Malcolm Gladwell on "Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know"

you good morning welcome my name is Tim at gloom I have the great privilege of being the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a very warm early morning welcome to everyone thank you for coming as we get started this morning we wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates for thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the hereon when dot the Seneca and most recently the Mississauga's of the Credit River today this meeting place is still home to many indigenous indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful for the opportunity to work on this land this morning we're putting two outstanding Canadians to work on this land and it is my great pleasure to welcome and introduce them they really need no introduction this is malcolm gladwell's v speaking a Trotman event since 2008 and all of us at rotman and the University of Toronto are thrilled you keep coming back Malcolm last month little brown and company published Malcolm six book sixth book titled talking to strangers what we should know about the people we don't know it's fantastic all of you are handed a copy when you got when you came in and I can tell you it's already zoomed to the bestsellers list Malcolm is the author of five New York Times bestsellers the tipping point blink outliers what the dog saw and David and Goliath he is the host of the podcast revisionist history and is a staff writer for The New Yorker Malcolm was named one of the most hundred most influential people by Time magazine and is one of Foreign Policy's top 10 global thinkers previously he was a reporter at Washington Post where he covered business and science and then served as the newspapers in New York City bureau chief Malcolm was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario but the most important thing you need to know about Malcolm is that he is a graduate of the University of Toronto he went to he went to Trinity College and graduated with a degree in history in 2011 the university awarded him Doctor of Letters honoris causa to recognize the global impact that his work has had on how people think about the social sphere and human potential indigo Books is our event sponsor today and all of us are Rahman were delighted when Heather Eastman herself Indigo's founder chair and CEO accepted the invitation to lead Malcolm in conversation heather is one of Canada's most respected entrepreneurs and business leaders she and her husband are among the country's most general flynt most generous philanthropist earlier this year they made a historic hundred million investment in the University of Toronto the soon to be built short ceman Schwarzer Eastman Innovation Centre will accelerate innovation in Toronto and Canada by creating the country's largest ever university innovation node [Applause] yes thank you and the new Schwartz Riesman Institute for technology and society is exploring the ethical and societal implications of AI and other emerging technologies their investment is the largest donation in U of T's history over the last 20 years heather has given many compelling talks on our stage and expertly interviewed many amazing authors everyone please join me in a very warm welcome to Malcolm and Heather [Applause] all right over to you okay thank you wonderful it says amazing amount that all these students that I see not only students here but that all these students are up at 8 a.m. in the morning to hear you Malcolm and it is great to be here with you I would not wear I student today that's what I imagine so all right this book of all your books and I've had the pleasure of reading them all this book seems to excavate a subject that is so relevant for our time so just as we get into this what what provoked you to explore this idea of how we talk to and more importantly how we understand strangers what is it that what provoked you into this subject well I you know I there's there's a serious answer in a non serious answer the non serious answer which is always the better answer is that I was got really into yeah I'm big fan of spy stories and the thing about spy stories is the spy never gets caught which makes no sense right spy should get caught but in fact spies they're usually hanging around for like a decade and then they when they get caught they get caught because you know some of some absurd you know thing happens that there's nothing to do with them being a spy and by accident and then we're like oh my goodness we had a spy in our midst and I tell out series of spy stories in the book and I have puzzled about this for years and like and it's never all of the conditions about spies so the spies who never get caught are never they're not like James Bond spies so they're not like dark geniuses in fact they're usually in apt they're always like we've added right in front of us there was set right in our midst yeah yeah they're they're mostly they often have you know major behavioral issues - typically alcoholics you know the worst the most damaging spy that's you know the month the two most damaging spiders of the 20th century in the United States are Aldrich Ames who was who was a really bad at his job got really bad performance videos was a raging alcoholic and once the Soviet Union started paying him money large amounts of money to hand over all secrets he just spent it so like one day he's driving to work and a Hyundai the next day he's driving to work in like a BMW 7-series and he was like completely unaware that this might are unworried this might cause suspicions and he's like wearing fancy Italian suits and like Briony Li loafers and like his wife bought hundreds of shoes and they were just and he's like on a g7 you know civil service salary and everyone was like oh I guess I guess Rick's come into some money you know there's no there was no like eyebrows raised like this story is told over and over again and that's I began wounds because like the inability of people to figure out that the person with whom they are working is he's actually someone else right that was fascinating to me and that got me rolling on this because then I realized well you know that seems to me a very modern kind of problem that people would have a that we would be incapable of