The Current - The power of going ‘Against the Grain’ with Terry O’Reilly

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

Some of the most major changes and inventions in history started with someone being told they were wrong, and them not taking “no” for an answer. And for Terry O’Reilly, those are the most captivating stories. In his new book,  Against the Grain: Defiant Giants Who Change the World,  the host of CBC’s Under the Influence, explores what we can learn from these mavericks, including Taylor Swift — and why in a world where we always need new ideas to grow, our first instinct is to reject them?

What does the best-selling author, R.F. Kwong, think of Taylor Swift's new album? I didn't get to ask her, but I can take a guess. Writers are good at their craft when they're good at observing other people. I like Taylor Swift's music. Reputation is her worst album because it is just obsessed with rumors about her. R.F. Kwong joined me for a special on-stage interview in Toronto to talk all about her new book, Catabasis. And we got into some hot topics along the way. Check out bookends with Matea Roach on your favorite podcast app to hear that conversation.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Almost all big changes and inventions in history started with someone being told they were wrong, and them not taking no for an answer. But in a world where we always need new ideas to grow, why is our first instinct often to reject them? Terry O'Reilly has some insight on that. He is the host, of course, of CBC's Under the Influence, and he has a new book out.

It is called Against the Grain, Defiant Giants Who Change the World. Terry's with me in studio now. Hi. Hello, nice to see you. Thanks for having me. I don't know if we're going to call these people that you talk about Mavericks. Is that okay? Yeah, mavericks.

Yeah, what is it that fascinates you about them? Well, if you've ever listened to our radio show or our podcast, you know that I'm endlessly curious about people who buck the status quo, who go against the grain, who swim upstream because they have this quest, this desire, or in this case, they had ideas that that would revolutionize their industry or their profession. And the people I was most interested in in this book were the people who were, they weren't just mocked, they were ridiculed, they were humiliated, most of them were fired from their jobs for pushing this idea.

and at the end of the day, they were right. So they had the wherewithal, the strength to push through that you talk about people from all kinds of fields, whether that be science, business, sports, entertainment, politics. So you mentioned sort of the commonalities they have. What other throughlines are there? That was the most interesting thing for me, I think, because as you say, I tackled a lot of people in different industries and professions. I think the connective tissue was that they had incredible willpower. They were willing to risk it all. And they did.

I mean, most of the people in this book, as I said, literally were drummed out of their professions. But they had this incredible willpower. And they were so isolated and so alone. And one of the lines that I use in this book is that the heart truly is a lonely hunter because they were all alone in their quest to change to, you know, bring change forward, but they never gave up. All of them never, ever gave up. And the outcome of never giving up, you talk about as well. So let's talk about some of these people. So Gustav Eiffel, Eiffel Tower. Tell us about him. How, you know, we all know the

Eiffel Power, but like tell us about his journey to the Eiffel Tower. So he was in the iron business in his life. So he was, railway transportation was just happening in Europe. They needed a lot of bridges to, you know, go across rivers and chasms and things of that nature. So he started in the iron business creating bridges. And he was a very smart guy and he discovered different ways to work with iron and he patented certain techniques and safety standards. And he became incredibly adept at working with iron. In the late 1800s, Paris decided it wanted to have a universal exposition and they wanted to have some kind of like landmark that would symbolize this incredible exposition. They asked for very, you know, they put out a request for proposal to

various architects and designers. They got a couple of hundred designs in. They choose Eiffel's tower. So Eiffel had submitted a, you know, the classic, which you in your mind right now see is the Eiffel Tower. People hated the idea immediately, Pia. They, like the elite of Paris said, are you kidding? The metal, first of all, they said, iron is not art. It's an industrial, horrible thing. They called his design metal asparagus. They thought it was an ink blot on the landscape of Paris. But he persevered.

He said, you know what? They don't know what it's going to be like until it's finished. All through the building of it, he only had about two years to build this thing. The elite and started attacking him every single day, every single day. Even the committee that chose his work said to him, you know, it's going to cost six million francs to build this. We're only give you $1.5 million. You have to figure out the other $4.5. So he had to even come up with the money to build it.

