In this episode, Dr. Adam Grant joins Megyn Kelly to talk about his new book, Think Again, and why he thinks everyone should learn to think again. He also talks about why diversity in the workplace is so important, and why we should all be fighting for it.
00:11:04.020I've been at registered Dem or I've been a registered Republican.
00:11:06.560I've been a registered independent for as many years as I can count now.
00:11:09.960But anyway, I, I don't know what, what does that make me a contrarian or smart?
00:11:18.320Well, it's, I think at minimum, it makes you motivated to be an independent thinker.
00:11:24.420And I think that that's, that's probably a good place for a lot of us to start.
00:11:28.880I think that one of the things that, that I always get tripped up on here is when, when people start conversations about, you know, well, if you, if you have a pattern of voting for a particular candidate, doesn't that mean that you support in general that party?
00:11:44.900Because you favor their policies and you tend to like their politicians.
00:11:48.900And whenever I hear that, I think, well, not necessarily.
00:11:54.480I actually start by asking, is this leader competent and does this leader meet my standard of character?
00:12:00.520And then, you know, there are deal breakers in both of those boxes.
00:12:03.460And if either, you know, if, if, if I have serious questions about their capability to lead, which to me means making thoughtful decisions that are based on the best evidence and information available, which means trying to resolve conflicts instead of starting them, which means, you know, surrounding yourself with, with people who actually help you see your blind spots, as opposed to sort of getting yourself trapped in a room of yes, men and yes, women.
00:12:29.780You know, you know, if I have questions about character, especially from the standpoint of integrity or generosity or humility, I don't care what your policy positions are.
00:12:56.740And, um, I know you have a, you have a bit on narcissism in your book and there's no question.
00:13:03.040I think in my mind, Trump's a narcissist and I just, I've never tried to defend him on character.
00:13:07.940I just don't think that's a place I want to go or could have a successful conversation for me.
00:13:13.780Um, but, but if I look at how, what he did on paper in his four years as president, I will say I prefer most of what he did on paper to what I'm already seeing in the Biden years.
00:13:28.640And I am somebody who's voted for many Democrats in the past.
00:14:43.540So I never know what to do with that, right?
00:14:45.660So I think that what really frustrates me as a social scientist watching people defend whoever their preferred candidate is and attack the enemy candidate, so to speak, is the standard shift.
00:15:00.180And I think one thing that would be helpful in our country is to identify the list in advance of the qualities we want in a leader and the qualities that are deal breakers that we would reject.
00:15:13.900The same way you probably had that list when you were dating, right?
00:15:19.900And I think if we set those standards up up front, we'd still have lots of people twisting the facts and favoring, you know, getting trapped in confirmation bias and seeing reasons why their candidate is good and the other one is bad.
00:15:33.060But at least we could find some common ground about things that are completely unacceptable.
00:15:39.380And I think it would be helpful as a conversation to have to say, look, we don't ever select leaders in any other realm of life where we don't do that.
00:15:49.140But I cannot imagine, of all the companies that I've advised and studied, I cannot imagine any of them choosing a CEO by the vote of their employees, first of all, right?
00:15:59.320But that aside, we do live in a democracy, last time I checked.
00:16:05.020But I can't imagine not having a model of what a good leader looks like before we make those decisions, regardless of, you know, what's the vision the leader has for the company and what the strategy is that they're going to pursue.
00:16:20.500I do know that most of the people that you hold up as heroes are more flawed than you'd like to admit.
00:16:27.520And most of the people you see as villains are a little bit less bad than you'd like to admit.
00:16:32.840And I think if we were all more aware of those nuances, that complexity, those shades of gray, we might have a chance at at least agreeing on some of the problems, if not the solutions.
00:16:44.040Right. Well, and it's like and my feeling having, you know, been in media for as long as I have now is don't hold up any politician as a hero.
00:16:52.800There's very few people to hold up as a hero in modern day politics, just given the nature of the game right now.
00:16:59.960And back to my point of do better America, there's a reason you get you get candidates who are as flawed as the ones we get now are.