discerning someone's true identity and who they are you tell an amazing story at the beginning the story of the young black woman who goes to a town to start over and she's all excited about her new job she gets stopped by a policeman in what turns out to be the most incredible altercation and then end result just for the people who haven't read the book yet share that story because it's a great entry into this yeah quickly share that this is the book opens it ends it's framed by the story of Sandra bland and Sandra bland was one of them there was that string of high-profile cases involving African Americans and law enforcement in America beginning with Ferguson and Michael Brown and she was one of those cases and maybe the most heartbreaking of them all and she's yes she's she's coming from a job interview into small town in Texas he's pulled over for a failure to use her turning signal so it's a pretext it's not I didn't do anything wrong and then she gets a you know into an altercation I mean the the conversation with the police officer just escalates and becomes this kind of absurd confrontation and he drags her out of the car and arrests her and she commits suicide few days later in her cell and the whole the thing that made that I'm one of the things that made it memorable was that the entire conversation was captured by the officers dashcam video and so we we know like normally there's always this kind of dispute about what actually happened and maybe was there was no dispute because we knew we had an exact transcript and I found that video and that transcript to be completely riveting and there the text for the book because it's about a two people who do not know each other are forced to have a high-stakes conversation and at every turn the police officer misunderstands her it actually didn't make sense you book in the book is bookended with it this conversation it didn't make sense at all I mean if he stopped her for the tale later some sense that there might have been something suspicious on this stop how did that happen how did that escalate from your taillight to lady get out of the car to lady you're gonna be put in jail how did that happen like what's going on he's a woman the woman commits suicide she gets stopped for a taillight and she ends up dead three days later how did that happen well it's a story that the reason I chose it to be the kind of text of the book is that you couldn't attack that story on ten different levels it is about a on one level it's about a police officer who who believe comes to believe that she is defying his authority he also harbors a kind of weird parent fan see that she might be a criminal that she's actually up to no good but on another the level I choose to spend the most time on the book though he's on a much higher level which is the on a structural level he's doing what he's trained to do so we're in an era right now in American law enforcement I don't know whether I doubted this is true here since on most matters Canadians are more sane than their neighbors but there's a philosophy of law enforcement that is currently in vogue in America which is based on this notion that officers should be proactive and that you should be willing to stop a thousand people to find two criminals and so you have a you know the the hit rate it's worse than you know how when you go to the airport they search your bags the hit rate for finding something in a bag gun explosives it's like you know it's they find it's like one in one in ten million or so it's absurdly lovely and when they do find and I've always wondered about this the absurd when they find your innocent when they find it we have a water bottle the reason they take the water bottle is that the water ball could conceivably be an explosive but when they find it in your bag they take it out of the bag and then they just throw it away into the garbage can and you and you're sort of torn because you know you don't say anything but part of you wants to say ah it's a bomb it could be a bomb don't do that but like it's so completely disconnected from reality and like every now and again the the the in America that the the agency that runs the screening the TSA will insert guns into bags to see if the people find them and they never find them like 95 percent or so that I had those six in the book of the guns go and found so it's like but it's so everyone in that arena considers it totally cool to to drastically inconvenience every aircraft every airplane traveler even though the odds of finding something are vanishingly small and even though when something is found they either or something does exist they either don't find it or when they find it they throw it I guess they're operating on the kind of probability yes so that philosophy has now been it's nothing used by police officers on the street which is why in America police officers pull over motorists with this you unless you drive in America you have no comprehension of how frequently this happens that so this officer in senator Blaine case pulled over people all the time always for for Tribute infractions and if you look at we have is the exact police record he never found once in his career he found a gun I mean thank the man his job was basically pulling over people for most active all all the examples you use here are so interesting I mean there are cases in the news that we watched one I'm sure very interesting to this audience the Bernie Madoff case where you're saying our inability even with facts even with bread crumbs all around aren't some our inability to understand strangers dirty Madoff case is incredible Bernie Bernie Madoff so there's a couple of in retrospect sort of hilarious Bernie Madoff stuff one is that um you know the SEC which is full of very intelligent people it's not a bogus agency would go they would from time to time we look at Bernie's returns which were supposed to be his trading strategy was supposed to be tied to the market but it his results were independent of the market so they would define gravity this raise a reasonable concern the SEC so they would go and see birdie and they would say Bernie you know you're returning 15% like clockwork quarter after quarter in the history of investing no one's ever done that can you explain what you're doing and Bernie would say