The SURPRISING Secrets To READ ANYONE Like An Open Book | Malcolm Gladwell & Jay Shetty

those two things exist inside of me and my attempt to make sense of that apparent contradiction is what makes me a writer you know what makes me someone i think that other people want to read and i don't there's no i feel under no compulsion to resolve that tension rather the opposite i should explore that tension hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every single one of you that come back to listen learn and grow now it's not every week that you get to sit down with someone who's inspired you since your teens and someone's books that really form so much of your decision making your psychology growing up and someone's books you've had such a deep impact in my life that i know i've recommended a ton of them to each and every single one of you and today's guest is none other than malcolm gladwell he's a journalist a speaker and the author of six new york times bestsellers including the tipping point blink outliers what the dog saw david and goliath and talking to strangers which will be diving in today now he's been a staff writer for the new york times since 1996 and foreign policy has three times named him one of their top global thinkers and he's been named one of time's 100 most influential people he's a co-founder and president of pushkin industries and pushkin industries is an audio content company that produces the podcast revisionist history if you haven't listened to it i highly recommend it which we consider things both overlooked and misunderstood i'm so excited to discuss how to be a better communicator and revisit some history today welcome to the show malcolm gladwell malcolm thank you for doing this not at all my pleasure yeah it's uh it's honestly an honor to have you here and uh i'm a fan of i believe laurie santos's podcast sits under your uh oh right yes she is one of ours most definitely yeah and laurie and i've had i've spent some really quality time together and she was actually a big part of helping me research for my book i'm a big fan of everything you're doing over there but i wanted to start off by asking you about something and i'm going to dive straight in here uh but i've heard you say that when you visit the lincoln monument you're always moved to tears and i wanted to know why is that oh wow so many reasons um i mean part of it is just the simplicity of you know the if you read the words inscribed on the wall of the monument it's i've forgotten how many words it's an absurd it's it's this almost absurdly short speech right his most famous speech it's over in uh two minutes i don't even know and yet it manages to say everything that needs to be said about one of the most one of the gravest and most important moments in american history and that idea that you could communicate so powerfully about something so important in such a small number of words i just find overwhelming and it's such a beautiful sentiment as well i don't know i yeah it's true i didn't that's i'd forgotten i'd said that but it is true i find that that monument extraordinarily moving yeah no that's beautiful one of my favorite thoughts that i believe is attributed to albert einstein is that if you can't explain something simply you don't understand it well enough yeah and i think the art of communicating with few words in a poetic way is super powerful i think one of the things that that i find and i've visited before that you know never been moved to tears but when i think about that i often feel more moved to tears even beyond words but by people's behavior and and in a positive sense it's almost like when you're in the space of someone who embodies those words that can definitely be something that's that's been seen to brought me to tears i don't know if you've ever experienced that or been in the picking up on the fact that i i i am a little weepy so i think i i think i can be moved to tears by that as well so i i may get moved to tears more than i'm you know uh would care to admit so uh yes those kinds of i i am hopelessly sentimental in many ways well i well i can very much relate maybe that's why i love your book so much uh i i can definitely connect to that i wanted to switch to the other side and i've also heard you say that you love spy thrillers and and i wanted to ask you what is it about spy thrillers that you love so much or that get your mind engaged i don't know you know it's a very good question i read enormous numbers of mysteries and thrillers of all kinds um and but my my particular love is for the spy thriller i think i've never gotten over the kind of dark romance of the cold war uh i don't i don't know if i have a good explanation for it about like espionage and people creeping around undercover and um pretending to be something they aren't and layering layering lie upon lie and deception upon deception that i find just incredibly engrossing um but i'm a huge i don't read you know i read serious non-fiction but the fiction i read is always of this you know it's all this genre espionage and thriller fiction i don't read anything serious you won't catch me reading proust uh it's you know i'm reading the the most serious stuff i'm reading is probably gender carry i mean the rest of it is the kind of books you buy in airports yeah it's just i suppose it's the way that i relax yeah absolutely absolutely so i want to dive into a ton of different areas today one is definitely as you can already tell i really want to dive into your mind and some of the decisions you make in your life i want to dive into your incredible book talking to strangers that we'll be putting a link to available uh for everyone to grab as well and the third and final thing is i want to grab it uh dive into your podcast because i think it's it's fascinating and i've been a fan of that for a while too but the first thing i want to ask you is i love what you've said about us on how what we do as human beings is exploit our contradictions you elaborate on that because i think that that statement in and of itself is just so like it's kind of like a mind bend uh that at the same time there's there's so much to unpack there let's unpack that together yeah well i always find that when you get to know someone or when you listen to someone really listen what you discover about them and then ultimately about yourself as well is that we're full of contradiction and that being contradictory is the one of the defining traits of being human um so you know i was just talking about how i'm incredibly sentimental and weepy but i'm also i'm the son of a mathematician i am at the same time hyper rational you know do i think of those two things as being contradictory of course but that's that's me you know and in the same way i can point to you know if i i'm sure we could do the same kind of analysis of you and i can do the same i can say the same with nearly all of my friends as i get to know them i understand what parts of their character are formally in conflict but they're not actually in conflict that what we do with human beings is we navigate our way around those kinds of things we get pulled in one direction or another and we kind of split the difference so we figure out when do i want to be this and when do i want to be that you know another version of this is in my case it's more there's all kinds of interesting dimensions to this i am the son of uh my father is was english my