Pushkin. Hi everyone, Malcolm here. The countdown is on on June twenty fourth. We'll be back with Season six, the most banana season of Revisionist history ever. I finally get out of the house. I've got Phoenix, New Orleans, and I go metaphorically to the Magic Kingdom on a mission of mischief. Season six is so fantastic. I don't want to give too much away. Just hang tight, It'll be here soon. It's been an especially busy time for me working on season six and promoting our new book, The Bomber Mafia. One of the events on my book tour was a conversation on Clubhouse with my good friend Adam Grant. He's an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School the University of Pennsylvania, and he hosts the podcasts Taken for Granted from the Ted Audio Collective. We've actually both had new books out this spring. Adams is called Think Again, which I really loved. It seems he and I are always crossing paths on the book to our circuit, and we always challenge each other and we always have fun. I wanted to play you some snippets of our recent conversations Forgive Me by the way for stating the obvious. But books make great Father's Day gifts. Why not make it both? Get the Bombermafia audiobook from Bombermafia dot com and then think again from wherever you get your books, and I'll see you very soon for season six of Revisionist History. Okay, here's our clubhouse discussion about the Bomber Mafia thrilla to welcome Malcolm Gladwell back to clubhouse. Malcolm glad you're here. Yes, thank you. I was gonna say not a week passes when I am not engaged in some kind of public conversation with you. Be careful what you wish for. Yes, I wanted to kick off by just asking you to tell us a little bit about the Bomber Mafia. I think it's anybody who's listened to Revisionist History the last couple of seasons knows how obsessed you are with it. But for those who are not initiated, give us the teaser. Bomber Mafia is the story of a group of pilots in southern Alabama in the nineteen thirties who believed that they had and could reinvent warfare. That they could through the use of technology, particularly the bomber and means of dropping bombs with accuracy. They could render every other part of the military obsolete, and they could turn wars from something that where hundreds of thousands of civilians died as a matter of course, to a kind of clean and surgical exercise. And they took that dream with them into the Second World War and tried to make it real. And it's the story of It's a story of that attempt. What happens when a group of people with an idea, fired by morality and technology meet the real world. This is a very different kind of book than you've written before. First and foremost because the cover is not white, which threw me, but also also because it's a history book, and because despite you're going back in history decades and decades, it's also more personal, I think than anything you've ever written. And I'd love for you to share with us a little bit about the seeds that were planted in your own life that got you curious about this topic. Well, my my my father, who was English, grew up in Kent in which is the which was called bomb Alley because the German bombers on their way to bomb London during the blitz would pass over my father's little town in Kent, and he, as a child, would be instructed by my grandmother to sleep under his bed, which was the only plausible defense against a bomb dropping on her house, and he would He had all these stories like a bomb once landed in her backyard and luckily didn't explode. He was once out picking strawberries with my grandmother and German planes passed over head, and my grandmother hid my father and my uncle under newspapers for reasons that no one really knows. She thought maybe she hid them from the pilots they wouldn't bomb them. But it was like a He would tell these stories and to me, at you know, the age of five or six, these stories were unbelievably exciting. You know, I was I was in We were in rural southwestern Canada, maybe the most boring part of the western world, and my dad was telling me nothing happened. I mean, it's a great good thing. And my father was telling me these stories about you know, like bombs dropping in his backyard when he was my age, and I you know, I think that probably instilled in me a kind of romantic love of this era. It shows and I know that you're a huge fan of spy novels and you've read all the fiction you can find about war. I think you've done something more impressive than writing a page turner of fiction in this book, which is you have brought these real life characters and their stories to life in a way that feels like I'm reading a thriller. I could not put it down. I've read now the print version and listen to the audio version, and I'm still hooked. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you got into the minds of these people that you've not been able to meet, well you write it is a departure for me. So I've never done a book which is so much of a kind of first of all, a single narrative. Usually I hop around, you know, I tell all kinds of different stories. But I also have never written a book which was so singularly focused on two characters. This book is the story of the conflict between two kind of legendary World War Two Air Force generals, Curtis LeMay and Heywood Hansel, and I really do you know, they're incredibly vivid characters, and we because we started this project as an audio project. I was always thinking of this verse as an audio book, and the reason for that was that we have so much incredible archival tape of these generals from the Second World Board. There's at Maxwell Air Force based in Alabama, there's a room full of tape of interviews with virtually every major figure in the Air force in that in that period. And once you know you can hear them, you I think you have a lot more confidence that you can bring them to life. And you know, like particularly Lemayh, who is this kind of unbelievable, cold blooded, you know, bulldog of a man. When you hear his voice, you feel like you you know who he is because he has this kind of guttural grunt. And that just gave me confidence that I could they would be more than two dimensional characters on the page if I could, If I could, you know, use do a kind of enhanced audio book that would bring them to life. Well it shows and I thought one of the other interesting features of the book was the way that you almost tantalize us with these questions of morality. Early on. You ask us to consider what would I have done and which side would I have been on? And I want to hear your answer to this, because you avoided it the whole book. But first, can you just walk us through the central moral dilemma of the bomber Mafia. Yeah, the bomber Mafia. One of the reasons I was so attracted to this story is that they are they are obsessive, and they are they're technological obsessives. They're they're a very familiar figure for us now there are. They're young men who are in the grip of a kind of passion that has been fired by a technological innovation. They would not be out of place in Silicon Valley today. They would, in fact, you know, be utterly They're utterly familiar in one sense, but in another sense, they're not because they're they have a moral vision. The reason they are so passionate about what bombing can do and how bombing can transform war is that they are desperate to avoid the carnage of the First World War, and that part of them I love. I love that they considered the the moral implications of their dream were as important to them as the kind of technological implications, and that's not something I see today. And so that I thought that they were this extraordinary role model for how you can bring together moral desires with technological obsession. But it doesn't work right. You know, the story of this book is the story of the failure of this dream, and so you you know you, I don't know if it is possible. I do not you. You're quite right. This book does not give you an easy answer to which side should we beyond? Because there is no easy answer. All I can say is I like the I like the fact that they tried to bring a moral vision to to their way of fighting wars. And I'm sad that they failed. But that's as far as it goes. I don't know. I didn't want to. I'm kind of I'm kind of overbooks that give you a new little conclusion. I find that condescending almost. I respect that. I also think, Malcolm Gladwell, that you are letting these people of the hook awfully easily to say that, Yeah, of course, they come in with a moral vision. They have a sense of almost ideological superiority, that they are going to fix all the problems with war while still fighting a war and essentially torturing countless people. And okay, you know what, good that they had a sense of morality even though they did so much harm. Really, are you okay with that? Well? I don't know how much choice you have once you are committed to a conflict. I mean, part of the reason the story I think is so compelling is that the deep way you get into the story the book, the more you're aware of how constrained the choices available to the characters are. You know, you think about the kind of second half of the book is all about what happens when my two protagonists Curtis Lemann Hey would Hansel come into conflict in in January of nineteen forty five, when the focus of the war has turned from Europe to the war against Japan to the Pacific theater. And there they are. They are given the task by the Allied leadership of bringing Japan to its knees and they get to choose how they how they how they will do that, and neither of the options available to them are any good. And I don't know, I really don't know whether you can It's not their fault. The options are no good, right, war is there's no kind of easy moral solution in these situations. It's like you're supposed you have to win a war and if you don't win the war, many many, many, many, many, hundreds of thousands of people will die, right, There's just no doubt about that. When wars drag on, they exact an enormous human toll. So everybody's agreed we need to get this war over