The Daily Stoic - Adam Grant on Ego and Knowledge

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

On today’s podcast, Ryan talks to author Adam Grant about his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know, why the Stoics believed in the power of intellectual humility, how to keep your ego at bay, and more.Adam Grant is an author, organizational psychologist, and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant is the author of 4 New York Times bestselling books and the host of WorkLife, a highly rated TED original podcast.This episode is brought to you by Public Goods, the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase. Just go to publicgoods.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout.This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.This episode is also brought to you by The School of Greatness podcast. Hosted by Lewis Howes it features interviews from athletes, influencers, authors , and more. Subscribe to The School of Greatness on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or visit lewishowes.com/podcast.This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. This episode is brought to you by Beekeeper’s Naturals, the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. As a listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast you can receive 15% off your first order. Just go to beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout to claim this deal.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Adam Grant:Twitter: https://twitter.com/adammgrant Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamgrant/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AdamMGrant YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2yY1krHd_ESN5DD9QaSTUA See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stood Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us dailystoward.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stove Podcast. My guest today is one of the most connected people in the world. A practitioner of the very give-and-take philosophy that he helped bring to the masses with his first and very popular book. Also the number one bestselling author of originals, a book that I quite enjoyed, and the author of Plan B with Cheryl Sandberg, which is sort of a very real world obstacle is the way how do you survive the blows of fate kind of a book. Adam is a super nice guy. Someone I've gotten to know over the years. His TED Talks have been seen

millions and millions of times. His books have sold millions and millions of copies. He has a BA from Harvard, a PhD from the University of Michigan, and was even a junior Olympic diver. He is just a great guy. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. We talk about his new book, Think Again, the power of knowing what you don't know. And as we talk about the Stoics, believed in the kind of intellectual humility that Adam is talking about, and we get into, how do you know what you don't know? How do you learn? How do you grow?

How do you challenge yourself? How do you keep ego at bay? And I think this is a great interview, and I can't wait for you to hear it. I've wanted to start with one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus, which I think connects nicely with the new book. He says,

it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And so for the Stoics, the sort of the main impediment to knowledge and growth was not ignorance or stupidity. It was it was conceit. It was sort of that if you think you already know everything in a sense, you're right because you can't learn anything else. Especially that you might be wrong about something. As with pretty much everything else, the Stoics nailed it. I love it. Yeah, I mean, that seems like a big theme of the new book is that basically sort of ego is this thing that prevents us from getting better

because it just gets in the way. Yeah, I think somebody even say that ego is the enemy. I've heard. Yeah, but I would say, yeah, I think ego is part of the story, right? It's very easy for us to overestimate our knowledge because we want to feel like experts and we take pride in our convictions and sometimes they even become part of our identity. But there are also some cognitive traps that we run into, right? So I think about Ego as more motivational. I have a desire to paint myself in a positive light and to look in the mirror and see somebody

amazing and brilliant staring back at me. But the cognitive piece is not what I'm willing to see, but what I'm able to see. And if you think about the Dunning Kruger effect, for example, one of the things that David Dunning has pointed out so so thoughtfully is that sometimes when you lack the knowledge or skills to produce excellence, you also lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence. And Ryan, the easiest example of this that comes to mind for me is I had a friend in high school who one day accused me of having no sense of humor. And I said, well, what makes you think that? And she said, you don't laugh at all my jokes.

Yikes. I'll leave it to you to judge who lacked the sense of humor, but she just thought everything she said was funny because she had no sense of what other people found funny. Right. It's like, I think we often think that sort of stupidity or ignorance is like avoid, that this person just doesn't know anything about this and that's why they're sort of going around acting in the way that they're acting. And it's often the exact opposite. It's that they really know.