00:17:06.860It's like the system set up to to invite people who are a little off and to discourage people who are amazing and whole and well.
00:17:17.660Well, the well ones tend to take a look at that industry and say, hell no.
00:17:54.360You know, it reminds me of an observation that that Plato made that the people who are most reluctant to govern were generally the best candidates for the job because they weren't in it for the power.
00:18:08.380And if you didn't have a little bit of hesitation about the responsibility, you might not be the right person to entrust with a role that involves a lot of authority and influence.
00:18:19.920And then Douglas Adams actually made the same point.
00:18:22.200And I think any time that one of the great British sci-fi writers agrees with one of the great ancient Greek philosophers, we're probably on to something.
00:18:29.920And I ended up having a former student, Danielle Tussing, who's now a SUNY Buffalo professor, who studied this idea that reluctance to lead could actually be associated with more effective leadership.
00:18:42.340And she found in a couple of studies that people who had no qualms were less effective, in part because they were overconfident.
00:18:50.560They tended to basically do things the way that they thought was right, as opposed to consulting with others and occasionally empowering others and admitting they were wrong.
00:19:00.500And I cannot imagine the right mechanism for ever getting somebody who's a little bit reluctant to lead to, you know, to even put their hat in the ring.
00:19:10.300But there is an interesting example from ancient Athens.
00:19:14.100They picked, in some cases, they picked leaders the same way that we select jurors.
00:19:18.240Just pick a random person from the population and let them lead.
00:19:22.460And I don't know that that would be worse than a number of the outcomes in recent history.
00:19:27.340Coming up next, we're going to talk about imposter syndrome.
00:19:31.420And is it holding you back or advancing your career?
00:19:34.960And we're going to talk about EQ and IQ and how the hell you know when you are actually good at something or whether you're deluding yourself.
00:19:55.100This brings me back to my friend Janice Dean.
00:19:57.520She's a meteorologist at Fox, and she's been very critical of Governor Cuomo because her both of her in-laws died in New York City nursing homes after his order that COVID positive patients be they had.
00:20:09.400They had to take them into the nursing homes.
00:20:12.260And, you know, she's she's not an activist.
00:20:17.620I don't even know if she's a Democrat or a Republican.
00:20:19.660We don't talk about that stuff when we're together.
00:20:21.180But she's been she's gotten politically active on this one issue.
00:20:24.880And now most people know about this issue because she's been jumping up and down and, you know, letting her hair on fire, trying to talk about this with people and has drawn attention to it.
00:20:33.920And now we've had a whole attorney general investigation that has found Janice was right.
00:28:29.260I'm one of the people who actually is a genius.
00:28:33.120And so that's the first thing is I think we should all occasionally question ourselves.
00:28:37.720I think the second thing is it really depends on whether the knowledge or skill that you're talking about is objective or subjective, right?
00:28:47.120The good news about traditional intelligence is you can take a test, right?
00:28:51.540They're not perfect, but we can do a decent job gauging somebody's, you know, logical reasoning skills, their verbal abilities, their, you know, their math prowess.
00:29:18.900And, you know, of course, some people process information faster than others, but it turns out that's one of the building blocks of intelligence is mitochondrial functioning.
00:29:29.900There's a whole science on this that says essentially one of the signals of being a smart person is you process information faster.
00:29:36.840There's a reason that, you know, that Jeopardy has people press the button most quickly, right?
00:29:42.380The test is like, oh, can I be the first one to know the answer, not just the one who knows the answer?
00:29:46.940Because that actually captures their intelligence, their processing speed, not just, you know, how much information they can hold in their head.
00:29:54.880And so you could do that with objective qualities, right?
00:29:58.300I think the problem is that a lot of what we're trying to judge ourselves on has a lot of subjectivity in it.
00:30:05.080So, you know, am I a good writer is something that I wondered for a long time.
00:30:10.920At some point, I realized that that was a silly question, and I should just ask, how do I become a better writer?
00:30:16.180But if you want to find out if you're a good writer, it's not that hard, right?
