Malcolm Gladwell & Adam Grant: Authors@Wharton - Talking To Strangers

now welcome to the stage Adam grant and Malcom Gladwell [Applause] [Music] Malcom Gladwell welcome back to pen thank you it feels like you speak here offer often enough that we should give you a professor status I I have come so many times I fear I'm overstaying my welcome well I think that remains to be seen isn't it so I have noticed over the last couple years that you seem to really enjoy contradicting yourself I do yeah why well I'm more worried about not contradicting myself so I would be very concerned if I was still saying the same things today as I was saying ten years ago that would strike me as being deeply problematic why well I would like to think that my my current self is a good deal more interesting and thoughtful than my tenure ten years from ten years before self right got it the and also I've never attached any stigma whatsoever to a contradiction it's the it's the consistency is surely them the lamest of all human virtues it I wanna I'm not even sure it is a virtue I've never understood why that should be high on our list of I mean they and even that you know phrases like so-and-so talks out of two sides of their mouth so it means that's the wrong why can't I talk out of mm mmm you can but you go to great lengths to push this to the extreme so your your last book David and Goliath yeah was almost the reverse of outliers no I disagree I thought I would know but let me make my case first and then you could tell me why I'm wrong okay so outliers was about cumulative advantage and David and Goliath I think was about cumulative in some ways disadvantage yeah okay colonel right I rest my case what why do you think they weren't opposites though well they were kind of I thought that David and Goliath was a gentle corrective to the excessive enthusiasm that greeted at outliers so I I was like you know and then sometimes when you write something you're like yeah sure and so you want to kind of go back and noodle around the lid because you know even the most thoughtful of observations contains an opportunity for for kind of for kind of joyful contradiction that's to say not nasty contradiction but you know you can make an observation and you can say oh here are all the interesting exceptions and sometimes the pile of exceptions gets so high that it's almost as high as the initial interesting observation and that's the kind of situation that I kind of like okay so you found yourself in a new one of those now so I read talking to strangers and felt like this is kind of the reverse of Blake in many ways well now I'm just so you should say that what this is one case where I don't believe I'm contradicting myself why not because what is the last story in blink amadou diallo it's just so it's the last major chapter in blink is about the shooting of amadou diallo a young African man in the Bronx who is a group of police confronted outside of his home and make a series of snap decision judgments of him that are all entirely wrong and shoot him dead okay what is the opening story of talking to strangers the story of Sandra bland a young african-american woman was pulled over by a police officer who makes a series of catastrophic bad decisions about her and she ends up dead I think of this as a continuation this is part two a blank this is a sequel this is a sequel so blink was a kind of journey through snap judgments that began with well when are they good and then slowly began to kind of explore the notion that actually they're only good in a very very limited set of circumstances and they're mostly kind of troubling and but it astonished me how few people and this may be as a tribute to how bad did that book was written how few people understood what I was doing that word like actual serious professors of psychology I was once on a train to Boston and I sat next to a neuroscientist so like I mean with all due respect to what you do Adam the neuroscientists that's where like your high IQ guy goes right so I'm say next naruse I have so many thoughts right now and he says to me nice guy I don't say which one he was we're chatting yeah I know the guy said happened to be sitting next to a neuroscientist he's like yeah I really disagreed with your book blink I read the first chapter and I was like I can't go on I said well the argument evolves and if you finish the book you might have a more thoughtful understanding of where I was going with it you inhabit you know of like reading things in you know reading 5% of something and thinking you know I mean have you ever had a novel and said you know a thriller and read the first 10 pages and say oh I I can't tell who did this murder well I'm sorry I might want to finish the book before you reach that conclusion why wasn't this nasty to him but I was struck by the kind of you know maybe I should have done a better job of telegraphing if neuroscientists can't figure out what I was doing in blink what hope is there for the rest of us I think I think you're giving neuroscientists a little too much credit so when I when I go to understand human behavior yeah I do things like survey people or run experiments or talk to them and then I figure out what cues are reliable and which ones will take a picture yeah inside your brain which is I get super excited about the picture and like draw all kinds of conclusions it is the kind of Instagram of science isn't it that's what you literally grab yeah they don't when they peer review papers they just do likes just like stick your did your cat scan yet look there more often dislikes but I take the metaphor I'm joking by the way for the neuroscientist I am I am curious though so you I buy that this was a sequel but it does a lot of Blink was about the surprising way is that our snap judgments are accurate yeah and after reading talking to strangers it's very clear that you've been scared away from the whole idea of thin slicing so what happened to change your mind well the science got better or did you our website I mean the there's been a lot of really interesting science since I wrote blink so plinkus written comes out in 2004 it's fifteen years later and in that fifteen years I feel like so here's a central one of the central things in which I have done an about-face between those two books is in blink I was quite taken with this notion that the face this idea Darwinian notion originally and then one which popularized by Paul Ekman the notion that facial expressions were a universal and reliable cue to the way you feel in your heart so your emotions in your heart are represented on your face is a billboard for the heart right that's a an idea that Darwin puts forth and then is is kind of popularized and becomes a consensus position in many ways in psychology for many years and then in the last 15 years a whole series of people have started to say now wait a minute and so this book is very much taken by the people who the blink was very much taken with the original consensus and this book is like actually now there are all kinds of people who are saying wait a minute and my favorite can I tell my favorite my favorite study on this one is and this is a German study and it could only be a German study just so you know so these Germans two German psychologists can conduct a study where they lead you down a long narrow corridor into a room where you're asked to read a passage of Kafka of course it was either Kafka Nietzsche they were like well which one there's no other possibility in a psychological study I'd quit the study right there but they continued you read the passage of Kafka you answer a series of questions and any say you're free to leave so you open the door to go back down the long narrow calling hallway only it's not a long narrow hall they've removed the partitions that made the hallway and now it's a big open room with the walls painted red a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room and on a chair below the light bulb is sitting your best friend looking at you balefully right and the question is what do you do when you see this you've just been reading Kafka if you think about to go home and all of a sudden it's whoa right so the first thing they do is they ask you after you like go whoa what are you doing here what good they ask you well how surprised were you gonna scale of 1 to 10 and everyone says oh you know not totally surprised then they say what do you think your face look like and they say well my face must have shown surprise I must have been this right jaw drops eyes go wide eyebrows go fool and then they actually videotaped they show you the videotape of your face and what they find is that the actual videotape of your facial expression at the moment when you were registering 8.5 or 9 on a scale of 10 of surprise your face shows no such thing some people let go some people maybe do a little bit of an eyebrow race a lot of you just level look like so the idea that our face is a reliable cure the way we feel is a fiction created in part by Hollywood and in part by Darwin who spent too much time looking presumably at dogs or whoever I don't know who he was using the dogs reliably show their expression he was Apes but yeah we do dogs reliably show their emotions on their face I don't know I've never I've never known what a dog is actually feeling to be able to try to triangulate well they show they show pleasure and they show distress in her body but I don't know whether they show do they show more complicated yeah they show curiosity we don't know it's an interesting question but we don't as human being so I have to say when I first read with this research I thought okay this is this is kind of an interesting finding but I don't know if I buy the interpreter because we also know that people are remarkably bad at judging their own emotions especially if they're low in emotional intelligence and so it's possible in fact that the many of them thought they were surprised when in fact they weren't or they only concluded that there was realizing later you really think you could come out of maybe they were terrified Kafka is really unsettling and then the room I don't know open but so something should be on their face maybe maybe it's hard to imagine they feel no emotions in that situation no I just I just wonder if there's a lag between the emotions they're feeling and the