

Is there no training? Well, I've directed some television, which gives you a good sense of training. But also, like, when you're acting on the set, you're watching directors work. I've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours watching directors work, thousands of hours watching directors work. And when I'm there, I'm always watching like,

how do they communicate to the actors? Where are they putting the cameras? How are they envisioning the kind of the look and feel of the story that they're telling? And I'll talk to them about it and pick their brains and stuff like that. So in a weird way, I've spent 25 years in a laboratory apprenticeship, kind of learning this skill set. Yeah, you've been shadowing. I've been shadowing.

So if the film fails, what has the director most often done wrong? Jason Reitman told me a great thing once. He said the number one mistake the directors make is they don't keep everyone in the same film. And it's tone. It's keeping everyone in the same tone. If you have a farce, everyone needs to be in the same farce. If you're in a drama, everyone needs to be in the same drama. And it's tricky.

Like, how do you communicate that to actors? because you don't want to alienate them and be like, hey, you're being way too big, like, bring it down. Like, how do you stay attuned to what the tone is and how do you bring the dials up and down on the actors to make sure they're in the same movie? So interesting because, yeah, and thinking about juxtaposing this against your theater life,

where everyone rehearses together. Right. As opposed to the piecemeal nature of making a film means I might not see the scene that precedes mine. Right. And sometimes someone's in a film and they're not even acting at all with other people,

the film. They're in the B story or C story. They're like the villain and they're off over here. And you know, you want to make sure that you're, that they're all telling the same story. Like there's this amazing comedy farce film called The Death of Stalin by Armando Inucci. It's got Jason Isaacs in it as I think Stalin and it's all, it's, it's a farce about kind of the warped nature of Stalin-ish Russia. It is a miracle to behold because all of these outlandishly great actors are all in this really difficult to act kind of farce, where it's very heightened, but the stakes are very real. That's a great example of, I think, some just great directing of keeping an ensemble

of actors in the same movie. Why didn't you recommend it to me before so that we could discuss? I know. I feel deprived. Would you have, you would not have taken two hours before this interview to watch. It depends on how good you think it is. Let's just go back to the springboard diving. Was it nature or nurture that has allowed you to be a competitive springboard diver and a professional TED speaker and a professional author and all the things you've most greatly feared you have encountered and gone through?

And that's probably made you an even richer, you know, experiencer of those acts. Is that your parents instill that in you? Is that something in your nature? And then how can we talk to like young folk who are experiencing this mental health epidemic? And resilience is something I really wanted to talk to you about. Failing, trying, failing better, trying again. How might there be some lessons around that from these examples? Oh, so nature and nurture questions are always dissatisfying in psychology.

Okay. Because it's always a mix of the two. Yeah. And you never know in an individual case, how much is each. even the things you think your parents taught you, you also inherited their genetic tendencies. Right. And so it's really hard to split that atom.

Yeah. No pun intended. So, sorry. Couldn't resist. I think what is useful is thinking about, okay, what are the habits that allow people to overcome those kinds of obstacles? And a great psychologist here at Penn, Marty Sellingman, found, you, I think you're father of positive psychology.

There you go. I'm a huge fan. I'm a Sellingman fan girl, totally. I think you'd be a fan boy, but... Either way. I don't know. Anyway, his, I think his classic research suggested that the mistake a lot of people make is when they encounter a failure or a setback, they fall victim to three peas, which are personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence. Personalization, this is all my fault.

Pervasiveness is going to ruin every part of my life. And permanence, it's going to ruin it forever. Yeah. And I think in his early studies, he studied life insurance salespeople who get rejected all the time. And the ones who managed to stick with it. You should study actors. Well, I was going to say, if you were making yourself available for this kind of research, you might not have landed the career that you did.

Yeah. But we would love to study you and your peers. The people who managed to stick with it and succeed were the ones who said, okay, I may have contributed to my failure, but there's something I can do to. change it. I'm not stuck with it forever. It's specific to this one job that I applied for that rejected me, which might have been a bad fit as opposed to I'm a bad candidate. And, you know, I'm probably going to feel differently in a week or a month than I do right now. So I'm not going to wallow in the pain of the present. I'm going to zoom out and, you know, think about how this might

change. And those are the kinds of, I guess, the basic habits that I've applied to different kinds of struggles. Like, I remember my first book when I submitted it to my literary agent. I was supposed to write a book proposal and I got so into it. I just poured out 1002 or 103,000 words. Oh my goodness.

And I sent it along and Richard said, I don't even think your academic colleagues will finish this. And my first reaction was maybe I'm not cut out to write a book. It was just too kind of thick. It was too academic.

and inaccessible? It was in the weeds of the studies and the theories as opposed to, here's the big idea, here's a story to bring it to life, here's the most interesting data. You hadn't become friends with Malcolm Gladwell yet. I had not. Definitely not. And needed a little bit more of that.

But Richard said to me, I said, do you think I can do this? And he said, of course, just write like you teach, not like you write academic journal articles. It's like, oh, okay, I already have a mental model for where, in a different part of my job, I'm constantly trying to figure out how to bring research to life and make studies surprising and counterintuitive or at least not intuitive. And I have a whole process for how I do that. I just need to do it like this the same way it comes out of my mouth. Right. That was a great moment where, you know, it reminded me, resilience is something that we often

locate in people's heads. We shouldn't. Very often it comes from your circumstances. And if you're lucky to have, you know, a coach or a mentor or a parent who believes in you and tells you, hey, like, do not personalize this, do not make this permanent, do not make this pervasive. It's a lot easier to bounce back or bounce forward, isn't it? I get a lot of pushback from this, and I've gotten in trouble several times online by saying this, but I see this young generation, kind of young millennials and Gen Z as really struggling with this resilience component. I don't necessarily know that they're suffering more, but I feel like it is more difficult for this generation to kind of get out of suffering or out of victimhood

or move past setbacks and failures. It's hard to speak generationally, but I'm going to do it. So, Sue, I'm going to hear from you in the comment section below. It's all right. But I see it in my son's friends and generation, and I speak a lot of college campuses. And from what I hear and from Soul Pancake and Soul Boom and my interactions with with folks. of this generation, it often feels like those three peas are getting lodged into people's psyches in an unhealthy way. What do you think it is about the modern world that is making those kind of land deeper? Is it a screen-based social media kind of thing? If you're looking on your phone all the time and you're just seeing other people's successes all the time,

then you ask someone out on a date, they say no, and then you don't ask anyone out on a date for a year because you feel rejected, you've personalized it, you've made it permanent, something like that. It's possible. I mean, I think there's certainly plenty of evidence to point toward social media is unhelpful in that way. You're always about the data. You're always about the data. That's supposed to be a compliment, Rayne. Come on. We love data. I know, I know you're more of a philosopher. No, no, I love the data. No, I love other people that know the data because I don't. Well, and I love other people that ask the questions that lead me to think about what data should we be gathering or looking up. Yeah.

I don't think social media is net helpful in this way. Are you on team height, Jonathan Haidt? I don't think we should be on teams. I think we should be looking for the truth. I think John has started a really important conversation and brought a lot of data to the four. And it's a complex phenomenon. It looks a little bit different for different groups of people and different countries. I think that the social comparisons that people make are often unhelpful.

And social media is not serving us well in this way, right? It should be the case that every time you see someone who's succeeding and you're failing, like what an algorithm then serves you is somebody who went through 100 rejections and then number 101 was a big success. We don't get that one, right? We just, we wallow in the, oh, that person's success was effortless. and, you know, I'm really struggling. I think that's a factor. I think there's also, I wonder how much of this is social media amplifies subgroups

and makes narratives seem more prominent than they really are in people's daily lives. Oh, interesting. So as a simple example, like, I constantly hear this complaint that, like, Gen Z is not resilient. I don't actually see that trend in the data anywhere. What I see is, like, the people in Gen Z. who are struggling with mental health are much more vocal about it than previous generations were.

