The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - How to Get Unstuck — with Adam Alter

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Adam Alter, a professor of marketing and psychology at NYU, and the author of several books including his latest, “Anatomy of a Breakthrough” joins Scott to discuss what to do about feeling stuck,... choosing when to explore vs exploit your career options, and why he thinks Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player of all time. Follow Professor Alter on Twitter, @adamleealter. Scott opens by discussing why he does not think Apple’s Vision Pro product will be successful.  Algebra of Happiness: it’s never too late to right a wrong.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:17 NMLS 1617539. Episode 253. 253 is the area code covering Tacoma Washington and the surrounding areas in 1953 Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster Abbey there was a huge dilemma over who would take care of her corgis once the queen passed when it was determined they were all under the age of 16 Prince Andrew volunteered the corgis were at each other's throats at the same time as the royal family. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 253rd episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Adam Alter,
Starting point is 00:02:04 a professor of marketing at NYU Stern, a colleague, a colleague, and actually I would call us friends, and the bestselling author of Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink. Our interview with Adam today comes from a live stream we did together with Section, our higher education startup, where we discussed his latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. Adam is sort of a, I don't know, he's not that young anymore, but he was always kind of the superstar, young superstar in the faculty of NYU Stern. NYU actually has a really strong faculty. It's super easy to recruit because you call a world-class faculty member at HEC or, you know, Carnegie Mellon and say, hey, how would you like to live in Soho for a couple of years?
Starting point is 00:02:44 It's a good wrap. So we get a lot of, we get a lot of academics. We also get them, I think, in sort of the eighth inning a lot. So we don't have a lot of young people and also tenure keeps people around longer, well past when they should be put on an ice flow. Is that going to make me more popular among my colleagues? Anyway, but Adam is always brought up as like this young star. Whenever we're talking about, you know, young superstar faculty, we talk about Adam. And he also has an appointment in the psychology department. Okay. Okay.
Starting point is 00:03:08 By the way, my joke about Prince Andrew, someone tried to set me up with Fergie like 15 or 20 years ago when I was in New York. And I wasn't interested. I wasn't interested. I'm not going to go into why, but I could have dated Prince Andrew's ex-wife. I don't know what that means. She was writing children's novels or something. Anyways, what's happening? Apple has officially announced its mixed reality headset and a slew of other updates regarding the Mac, iOS health tracking, and messaging. The event was really impressive, no doubt, between the combination of design, the ability to draw in several million
Starting point is 00:03:50 people to the live stream, and it's what has to be its biggest product announcement since the Apple Watch. There's a lot to unpack here. The Apple Vision Pro has been marketed as an augmented reality platform and something that will introduce consumers to spatial computing. Well, isn't that spatial? I tried to do Dana Carvey there, church chat lady. I don't think it works very well. Isn't that spatial? So, look, this is, I'm a skeptic.
Starting point is 00:04:19 And I think AI is amazing. I thought the metaverse was stupid. I thought Web3 didn't make any sense. I thought AI is amazing. I thought the metaverse was stupid. I thought Web3 didn't make any sense. I thought voice was fantastic. I love making very big generalizations about technologies. I don't fully understand this thing, and I think it has an uphill battle. One, it was greenlit when the market thought there would be a bigger market for these 3D renderings of the web called the metaverse or these fully immersive experiences. I believe that if they could have that billion
Starting point is 00:04:50 dollars back and not launch this thing, they would do it. When you're in marketing, a decent way to kind of start or when you're evaluating a concept or a project is what's the business we're in, what is the product, and what is its point of differentiation? I'm not entirely sure how to answer that here. Or put another way, what problem does it solve? Maybe sort of three-dimensional or more immersive entertainment experience. It might be a Zoom killer, maybe. It strikes me that it's probably more of an enterprise solution than a consumer solution. This is why I don't think it works. And if anyone can make it work, it's Apple. I don't think the Apple Watch right out of the gates made a lot of sense. It took two, it was a pain to charge every night. In my opinion,
Starting point is 00:05:34 it was not functional. It was just a, I would argue it's not even a wearable, it's just a second screen for your phone. But Apple has such incredible staying power, such incredible marketing, such incredible iterative skills that slowly but surely they just sort of overwhelmed the industry with innovation around the watch. And now the Apple Watch sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry combined. And they could do the same thing here, but I am more skeptical. Why is that? One, I think at a very basic level, people don't want to put that thing on their head. Why is that? One, I think at a very basic level, people don't want to put that thing on their head. Why is that? The things that can eat you and the things you can eat very rarely come at you directly. They attack you jaguar, it will actually circle back, come behind you, and attack you from behind, recognizing you're more vulnerable because you don't have eyes in
Starting point is 00:06:29 the background. Isn't that amazing that animals are born with that instinctive knowledge? Anyway, as a result, we are very sensitive to movement and motion in our peripheral vision and very sensitive to it being inhibited. One of the reasons that outdoor advertising, specifically billboards, are so powerful is that you notice things in your peripheral vision. Think about when you're walking down the sidewalk and you hear someone walking just out of your vision, in your peripheral vision or just behind you, and you hear their footsteps and it's just them and maybe you walking behind it, you feel vulnerable. If they were to attack you, you would be very susceptible. So I believe that putting things on your head that block out your peripheral vision
Starting point is 00:07:12 is just naturally uncomfortable. Also, we are a species that needs to see the horizon or we start feeling motion sickness. And with the Oculus, I don't know what the data is here. No one knows what the data is here. Supposedly somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of people who spend more than 20 minutes on an oculus start to feel nauseous in some i don't think people want to put this shit on their head i just think this thing is these things are stillborn if you think about the ultimate metaverse or spatial reality the place to do it was the incredibly creative $150 billion gaming industry. And they haven't gone headset. I mean, they've tried and then they realized it doesn't make any sense.