ones they display but even they might be so surprised now react it all helps their case them because Darwin's if there's a lag then oh then Darwin's idea also goes out the window right I mean if you go home at night and you're lying in bed and you're thinking oh my god it came out of that room when I saw my friend at that point it's not useful to have your face yeah right but the the more compelling evidence was the evidence of like all a number of people right I talked to these two really wonderful Spanish guys Spanish researchers who went to the most remote corner of the world and showed so they what they did you get the series of photos of people making quintessential emotional faces so you know smiling broadly for happiness and this for anger and you know this Rafi or whatever fear looks like and then they show them to those children too like eight-year-olds and the a trolls they'll say what is this face show and the face is you know I mean a knurled says that's happiness right and the eight-year-olds will get it will get this will nail this they'll get all of them right they know what an angry face is they know what a happy face is they know is so then they go to like a little what's called the Trobriand Islands which is like where anthropologists go when they want to get as far away as possible from basically the only Westerner is the tribunes I've ever seen are anthropologists it's a very very so they have actually a weird sense of what the Western world is like they think the Western world it actually is just a large group of nerdy academics that's our notion their mental picture of American society is like guys and tweed jackets and you know so the tro bein people that this are like unbelievably terrible so only 58% of them can recognize a happy face as being happy and then but that's the best one they do on things like a angry face they're all over the map a huge percentage of them think an angry face is a happy face and an angry face is a fearful face which is the opposite of inc I mean it really goes to show you how much cultural iam printed a lot of these things are and my favorite is they completely have no understanding of a surprise face because for them surprise is it's a sound it's not a expression at all so I have to say though when when I think about that I never I never thought we were supposed to believe that facial expressions were that Universal or that reliable as indicators of emotion right I think what if you read the Ekman research what he did was he said hey even if you go to a culture very different from your own people will recognize some of the prototypical expressions at a rate that's better than chance and that suggests that there might be some universalities and expressions but then to you know to expect that every culture would recognize every emotion then they wouldn't have their own norms that seems a little bit extreme doesn't read if you read his original his famous science paper and like 71 or 72 he goes a little further than that and in the way that that argument was represented perhaps to be fair to Ackman represented by others in subsequent years the universal claim became quite strong and also the data that he presented at the first time so there's all kinds of I don't mean to go down a neck a rabbit hole but there is a massive rabbit hole here where there's a lot of controversy about the research methods that were used and the data itself is pretty unconvincing so it's but you're right I think this was I'm sorry say that again did you say I was right this is such a satisfying early victory I didn't expect it to happen you know if you take pleasure in these small victories dad I'm the CEO so far it gets you what's my point oh the real issue is not what academics think though it's that who believes this more than anyone else I mean lossless particulate cops are like the great offenders and that's because this is a book that begins an end with the story of a police officer who gets someone very wrong that's a relevance to me but I also think that there's a grace about for the basketball fans that I noticed some basketball fans in this audience there's a great story about the general manager of the Phoenix Suns who I hope there's sufficient numbers of basketball fans in this audience to make this story worthwhile but he is in a position to draft Kawhi Leonard one of the greatest players of his generation and Kawhi is just coming out of college so he's what 19 or 20 and the general manager sits down for a meeting with him and Kawhi Leonard is sweating profusely and he's got rings under his armpits and the general manager is like I don't want this guy he's like I want someone who's cool under pressure now everything is wrong about that Kawhi Leonard is maybe be coolest player under pressure in the game and be the notion that because someone is sweating in an interview as a 20 year old wearing a suit probably for the first time in his life maybe the room was hot maybe he had a fever maybe I mean there's a million reasons why he might be sweating maybe he's never been in a job interview before but like that's a classic example of what we're talking about someone sees a signal being sent by demeanor or facial expression leaps to an absurd conclusion and whips on maybe the greatest basketball player of his general wanted one of the greatest I'm a Torontonian so you can imagine my affection for Kawhi Leonard is high but he whips on this great player because he jumps to this stupid and what's even crazier about that is it's not like you don't have another source of information on Kawhi Leonard an amazing basketball player and you meet him like I mean God knows where they were in like a conference room with you know the heating lop too high you're like oh I know you're a great player but man you're sweating I don't do this so we should be we should obviously be careful with facial expressions and body language curious though one of the things I was surprised by is you didn't talk much about vocal cues in the book and there was a paper that Michael Krause published recently that he led where as five experiments where you have a chance to observe somebody expressing different emotions both facial a body language as well as vocally and the finding was that if you close your eyes and you just listen to their voice you read their emotions more accurately yeah then if you're looking at their face - and so I don't think we understand yet why this is whether it's harder to control your voice and so you know your your real anxiety might leak or whether they're they're aspects of the voice that are less likely to vary from person to person or culture to culture but where have you come down on vocal cues should we trust them well no so I love the question where do you come down okay where do you come down on one of humanity's major forms of communication I don't know Adam I think I'm in favor of so I'm gonna ask this question parenthetically because I'm now in the podcast business I'm now in the audio I mean no one - vocal cues business and we made this book the art we were talking on it the audio book for this book we made it like a podcasts so we you hear all everyone I interview you hear their voice because I haven't used interview tape and there's a Janelle Monae song and we license for the book and there's Ollis so it's a complete immersive vote audio experience and I think it's a much much better book as an audio book why because it's a very embarrassing emotional stuff in this book and just experiencing that through the audio only channel turns out to be incredibly effect and powerful so to your point why is that so why are we why is the vocal queue so kind of emotionally resonant maybe part of it is that we are uniquely kind of susceptible or skilled in the way that we process our auditory cues maybe that's what that thing is getting at or maybe it is that the that that your eyes are just a source of such so much noisy and misleading information that it's just messing up your mind I tend to think it's the latter I think that whenever possible unless you want to date them the people that you you should if you want to make an accurate assessment of someone you shouldn't you should try not to see them in them okay hold on a second because you went so far as to at least imply if you didn't fully say that parents should not even meet a babysitter and interview them before they hire them there's no obvious sign of children okay so wait Adam you were talking early about contradictions let's discuss the contradiction it just came out of your mouth so wait I'm the contradiction keep going you just said with great gusto talking about somebody who said the auditory cue allows you to be much more skilled at making sense of some of all manner of someone's character etc etc and then in the same breath like not a minute later you expressed outrage at the notion that you'd want to that you would not want to meet your babysitter well I think I'm totally outraged I thought you just said the auditory cue was better call the babysitter up you just said that was better oh I want the behavioural cute I want to see if they drive like a maniac into our driveway I want to be when you're previewing babysitters do take them for a drive what have you heard this before it's just like a first date you watch out the window and your serve tisha Slee tracking their driving habits before they come in I did this my weight how many babysitter's are like squealing their wheels they do you have some like incredibly long winding driveway up there and we're in fact high also I want to see if they show up on time because I'm always late and I don't need to meet them to know whether they'll show up on time you could make an appointment too for them to call you and you can see whether they call a lot easier though I know as the person who's always late it's a lot easier to make a phone call on time that is to show up somewhere on time all right you still you can you can you can say show up in my house at 7:00 or not be there and then show up with my house and then call me when you're on it take this take this a screenshot of the fellows idea I'm in ok but I also want to see them interact with our kids and see whether they ask questions see whether they engage them in things that seem like they might be fun are you having a babysitter or a tutor for your