I really and they would say all right and they would go back to their boss I mean it's in the SEC report they would go back and say produce it it's really good hey you explain Renaissance with capital they know they're smart guys they say this is ridiculous we have all this money with this guy we know he's nuts they only lose half their position yeah what is that smartest hedge fund in the world is Renaissance Capital a most successful vault and they had a big Bernie Madoff snake and they was yours before he's busted and they're so smart these are the guys came from IBM remember the all phd's this is they've made better returns than any hedge fund in history they have a made off-site stake and they're like they say well you know his trading strategy makes no sense you can't be doing what he says he's doing so maybe we shouldn't hold on to this state thirty million dollar stake maybe we shouldn't hold on to it like like nobody the point is that and I talked with a salon the book is this idea of default to truth it is incredibly difficult as human beings for us to make the leap to believe that the person were in contact with is being deceptive we have a default to truth we are we are we are trusting engines as human beings and you make the point I want to come back to this you make the point we need to because if we weren't trusting we could never have society and work with people but so I want to come back to the default the truth but you introduced this idea of mismatch mismatch between how someone behaves and the the perception that we develop or what we propel on to them almost yeah Amanda Knox which is another case where you say it's a great example of mismatch right we didn't like the way or they didn't like the way she behaved I unpack that one a little and then I'm gonna get into the themes that you're so we have so when you look very closely at this problem of why is it we are incapable of telling when someone is deceived lying to us so some of us may think we're good at picking up lies you're not right now you're not no one's good at this Liars get away with their lies for as long as they are we still want to put in the effort witness donald trump witness on trophy although he's let's bracket that because i want to come back the and if you dig into that what she discovers it there are certain kinds of people with whom we have the most trouble and there are people who are called mismatched and a mismatched person is someone whose facial expressions and body language does not match their emotional states not for any kind of pathological reason but just because in the normal course of human variability there are some people who when they are nervous they sweat profusely and they stammer and their face flushes and there's some people when they're nervous look absolutely calm right this the person who is terrified but talking to you like this it's mismatched i tell the story about my dad my dad was once on holiday with my mom my dad here's my mother's scream he comes running out of the shower naked he's 75 and he she's a young man enormous young man with a knife to her mother's throat my father says points his finger the guy and says get out now guy runs away now question is why does the guy run away my dad is 75 and naked one school of thought which was suggested to me by a radio show host in america is it oh nobody wants to fight a naked man which i had n thought about this was like it's totally true like it's particularly if the guys dripping wet and 75 know me without my father with all due respect him handsome man I wouldn't want to fight with him naked so there's that it's terrifying but there's also the fact that my father was mismatched my father was kind of guy I mean at that moment he was probably as terrified as that has ever been in this life right its beloved wife of 50 years his a someone but my father never showed fear on his face ever so this guy thank you left my mom sort of sees this man not only is he naked but he look he thinks he's a psychopath my father's like like get out and what he expect you know here he is thinks he's just drop the knife and like skedaddle out the door yeah so that is that people like my dad give us problems right now so think about this if you are there's a number of different settings where you might encounter someone like my father and you would have trouble with him so if you didn't know if you saw my father in that moment and didn't know him well you would think he was a psychopath he was known as second path sweetest kindest man alive he just didn't show it on his face right so think about that there would another number of other settings suppose the whole theory of I'm very very opposed to job interviews which I think are the Posterous and one of the preposterous things about a job interview is that there is some benefit in meeting the candidate face-to-face what is the benefit what if you meet someone who's mismatched there seems to be more opportunity for for making a dramatic mistake with someone the kind of information that you're getting from them although I have to do contradict myself because remember the the the one of the the final story in blink is the story about how Symphony Orchestra's did not begin to hire women until they conducted blind auditions so until they were they would free for millennia centuries Symphony Orchestra has never hired women and if you asked him why they would say because women can't play classical music and they persisted in this belief until the 1980s when they put up finally for other reasons put up a screen so they couldn't see the person while they auditioned and the minute they could no longer see the person they began to hire women immediately and so many women so quickly that women quickly became close to a majority of many orchestras so I interrupted you were saying yeah so they thought they were they thought they were gathering information about a stranger of value by looking at the stranger but in fact by looking at the stranger all they did was collect information that reinforced a pre-existing bias they had they would have been better off not meeting them which makes me wonder in how many job interviews would we be better off not meeting the candidate so everyone in this room is going to do high-stakes job interviews for big-deal jobs