Starting point is 00:07:54 People don't want to play that way. They don't want to relax that way. It's not that relaxing. Even when I'm watching a football game with my kids, I want to see their reaction. And I'm just more comfortable having certain elements of my peripheral vision open and available to me and free to me, if you will. The other thing that really scares me about this or where I think it's in sort of no man's land is what is arguably the hardest thing about a business. The hardest thing about management is compensation. Trying to figure out what to pay people such that you keep the company alive, you don't overcompensate them. There's no bigger pay cut than calling all of your employees into a room, and I've done this before,
Starting point is 00:08:35 and said, sorry, but we're laying off a third of the company, and those third are in this conference room right now. That is a really ugly day for everybody. And that comes from a lack of discipline or structural shifts. Anyways, the hardest thing from the consumer standpoint of your business is pricing. I just never know how to price shit. I find it so difficult. I find that this price is literally no man's land. And that is a $3,500 price point. Think about plus 8% tax or whatever the sales tax if you live in California. What is that? That is $240, $280. So you're talking about $3,800. Basically talking about $4,000 here. If you're going to charge people $4,000, I think it needs to be a product that's more enduring. So the useful life of a car is 10 to 15 years. The
Starting point is 00:09:28 useful life of a jet is 40 years. Get that. Get that. Daddy's in the market for a jet. Do you know jets last, their useful life is 40 plus years? Isn't that amazing? So if you buy a 10-year-old jet, you're kind of buying a two or three-year-old car. It feels brand new. Anyways, that has absolutely nothing to do with our conversation. If you buy a laptop, it degrades pretty fast, but I would say the useful life is probably two or three years. And a laptop is now, you can get a great laptop for seven or 800 bucks. A TV's useful life, it seems like it's less, but it's probably more like five to seven years. And those things, you can get an amazing TV for a thousand bucks. So you're telling me I'm going to spend $3,800 on an item that has all of this camera and lens technology and power and chip technology that spells to me it's going to need constant iteration and updating. There's no way there's i just don't think there's any way this thing is nearly as utile nearly as
Starting point is 00:10:26 relevant as the original vision 12 18 24 months in and there's that 3800 i think this price is literally in no man's land if they had charged 10 grand and said that includes i don't know if they could have done this but constant upgrades you. You only need to buy one. It's just always going to be the mixed reality headset you need. And you just bring it in and we'll refurbish it for 100 bucks or 200 bucks, whatever it might be. I just think the market here is just tiny. I just think it's absolutely such a niche market that won't move the needle for them. Could there be some spillover? Could it be like the technology or the piece dividend? Could there be a technology dividend that flows technology into their other products? Maybe. Maybe. Auto companies, and let's go back to jet aviation, have a flagship product and that technology will leak down to their other models. The 7 Series was the first car to have dual climate temperature zones. And then it leaks down to the 5 Series and the 3 Series. It was the first car to have dual climate temperature zones. And then it leaks down to the 5 Series and the 3 Series. It was the first one to have heated seats, and then it leaks down, what have you.
Starting point is 00:11:30 Maybe this will be kind of their technology test lab, and the sensors or the AR will move down to the iPhone. I also don't want it to win. And I'm a huge Apple shareholder, or huge for me, not huge for them. But I'm increasingly worried that we are sequestering from one another. And we're developing all of these reasonable facsimiles of life brought to you by the industrial digital complex that make us less and less happy because the key to happiness is the depth and number of meaningful relationships. And relationships are a function of proximity and physical presence. And this, yet again, is another thing that's going to take us away from each other, that's going to sequester us. I just find it so fucking nihilistic and depressing that the most powerful companies in the world, the wealthiest companies in the world, the companies that have the most technology, the companies that have the deepest resources run by the smartest people either want to put us on
Starting point is 00:12:28 Mars or take us into another universe or put some shit on our heads so we can't really even see each other, but we can see some sort of 3D rendering of a Clippers game or porn. Well, fuck me. That's not what life is all about. Jesus Christ, what problem does this solve? Answer me that. How are you solving anything for me here? A lot of excitement. The best thing, hands down, about the mixed reality headset that was launched by Apple was seeing Tim Cook dance. There's a video showing him after the keynote dancing. I like Tim Cook so much. And that dance, he deserves to dance. He has added more shareholder value than any individual in history. Jobs took him to $300 billion. He's taken them to $3 trillion. Some people will argue, justifiably, that $0 to $300
Starting point is 00:13:18 billion is harder than $300 billion to $3 trillion. But still, nobody has added $2.7 trillion in shareholder value to a single organization. And Tim Cook, my still, nobody has added $2.7 trillion in shareholder value to a single organization. And Tim Cook, my brother, get your boogie on, Big Cook. Big Cook is in the house. Show us where your mother lives. We'll be right back for our conversation with Adam Alter. trajectories? And how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. I just don't get it. Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey, y'all. I'm John Flynn Hill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works.
Starting point is 00:14:28 You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found. We'll bring you the answers you need every Wednesday starting September 18th. So follow Explain It To Me, presented by Klaviyo. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at NYU Stern and the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. Adam, great to see you. Just a quick story about Adam.