And I think that's in part because mental health has been normalized or mental illness challenges have become more discussable than they were, which is a good thing. I think it's in part also because there's a norm of self-expression that pervades social media

that allows people to share things that they might have only said to, you know, a friend or a family member now get, those get broadcast. But suicides are way up in Gen Z from a social media, from other generations. That's not just vocalization. That's, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. No, I mean, that's, that's a hugely concerning problem. But,

yeah, I think one of the world's leading suicidologists, Matthew Knox, has, you know, has basically highlighted that suicide is very difficult to predict. And suicide rates actually don't consistently track with rates of mental illness, you know, at the country level or the population level, which is sort of complicated. There's also, Jen Sr. wrote a beautiful article a few years back about sort of happiness and mental health challenges that people face. And she covered some evidence suggesting that the majority of people who attempt suicide, if they survive, never try again.

You could wonder if there's something different about the people who end up dying by suicide from those who attempt it but survive. Was that more of a cry for help? for example. But I think that the trend of the data to me suggests that for many people, the sense of despair that leads them to want to take their own life is not permanent. And surviving that often turns a page or opens a door that shifts things for them. And so I'm really hesitant to say, okay, suicides are up among a generation. Therefore, the generation lacks resilience.

I just want to give a big thank you and a gigantic shout out to one of our sponsors, the Fetzer Institute. In an era where mental health is a growing concern, Fetzer's insights into the role of spirituality and building resilience isn't just timely, it's essential. They offer hope for what so many of us are seeking. Thank you for your support. Fetzer. Visit them at fetzer.org.

What else can you say about Gen Z besides the fact that they're more kind of vocal about their mental health issues? What else can we say about Gen Z? This is a good question. How do you answer that question in an empirically responsible, non-inflammatory manner? Here's what I think. We're actually doing a podcast on age and generational myths right now. Okay. And one of the things that I see again and again in the data is basically, every generation has criticized the younger generation on the same dimensions that we're perhaps judging Gen Z a little bit on now. And my read is that every generation basically wants the same things and has slightly different ways of expressing those desires.

And sometimes people overreact to the way that the value is communicated, not realizing that the underlying value is the same. For example, like every generation wants quality of life. older generations were a little bit more willing to sacrifice the amount of time they had with their family to work to provide. And Gen Z is a little bit more vocal about not doing that. But at the end of the day, they all want to provide for their families, right? I think also a lot of the different, that has been a huge shift over the last 10 years where young people more and more are looking for quality of life in their workplace and in their kind of work life balance.

And this does give them a lot of shit from Gen Xers and boomers about like, we used to work 87 hours a week and not complain about it. And this generation is calling bullshit on that. They are. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But if you want to live in Bushwick and eat avocado toast every day, you got to work for it. Well, here's what's interesting about that is yes, this generation is, you know, sounding the alarm or objecting, but they're not actually on average working fewer hours than millennials

did or gen X or student. Interesting. And so it may well be that what we're reacting to is the complaining, right, what they're saying as opposed to the behavior of what they're doing. You've been teaching now for, what is it, 15 years? Have you noticed a difference from the students now from when you started? And what difference do you think COVID might have made in that? Oh.

So the biggest difference that I've seen over my 15 years here at Penn is. is there are more students, more impatient for their climb up the career ladder than in the past. So when I got here, 2009, there were a lot of students who had big career dreams and wanted to know what should be on my 10-year plan in order to get there. And I had to explain to them you can't make a 10-year plan. You can plan one or two steps ahead. Right. Now it's much more, I want to be at the same destination in two years. Right. How do I get that? Right. And with that expectation of a meteoric rise, I think comes a, what someone call what leaders. Yeah, pressure, pressure to succeed fast. Coupled with an expectation that you're

going to have a voice right away in your workplace. Yeah. Yeah. And my agent is at a big agency. She complains about this all the time. She said the new, the new folks she's bringing on to the agency, they start as an assistant, right? So you're getting coffee and you're just answering phones and you're scheduling, right? That's all you're doing. and she's had to go through several young assistants who have really kind of thrown up their arms because they thought, like, I thought this was going to be more collaborative. Meanwhile, she's been an agent for like 35 years. Like, you know, why don't you sit there for a couple years, just listen to the phone calls,

learn, schedule, learn, get some coffees. You're going to learn a lot at the end of a period of time. Well, so I think that's in part a failure of teachers and in part a failure of leaders. So the teacher failure is we've created an illusion at universities that the day you graduate, your learning is over and now you can start succeeding. Interesting. And I think that's such a big mistake. I think I actually have had a lot of conversations with students who think it's selfish

to prioritize learning in their first or second job. Well, was it selfish to go to college and spend four years just learning? You're helping no one. Right. No one at all. Well, no, I was making an investment in my education. and growth. Why do you think that education should stop the day you get a diploma? It shouldn't. Choose your first job or two to try to figure out how you can learn the most, and then you're better

equipped to make a bigger difference later. That's amazing. Would be my guidance. That's great. I'm so grateful for this company called the acting company. I got out of acting training school at NYU. And there was this company called the acting company. And it was a bridge company. It was specifically, we're going to take actors who want to do theater. We're going to take them out of school. We're going to tour with them for a year or two. They're going to go on tour. They're going to teach workshops. They're going to be doing Romeo and Juliet in like high school cafeterias and little civic auditoriums around the country. You'll get your equity card. But I'm so grateful for that experience. It's been two years helping put up sets and learning and performing in big spaces and small spaces

and just kind of like cutting my teeth. And then I was a lot more prepared to go into the workplace. I love that. And I mean, it didn't stop there, right? Remind me how many, years did it take until you got your big? Well, it was 10 years in the theater before I did any TV or film. And then it was another three or four years of, you know, doing piddley TV and film before I got the office. So it was like, it was, I was an overnight success after 14 years in the business. There you go. And without that training, you have to wonder, like, could you have played Dwight five years earlier? Yeah, yeah. Where would you come down in that? No, absolutely not. And there's, there's a whole series of stories sometimes when I talk to young actors that I tell about all of the

hardships and failures that I had along the way to getting Dwight. Like one of them, I got my first Broadway show. It was at the roundabout theater. I was cast in a lead. I was like 28 years old. I was like, oh my God, this is it. But along with that came all this pressure. I'm going to get a New York Times review. Maybe I'll get an Emmy award or no, a Tony award. Maybe I'll sign with the William Morris agency. Oh. And all that pressure made me really stiff and self-consum. and the rehearsal process was a bust and I really was bad and I sucked. And I got bad reviews and I was not good in the play. It was horrible.

It was a miserable experience. There's nothing worse than doing a play for four months in which you know that you suck. And I got out the other side and at the end of it I was like, fuck this. I am done. I am done playing this game of the pressure and, oh, I might get discovered and this and feeling like I need to be like Mr. New York actor man. I'm like, I'm kind of a weird guy. I wear glasses.

I get my clothes at thrift stores. This is who I really am. And I was like, I'm not playing that game anymore. And I kind of re-engage with my acting career with a lot more kind of verve and authenticity. And embraced kind of my inner weirdo, so to speak. And thank God, because had I not. bombed on Broadway, I never really would have been prepared to play Dwight Shrewd. Wow.

So. The outer weirdo. Yes. I took my inner weirdo and brought him to the outer weirdo. So, and, you know, I have so many stories like that about how failures, obstacles, setbacks actually prepared me, primed the pump and opened the door for eventual greater success down the line. That's such an interesting response to failure, though, because so many people after failing would become even less of themselves.

and say, okay, let me now study exactly what the audience wants and let me model myself after these other actors who are making it when I'm not. What gave you the courage to say, I'm not playing that game anymore? I don't know exactly, but I've always had in me a little bit of the rebel. I know I don't really look or sound like a rebel right now.