00:30:20.560Go and send your work to your most thoughtful critics and have them tear it apart and see what they challenge.
00:30:26.340And it's easy to dismiss one person's criticism.
00:30:29.120If you have a bunch of independent critics who all point out the same flaws, you've now learned something about a systematic distortion in your writing ability, and then you can try to correct it.
00:30:37.840Hmm. It's so much harder to do in my line of work because your line of work is not totally polarized.
00:30:50.240I just feel like everything in politics, you know, and I'm not in politics, but I cover political news.
00:30:55.620I cover news, which tends to be dominated by politics, is colored, right, by what team jersey people think you have on or just what you get associated with.
00:31:05.980And that used to be the case only for those of us at Fox.
00:31:08.760I mean, I lived this personally, but now we've gotten to the place where every journalist is tarred with a certain ideological, assumed ideological bias based on where they work.
00:31:17.940And so it's almost like a lot of us have gotten a place of like, do not listen to your critics.
00:31:23.040Do not, you know, because they're not honest brokers.
00:31:26.700Yeah, I think that's a real challenge in your world, and it's one of the many reasons I'm not in your world.
00:31:31.820I always wanted the standards to be clear, right?
00:31:36.800So in, you know, in any, well, let me back up and say the ideals of science involve people agreeing on the standards of proof and then doing, you know, independent blind review.
00:31:50.220And then when they're wrong, admitting it and correcting it.
00:31:54.640And I don't think it's an efficient market, but it is, I think, the most, it's the most effective self-correcting institution that I've ever seen.
00:32:03.080Like in general, scientific knowledge has increased in accuracy over time.
00:32:07.280The life expectancy has doubled in the past century because we have scientists doing evidence-based medicine.
00:32:13.260And I wish that other worlds adopted some of those standards.
00:32:18.180I think one of the best examples that I've seen is in the UK.
00:32:22.000Megan, one of my favorite moments of, at least in recent memory, was when Ben Shapiro was debating Andrew Neal.
00:33:05.220Number one, that Andrew Neal self-identifies as a conservative and said, my job is to challenge arguments regardless of the positions that I hold.
00:33:15.820And made a very, I thought, reasonable critique from an imagined liberal perspective of some of Ben's arguments.
00:33:24.120And I wasn't coming in expecting to evaluate the substance of either of their points.
00:33:30.700And I thought, wow, if we had a culture, if we had more journalists in the U.S. who operated like Andrew Neal does, we would have a lot more intellectual integrity in our conversations.
00:33:40.960And then the second thing I loved about that was Ben saying, I lost.
00:34:49.520And she said, I want to apologize to you.
00:34:52.720She said, I assumed that somebody in a role like yours at Fox News would never ask a question like that, would never, you know, sort of come at him from an unexpected side that, you know, my side of the aisle, she's a progressive, would like, would cheer for.
00:35:14.440And I'm like, oh, thanks, you know, fine.
00:35:16.820Anyway, we had a very short lived friendship.
00:35:18.720It didn't it's not because anybody broke up with anybody, just didn't really go anywhere.
00:35:21.420And then, you know, like when I sort of continued on with views that were more center right, right, like I'll hit anybody, I'll hit a Republican, I'll hit a liberal, really don't care.
00:35:34.960I'm there in service of the audience and the truth.
00:35:36.520But I went I moved to NBC and I said things like what they're doing to Brett Kavanaugh is not fact based.
00:35:42.980And let's actually walk through what the accusations are and so on.
00:35:45.420And people like Sarah Jessica totally abandoned me.
00:35:50.520So she loved me when she thought like, oh, she's secretly on my side or like she'll be fair to my side.
00:35:58.440But when you're not like really on their side and they see that over time, it's, you know, given the way we are right now, it is tribal and it's abandonment.
00:36:07.920And, you know, we've seen that with some of the Trump people, too.
00:36:09.840Some of the Trump people who thought like I was 100 percent Republican abandoned me for the opposite reasons.
00:36:30.840I mean, that's that that's a symptom to me of I'm sorry you've had to go through that, first of all.