Like they have very strong opinions and a very clear rationale for what they're doing. It just happens to be either totally wrong or something that you very much disagree with. Yeah, sometimes it's the illusion of knowledge and sometimes they have bad taste and separating those two things is hard. But one thing that I think is fascinating from this body of evidence is that hard, but one thing that I think is fascinating from this body of evidence is that people who are completely ignorant rarely fall victim to this kind of overconfidence. Because if you literally know nothing about a topic, it's pretty hard to feel like you know anything. It's when you have a little bit of knowledge that if it becomes dangerous because your confidence tends to climb faster than your competence. Right. That's what I was going to say, right? There's that expression

a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Exactly. So I always think about the Superbowl as an example of this. So you gather a group of friends for a Superbowl party and the of the ones who are football fans, the ones who knows the least about football is the most likely to be screaming at the coach, you're calling the wrong play. And the people who really understand football know how complex it is, right? And how many, how many question marks there are and what's going to work out and what is and they evaluate a coach on a whole series of decisions, not on one call. At the same time, if you have a friend who hates football and has never watched it, right? That friend is not going to be commenting very much.

Yeah, although I think what's interesting about that example is it's also often, and I think sort of ego and this go hand in hand, which is it's often the person who feels most insecure, either in their place or in their knowledge or any number of things that feels the least secure, is the one who somehow feels obligated to talk the most or compensate for that. So this tricky thing about not knowing things is that, as you said, it doesn't often lead one to a place of quiet ignorance or just like, Hey, I hope nobody notices. It almost, it often seems to manifest itself in sort of an aggressiveness that paradoxically makes it very unlikely that your mistake will ever be rectified.

Yeah, I like to think about this as the Joey Tribion effect. Just these moments on friends where Joey has no idea what anyone else is talking about, but he'll try to jump in quickly with an early comment and then not in smile so that he feels part of the conversation. Yes. Yes. There's an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa says, I think it's quoting Abraham Lincoln where it's like, I'd rather be seen as as stupid, uh, then open my mouth and remove all doubt. And Homer hears this and he thinks to himself. And then the voice in his head says, you have to respond. And he just goes, takes one to no one.

The ability to, in a way, it requires a kind of a confidence to say, like, I don't know, it requires a kind of a confidence to say like, I don't know, or to just be silent and listen. And so it's funny that what we often, you know, we go like, there's no dumb questions. We really do have to say that because people are afraid of asking, and they're sometimes so afraid that they'll do the opposite of asking, which is pretend that they already know the answer. Yeah, one of my biggest pet peeves in life is what's called feign knowledge, which is when people claim to know things that they don't actually understand.

And one of the things I've started doing after writing Think Again is trying to get out of that trap myself by making a list of all the things that I'm ignorant on. And some of them were really easy. I just actually started a list one day and I said, okay, what do other people talk about a lot that I just feel completely clueless about? And I went, okay, financial markets, music, food, art. And then it started getting a little more specific and I said, okay, I don't understand certain economic policies very well. I'm pretty clueless about why people belong to political parties in other countries. And actually, I'm clueless about why people belong to political parties at all. And what I decided to do is every day, I would add something to the list

of ignorance. And the goal is for it to keep growing as opposed to shrinking, because it reminds me of all the things that I lack information about. And it also encourages me when these topics come up to do what you're describing, which is I think confident humility, to have the confidence instead of insecurity, to say, actually, you know what,

I have no idea what you're talking about right now. Could you explain? Do you find that as a public person, that's, you have to be almost more disciplined about that because like, for instance, I'm interviewing you right now, I get interviewed, you know, back before the pandemic, we would get on stage and hundreds of people would have, you know, raised their hands to ask a Q and A

at the end of a thing. Reporters might ask for your opinion about stuff. I find one of the tricky parts is as you become successful at anything, the pressure to pretend that you know about stuff because you're being asked a question and it feels weird almost rude to not answer the question can also sort of inflate your sense of knowledge and brilliance about things. I think you just nailed it. In that, it's interesting because I think a lot of people

look at this trap and they say, okay, you know, when you end up answering questions that you have no business responding to, you've become overconfident in your knowledge and this is a great example of an area where you don't know what you don't know. But I think you're highlighting that there's another pressure here, which is,

if you're an agreeable person, if you wanna please other people, if you like to fit in, if you wanna maintain harmony, if also you're somebody who cares about being helpful or generous, then it's really hard to dodge the question, right? Or to bridge to, right, or to bridge to, well, here's what I actually know because you feel like you're doing the