with. But there's basically actually there's three options. And you know, Hayward Hansel has one option. He wants to use bombs as sparingly as possible. It is a complete and utter failure for reasons outside of his control. Curtis LeMay has another option. He wants to napalm every city in Japan, which is brutal and unbelievably horrifying. But he would say, well, I don't have any other options now. The third option, of course, is the option taken by in August of nineteen forty five when we dropped to atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Again, another thing, another option that leaves us sort of leaves all kinds of moral questions dangling. I just you know, I have difficulty from my comfortable perch in twenty twenty one passing judgment on people who didn't have any good options available to them. Now I understand I was trying to figure out as I listened, as I read, why you were so reluctant to take a moral stance here, because you are not shy about moral stances, And I thought, this is this is not at all Gladwellian. You normally have a strong view about what's right and wrong. And as I listened to you, now it clicked that they were stuck choosing between wrong and wrong, and you appreciate and admire the fact that they at least tried to do what was right. Yeah, you know, it's this is a side thing, But this is an idea that I've become kind of obsessed with recently. I've been doing a two episodes of my podcast this season, Revision's History, on the dilemma of a little small HBCU in New Orleans and the problem of if you choose to educate lower income students, and if you choose to serve them by keeping your tuition low, you create all kinds of problems. Right, can't pay for anything. Your school is not considered to be prestigious. You, I mean, you can go on and on and on and on and on. And the president of the school told me, he's like, you know, the problem with the way we think about higher education is that we we don't consider the degree of difficulty. Now, Adam, you know I'm raising this with you because you are a former diver and the great, the great contribution of diving to the world. And I'm not I'm not being flipp here. Honestly, the great one of the great contributions of your sport to the world is that it introduced that phrase and that concept degree of difficulty into common parliance. And it's a crucial idea. It says that you cannot simply judge an outcome all by itself. You have to judge the obstacles that were that the person pursuing that goal had to go through. Right, was faced with and this guy in New Orleans, he was like, the problem with HBCUs is that no one gives us credit for the degree of difficulty involved in what we do. Right. I just thought that was absolutely true, and you can't go through all manner of things in society. The one thing that was absent from the debate this past summer about police and by the way, a debate that I was that I have been writing about and arguing for police reform for twenty five years at this point. But the one thing that was absent from this summer was a sense of the degree of difficulty involved in police work. It's really hard, right, really really hard, and I wish that had been a part of it, and it wasn't there to the same extent. And that's also what I feel about these characters back in the Second World War is a degree of difficulty was through the roof, and you just have to build that into your consideration of their actions. I love that lens in part because one of my biggest frustrations with diving is that the formula for degree of difficulty is almost completely bogus. How did you decide that when somebody does a front four and a half that's a three point eight degree of difficulty on a three meter, but when they do an inward three and a half, it's only a three point four. You could you could change that scale dramatically and we would have different Olympic gold medalists, we would have actually completely different dives done, and we could have a whole rabbit hole about this, which I'm very tempted to do, but I think it hold on, hold on, hold on, Adam. This is like fantastic. Are you saying that there is an underappreciated degree of difficulty? With a concept of degree of difficulty, there a minimum, there's an underappreciated degree of difficulty in asking people who judge a sport to come up with a meaningful quantitative metric for scoring the sport, Adam, adam, you know more about diving than ninety nine point nine nine percent of humanity. You are a You are a prominent psychologist who writes in a matter of things, and you've never written about this. Do I have to take this idea from you? Can I interview about about this? I will give it to you. It's yours right now. This is just the most interesting thing that I'm sorry, this is like fantastic, This is just amazing, the even diving god degree of difficulty wrong? Well, but isn't that isn't that part of the point that Well, I mean, first of all, inventing something almost almost always means you get it wrong, because the hard work of creating it usually blinds you to the different hard work of optimizing it. But also that the concept of degree of difficulty is so much more complicated everywhere else, and the fact that we couldn't get it right in diving, It's like all you have to do is, you know, measure how high people jump, how fast that they can spin, and you know how much control you have. Actually, there's a there's a whole metric of jobs for degree of difficulty, right, we can we can measure job complexity and know that when a job has higher degree of difficulty, intelligence seems to become more important. Um and oh, there's there's so much we can talk about here, but I want to I want to get back to the one of the central questions that apply degree of difficulty to moral dilemmas raises, which is, once you recognize you're in a situation with high degree of difficulty, what do you do? What are your what are your takeaways from from studying these bombers? The great mistake the bomber mafia makes is they is they like many technological innovators, by the way, is they they they do not have the imagination And it's not a fault, but no one would to come up with all of the possible comp locations of their dream. And you know this is the this is the time honored problem of the innovator, Right that the thing that makes them good at innovating in their specific rate region is the narrowness and and intensity of their focus. They don't they're not distracted. They're like I on the prize, right. But the problem is that when they take that idea in the real world, that becomes a liability all of a sudden. You've got to think about fifty things that never occurred to you tomorrow. So the skills that get you to the real world are the skills that also impede you once you reach the real world. Well, okay, so you you have a parallel here which I didn't see until just now between the Bomber's dilemma and how we think about degree difficulty in diving, which is I think the central tension in diving and degree difficulty is do you base it on how hard it is to do at all or how it is to do well? There there are some dives that only a few people in the world can even make, and those some people would argue those should have the highest degree difficulty, and others would say, no, you take the hard dive that everybody does but everybody misses, and that's the dive that gets the highest degree difficulty. Your version of this, I think is is precision bombing, which is you say, okay, how you know how many bombs can you drop? Or you know how much? How much can you terrify or demoralize a city with your bombs? Versus can you hit your target perfectly? What? What does that teach us about what's really difficult? Is it the execution or is it the ability to to show up in the first place? Oh wow, that's a really good question. Um. I mean, I'm gonna cop out and say bows or it depends. Um. Point. I can tell you what interests me more, which is I'm more interested particularly this is a weird thing to say, particularly as I get older in the execution, because more and more I find myself I am interested and fascinated and amused by people's obsessive dreams. But what impresses me is execution. That you can just do it in a way that so everyone starts tries to do the same thing, there are three people who pull it off. Those are the three that if that's that's what impresses me is like you know, it's like, you know, any of us can make an attempt at Mount Everest or run a marathon, but a handful of people get to the top or break, you know, two hours and dirty minutes. Those are the people I take my hat off to. Okay, that speaks to something you've alluded to a couple of times, and something you made me rethink in this book, which is the idea of obsession. I have always thought of obsession as something bad. I think of people with OCD, I think of an obsessive stalker. And you you have a very different take on obsession. I think you even see it as a beautiful thing. And I want to hear more. I do I, and I wonder why I do. I don't know if I had a good answer to that him. I don't. It's not as if the easy thing would be to say that I you know, I grew up with an example of obsessiveness. Actually I didn't. Neither of my parents could even plausibly did be described as even coming close to that standard. My brother is the least obsessive. Hello, I mean he sort of, he's not. Obsessives were dabblers my whole but Dad's whole thing was he loved doing lots of things, even if he did them badly. That was his favorite thing. He both built greenhouse in her backyard, and he was so proud of how inex or inexpertly he built it. He would show off all of the crazy angles and the gaps. Then he thought that was hilarious. Okay, I have a few things that I'm curious about then. The first one is you called yourself a dabbler, and yet you're also an elite runner. I think you once beat the Canadian record holder if I remember correctly. Isn't running the most obsessive sport ever? I mean you literally just do the same thing over and over, step, step, the opposite, the opposite. So how many when you were diving as a kid, how many hours would you spend in