You're seeing a rapidly decaying, middle-aged man in front of you. But it was a little bit of like, Fuck all y'all. Like, I'm just going to do, I got to be me. And it was a little bit of like Joe Strummer, you know, in the middle of that, who was my absolute hero on my Mount Rushmore. Another thing is, my father was a lack of a better word, a failed artist. He wanted to be an artist. And he painted all these paintings, but he would never try and sell them.

And he would write these books, but he'd never really try and get them out there and get people to read them. and I saw how sad that made him and frustrated it made him. And I also saw kind of how he lived a little bit as a victim of not kind of taking the reins and moving his career forward. So I kind of knew for me like, hey, if I'm going to make it in the arts, which are so hard, I have to, you know, I have to put my whole time and attention not just into my craftsmanship, but into also building the business side of who. I was. So I think that was also a motivator. Sometimes we can learn from our parents' mistakes and there can be intergenerational solving for success. Oh, I like that. What's the term for it? It's intergenerational buffering. Oh, basically cycle breaking of, you know, you see a parental unit. Where's that from? Coneheads. Parental unit. Yes. Oh, I like that. Do it again. Parental unit.

We're going to do consumption of mass quantities later. Consumption of mass quantities of Cheetos. What did they eat? They always like beer or something. I remember. I don't remember. I only remember that movie because there was a diving scene, which totally was backward. You're such a diving nerd.

I know. I prefer diving geek, just to be clear. I think it's so interesting to say, okay, you watch your parents make the same mistake over and over again. And that makes you determine to break the cycle. and just make a choice, I will not, I will not make the same mistake. And maybe, you know, it disproves, I feel like a lot of people sort of make excuses for not learning vicariously from others' failures by saying, well, sometimes you just have to commit the error yourself to learn from it. Yeah. I think someone as close to you as a parent making the mistake is close enough that it almost feels like your failure.

So leave that door open to be able to learn from other people's failures, especially someone as close to you as your parent. Yeah, and I mean, you don't want to internalize it to the point that it reflects on you. And you feel like you're embarrassed by a parent's failure. But I think that a little bit of identification, it sounds like in your case was healthy. Like, I don't want to be the artist who never sells a painting. You know, one of the things that fascinates me about you is I have a very kind of like an anti-gouru stance. Like I, when there are people who are like online saying, you must remember to act like this. and if you do this and this,

then you will have, things will come into your life and you will do X, Y, and Z. But in a weird way, you're kind of like this, I'm sorry. Don't go there. You were able to do it somehow. You were able to have your face and kind of have like a line of text

about how to think about something. And you know what? God damn it, you're always freaking right. Is that because it's based on data? Not always right. But, yeah, I try to... Well, you're not always right? Like, what have you said?

What have you put out in one of your, like, many posts, whether Twitter or Instagram or substack, I don't know where else you are, that you kind of whiffed on and you wish you could take back? Oh, I've got, I mean, I've gotten tons of things wrong over the years. I try to correct them before I post them. Okay. But there are exceptions.

I think one thing I got wrong was I wrote a New York Times op-ed in, I want to say it was in 2016 about, it was a case against authenticity. Wow. And I said, it's interesting given the story. I was just trumpeting my finding my authenticity. Yeah. I came around to your point of view. But I think I miss explained the point I was trying to make.

The point I was trying to make, well, let me tell you what I said first. And what I was wrong. You know that you're reaching back nine years to find one thing that you were wrong. No, no, no, there are lots of others. But this one was a really big, unforced error. Okay. Because what I was concerned about was people using authenticity as an excuse to either refuse to change bad habits or to be assholes for other people. Yeah.

And I was not okay with that. I get that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, I read all this research showing that people who, are, do you know the distinction between high and low self-monitors? No. Oh, we should talk about this. Okay. Okay. So there was a psychologist Mark Snyder who put this distinction on the map. High self-monitors are people who are always reading the room

to decide how to act. And low self-monitors are people who basically are like, this is who I am. I'm going to be that person regardless of where I am. So Pam is a high self-monitor and Michael Scott is a low self-monitor. Michael Scott might be the lowest self-monitor in the history of TV. I love that. Except that he's not, right? Because he's trying to be famous and he's different when the camera is there. Right. That's interesting because his goal is to be a high self-monitor.

Yes, but he's really bad at it. He's just the worst at it. So just a bad actor, which low self-moniters generally are. There's both a motivation and an ability component of that. And so there's some really entertaining experiments. Like back in the 70s and 80s, you would, you would, Psychologists would do these experiments where you serve people a steak and then you watch what they do with it. And the low self-moniters would just salt it no matter, like before tasting it.

Because they had a salt personality that was like a certain amount of salt and every steak need salt. Yeah. Yeah. And the high self-moniters would sample it and then say, well, this particular state. What does it need? Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Anyway, long story short, if you look at the research on career success. And that's Dwight Shrewt, by the way. We're going to cut in the footage of Dwight Shrewd eating the pancakes. And he's like, pouring the syrup and like the salt and like eating when he's meeting with Jan trying to backstab Michael. Dwight, I think, is a, he has low self-monitoring ability but high motivation.

Okay. Which is a real challenge, right? Because he cares a lot about his image, but he's not good at figuring out how to achieve the desired image. I feel like you could do a psychology class entirely based on characters from the office. What makes you think I haven't? The number of office clips that I show in my classes exceeds all. other clips combined.

That's awesome. And really, for every concept I teach, there is a scene. Adam, I don't you honorary shrewd. Wow. Yeah. I don't think I'm worthy of that honor. You are not, but nonetheless. That's exactly what a shrew would say.

Ah, yes. Well, well played. I feel seen. Well played. But were you making a larger point about the high self-monitor? Yeah. So the finding from many studies in lots of different jobs is high self-moniters have more career success than low self-moniters.

Okay. Makes sense. They're better at managing their reputations. They figure out who needs help and they try to be helpful to them. They, you know, they don't commit, like, faux paul, like, all the time. They don't have as many career limiting moves. And so I looked at that research and said, you know what, this authenticity thing, like, no, we're doing this backward. And there was a, there was a, do you know, Lionel Trilling?

Social critic or literary critic? Yeah. Social critic. Trilling wrote this great piece years ago where he said, instead of authenticity, we should have sincerity. Where authenticity is starting from the inside and bringing that out. And sincerity, he said, is paying attention to the person you claim to be and then trying to bring that in.

I was like, oh, maybe we should do more of that. Well, I completely missed the boat with this argument. Okay. Because the way I wrote it, it sounded like I was saying, don't be yourself. And you should not be. concerned about what your values are and not be true to your identity. Like, no, that's not what I meant. So what kind of blowback did you get on it? A lot. Was it letters? Was it academics? Was it the New York

Times editorial staff? How did how did that work? It actually, I mean, I got a lot of criticism for it. A lot of it was just readers of the times. You know, hateful comments, the emails, you know the drill. Yeah. And I realized that what I wasn't trying to argue for, I wasn't arguing a against authenticity. What I was arguing for was a particular way of thinking about authenticity, which is to say that authenticity without boundaries is careless, and authenticity without empathy is selfish. And so I don't want you to be the kind of person who says, well, this is just who I am, which is an excuse to be a jerk. I want you to be the kind of person who says, what I value is being a person who both expresses my principles and cares about being respectful

of other people's principles. And I've got to figure out how to thread that needle, which is in some ways actually more authentic because you're appealing to more than one of your values. But what I'm hearing there, and I think this is a really important conversation, is values. We don't talk about values very much

because they get kind of lumped over with morals, which is a very powder keg kind of issue. Judgy, yeah. And can feel judgy and like where do morals come from? And do they come from the Bible? And how does that work? but everyone has values and everyone can calibrate their values and want to live according to their values. And oftentimes people don't, well, first of all, we don't educate children about values.

They're not coming up with their lists of values and meditating on their values and consulting about their values and, you know, aggregating their values as they become young adults. but couldn't we be doing way more to educate young folks on like, this is important to me and this is not. This is who I want to be. This is what integrity looks like when I carry it through. You know, how do I want to move my life forward according to my values that might come partially from my religious background,

partially from my parents, partially from society, and partially just from what I observe and what I've gleaned on my own journey? This is what I love about you in Soul Boom. Okay. Yes. Okay. Of course, we should be teaching values. Yeah.