person who asked the question and disservice. So what I've tried to remind myself of Ryan is not only that in the long run, that does a disservice to everyone to try to wax poetic about things that I'm ignorant on, but also that if I express uncertainty, because I'm seen as knowledgeable, at least in my broad area of organizational psychology, people will actually listen to me more carefully. There's a great paper by Karl Merker and Tormala, which shows that when experts express doubt, they actually become more persuasive. Because people are surprised to hear someone knowledgeable say, I'm not actually sure. And then they pay more attention

to the substance of the answer, which then means they're gathering new information. So that for me is a good reminder. It also, I think, prevents some embarrassment too. Like when I've gone back, I've had this sort of privilege and burden of doing updated editions of a couple of my earlier books. Wow. And just reading, old writing too. One of it's so mortifying because you're like, where did I get off being so certain about

this? Like, not only was nobody asking me, I was just unsolicitedly waging into something that I really only understood the very tip of the iceberg about and had I expressed this more generally or, or, not, I don't want to say hedged it, but what you were saying sort of expressed some of the uncertainty about it, it probably would have aged better and I would look like less of an asshole. Yeah, I think I'm not going to call you an asshole necessarily Yeah, I think I'm not gonna call you an asshole necessarily, but I think a lot of people miss those moments of learning

because they're afraid to revisit their old ideas and their old work. Because like you said, it can be embarrassing. You're like, who is this moron? Why does he think these things? Why did he seem so full of conviction about something that he hardly understood? And I think we should look back at those moments

more often because there are signs that we've actually evolved in our thinking and grown in our understanding. And if you don't look back and feel just a little bit embarrassed by your past work, it seems like you might be stagnating. I got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Is this thing on? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo.

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Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon music app today. Well, let me ask you first of my advice then, because I'm struggling with this right now. I'm, when I look back at, so there's some work where I'm like, okay, I shouldn't have said that at all. Then there's other work where I'm like, I sort of,

I really, I'm like, wow, this is so punchy into the point and it's really, it's stylistically exactly where I wanna be. But now when I try to write that way, I have trouble because part of the reason I think it's so punchy into the point is that there is, I don't wanna say, it's not the certainty so much as, now that I understand the topics more,

there's more nuance, right? One of the tricky things I think about the more you learn is the more complex the world gets. So how do you balance sort of that desire to always know more, but then also, you know, not have everything descend into sort of chaos and uncertainty and complexity. Do you know what I mean?

I do. I've been grappling with the same thing myself, which means I'm definitely not qualified to give advice on it. But let me react at least, which is to say, I think there's, there are two things that jump to mind right away. The first one is, there's an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, where he said, for, it was something like, for the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give a fig, but for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, I would give

anything. And I think what you're looking for is to avoid ignorance simplicity, but to try to get to elegant simplicity. And it's hard, right? I think it's a valley there. Yeah, there's a valley. And if you make it through, you're still worried on the other side that you've glossed over a bunch of important nuances. So I think one of my, one of my favorite principles is that every truth has an equal and opposite truth. And I wonder if this is one of the ways to get around this problem is to say, okay, look, I've, you know, I found a really punchy, compelling, simple

way of capturing deep wisdom. Let me see if I can write the converse of it. And if that one's true, maybe I'm onto something. And the insight that I want to deliver then is, is not one or the other, but to try to explain when each is true. So let's take a concrete example. A great truth, people who have grit are more successful than people who don't. The opposite great truth, people who know into quit are more successful than people who don't. So I'm not going to come out and make either claim alone, right? I'm not going to say, grit is the only key to success. I'm also not going to say, quitters always win. What I want to understand is, how do you find the right balance between grit and quit? Right. Yeah, I've talked about this before where it's like, okay, you learn about

the Civil War in like high school and you're like, oh, it was about slavery. Then in college, you read some books afterwards and obviously we're going through this as a society right now, it becomes clear that it's much more complicated, right? And then you really study it, like you really get into the primary source documents and you read the diary and you're like, oh, it was exclusively 100% about slavery, right? It's like, things go, it's like really simple, then then you study it more and it becomes hopelessly complex. And then you come out of the other side and it's distilled down into wisdom where you truly do understand that thing. And you make a good point where it's like sometimes, sometimes you've got to that complexity