very very soon very few of those jobs are going to be jobs where your actual present self presentation is crucial you're not you guys are not going to be selling perfume on the on the ground floor of the bay right you're going to be applying for jobs as analysts as as consultants as all those kinds of things what value is there in your future employer meeting you they're going to be gathering if what if you're mismatched what if the what if you're someone who when you are incredibly interested you don't look interested so the employer says well you know I don't know why you came to this interview you're totally bored out of your mind and you're not white why should the employer have an opportunity to or what if your employer I mean and then it's more prosaic reasons what if you're the wrong skin color for your employer what if you're the wrong height what if you're not attractive enough for you I mean all kinds of things that are irrelevant to your ability to do the job it's saying an interview shouldn't happen you're saying in person could the wrong direction I don't believe in the in-person interview so how like you have any people that work in your company that works at weworks are there how did you hire them well I I've taken this very seriously so for years I've been worried about I make people redact the name of their institutions so I don't want to know what you went to school I heard that she went to school but I feel it's only harmful to find out the name of the institution and now so this recent rally I just hired a new assistant I I met one of them but the one I hired I Skyped with so I saw her face but now I regret skyping now I think I should just have email with her I even I don't think it's even appropriate for me to talk to her on the phone because I think her tone of voice is irrelevant she's my assistant she's not she's not speaking for me why do I care how she speaks so if I don't care how she speaks why should I listen to the way she speaks I don't care how she looks she's not modeling for me she's working for me right so do I care whether she's tall or short no do I her care whether she's got blonde hair or black hair no do I care whether she has a tattoo on her forehead no I don't care so all I'm doing by meeting her is like introducing sources of bias into that I care that she's honest good person who's diligent can I tell that from meeting her actually no because everything we know about our ability to read a stranger is that we're really bad at picking up on fundamental character traits from a face-to-face encounter so don't do the face-to-face encounter so we have to deal with strangers yeah we have to deal with strangers all the time usually the decisions we have to make with strangers aren't that important I mean you go to the grocery store you see you know you stop somewhere when you're crossing the border they're not that important but in the larger sense because I think this does get to where we are as a society in the larger sense as our societies become a more diverse naturally more diverse we do need to understand how to deal with people that we would define as strangers so how do we get better how do we get better at determining the truth that reading through mismatched cues how do we get better well I mean the most important step is in the abandoning some of our we're so that our biggest problem is we were vastly over confident in our ability to quickly make sense of another person so step number one is being a little bit more humble about that aren't that ability so to give you another since I'm on this job interview jag I have one more one when I was doing my an episode of my podcast revisionist history I did two episodes on the lsat as I challenged my assistant who's half my age to the LSAT because I wanted to see and so we did the offset and then I got it deep and I in the whole question of how law firms hire people and I found this guy who did Moneyball for law firms fascinating guy and one of the many many things he did was he when you go to a law firm and you're applying for job you you meet with some partners and they give you a grade right and so what he did is he collected grades of given by partners and then he went back and correlated the grade with the higher the higher e's actual performance as a lawyer so the question is was there any connection between how well you scored on your initial job interview and your actual performance as a lawyer and what he found was that there was a negative correlation between how much the partner liked you and how good you had actually turned out to be now if I saw that data and I was in a law firm I would say okay I think we should stop this practice now right this is not good in fact and then we back this up it's funny I just remember this Roger Martin former dean of the Rotman School of Business told me an almost identical story when he was at monitor consulting and he became managing partner he made everyone rate the incoming class unlike you know scale of each year they would hire a whole bunch of new people everyone had to give them all the existing partners had to rate every new Inc newcomer and then he would revisit the ratings five he revisited the ratings five years later so on he would wait five years and then he would go back and what he found is the exact same thing that there was no correlation between the expectations of a new hire at the point of hiring and their actual performance as a so at a certain point you got to say look I mean I know we just put a bunch of applicants in a hat and pull them out or we radically change the way we assess them what we cannot do is continue to do the same stupid methods which are empirically shown to be completely faulty right so that's an example of you have to come to terms with the fact that you cannot deal with the stranger the same way you deal with a loved one that's the issue here that where we have a great amount of confidence in our ability to read people because we can read our intimates well don't project that onto strangers but you have another example in the book where I would say the relationship was not quite stranger and the example that I'm talking about is Larry Nasser right so Larry Nasser is the coach for these young girls the parents who bring the young girls to him he's not totally