children no I want to test whether they'll be good babysitter's don't you well I said I said I've got a parent so I know this is all abstract for me clearly not that's what I was all I know is when I was a child we had babysitters I did not want to interact with them why would I want to interact with them some my parents dragged some stranger into my into that house whose invariably annoying I'd like to be left alone this explains a lot right now I understand the life you lead so much better were you interacting : as a child you would interact with your baby's hidden of course this may be it's an American thing I don't know I marvel at this this notion that does no-one ever leave anyone alone anymore maybe maybe I don't know I remember kids are at home hiding under a bed they're like keep the babysitter away from me I just want some alone time sounds like you had horrible babysitters no I better use I can you know entertain myself I'm not that kind of psychologist but we can have the PTSD conversation if you like so okay so I I have some bones to pick we can talk more about the book but I know you wanted to talk about other things that we disagree on so there is there's something that's bothered me ever since you wrote outliers it's actually bothered me before that because I think you first told me about it when we first met on your blink tour so this has kind of been annoying me for 14 years okay okay you've carried this festering annoyance around with you for now for 14 years it's almost a Gretsch yeah but not quite okay so the the issue is you wrote this whole book about how chance and luck and opportunity are much more important than we realized in shaping our success and you didn't mention anywhere in the book that if we look at the standard metrics of success which would be job performance or income single best predictor that we have of anything we can measure is your intelligence your cognitive ability mm-hmm and I look at that and say okay that's true across jobs it's more true as jobs get more complex and that's all luck right I didn't choose my intelligence I was born into it it's highly heritable and so there would have been such a compelling chapter of that book that says hey you know what how smart you are is is one of the biggest determinants if not the biggest determinant of how your future is going to turn out and guess what that was kind of a it was it was a lottery wait there is a chapter on that but it was about the fun you made the opposite point in that check well I was just trying to get us to stop falling in love with people just because they have sky high IQs which is fair yeah but I I thought it would have been a really interesting argument to say hey wait a minute you know this thing that you have no control over is actually a big driver of your fame and fortune and and your success but you don't like that story do you well is it a story I mean so I actually you know the in January started a company with my friend Jacob to make podcasts Pushkin Pushkin it's called Pushkin we now have 16 employees so I actually have been involved in hiring decisions now for the first time well but does this mean you're managing people that would be British too far I have we have other people that do I'm off I'm very relieved right now in the corner but uh I've now so thought a lot about what it is I like about people and but my I'm impressed by the fact that the the thing about intelligence is that it's not a scarce commodity it seems to be that there's an endless number of people who seem to be more or less smart enough to do whatever we need them to do and so the things that predict success in that select universe I haven't not had nothing to do with intelligence but they are they are parallel to intelligence or in some cases orthogonal to intelligence so I mean what I'm really interested in is conscientiousness and hard work and and curiosity and flexibility and all those kinds of things so I'm I I had found myself way more interested in sort of character traits now than I thought I would be and less I'm sort of been different too you know that when I when I interview people for a job they're all smart enough do you think so yeah I'm just not I just don't think I'm Way more interested in in can you get your work done on time right that seems to me really and the person who shows up and tries hard that's like I don't know I've always found this in this this intelligence thing to be there's something deeply unconvinced about it and I know except for the legions of data gathering to school decades with meta-analyses studies of studies I know I know but I mean what do you find unconvincing about it there conceptually well I get it I mean I get it in in one sense it's like such a kind of obvious observation that I don't understand why it's useful anymore same is true for hard work though isn't it gosh like it shocked that the people who put in more energy and have more perseverance are gonna produce better results and I never would have guessed it I didn't learn that when I was reading the little engine that could but I am curious about this because if you think about you know smart enough the data suggests that even in simple jobs intelligence is an advantage because people who are extremely bright end up finding faster and more efficient or smarter ways to do it and then they have all this time left over to end up doing more creative parts of the job and so I think we should run a test I think we should we should have you hire a lazy genius and a hardworking person of average intelligence and let's track them and see how they do are you game well no I am but let me talk about another thing it's granted I I it's a it is as obvious to say that hard word is that success is relative hard work as it is intelligence but there are certain so there are certain thing very particular things that I'm increasingly interested in and I think are really really useful predictors of real success at the kind of granular level so one is the kind of people's willingness to to persevere past the point of pretty good now that does not strike me as having anything to do with intelligence in fact a lot of really really smart people I know don't persevere past the point it pretty good but I really really really really want to work with people who will do that you know I'm thinking of someone in my podcast company right now I think I have no idea what her IQ is I assume it's super high up no clue it could be average no I've never gone down that path what I do know is if she's insanely good at this thing of pushing past pretty good she won't I will stop and say it's good enough and she will not and she's right and I'm wrong and a lot of my podcasts are they go from they get into her hands and they go from B pluses to a pluses and that I don't know what that is she has it I can't there are very few people who have that and I do not think it's because she got double eight hundreds of SATs yeah it sounds like she's a Maximizer reddit rather than a satisficer and also sky-high achievement motivation yes so now doesn't that suggest that you're kind of highly reductive very uh natum like highly reductive obsession with intelligence needs some correction no of course not wait but that has nothing to her being those two things whenever they were the particular jargon you're using the moment that's not correlated with intelligence is it no not at all completely uncorrelated it thank you thank you thank you so of course I want but I work here is done what else should we talk about Adam no but in fact I think this is interesting so there was an Atlantic article a couple years ago that argued that intelligence is one of the few dimensions maybe the only dimension of human beings that you can legitimately discriminate against in the Western world and so I read that article and said yeah you're right you know we constantly discriminate against people not even who are you know are not intelligent but just maybe even our slow thinkers which I know is something you've been thinking about a lot with varying degrees of speed and I think what's what's fascinating to me about this is let's we're at a place like Penn where intelligence is a filter I've been wondering whether we should have intelligence diversity and we should deliberately admit people who are not as bright as the area you do or slower legacies with what I say you do they're called legacies Wow [Applause] so just before we go further how many legacies in the room so we know all right know it no one's willing to raise their hands I actually haven't seen the empirical data on whether legacies are less intelligent oh yeah how did you not see the big study that was done that came out last week using the Harvard data from the Asian now tell us so this came out last week there was a paper published because of the lawsuit filed by asian-american students against Harvard University on the grounds that they were being discriminated against in the admissions process Harvard was most forced to turn over its admissions data and the emissions data are super fascinating and in the category of white students who are either legacy faculty children donors kids or athletes 43% were of though of that 43% of the white total fell into the one of those five categories and virtually everyone in one of those five categories would not have been admitted without having one of those qualifications so white affirmative action is a very very big deal at Harvard University and it comes law almost entirely at the expense of Asian students so it to answer your question yes Harvard is actively practicing precisely what you are prescribing for Penn but they call it something different but admitting lots of legacy and donor kids is a way of of having intelligence diversity and you can you should go and ask them how well that means Graham is turning out maybe it works really well I don't know so Nate certainly helps in fundraising right let's see the principal since Harvard University like all the other Ivy's is a hedge a hedge fund with a an Intel operation attached to it as a fun I mean I don't know why you're nothing that's what it is you have a Harvard as a forty billion dollar it's a forty billion dollar hedge fund and how does it raise money for the hedge fund by running a school on the side the hedge funds have all have various ways of raising money