because you're leaving out a bunch of stuff. And then other times you've got it because you fully do understand the relationality between all the facts that are involved. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, part of what I'm pushing for when I run into this trap is the contingencies to say, okay, what are the times when this thing that I think is good might be bad, or even just to offer a couple of caveats to say, hey, you know, there might be a few situations where this important idea doesn't hold. And I think if you qualify

it, right, you're still getting the powerful insight, but you're also letting people know, Hey, I don't expect it to work for all the people all the time in all the situations. Right, and we think humility is always a good thing and it is, but one of the notes I sometimes get on drafts of my writing is like, Okay, you've used two examples here where one will do, right? Or you're you're repeating your point. And so on the one hand, I sort of actually like this note because it's, I think that's the job of the authors to sort of emphatically make your point and to leave no stone on turn. But at the same time, if you're sort of unable to just come out and say and own it, right? If you're sort of trying to just throw

a preponderance of evidence and let that do the speaking instead of owning it as the sort of authorial voice, it's not going to be effective either. So, so humility can be this tricky thing where you've got to get, you've got to be intellectually humble, but then almost from a, from another standpoint, you've got to, you've got to be intellectually humble, but then almost from another standpoint, you've got to be like, I'm just going to come out and say what I think. Yeah, and I feel like there's a lot of pressure on authors to make that case and do it with a lot of a lot of oomph, right? To say, you know, you think X is true. I'm going to tell you why reverse X is true. And you think X is true. I'm going to tell you why reverse X is true.

And I wonder if we're putting a little bit too much pressure on having answers. As opposed to saying, here's a perspective I think is really worth considering. And here's what you'll see differently once you're able to look at the world this way, as opposed to saying, OK, I have now found truth. And here I am, my job is to enlighten all of

you. And this goes right into what for me has been one of the most powerful frameworks I've ever come across, which became one of the anchors for think again, which is the idea that we spend too much of our lives, our thoughts, our conversations, our jobs in the mindsets of preachers and prosecutors and politicians. And I was so intrigued when I first came across this idea in a classic paper by Phil Tetlock because I thought, okay, you know, it's clear that when you're in preacher mode, you think your job is basically to proselytize the truth you've already discovered. When you're in prosecutor mode, it's sort of the reverse.

What you want to do is you want to prove somebody else wrong and win your case. And it's clear that if you're in either mode, if you're preaching that you're right and prosecuting other people for being wrong, you're not going to be that open to rethinking your own views. And then if we go to politician mindset,

it's a little more flexible. The problem is though, when we're, when we're trying to politic, we're basically looking for the approval of an audience. So we're busy campaigning and lobbying and trying to convince them to support us. And that might mean that we cater to whatever they think is true. But we're changing our mind for the wrong reasons at the wrong times. And we may actually be even saying things that we don't really believe deep down. So I guess part of what I've been wondering about is, can we get out of those mindsets? Can we not feel like we have to preach a perspective or prosecute an audience's wrong belief or a politic by catering to what our tribe thinks?

But actually start to think a little bit more like scientists. And I'm not talking about putting on a white coat and carrying around a beaker and a bunch of test tubes. I'm talking about having the mindset of the mentality of a scientist to say, OK, my ultimate goal is to get closer to the truth here. That means whatever my opinions are, I should treat those as some working theories as a bunch of hypotheses

and then I should figure out, okay, what experiments do I need to run? What observations do I need to conduct in order to figure out if my hunches might be true or false? But it bumps right into some realities of the market, right? I talk to authors about this all the time. It's like, yeah, that's an interesting idea, but your value proposition to the reader here is, essentially, I haven't quite figured it out. It's complicated.

There's truth on both sides, which nobody wants to read a book about, right? The publication bias is obviously a tricky part in the scientific literature, but the reality is who wants to read an academic study or about a science experiment that didn't work? So it's hard to get a, it makes sense as an individual while you live that way,

but then it sort of bumps into the reality of life where sometimes you gotta pick a side. Yes, although I think it depends in part on how you define what it means to have an experiment not work. Right, I think for too many people, not working means it didn't confirm my, either my expectation or my preference. Sure. And I think, you know, there's been a lot of conversation about how we need to get out of confirmation bias mode and we need to look for data or evidence or information that challenges our convictions.