Starting point is 00:15:14 Adam's such a baller. He wouldn't come to department meetings. And essentially, the entire conversation would be around how do we recruit more junior professors like Adam Alter? It was literally just like, I stopped going to department meetings because it was all like, you felt like you were the middle child. And then basically, mom and dad would keep saying, why can't you be more like Adam Alter? Anyways, Professor Alter, it's always good to see you. It's very good to see you, Scott. If you say that, you're welcome to join me everywhere I go. My God, it was literally obnoxious. I know,
Starting point is 00:15:45 Adam, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, Adam, let's bust right to it. Your book, Breakthrough, or Anatomy of a Breakthrough. So before we talk about getting unstuck, if you will, how do you recognize when you're getting stuck? What are the elements of starting to identify, I'm hitting an unproductive moment professionally or personally? I think it's obvious. And I think when you don't feel stuck, when you feel like even if things aren't changing, if you're comfortable with that, then you're not stuck. It's a very subjective experience. So when you speak to people, and I've run this survey on thousands of people around the world now asking them for their
Starting point is 00:16:23 experiences of stuckness. And they'll tell you very clearly, I wish I could make progress financially in my work, in my personal relationships, whatever areas it might be. So very often, it's just subjective. But of course, there are domains where you have objective feedback, where you know there is some metric telling you that things are slowing down, whether it's about money, whether it's about followers, whether it's about followers, whether it's about any form of engagement or some metric that matters to you, you might have an objective signal. But chiefly, it's about that feeling. I was speaking to someone last night. He told me that his dad was a mathematician and he spent 30 years working on a problem. He never
Starting point is 00:16:59 felt stuck, even though it took him 30 years to come up with a solution. So if you're engaged and you're happy and you feel like you're where you want to be, essentially you're not stuck. If you're engaged, I like that. If you're engaged and happy, you're not stuck. That makes a lot of sense to me. When you think, okay, I am stuck, and professionally, financially, personally, what are the first steps to getting unstuck? so a lot of people rush to act um you know there's there's a confusion in the brain between being physically trapped and being mentally stuck or emotionally stuck and when you're physically trapped we're very well designed to deal with that you read these stories all the time in the paper of hysterical strength
Starting point is 00:17:39 these people who lift cars off others and off themselves, that's a very adaptive way to respond to physical entrapment. But unfortunately, that kind of flailing fight or flight adrenaline response is terrible when you're emotionally and mentally stuck. So you've got to slow things down. I spend a lot of time in the book talking about how to strategically slow things down. I talk about Lionel Messi, the soccer player. I talk about musicians, artists, people in all sorts of creative industries and about the importance of taking a beat before you do anything. So that's the first critical thing. Once you've done that, once you've accepted where you are, you understand the lay of the
Starting point is 00:18:17 land, you know what your options look like, you can start to strategize and then start taking action. Yeah, I think you refer to it as a creative cliff. By the way, everyone you mentioned is totally unimportant with the exception of Lionel Messi. So can you tell the story about Lionel Messi and how that relates to being getting unstuck? Yeah. So I think he's the greatest soccer player of all time. I think he's certainly the best player alive today. And I think probably the greatest of all time. And one really fascinating thing about him that a lot of people don't know is that growing up and even still today, he was famously anxious
Starting point is 00:18:48 before soccer matches. And when he was young, a lot of coaches said he's never going to make it big because he's too anxious. He used to be physically sick before matches. He would complain about getting on the field. And once he was on the field, sometimes he struggled to perform at the beginning of the game. And so to cope with this anxiety, he developed this technique of not doing anything for the first three or four minutes of the match. So what he started doing was instead of playing the game actively from the first minute, he would amble around the center circle of the field and just watch everyone else play. So he was effectively, you know, there were 22 players on the pitch, but this one player was not
Starting point is 00:19:25 yet playing the game. And what he was doing instead was two things. One, he was getting himself in the position where he could play the remaining 85, 90 minutes of the game. But he was also strategically looking at how everyone else was playing. He was learning where the weaknesses were in his opposition. Were two players who should have been connecting, not connecting? Was there a weakness on his own side or was there someone who was particularly engaged? And that made him more effective later on. And we know he does this because if you look at the goals that he scored, he has scored in every minute of the game at least once, except minutes one and two. He's effectively not playing the game yet. And still, despite that, and because I think he slows down, he is the most effective soccer player in the world.