And he negotiated this incredible deal where he said, I'll do that. But I want the rights to all the entrance fees and all the rental for the restaurants or whatever businesses would accumulate around the Eiffel Tower. and he ends up building this beautiful Eiffel Tower. He ends up earning all his money back in one year. And then for the next 20 years, he becomes one of the wealthiest men in Paris because of that deal that he struck with them. They thought he was going to absorb all the losses.

But he, in fact, became a wealthy wealthier. And we got the Eiffel Tower. Yeah. And it's one of the most beautiful things in Europe. Yeah, maybe in the world. We can argue about that afterwards. Okay, so two of your heroes, you profile in your book, they come from your own field of marketing,

Albert Lasker and Bill Bernbach? Burnback. Burnback, yes. Okay, so why do you look up to those guys? Well, Albert Lasker is one of the most fascinating people in advertising in my mind because he revolutionized the business for all time. So one day he was in his office. He was an ad guy in Chicago.

And there's a knock on the door and his secretary gives him a note. And the note says, I know what advertising is. And I know that you don't know what advertising is. And Albert was already a successful ad guy. If you want to know what advertising is, send the word yes down to the saloon. So there was a guy in the saloon who had sent this note up to Albert Lasker. So Lasker's intrigued, sends the word yes down to the saloon. Up comes this strapping six foot for Canadian Mountie, who was an ad writer, who was writing ads for the Hudson's Bay Company.

And he sat down across from Lasker and he said, so what is advertising? And Lasker said, well, it's news. It's when you have some news to say about a product. And this Mountie, whose name was John E. Kennedy, said, no, that's not right. That's just a tactic. The secret to advertising is salesmanship in print. Now, that may sound so mundane now, but in the 1800s, that was an epiphany because what he was saying was it's persuasion, its entertainment.

So that changed advertising for all time, that suddenly ads had to become persuasive and give people reasons why and try and convince them to buy products. So that was the start of the modern advertising industry, that moment, from a Canadian, which I kind of love. Bill Burnback had an agency called Doyle Dane Burnback in the early 60s. He did all the Volkswagen advertising. So Burnback looked at what Lasker did, salesmanship in print, and then kind of changed it and brought humor to advertising for the very first time.

There was no humor in advertising in the late 50s. It was like, see the USA and your Chevrolet. And then along comes this funny VW advertising that says, you know, the car is ugly and it's underpowered and made fun of itself and that was self-deprecating. So he started the golden revolution in advertising in the 60s. Both men had to have each other in order for the advertising industry to proceed. You talk about so many people in this book. I don't have time to talk about all of them. But you devote an entire chapter to Taylor Swift.

And Terry, if you know me, we could spend hours. talking about Taylor Swift. But just what stands out for you with her? Like, why'd you want to include her? Okay, let me say this. That was the most revised chapter in my book. Every time I thought I had finally finished that chapter, she would break another record or another norm, and I'd have to revise that chapter again. I think I revised that chapter maybe more than 20 times, because Taylor Swift, in my mind, is a phenomenon because she goes against the grain of the recording industry. So, she, you know, can't, doesn't have the rights to the masters of her recording. So what does she do? She re-records her albums. Nobody does that. Some artists may record a hit song. She re-records albums to regain control of her song and her music. And her fans are so in love with her that they go along with that. They all start only buying the newly recorded albums. Then she does things like, you know, she invites all the fans to her home to hear her records.

Like, nobody does that. I remember seeing her on Graham Norton. And Graham, she was talking about inviting fans into her home. And Graham Norton was saying, that's such a bad idea. She said, you know what? They're great. They're wonderful. I love doing it.

And you could see all the other celebrities on the panel just with their mouths open, thinking, I would never invite my fans into my home. It's so interesting because, you know, this book is about Mavericks. And you see her someone who pushes back, as we saw with the re-recording of her albums. But so many people see her as such a conformist. So it's interesting that you see her in a different, Totally, totally. And the fact that, you know, she mounts this big eras tour, then puts out a movie which she funds into theaters while the tour is in motion, which nobody would ever do. That's a complete maverick move because you would think at first blush that having a movie in theaters, people would stop going to the concerts. But it wasn't that. People would go to the concerts, then go see the movie. And then she distributed the movie herself. She didn't go through a movie studio. Like nobody does that kind of thing. Hi, I'm Mike Figgis.