mother is jamaican i am biracial i belonged at my foot in two very different heritages and people ask me well which way do you identify and the answer is i don't i'm both and being both is it's a contradiction you know i see both sides of when we you know i've written a lot about racial issues in my books and one of the reasons i'm drawn to them is i see i feel i see both sides of them you know i have a there's a part of me that's white that sometimes sees the world through the through the lens of a privileged white man and part of me is black and you know sympathizes with the other side of the equation very easily and readily and appreciates it those two things exist inside of me and my attempt to make sense of that apparent contradiction is what makes me a writer you know what makes me someone i think that other people want to read um and i don't there's no i feel under no compulsion to resolve that tension rather the opposite i should explore that tension and i you know so that's that's what i meant by that statement i think all of us at our best do that it's actually extremely reaffirming to hear you say that and to do the analysis on myself as you mentioned i obviously spent three years of my life living as a monk and i spent my time majority of it in india and now i'm in the world of media and i live in la and i i feel completely at home being a content creator and producer in so many ways and i love embracing those polarities like it excites me and it energizes me to tap into my monk mind and then my media mind and try and connect dots and see patterns where others see anomalies and i've genuinely embraced that and i often get asked the same question that how can you still claim to have monk elements in your life when you live such an in one sense externally driven life but to me i don't see them even as transitions i see them as i love being a paradox and and i enjoy the paradoxical nature of how my mind can go between the two and find connections and and i've only seen that present me with more opportunities and and what you said there was like to engage with that you know to actually connect with that but i feel like our minds like to simplify and box and that's why we see contradiction as controversy or we see it as a weakness right it's almost like what you just said is that if you are teary-eyed and sentimental one moment and you're mathematical the other it's almost like one of them is a weakness why is it that we have this propensity to judge a contradiction or a paradox or someone who embraces polarities as a weakness or a character flaw we all go through difficult and stressful times and there's just no avoiding it the best way to prepare for tough times is to make sure that you're always choosing to stay healthy as much as you possibly can of course this means feeding your mind with the best books videos and content on the other side of things it means making sure that you're creating healthier eating and workout habits if you're not taking full control over the things that can influence you you're not truly living up to your potential because everyone is different today's sponsor noom adjusts to your lifestyle i love them because they take a step back and teach you the psychology behind the decisions you make and help you to keep track of everything from workouts steps to analyzing your diet and recommending healthy recipes you no longer have to do this alone because noom also connects with you personally and with your assigned goals 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today that's noom noom.com forward slash purpose how many times a day do you reach out to your phone and pick it up and how often do you do this without even thinking about it i'm sure you pick up your phone multiple times a day to mindlessly just scroll through social media or check your latest email now this isn't a bad thing if you're intentional about who you follow and what's on your feed and how long you're going to be on this platform but for the most part many of us do this on autopilot simply to escape the feeling of boredom and i'm just as guilty i make that mistake too but here's the trick ever since i downloaded blinkist on my phone i feel no need to do that and actually always leave the app feeling more fulfilled i hope you download blinkist and experience the benefits of using your time wisely blinkist works on your phone your tablet and your web browser simply put blinkist gives you key takeaways you need to know the information that you need to understand from over 3 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jordan gross it's a five-step method for mastering your morning routine so you can face each day on your own terms right now blinkist has a special offer just for our audience go to blinkist.com to start your free seven-day trial and get 25 off a blinkist premium membership and up to 65 percent of audiobooks yours to keep forever that's blinkist spelled k i s b-l-i-n-k-i-s-t dot com forward slash j to get 25 offer premium membership and a seven day free trial blinkist.com forward slash j there's a strain in the current climate which makes this worse which is this idea we have now that we can reduce people's identity to something singular so we say if someone you know we see it in the political realm someone is a trump supporter and we and we we believe when we say that that every other fact about them ceases to be of significance on the other side we say there are lots of people you know we there's a very active given an example and i don't mean this in any way in a in a derogatory way but um there is now there has risen uh uh a real uh activism in recent years around the trans movement and these are people who define themselves by their sexuality um in the public in public debate um and my question to both of those in both of those cases is i accept that identity of yours but i also want to know more and i want to i want to see all of you because even the most ardent trump supporter is much more than that i you know i had a discussion with someone the other day who's a stepmother and she was talking about how her identity as stepmother is really really important to who she is and every time she meets a stepmother she's reminded of how in many cases everything else pales in comparison to the complexities that come from being a step parent when i meet people trans people i'm the thing that strikes me is how there's a million other sides to to them that i want to know that are equally as as important as their sexual identification um and i think we do them a disservice when we have a discussion about trans people in which all we do is talk about that aspect of their lives and neglect the other parts it's it's a kind of a way in which we allow ourselves to pigeonhole and dehumanize people is to reduce them to a single thing now why do we want to reduce people to a single thing because as you say we have this weird desire to want to have this single non-contradictory understanding of someone um it's crazy you know i was i was trying to i'm a big runner yes yeah i was gonna ask you about that and i was talking to someone who's just started running and i was trying to explain the fundamental contradiction of running because i observed her she's my neighbor's wife and i observed her running down the road and i was like she needs my help and she was she hadn't understood the contradiction of running which was you are exerting