a stranger I mean their kids are training with them yeah and yet they are in complete denial even sometimes not only Clues I mean their daughters telling them things that they're uncomfortable and yet they wanted to project this godlike wonderment on him and they refused even in situations where they were almost in the same room so share a little I mean most people know the story from the news but what about that story was interesting and what did you sort of how did that add to this we just can't read the people that we think we can a pedophile is a very nice there's a pedophile as was Jerry Sandusky story I also tell in the book a pet file as a spy a pedophile is someone who is functioning and pretend in a an environment where he is pretending to be normal and is in fact harboring a a criminal deviant side to his character right so the question so we're not very good at finding spies in the real world right real spies so why would we be better at finding pedophiles that he's engaging the pedophile is doing exactly the same thing that a that a at reason the spy is doing they are obscuring their true identity from us so in that sense they are we think we know them when we don't and the default to truth theory which is the theory that I spent a lot of time on the book says that doubt is not the same instant as it is possible to have doubts about someone and still believe them so doubt is the is the companion of belief not the enemy of belief that you change your mind about someone and come to believe someone is deceptive only when the doubts becomes to become so many doubts that they are impossible to ignore so with a pedophile you may observe things and what you will do is you will you observe small things that might raise small doubts and you just keep dismissing them the same way you do with a spy Aldrich Ames shows up in the BMW which is odd for a guy making fifty thousand dollars a year and you say yeah must have inherited some money then he gets his teeth capped and you're like oh maybe he has a dentist friend who gave and then he like is wearing Briony loafers and you're like must have been a sale right you you keep until finally like you know you can you capture some KGB spy and says you had someone high up in your counterintelligence division who's working for us and you're like oh it's probably Rick right same thing that you've inspire Ben Spies tell all the Cubans five stories I mean the stories in this book are so compelling just just while you're on to spy if I give if I give away all these stories they're so good because then we're gonna let me finish the thing the pedophile is no different so the parents take their child to be treated by Larry Nasser and there's one story which I caught in the book with a mother who is herself a doctor as Larry Nasser is treating her 11 year old daughter for this and he she observes that Nasser has an erection she's in the room she's sitting here right here he is like five feet away and she looks and he has a massive erection and she's like oh that must be very embarrassing for him like she doesn't make the connection between the erection and the fact that he's has his fingers inside her daughter's vagina right that is not because she is a bad parent or negligent person or complicit with him that's what we do right that's the that is we are true we are trusting engines it's really hard for us to take that funnel could we stop on that one because I bumped on that one thinking that it wasn't because they were a trusting engine and I'm just curious your view curious about your view i bumped on that story because what it felt to me like and maybe I'm projecting what it felt to me like was that mother is so committed to her daughter's career as an elite athlete and she so wants to stay on that path of the elite athlete that anything that might have pushed her off that path yeah she was just not going to accept that's how I felt when I was reading the story which was a bit different than just being trusting well no I would argue that is a powerful part of so in every case where we default the truth there was a version of that why is it so hard for you know the the husband to realize his wife is cheating because he desperately wants the marriage to be real why is it so hard for the people who invested Bernie Madoff to come to understand that the man is a Ponzi schemer because they are powerfully attracted to the fifteen percent returns you're in you're out there's always some reason why we want to maintain the illusion that this person we're dealing with is is honest in the case of pedophilia it's really really hard because the crime itself is so devastating so the more unspeakable the deception is the harder it is for us to accept it so there's a book that was actually written by a woman named Karla Van Damme who is Canadian and it's it is did she write the book or did she know she did anyway she's written I was glad this even happens to him but there is a book I found in the library once which was written it was a collection of essays that have been put together by I believe her but or maybe someone else in that field by some someone who studied pedophiles and what they had done is they had put together they they had gone to a to a series of pedophiles and asked them to write out their to write it's the mini memoirs of their life as a pedophile and they're the most terrifying things you will ever see and what you realize is that every case is like that this this the malaria national case is not an unusual at all that's what happens over and over there is these I mean it is literally this is the creepiest book ever read in my life and I'll never forget this one thing with a guy used to play a game where he would deliberately abuse children in front of their parents that was that was what was thrilling for him and he's like I never got caught they did be in the room with me and they would never see it I mean the point is this so it's not like grant I granted there is a weird dynamic and if you're a gymnastics mom and you are taking your ten-year-old child you know to Train three hours a day in a sport that's so brutal that they have to go and get treatment for serious injuries you already have some I would grant I would argue some problems as a parent but so there's something in our brains about