I think we could go even further. And this is something I learned. One of the things I did while I was writing think again was I spent time with a bunch of super forecasters who compete in tournaments to try to predict future world events. And arguably the world's best super forecaster is a military historian named Jean-Pierre Begum and Jean-Pierre predicted the rise of Donald Trump back when he was considered

a joke by most experts and pundits. He's predicted all sorts of elections around the world as well as a range of other events. And one of the things that John Pierre does is when he forms an opinion, he makes a list of the conditions when he would change his mind. And that way he's keeping himself honest to say, okay, in a couple of weeks now when I confront this situation that I'm tempted to dismiss because it doesn't conform to what I already believe. Let me go back and look at before I was attached to this belief, what did I think might be valid information to change it? And that way he's a little bit more accountable for maintaining some independent thought

about, okay, here are my criteria, here are my standards. And I would love to see more people do this, right? It doesn't necessarily have to show up in the way that you speak and write every day, but just to have a working set of ideas about, okay, this, this important truth that I think I found, what would I have to learn in order to question it? That's something we should identify before we decide we found the truth. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

No, and you've seen people struggle with that so much during the pandemic. I mean, you see it in journalism, right? Like a reporter will write a piece and then they'll have to detract, they'll retract, you know, sorry, they'll append the story and be like, oh, it turned out this source was incorrect or, you know, this assumption was not true, blah be like, oh, it turned out this source was incorrect. This assumption was not true. But these are central parts of the entire story and that the story remains. I think you see it during the pandemic. People made decisions when there were 50,000 cases a day.

And now there's 300 or 400,000 cases a day and they haven't changed that decision. It's like things are exponentially worse or significantly worse and the thing you were on the fence about in June, you're just kept trucking along because I think changing one's mind is so hard because it requires admitting error and that's obviously where cognitive dissonance and stuff comes in and we just we just seem to be utterly unable to do that as human beings. Yeah it's hard particularly when we've gone public with our plans. Right. Yes. So you know I think one of the things we need to do

is culturally we need to, we need to really rethink what it means to be a flip flopper, right? Because what so many people are afraid of is admitting to themselves, well, I was wrong, therefore, you know, I'm an idiot or I'm inconsistent, but also admitting to other people, yep, I'm a hypocrite. And again, if you're doing, if you're shifting your views because you're following a tribe that you're belonging to, then you're stuck in politician mode, and you are flip-flop. But if you have a more scientific stance, and you're saying,

okay, I have rigorously evaluated the information, I set my criteria up in advance for when I would change my mind, and now I have changed. That's actually progress. And I think we should give people credit for that. I think we should say, okay, you have just grown, you have evolved your thinking. And last time I checked, you can't say you've learned anything if all you've done is you just affirmed what you already believed, right? The whole point of learning is to continue revising your beliefs. Yeah, Cicero talks about this in one of his dialogues. He goes like someone accuses him of changing his mind.

And he says, I'm a free agent, you know, just because I believe something, you know, when you were, you know, the other way I think about this and people go, Oh, you know, if 16 year old me could, could, could see me now like they'd kick my ass or something. And it's like, who cares what a 16 year old thinks, you know, we, we, we sort of have these opinions that we form early on or these impressions we form early on. Who cares what a 16 year old thinks? You know, we sort of have these opinions that we form early on, or these impressions we form early on, when really we had such,

we had a fraction of the knowledge and experiences that we have now. Of course, we should think and act and believe differently. It would be weird if we didn't. Yeah, I think particularly because the world is changing faster and knowledge is evolving more quickly than it ever did before. If you were a live Ryan in 1432, you could probably spend a good chunk of your life not

having to change your mind about a whole lot. But if you look at the proliferation of information, the advances in science and medicine and technology, we have to update our thoughts a lot more often because there's new knowledge, right? And also, as the world changes, we can't stand still. We have to adapt with it. If we don't, it's really easy. And I've just seen this happen in so many companies.