some go to you know fundraising tours through Saudi Arabia some go to Russia and get sheiks to or get get oligarchs to give the money Harvard operates this thing in Cambridge which funnels any kids who send the money once they graduate but why this is hard I really have nothing to say in response to that no I think I'm not sure I totally disagree although the size of the hedge fund is only a few dozen employees right which if you look at the scale of the operations of the actual university would highly inefficient operation but that doesn't mean it's not about the operations about I it seems like there's a lot of discussion there that around how we should eliminate legacies right so MIT doesn't take into account legacy factors at all I've been wondering if we should go further and we should actually ban legacies so if your parents went to Penn you should not be allowed here what do you think hi well listen I mean you know me I'm nothing would make me happier than anything like I love that idea I don't understand why I mean it really just is about raising money and since you have enough money I don't I think you can probably put that aside for a while you could even go further how about you could ban relatives you could say you have to be at least a third cousin if there's a bigger family tree in an application actually but think about this for a moment because everything that we know about privilege in America suggests that privilege is not merely confined to an immediate family circle it has ripple effects that when you if you you know and that that these kinds of kinship groups grow over time and have a kind of you know by the third generation you have a a big kind of ball of privilege that stretches across many different so why not just ban the whole ball right I'm a Bert good yeah while we're talking about admissions you get what kids can't go to Penn are you prepared for I didn't go to pet him fine I just teach here I I was intrigued we talked actually a couple years ago about your your disappointment with the LSAT and then you did a revisionist history episode where you took the LSAT took the ELSA you are not happy with the fact that this test is timed Varian era tell us why not and then I'm gonna tell you why you're wrong well here I was taking a test to gain essentially entry into the legal profession and I discovered as I took this test that they were trying to make me rush and there were several thing that struck me as odd about this first of all when I was doing my tutoring as I did the whole tutoring was about how to answer questions quicker than you would normally answer questions and in fact I was given explicit instructions about how in the reading section for example to read it without comprehending it which I thought and this was a skill they were trying to teach me in order to maximize my score in the test so my first thought was this is odd that I would be screened for a legal profession by by them measuring my ability to read something without comprehending it passed whole new light on the behavior of lawyers and about my issues of art and then then I thought on a practical level I thought that being a lawyer being a good lawyer was a function of your ability to spend an enormous amount of time solving a problem stay up all night if you have to right and also that a law firm makes money by its ability to spend the maximum amount of time on a problem in some sense they'd go buddy out so why if that's the case why they making me rush because I made me rush so much like couldn't finish at least two or three of the sections right that a real LSAT would be they give you a series of impossibly hard questions you get there at 9:00 and you're like leave when you're done right that's for me about that is the real you get there at 9:00 if you want to take 24 hours you can be like we'll be here all night and here's some food right that's that's what the LSAT should be and the question should be really hard and if you can crack them or taking as long as you want that makes that strikes me is really good preparation for what you do now okay tell me why you think that's good yeah so I I disagree for a few reasons the first one let's start with the easiest one is I think there's a critical aspect of the lawyer job that actually is about thinking on your feet so if you ever go to trial and you listen to the argument of the attorney on the other side of the case right you have to adapt in real time and you may also when you're grilling a witness have to adjust your line of questioning and try to figure out how to get them in the LSAT is there a portion when you're when you're asked to stand up and think on your feet trying to think you sit down and think there is Adam know if you're taking me way too literally I mean there is there is a skill in thinking rapidly that a lot of lawyers depend critically on all right and so don't you at least want an indication of that okay so let's have one timed rapid section on the LSAT okay I make the rest of it as long as you want okay so I don't want the rest of it to take forever because we already have that it's called your college classes you have a whole semester to master the hard problems so we already get an indication of whether you're a good tortoise on the basis of how you did in a whole semester don't we well in that case this just throughout the LSAT all together so why do we need so you're saying we have something that already tells us the thing we want to know about your ability for law school your suitability for the legal profession so then why do we add the thing that doesn't help us like I don't think it doesn't help us I think it's it's an apples to apples comparison right so we're taking people with different majors they took different classes they have different skills and so we now have a common test where we can look at their preparation and their quick thinking skills and that that's not the most important thing I want to assess but it's not useless either right well there are lots of things that are not useless so I mean I could say let's all go run a 5k and I will be terribly interested in the results of that 5k because it would tell me something about your physical stamina is your physical stamina relevant to your ability to be a good lawyer probably maybe sure if you're in good shape are you likely to be maybe a healthier happier employer yeah pop employee yeah maybe so why not I mean once we're adding kind of relatively arbitrary locations for this let's go whole hog let's have you know let's do have you do a whole bunch of things that are kind of wolf Eden and by the way running the 5k is would be more useful than the LSAT because it opens up a runner of course it opens up a whole new it measures a whole new dimension so the LSAT the problem with the LSAT is that it is in some sense at its best it is needlessly duplicate of of the things we've already learned about you from your GPA right entirely right I think it's gonna give us something about your reasoning skills and your problem-solving skills there aren't easily measured you think that the GPA is independent of your reasoning I didn't but I don't think it's fully depends where I went to school the university Anto my GPA was a function of my reading and thinking skills but I don't know what you guys are doing are you like our measures aren't as perfect and consistent as we would like is it why are you standing up here you are the professor at a university and you teach courses that last many many months and you ask students to think and read deeply and and respond over you know extended periods to and then and you're standing up and you're defending a test that takes an hour and a half or two hours not defending it this you are I'm just trying to stop you from killing it but I mean what's in it for you like why the empirical evidence what made you suddenly a fan of the status quo you know when I went to the LSAT I thought you were more of a rebel than that you're you you become that's going on over there not a fan of a status quo I just want some standardized measure of something right and so we already have the LSAT machine I don't want to I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater and I'd say okay let's develop better questions let's let's maybe get closer to the skills that are relevant for I'd love to plant for example some ethical dilemmas and then see whether you fall for those traps or not but I even like you're running idea but what I would want to know is not how fast you can run the 5k yeah but rather what happens when you run your first 5k and then what's your Delta over the next four weeks of training yeah I would love that actually I feel like that would be much more useful than are you fast oh yeah I'm not I just didn't know you fast I'm interested in observing the 5k and seeing how you handle it I would love the idea of coming back four weeks later and seeing what your second 5k is and seeing how you respond to the challenge of course then people deliberately run the first 5k slow and harder to have room for improvement here we go especially a pendant yes but what about Maya do Nilsa even a very very simple fix which when I put this to the people who run the test who were very nice by the way but utterly unconvincing in their defense of the test so I said to them wool on you know it's five sections thirty five minutes each on the first section I finished with loads of time to spare and I wanted to use I literally had 20 minutes left over after the first section and I didn't understand why I couldn't use that extra twenty minutes to add on logic games because on logic games I was you know completely clueless but I could have used twenty where and they were like no you can't transfer time from one portion of the test to another I said well in the real world as a lawyer I could do that and aren't you interested in fact as a lawyer I would do the things that I can do really quickly quickly and I would use that to buy time for myself when things that need more that's a that is a sign of a rational well-prepared professional but they're completely uninterested in that so they're interested in the person who has five tasks as a lawyer arbitrarily divides them all up into equal I'm gonna do one hour from my supreme court brief one hour for lunch one hour for reading the paper and like that's what that