how we project what we want to believe this this default to truth so are we to be doing something about it like are we to be sure okay so that's that because you're saying we need that for society yeah and so therefore where do we go with this like I read this and I thought would I change the way I interact with people maybe interviews but are you are you thinking after doing all this excavation when will you change the way you interact with people know what the argument of the book is do we need to accept the the the benefits of being trusting are so large that we need to accept the cost which is that we will be occasionally deceived and just move on I mean you do about it you don't want to be so you know though there is one guy for example who sees through men off it's Harry Markopolos and he's the guy who goes to the SEC four times and tries to get them to because he understands that man off is a Ponzi schemer so I went to see my accomplice because I wanted to find out who what is it like to be the one person who does not default truth Harry Markopolos is a lunatic he thinks everyone is skilfully so yeah he thinks everyone the reason the reason he thinks that may not be scamming him is he thinks everyone is scamming him and he told me the story about how he goes to the doctor and the first thing he says whenever I go to the doctor all I could think about is it like 50% of the test order by doctors are unnecessary I just attempt to line their own pockets so I tell the doctor right away don't you dare Brewer yeah you mess with me before I go to the doctor right when I go to the doc I'm like you know hi he's like don't with me and then he told me this is incredible sorry he he becomes convinced that the Attorney General of New York Eliot Spitzer is the only one this is after repeated failures with the SEC is the only one who can bust Madoff so he has a report he's written on how Madoff is crooked and so he puts on latex gloves prints out the report so his fingerprints are not on because he's got in his head that he can't possibly reveal himself to puts it not just in one but in two plain brown envelopes puts on a very very bulky sweater and then not one but two overcoats big hat goes to an event that Spitzer is speaking at and then when the event is over sidles up to someone working at the venue and says to her get this to Bernie or to Elliot it gives her the plain brown envelope you know what are the odds you're working it you know that it was at that key at the Kennedy Library in Boston you're working at the Kennedy Library some dude in two overcoats wearing latex gloves slips you not one but two envelopes inside of one another and says I have the dirt on Bernie Madoff like yeah right I mean your job description is not to give envelopes that come from people like that to the speaker right I mean he doesn't work and then he becomes convinced could there be white hats right could there be anthrax powder in those and then when they bust Madoff he becomes convinced that the SEC is gonna take him out because he's an embarrassment to them and so he like sits in his house with a shotgun and a gas mask on waiting for the commando squad from the SEC so he simultaneously believes that the SEC is so incompetent that they can't find a Ponzi schemer but so eerily Machiavellian that they have put together a commando squad which they deploy around the country to take out whistleblowers that no one else has ever heard of I mean point is you can't be like Harry Markopolos and survive and make you know how fun is his life not that fun so on an honor of the last example before we go a bit broader but on the last example that I think is gonna be very relevant to this group that you excavate it's the Stanford Jane Doe story who we now know is Sean tau tau Miller yeah yeah so this this is the story of the young girl who was badly raped and left sort of you know semi-conscious position and you talk about reading the clues like yes or no did she actually want to participate so people in universities need to be able to Rekluse right so - this whole subject of what constitutes yes and are you reading clues in those situations don't you need to be able to like read the clues or hear the language well that chapter is about alcohol and drunkenness and what is it what is being drunk due to our ability to to to to have a conversation with a stranger right and the answer is that it powerfully erodes not just your ability to understand someone else and communicate with someone else but also in erodes who you are so when you are consenting you may consent to something while inebriated but you are no longer consenting right someone else is in there this is this idea about and the assumption is he was drunk too by the way right oh he's yeah he's drunk out of his mind yeah and this is the reason this chapter is a complicated one and then we probably don't have enough time for me to kind of do you can do it properly but I wanted to write about sexual assault on campus because it's such a epidemic problem right now the numbers are really terrifying and we're not doing a very good job of of confronting and in dealing with it and what so I started to go around the country talking to people who have who either study the problem or who have first-hand experience with it so deans of universities and and they all said exactly that every single one of them said exactly the same thing as the first thing they said today which was oh so you're gonna have to talk about drunkenness I was like I didn't know that they're like yeah this is an alcohol problem not entirely but it is powerfully filled if they're basically said we don't see any cases where the people involved aren't drunk so you have to it's about its this is about what happens to people when they are severely inebriated and and so you have to and so that's what the chapter is about it's about trying to come to terms with the role that alcohol plays in causing these interactions to go awry and it's in some level you're like well that's obvious but the problem is that the way we are discussing this problem in many cases we're leaving alcohol out of the equation and we're failing to understand the ways in which drinking on campus has is profoundly different today than it was in for example our generationally I'm assuming we're