I wrote and directed movies like leaving Las Vegas and time code. And recently, I was on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's infamous passion project, Megalopolis, making a fly-on-the-wall documentary. In Unfiltered, the Mike Figures Podcasts, I'll share stories of watching a mad genius at work. Get Unfiltered, the Mike Figures podcast, wherever you get podcasts. Let's talk about some people who, you know, despite doing these things, didn't find the recognition. So tell us the story of Ignaz Semmelweis.

Semmelweis. Yeah. So he was a doctor in the 1800s in Vienna. So he worked at one of the biggest maternity hospital in Vienna. Women started, there was two segments to this hospital. There was the one that the midwives ran one section and the doctors ran the other. and women in the that were treated by the doctors started dying in childbirth and igna igna simmelweis started to look at this and said why is that and then he noticed that the midwives

the women that went through the midwives weren't dying and he couldn't figure out what that was and he did a lot of experiments to see if it was that was it the air coming through in the part of the hospital that was making people sick he just didn't know what it was the thing about that hospital was that it had a great research department because they had a big autopsy division. Because it was a big hospital, they could do a lot of experiments doing autopsies. That's how young doctors learned. They would go from the autopsies right to the maternity ward and weren't washing their hands. So eventually, Igness figures out that there must be some germs being transferred to the women because so many women were getting sick instantly after giving

childbirth. So he tells the doctors to start washing their hands. He says, let's just try this. The death rate goes way down in the doctor's side, but the doctors are furious because they can't believe that doctors could be killing their patients. Their egos won't listen. They're associated with being dirty, yeah. So they stop, they won't wash their hands. They actually protest washing their hands and women keep dying. dying. Ignace Semmelweis just goes on a quest to get doctors to simply wash their hands. The problem was he couldn't prove he was right. In other words, germ theory, bacteria theory was 20 years away. He was ahead of the curve. He couldn't tell them exactly what the thing was that was making women die. So they drummed him out of the profession. They called him a quack. They ridiculed him. He couldn't get hired anywhere. And all he was doing. He was asking people to wash their hands. And the ultimate irony in his case was he started to suffer from bouts of depression and anxiety. And his mood started to swing. And his wife was

worried about him. His wife and a friend take him out for the day. They bring him to what he thinks is a museum. It's actually an insane asylum. They commit him in the sane asylum. He gets, he starts to try, you know, to get out of the insane asylum, the orderlies jump him, punch him, put him in a straight jacket, a dirty straight jacket, and he dies of sepsis, which is the exact thing the mothers were dying of. Like he died of the same thing. His case, as you say, the doctors rejected it for like maybe specific reasons, but with everyone you profile, there seems to be this pushback or this rejection of their ideas. And I said in the introduction, like kind of societally, our first instinct to say, ooh, new idea, not sure, skeptical, cynical, or you're wrong. Why do we do that?

That is the ultimate irony of the world, that the world needs new ideas every day. And the default response to a new idea is rejection. It is the default response when something's new, even in my profession, at a much smaller level than everything we're talking about today, When we would walk into the boardroom with a big, fresh idea to present to clients, 100% of them were terrified of the idea. If you walked in with a really safe, boring idea, they would buy it on the spot. So people are afraid of new, even though they need new to survive. So, you know, in my profession, you had to learn how to present an idea to nervous clients and how to swing them around to your point of view and how to calm them down while the cement was still wet in the boardroom.