yourself and pushing yourself at the same time as you are required to be relaxed right and at peace the only way to exert yourself is to be at peace and i saw her exerting herself and she wasn't relaxed she was tense and i said i stopped and said you can't run that way right you have to understand the fundamental contradiction of running the only way to push yourself is to be so relaxed in your upper body that if i touch you you should follow if i jostle you you should fall over that's how electricity should be she didn't she didn't get she hadn't gone that far right she hadn't to understand that fact that's true in so many different aspects of our life um that's a very long-winded way of answering that question no no that's that's great that's so true it's it's it's funny i literally said that to someone about meditation two days ago so i've been meditating for a long time and it was the same thing around how so much of meditation is where people are forcing themselves to concentrate or forcing themselves to meditate or to empty their mind or whatever it may be that they're attempting or aspiring to do and so often it's actually the exact opposite that the point of focusing is to let go so that you can allow yourself to be more present and be more aware whereas we're trying to force ourselves in a direction which which so aligns to running and and i know i've heard a lot of people describe running as a meditative state uh for some people at least yes no it's it's not a long-winded way it's it's uh very connected to some things i can see i guess i guess yeah for me it's always just how do we or or is there a way of training our minds to entertain and engage in opposing ideas without feeling the pressure to choose or define ourselves by them is there a method that we can expand our minds so that we can have both of these ideas coexisting without needing either of them to reflect the whole of us or the truth i think of that as that's my definition of what um tolerance is what does it mean to be accepting and tolerant of others and i think it is um allowing their giving them room for their contradiction um so allowing them to be i mean i was talking about the tran you know the trans movement of the trans identity allowing someone to be that and whatever else they choose to be right if they also want to be a republican and they also want to be a rocket scientist and they also want to be a stepmom you know to be whatever they want that's to me that's what um tolerant and accepting the fact that those may be a group of of identities and responsibilities and roles that we may be unfamiliar with that may trouble us that may discomfort us that may strike us as weird it's our job to get over that that's what it means to be a tolerant person um is is to kind of embrace people in their complexity um i think that's the um and i actually struck one of the big differences between my generation and yours i'm a generation older than you and your generation and the one below you is i i am struck when i meet young people at how much better they are at navigating or accepting those kinds of differences than i was at that age um i think a lot of our issues in this society are a whole over from a much kind of more rigid way of appreciating people that comes from earlier generations you know the in my company the i'm admit that 25 year olds at pushkin my audio company our audio company they sometimes blow me away they're just so much it's so much easier for them to kind of wrap their you know to accept people in all of their um you know glorious contradiction it's harder it's harder for someone of my age [Music] if our ancestors were around to hear of the amazing work of our next sponsor they'd be simply amazed and it'll probably be something they couldn't fathom to think that by taking a test you can find out what your family's inherited health risks are that's exactly what you get when taking an ancestry health test when you understand your family's inherited health risks you know what needs your attention most awareness is truly the gift of this test which allows you 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slash on purpose that's helix sleep.com forward slash on purpose and get up to 200 off your mattress that's a great definition of tolerance tolerance is a word that i don't hear that often apart from in certain spiritual circles and traditions but that's definitely a a great definition for tolerance and and and i really think that it's it is truly allowing people to when we say that we want to live in a world where people can be authentically who they are and express every part of them it demands what you just said because without that we're almost trying to place them in just another box and a new set of boxes and that we're creating so no that's refreshing to hear it's it's very refreshing to hear i want to dive into uh talking about the book talking to strangers uh because what i find fascinating is you wrote this book before everything happened and and it almost when i say everything happened i mean everything that's happened in 2020 and it almost seems like it's been written perfectly for this time in so many ways there's there's so much about the book i remember first coming across it when it was first released and i think i missed an opportunity to interview you at facebook in new york briefly and i was thinking when will i get a chance to interview you but it almost feels like this is an even better time because there's just these questions have become so much more compelling and in front of mind i i wanted to ask you to start with because it's called talking to strangers how do you define or how can people define who a stranger is in their life a stranger is just i think anyone who is not a member of your intimate circle so i don't have trouble i mean i we all have some trouble communicating with our loved ones but we have enormous advantages when it comes to communicating with the loved ones and in many ways as human beings we're built to communicate effectively with those in our intimate circle that's how we evolved as a species when we have context when we understand people's i remember when my my dad and i used to be able to we spoke in this weird language where he would start a sentence and i would know exactly what he meant and he wouldn't have to finish it and you know he could do the same with me and we would literally talk in two-word sentences and that's that that is the beauty of intimacy right my mind was structured like his we had we shared the same world and i knew what he was getting at and he knew what i was getting at you don't have that luxury with someone outside your circle and so this book is all about what happens when the tools that we were given by evolution to deal with our intimates are used on strangers and the answer is they fail not all the time but often and i wanted to kind of navigate that failure and try and figure out well what what should we do then if these these time-tested strategies for communicating with others no longer work because what the weird thing is you know and i talk about this in the book the idea that we would have regular conversations with people we don't know is such a modern notion like until 100 years ago or 150 years ago the odds that i would be having a conversation with you were zero right zero i would never have had a conversation with someone of your background you never have a cover that was