00:36:37.400Secondly, it's it's a symptom to me that there I mean, there's something very wrong with the way that people evaluate our journalists.
00:36:47.260I think a journalist's job is to surface the truth.
00:36:50.280And in that way, journalists and scientists are supposed to have a lot in common.
00:36:53.880And the difference is nobody rejects a scientist, except now in our political, our politicized world of of scientists trying to communicate the best data to the public.
00:37:05.880But in general, right, in the scientific community, people don't accuse scientists of of, you know, failing to live up to their allegiances.
00:37:15.280Like loyalty is to their principles, not to their party.
00:37:18.040Uh, it's to the pursuit of truth, not to have the ideas they've been defending in the past.
00:37:24.160And I don't I don't know how to close the gap between there and here, but it sure seems like a gap worth closing.
00:37:36.020We read the comments to our show all the time on Apple and they're they're always so thoughtful.
00:37:41.220And that is one of the number one things I hear.
00:37:43.120I mean, one of the top things I hear, which is thank you so much for being just a voice of reason and for challenging both sides and for not being afraid to go to the dicey things that we're no longer allowed to talk about.
00:37:54.020And that is one of the things I appreciate about your approach to life, which is let's talk, let's debate, let's challenge each other respectfully.
00:38:11.380And, you know, you talk about everything from the Wright brothers and how they used to argue all the time about ideas nonstop and would be disappointed when somebody wouldn't argue with them because they learned.
00:38:18.940And to, I don't know, more modern examples where where people fight it out at Pixar over whether the Incredibles can be made and or whether that's an impossible task.
00:38:29.240And I think we've we're losing that right now.
00:38:32.380Certain subjects are off limits and too offensive.
00:38:36.300And people are told it's unsafe or it's too uncomfortable.
00:38:41.260Or if you don't have the quote, the right viewpoints, you should be silenced because words can be violence.
00:38:46.200It's just, you know, we're going a very different way, Adam.
00:39:03.920And then we're we're taught growing up that, you know, we it's it's it's it's not civil to argue about or even discuss politics at the dinner table.
00:39:14.180How in the world then are we supposed to do it with faceless people on social media when we can't even have a thoughtful disagreement with someone we love in our own family?
00:39:22.620I think I think I think that's a massive problem.
00:39:25.480I think the the first thing that that I've been trying to do to change that in my own life is there's always a point when I'm disagreeing with someone where they will say before I ever think to.
00:39:37.220So, well, let's just agree to disagree.
00:39:42.960I think it disrespects our ability to have a thoughtful discussion and respect each other's right to hold different views.
00:39:48.680It also prevents us from from figuring out what went wrong and trying to fix it next time.
00:39:54.540So whenever somebody says let's agree to disagree, I treat that as a signal that it's time for me to stop arguing to win and start asking questions to learn.
00:40:03.220I just said this with the other the other day with a friend who's very strongly opposed to vaccines of all kinds in most situations.
00:40:09.880And I said he said, we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
00:40:13.400And I said, actually, no, tell me tell me where this conversation went off the rails for you.
00:40:19.020And I want to understand how I can be more persuasive next time.
00:40:23.960Also, how I can be less stubborn next time.
00:40:26.620And not just with you, but with other people that I might disagree with, too.
00:40:30.320And I think that that's it's a small example, but it's the kind of skill that we ought to be teaching.
00:40:36.480Coming up after this break, we're going to talk about conservative students at Wharton and what it is like for them.
00:42:16.900In any event, that's what Biden's doing.
00:42:19.440That's my long-winded explanation of Biden.
00:42:21.720He's a little candy man with his little lollipops dangling them in front of disaffected Democrats who are pissed off about the Trump years and they don't think he's been, you know, hard left enough.
00:42:34.080I don't know who they are because even AOC is praising how left he's been.
00:42:38.040But I guess he just thinks this is a way of ginning up support on the Dems side.
00:42:42.020Maybe, hopefully, he's going to drop some moderation bomb at some point and he's going to use this chip in the bank.