the pool a day? I mean, actually in the pool, probably four seconds to dive from the time you left the house to the time you got home again, what are we talking about time devoted to the task? I'm three hours during the school year, probably eight or nine in the summer. Okay. In my entire time, as you know, I was a very good age class runner. In my entire time, as a very good age class runner, I never never spent more than an hour a day running never, and I never ran more than five days a week. And by the way, nor did anyone else I know. In fact, and if I had done that, I would have gotten I would have gotten hell from my coach. He would have said, you are destroying a Running is all about restraint, you know what. The the the little adage they repeat to you when you start out running is train, don't strain for tomorrow is another day. Running is the op It's the anti obsessives past time. It's all about restraint. It's all about never only when you race do you push yourself to the edge. At all of the times you hold yourself in check. Right the coach, I have a I'm intoining right now for this mile race I'm doing, and I have a disguise helping me coach and he looks at my my workouts online. You know what he tells me. He's like, yeah, you need to probably take a little more recovery on that, or you should take some more days off. He's making sure I'm not obsessive runners. You've totally misunderstand running. This is probably why you don't run. You don't get it. That might be true. You're bringing your crazy eight hour a day memories from childhood to bear on a completely different sport. I don't know you have bursts of obsession in running. I've heard about your stereo routines, for example. No, those are He's not. It's an obsession. That was. That's I used to get together with three very good friends of mine and we would do a workout on the stairs in Fork Green Park in Brooklyn. To say that was obsessive is nuts. It was totally fun. We would like you have a long recovery because you jog down the stairs and you sprint up them. On the job down the stairs, you like gossip and catch up on stuff and chat, and then you just have a little zip up the stairs and it's like it's it's the furthest thing. You don't know what you're talking about. Meanwhile, you're executing these insanely complicated dives that if you if you're off by two inches, you lose. This is nothing, nothing in common with what but what I'm up to. Well, I have to tell you that one of your so called friends said that when he went with you for the first time, he wasn't sure if he was going to vomit or die. So not everyone's experienced mirrors yours, but every other occasion than he smoked me, so I didn't know what he's talking about anyway. The other the other thing I wanted to ask you about obsession is I think about this research by valorand on two kinds of passion. He calls them obsession, obsessive passion, and harmonious passion, and he says, obsession obsessive passion is basically it's it's extrinsically motivated. It's driven by guilt, by pressure, by this, you know, compulsiveness that really undermines people's ongoing interest and commitment. Whereas harmonious passion, instead of feeling like you constantly have to push yourself to do it, you're pulled in by the activity. You're interested, you're intrinsically motivated, you're curious, you're excited, and your energy is sustained by your enthusiasm. And I wonder if if that's part of what you're describing, or if you think there's actually still an upside to the obsessive part of passion. Well, it's funny that the word I was waiting for you to say in what you in that in that um little dichotomy you described was um pleasure. Um. So I grant. I suppose that there are there are different motivations initial motivations for certain kinds of of a obsessive pursuits. But to me, the real issue is not why you start, but where you end up and does the does the immersion bring you pleasure? And it always amazes me how how little that word is used in particularly in connection with people's work. I always ask people, well, do you find your work fun? To be in? The simply the most important question, And I'm not interested in some people. We have all kinds of reasons why we work. Some people work because they have a family to support. Some people will work because they would be bored otherwise, I go on, some people work because their parents, would you know, disdain them if they didn't. Whatever, The question is, once you're at work and immersed in it, are you enjoying yourself? And you know, when I think about the people I like working with, they're all people I don't. I like working with people who do a good job, Sure everyone does, but I really like working with people who are enjoying themselves. That's really what what compels me, and I think of for some people who root to enjoyment is obsession, right, It's like that's you get singular in your pursuit because it just brings you joy. I don't understand why those words are so rarely used in this context. So, like to go back to the bottom Offia for a moment. They're in the middle of Alabama in the nineteen thirties. You could look at them objectively and you could say these losers off in the middle of nowhere, pursuing an idea that will never go anywhere. Or you could say these are a group of people who have successfully found a place where they can find joy in their passion and work, and that makes them winners. No one else is having joy in the army in nineteen thirty five. Wow. So when you talk about obsession, then you're talking about a single minded focus to pursue mastery in a way that brings joy. Yeah, But the social aspect it's really crucial here. Um. It's funny because you know, the this book, The Bara Mafia is the really the first book that I've ever done where from the from the very beginning of this book, it was a team effort. It literally I know, I'm my name is on the cover, but that's a misnomer. There's six people, seven people at Pushkin who played as large or in some of these is large a role than me and put it in this together. I've never done that before, ever, not, I can't even. I was not the guy in college who you know, had a team of people and we were no, no, no no, no. I never did a team. I was never on a basketball team. Never did any team sports, never teams. Not in my I did not. I didn't even. I wasn't the kid who went home from school and did homework with his dad. Never happened. Right, this is not doing stuff with other people is not something I have ever done. And I did it with this book. And you know what, this is most fun book I've ever done. Never had so much fun writing a book. It's like fantastic, right, It's that and why because everyone else was as into this idea as I was, right and pursuing different parts of it. And that's so like I, you know, I here, I am writing about a group of people who find joy in each other's obsession. And I am with a group of people finding joy with each other's obsession. It's like it's lovely at my you know, at my advanced age. I'm much older than you, Adam, I get to say things like that. At my advanced age, I discovered this fantastic thing called, you know, strength in numbers, the joy of shared obsession. Yes, I love that. That was Grant and Gladwell Clubhouse Part one. After the break, we meet again to discuss Adam's book, Think Again. Adam, can you give this? Can you give us an overview of Think Again? The core idea build on some brilliant work that my colleague Phil tet Luck did, and the premise is that we spend a lot of our life with these mindsets of occupations that we never have worked in. We find ourselves thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians more often than we would want to admit. When I'm in preacher mode, I'm trying to proselytize. When I'm a prosecutor, I'm trying to win a case and prove you wrong. When I'm a politician, I have a constituent, I'm trying to get their approval, so I'm doing all this campaigning and lobbying. My big worry with preaching and prosecuting is that people are not willing to think again because I'm right, you're wrong, You're the one who needs to change. I'm good when people are in politician mode, they look a little bit more flexible. But all they're doing is they're flip flopping what they say in order to communicate what they think their audience wants to hear. And so if it looks like they're rethinking, they're doing it at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, or they're just towing the party line and appealing to their tribe without actually changing their internal beliefs. My hope is that people will think a little bit more like scientists and say, you know what, I don't have to believe everything I think. I don't have to internalize every emotion I feel. When I start to form an opinion that's just a hypothesis. Let me go out in the world, run some experiments, observe, talk to people, and test the hypothesis. And I should be then surrounding myself with people who don't just agree with my conclusions, but actually challenge my thought process. And the goal of all that is to try to break us free of overconfidence cycles where we take pride in our knowledge, we have too much conviction that leads us to confirmation bias, and then we become a little bit arrogant. What I want to do is activate rethinking cycles where we have a humility to know what we don't know, We doubt some of our convictions. That makes us curious to go and discover new things, and that reinforces this mindset of being a lifelong learner, saying, wow, I just learned something. There's so much more to learn. Um, well, you have written another wonderful book, and I find it. Actually, there's so many fascinating things. My only critique of this I have a critique of this book. By the way, I hope you have more than one. I have several, but my my large one, which is a is it's four books. I'm reading this book. It's like, why you I You're like jumping ahead of the next idea and I'm not done with the one you're on. I either you either. You have to you have to, like you know, slow down and write and chop your ideas into pieces and devote. Oh, you have to write longer