on my background wouldn't happen like you know so it's like and so if you think about that are the in a very very short period of time we've been asked to do something as human beings that we never had to do before and i i began talking to strangers with this an account of one of the most high profile of the um encounters between african-americans and police the the the sandra bland incident texas a young black woman is pulled over by a a texas a white texas cop and she ends up hanging herself i mean herself few days later but what's interesting about that interesting what's singular about that encounter is for most of us uh the idea like i grew up in a small town if i was pulled over by a police officer i knew the police officer and he knew me and he knew my parents and i knew his kids and i went to you know the cop in my small town growing up he went to my church the odds said so the conversation between if i was doing something i shouldn't be doing he pulled me over he would say malcolm first thing first thing he would say was malcolm what are you doing and then he would say do i have to call your parents right it's a totally different conversation when you know the person and they're from your community and he would know whether i was a bad kid or a good kid or a well did i have a did he pull me over three times before for drinking or not or was i a good kid who just did something stupid in the case of that officer in sandra bland he doesn't know anything about her and she doesn't know anything about him and that requires of him principally a wholly different set of behaviors and strategies all of a sudden what things he's holding in his head and what assumptions he's using to understand her and what biases he's carrying are super consequential and that's what i was trying to get at in the book yeah and and of course he completely misread in that situation there is he barges it yeah yeah what are those things that we then are what are what are like the biggest pitfalls in our assumptions and biases when we're first meeting a stranger where is it that we naturally go wrong because in the example you gave of speaking and communicating with your father it's almost like you're on the same algorithm and the google autofills there and you know it's it's like google reading your mind and knows what you've typed in or what most people type in and sometimes i think we think we can do that like we almost have i feel like and maybe it's just me but i feel like we have an intuition where we sometimes feel like just by meeting someone we know whether they're right for us to marry date uh do business with collaborate with like we always try and we almost trust ourselves enough to figure that out in one meeting yeah yeah but but in this book you're almost telling us that it's it's not that easy we're often making mistakes what are those key mistakes yeah well the most is three i talk about but the one i'll start with the second that i talk about and it's it's it's this what i call the illusion of transparency and that is this um uh this idea that what can i tell about you from observing your facial expressions your body language um how you carry yourself and hold yourself we as human beings place a great deal of emphasis on that kind of evidence we use that evidence to send people to jail to judge guilt or innocence to figure out whether that people someone likes us or doesn't like us and if you ask us we're pretty confident in the judgments that we make based on though that kind of evidence and but the truth is we're terrible at decoding people's emotional states from observing their the outward the outward manifestations of those states i cannot look at you right now jay observe your facial expressions and have the slightest clue what you're thinking you could be you could think i can't believe this guy he's such a you could be thinking this is so much fun you could be thinking about what you're gonna have for dinner tonight i have no idea right i can certainly try i am looking at your face right now and i'm you know some part of my brain is saying okay is he interested is he not i think he is i'm drawing all kinds of conclusions um but if i am completely honest i have to own up to the fact admit to myself that almost all of those conclusions are false or at least i have i'll put it better i have no way of knowing whether my conclusions are true right um so that's a if it's my if you're my dad and i've known you for my entire life i'm i'm not bad at making sense i know that when my father is looks a little puzzled and perplexed it's not that he's angry at anyone it's just that he's daydreaming or i know that when he hems and haws about something it's not that he can't make up his mind it's because he's just weirdly inarticulate sometimes right i know that about my dad i don't know that about you right and until i've spent all that time with you i can't be drawing conclusions from that kind of stuff and we and it is astounding how many mistakes we make because of this simple assumption that we think we you know what's the whole job interview based on you meet someone you ask a bunch of questions and mostly what you're doing is you're looking at their body language you're looking at a facial expression and trying to decide ah this is a nice person is this an honest person you can't tell that from looking at them right so it's like that's a kind of that's a big thing that i explored in the book and that's what happened in the case of sandra bland the cop observes her behavior and he thinks that she's behaving in a way that is suspicious and dangerous is the furthest thing from dangerous and she's not behaving suspiciously she's upset she's mad because she got pulled over for no reason and he doesn't understand that he confuses you know her uh being upset with her being dangerous those could not be more different right that is a if you're a police officer about to make a consequential judgment about how to deal with someone if you confuse those two emotional states you're making a huge error and i guess in that situation of course the the police officer or someone in that role has the pressure of feeling or there's a feeling of a pressure to make a decision in a short period of time but in in some areas of our life we don't really have that we almost place a false pressure on ourselves because we don't really have a window to decide just with the hiring example i was recently reading a uh leadership and recruitment book and it there was there was a theme in it that was called uh higher slow fire fast and and it was just talking about like the hiring process needs to be much slower because what we usually do is hire fast and fire slow and so saying that there needs to be that shift but we almost put a pressure on ourselves like well if i don't know if he or she is the one in this meeting then i'm going to be single forever or whatever it is so is it time is it more interactions is it what what is that that's that's going to allow us to improve that well time i mean times are actually a big part of this and funnily enough you know in the wake of the george floyd case um a lot of was a lot of really interesting things that i i mean i listened to a number of people who studied um uh law enforcement law enforcement to the united states and one of the most interesting thing i heard was there are an awful lot of police departments in this country that place very strict time