Not shoving values down children's throats, but encouraging them to think about what are their guiding principles and what's important to them. And I mean... How do we do that? Well, we could go to the research way or the personal way. Where do you want to take this conversation? Okay. Let's start with research. Yeah, let's start with the research.

So one of my favorite studies on teaching values was Samuel and Pearl O'Linner sociologists. They studied Holocaust rescuers. Wow. non-Jews who risked their lives to save complete strangers during the Holocaust. And they got hundreds of these rescuers and then bystanders who were raised in the same community but didn't stick their necks out to help. Wow. And they tried to basically reverse engineer what was different about the rescuers. And there were a lot of non-findings.

But one of the differences was that the parents of the rescuers tended to teach values. values over rules. How can we differentiate values, rules, morals, and ethics? Oh, all right. So morals and ethics, I think about as, you know, as statements about right and wrong. Okay. I think values are slightly different. They're statements about what's important to you.

Ah. Which could be either moral or for other personal reasons. When I think about rules, I think about them as basically binding expectations. And the rescuers benefited from, it seems, having parents who, instead of saying, do what I say because I'm your dad or I'm your mom, when they made a mistake or, you know, stayed up past curfew or hurt somebody's feelings, their parents encouraged them to reflect on the consequences of their actions. And so they would say, how do you think this made someone else feel? I was up worrying about you when you didn't make it home in time for curfew. And their kids. How do you think that impacts me? Exactly. Let's think about the effects of your behavior on others.

And then maybe in the short run, their kids felt guilty. Now, is that just increased compassion? Maybe. Because sometimes it's hard to take a teenager and say, hey, don't just think about yourself and what feels good and what feels right in the moment. Like, hey, let's pause for a second. Let's think about the reverberations here. Yes.

How did this impact others? And then there's like, oh, you see this, you know, you see this in kids. their light bulbs go on. Like, oh, wow. I didn't, I hadn't thought of that. So that's the Holocaust rescuer version of teaching values. Okay. So of our rules. But there's also a creative version of this. Okay. There's some evidence that highly creative kids, as rated by their teachers in school,

were more likely to come from families with fewer rules. Okay, wait. Say that again? So highly creative kids were raised by parents who had fewer household rules. Wow. Okay. And also by parents who tend to fight more. Wow. I don't know that that's a good thing. No, so they're not nasty like fistfights.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not shouting more. But when I think about that, I think about a lot of creative folks that, you know, Kurt Cobain growing up in a family where there's divorce and fighting and no rules. And yeah, he created one of the greatest rock bands of all time, but it was also prone to addiction and we know how that ended. Yeah, I'm thinking of not the Nirvana version. but the more everyday version,

which is too many parents fight behind closed doors because they want to protect their kids. They're then teaching the message, though, that it's not okay to disagree. Right. As opposed to modeling how to have a constructive fight. Yeah, my wife and I always would talk about that.

Like, let's have an, we're having an argument, and we'd start an argument, and Walter would be in the room, and we'd be like, hey, Walter, do you notice that we're having an argument? Do you see how we disagree on this? Because I thought this and your mom thought this, and then he would pipe in and like,

well, mom's right, because she didn't. I was like, okay, slow your roll. Oh, there, Haas. You know, we... Who invited you to this fight? And then I was like, shut the fuck up. No. But then, you know, we get to argue about it.

And then we get to, like, work it out, you know? And even if there's an apology to be had, hey, Walter, do you notice that I apologized to your mom because I did X, Y, and Z, and she thought, blah, blah, blah. And then, yeah, I think... There's a lesson there in conflict resolution and emotion regulation skills. Mm-hmm.

But then the creativity comes from realizing when, you know, when two people disagree, agree and they're both adults, there may not be a right answer here. And I have to learn to think for myself. I need to be open to alternative ways of looking at a problem, which is good for divergent thinking. And then when rules did exist in these households that raised highly creative kids, they tended to have a value behind them. If we go back to the curfew example, it's, this is a safety decision. And let's talk about why that's important. And, let's talk about why that's important and why we think this hour as opposed to just like you're coming back by 11 and follow the rule

otherwise you're punished yeah yeah exactly interesting so yeah i think we could teach values so let's let's talk about how this works personally so during covid um we we had a lot of a lot of free time not knowing what to do is a lot of people did my wife alison and i sat down and we actually decided we were going to ask our kids to write what they think our family values should be and so they like each of our three kids made a list and then we made our list and then we basically pooled them all. And we found there were five or six values on everyone's list. Whoa, you could make like a coat of arms. Oh. And hang it on the wall. Where were you in 2020? A family crest. But this is a great activity for a family to undertake with their children. I love this idea. Yeah. Is there a Wilson crest?

No. No. I feel like there should be and it shouldn't be a tennis ball. Why don't you leave the comedy to Okay. All right, funny guy? I didn't even get a courtesy laugh. No. I'm just glad it wasn't a Wilson volleyball joke. I feel like the castaway reference

has been done too many times. It's been done. It has been done. No, there's not a Wilson Crest, but I love that idea. And then you can also, if you want to get really creative, you create like a Game of Thrones, like your sigil and like,

what's the animal of your family house? And then you get to design it together. What does it stand for? But ensconced in the middle are your values, you know, those five. like core principles that guide you. I think you have to be careful

because this could just breed a whole family of narcissists. That's true. It's like, uh, and then we'll get matching tattoos of the eagle holding a sword with our five virtues on them. Exactly.

And we'll go to war across the cul-de-sac with the Johnsons who do not share our values. Well, I'm actually thinking Billy Madison, this is how O'Doyle became O'Doyle rules. Or the mandol bombs in Seinfeld. In both, like, they must have had, like, the family crests.

I love the pop culture references. You're letting them fly. It's fantastic. It's just comedy. But I think what was really powerful about it was that the values, when we did this exercise, the values came from our kids. And it showed us that actually they already knew what was important to us. But also, they had some better ways of phrasing things that were, like, we hadn't explained well.

And so, you know, we came out with this list of, you know, we value generosity. We value joy. we value learning, we value integrity, we value grid. And then we had a really good debate about how to prioritize those when two values would be intention. So Allison and I didn't agree on whether kindness or happiness was more important. And it was actually helpful to talk that through with our kids. I wonder, you're making me think now, could people do this in extended families?

What if multiple immediate families do this? And then you figure out, like, okay, this is why we like these cousins. This is why these cousins are not as exciting to hang out with. They clash on core values. But is this part of what's happening in the United States right now, to a large extent, it's a little bit simplistic, but you kind of have these kind of two populations, kind of experiencing the world in two very different ways, the political left and political right.

And there seems to be, even with left and right, back in like the 70s or 80s, there seem to be a kind of a set of shared values. This is what it means to be an American, let's say. And now I don't want to get you in trouble politically, but now there really isn't a set of shared values. It seems like there's people with very, very different values. So I might reframe that a little bit. Okay.

I think the core of our problem is that we're divided by opinions instead of realizing we could be united by values. Ah, interesting. Let's take an example like, climate change, an issue you care deeply about and have been working hard on. There's a lot of research now

on moral reframing that says like, you know, the sort of the standard arguments made by the left around, okay, we need to, you know, protect the planet for future generations. You know, we're doing them an injustice. We need to be more compassionate.

They kind of appeal to prototypically liberal ideals. If you were to reframe that same argument and say we're creating an impure planet, an appeal to the more conservative, you know,

ethos of purity. If you were to appeal to authority and say, you know, actually, like, there are, you know, great wise elders who have cautioned us for generations about, you know, protecting our planet,

you actually get more uptake. And so, you know, I think this actually goes back to the generational differences. Now it's it's a political difference of, you know, the deep- Or you're soiling God's beautiful creation. Yeah. Something like that. The religious version of that will work very well for a segment of, you know,

mostly the right, not entirely. We may all want the same things, but we respond to different kinds of arguments about how to get those things. And I don't think we're doing enough of thinking through, how do I communicate the message that I care about, instead of telling you why you should adopt my idea. I should think a little bit about how to explain this in a way that resonates with your view. Right, right.