books. You can't do you can't keep doing this and like raise anyway, that's a it's a very mild. It's a it's a it's flattery designed is disguised as criticism, but I wanted to start. I kept thinking when I was reading this book, how does this fit in with Adam's previous books? And I'm wondering, do we have a kind of emerging Adam Grant philosophy of life? Can you talk about how does this one fit with your previous books? I think this it's an interesting question, and I will accept your backhanded compliment any day. Thank you for the enthusiasm and also the criticism, which I look forward to more of. I guess this book is sort of a meta book in that in each of the books I've written before, what I've tried to do is I've tried to get people to rethink something that I think that they've gotten wrong, or maybe an assumption that's been incomplete. The I mean, but do you What I want is whether you think there is a kind of Adam Grant ideology that's emerging from writing all Are you getting a kind of sense of well, wait a minute, here is how I see the world, and if you read all my books you'll get this Grantian vision. Yes, although it would be a little ironic to commit to an ideology, because then I'm not staying open to rethinking my opinions and beliefs. Am I. No, No, you could have a component. You could have an ideologies, which is that you revisit your ideology. That's fine. No, I think I think there is a there's an overarching thread that runs through all my work which I didn't see until I'd written a couple of books. The threat is that the very things that you think are critical for success in life, I can actually be attained through building character. And I think that my work has has looked at different kinds of character strengths and said, you don't have to choose between your goals and those virtues, whether it's generosity or now it's you know, it's humility. And so I guess what I'm looking for at large is a way to align character with with achievement. How's that? Yeah? No, that that actually that fits with That's what I've always sort of sensed in Well, why didn't you just tell me that a few years ago? Because then I would have understood who I was and what I was trying to achieve. No. No, but I'm curious me because I'm always very attracted to U two religious themes in things to sort of ary, particularly if they're kind of slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some there was some kind of moral case being made in your books that maybe you weren't making explicitly, but that there was something about reading a books that felt very comfortable to someone who was used to thinking about the world in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things. Like if I was thinking if I had a Bible study of evangelicals and I said, this week, we're not reading it's a New Testament. We're going to read the works of Adam Grant. I think actually people with that kind of world would be very at home with the arguments that you're making. That's interesting. I love it when when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I think where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around you know, okay, a lot for me at least a lot of the principles and recommendations that come out of religious traditions or missing the nuance about how do you actually do this in life? Right? So, yeah, of course you want to be a generous person, but how do you give to others in a way that prevents you or protects you from burning out or just getting burned by the most selfish takers around. Yes, I want to be humble, but I don't want to become meek or lack confidence. And so I think, I guess what I want to do In a lot of my work is trying to use evidence to pick up where where these these higher principles leave off and ask, Okay, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing you know, our ambitions? Yeah, yeah, I was struck by because I am, as you know, a BlackBerry fanatic user, not fatally struggle words. It's from they make it in my hometown. I have a you know, it came out of my dad's university. And you have a little thing where you talk about Mike Lazaridis who ran rim BlackBerry for many years, and he made this error and they went from fifty percent market share to whatever it was, five percent in five years because they failed to understand the smartphone revolution, the typing on a keyboard as opposed typing on a screens, et cetera, et cetera. He was not willing to revisit his assumptions about what a smartphone could be. And I was thinking about that, and I was like but you know, when I go home sometimes to visit my mom, I sometimes see Mike Lazaritas, like buying books in the bookstore. He doesn't live that far from my mother. He's a very happy guy. He didn't have any regrets. I don't think he built this beautiful house, all these trees outside. You know what I think. I think he's like doing cool projects. He made himself, I don't know, billion dollars. Probably at the end of the day, you know, I suppose he could have his shareholders might be upset that he didn't rethink his assumptions. But it was very hard for me to think of Mike Lazaritas as being a loser. And also like, so what if he wrote it all the way down? Like he believed in a certain kind of ascetic functionality and a phone like I happen to believe that too. Mike chose me over the many millions who wanted a phone that did everything, Like, I don't know, is there any different with this solid trude. I was thinking this into context of I'm also a fan of a deeply committed Diard fan of the Buffalo Bills. If you know what an involve football, you know that that is just an invitation has been for thirty years, an invitation to masochism. Start starting with Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas four super Bowl zero wins. Exactly do I read you? Know? If I read your book one way, I would single Malcolm, you should just rethink your your football allegiances. They make no sense. Like you got it? This is working, this Buffalo saying there's a certain pleasure in me sticking with them through thin and thin um, But so like, do you see what I'm getting at? Like I do? Oh, there's there's so much to work with here. Okay, let me let me start by saying, I love that you are rethinking your claim that you've made to me several times in this friendship that you always for the favorite, because the Buffalo Bills are definitely not the favorite. Yes, that's true, So welcome to the underdogs. It's about time you came around. Thank you. Secondly, I'm BlackBerry. I still want the keyboard back. I hate typing on a screen. I will never be as fast as I was. I'm not worried about Mike Lazarides at all. What I'm worried about And Malcolm, where is your empathy? Where is your compassion for all the people who lost jobs because RIM went under. They didn't go under, I mean it basically did. How many people are working there now? Well no, well, actually this is a sidetrack. But years ago I wrote this piece about what happened when I think it was General Dynamics had a very large presence in Rochester and they shut down their factory and left. This is in the seventies, and everyone in Rochester said, oh my god, this is the end of Rochester. And then this researcher I forgot who it was, went back ten years later and said, what happened to all the people who got laid off from General Dynamics? And he said he pointed out that the resurgence in the tech industry in Rochester was a direct result of all the people who were freed from General Dynamics and went on to do cool things. The exact same thing happened in Waterloo, in my hometown. All the people who left for RIM are the foundation of this incredible tech resurgence in southern Ontario. So do you know, Mike just educated a bunch of people about how to be entrepreneurs and how to think about I think, and it's win win for Waterloo. Anyway, it's a side point. No, I think I think you're right. I think that's a great point. And I'm feeling the joy of being wrong right now because I think you can see the impact on the ecosystem if you know, if you go to Canada. I think there's a part of me though that I guess. I also I also feel bad for you and me because we want that keyboard, right. I would love it if there was an iPhone competitor that you know, that worked a little bit more like the BlackBerry did. And so I feel like we're missing out on, frankly, some possible technological advances that didn't occur because they know they stopped producing products. What this book is is a kind of rebuttal to don Quixote. Don Ka Hoode is everything that he stands for is something this book is refuting. Right that this book is saying, to persist in tilts and windmills, to persist in You know, the whole story of Don Hodi is Donka Hoode continues to wage these battles that cannot be won. He will not rethink anything. And you know that book suggests as a kind of nobility in that romantic attachment to a cause, even in the face of and you're saying, actually, no, Don Cohote is going to be much better off if he rethinks this position about being this shivalrous night and starts scientifically examining his options. Right, like this is this book is the anti It's the antique, don Quixote. I never thought of it that way, but I like it. I'm not saying you should always give up on your passions or let go of the causes that are important to you, right. I want people to stand by their principles, their core values. But I would be thrilled if more people were willing to say, look, I'm committed to a set of principles, but I'm willing to be flexible about the best plan to advance those principles. And I think that really requires us to think a little bit more like scientists and a little bit less like preachers or prosecutors or politicians who are convinced I'm right, you're wrong, and I'm only going to try to cater to my own tribe. That's all for now, dear listeners, Thanks for hearing us out. Thanks to Adam Grant and his team at TED for their help with this episode. My audiobook The Bomber Mafia is available at Bombermafia dot com and Adams Think Again is available wherever books are sold. Till we Meet in the Clubhouse Again, I'm Malcolm Gradwell.