is essentially what they're saying like well I guess it's good enough we'll send that off to the Supreme Court off to wendy's now for like a like this is just absurd and here's their response or is that their responses well we can't do that because and then you gonna it's all about because they they don't want it one of the five sections of the test is a experimental section they used to test out new questions and so it's very important for the experimental section for it to be timed and so if you could transfer time among them they would have to make that for only the non experimental sections and so you would know what the experiment take I mean it's just absurd if they say it's have all about making their own lives easier how about we have two experimental sections and then you can transfer time between that it seemed it seems very simple it seems to know I think I think that makes a lot of sense surprisingly and so I want to I want to shift gears a little bit so there's some other revisionist history episodes that I listened to and and had some strong reactions to then I want to push you out a little bit so one that you did that I found riveting was on the birth control pill John Rock was that his name you made a case that because he was Catholic he had to abandon it his principles can you quickly summarize that case that I can destroy it wait he had to abandon his principles what do you mean that I don't know you said it that's not what I said I said that he was so this for those of you who didn't listen to this this is a an episode I did about a guy named John Rock who was a fertility doctor he was a famous for Chilean doctor in the 30s and 40s and 50s and he collaborated on the invention of the birth control pill and he was at the same time a devout Catholic and it was his great desire to have the Catholic Church approved the birth control pill and and he tried very hard and came very very close to getting the church to approve the birth control pill and what I was trying to describe was the brought up board I was trying to describe was what is the way that one ought to dissent which is one of my I keep coming I'm fixated on this issue I don't know I don't know why would I keep coming back to it again and again and again and again and again when you are part of a community and you disagree with the community what is the appropriate way for you to register your disagreement and so he had a number of options one was to leave the church another was to convince the church and at the time you know it was a long shot to believe that the Catholic Church has a long history of being opposed to contraception but Rock makes this very complicated and some sense convoluted and also in some cases sense kind of genius argument as to why you could fit the birth control pill into existing Catholic teaching and the Pope comes this close to agreeing to it and I love the fact that he made the effort so it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him would be to say oh the church is just being stick-in-the-mud I'm going to abandon the church and let's just sell this thing the way we want to sell it instead he sort of stayed and fought and I then had a conversation with someone here at Penn so there's a guy here at Penn who is doing equally groundbreaking research on new methods of contraception and he was describing something that he was he and others are working on which essentially is a pill that a woman would take which would it would freeze her eggs inside her body you'll basically stop your eggs from dividing so you could take the pill at 15 and then when you wanted to restart the process of of producing eggs at 35 when you were married you would essentially have a full complement so it's a even more elegant way of extending female fertility it also happens to be an incredibly effective contraceptive because of course you can't get pregnant if your eggs are frozen inside your body and so the question for him was do we call this a contraceptive or do we call it a fertility drug and he said he himself is Catholic and so he said I would like to call it a it's a fertility extender that has as its unintended consequence that it's a contraceptive and he thought is this a chance the Pope would like this and an agree to it and that made it very happy as a Catholic anyway my point is that approach so both of those people approach their church with an enormous amount of respect so as opposed to saying I have fallen out of love with its particular teaching of the institution that I grew up in so I'm going to turn my back on institution they instead went to extraordinary attempts to square what they believed with the reality that God find that so beautiful yeah so we'd call that tempered radicalism yeah and I think I guess what what what bugged me a little bit was when you talked about how he needed to give up a little bit on some of his principles the way they were taught no he doesn't need to give up on principles he's living a different set of principles which had to do with the way that he was taught to try to save existing human lives right and trying to work those into the church but I don't actually think we disagree on this one so let's move on are we doing well let's say one of the thing about him about because you doubt that episode was part of this big love affair with Catholics that I had in this season of revisionist history and the thing about Catholics the Catholic Church at non Catholics as yourself may not understand is that the Catholic Church has an extraordinarily rich tradition of internal debate so it looks from the outside like it's this rigid hierarchy where everything's coming down from the Pope and there's no room for disagreement in fact the Catholic Church if you're on the inside is all about disagreement they're just hunts I mean they're you know Cardinals and bishops and theologians are constantly wandering off the reservation arguing with each other and so it's like it's this really interesting model for how debate and dissent works in the context of a organic community it's actually the opposite what we think it is we think it's we think it's not a model we think we have to deviate from that if we want to have a rich and heterogeneous society but in fact no the Catholic Church pretty good model in many ways even where the devil's advocate came from yeah so one of the things that you did with with the Jesuit tradition was you introduced this idea of casuistry which i thought was brilliant and I'm not gonna spoil it for the audience you should all listen to this episode you you applied the concept in a really interesting way to sports and you basically I think if I heard you right you landed it saying we should continue banning performance-enhancing drugs but performance restoring drugs should be fine yeah well what I wanted to do so the casuist the Jesuit tradition of casuistry is all about trying to resolve difficult moral dilemmas new moral dilemmas without resorting to principles and so what you do is you you find a case that you agree with and you have a new case and you say well I don't know how I feel about it so what you do is you take an existing case that you agree with in an existing case that you disagree with and you see well is it closer to the one or the other so in this case I was trying to I was talking about peds and I said Barry Bonds we don't that's the wrong he declared it something wrong because he takes peds and totally distorts his body and turns himself into something new but on the other hand we are fine with Tommy John surgery which hundreds of thousands of baseball pitchers have which is where they basically gave themselves a bionic elbow which allows them to throw for longer and to overcome injury but like they used to not better than they used to yeah although yeah so there's two cases one is where we're using an artificial means to restore our ability and one is an artificial means to transform our ability and so I think the issue of the PD is which of those two things is it doing so I'm so you know there was a big controversy in the NBA there's all the sort of controversy over people don't talk about it much but clearly there are some the temptation if you are an athlete and got injured to like go to Germany going to Germany is like code word in the professional sports for getting access to all kinds of really interesting new treatments I don't have a problem with that I feel like go to Jeremy's fine I do have a problem with someone who uses a PDA - like I said to transform himself into something other than what they were but injury for a company from injury strikes me is something that we should embrace every measure possible I don't understand why there is this weird notion that just because something is a product of pharmaceutical ingenuity we can't use it to recover from an injury right that seems crazy to me yeah I found that convincing the thing that that I started to think about more that left me wondering though was why should we stop it performance restoring so I as a kid wanted to make the NBA you start high school less than five feet tall you feel like it's probably not gonna happen yeah and so then you start to wonder well why should I only be able to restore myself to my natural ability why shouldn't I be able to take growth hormones to become as tall as Elton Brand or why should I not be able to be as fast as any of the players that I looked up to how do you know where to draw the line on them and why why is it fair then to give some players their their natural genetic advantages yeah well you know we're about to this is all going to happen right with with recent all these recent advances in gene editing and such people are going to be trying at least to engineer these athletes as many athletes are the first place we're gonna do this so we're gonna have to deal with these things sooner or later it may be the case that we may need to kind of put a fence around a lot of athletic arenas and say and ask ourselves what is interesting to us about athletic competition maybe what's interesting to me about watching a basketball game is the knowledge that I am watching people exactly as they were born to be and not as they were or maybe not or maybe I'm like actually all bets are off but also there's another interesting which is like so I had this I had a really fast and discussion with some