I mean, Arthur Brooks says we just need to learn to disagree better. And that's part of what you're talking about. Argument illiteracy is a huge problem in this country. Interesting. But it's not just that because it doesn't even have to get to the point of disagreement yet. It can start with, like, here are the principles that we are all aligned on. Nobody wants to create a disgusting planet. And yeah, conservatives are more worried about that and liberals are less worried.

about that, but none of us like that concept. Right. Let's talk about now what we do about it. How would you educate someone in argument literacy? You got like three hot tips. Oh. Number one, show some humility going into the argument. So I've been called a logic bully.

My wife had to explain it wasn't a compliment. You're like, yeah, I've got logic. It's on my side. And I'm fiercely making my point. Like, submit to my facts. data. If you don't buy my evidence, I don't know why I were here. What happens is that that shifts me into prosecuting attorney mode. And the other person brings their best defense attorney to court. And nobody learns anything or changes their mind. What I've learned to do is come into an argument

and say, I've been told I could be the world's most annoying prosecuting lawyer. And I don't want to be like that. So if you catch me doing that, please call me out. Wow. That's powerful. But no one's doing this, Adam. No one's bringing humility to a knife fight, you know? I mean, look, when I do that. On the left or the right. When I do that, the other person will usually own up to one of their limitations. Ah, yeah.

And so then we're making a mutual commitment. Well, sometimes I can pontificate and I can lecture and I can be a know-it-all. You do have that habit, Rain. Yes. Wow. Forget you. You're no longer a shrewd. Revoked.

Dope. Shrote. Revoked. I tried. tried. No, I don't think you have that habit. In fact, you keep turning the conversation around on me. That's what the podcasts do. That's what I'm supposed to do. I guess. I don't know. All right, that's one. Show some humility as a starting point. Number two, listen. Right. It actually turns out that if you're going to talk to somebody who disagrees with you,

you can be more persuasive by listening than arguing. Because a really good listener asks tricky questions, complicated questions, that bring out the ambivalence. Explain what you mean, you know. Oh, you think climate change is a myth perpetrated by, you know, liberal scientists. Like, explain that. Where do you... Okay. So that one runs the risk of just leading them to double down.

Okay. What you want to do is ask a question, this comes out of the science of motivational interviewing. You want to ask a question like, you know, it's like, I've heard a lot of extreme opinion on climate change. You seem like a really reasonable person. What are your thoughts on this issue? And like when have you felt like we were just making a big deal out of this? And it's a mountain out of a molehill and we're kind of in a moral panic.

And when have you felt like, you know, maybe we should be doing a little more and the recycling movement isn't cutting it? Talk to me. Like talk to me about your feelings about that. Yeah. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. It's a little bit of a reframe there.

Yeah. Or another version of this. puts the conversation in a certain context. It does, and it allows you to articulate your views in a way that won't lead you to get judged by me. I'm putting out there, look, this is complicated, and there's a whole spectrum of views, and you are probably somewhere in this fully acceptable range. Another version of that would be, you know, if you've already disavowed climate science, and you just said you think it's all bunk, what I would say is, you know,

And that's so interesting that you think that. Like, tell me what kind of evidence would change your mind? Like, what proof would you have to see that would convince you? That's good. Because to most of those people, I imagine, there isn't any evidence that would ever change their mind. Maybe unless, like, Donald Trump came out and said, climate change is real. I've done work.

It's actually real. You got to trust me on this. That's not evidence, by the way. But maybe it would be a persuasive source for them. Yeah. But yeah, I think in very rare cases, people will. say nothing would change my mind. And then what I've said in response to that is, I appreciate you sharing that with me. This is a religion for you. It's a matter of faith. You are not persuadable.

And so I don't want to waste your time with this argument. And more often than not, they will backpedal at that moment and say, well, no, no, no, actually, you know, there is, well, what if there was this kind of study? And then we can go and explore whether that kind of research exists together. Interesting. But more often than not, instead of saying, you know, nothing would change my mind, they will say, well, you know, I, like, I need to see a study that wasn't funded by, you know, fill in the blank bias group. And I need to see. Or academic institution or UN-backed institution. Yeah, we need a neutral source.

And then, you know, we need data that, you know, that aren't too narrow in, you know, in the following few decades because we know that, you know, some of- I need to see a study funded by Newsmax. I don't think they fund studies. They'll start to give you parameters. And that, what happens there is, is that you are learning what they find convincing. And the less, the more you disagree with someone, the less you know about how to persuade them, because you don't think like they think. And so you should be trying to understand their reasoning so that then you can argue on their

terms instead of yours. That's amazing. And then, can I give you a third principle? Yeah, please. Ask me for a third principle. Adam, could we get a third principle? No. I ran out at two.

No, I have one. I think at the end of an argument, sorry. Yeah, okay, I got one. I think that a lot of people say, well, let's just agree to disagree when an argument goes off the rails. We don't want to, you know,

we don't want to create irreparable damage. You know, we don't want to ruin the relationship. That sounds good to me. Is that not helpful? I think it's actually a mistake. It does both of you a disservice. Oh, wow, okay. What I would love to see more people do,

is say, okay, let's agree that we currently disagree. And now, instead of arguing to win, let's debrief to learn. Is there something I said that lost you that I should be aware of the next time I have this kind of debate? Oh. Is there something I could have said that would have swayed you? Yeah, a little bit. Or at least would have led you to think I'm not an idiot. And then, you know, the hope is that the next time you and I argue about something else, we can apply that.

The next time I'm in a, you know, a debate with some. somebody else I can learn. And that way, I'm actually getting better at arguing because guess what? You just fought with me. You are a great person to give me feedback and advice. I want your notes. Wow. Don't end there. And if we couldn't see eye to eye on the content of the argument, we can at least align a little bit about the process and how we can do it better moving forward. What do you think? I love it. That's fantastic. You teach the Wharton School of Business. A lot of what you do is kind of occupational psychology. How do we work better? How our

company's more effective, what makes employees happier, what increases well-being. But you're doing this within systems that for a lot of young people today and a lot of old people too, frankly, seem to be breaking down by every measure. You can do all the studies you want about how to increase well-being, you know, in academia or in the healthcare industry or in agriculture or something like that. But these systems seem to be inherently broken. I mean, our health care system is one of the most broken systems. In the history of the human race, the American healthcare system might be the most brokenest

of all the systems ever. Do you feel like was something like that, like the system should just be scrapped and rethought from the ground up? Do you think that there's tweaks that can be made? Do you think if, oh, if they just managed this a little bit better, we can fix existing systems? And I'm talking about all of them, because anyone who works in any system out there, education, talk to a school teacher, going to inner city of Philadelphia right down the street, talk to a sixth grade teacher and say, hey, is it working out for you? And it absolutely is not working out. So to what extent do we continue to try and like prop up systems, put band-aids on systems, give internal tweaks.

And to what point does someone like you kind of say, hey, this system needs to be scrapped and we need to start over and completely rethink how we're doing everything? It's a really good question. And it's, for me, the answer depends on the context and which system we're talking about. I think. Well, I've laid out several. So pick, pick your favorite. I mean, as an organizational psychologist, my expertise is much more on.

I said occupational psychologist, organizational psychologist. It's the same thing. It's called it occupational psychology. Okay, there you go. So you're in the clear. Okay. You're just European. I love Europeans.

I think at some level what's... I love how they smell. Do you? Yeah. I have a cologne. It's called European. I think you just create... You just are like...

And you just smell like a European. You just created a positive stereotype of all Europeans. Yeah. It's smelling good. Yes. They're delightful. I have a flight I would like you to board from the past in Europe that did not... They smell.