Pushkin. Hi everyone, Malcolm here. The countdown is on on June twenty fourth. We'll be back with Season six, the most banana season of Revisionist history ever. I finally get out of the house. I've got Phoenix, New Orleans, and I go metaphorically to the Magic Kingdom on a mission of mischief. Season six is so fantastic. I don't want to give too much away. Just hang tight, It'll be here soon. It's been an especially busy time for me working on season six and promoting our new book, The Bomber Mafia. One of the events on my book tour was a conversation on Clubhouse with my good friend Adam Grant. He's an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School the University of Pennsylvania, and he hosts the podcasts Taken for Granted from the Ted Audio Collective. We've actually both had new books out this spring. Adams is called Think Again, which I really loved. It seems he and I are always crossing paths on the book to our circuit, and we always challenge each other and we always have fun. I wanted to play you some snippets of our recent conversations Forgive Me by the way for stating the obvious. But books make great Father's Day gifts. Why not make it both? Get the Bombermafia audiobook from Bombermafia dot com and then think again from wherever you get your books, and I'll see you very soon for season six of Revisionist History. Okay, here's our clubhouse discussion about the Bomber Mafia thrilla to welcome Malcolm Gladwell back to clubhouse. Malcolm glad you're here. Yes, thank you. I was gonna say not a week passes when I am not engaged in some kind of public conversation with you. Be careful what you wish for. Yes, I wanted to kick off by just asking you to tell us a little bit about the Bomber Mafia. I think it's anybody who's listened to Revisionist History the last couple of seasons knows how obsessed you are with it. But for those who are not initiated, give us the teaser. Bomber Mafia is the story of a group of pilots in southern Alabama in the nineteen thirties who believed that they had and could reinvent warfare. That they could through the use of technology, particularly the bomber and means of dropping bombs with accuracy. They could render every other part of the military obsolete, and they could turn wars from something that where hundreds of thousands of civilians died as a matter of course, to a kind of clean and surgical exercise. And they took that dream with them into the Second World War and tried to make it real. And it's the story of It's a story of that attempt. What happens when a group of people with an idea, fired by morality and technology meet the real world. This is a very different kind of book than you've written before. First and foremost because the cover is not white, which threw me, but also also because it's a history book, and because despite you're going back in history decades and decades, it's also more personal, I think than anything you've ever written. And I'd love for you to share with us a little bit about the seeds that were planted in your own life that got you curious about this topic. Well, my my my father, who was English, grew up in Kent in which is the which was called bomb Alley because the German bombers on their way to bomb London during the blitz would pass over my father's little town in Kent, and he, as a child, would be instructed by my grandmother to sleep under his bed, which was the only plausible defense against a bomb dropping on her house, and he would He had all these stories like a bomb once landed in her backyard and luckily didn't explode. He was once out picking strawberries with my grandmother and German planes passed over head, and my grandmother hid my father and my uncle under newspapers for reasons that no one really knows. She thought maybe she hid them from the pilots they wouldn't bomb them. But it was like a He would tell these stories and to me, at you know, the age of five or six, these stories were unbelievably exciting. You know, I was I was in We were in rural southwestern Canada, maybe the most boring part of the western world, and my dad was telling me nothing happened. I mean, it's a great good thing. And my father was telling me these stories about you know, like bombs dropping in his backyard when he was my age, and I you know, I think that probably instilled in me a kind of romantic love of this era. It shows and I know that you're a huge fan of spy novels and you've read all the fiction you can find about war. I think you've done something more impressive than writing a page turner of fiction in this book, which is you have brought these real life characters and their stories to life in a way that feels like I'm reading a thriller. I could not put it down. I've read now the print version and listen to the audio version, and I'm still hooked. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you got into the minds of these people that you've not been able to meet, well you write it is a departure for me. So I've never done a book which is so much of a kind of first of all, a single narrative. Usually I hop around, you know, I tell all kinds of different stories. But I also have never written a book which was so singularly focused on two characters. This book is the story of the conflict between two kind of legendary World War Two Air Force generals, Curtis LeMay and Heywood Hansel, and I really do you know, they're incredibly vivid characters, and we because we started this project as an audio project. I was always thinking of this verse as an audio book, and the reason for that was that we have so much incredible archival tape of these generals from the Second World Board. There's at Maxwell Air Force based in Alabama, there's a room full of tape of interviews with virtually every major figure in the Air force in that in that period. And once you know you can hear them, you I think you have a lot more confidence that you can bring them to life. And you know, like particularly Lemayh, who is this kind of unbelievable, cold blooded, you know, bulldog of a man. When you hear his voice, you feel like you you know who he is because he has this kind of guttural grunt. And that just gave me confidence that I could they would be more than two dimensional characters on the page if I could, If I could, you know, use do a kind of enhanced audio book that would bring them to life. Well it shows and I thought one of the other interesting features of the book was the way that you almost tantalize us with these questions of morality. Early on. You ask us to consider what would I have done and which side would I have been on? And I want to hear your answer to this, because you avoided it the whole book. But first, can you just walk us through the central moral dilemma of the bomber Mafia. Yeah, the bomber Mafia. One of the reasons I was so attracted to this story is that they are they are obsessive, and they are they're technological obsessives. They're they're a very familiar figure for us now there are. They're young men who are in the grip of a kind of passion that has been fired by a technological innovation. They would not be out of place in Silicon Valley today. They would, in fact, you know, be utterly They're utterly familiar in one sense, but in another sense, they're not because they're they have a moral vision. The reason they are so passionate about what bombing can do and how bombing can transform war is that they are desperate to avoid the carnage of the First World War, and that part of them I love. I love that they considered the the moral implications of their dream were as important to them as the kind of technological implications, and that's not something I see today. And so that I thought that they were this extraordinary role model for how you can bring together moral desires with technological obsession. But it doesn't work right. You know, the story of this book is the story of the failure of this dream, and so you you know you, I don't know if it is possible. I do not you. You're quite right. This book does not give you an easy answer to which side should we beyond? Because there is no easy answer. All I can say is I like the I like the fact that they tried to bring a moral vision to to their way of fighting wars. And I'm sad that they failed. But that's as far as it goes. I don't know. I didn't want to. I'm kind of I'm kind of overbooks that give you a new little conclusion. I find that condescending almost. I respect that. I also think, Malcolm Gladwell, that you are letting these people of the hook awfully easily to say that, Yeah, of course, they come in with a moral vision. They have a sense of almost ideological superiority, that they are going to fix all the problems with war while still fighting a war and essentially torturing countless people. And okay, you know what, good that they had a sense of morality even though they did so much harm. Really, are you okay with that? Well? I don't know how much choice you have once you are committed to a conflict. I mean, part of the reason the story I think is so compelling is that the deep way you get into the story the book, the more you're aware of how constrained the choices available to the characters are. You know, you think about the kind of second half of the book is all about what happens when my two protagonists Curtis Lemann Hey would Hansel come into conflict in in January of nineteen forty five, when the focus of the war has turned from Europe to the war against Japan to the Pacific theater. And there they are. They are given the task by the Allied leadership of bringing Japan to its knees and they get to choose how they how they how they will do that, and neither of the options available to them are any good. And I don't know, I really don't know whether you can It's not their fault. The options are no good, right, war is there's no kind of easy moral solution in these situations. It's like you're supposed you have to win a war and if you don't win the war, many many, many, many, many, hundreds of thousands of people will die, right, There's just no doubt about that. When wars drag on, they exact an enormous human toll. So everybody's agreed we need to get this war over