limits on officers in when they're dealing when they're out dealing with the public you are required to wrap up your encounter in a given amount of time and you are applauded and rewarded when you deal with people quickly and you are penalized when you're slow that's crazy right you can't do that similarly with doctors we make doctors you know insurance companies make doctors they give them clear incentives to be as quickly to deal with patients as quickly as possible to the point where doctors feel like they're on an assembly line that's also that's a way to create misunderstanding and mistakes right you cannot speed up some of these encounters so time's a big part of it a lot another big part of that is empathy is you need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone else for a moment and that is both in order to do that you need to you need both more information about that person but you also need to be trained in the capacity of of sitting outside your own perspective and you know i can't believe i'm saying this to someone who spent time as a monk i mean a lot of what you do when you are in that environment and when you do things like meditate is you train yourself to do that kind of thing right to step outside your own consciousness and you know a police officer has to be uh in a way a a a social worker a psychologist and all of us have to play that role um and that that requires that's a real act of humility to do that to set aside your own feelings and instead ask the question what would i be thinking if i was in this person's shoes and what are the range of possible reasons why this person is behaving the way they are yeah and and today we have such an incredible ability to do that because like you said 100 years 150 years ago we wouldn't be talking and and people wouldn't be listening to this or wouldn't have the opportunity to listen to this and because of that we're today exposed to more ideas more cultures more backgrounds more walks of life which means our compassion and empathy should actually be increasing because we have the ability to hold more knowledge and depth about a number of backgrounds and walks of life which we wouldn't have had before which naturally closes our mind but it seems like sometimes the more exposed we get the more judgmental we can become too because of the differences it's almost like you said before like 150 years ago or the town you grew up in where your police officer knew your name which is which is insane for me to think about i was born and raised in london and that was definitely not the case but from going from that where you feel like you know everyone you trust everyone you know everyone's parents you know where they live that creates somewhat of a safety net whereas whereas there's so much more fear in today's society because there is so much of an unknown yeah and yeah i would say i would say that i think you're right that we're get we're better at this than we were that's what i was talking about earlier but the problem is that the the the task is harder that's sort of what it is like 50 years ago in the workforce uh virtually everyone i would have dealt with would have been a college-educated white male right from i could probably go further if it was 75 years ago a college-educated white protestant male um you know it's not when everyone is cut from the same coming from the exact same slice of and middle class to upper middle class in the media world that's what it was right i'm a journalist at the washington post in 1970 everybody is a white pretty much everyone is a white upper middle class male either protestant or jewish who went to one of ten colleges right now it's not that way right and that's so just the it's just harder now um and we're we're better but we're the i think the difficulty of the task before us is accelerating faster than our own abilities you know it's um i think that's probably the best way to to make sense of the dilemma we're in yeah and i think that's been accelerated even more today in digital communication like obviously we're not sitting next to each other right now and and everyone's listening and watching us is not sitting next to us us right now and everyone's been you know forced into this zoom conversation or digital conversation that they're having right now and i wonder what your thoughts are on digital communication and how that's and and hey let's let's be sure to be honest even before this when you were referring to my generation or the generation after especially the generation after and the one after that most of the communication is happening digitally and potentially not even through face and it's happening through text and it's happening through words where where does that leave us to really feeling like we understand people and and that they understand us and that feeling of feeling understood and understanding yeah well i mean i guess what i would say is i mean let's talk about this conversation we're having over here um what is it we can't do over zoom well um i can't see you what is that we're we're probably going to hang out less than if i had come to your office and so we might have chit-chatted before we might have chit-chatted afterwards we might have if we'd gotten along we might have had a meal imagine if we'd gone for a walk and instead of talking face to face we'd spoken side by side now that sounds like a a trivial thing it's not a trivial thing different conversations when you walk with someone because you're not looking at them and all of a sudden like people always talk about how these they took these you know with their best friend a wonderful car car trip across country when they were 19 years old and what amazing conversations they had a lot of that is about being in the same place with someone for hours and hours and then while that is like side by side and not face to face you could have a different conversation and then when someone is eating they're relaxed and you see a different side of them than you would and you learn something new like even something that may seem trivial like what someone chooses to eat and how they eat it what they say about the food they're eating i mean these are all like they just help you fill out the picture a little bit and i think it what it does is it softens um like i was listening to i took an interview with a guy who's a uh a journalist who's made his living doing really really confrontational interviews with people and he was being interviewed about his technique and the guy the interviewer asked him do you prefer to do these face-to-face or on telephone or online he goes oh always on the telephone never ever face to face because he knows he can't be mean face to face right so it's often i think it softens the encounter when you can spend time unstructured time with someone um and i think that's what what's what we see in social media is it's the harshness of the tone has to do with the fact you're never meeting the person that you're attacking you wouldn't say that if they were sitting next to you right that's my worry about these times i worry that too much of this digital thing is going to remove the possibility for um let me go to another tangent my i i've been interviewing for a project um the uh the singer paul simon spent many many hours with him and i've decided my favorite paul simon song is a song which is called tenderness and the chorus is just try some uh tenderness beneath