That's description. Yeah. Anyway. Was it Ryanair by any chance? No, it wasn't. And I don't remember who it was. I'll get back to you on that. But I've never flown Ryanair, so it wasn't that.

Okay. So back to the question at hand. I think systems are created by people. And if we, whether we want to reform an existing system or, you know, just engage in a shumpeter like creative destruction act, where, you know, we throw out an old system and try to replace it. the better one, what that requires is human buy-in and human collaboration, right? We need people to agree that the system needs change and then to work together on, you know, either reinventing it or repairing it.

But I would hazard a guess that 85% of Americans think that the health care system is completely colossally broken, but no one has buying in on how to change it. No, and if you talk to the people in positions of power, they don't have the power to fix it. because they need, you know, they need government intervention. And, you know, one company ends up shouting into the wind and it does no good without a coalition. And so I think one of the problems is that a lot of our systems were created by people when America was a much smaller country.

Like the founding fathers could not have imagined what these kinds of systems would look like at the scale we're at now, right? Of 350 million people. And so I think what we have are, you know, systems that were created for much smaller groups that now have ballooned. and they're much harder to manage at scale and they're much harder to change at scale.

I think the way that I like to approach this, given what, I guess, the training I have and the expertise I lack is to say, what we want to do is we want to study how to create pockets of change. And so let's say, for example, you wanted to, let's take the education system. There's a big conversation about

whether we should reinvent federal education. That's not where you start as an organizational psychologist. where you start is you pick a school district. Right. And you start running some small experiments. And you say, as some research has shown, it might be a good idea to let teachers stay with the same class of students more than one year.

It's a practice called looping. It's been studied in multiple countries. It's a very, very small effect. But guess what? When your teacher gets to know you for a second year, they are better at helping you overcome your challenges. So let's run that trial and see how it goes. and if it works, then we can do it at the state level.

And then we can think about spreading it to the federal level. And I think that, you know, our politics are mired in like preachers and prosecutors kind of, you know, going at each other and making no progress. Instead of having more people who think like scientists and say, I have a bunch of hypotheses about how to make this system better. And some of them are reforms and some of them are reboots. Let's test them in, you know, let's find a lab, a local lab that's willing to test them. And then learn from the ones that are successful and the ones that aren't.

And then as we start to spread them, we'll figure out which ones are context-specific and which ones are really easily scalable. And that is the kind of approach I would take to answer in that question. Because I don't know, right, depending on what the reform is. And maybe that the system is permanently broken. It may be that there's an on-the-margin fix that could actually make a difference. That is not a satisfying answer, but it's how I think about it. No, no, that makes total sense. It's incredibly reasonable.

I mean, I'm going a little bit bigger. I'm really talking about, as you know, in Soul Boom, about a spiritual revolution. And you take a system like healthcare, which is supposed to be healing people, but it's based on a for-profit system. And talk to anyone that's like gotten a bill from a hospital. I mean, it's crazy. It's absolutely absurd. And even the whole idea of like you get a bill and it's for $117,000. And they say, well, don't worry about it because we do X, Y, and Z with the insurance company.

and we get it down and you only owe $814. You know, but why is it working that way? But why is our health care system based on a for-profit system? Why did we decide that education would be funded by our tax dollars and that health care would not be funded by our tax dollars? They're both public service and they're both for the raising of all boats and, you know, the common care for not just the poor, but all of. of American citizens, do we ever just say, hey, humanity, capitalism has run its course,

you know, abject consumerism that promotes kind of this kind of toxic individualism, you know, quarterly profits, you know, at board meetings, quarter after quarter, being the standard for the progress and growth of a company is just unsustainable. Let's, you know, I get, I'm not talking about communist revolution, but I'm talking about. spiritual revolution, but you're so entrenched in this stuff. Like you have companies, you have Google coming to you and saying, hey, help us figure out X, Y, and Z. I'm not saying that you're like Mr. Corporate Man, but can you shine some light on what a spiritual revolution might look like? People who push for revolutionary change are often in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Okay. Right. So when you say, Ray, capitalism has run its course. I would say, well, capitalism also more or less doubled the human lifespan in the last century. And the fact that there were financial incentives for, you know, scientific breakthroughs and medical innovations. And there was a revolution in evidence-based medicine. That's mostly been, I think the majority of that is, you know, is American. The majority of that happened on college campuses from recent government-funded research. Correct.

Not from profit. I was hoping you would go there. but even so, right, there's public-private partnership there because a lot of the funding is also coming from companies. And actually, if you look at our last half-century or so of innovation, the public-private collaboration is responsible for much more than we realize. And so, like, well, maybe it needs to be both. Maybe there's some kind of solution we haven't thought of yet.

And so I just, I want to make sure that when we reimagine, like, this is, I mean, this is such a, it's a core think-again question that I failed to answer in the book. As we think about reimagining a system from the ground up, we shouldn't lose sight of also. What are the things about the system that have worked and let's harness those? That's a great point. Because people come from all over the world to dip their toes in the American health care system because we have the best doctors and nurses and care and studies and research and options.

And there's so many things that our hospitals right down the street do incredibly well. Yeah. So I just, you know, I want to try to learn from the. and, you know, weed out the bad. What does that look like? Your guess is as good as mine, probably better. All right. But you were asking a question about spiritual revolution.

What are my favorite exercises that I have done for years, and I put in the book, Soul Boom, is what if aliens were looking down on planet Earth? And they look down at humanity in 2025 and how they were doing things, how they were dealing with health care or climate change or politics or what have you? Like, what would they be saying about us? because it's as soon as people shift their perspective in that direction, they're like, oh, wow, yeah, we really are fucked up, aren't we? So you're a little bit of an alien. You have a little bit of alien DNA.

You're at the center of this. Like you're working with, you know, governmental agencies and you hear you're reading studies and you're working with companies and you're dealing with students and you're in academia. You go to TED conferences every year. Like, what do you think the big shift needs to be, like looking down on planet Earth from 20,000 miles up in the sky? It's a really good question. I think if I were to look at what are the root causes of our problems across a lot of different spheres? I think the... See, I took me five paragraphs to try and sum up a question.

You did it in a sentence and a half. You gave me lines. Okay. I'm like, oh, I can run with that one. Okay. The core challenge that I see is that people are caught up in being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We see it with originalists of the Constitution.

We see it with leaders saying, but that's not the way we've always done it. And I think that's a mistake. Yes, we want to learn from the past. But the goal is to use that knowledge to improve the future, not to replicate the past. for me this this actually starts with parents that I know so many I see this with my students all the time I know so many young people who think that their their responsibility in life is to make their parents proud I think that's backward I think they should be striving to make their children proud that our responsibility is not to please our predecessors is to try to improve circumstances for our offspring

And I think if we shift the lens that way, it becomes a lot easier to solve the problems we're facing because we're not wedded to the way we've always done it. We're not prisoners of the past. We're not, I love this meme. There's a meme that made my day when I ran across it. It says traditions are peer pressure from dead people. We have enough pure pressure. Right. That's great.

We don't need it from our ancestors. Yeah. I think we should try to be back. are ancestors. And I think if that's the steering motivation that we bring to the table, we can begin to benefit from lessons of the past, but also throw out the ones that are not applicable to the present or the future. I'm taking notes on my next book, which is about the meaning of life. Oh, I like how your topics get bigger when most of us are like, how do I contain this? Yeah, no, it's getting smaller and smaller. Please tell me that 42 is in the book.