guy about the notion of recovery and he was talking about LeBron James and he was saying he had done he'd been part of some study of LeBron and the Brawn the thing that distinguishes him from other basketball players is that he recovers from exertion much more quickly mm-hmm so you can measure your suppose we have a scale of a zero to a hundred and a hundred is you are perfectly recovered and zero is you are completely depleted so you play an incredibly exhausted game and you're at ten so typically you are i if we were at 10 the next morning we might be at 35 LeBron is it 80 and so the argument was the reason he's the greatest basketball game player in the game is not necessarily because at full strength he's better than everybody else it's that after 50 games he's at 18 anyone elses at 40 now why is the Bron that way well part of that is because he really takes care of himself well and part of that is that genetically he's built that way but then it raises the question so what if he developed you know interventions complicated interventions that allow more players to respond as to recover as quickly as LeBron yeah do we want that that's that gets super interesting because part of what's fascinating about LeBron is the notion that you are watching someone who is you know has his has been gifted by God with two things one a natural ability to recover and to the discipline a lot of it is the fact that LeBron gets more sleep than everybody else right it's you know he's they might need to say that one again for this audience he is maniacal about sleep and sleep is the single most powerful determinant of your ability to recover and a lot of other guys believe it or not in the league in professional sports in general may pay lip-service to sleep but don't understand that it is Z right so I'm interested in the fact part of what makes him interesting is that he's the guy who takes sleep seriously but I'd hate to can remove from consideration yeah well I like I like your I think your argument if I could put it in psychology language is that it's not his maximum performance that makes him great it's his typical performance and I think that I think that's actually true probably for most people I wondered you did another episode on rules for life yeah where you claim you had a lot of them but you didn't release most of them would you add this as a rule for life and can you give us some of your other rules for life and what is this idea that it's better to be consistent consistently good than intermittently excellent oh I had thought about that I like that first of all I hadn't thought about the difference between your optimal performance in your average performance in typical performance that's actually a really lovely little concept we play with that for a moment what does that mean exactly so if I like if I prefer your typical self to your optimal self what does that mean in terms of our friendship I don't think anyone would ever prefer the typical to the captive Oh are we friends by the way yes this is this is a very strange way of interacting as friends but strangely my favorite one but well no I don't think you would ever want that but I think that often in sports and we do this when we hire two in professional jobs we want to see how good they are at their best and then we choose the person who you know who's able to make the the longest let's say the longest drive in golf or you know in I think in football it'd be the quarterback with the strongest tomorrow and yet the the Tom Brady who ultimately becomes the best player is the one who can actually hit the receiver every single day and every single spot I just realized what the last time we had a conversation we had an argument about what's more what's harder to be you said what you said that you thought comedians had one of the hardest jobs of anyone I said they were a better psychologist I think but you said it's really hard to be a good comedian and I said it's harder to be a good teacher yes and you really disagree with it I said but this the way the result of this Agreement is exactly this a comedian is meta we already resolved no no no you talk about your instance you still haven't changed your mind really things that have been festering this has been festering but this is the explanation we're talking it's apples and oranges a comedian is measured in terms of their optimal performance they have a carefully rehearsed time limited performance and that is how we come to understand their genius a teacher is all about typical performance a teacher you measure a teacher on their ability day in day to come in and keep even even keel you in the face of all kinds of provocation and exhaustion and what-have-you they have to remain this consistent common presence in the classroom so it is to profoundly different tasks so the right answer is that both are impressive for very different reasons it so happens that I valorize typical performance and you have an affection for optimal performance no no I think your whole analysis is right except you're thinking about the wrong kind of comedians which I was not clear about a year and a half ago so the the comedians I had in mind were two kinds of comedians one where comedy writers who have to go and do it day in day out so I was thinking about you know Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David writing Seinfeld yeah you know in producing what 200 episodes we're talking about performance yeah but that that is if that is their performance right is to actually create the script yeah and then the other was improv comedy where you have to do it on the fly and you get judged and every single idea that you but even probably still optimal performance it's not typical perform it might be unless the improv lasts for like weeks yeah I was thinking about aggregating somebody who is good at improv night after the weight be also doing interesting about hiring people so you're right the job interview is measuring optimal when many cases were interested in typical yes so how would you change hiring for your department at Penn if you are interested in typical wait I'm interviewing you here what's going on no no this is interesting you're asking me questions yes what tell me what typical hiring looks like if you did it at Penn what are we hiring for our faculty staff active faculty so faculty hiring we first read all their research papers yeah and decide whether their work is interesting and rigorous and important that's optimal yes although if we have enough of them we're starting to move toward how optimistic yeah and then we have them come in and do what's called a job talk where they present on their new research to a group of faculty and we interrupt a lot and grill them on their findings and then we get a taste of how they you know they had a criticism of how they perform in front of an audience is actually often tougher than our own students yeah is that that topped him a lot typical probably yeah yeah but then we also look at their teaching evaluations and their student feedback and that I think is more typical yeah yeah do you believe in student feedback don't you believe in it is it a religion I think what do you think it's do you think it's useful oh I find it immensely useful I feel like every data said it's not useful useful for what I don't know that it's always accurate engaging who is a good professor and who's not then if it's not accurate engaging who's a professor and who's not in what sense is it useful it's useful in that I get direct feedback about things to repeat and things to change and so I feel like my students are my coaches and I changed my class every year based on what some things they like about your teaching or not actually what's useful about your teaching I don't know I think that could be a problem but I define usefulness in part in terms of what they like because I assume if people are more emotionally engaged in the classroom and they find it more interesting they're gonna learn more and that ultimately will make the class more useful yeah my dad used to get his professor used to get terrible student evaluations and he thought it was a point of pride his point was my point his point was they don't like it when I challenged them he's like I'm sorry I challenged them oh I think my students loved that they challenged me back is the hook right yeah but we also have a Teaching Award for that it's called the tough but I'll thank you in five years or so this is my favorite thing from that I got really into the teacher the the whole movement to do value added any some kind of assessment of teacher quality and there's all kinds of problems with it and understandable ones but one of the most fascinating observations was and David Epstein the great David Epstein talks about this in his book to study this book range was this notion that actually some of the really really best teachers are ones whose effect on their student does not show up in the earth that they're teaching the student but shows up down the road in other words they're challenging you and giving you stuff that in the moment actually the effort that you take to make sense of this and incorporate it in your worldview sets you back and then when you finally make sense of it two years down the road that's when the teachers effect on you is becomes manifest so if that is the case then trying to measure as we do a teacher's value by observing the performance of the students in the year that they're in that teachers class is deeply problematic oh I agree with that there was a Northwestern study a couple years ago which showed that one of the ways you can more accurately measure teaching quality is when you take an intro class with one professor and then you go into a more advanced class in that field do you actually do better than in the advanced class based on the quality of learning that you had in the the intro yeah which I think gets closer to what you're interested in yeah yeah but this this goes to something else that you wanted to talk about I think you mentioned when we walk on stage that you've you read an article about how the whole United States other yeah so this is a I've been obsessed to this recently so I first read this essay a couple years ago when I did a podcast episode on the brown decision and it is a african-american professor of history at Chicago called