Starting point is 00:20:07 Yeah. So Ronaldo and Mbappe would like to have a word, as would Pele. Now let's talk about going from defense to offense. How do you try and create a context or set yourself up for a breakthrough? First off, define a breakthrough. And then how do you set yourself up to increase the likelihood of a true breakthrough? First off, define a breakthrough, and then how do you set yourself up to increase the likelihood of a true breakthrough? Yeah, so a breakthrough means different things in different contexts. And I think because this audience is interested in business and entrepreneurship, obviously a breakthrough means something very specific in that context. It means moving beyond whatever plateau you've hit now or whatever barriers you've hit now to
Starting point is 00:20:43 the next thing. Those barriers are universal in business. So you hear about the end product after 10 barriers have been faced and overcome for all the most successful products and companies. But if you, as I've done, you read, say, 100 biographies of the 100 most successful entrepreneurs of all time, and you look at the origin stories, they involve just one massive hurdle after another that they managed to overcome. Now, there are also people you don't read about in biographies who didn't do that. But those breakthroughs are effectively the other side of that experience when you hit that barrier. And so the big question is, how do you achieve that? And a large part of it, so looking at careers and looking at what people do, the most effective
Starting point is 00:21:26 single strategic thing you can do to make breakthroughs is to do these two things that are in opposition to each other known as exploring and exploiting. So exploration is when you spend a bit of time roaming far and wide and trying to experience as many things as possible. I give a talk to the freshmen at NYU sometimes, and the talk is about saying yes. It's about saying yes to all the opportunities that come your way, and that's during a period of exploration. In fact, I show them four emails that I've got over the last 15 years that have changed my life, where I had the option and my instinct was to say, I'm not going to do that. It's going to be time-consuming. It might not work out,
Starting point is 00:22:02 but it produced outcomes that changed my life. And you only know which emails there'll be by saying yes to a whole lot of them. So that's a period of exploration. You try different things. Jackson Pollock, the painter before he became the drip painting expert, did a hundred different things. Peter Jackson, before he made Lord of the Rings, was making horror films. You've got to try stuff, but at some point you've got to call it and say, look, I've been trying these 10 different techniques and approaches. I can't explore forever. But what I've got to do next is exploit.
Starting point is 00:22:29 And exploiting is when you become absolutely single-minded, focused just on the thing that you think is going to bring you the most benefit. And that's when you say no to everything else. So you move from this mode of saying by default, yes, to saying by default, no, I'm not going to do anything that's not in the service of this one thing that I'm going to devote my heart, default, yes, to saying by default, no, I'm not going to do anything that's not in the service of this one thing that I'm going to devote my heart, mind, and soul to. Yeah. So this has been difficult to go this long without turning all this back to me, but I'll start. This guy named Barry Rosenstein, who's the founder of Janna,
Starting point is 00:23:03 this multi-billion dollar hedge fund, said something that was profound for me. And that is, he said, there's three buckets in life. There's things you have to do. So he said, if my biggest investor's in town, I have to meet with him. He said, and there's things I want to do. Like we were, he said, I want to go to the Bruce Springsteen concert. And there's things you should do, right? Your coworker's daughter is having a Bob Mitzel,
Starting point is 00:23:26 you really should go. There's a round table discussion around alternative investments, you really should go. He says the true focus and true luxury in your life is eliminating the should bucket. And now I'd say constantly to my team and to the people in my life, like, oh, we really should do this. I'm like, I'm no longer about should. Do I want to do this or do I have to do this? And it strikes me that when you're really focused on an objective, you clear out all should, and it's what do you need to do to just get to that one thing? Am I interpreting this correctly? Do you want to add to that at all? 100%. I think that's true. I think when you get to the exploitation phase, it's about not doing the shoulds. It's about figuring out exactly what you want to do. And
Starting point is 00:24:14 what you want to do is in service of whatever that goal is that you're heading towards single-mindedly. But it's a privilege to be in that position, right? The ability to say no to the shoulds comes over time with development, seniority, with all sorts of other things. It's a luxury and it's not something that's afforded everyone. But I think you can afford it yourself by giving yourself license to be in the no phase of life. I'm not exploring now.
Starting point is 00:24:37 I'm exploiting. And so to do that, I am going to say no to a lot of the things that fall in the should bucket that I might have said yes to when I was exploring. And tracking careers, thousands of careers is one of the most interesting studies I've ever read. Looking at entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, creators, filmmakers. If you want to know when you're going to hit a hot streak in your career, this great golden period of growth, it is when you have explored and then exploited and doing it in exactly that order and knowing when to switch from one to the other is the key and it's that moment when you stop
Starting point is 00:25:09 saying yes to the shoulds you start saying no so i think a lot about you know i love the character um varus is that his name he's like the mentor in game of thrones he says, I serve the realm. And I loved, I saw this clip, I think, of course, on TikTok. And he says that power is an illusion. Like who really holds power in a situation? And it's who the people think has power. It's nothing but a shadow on the wall. And I think about my own struggles when I've been stuck. And a lot of it is illusory or just a shadow on the wall. And that is, and for those of you who don't know, Adam has an appointment in the psychology department, is I think as much as his domain expertise is as much around psychology as it is around consumer
Starting point is 00:25:55 behavior. But when I've been stuck, it's been a function of I'm focused on the immutable. I'm focused on the past, which I can't change. And I beat myself up. I get angry at myself. I get upset at myself and it paralyzes me because I'm so disappointed in myself. I'm so angry about something that is literally immutable. And whether it's stoicism or Buddhism, it says pretty much, look, boss, be upset and focus on the things you can control. As someone who has domain expertise in psychology, what is the link between beating yourself up, depression, anger, things out of your control, and getting stuck? And then what are the practices around self-care and mental wellness to get unstuck? I mean, a full three chapters, a quarter of the book is about exactly that. It's about the
Starting point is 00:26:49 emotional consequences of being stuck. It's about the unhelpful patterns that people have in ruminating over the past of focusing on the wrong things or focusing on the things they can't change rather than looking forward to the things they can. And the reason it's three chapters is because people always say, what am I going to do? How do I do this thing to get unstuck? But we neglect traditionally that emotional part of what it is to be stuck. It's universal.