It is. Yeah, it is. That's going to be the very last chapter. It's 42. That's what you get. You know it would be really great if the book had 41 chapters and it went from 40 to 42. And you just skipped 41. And 42 was just 42 and then just said 42. Exactly. Becoming a better ancestor rather than descendants. Yeah. Your job is not to be a good descendant. It's to be a responsible ancestor. See, I'm putting that in the meaning of life. life might find it courtesy of Adam Grant. I know that you've talked about moving away from like

religious practice necessarily more into kind of the the core of meaning and service. And that's very important in your work. And one thing I love about what you do is that you're an organizational psychologist, but there's such great heart and spirit in the work that you do. And you'll always come back to like, how can we care for one another better? But do you think that there's a spiritual path that we can follow to take us in this direction? I do. I don't feel qualified to weigh in on what that looks like. That's much more your domain than mine. I am just an unemployed sitcom actor. What do I know? I like how unemployed has become part of your identity. Okay, I'm going to do this in the dorkeiest way possible. One of my favorite concepts that shapes how I think about a question like

this comes from systems dynamics. And it's called equifinality. I thought you were going to say like St. Thomas Aquinas or something like that. No, I'm going right to equifinality. Okay. So the idea of equifanality is that in any complex system, there are always multiple paths to the same end. And I think that, I mean, I think our world is a pretty complex system. I think that for somebody who like me loves, I guess I'm a rationalist. I love to learn from evidence and from reason. Like, the way that I get to principles of character and values is mostly through data. For somebody who's, you know, more intuitive, more emotional, more philosophical, more spiritual, there's a different route to the exact same ideas. Like the number of times I will publish a book or an article or release a

podcast and then have like a priest and a rabbi reach out and say, you know, this, this is a principle you're covering was actually taught in the Old Testament 2000 years ago. I'm like, okay, there are timeless principles here. And that's, it's one of the things I loved when I was reading Soul Boom was you did such a beautiful job tying together, the philosophical traditions with what we've learned from psychological research and, and highlighting that there actually is a spiritual core to that. But, I mean, what does that path look like? I think it's probably a little different for every person. I don't think it's my place to try to light the way. I think the best thing I can do is say, well, here's what I've learned for the research and how it has made my life in some cases better.

And in some cases, I at least understand why it's not as good as I want it to be. And, you know, I hope some of that is useful to you too. I got to travel to India last year and meet with the Dalai Lama. And I got to interview this wonderful Tibetan monk. And I was just like, hey, pretend I'm just climbed up to the top of a mountain. And you've been living there in solitude for 20 years in silent meditation. and it's like the New Yorker cartoon, and I'm like, oh, why is monk? What is the meaning of life?

What do you think? And this Tibetan monk who had been studying the meaning of life for his entire life, he said it boils down to one thing. Service to others. That service makes you feel fulfilled, gives you something to put your focus on, gives you meaning and direction, and helps and benefits the other person, obviously, that you're serving.

So wouldn't, again, looking from that 20,000 mile view above planet Earth, perhaps that shift be from me oriented, me centered, self-centered to other centered, that if somehow in educating children, somehow in our system, somehow in our political sphere, we could shift to serving others as best practiced by Jesus Christ. himself 2,000 years ago, that might start the kind of transformation that we're both talking about. And you know from a positive psychology standpoint, the incredible benefits. And Martin Seligman has studied this his whole life, the incredible benefits of service to others. I would have a hard time rejecting that.

Thesis. That perspective. Yes. I mean, I think in some ways it's a reason I, at the very beginning of my career got interested in studying givers and takers. Was a lot of people believed exactly what you're saying, but thought they had to be a taker at work in order to get ahead. So then they could start giving back, you know, as a mentor or a philanthropist. Interesting. Yeah. And so that's kind of a capitalist myth right there.

It is a myth. It's backward. Yeah. Like you, you don't succeed and then start giving back. You actually start giving and that can accelerate your success in some ways. Yeah. We have a lot of evidence now that people who spend more of their time helping others, they get better performance reviews, they're more likely to get promoted.

And ultimately, they're more effective as servant leaders, building organizations that end up coming closer to fulfilling their missions. And I think that at a fundamental level, like, I'm not going to sit here and tell you, like, if you are a taker, you will definitely fail. You must be a giver to succeed. That's equifinal two, multiple paths. what I can say with conviction is that of all the paths to success, the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. And that is, you know, that's a form of service that allows

you to achieve your goals and aspirations. And I think that a lot of people get sort of mired in this debate when they think that service is always altruism, that it requires self-sacrifice. If you're always sacrificing yourself, that's not sustainable. And I've seen this in my own research time and again. People who are extremely, selfless who care a lot about others, but not at all about themselves, they end up burning out and they end up getting burned by the takers in their midst. Oh, interesting. The people who are both high and concerned for others and high and concern for themselves are the ones who end up making the most meaningful contributions to others. Wow, I haven't heard that before, but that makes total sense,

especially like you see in the nonprofit sector where burnout is so high. So rampant. And people throw themselves into like helping and saving the world and only thinking about others. And then after eight years, they're like, I'm done. Not sustainable. Yeah. I'm opening a smoothie shop. Yeah. This is where you want people to say, look, you're often advised, people get advice all the time, give until it hurts.

Okay, that's a good way to push yourself to be more generous. But when it hurts, you need to start doing something different so that you don't keep putting yourself in a position of pain because eventually you are going to stop giving. And giving to others is one of those things like, if you want to start doing it selfish, because it will advance your career as you're highlighting and because it would actually bring you more kind of like happiness, well-being, and internal meaning, then so be it.

Start with that. Start giving to others for selfish reasons. I mean, there's a whole office episode about this. Which one? Don't you remember Dwight and Andy with the bagels and then the buying lunch and they're trying to one-up each other and who can be the biggest giver? That's right.

Oh my gosh. That's incredible office literacy. I think Andy even starts to give Dwight tips. Isn't it? And we're giving a massage? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was so much fun.

I loved filming that episode. I love that. That's brilliant. There's an idea from the Baha'i faith that might be related from this. It's not a direct teaching from the prophet founders of the Baha'i faith, but it's something that systemically we talk about a lot. and I'm wondering how you think it might relate. And that is building capacity so that when you're in an organization and maybe it's a little dysfunctional,

maybe it's a startup, maybe it's a church group, maybe it's a neighborhood coalition, maybe it's a political movement or whatever. To think about your work as building the capacity of the people that you're working with really takes the focus and onus off yourself and kind of like, oh, this person has very little capacity, let me build them up here. This person has a good amount of capacity. Let's see what they do with even more responsibility. So there's this constant kind of like churning to grow so that all boats are rising.

I love the idea of capacity building. It's actually, believe it or not, a hot topic in corporate strategy research. Okay. Jane Dutton first introduced me to it. And then my colleague here, Dan Leventhal, put this idea of absorptive capacity on the map that organizations differ in their ability to learn. and in turn to grow their people. And I think the primary responsibility of a leader is to elevate the people below you.

Too many leaders promote people who are basically just trying to find the shortest path to success and end up basically rising by cutting others down. Instead of saying the best way to succeed here is actually to lift other people up. And capacity building is a good long-term frame for them. But it doesn't even have to be a leader that's capacity building. You could be in charge of the mailroom and capacity build not just the people under you,

your underlings, but the people working above you to kind of say, hey, everyone has a capacity. We're not quite sure what it is, but let's look at everyone and monitor how we might elevate their, not only their performance, but their possibility. I think to connect these two threads, I would say, and just make sure that you don't build others capacity in a way that drains yours. Ah, that's great. That's great. What was the thing you were going to say?

Oh, I wanted to come back to. I like how you just casually dropped in the Dalai Lama here. You're like, yeah, I got to meet this guy. You know. I'm so curious about what that meeting is like. Like, do you walk up to the Dalai Lama and you're about to tell him how much his spiritual wisdom means to you? And he says, I think about what an idiot would do.

And I do not do that thing. He's a huge office fan than Dalai Lama. I bet. No, he's more of a Parks and Rec guy. But yeah, it was, this was put together by Arthur Brooks, who has been going and visiting him for the last couple of decades. He likes to bring social psychologists as well as, you know, spiritual thinkers and some influencers and just a real interesting amalgam of people there on the trip.