your honesty and my argument to him was that that's the story of his life in some way he's someone who is trying to convince people to not to be dishonest keep your honesty but put a little tenderness in it and i think that what meeting face to face about is all about is it doesn't change the honesty of the conversation it means there's more tenderness yeah and that's and that's definitely something that's missing today i think you're so right that we're that that we've obviously been talked about before the accountability of when you're in front of someone versus when you're when you're behind a keyboard but i think tenderness is such a great word because we are so much more equipped to communicate in a way that we think we're accountable to and accountable for when we're face to face and i've definitely found that i remember uh one of my managers saying to me that oh whenever there was a conflicting conversation to have it was better to walk together so you felt you were walking in the same direction even if you had opposing views and so that ability to not sit you know across from a table across from each other that's exactly what i was talking about yeah no that's so lovely i actually had never thought about that's the that's a beautiful illustration uh or use of that side-by-side principle yeah exactly yeah just you know side by side walking in the same direction same vision even if you have conflicting ideas because when you sit like this of course we're not being confrontational but an interrogation would always be like this and therefore i think so many people feel interrogated in interviews or on dates for that matter and i agree with you on the side by side i remember some of my best conversations with my friends growing up were both of us playing uh video games together and so like our my like our our almost conscious mind would be obs you know completely switched onto the game and then our subconscious mind could actually connect with each other because we were just you know so wired into this game that we could play without even having to think about it that we were able to let go and kind of get beyond the barrier that that guys may never have done if we were sitting having a drink together or juice together or something like that it just wouldn't have happened yeah yeah i've definitely experienced that over video games or at least i can remember a lot of great conversations that happen over uh lost games of fifa and and other video games but uh i was going to say why what what games you play it make it fifa makes sense you're grew up in london yeah there's gonna be a lot of fifa yeah my i'm i'm i'm big into sports games of fifa nba 2k uh i i played a lot of uh assassin's creed growing up yeah which was uh i don't know if i could i could handle it anymore the fifa football's a big love of mine having grown up in england and yeah you can't not love football so yeah you never did you spend any time in england growing up well i was born in um kent and we we left when i was six okay uh but we would go back i mean i've been i've been i go to england you know once or twice a year and have done so for 30 years so i'm very and i feel very at home you know going back to the contradictions some part of me um there's a part of me that feels very very very at home in england yeah talking talking about going home and revisiting i wanted to talk about your podcast revisionist history again as i said to everyone it's it's an incredible podcast and a big part of what the podcast is is about looking to history and looking at the overlooked and the misunderstood uh if if you had to do an episode on a past event in your life uh what do you think could be misunderstood or overlooked by you if you were to reflect on it oh wow that's a really really really good question um take your time yeah i mean i i guess i would go back i if i was gonna do something on my life i would do a lot of what ifs um i'm not someone i'm very happy with the path that my life has taken but i'm not someone who thinks this was the only path my life could have taken and so i really wonder and i'm i i'm conscious of the fact that there were crucial moments in my life when i could have broadened my experience and i didn't instead i chose to stay where i was and burrow deeper and i as i've gotten older i've i have i'm more and more convinced that was the wrong strategy um so when i was in my late 20s i was working at the washington post i had an opportunity to go to europe and be the germany correspondent basically european correspondent for the washington post based in germany um this is early 90s just after the wall fell and i i didn't do it um and similarly i thought after graduating from college that i i had a notion that i would go to graduate school in jamaica um that it would be a really interesting way to explore that part of my heritage and broaden my perspective and live in a very different culture and i didn't do it and um part of me regrets both those decisions um because i look at myself now and i say what what is lacking from my life it is a little bit of that breadth um you know i have uh so that's you know those are those i would go back and i would re-examine those decisions and i would try and figure out was i scared was i what was going through my mind that kept me making much more conventional decisions than i perhaps should have thank you for opening up by the man thank you for sharing that it's it's always uh it's it's always fascinating just and i never i didn't think that you had anything that you regret or that you're not happy with where you are so that was definitely not what the question was aimed at it was it was definitely just an intrigue i think that especially with how you talk about things being misunderstood and overlooked i think that's what i love about what you do on the podcast it's it's not so much about this is wrong or you know it's it's so much of history and we always hear that you know history's always told from the winners side and history's always told from the people that benefited from what you know with the events that took place i guess how how do you find how how do you think that history can be most usefully used because i find that because in in the past i think hindsight was such a gift but it almost feels like uh what's that beautiful statement by mark twain you know history never repeats itself but it always rhymes and you know it's it's that kind of feeling of like i feel like hindsight was such a gift but it seems even now that because when we do hindsight we actually realize so much was misunderstood and overlooked that now we focus so much on that however you find history and reflecting on history how is it actually practical and useful in today's world seeing as you do it so much well it goes back to what i was saying before about um the importance of empathy in understanding another and how you have to be trained in that particular art and i think that history is one of the ways in which you train yourself in the art of empathy because the great luxury of history is you have time has passed and usually many many many people serious people have weighed in on the events that you're interested in so what you have is a breadth of perspective a rare breadth of perspective on the actions of others and if you do it right you you you get practiced in the art of empathy you can look at everyone involved in any consequential moment and