I get a decent number of queries from founders and CEOs to talk about leadership. And one of the hardest challenges for me is getting them to admit that their strategy might not be working, or that it might be time to reconsider their vision and their values. And they'll say things like, well, that's not how we've always done it.

Or, no, that'll never work in my industry. I've stopped arguing with them actually, and I just respond with a simple question, Or no, that'll never work in my industry. I've stopped arguing with them. Actually, and I just respond with a simple question, which is Blackberry, Blockbuster, Kodak. Sears, should I keep going? Is that the group you're hoping to join? And it's amazing how many leaders believe that their job is to figure out the perfect vision

or strategy and then execute on it as opposed to constantly updating what they think might be effective. One of what's weird too is that if the leader is not taking in new information at that level and re-evaluating the plan and setting the long-term plan, like who do they think is doing it and where do they think is doing it, and where do they think that change is going to come from? It's not like some mid-level manager is going to discover the fundamental flaw in the cultural values of the company or the product offering, and then that's just going to

bubble up to the top. It's got to come the other way. Yeah, well, if they do, right, the odds that it will float at the top are pretty low in most organizations. It'll get crushed. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's interesting because you see a version of this in sports too. I know you've been spending a lot of time with pro sports teams. And there's a great study by Berman and colleagues, which looked at how long a team has to play together, the core nucleus in basketball, before they maximize their odds of becoming a great team. And it turned out, it wasn't until the the core team had been together for about three and a half years, that they ended up winning

the most games because they had to learn each other's strengths and weaknesses and figure out effective routines. But after that three and a half year period, you start to see the benefits of shared experience level off. And there might be some cost that emerge. And one of those costs is obviously that the players start to get old. But there's also a routine rigidity effect where you get used to your old playbook

and you just keep running the same plays over and over again. And then other teams start to review your stats, they watch your game films, and they can outsmart you. And so I think the moment that you figured out a successful strategy is the moment that you need to start rethinking that strategy because other people are either going to copy it or they're going to figure out how to beat it. I was curious, another sort of classical reference for you that I'm sure you're very familiar with.

But, you know, Socrates is wisdom, you know, sort of being rooted in the idea that he knew what he didn't know, or that he knew that he knew nothing. How does one get there, right? Because it seems like the tricky thing is, how do you know that you don't know something, right? How can you know what you don't know? Well, I think,

I mean, obviously in areas where there's well-established evidence and and independently verified facts, it's a little bit easier than it would be in areas where where there's not a lot of consensus among knowledgeable people. But I guess it's a caveat. I'd say, you know, often the consensus of experts is wrong. And that's where revolutions in science happen. That's where technological progress often occurs. So I guess the place I would start is to say, look, a lot of people are still sadly determined to be the smartest person

in the room, or the person with the most expertise in the room. And I think we all have a responsibility to try to enter more rooms where we're the least knowledgeable person, or we're definitely not an expert. And ideally, those are rooms where there are people with a lot of knowledge, but who actually have different opinions or different values or different beliefs, so that we can see a range of ideas on the table. And a simple step in that direction for me is to look at who you follow on social media. I'm really shocked by the number of people

who only follow someone if they agree with their conclusions. And I don't wanna follow you if I agree with all of your conclusions. I wanna follow you if I think you have an interesting and rigorous thought process. And you might then teach me something about how to think even if I disagree with where you've landed, or you actually are one of my most thoughtful critics, and you consistently challenge the arguments that I make. That's how I learn is by being exposed to those views.