Starting point is 00:27:15 It makes people feel unbelievably lonely. I've had all these interactions with people over the years asking them about the experience of stuckness. They say a lot of things that sound like what you're describing and looking back and ruminating. But they also say this is such an extreme and central part of my existence that I would pay a vast proportion of my resources and do whatever it takes to get unstuck. I just need to be pointed in the right direction. So I think there is this real struggle that comes for a lot of people with
Starting point is 00:27:42 knowing how to cope emotionally at that first stage with the experience of being stuck so that they can then marshal their resources to actually do the things they need to do to get unstuck. So I agree. The emotional part is a huge thing that you've got to work through before you can start actually doing things and strategizing. Just being more tactical, but what about being stuck in a relationship? What about not being able to get past hurt or disappointment, or you feel like you're in an unproductive or a bad marriage? I was, again, all of my learning comes through HBO. I was watching Succession and I'm literally have PTSD from Shiv and Tom's relationship. That was a horrific discussion on the balcony,
Starting point is 00:28:20 wasn't it? I mean, people just shouldn't. No relationship is much better than this. People should never be this mean to each other. I just don't. And literally, like, I had to turn it off. I'm like, people should just not be that way to each other. Anyways, talk specifically about when you feel like you're stuck in a relationship or something that's unproductive in your personal life. Yeah, well, I mean, I think there are often discussions that people have about whether to stay in a relationship that's as toxic as the relationships that are depicted on succession. And it's a very good question, especially if there's abuse or something's going on that makes it an untenable situation. But with any of these discussions and decisions, there's always this, the two end points are to quit,
Starting point is 00:29:10 to exit, to get out, whatever the thing is that's going on and to do something different, whether it's being single or trying to find a new relationship or to stick with it and to try to improve it. And that's going to be true whether you're in business. It doesn't matter what the domain is, but that's the key decision. And if you're going to quit, if you're going to leave, that's fine. That's a decision you've made based on the information you have. You still need to slow things down the way Messi did. You can't make that decision rashly.
Starting point is 00:29:30 But if you're going to do that, that's fine. If you're not going to quit, then every resource has to be in essentially, and this is a terrible term in this context, but exploiting the relationship in the explore-exploit sense. So you have to do everything you can to become kinder to become a better parent to become a better mentor to become a better husband wife whatever it is and that might mean therapy it means very different things for different people obviously but you should as you would with a business or with anything else you've got to pour your whole self into that process of making that thing better and i mean we could talk about succession all day. I certainly could. Between succession and messy, we could take up a whole hour. But yeah, I mean, I think
Starting point is 00:30:10 there are better ways to do things. And I think humans are not sort of well-wired for those kinds of interactions. The kinds of interactions that happen in relationships and marriage, we screw up a lot of those because we just don't know what we're supposed to be doing. You need therapy or you need to read something that'll give you a little bit of guidance. And so do that. Be an omnivore. Consume as much as you can. Reading your work, Adam, a lot of it had echoes of Daniel Kahneman's thinking slow and fast.
Starting point is 00:30:39 That's high praise. I'll take it. Well, just the notion that it's hard to read the label from inside of the bottle. And on important decisions, you want to slow down your thinking and i like that you when you feel stuck you you said going to this creative cliff making rash decisions feeling like an action orientation is going to solve this can have bad consequences right yeah and also speak to other people yeah the the most valuable resource we have as humans, no other animal has this. The unhappy anteater doesn't have like 12 other anteaters that I can
Starting point is 00:31:11 go and commune with and talk about the problems of being an anteater. But as humans, we are uniquely in this incredible position of having tremendous social resources. So go talk to people who are like you, but even better, talk to people who are maybe not exactly like you, different expertise, different backgrounds, a different understanding of things. And that has tremendous unsticking properties. If you're unsure about something, that is your greatest resource is the fact that you know other people, you don't live as an island. And so there's an incredible unsticking effect when you're making these really big life decisions in particular, that comes from just having a conversation with someone else about them. I love you say in the book that originality is overrated.
Starting point is 00:31:54 And I actually, I agree. I'll let you go and then I have some thoughts. Yeah, no, I'd like to hear what you have to say about it. This is in my experience working with a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives. I've worked with musicians and authors, and I'm an author myself. And I think what we all search for, and this is true in business in particular, is novelty. So whether you're an investor in businesses, whether you're a creator of businesses, whether you're just interested in being a creative yourself, we think that novelty and genuine radical originality is the only path to true success. And honestly, that's just, it's a myth. It's a lie. There is basically no such thing as radical originality. I challenge
Starting point is 00:32:34 anyone to come up with a truly radically original novel product that did not stand on the shoulders of either giants or maybe not giants, but certainly other ideas. And so many of the best businesses were not first. They didn't do something that no one else was doing. And it's true about creatives as well. It's true about, I talk about Bob Dylan and a whole lot of other examples of people who we think of as being sort of genuinely original. And I think the liberating thing about that is there are other ways to make successful products and ideas happen. The best one that I know of is to combine two things that are old in a new way, which is really much easier than coming up with something genuinely original. And so I talk a lot about this art of recombination,
Starting point is 00:33:15 of finding ideas. And for the last 20 years, I've had a couple of documents where I collect ideas as they come to me, as they happen to arise. And so now that document is just thousands of ideas deep. And if on a random day I say, let's look at idea number 27 and idea number 412, and the task that makes me kind of nimble at this is to say, how could you combine them in a way that hasn't been done before? And often there's a business, there's a book, there's a new idea. So I think recombination is a better way to go than radical originality yeah it's i mean i remember our colleague peter golder who uh was at nyu and is now at dartmouth
Starting point is 00:33:52 is devoted his entire research effort to proving and he's right that the original player whether it's a gui or mobile phone or search is never the one that captures all the stakeholder value. It's the person that comes in and improves on it. And when I get accused of doing something original, I'm like, no, I find other people's work. I put a different spin on it. I apply it to a different medium. I maybe say it in more provocative human terms. I don't think of myself as original at all. I think of someone who wants to find other people's work and I reference them and I credit them. I don't plagiarize it,
Starting point is 00:34:27 but I mean, this is amazing work. And if you can bring to bear something that's fantastic, but incrementally improve upon it, you know, that's where the sauce is because the truly original breakthroughs to thinking is super important, but it generally doesn't create a lot of value
Starting point is 00:34:45 because it's by virtue of being truly original or breakthrough, it's a little bit ahead of its time and hard to commercialize. So it's like, you don't need to be original. You need to have an incredible appreciation for something interesting and then say, what is my view on it? Or is there a different way to communicate it that reaches a broader audience? So when we talk about being unstuck, and immediately there's a lot of notion around, and you talk about this, and our colleague Jonathan Haidt talks a lot about this, is that when everyone's barking up the same tree, you get stupid. And you reference that it's important to speak to people outside of your circle to get a different viewpoint. You talk about diversity and crowdsourcing for getting unstuck. Say more.