Charles Payne who wrote this essay maybe fifteen years ago called the whole United States a Southern which is remains I think is the most brilliant one of the most brilliant essays I've ever written however in my read and it was that phrase was was something that George Wallace the infamous segregationist governor of Alabama in the late 60s once famously said and what he meant was and this is Payne's argument was that the project of southern white segregationist and racists during the civil rights movement was to personalize the discussion of racism what they wanted to do was to make our attempt to come to grips with racism happen entirely along interpersonal lines so their argument was if only black people and white people can look each other in the eye and be nice to each other and be polite to each other and open doors for each other and do all those kinds of things we'll be fine that this is really about you and me getting along and the reason they wanted to do that is that they desperately wanted to distract attention from the institutional response to racism to segregation and gerrymandering and voter suppression and redlining and all that kind of yeah and the title when George Wallace famously says the whole United States is southern what he meant was we won our way of thinking about race has won the day that we can distract everyone with arguments and little petty discussions about conduct such that they won't they'll stop talking about institutional questions so why did why is this come up with for me well my book and we did come here to talk about well we got distracted my book is only considers the the question I did the book begins and ends with the famous case of infamous case of Sandra Penn right the young black woman who's pulled over by a police officer and it's I'm talking about the broader problem we have with these encounters between African Americans and law enforcement but I don't talk explicitly about race or I don't talk explicitly about whether or not the cops who are confronting these African Americans are racists that that question is absent from the book why because I wanted to talk about this entirely along structural terms I wanted to talk about what are the institutional mechanisms that create these fateful encounters between African Americans and law enforcement I don't want to fall into the whole United States a southern problem of saying oh that case is about a racist cop because whenever we make that draw that conclusion we like we think we're done like well what are you gonna do guys racist so sorry about that next time we'll do better we say that and because we keep saying that this problem does not get better these this issue has been going on for in this country hundreds of years right and if you look actually at the numbers you know we've had pretty consistently for a long time now about a thousand deaths every year of civilians at the hands of law enforcement we're not make that is way out of sync with other Western democracies we're not making any progress on this we briefly paid attention to it in that span between Ferguson and you know Eric garner and then now it kind of like you think it's still going on it's totally still going on do we care about it not really why because we said oh it's about racist cops right oh by the way then we had the governor of Virginia where his black face up in arms about the governor of Virginia wearing blackface we spent as much time on that as you did on voter suppression and gerrymandering in Georgia and North Carolina even though those two things are way more consequential than the fact that oh do you really think it's unusual that a white guy in his 60s who was at a frat house in UV in at UVA in the old 1970s would have dressed up in blackface I mean does that really shock to you right does not she doesn't shock me right the only thing we would devoted any amount of time is and then in Canada my beloved Canada is consumed right now with a political scandal over the fact that the Prime Minister in some dumb moment 20 years ago wrote war brown face to a party meanwhile this is the same guy who has done more to accept refugees over the last several years in Canada then virtually any other Western leader outside of Germany this is a man whose record on structural issues is exactly what we should be focused on in what matters I mean compared to this country this country is a disc our record on refugees of less covers is a disgrace this is a man who is stood up and has has gone out of his way to open his arms to some of them and what are we distracted about the fact they did something stupid at a party 20 years ago that is so profoundly dumb in terms of what we should be concerned about Haley this I have now got to the point where I'm not even sure if there is a conflict between institutional arguments and personal arguments I don't even want to hear the personal stuff anymore honestly though I'm just like you know if it's if it come down to whether you let in tens of thousands of refugees or whether you wore brown face to a party I really don't care what you go to a party I honestly I don't want to hear it I don't want people to spend time on it I don't want to spend waste energy on it I'm much more concerned about the thousands of people who are you know suffering in some country and have nowhere to go right and if you replace him you drive him out of office and you replace him with some right-wing nuns numskull who closes the borders are we really better off who has a sterling record in what he wore to parties right never wore you know if he went to a party oh he dressed is like a you know a police officer or a fireman right okay that's what you want that's the world you want to live in fine it's not the what I want to live in I want to judge people on a very different set of criteria so I'm curious about why this happens so it seems to me that that a big part of it and this is not just true for racism it's also how we deal with sexism a lot it seems like a big part of it is because we're much better intuitive psychologists than we are sociologists so we explain behavior in terms of people's individual motivations and values and attitudes and we're horrible and seeing the the collective forces that affect all of us do you think that's the story is there more behind this I mean that's a it's a really really really good question on one actually I feel like you are better positioned than I am to answer I'm a little bit baffled by it because we did go through a period in this country and many other countries where we were very interested in structural solutions to problems but it's kind of fallen out of favor I feel there's something that's gone on very recently where is somehow way easier for us to describe to get worked up about blackface then it is for us to get work about voter suppression yeah and I don't underst I don't do not understand that I think maybe the other factor that comes to mind is there's a lot of evidence for efficacy being a problem right so I don't feel like I can change a structure or or influence an institution whereas the idea that I might be able to get an individual person to be less racist or less sexist it feels a little bit more palatable and so I think people just put more faith in these kind of more individual factors but they don't solve the problem isn't the truth the opposite isn't the truth that it's actually easier to change structural things than it is to change interpersonal attitudes probably collectively but not for me right not as no individual citizen because really what I mean both those stories Ralph Northern and Justin Trudeau are stories about really dumb things people did one one one when they were very young and two and there probably was drunk I don't know I mean those kind of things people are always gonna do dumb things I'm really I despair of preventing 18 year olds from doing dumb things I'm actually do I think we could productively solve gerrymandering and voter suppression digitally yeah I actually think we can I mean I I don't think I don't think if we paid more than five minutes attention to it it wouldn't take that long yeah but we is the operative word yeah yeah but why but that even that's weird so all of a sudden we've lost faith in our ability to do collective so we're really what we really believe now in is in our ability to kind of raise our voice and cry shame and what we don't have any faith in anymore is our ability to get together with some group of people and use existing political and social and regulatory channels to change structures that somehow seems impossible now yeah it seems crazy to me I agree so I think I have some lightning round questions okay are you up for them yeah okay favorite book you've read this year favorite book you wrote this year no I just read a really great book about the Shah of Iran that I just thought was kind of fantastic I can't remember okay that's helpful yeah an author you think we should all be reading well I always you know I recently was asked this question and I gave the answer Janet Malcolm and then GI then I came home from my book to her and I got I saw I had a note from Janet Malcolm no I understand Janet Malcolm is like like a hero it's the name right I think she's genius and I've read everything she's ever read and the idea that I got a little a sweetest note from her cuz I gave her a shout out just like it I don't know I want to frame it put in my wall so now I'm going to say Jenna knock up because if she could hear this maybe send me another note good all right what if you could give one piece of advice to your twenty one twenty one or twenty seven-year-old self what would you say and maybe you can give us both since we have both age groups represented twenty one I should have left North America I thought about it had a chance to and didn't and I completely regret it I think that was a huge error on my part and gone somewhere that was not like you know some people interpret that is saying oh I should go to Paris for a while there you know that doesn't help if you live in New York City or Philadelphia and your idea of getting away from it all go to Paris you would solve the essential problem right you've simply you know you've replaced kind of you know hoagies with croissants that is not that is not an advantage isn't open your horizons in any significant way I mean