see it through their eyes now you may not agree with everyone but you still have this opportunity to revisit something from another perspective so you know i've been working on this huge project i did it in four episodes of my podcast were about um the second world war this decision made by a general in the second world war to bomb tokyo to with fire bombs in march of 1945 and i've then subsequently gone back and i'm now turning it into a much larger book and you know there's all these different characters in that time all of whom have very different perspectives and you think when you start that guy's wrong that guy's right this is outrageous and then six months later you don't think that way anymore you you you don't even you don't use that language you still have a moral perspective but your the language you use is different what you say is i understand why that person made the decision that they made even though i think i disagree with it that's the way you phrase it and that's such a much more evolved and important way of phrasing your um your feelings about someone and their actions it's if we could all somehow use that perspective in the way we made sense of each other i feel like the world will be so much better um that's about that's i think what the function of history is yeah that's such a great answer that that's that's a brilliant answer actually because yeah if history was used in that way like you said it's such a rare opportunity to dive into something when it's not being defined as we're in it most decisions we have to make are at least again the false pressure or the illusion of pressure that it has to be decided today but history gives you this complete you know kind of stillness of time and and just slow down in pace to just re-observe and and i love what you said about that transformational change in perception our instinct or intuitive initial understanding is so much about love or hate black and white and it's so divided even in our reaction and response but you're so right that you can almost weave it together more as you let it settle i i wanted to dive into this season's theme which is attachment and and i think you know i talk i talk about attachment in different ways in my podcast considering my background too but you know sometimes obviously attachment hurts our perceptions of what really is and you know we've heard it before that we get more lost in what if rather than what is and this distortion of reality uh that exists because of our attachment to illusion or ideas or hopes uh can you give an example that you've seen where where attachment actually uh hurts or potentially even benefits us if it does in any way yeah well i was focused on the on this season on the downside of attachments um and what i by attention i was talking about attachments really to ideas and practices that become you know so much of the reasons for the why we do what we do are unexamined and i was trying to examine them so you know i one of my favorite episodes this season uh was about a guy it was the second episode of the year about a this guy goes to bolivia and tries to convince high school students in bolivia why he's in bolivia's not crucial story but he happened to be in bolivia he wants him he wants high school students to elect their student councils um by lottery to choose their leaders by lottery and he makes this very compelling argument about how you get better leaders when you choose them randomly that more people are involved that they have much broader those who you choose have a much broader perspective on on what issues they want to address and more most of all you what you learn is that there are all kinds of people who are capable of good leaders who you would never have thought before and so what the current what the current system does what what democratic elections do instead of opening up possibility to everyone they actually close possibility to many people and what was fascinating about that is that's an incredibly incendiary idea that you would do away with an election and we would be better off with the lottery why is it incendiary because we have this attachment to this particular ritual of choosing our leaders and we've had it for a couple hundred years and we've told ourselves it's the best ever and we won't look at any other alternatives and we have kind of gr all kinds of myths have grown around this particular ritual which we don't look at either one of the myths is that we we're good at predicting who's going to be a good leader we are not we're terrible at it and we won't and by the way there has been a mountain of evidence as to how bad we are at it and yet we refuse to revisit that question we're overly attached to a particular way of choosing our leaders that's a beautiful a really good example of how we get in how our attachments get us in trouble um and i what i would like people to be is to be freer when it comes to um thinking about possibility in the world um yeah okay no no please please go ahead another of my favorite episodes was called hamlet is wrong and that's this notion of a famous economist and that was his favorite slogan and what he meant was hamlet was someone who was um paralyzed by his choices right to be or not to be that's the question he didn't couldn't decide what to and this guy said actually hannah had it backwards that when you don't know what's going to happen you're free to do whatever you want right so you know that's another way of saying the same thing that freedom is being able is detaching yourself from this desire to predict the future or this um phony sense that you know what's around the corner you don't know what's around the corner and that means you should be you should be free to follow whatever course you want that's like such a powerful liberating notion yeah no i i think so too i think i think sometimes we feel more confined by systems than their effect and so one of our excuses to ourselves around questioning ideas or beliefs that we have is because we feel that they are already predefined and predetermined by the world we live in and and so it's almost like a uh an excuse that oh well i can't question this because it sits within a bigger construct that won't actually allow me to exercise that freedom and i'm guessing you're saying that that's actually to some degree false yeah i always had this conversation i have a lot of friends with um k high school age kids who are all thinking about going to college and i always say exactly the same thing to them they say where are you thinking going to college and they list the same names you always name and i always say well why wouldn't you go abroad what when you go to the why don't you apply for you know i don't know some school in johannesburg or you know or uh serbia or i mean there are english language universe universities all over the world you go to why would you confine yourself to you know brown or williams college or whatever the favorites are of the moment and they they never have a good answer right they're like flummoxed by that question or i say you've applied to the colleges that you think are the quote unquote best what if you went to you know uh you know a big public school in the midwest instead of some fancy elite coastal private school you would meet lots of people you would never otherwise meet it might really expand your horizons you're still the same person plenty of brilliant professors at those schools