Starting point is 00:35:30 Yeah. So essentially there are three kinds of people you could consult in general. You can consult people who are a lot like you and that most of the people you spend time with are a lot like you. Maybe they live near you. Maybe they have the same background you have. Maybe they're demographically similar to you in terms of ethnicity, wealth, religion, and so on. We tend to have a lot of people around us who are a lot like us. The problem with only speaking to those people is they amplify our strengths, but also our weaknesses. And so they entrench us. If we're stuck already, we're unlikely to get unstuck by speaking only to those people. This is also, by the way, a matter of leadership of
Starting point is 00:36:05 how you put together teams. So you've got these people who are amplifying you and who are like you, and they're great. It's good to have some of those people around for harmony and whatever else, and you understand each other, and there's a lot of benefit to that. But there are two other kinds of people that are really important. One of them is non-redundant people. Non-redundancy in the literature basically just means that they're different from you. They're non-redundant people. Non-redundancy in the literature basically just means that they're different from you. They're non-overlapping. So I remember when I was a grad student, and still this happens at NYU, when recruiters come to campus, they'll often say, I want the smartest Russian literature student, the smartest organic chemistry student,
Starting point is 00:36:37 the smartest mathematician, the smartest marketing student, and I'm going to bring them all together. They can be educated in the area. Let's say it's a hedge fund or a consulting company or whatever it is, but I want them all to think differently and to bring that difference to bear on whatever is going on in this particular case. And so that you've got these people who are like you, people who are different from you, but then you also need a third kind. And Pixar is very well known for doing this with many of its most successful films. You bring in the black sheep. So the black sheep is not just non-redundant. It's someone who says to you, you're wrong. And let me tell you the three flavors of wrong that you are. And this is, let me break it down for you. So in Pixar's case,
Starting point is 00:37:15 they've got all these people who are amazing at animation and they'll bring in someone who's a storytelling expert. And that storyteller will say, stop worrying about whether the fur looks like fur and the water looks like water. That's nonsense. No one's going to watch a film because the fur looks like fur. Let's figure out the story. And so they'll push back. And that creative tension and the tension in our own lives that we get from people who don't think like us, it's threatening and it can make us feel a little bit unnerved.
Starting point is 00:37:39 But if you embrace it, it is the key to getting unstuck is to having that pushback, that conflict, that sort of productive. You want to be polite about it, but you want to have these people around you as well. So I was late to this because I was interviewing Andrew Osorkin. And the two of you actually remind me of each other. Again, I'll take it. Thank you. That's high praise. Well, but you're both sort of the youngest
Starting point is 00:38:05 person in that room you were the youngest at least at stern you were kind of the youngest star uh we no one ever leaves at stern they leave feet first which creates very little opportunity for younger academics but that's another talk show but you were considered sort of this young star you're no longer that young. Andrew's no longer that young. And I would just like you in a very open, honest way to speak about what were the attributes that got you so much accelerant so early in your career, looking back on it. And then what are your thoughts around trying to maintain velocity as you're no longer like the young kid on the block? So in my first six months of grad school, this is 20 years ago when I came to the US, I worked entirely, I poured my mind and soul into
Starting point is 00:38:50 this one project. And I thought it was going to get published in the best journal and it was going to make me as an academic and I was going to get a job on the back of it as a professor and so on. And I went into my advisor's office and he said to me, I just want you to know that I've got some bad news. This thing that you have been working on, someone else just published that paper. So we're going to start from scratch. And it was the most devastating news. It felt like six months had been for nothing. And so from there on, and I've continued to do this now, the answer to your question is diversification. You are an index fund of yourself yourself and if you do 10 different things some of them will not
Starting point is 00:39:27 work out there are aspects of my career that went nowhere but i do as many things as i can at least initially that's the exploring i guess and so i i write books and i consult and i do legal expert testimony and i do the work that i do with section and And when these opportunities come up, you have to say, yes, you've got to pursue them and figure out if they're right for you. You don't have to keep all of them forever. You've got to exploit at some point for sure. But I think that diversity, especially early on in your career, when you don't know what's going to pan out,
Starting point is 00:39:58 you can only go further with the things that you've tried and made a goal of. And so that's been my philosophy ever since that 20 year ago experience of having that sort of profound loss of all that work I'd done. And the question about looking forward, I think I am now in an exploitation phase to an extent. I do a lot of what you said about shoulds. I say no to a lot more and I feel very privileged to be able to do that. But I think if you keep enough doors open and you try enough things and you're voracious and omnivorous you consume everything at some point you can start saying no to things because some of those things that you've tried will work out and so that's I think being a being a key across time I just want to I want to talk a little bit I want to go off script a little
Starting point is 00:40:40 bit I'm disturbed concerned I'm a bit of a catastrophist in that I'm naturally a pessimistic person. It strikes me that there is this epidemic of loneliness. And I saw this study that just absolutely rattled me. And that is, if you had a choice between a smoker, between being a smoker, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and having friends, and being a non-smoker but not having friends, you'd live longer smoking a pack a day and having friends and being a non-smoker but not having friends you'd live longer smoking a pack a day and having friends and now one in seven men don't have a single friend the number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half like what are your thoughts on loneliness and as men especially who seem to have a really difficult time forming relationships. What are your thoughts