You know, and, you know, have, you know, answers to what you think their objections are going to be. Like, you really had to be prepared in order to get people past that instinct to reject. You know, one of the realms where people always want new ideas, new ways of doing things, most people anyway, is in the realm of politics. Like, when someone is running and they're unusual or different from the other cast of characters, often there's, like, that's interesting. interesting. Why don't we try it that way? Politics is its own thing, but in the political realm, what does it take to make headway? Well, I write about Justin Trudeau in the book. So if you think back to his election, the liberals, he only had 10 months, by the way. He was in third place back then, right? It was a 10-month election, so he had 10 months. He decides he

wants to do it differently. So I have done a lot of federal election advertising, and we are always asked by the parties to do negative advertising, to do negative ads against the opposition. He didn't want to do that. He wanted to run a positive election. So he said to his advertising agency, I want to go positive from the get-go. I want to stay positive. I don't want to take pot shots at the conservatives, even though they had been in power a long time. And when a party's in power for a long time, you can take a lot of pot shots at them. He refused to do it. So he starts his campaign, all positive, and in 10 months, he wins a landslide in this country, if you remember. He called his campaign Sunny Ways, in other words, the positivity of sunshine.

And he went from 36 seats to 184 seats. I think it was historic. No party has ever gone from third place to become prime minister in history. That's never been done before. And to go from 36 seats to, I think, 184 had never been done before, like, going positive, which was totally against the grain of a political handbook for marketing, he had a landslide victory. Things obviously changed in the ensuing years.

Could you, in this political climate, because a lot has changed since 10 years ago, could you see a political campaign at this moment in time running on sort of sunny ways vibes? Like with the positive, there's so much division in the world, so much negativity, so much polarization. Could that work at this moment in time? I think theoretically, yes, you would still have to have a great platform and have a vision for the country. But if you think about how dark it is out there right now and all the division, I think people would be hungry for a positive outlook because it all seems so negative right now. It's so, so dark. So I think theoretically somebody could do that. It would take enormous courage to do it because it goes against all the playbooks. And you see every politician right now, is just hammering the other side. So it would take incredible courage to do it. There is a difference between critique and constructive criticism and just harsh criticism in every industry and everyone. You always talk about how to give feedback and all of those

things. One of the traits of the people you profile in the book, all these innovators, the thing that they have in common is that they were fueled by pushback. They gave them a little bit more of their mojo. But where is that line between constructive criticism, the one that can motivate and that sort of criticism that just like draws you down that's so discouraging it's probably the answer to that's probably a case by case basis but i would say that you're right most of the people in this book were fueled by the by the rejection which i think if you're going to achieve what these people achieved i think you have to be the type of person who is fueled by rejection i think a lot of great ideas never see the light of day because people fold under that kind of rejection or that

kind of oppression. Even in the advertising business, again, going back to just what I did for a living, a lot of great ideas die in the boardroom because they're not sold properly or, you know, they can't swing a client around to it. So I think it takes really special people who are willing to risk it all to make a change in the world. I think the one thing I learned from this book is that if you don't think one single person can make a huge change in the world, you are are wrong. But don't be pig-headed when you think you're right? That's probably the fine line is can you figure out a way to push ahead without just repelling people? And that's, I mean, even, you know, it's, it's a tough thing because you've got to put on your helmet and your armor

and go into battle. At the same time, you just don't want to leave, you don't want to burn bridges and just leave chairs overturned in a boardroom. You have to figure out a way to try and get people on your side. A lot of people I write about didn't do that. They just literally put on their helmet and charged. What's your one bit of advice for people out there, no matter what industry they work in or for yourself? What did you take away from the book saying, hmm, I got to do this differently. I got to think about this a little bit differently. I think, well, you know, there's a line that I've always loved, and I've always kind of kept close to me in times where I wasn't sure I was going to succeed. And that line is dare and the world will always yield.

And the reason that I cling to that line is there's a great insight there. It says if you dare to push back, the world will eventually let you do what you want to do. You have to push really hard in the beginning. It's going to be really tough and it's not going to get a lot easier. But the secret is the world will always yield to your idea if you're willing to stick with it. And that has always been an inspiration to me, that there is always a solution. It's been great to see your face. I've never met you in person. We know the voice. Thank you for coming in. Thanks for the book, Terry. Terry O'Reilly is the host of CBC's Under the Influence. That's where you know his voice from. He has a new book out. It's called Against the Grain.

You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.