roughly probably older than you but I was gonna say no so diplom I was gonna guess you and that is a very very significant fact and it's you're not to point a finger at you even even as I point to finger you it's your generation that is having the most difficulty both with this issue and with alcohol and I think it I think it's incumbent on your generation to own up to the fact that the the the way you are dealing with alcohol is is it is profoundly problematic so I was I thought the connection when I was reading it was if you were if you were if reading strangers can be difficult sometime if you project things that aren't so it's way more difficult if both people are drunk Oh impossible I actually thought when I was reading that chapter that I wish your book had been around when the whole Cavanaugh hearings were going on because clearly this guy was drunk out of his mind he wouldn't remember what he did he was probably is this actually really can never came up so I spent a lot of time on the phenomenon I'm being blackout drunk this idea that you can be a functional you can appear functional but your hippocampus is shut down and so you're not making any memories so what does it mean if I'm having a conversation with you if the minute words come out of my mouth I don't I've forgotten what they are so if you and I are both blackout drunk we can have a conversation we can dance we can you know chat we can see a movie but nothing that we say to each other will be remembered by either of us so we could literally have a conversation where I would just say over and over again we could literally have a conversation where I could say over and over again and you would not have the same look on your face of Wow is it Malcolm interesting right now you were laughing but like in the way that drinking happens today and did not even if you're gonna you can't it's really really hard to get blackout drunk on beer so when I was in college we basically only drank beer it was unknown an unknown phenomenon I didn't never knew I mean I went to Trinity College in the 1980s we drank a lot right I never knew anyone who got blackout drunk blackout drinking is was used to be so rare that people who study that thought it was just alcoholics serious lifetime alcoholics we got blackout now if you go to you know undergrads at an American University and you ask them about blackout drunk there will be kids who will tell you that they get blackout drunk every weekend I mean you said this is a huge No so weird take a young man and who has you know six shots of vodka who is you know blowing you know 0.20 on a breathalyzer and who is blacked out by 10:30 at night and you're you are loosing that young man on a party where there are other people where there may be women who are also blackout drunk now ask me if anything good can come out of that right you have neither party is capable of forming any kind of memories and if you cannot form memories you cannot form any kind of assess assessment of so we are asking the young man before he you know is sexually aggressive with someone get their consent how do you get consent from someone when you're blacked out and they're blacked out right so at the heart of the problem so so where do where do we go with this like if we want to be better like on those circumstances what it will matter if you are saying a lot a lot of times you can't get it you don't read a stranger right it doesn't matter but there are times when it does matter it doesn't matter when you're hiring someone it does matter when you're electing someone we elect people we don't know anything about them mostly were you know how much charisma comes off them well I think we should you know I think we shouldn't need people that we elect either we should meet them or we should not oh god no we shouldn't meet them no no no no no we should know something about so which well it's a very good question I mean what should we know it doesn't really work because you know it's hard to imagine not meeting them but imagine you if you had say 15 people running for you know to be the candidate their party's candidate in an election as we do in the United States and there was some way to magically not meet them there's a ton of things we could do we could give them problems you could come to them at 9 a.m. and give them a case study of the sort that you know students have all the time a two-page case study of a kind of problem there might crisis they might have to deal with in if they became president and you say to them you've got six hours after six hours I would like you to record a thirty minute speech in which you detail how you would respond to this crisis and we'll all listen to the recordings that strikes me as being a super good way to get to know whether someone so they can do whatever they want in those six hours talk to whoever they want if they want to have someone else write the speech find out what I want to know is can you put together a thoughtful response to a novel problem in a short period of time under conditions of great pressure that is you know it would be way better so what if the person who does the best job turns out after the fact to be four foot eleven highly unattractive overweight on TV bad on TV with a lisp we would realize oh maybe we made a mistake by only electing tall strapping handsome people and maybe we ought to open it up to there's a whole range of other people out there who might be really really good at this job who we have I didn't chart once where I took every US presidential candidate of both parties going back to 1900 and I charted the following things what religion were they what Raceway hey how old were they what and how tall were they and let you discover of course is that almost with like two exceptions there every single presidential candidate of the last 100 years in the United States has been over six feet white Protestant between the ages of 55 and 65 and a male so Hillary wasn't it's one but Brock was black but it's like 98% fit that well so what percentage of the u.s. population is between 55 and 65 white Protestant over six-foot and male it's like I think it's 10% if that so you're before you even start you're ruling out 90% of the population that is bananas it's like that would that would be like me starting a company and saying