Starting point is 00:41:27 on technology? You've written about technology, irresistible as a parent, as a man, as a friend and colleague. What are your thoughts on technology and loneliness? Yeah. So, I mean, my last book was about technology and screens, and that's still a huge part of my interest. And I think that the rise of technology, the rise of social media platforms has been a big part of that loneliness, that epidemic of loneliness, because that's where most of our social lives live. And it's just an unfulfilling, impoverished version of what it is to have interactions with other people. But I'll say this as well. I moved out of New York to a suburb about five years ago, and my wife and I sort of independently started to meet. She met
Starting point is 00:42:10 women and I met men in the town we're in. And she formed friendships like that. And I think guys are kind of, they have this sort of carapace of invulnerability. They don't want to interact with each other in a way that's vulnerable. One of the things I love about the way you interact, Scott, is you're very real and open about things that are hard for you and difficulties. And that's really disarming. And there's old research in social psychology that basically shows that to the extent you're willing to give people just a little nugget about yourself, you disclose something about yourself, you're vulnerable, they will do it back. They'll mutually disclose and do that five times. And you have like effectively a very good friend.
Starting point is 00:42:48 And if you do that over and over again, you form friendships. And so the thing I'm teaching my kids is that it's an illusion that the sort of the alpha person in the group will be the most popular and most liked. That person who's never vulnerable, never forms close relationships. You have to be willing to let it, maybe not all hang out, but a good portion of it hang out. And that's what people really respond to when they start to feel close to you. Yeah, it's very strange. As a man, you feel as if you express affection or admiration for someone else, that it's a zero-sum game, that you become less masculine or less impressive. I find women are much better complimenting and just saying, oh my gosh,
Starting point is 00:43:25 you look so beautiful tonight. Like a guy would never say, dude, you look so handsome. We just can't say that. There's something that's like, oh, that means we're in less, I don't know. It's very strange that we see compassion and love and affection as a zero-sum game as men. Are there any, you know, given what you've seen evolve over the last years in terms of technology, our society, you know, I always try and focus on what is the message we can have for a younger professional? start decent job, decent credentialing, but are maybe not feeling stuck. But like, I think any ambitious person will have a lot of periods where they feel like they're not accelerating as quickly as they'd like professionally or personally. What would your advice to your younger self be? So I have this research with my colleague, Hal Hirschfield at UCLA. And what we found is that when people have a nine at the end of their age, when they're 29, 39, 49, 59, they have this mini crisis and they say, where am I? I'm looking down
Starting point is 00:44:30 the barrel of a new decade. Am I doing the things I should be doing? Is my life meaningful and rich? Do I have the friendships I need? And so you see all sorts of extreme behavior. You see people who've never run signing up for marathons. There's this big spike in 29 and 39 and 49 year old marathon runners. You see a lot of extramarital affairs, so not so good things. You see a lot of different kinds of behaviors spiking in these ages. But the thing that's interesting to me about that research is it suggests the importance of zooming back and figuring things out in moments that are a little bit quieter. And I don't think we do that. I think we act and we're constantly acting and we're all busy. We have demands on our time and attention. And I think taking one day every three months, devoting that day or at least a few hours to saying to yourself,
Starting point is 00:45:15 where am I? Let's create this sort of metric. I started here. This is where I was, whether depending on how old you were after college or when I left my last job or whatever it is when I started this venture. And this is where I am and this is where I need to be. And then think really carefully about whether you're orienting yourself in the right direction before you're 29, 39, 49. You don't need to wait for these kind of grand moments to do these kinds of audits. And actually one of the processes I talk about in this book is known as a friction audit, which is about saying, hey, I'm going to take this day in this quieter moment, and I'm going to figure out where there's friction in my life and whether I'm pointing in the right direction. And those are essential
Starting point is 00:45:53 because you do that for one day and the next two months and 30 days are pointing in the right direction rather than just like kind of like a rat in a maze running along towards a dead end. So I think we just as a species don't do enough of that really high level thinking. You've got to build it into your calendar, put it every three months in your calendar and do it and spend that time and it'll change your life. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be
Starting point is 00:46:31 radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series
Starting point is 00:47:01 about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:47:37 Algebra of Happiness. It's never too late to right a wrong. So in, when was it? I think it was about 20, 20, 22 years ago, I had been kicked off of the board of Red Envelope, the company I started. I got into a war with our venture capitalist, a guy named Mike Moritz from Sequoia Capital. And Mike knew nothing about retail. By the way, I treat my grudges like my plants. I water them, I love them, and I watch them grow. But Mike, who is arguably the most successful venture capitalist in history, came onto the board of Red Envelope and was supporting literally an incompetent CEO. And I just couldn't handle it. I was young, I was obnoxious, I'd had some success,
Starting point is 00:48:22 and I couldn't have handled the situation more poorly. And because Mike was a billionaire and I was just some crazy 34-year-old entrepreneur, the board decided to kick me off the board. And that was devastating for me at the time. I remember when they called me and told me they were kicking me off the board. I was on my way to SFO Airport, and I was in a rental car. and I got out of the rental car and I literally couldn't like, I was trying so hard to process what I do next. Do I call shareholders? Do I call people on the board? Do I call like a lawyer? I couldn't even process what had just happened. I remember standing outside of my rental car, just standing there, just like for 10 or 15 minutes, just like paralyzed.