And the goal is to sometimes figure out how to make my own arguments stronger. And those people are sort of a steel man that's supposed to a straw man. But other times to say, you know what? These people might convince me that I was wrong and maybe I should be disagreeing with my own arguments. It's one of the tricky things I think we're seeing with social media

to go to what you're talking about though, is like how do you expose yourself to people who you disagree with or have different opinions? Well, also keeping away, say people who are operating in bad faith, people who are attempting to undermine the credibility of certain institutions or certain fundamental bedrock truths, right? Like, there's an irony in like the people that have sort of been captured by ridiculous conspiracy theories,

and you go, well, how do you believe that? And they go, do your research, right? They're under the impression that they actually are doing their research and getting information from people they disagree with. It's just sort of they've been almost sucked into kind of like a fun house mirror or something. Yeah, it is tricky because if you meet somebody who believes strongly in conspiracy theories, they seem to have the same standards that you do. Right. You know, around gathering lots of knowledge and being skeptical of the information you come across

and questioning assumptions, there's a great idea from psychology that I found helpful in conversations with people who have gone down this rabbit hole. So, let me give you a concrete example. I was talking to a friend recently who has bought into a bunch of conspiracy theories. And he was, you know, he was talking about how the government is spewing lies and vaccines are unsafe. And, you know, we can't trust politicians and, you know, pharma companies have a profit motive.

And, you know, my initial instinct was to start prosecuting all of his arguments and preach me about mine, but that only makes people who are already resistant more defensive. So I said, okay, what would a scientist do? What a scientist would do right now is get really curious and say, look, I don't know what's going to change his mind and I don't know how he formed his beliefs, but I definitely want to understand that better. And so I'm going to interview him, right? I'm going to try to figure out, okay,

how does his mind work? And what I started thinking about right away was this research on what's called the illusion of explanatory depth. It's about the basic idea that when it comes to complex systems, we think we understand them better than we do. And if we have to actually explain them and unpack the mechanisms, we start to realize there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge.

So Ryan, the original demonstration of this was with mechanical objects. So you'd ask people, okay, how well do you understand the earbuds that are currently transmitting my voice into your ears and how those work. And a lot of people would say, yeah, you know, I'm pretty good working knowledge. And then you follow up and you say, okay, explain it to me. What happens right now? Like, how is this actually working? Walk me through the steps.

And of course, people can't do it. And after trying to explain and seeing all these holes in their understanding, they become more intellectually humble. They become more curious. They're more likely than to depolarize their views and admit what they don't know. And this has been shown to you for political conversations that, you know, if somebody is passionate about a particular policy on climate change or on on health care, if you just ask them to explain all the consequences that their preferred policy would have.

So how is this gonna work? Not why do you favor it? They start to realize again, well, I don't actually fully understand all the second order effects, and this is really complicated, and you want them to see the complexity of the problem, and also the complexity of some of their own thoughts,

or at least the ambiguity in those thoughts. So, I had all this in the back of my mind and I said to my friend, okay, so just walk me through how the government would trick not only, you know, 300 million people, but also communities of independent scientists who have tenure. And you know, he started explaining how easy it is to manipulate people. And I said, okay, yeah, you know what? Possible that people could be manipulated in certain situations, but imagine then the incentives

for going against that consensus, right? If you're the scientists who debunks the whole conspiracy, you might win a Nobel Prize one day. If you're the one journalist who's willing to tell the truth and get the cold hard facts, then that is a Pulitzer Prize waiting to happen. And are you telling me there is not one competent scientist or one competent journalist in these mainstream institutions who doesn't have the motivation and the ability to try to get to the truth? And he got stumped at that

point. And he said, well, you know, there might be a couple, but you know, this is really hard and it's difficult to go against the establishment. And I said, yeah, absolutely. And how hard do you think it is for all these people that you think are incompetent to coordinate a conspiracy on this scale? Right.

And again, trying to walk through the mechanisms for how that worked, he couldn't do it. And afterward, he became much more nuanced in our conversation. So I don't know that I debunked all of his beliefs, but I at least got him to recognize that maybe he wasn't as right as he thought he was. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors, and then we'll get right back to the show.

Stay tuned. Well, yeah, when you talk to those people, your point about like, so someone would be debunking this and their answer is always like, well, what is talk to those people, your point about like, so wouldn't someone be debunking this and their answer is always like, well, what is this? What about this person? And they point you to some other crazy person, right? Like there, you can see how, how sort of one, either one, particularly malicious bad actor or one true, believing crazy person can, in fact, you know, it's like one person operating either from insanity or bad faith can in fact the thinking of

countless other people because we have a hard time understanding that like, oh, you have to almost quarantine yourself off from influences like that. Like that's something I found on the like some communities I run. It's like, you'll see someone come in and, you know, it'll be like your friend. And there's part of you that wants to have a nice long discussion with this person. But, but it's like, meanwhile, they're infecting other people who are on the edge. So it's like this tricky thing with thinking where you wanna be open-minded, but at the same time, you have to be very protective.