with. But there's basically actually there's three options. And you know, Hayward Hansel has one option. He wants to use bombs as sparingly as possible. It is a complete and utter failure for reasons outside of his control. Curtis LeMay has another option. He wants to napalm every city in Japan, which is brutal and unbelievably horrifying. But he would say, well, I don't have any other options now. The third option, of course, is the option taken by in August of nineteen forty five when we dropped to atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Again, another thing, another option that leaves us sort of leaves all kinds of moral questions dangling. I just you know, I have difficulty from my comfortable perch in twenty twenty one passing judgment on people who didn't have any good options available to them. Now I understand I was trying to figure out as I listened, as I read, why you were so reluctant to take a moral stance here, because you are not shy about moral stances, And I thought, this is this is not at all Gladwellian. You normally have a strong view about what's right and wrong. And as I listened to you, now it clicked that they were stuck choosing between wrong and wrong, and you appreciate and admire the fact that they at least tried to do what was right. Yeah, you know, it's this is a side thing, But this is an idea that I've become kind of obsessed with recently. I've been doing a two episodes of my podcast this season, Revision's History, on the dilemma of a little small HBCU in New Orleans and the problem of if you choose to educate lower income students, and if you choose to serve them by keeping your tuition low, you create all kinds of problems. Right, can't pay for anything. Your school is not considered to be prestigious. You, I mean, you can go on and on and on and on and on. And the president of the school told me, he's like, you know, the problem with the way we think about higher education is that we we don't consider the degree of difficulty. Now, Adam, you know I'm raising this with you because you are a former diver and the great, the great contribution of diving to the world. And I'm not I'm not being flipp here. Honestly, the great one of the great contributions of your sport to the world is that it introduced that phrase and that concept degree of difficulty into common parliance. And it's a crucial idea. It says that you cannot simply judge an outcome all by itself. You have to judge the obstacles that were that the person pursuing that goal had to go through. Right, was faced with and this guy in New Orleans, he was like, the problem with HBCUs is that no one gives us credit for the degree of difficulty involved in what we do. Right. I just thought that was absolutely true, and you can't go through all manner of things in society. The one thing that was absent from the debate this past summer about police and by the way, a debate that I was that I have been writing about and arguing for police reform for twenty five years at this point. But the one thing that was absent from this summer was a sense of the degree of difficulty involved in police work. It's really hard, right, really really hard, and I wish that had been a part of it, and it wasn't there to the same extent. And that's also what I feel about these characters back in the Second World War is a degree of difficulty was through the roof, and you just have to build that into your consideration of their actions. I love that lens in part because one of my biggest frustrations with diving is that the formula for degree of difficulty is almost completely bogus. How did you decide that when somebody does a front four and a half that's a three point eight degree of difficulty on a three meter, but when they do an inward three and a half, it's only a three point four. You could you could change that scale dramatically and we would have different Olympic gold medalists, we would have actually completely different dives done, and we could have a whole rabbit hole about this, which I'm very tempted to do, but I think it hold on, hold on, hold on, Adam. This is like fantastic. Are you saying that there is an underappreciated degree of difficulty? With a concept of degree of difficulty, there a minimum, there's an underappreciated degree of difficulty in asking people who judge a sport to come up with a meaningful quantitative metric for scoring the sport, Adam, adam, you know more about diving than ninety nine point nine nine percent of humanity. You are a You are a prominent psychologist who writes in a matter of things, and you've never written about this. Do I have to take this idea from you? Can I interview about about this? I will give it to you. It's yours right now. This is just the most interesting thing that I'm sorry, this is like fantastic, This is just amazing, the even diving god degree of difficulty wrong? Well, but isn't that isn't that part of the point that Well, I mean, first of all, inventing something almost almost always means you get it wrong, because the hard work of creating it usually blinds you to the different hard work of optimizing it. But also that the concept of degree of difficulty is so much more complicated everywhere else, and the fact that we couldn't get it right in diving, It's like all you have to do is, you know, measure how high people jump, how fast that they can spin, and you know how much control you have. Actually, there's a there's a whole metric of jobs for degree of difficulty, right, we can we can measure job complexity and know that when a job has higher degree of difficulty, intelligence seems to become more important. Um and oh, there's there's so much we can talk about here, but I want to I want to get back to the one of the central questions that apply degree of difficulty to moral dilemmas raises, which is, once you recognize you're in a situation with high degree of difficulty, what do you do? What are your what are your takeaways from from studying these bombers? The great mistake the bomber mafia makes is they is they like many technological innovators, by the way, is they they they do not have the imagination And it's not a fault, but no one would to come up with all of the possible comp locations of their dream. And you know this is the this is the time honored problem of the innovator, Right that the thing that makes them good at innovating in their specific rate region is the narrowness and and intensity of their focus. They don't they're not distracted. They're like I on the prize, right. But the problem is that when they take that idea in the real world, that becomes a liability all of a sudden. You've got to think about fifty things that never occurred to you tomorrow. So the skills that get you to the real world are the skills that also impede you once you reach the real world. Well, okay, so you you have a parallel here which I didn't see until just now between the Bomber's dilemma and how we think about degree difficulty in diving, which is I think the central tension in diving and degree difficulty is do you base it on how hard it is to do at all or how it is to do well? There there are some dives that only a few people in the world can even make, and those some people would argue those should have the highest degree difficulty, and others would say, no, you take the hard dive that everybody does but everybody misses, and that's the dive that gets the highest degree difficulty. Your version of this, I think is is precision bombing, which is you say, okay, how you know how many bombs can you drop? Or you know how much? How much can you terrify or demoralize a city with your bombs? Versus can you hit your target perfectly? What? What does that teach us about what's really difficult? Is it the execution or is it the ability to to show up in the first place? Oh wow, that's a really good question. Um. I mean, I'm gonna cop out and say bows or it depends. Um. Point. I can tell you what interests me more, which is I'm more interested particularly this is a weird thing to say, particularly as I get older in the execution, because more and more I find myself I am interested and fascinated and amused by people's obsessive dreams. But what impresses me is execution. That you can just do it in a way that so everyone starts tries to do the same thing, there are three people who pull it off. Those are the three that if that's that's what impresses me is like you know, it's like, you know, any of us can make an attempt at Mount Everest or run a marathon, but a handful of people get to the top or break, you know, two hours and dirty minutes. Those are the people I take my hat off to. Okay, that speaks to something you've alluded to a couple of times, and something you made me rethink in this book, which is the idea of obsession. I have always thought of obsession as something bad. I think of people with OCD, I think of an obsessive stalker. And you you have a very different take on obsession. I think you even see it as a beautiful thing. And I want to hear more. I do I, and I wonder why I do. I don't know if I had a good answer to that him. I don't. It's not as if the easy thing would be to say that I you know, I grew up with an example of obsessiveness. Actually I didn't. Neither of my parents could even plausibly did be described as even coming close to that standard. My brother is the least obsessive. Hello, I mean he sort of, he's not. Obsessives were dabblers my whole but Dad's whole thing was he loved doing lots of things, even if he did them badly. That was his favorite thing. He both built greenhouse in her backyard, and he was so proud of how inex or inexpertly he built it. He would show off all of the crazy angles and the gaps. Then he thought that was hilarious. Okay, I have a few things that I'm curious about then. The first one is you called yourself a dabbler, and yet you're also an elite runner. I think you once beat the Canadian record holder if I remember correctly. Isn't running the most obsessive sport ever? I mean you literally just do the same thing over and over, step, step, the opposite, the opposite. So how many when you were diving as a kid, how many hours would you spend in