But we spent two days in the day. a room with the Dalai Lama who was kind of holding forth in Tibetan and it was being translated. So it was kind of just hearing him lecture, sermonize, speak what's on his mind, on his heart. And that was just really magical to just be in the room with someone, especially someone and he's such a hero to me who has suffered so much and still show so much love and compassion for those people who have killed his family members, his church members, you know, robbed him of his kind of his birthright, you know, bulldozed, his ancestors' graves, and he's always seeking, like, how can I have more and more compassion and understanding for

those people? So someone like has put their money where their mouth is in a way that very few have. So it's not just wisdom coming from some like holy leader who in some title has been put upon him. Surprise, surprise, the Dalai Lama's message came back time and time again to love. And it just was like the transforming power of love. And we need to just keep turning to love, reinventing love, thinking about love, moving in love, walking in love, living in love, starting that on an individual level, moving it to the family, moving it to the cul-de-sac, to the community, to the school, to the organization, to the business. And what about that? I mean, where does love

fit in to organizational or occupational psychology? You know, I don't want to say all you need is love, but some of what you need is love.

Believe it or not, dear colleagues, Segal Barseid, who studied love at work. She studied it in terms of companionate love, which is, I would say care,

is another term for it. And it turned out that in hospitals that had strong cultures of that kind of care, you actually saw better patient outcomes. Wow. And this is...

More loving hospitals heal patients better. That is her thesis with longitudinal data. It's not a randomized controlled experiment, and so we can't say that it's causal, but it's predictive, at least,

that if, you know, if... I didn't understand what any of that, by the way. Just FYI. Yes, you did. In case you didn't understand it either. When you play dumb

and then quote from... Hey, studies, I don't buy it. But I think that what we know is that if a hospital is lacking that sense of care, that seems to be a leading indicator that employees are burning out or that they're not supporting each other effectively. And that will trickle down to affect the patient. It may also be a leading indicator of the fact that they haven't built a culture where you do whatever you can to serve the patient. And I don't think this is unique to hospitals. Hospitals are a good place to study it because care is so core to their work. But I mean, there are actually lots of

studies now suggesting that teams that build cultures of care are more productive because you don't want to let your colleagues down. And I would assume this is what makes for a great TV show is you care about making your fellow actors look good and your director and your producers and your writers and you don't want to let them down. But you tell me. Well, there's a quote from Abdul Baháh, who's a central spiritual teacher in the Baha'i faith. And it says, where there is love, nothing is too much trouble. And there is always time. And I love that idea that when love is there, you'll go through any kind of trouble.

And you'll take all the time that it needs. I do feel like in the office, we were so blessed looking back on it that Greg Daniels and the other kind of leaders of the office and creators of the office, including Steve Correll, created such a loving, warm, collaborative atmosphere. And I do think that that bleeds, it bleeds into the scenes, you know, it bleeds into the details and into the, there was just a warmth about the show, even though it was shot as unwarmly as humanly possible,

with fluorescent lights and essentially like news cameras. I think that bled through, and I think it's one of the reasons that the show has lasted so long, is that there is a core underneath it all. It's not judging its characters, not pointing fingers, and it's not, yes, it is highlighting kind of the bleakness of the American workplace. But ultimately, there's kind of a loving family underneath it. Too bad Dunder Mifflin doesn't exist anymore.

Well, I was actually hoping you would rescue it from bankruptcy. There's your spin-off, but you're going to have to play my cousin Shrut because Moes Shrute is too busy. Michael Shore running other big TV shows. It's a comedy writer. So will you play a shrewd if we have a reboot? I would be honored to audition for a shrewd roll. You wouldn't, I would bestow upon you a shrewd roll. I just want you standing there.

I want you right now, let's just do your audition right now. Pretend you, mime, you've got a pitchfork in your right hand. Wait, pitchfork? Yeah. No, no, it's not to attack someone. It's for, hey, it's for, it's, so you're just holding it. And then a completely blank expression. And then think about the pride of your ancestors.

You've got the part. That's brilliant. Amazing. Do you know any German? Nine. That's all you got. That's it. I got nothing there.

Here's a good question. Is there a belief you held on to for years that you had to let go of, not because it was wrong, but because you outgrew it? Oh, yes. Personally. Yes. A belief that I felt, I held very strongly, was that I didn't like art.

What? Yeah. You didn't like art? I would go to a museum and look around and be like, it's, I mean, it's neat that you can make this stuff, but I don't know why. Okay. I don't feel anything.

That wasn't just modern art. It was like any art. It was just, even like entry level like Monet or something like that. Like, it had no emotional impact on me whatsoever. Okay. Like, couldn't, could I just read the artist describing, what their motivation was for creating it, and then maybe I could get something out of it.

I'm like, where are your data? Like, where are the numbers? Well, they have paint by numbers. That is probably my kind of art. Yeah. What changed my mind about this was my wife, Allison, wrote a novel. And published earlier this year.

It's called I Am the Cage. And in the novel is some of the most arresting poetry I've ever read. And I was deeply moved by it. And it got me thinking about things that I've written about and studied for a long time in ways that I'd never considered before, no matter how many studies I read. And what it, first of all, like, okay, poetry is art. I do like art.

But secondly, what it, I think what it really did for me was it sparked a conversation about, aesthetic chills. You know, the goosebumps you get? I never had one in an art museum, and I never had them listening to music, which is where most people get them. But I get them reading. And I especially got them reading Allison's poetry.

And do you read poetry or fiction, or do you only read nonfiction? Oh, I love fiction. Cool. What are some fiction books you like to read? Oh, I mean... Which ones have given you aesthetic chills? Aesthetic chills in fiction.

Let's see. Honestly, I was going to say, Ender's game. Oh, I love Ender's Game. Do you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've read that whole series.

Same. Yeah. Prefer the Ender's Shadow series to the children of the mind sort of spinoffs. Yeah, yeah. I guess I liked following Bean more than Ender on his journey.

But the twist in that book blew my mind and it was one of those, I can't believe, I missed that. Have you read the conversation? Three-body problem? Yes, I have. All three of the series?

I have read the first two so far. Okay. And I just watched the Netflix season one. Yeah, because that has a lot of great, amazing twist. Same feeling. Yeah. I was like, wow, this is powerful. Severance, the season one finale.

Oh, yeah, that was fabulous. Had that effect. Okay. But I think, you know, I was mostly reading sci-fi and, like, thrillers and mystery novels, like Harlan Coben or John Grisham. and I didn't realize that the way I felt when there was a big reveal is exactly the kind of emotion that people have when they're appreciating art. And it took Allison's poetry to make that connection for me.

And now I look at art differently. And I think that same sense of wonder and transcendence that many people get in an art museum. I can find it when reading poetry. I can also find it when looking up at the stars or at like a majestic mountain. I'm like, okay, maybe I'm not. not as much of an alien as I thought. So awe, wonder, curiosity are correlatives

between people that are maybe spiritual but not religious, maybe even atheists and spiritual people. There is a commonality, a universality. Yes. A feeling of wonder and awe. And the way that it opens one's heart. Nailed it. Yeah.

Yes. So it's something that unites us. Yeah. And not something I had thought enough about. Well, I'm in awe at your magnificent brain. Aw. Your body's not bad either. Adam Grant, you naughty boy.

But thanks for coming on Soul Boom. Before we go, we ask everyone, what is your definition of the word, the very, very tricky word, soul? Wow. Defining, me defining soul is a terrible idea. I just want to preface, but I'm going to play ball. I think of your soul as the thing that transcends your individual body and connects you to all of humanity. Maybe. I like it.

No. I like it. Or I might also like in the, I guess the way that I use it, like when I say somebody has soul, soul is about having a big heart and being a person who stands for principles. So there's a care and integrity component of it for me. Adam, thank you so much for taking time out of your incredibly busy schedule to do this little Soul Boom, Philadelphia style, Philadelphia love everyone, Philly, love you. Thanks for having us in your basement.

Glad to be here. All right. Thanks for coming back. The Soul Boom podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcast. tasks.