Starting point is 00:49:08 Like I didn't even know where the keys were. I didn't know. I couldn't even think about where, like getting my luggage out of the trunk. I was just so literally paralyzed, not with fear, but a situation I just didn't know how to deal with or process. And long story short, actually, let's make this long story even longer. I decided to raise a bunch of capital, become the largest shareholder, and then go back and sweep out the board and kick everyone off the board. And over the course of the next two or
Starting point is 00:49:35 three years, I did that. That's the fun part. And I'd like to say the story ends well, where we went on to be able to billion-dollar company, but I was able to take control of the board. And then 2008, the great financial recession, Wells Fargo pulled our credit line. We had a snafu at the port in one of our warehouses, and we were literally like chapter 11 in like 11 weeks. Story does not end well. Anyway, anyway, when I initially raised money to become the largest shareholder again in Red Envelope and sweep out the board, I had a friend put me in contact with some capital sources. And I immediately raised, I think, $20 or $30 million and became the largest shareholder. And I said to him, I said, okay, I'll give you some upside in that $20 or $30 million, and I'll pay you $50,000. And so I sent him $25,000 and said, I'll pay you another $25,000 in, I don't know, a year. And so I sent him 25 grand and said, I'll pay you another 25 grand in, I don't know,
Starting point is 00:50:26 a year. And you get, I don't know, 10% of the upside. Boom, shake hands, we're done. And then all hell broke loose. The stock dove, eventually chapter 11, I lost a shit ton of money. And he sent me an invoice for the 25 grand, the remaining 25 grand. And I said, boss, I lost so much money here. This was a fucking disaster for everyone. You made 25 grand. I am not going to send you the second payment. You're the only person here who made money. And he was very upset and it put a real strain, basically ended our friendship. And we weren't close friends, but we were friends. And I hadn't spoken to this guy in probably 18 or 20 years. And he reached out to me and said, I listen to Prop G Pod all the time, and I just love it. And I just wanted to say, I hope you're well. And in the back of my mind,
Starting point is 00:51:10 it had always weighed on me. It had always just weighed on me that I understand why I didn't pay him, but I never felt right with it. I never felt right with it, nor as I shouldn't have, right? I agreed to pay the guy. And I've decided as I've gotten older that every person I work with, my aspiration is that they believe after spending time working with me that they think I'm one of the most talented and generous people they have ever worked with. And I can't control the former. Talent is, there's a lot of dimensions that come into talent, but you can't control generosity. You can't control their perception of it, but you can control your actions and say,
Starting point is 00:51:49 what is market? Go further than market. Pay people more than market. Be generous in terms of your views of them, in terms of forgiveness, in terms of compensation. The way I express affection to people, quite frankly, is money, is by paying them a lot or buying them shit. I realize how weird that sounds. A lot of virtue signaling going on here. Anyways, I sent him an email saying, look, I owe you 25 grand, and it still never sat well with me that I didn't pay it. So I want to pay it. The NASDAQ is up 60% since whenever it was in the last 18 years. I'm going to give you 40 grand. And I sent it to him. And we just had lunch today. And it wasn't that that repaired the relationship,
Starting point is 00:52:29 but it kind of was a signal for reigniting a friendship. And my whole point here is it's never too late. If you fuck up, if you did something two years ago and you feel bad about it and you never had a chance to apologize, if you have the opportunity to call your dad and say, you know, I really acted like a jerk. If you have a chance to call your ex-husband and say,
Starting point is 00:52:54 you know, five years ago, I was very upset. I was very, this was a hard time for me. And I didn't behave in a manner that reflects our relationship or what we had together. And I'm sorry. And the opportunity, when you get a little bit older and you become a little bit more comfortable with your emotions, you become a little bit more reasoned in terms of your ego, recognizing your own deficiencies.
Starting point is 00:53:18 When you realize the power of an apology, when you realize the power of honesty, it just feels right as rain. It is never too late. It is never too late to do the right thing. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to The Prophecy Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show. When daddy's on the nitrous, I totally bond with my hygienists. I find out about their lives, where they come from,
Starting point is 00:54:06 and I turn into an extrovert. I should just carry around a gas tank of nitrous wherever I go. Oh my God, genius. Genius. I once went to a bachelor party where someone brought a canister of nitrous. You know, made things better. Made for a good time, made for a good time. Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners, and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin,
Starting point is 00:54:54 sponsored by Klaviyo. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash B-F-C-M.

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