I'm starting this we're gonna do some cutting-edge stuff in AI software we're gonna it's gonna be totally brilliant but I'm only hiring people from Owen Sound now I have no problem with Owen Sound I'm sure there are lots of really really good people in Owen Sound but like you wouldn't say you wouldn't limit the search you wouldn't just blank it like I don't even know where you would look for AI people in Owen Sound well yeah like it's crazy that's what we do exactly we do it's interesting cuz what in the end when I finished reading it in addition to being so engaged in the stories what I mostly took away was on those moments when you have to make important decisions and you're meeting strangers mm-hmm we ought to pay attention to what you had to say which is maybe remove the normal processes and the normal biases not to give it up in everyday life because you want to have the trust and is that in the end like when you finished your journey through the is that where is that how you feel that there's certain decisions you will try to come at differently yeah yeah I mean we're possible I mean the last quote of the book is just about how long how different would law enforcement look if we took our problem with strangers seriously so it's really law enforcement I could have done a similar kind of book looking at other fields but I chose law enforcement because I was so interested in the Sandra bland case but um but yeah I do think on a systemic and kind of institutional level there are so you know the the philosophy department at Princeton University hires faculty without meeting them they just read their papers you know but the psychology department at Princeton University which is done a which has been the home of a lot of research showing how problematic face-to-face interviews are still does face-to-face interviews so I wanted to do I actually wanted to do a podcast on this I wanted to go just to Princeton and start with the philosophy to part with a psychology department and describe all the research they had done on how bad face-to-face was and then say we'll see now how do you hire and then go to the philosophy department and have them comment on the cycle I mean I want to start a kind of civil war essentially between the two but they would not I would return my calls look we only have a few minutes left and I want to take advantage of the fact that we're sitting with you and you do spend a lot of time in the US what the heck do you think is going to happen like you know a lot about people and their behavior you've observed all kinds of phenomena this is a heck of a phenomenal how is this current but what's your gut sense about how things are going to sort out yeah I mean there any fanger I think they follow a lot about human behavior I think they finally I think they finally got them took a while but everyone is so I mean it is like watching a crazy reality TV show but the world you know we're proudly Canadian you're Canadian we're all Canadians here we're proudly Canadian Canadians want to make contribution but in the end the world I think needs a strong United States it's a big country and yeah I'm remind me so way back when when Trump first took office and he went to the CIA and he gave a speech and he basically dissed them in the speech this is like really early on like within weeks of taking the presidency and I was talking because I had all this stuff about the CIA memo so I was regularly talking to all these CIA guys and I asked him about it and the CIA guy said you know the thing you have to understand about the CIA is we not we may not be really good at our job of spying but we are really good at getting even with people we don't like and he said you know mark my words if he goes after us we will bring him down now who's the whistleblower in this case it's a CA a guy who was seconded to the White House now and he's going after him that's why do you think he's there they said they sent him there to listen in on the phone conversation of course they did right that's they've been waiting for this they're like let's you know balance really we're gonna send Alan over there check back in with us when you got something and Alan check back in he was like found something right now there is a story you are such a beautiful storyteller I I just want to say on on us on a serious note you know I read stories I mean I read books and I read stories for a living that's what I do and you are the most compelling storyteller and your stories do leave imprints in our brains and they're valuable and we're grateful thank you [Applause] Wow I'm only sorry this this has to end before I thank Malcolm and Heather a couple of things first of all shortly after very shortly a lot of students are going to come and have another lecture in here so as much as I know you'd love to linger and chew through all this we do need to exit the building we've been I've been getting a few questions one is will Malcolm be around to sign the books unfortunately the answer is no he has to rush off to another appointment the other question I've got is how many people are in this room 1,450 people here this morning and the final question people have is where do I buy the book well Heather assures us that there are lots of copies of this book in all of Malcolm's books at indigo indigo calm so by there our next Brotman indigo author event will take place on December 4th at 5 p.m. and Heather will be back and she will be interviewing Stephen Schwarzman chairman and CEO and co-founder of Blackstone about his new book entitled what it takes lessons in the pursuit of excellence thank you all for joining me and a big thank you to Malcolm and Heather [Applause]

Channel: Rotman School of Management

Views: 15,328

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Keywords: Rotman, School, University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Business, MBA, Careers, Jobs, Work, Rotman School, Full-Time MBA, Business School, University of Toronto, global, world, top business school, #1 business school, leading business school, leadership, international, international students, U of T, Rotman School Of Management (College/University) business design, Here's where it changes

Id: KR1ninH0Xf0

Length: 69min 28sec (4168 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019