but just like you're going to meet kids just a wider range of why wouldn't you go to a place where you'd meet the widest range of people um and they don't have a good answer that question they're they're 17 years old and they're already powerfully attached to two notions which have no intrinsic validity right and it breaks my heart by the way i was the same way at that age and it breaks my heart right yeah why was i that way why was i conservative at 17 yeah there's the one time in your life when you don't have to be conservative in your choices particularly these kids by the way their parents are you know comfortably off they get a their parents can afford to back them if they want to go somewhere weird and their parents can afford the plane ticket to johannesburg get on a plane like you know like it's so fascinating to me that like it's weird that as a teenager we are we're terrified of like doing something you know out of the ordinary no i don't know your story but you did something completely out of the ordinary like that's that's super interesting to me right that decision that you made yeah i i was 22 and i decided to i thought i was going to be an investment banker or a consultant because that was the 18 year old me kind of yeah i i wanted to be in art and you know i wanted i wanted to be an art director or something like that but i i didn't realize i didn't believe that could be a real career growing up and so i i settled for business and thought okay i'll go and you know make money and be safe and and then after having interned at companies every summer from 18 to 22 but also spending the other half of my holidays and vacations spending them in india training with monks i decided at the end of my degree that i should go off and live as a monk instead of joining a company so that's what i did and we can talk about that separately but but yeah i was really fortunate that i got i got to meet a monk at 18 that planted a new seed of an idea that i was exposed to and i think that's the challenge that one side is exposure where we're highly exposed to similar ideas these same thought processes and the same things being rewarded in a culture and i think reward is so important that if you're only seeing financial fame and powerful reward being around certain areas of society then we naturally gravitate there whereas no one is giving me any awards for becoming a monk or no one is giving me any you know there's no incentive to go off and become a monk but i i always feel like if i wasn't exposed to that person it wouldn't have happened and i remember a study that mit did which was which was on creativity and productivity of employees but but they showed two charts and one chart was employees where they knew people who knew people who knew them back and then the second shot was an employee who knew people who didn't know each other and they found that people who knew people who didn't know each other were more likely to be creative and innovative inside an organization because going back to how we started they were able to hold opposing views and and that to me fascinated me and then when you look at some of the most brilliant minds in innovation or tech or i'm sure journalism but anyway it's all people who did really random things or at least were exposed to very disconnected random ideas yeah and and that's yeah i get fascinated by that stuff too so i'm glad but i want to be mindful of your time uh malcolm i could talk to you for for a lot longer uh but we're gonna dive straight and i've got so many questions i wanted to ask you but but we'll save them for a part two when you write your next book hopefully you'll come back on but uh this is yeah this is something that we do at the end of every uh episode it's called the final five so these are answers in one word or one sentence maximum i have been known to break rules when i feel like it uh but but i urge all of our guests to answer in one word or one sentence so the first question for you is what do you know to be absolutely true about human behavior that many people disagree with you on or would have an opposing view oh uh that even the worst of us are redeemable so you believe that even the worst of us are redeemable right okay great wonderful answer okay second question uh what's something that's socially acceptable that you don't agree with uh smoking pot great answer okay we have to save that from part two too uh question number three the hardest recent change that you've made in your life the most difficult [Music] wow uh that's a hard one um starting a company um yeah i'm sure that's super hard okay question number four what was your biggest lesson that you've learned in the last 12 months that we are i mean since the pandemic started way more resilient uh than i would have imagined i would have thought we were in chaos by this point and we're not i mean we've come close a couple times but man we had been through a lot of in this world and in this country over the last seven months and we are we're hanging in there absolutely okay question number five if you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be oh i'm gonna follow i'm gonna steal an idea that a friend of mine said the other day that i loved uh keep in mind the friend of mine who told me this is very wealthy she said i would like to pass a law that everyone in the world has to put their name in a hat and switch everything about your life stays the same but you have to switch homes with the person who you draw out of the hat permanently wow that would be amazing permanently permanently wow that's incredible that is our first on on purpose we've never had such a low bid passed or named so i i appreciate you sharing that with us anyway malcolm that was your fast five everyone malcolm gladwell talking to strangers is the name of the book that we've been discussing today uh go grab a copy put the uh link inside and like i said i i would have to say this categorically i'm happy and i'm very comfortable saying it uh malcolm glad was my favorite author of all time and so uh without a doubt uh malcolm's books have been a huge influence in in my life and probably part of me becoming a monk in some way or the other anyway so uh i'm very grateful to malcolm i would check out any of his books uh not not just this one but this one's a great one please go check it out and his podcast provision is history as we mentioned before and discussed as well go and take a listen and malcolm thank you again for coming on the show i hope this is uh one of many and i look forward to getting to know you better as well and i and i hope we can do dinner or a walk sometime that would be lovely thank you so much thank you so much malcolm and uh look forward to look forward to everyone getting to check you up more wonderful awesome hey everyone my name is jay shetty and welcome to my youtube channel every week i'm sharing three videos that are going to help you feel more fulfilled feel more happy and more successful make sure you subscribe to this channel so that you can find out about the videos as soon as they launch press the like button and leave a comment and let's keep making wisdom go viral together make sure you subscribe

Channel: Jay Shetty

Views: 105,954

Rating: 4.8124762 out of 5

Keywords: Bhagavad Gita, Life, Explore, Mind, Purpose, Social Media

Id: HAPUh1M22_g

Length: 70min 45sec (4245 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020