the pool a day? I mean, actually in the pool, probably four seconds to dive from the time you left the house to the time you got home again, what are we talking about time devoted to the task? I'm three hours during the school year, probably eight or nine in the summer. Okay. In my entire time, as you know, I was a very good age class runner. In my entire time, as a very good age class runner, I never never spent more than an hour a day running never, and I never ran more than five days a week. And by the way, nor did anyone else I know. In fact, and if I had done that, I would have gotten I would have gotten hell from my coach. He would have said, you are destroying a Running is all about restraint, you know what. The the the little adage they repeat to you when you start out running is train, don't strain for tomorrow is another day. Running is the op It's the anti obsessives past time. It's all about restraint. It's all about never only when you race do you push yourself to the edge. At all of the times you hold yourself in check. Right the coach, I have a I'm intoining right now for this mile race I'm doing, and I have a disguise helping me coach and he looks at my my workouts online. You know what he tells me. He's like, yeah, you need to probably take a little more recovery on that, or you should take some more days off. He's making sure I'm not obsessive runners. You've totally misunderstand running. This is probably why you don't run. You don't get it. That might be true. You're bringing your crazy eight hour a day memories from childhood to bear on a completely different sport. I don't know you have bursts of obsession in running. I've heard about your stereo routines, for example. No, those are He's not. It's an obsession. That was. That's I used to get together with three very good friends of mine and we would do a workout on the stairs in Fork Green Park in Brooklyn. To say that was obsessive is nuts. It was totally fun. We would like you have a long recovery because you jog down the stairs and you sprint up them. On the job down the stairs, you like gossip and catch up on stuff and chat, and then you just have a little zip up the stairs and it's like it's it's the furthest thing. You don't know what you're talking about. Meanwhile, you're executing these insanely complicated dives that if you if you're off by two inches, you lose. This is nothing, nothing in common with what but what I'm up to. Well, I have to tell you that one of your so called friends said that when he went with you for the first time, he wasn't sure if he was going to vomit or die. So not everyone's experienced mirrors yours, but every other occasion than he smoked me, so I didn't know what he's talking about anyway. The other the other thing I wanted to ask you about obsession is I think about this research by valorand on two kinds of passion. He calls them obsession, obsessive passion, and harmonious passion, and he says, obsession obsessive passion is basically it's it's extrinsically motivated. It's driven by guilt, by pressure, by this, you know, compulsiveness that really undermines people's ongoing interest and commitment. Whereas harmonious passion, instead of feeling like you constantly have to push yourself to do it, you're pulled in by the activity. You're interested, you're intrinsically motivated, you're curious, you're excited, and your energy is sustained by your enthusiasm. And I wonder if if that's part of what you're describing, or if you think there's actually still an upside to the obsessive part of passion. Well, it's funny that the word I was waiting for you to say in what you in that in that um little dichotomy you described was um pleasure. Um. So I grant. I suppose that there are there are different motivations initial motivations for certain kinds of of a obsessive pursuits. But to me, the real issue is not why you start, but where you end up and does the does the immersion bring you pleasure? And it always amazes me how how little that word is used in particularly in connection with people's work. I always ask people, well, do you find your work fun? To be in? The simply the most important question, And I'm not interested in some people. We have all kinds of reasons why we work. Some people work because they have a family to support. Some people will work because they would be bored otherwise, I go on, some people work because their parents, would you know, disdain them if they didn't. Whatever, The question is, once you're at work and immersed in it, are you enjoying yourself? And you know, when I think about the people I like working with, they're all people I don't. I like working with people who do a good job, Sure everyone does, but I really like working with people who are enjoying themselves. That's really what what compels me, and I think of for some people who root to enjoyment is obsession, right, It's like that's you get singular in your pursuit because it just brings you joy. I don't understand why those words are so rarely used in this context. So, like to go back to the bottom Offia for a moment. They're in the middle of Alabama in the nineteen thirties. You could look at them objectively and you could say these losers off in the middle of nowhere, pursuing an idea that will never go anywhere. Or you could say these are a group of people who have successfully found a place where they can find joy in their passion and work, and that makes them winners. No one else is having joy in the army in nineteen thirty five. Wow. So when you talk about obsession, then you're talking about a single minded focus to pursue mastery in a way that brings joy. Yeah, But the social aspect it's really crucial here. Um. It's funny because you know, the this book, The Bara Mafia is the really the first book that I've ever done where from the from the very beginning of this book, it was a team effort. It literally I know, I'm my name is on the cover, but that's a misnomer. There's six people, seven people at Pushkin who played as large or in some of these is large a role than me and put it in this together. I've never done that before, ever, not, I can't even. I was not the guy in college who you know, had a team of people and we were no, no, no no, no. I never did a team. I was never on a basketball team. Never did any team sports, never teams. Not in my I did not. I didn't even. I wasn't the kid who went home from school and did homework with his dad. Never happened. Right, this is not doing stuff with other people is not something I have ever done. And I did it with this book. And you know what, this is most fun book I've ever done. Never had so much fun writing a book. It's like fantastic, right, It's that and why because everyone else was as into this idea as I was, right and pursuing different parts of it. And that's so like I, you know, I here, I am writing about a group of people who find joy in each other's obsession. And I am with a group of people finding joy with each other's obsession. It's like it's lovely at my you know, at my advanced age. I'm much older than you, Adam, I get to say things like that. At my advanced age, I discovered this fantastic thing called, you know, strength in numbers, the joy of shared obsession. Yes, I love that. That was Grant and Gladwell Clubhouse Part one. After the break, we meet again to discuss Adam's book, Think Again. Adam, can you give this? Can you give us an overview of Think Again? The core idea build on some brilliant work that my colleague Phil tet Luck did, and the premise is that we spend a lot of our life with these mindsets of occupations that we never have worked in. We find ourselves thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians more often than we would want to admit. When I'm in preacher mode, I'm trying to proselytize. When I'm a prosecutor, I'm trying to win a case and prove you wrong. When I'm a politician, I have a constituent, I'm trying to get their approval, so I'm doing all this campaigning and lobbying. My big worry with preaching and prosecuting is that people are not willing to think again because I'm right, you're wrong, You're the one who needs to change. I'm good when people are in politician mode, they look a little bit more flexible. But all they're doing is they're flip flopping what they say in order to communicate what they think their audience wants to hear. And so if it looks like they're rethinking, they're doing it at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, or they're just towing the party line and appealing to their tribe without actually changing their internal beliefs. My hope is that people will think a little bit more like scientists and say, you know what, I don't have to believe everything I think. I don't have to internalize every emotion I feel. When I start to form an opinion that's just a hypothesis. Let me go out in the world, run some experiments, observe, talk to people, and test the hypothesis. And I should be then surrounding myself with people who don't just agree with my conclusions, but actually challenge my thought process. And the goal of all that is to try to break us free of overconfidence cycles where we take pride in our knowledge, we have too much conviction that leads us to confirmation bias, and then we become a little bit arrogant. What I want to do is activate rethinking cycles where we have a humility to know what we don't know, We doubt some of our convictions. That makes us curious to go and discover new things, and that reinforces this mindset of being a lifelong learner, saying, wow, I just learned something. There's so much more to learn. Um, well, you have written another wonderful book, and I find it. Actually, there's so many fascinating things. My only critique of this I have a critique of this book. By the way, I hope you have more than one. I have several, but my my large one, which is a is it's four books. I'm reading this book. It's like, why you I You're like jumping ahead of the next idea and I'm not done with the one you're on. I either you either. You have to you have to, like you know, slow down and write and chop your ideas into pieces and devote. Oh, you have to write longer