really goes somewhere at twenty-seven the same twenty seven I actually at twenty seven had another opportunity to go somewhere and didn't go and and regret it all right how do you measure your success well you seem very very uninterested in the notion of people going somewhere else no I'm a board I just want to make sure we get through all the light questions you're like oh I'm good that note in fact wait did you ever go anywhere else yes I have to multiple places I traveled through Panama and Costa for travel when I say go I mean I lived somewhere else yeah I lived in Sheffield does that cut northern England it kind of counts right I did it did you like follow English football when you were there no we purposely didn't get cable because we didn't want to watch TV so we ended up watching hours and hours of snooker which apparently is playing pool or billiards but even more boring no but there's a will Maddox and Adam Galinsky series of studies that you probably know showing that if you go abroad it actually makes you more curious and more open to experience especially if you go to countries that are different from your own but if the people who are already open and curious who are more likely to go in the first place which is a bit of a paradox but what about things like the we're analyzing ground but keep going okay I just wanted to bring up one of the things that I've always loved about there's both Mormons and Mennonites have a practice of sending everyone outside their own culture so you correct for that right and both of those cultures are deeply conservative but they nonetheless do some do the kind of thing is most likely to enhance your curiosity and open your eyes how interesting that that was a basileus is is fascinating we should all be subjected to that I think so the question was how do you define your success define or measure it how do you know if you are successful if you get me do what you want really freedom not impact no it's about like it's about call it's about yeah if you wonder if yeah no one's standing in the way of what you wanna do read write go but you achieved that 15 years ago yeah I was successful 15 years and now well I guess I still AM but you can no one's stopping me but you have a company now you've constrained yourself more isn't that other I don't they don't building gay involve me in anything significant I'm just arm candy for the operation suspicions confirmed all right is there is there a topic we can expect to hear on revisionist history next season or something you're excited to explore for the family yeah there's a bunch but everything's very you know early early early stages I have I have little scribbled notes in my wallet right now I have a little piece of paper which has these kind of just words on it of things that I've been thinking about there's one story that is I would like to tell that is so hilariously and deeply embarrassing to the Ivy League perfect nice totality but I can't tell you it because I give it away and also I felt clear it's a little it's a story I'm only gonna say that it involves I know I can't even tell you that much it's a story but the story is two minutes and those shows are 3040 minutes say so I need 38 minutes of run up I don't know if the 38 minutes of run up alright so I'm working on that all right well stay tuned for that incredibly I didn't lightning answer yes on a scale of one to ten how doomed is Gen Z why do you think it's dude I don't this is a student question oh the student question not doomed at all I kind of um my experience with Gen Z which is through people that I've hired largely for is that they're like fantastic in every way and I love the I had a great experience with my one of my old assistants was we went to interview you know Jonathan hight the righteous mind yeah he said my ears social psychologist my you who is very highly regarded lovely guy who but he's one of the people who's most upset about the how the epidemic of political correctness and such and with support of the other things he's worried about on campus his remodeling of the American end of the American when he's that whole thing and I to say spaces safe spaces and I'm by it my initial impression was he's taught for most of his career at places like NYU and he's extrapolating from NYU I mean it may be the case that there's a lot of coddling of Minds at NYU which seems plausible to me based on what I know but my knew that some coddling is going on there but it's not clear to me that that's true anywhere else right like yeah I will anyway so I went to see him to interview him for something with my gen Z assistant and we interview each other and he gives all these arguments a great length and afterwards we leave and my assistant turns to me and says that's and I thought it was very refreshing because I realize that like a lot of a lot of it is just by it's just about terminology that really the thing that's really lovely about I think this generation and makes it very different from mine is how deeply concerned people are about other people's feelings which is the fantastic thing like that they think before they say something they want to and they want to have a discipline of thinking first what is the effect this thing's going to have on when should I be careful and how I choose my words what is the point of having a communication with you if I leave you feeling alienated unhappy upset or I mean this is like it's supposed to be win win win win win but they it so happens that some of the terminology that surrounds that offends white guys in her 50s I mean I don't know why that what why isn't you know why should we get so worked up that white guys in her 50s are upset about the terminology used by 21 year olds like and even my assistant had a great riff on this he was like Johnson he was getting very very worked up about trigger warnings and as he was talking he's very very charismatic and persuasive and I was like oh my god trigger warnings and then my assistant Jacob was like well didn't if a teacher is teaching you something and the thing includes some material which might be a you know any teacher for all time like going back you know if Aristotle was teaching you something and that some of the things one of the things he was gonna tell you about is this a little bit upsetting or weird he would say by the way the thing I'm about to tell you is a little upsetting or weird Aristotle would have said that 2,000 years ago so today we just say and by the way that I should give you a trigger warning all right like it's just a different word to describe something that every good teacher ever has always done right why is this upsetting to white guys in their 50s I mean it's just me yeah no I'm not I don't think you do that I don't think you by the way you don't say anything because he's a colleague of yours but I suspect it maybe deep down you agree with me on this one but it's just like people get so worked up about ya know just kind of for is this this is just the forum in which good teaching is taking place and communication is taking place ya know as I've told John I think that part of the purpose of higher education is for you to get more comfortable being uncomfortable with thoughts that might not be that exciting to you might even be upsetting and to learn how to have a good intellectual debate about that as opposed to immediately shutting down ya and disengaging but I think there's probably a line that needs to be drawn on that some of you you are really bad in the lightning round but I'm gonna try a few more so a few other questions that some of the audience members were interested in your favorite city to visit in the u.s. good question well fun city or weird City weird city would be Birmingham Birmingham is so been DeBerg Birmingham is a city sorry I mean I've been packed with a mountain in the middle of it and the white people live on the mountain and the higher you go on the mountain the rich the white people get literally I described to you Birmingham and every morning the white people come down off the mountain to like go to work and then black people go up the mountain to work in the houses of the white people and it is the craziest and if you talk to brimming in someone from Birmingham you say if they're white person you say well where do you live on the mountain you're like well halfway out like okay that's how rich you are alright but experiencing that it's like a you understand why it was so crucial in the civil rights movement because it literally is a place I mean it's Johannesburg that they used to call it in fact it was the johannah's per famous is your hands because it's out then you see it when you go there and it's like it still it's not intact in the way that it was intact in 1965 but or 1960 but you understand oh why did Martin Luther King wanna end up here because there's a mountain in the middle where all the way people live like it's literally anyway I find it it's sort of riveting to kind of drive around and see how historically this country kind of constructed southern cities alright last question in one sentence and before we do this I want to thank you for joining us at Penn it has been highly entertaining and also thought-provoking as always we have a group of students in the audience who often describe them describe themselves as insecure overachievers what is the one piece of advice you would most like to offer them insecure overachievers why would you call yourself do self-identify as an insecure overachiever because you're insecure me no no the group why would you agenda I mean is that a bad thing to be it's probably a good thing to be right it means is the insecurity as driving your overachieving probably I would hire an insecure overachiever I think that's what that person I was talking about my company that I like so much I think that's what she is and this has been it's fantastic alright so keep it up Thank You Malcolm

Channel: Wharton School

Views: 97,363

Rating: 4.7688265 out of 5

Keywords: Wharton, The Wharton School, business school, business, university of pennsylvania, penn, wharton business school, adam grant, malcolm gladwell, authors at wharton, McNulty Leadership Program, success, intelligence, privilege, talking to strangers, interview, talk

Id: xIu4Ca2QQdw

Length: 88min 2sec (5282 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019