books. You can't do you can't keep doing this and like raise anyway, that's a it's a very mild. It's a it's a it's flattery designed is disguised as criticism, but I wanted to start. I kept thinking when I was reading this book, how does this fit in with Adam's previous books? And I'm wondering, do we have a kind of emerging Adam Grant philosophy of life? Can you talk about how does this one fit with your previous books? I think this it's an interesting question, and I will accept your backhanded compliment any day. Thank you for the enthusiasm and also the criticism, which I look forward to more of. I guess this book is sort of a meta book in that in each of the books I've written before, what I've tried to do is I've tried to get people to rethink something that I think that they've gotten wrong, or maybe an assumption that's been incomplete. The I mean, but do you What I want is whether you think there is a kind of Adam Grant ideology that's emerging from writing all Are you getting a kind of sense of well, wait a minute, here is how I see the world, and if you read all my books you'll get this Grantian vision. Yes, although it would be a little ironic to commit to an ideology, because then I'm not staying open to rethinking my opinions and beliefs. Am I. No, No, you could have a component. You could have an ideologies, which is that you revisit your ideology. That's fine. No, I think I think there is a there's an overarching thread that runs through all my work which I didn't see until I'd written a couple of books. The threat is that the very things that you think are critical for success in life, I can actually be attained through building character. And I think that my work has has looked at different kinds of character strengths and said, you don't have to choose between your goals and those virtues, whether it's generosity or now it's you know, it's humility. And so I guess what I'm looking for at large is a way to align character with with achievement. How's that? Yeah? No, that that actually that fits with That's what I've always sort of sensed in Well, why didn't you just tell me that a few years ago? Because then I would have understood who I was and what I was trying to achieve. No. No, but I'm curious me because I'm always very attracted to U two religious themes in things to sort of ary, particularly if they're kind of slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some there was some kind of moral case being made in your books that maybe you weren't making explicitly, but that there was something about reading a books that felt very comfortable to someone who was used to thinking about the world in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things. Like if I was thinking if I had a Bible study of evangelicals and I said, this week, we're not reading it's a New Testament. We're going to read the works of Adam Grant. I think actually people with that kind of world would be very at home with the arguments that you're making. That's interesting. I love it when when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I think where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around you know, okay, a lot for me at least a lot of the principles and recommendations that come out of religious traditions or missing the nuance about how do you actually do this in life? Right? So, yeah, of course you want to be a generous person, but how do you give to others in a way that prevents you or protects you from burning out or just getting burned by the most selfish takers around. Yes, I want to be humble, but I don't want to become meek or lack confidence. And so I think, I guess what I want to do In a lot of my work is trying to use evidence to pick up where where these these higher principles leave off and ask, Okay, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing you know, our ambitions? Yeah, yeah, I was struck by because I am, as you know, a BlackBerry fanatic user, not fatally struggle words. It's from they make it in my hometown. I have a you know, it came out of my dad's university. And you have a little thing where you talk about Mike Lazaridis who ran rim BlackBerry for many years, and he made this error and they went from fifty percent market share to whatever it was, five percent in five years because they failed to understand the smartphone revolution, the typing on a keyboard as opposed typing on a screens, et cetera, et cetera. He was not willing to revisit his assumptions about what a smartphone could be. And I was thinking about that, and I was like but you know, when I go home sometimes to visit my mom, I sometimes see Mike Lazaritas, like buying books in the bookstore. He doesn't live that far from my mother. He's a very happy guy. He didn't have any regrets. I don't think he built this beautiful house, all these trees outside. You know what I think. I think he's like doing cool projects. He made himself, I don't know, billion dollars. Probably at the end of the day, you know, I suppose he could have his shareholders might be upset that he didn't rethink his assumptions. But it was very hard for me to think of Mike Lazaritas as being a loser. And also like, so what if he wrote it all the way down? Like he believed in a certain kind of ascetic functionality and a phone like I happen to believe that too. Mike chose me over the many millions who wanted a phone that did everything, Like, I don't know, is there any different with this solid trude. I was thinking this into context of I'm also a fan of a deeply committed Diard fan of the Buffalo Bills. If you know what an involve football, you know that that is just an invitation has been for thirty years, an invitation to masochism. Start starting with Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas four super Bowl zero wins. Exactly do I read you? Know? If I read your book one way, I would single Malcolm, you should just rethink your your football allegiances. They make no sense. Like you got it? This is working, this Buffalo saying there's a certain pleasure in me sticking with them through thin and thin um, But so like, do you see what I'm getting at? Like I do? Oh, there's there's so much to work with here. Okay, let me let me start by saying, I love that you are rethinking your claim that you've made to me several times in this friendship that you always for the favorite, because the Buffalo Bills are definitely not the favorite. Yes, that's true, So welcome to the underdogs. It's about time you came around. Thank you. Secondly, I'm BlackBerry. I still want the keyboard back. I hate typing on a screen. I will never be as fast as I was. I'm not worried about Mike Lazarides at all. What I'm worried about And Malcolm, where is your empathy? Where is your compassion for all the people who lost jobs because RIM went under. They didn't go under, I mean it basically did. How many people are working there now? Well no, well, actually this is a sidetrack. But years ago I wrote this piece about what happened when I think it was General Dynamics had a very large presence in Rochester and they shut down their factory and left. This is in the seventies, and everyone in Rochester said, oh my god, this is the end of Rochester. And then this researcher I forgot who it was, went back ten years later and said, what happened to all the people who got laid off from General Dynamics? And he said he pointed out that the resurgence in the tech industry in Rochester was a direct result of all the people who were freed from General Dynamics and went on to do cool things. The exact same thing happened in Waterloo, in my hometown. All the people who left for RIM are the foundation of this incredible tech resurgence in southern Ontario. So do you know, Mike just educated a bunch of people about how to be entrepreneurs and how to think about I think, and it's win win for Waterloo. Anyway, it's a side point. No, I think I think you're right. I think that's a great point. And I'm feeling the joy of being wrong right now because I think you can see the impact on the ecosystem if you know, if you go to Canada. I think there's a part of me though that I guess. I also I also feel bad for you and me because we want that keyboard, right. I would love it if there was an iPhone competitor that you know, that worked a little bit more like the BlackBerry did. And so I feel like we're missing out on, frankly, some possible technological advances that didn't occur because they know they stopped producing products. What this book is is a kind of rebuttal to don Quixote. Don Ka Hoode is everything that he stands for is something this book is refuting. Right that this book is saying, to persist in tilts and windmills, to persist in You know, the whole story of Don Hodi is Donka Hoode continues to wage these battles that cannot be won. He will not rethink anything. And you know that book suggests as a kind of nobility in that romantic attachment to a cause, even in the face of and you're saying, actually, no, Don Cohote is going to be much better off if he rethinks this position about being this shivalrous night and starts scientifically examining his options. Right, like this is this book is the anti It's the antique, don Quixote. I never thought of it that way, but I like it. I'm not saying you should always give up on your passions or let go of the causes that are important to you, right. I want people to stand by their principles, their core values. But I would be thrilled if more people were willing to say, look, I'm committed to a set of principles, but I'm willing to be flexible about the best plan to advance those principles. And I think that really requires us to think a little bit more like scientists and a little bit less like preachers or prosecutors or politicians who are convinced I'm right, you're wrong, and I'm only going to try to cater to my own tribe. That's all for now, dear listeners, Thanks for hearing us out. Thanks to Adam Grant and his team at TED for their help with this episode. My audiobook The Bomber Mafia is available at Bombermafia dot com and Adams Think Again is available wherever books are sold. Till we Meet in the Clubhouse Again, I'm Malcolm Gradwell.