Yeah, it's very tricky. And Rhina, I'm curious to hear your take on this because in some ways you're a reformed marketer, right? You've got on the record saying, you used to lie to people for a living. So how do we make the truth more viral? Well, I think, I don't know if I would say I lied to people for a living, but I would say that marketing

is essentially a deceptive art, right? The whole purpose of marketing is to get people to do things that, you know, maybe otherwise they wouldn't be inclined to do. I think it's a couple of things. One, as far as like sort of community management, I'm a big believer in shadow banning. So, these people just quietly go away. So, I think obviously in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, I think the public banning of a lot of these personalities

was the right move. But I think, algorithmically leading up to it, and over the last, you know, several years, the social media platforms have done a bad job algorithmically punishing these things, likely because it was not always in their interest to do so. But I think the problem with truth, not being viral, goes to exactly where we were starting this conversation, which is certainty is attractive and compelling and spreads well. New onts and complexity and complications do not. And just look at a platform like Twitter. It's like, what can you fit in 240 characters versus, you know, what can you, what can you fit there?

By definition, that is going to incentivize and prioritize short, concise, sort of limited ways of thinking as opposed to complexity, which I feel like describes most of the world. So I'm not so convinced that it has to be this difficult. In part because there's some evidence that's come out recently showing that if we can use

just a little bit of humility or uncertainty to highlight the complexity of the point of view that we're trying to communicate, that people are just as interested in what we have to say, but they also are less likely to blindly believe it. So for example, if you were trying to write a headline about how, let's say, some recent research has suggested that coffee might be dangerous for your health.

Right? Instead of saying, new study says coffee toxic. What you could say is, new study shows problematic effects of coffee for some people. Right? Not that hard. But what really depends, the difference there, and we were talking about market forces earlier and I talk about this a lot in trust me I'm lying to me it's the sort of it's the original sin of our modern media system. If I'm a paying subscriber of the New York Times, which headline

am I going to prefer? The manipulative one or the straightforward one. Because I have a manipulative one or the straightforward one because I have a An infinite game going with the New York Times. I want The the nuanced but truthful headline, right? And so so in that case the New York Times in my my In my interests are aligned the New York Times is not gonna mislead me because they want me to continue being a subscriber Like when you look at the headline of the New York Times breaking the Pentagon papers, it's like a 40 word boring headline. It's like, you know, a released study, you know, it's like it's beyond boring, right? But that's because millions of people were getting the New York Times delivered and it was

on the front page in a physical item. So it's like either you read the story or you don't, but you already paid for the newspaper, right? If on the other hand, I am a website that has no subscriber base, and the primary source of my traffic is how this thing spreads on social media, then your interest of getting the truth is at odds with my interest of what drives social sharing, and from what

we understand from what drives social sharing, it's high-valence emotions, the anger being the most, and again, you're not my customer. So I don't care if telling you the story is more extreme than it actually is gets you to click. There's no repercussions for me for having deceived you. And by not deceiving you, I didn't get your click. Does that make sense? So the market is unfortunately what's distorting the truth here.

It does. I think that makes sense. And so, yeah, if you have a market that's based on outrage or that's based on certainty and intense emotions, then I think it requires some rethinking of the way that the algorithms work. And I would say, look, we're all entitled to freedom of speech, but nobody has a right

to freedom of megaphone. There's no reason why we couldn't have independent moderators that say, okay, if somebody is not a credible source of information, then we're going to independently fact check before we let it go outside of their immediate community. Well, I think two, sort of two other good examples. One, I think the incentives of books, obviously UNI or biased are quite good, right? Like, UNI spend years working on a book. It's for sale. And we have a lot of room to discuss what we're talking about, right? We don't have 240 characters. We have 240 pages. And we know that, you know, somebody is going to pay, you know, 15 to $25 for this.

So it has to have strong word of mouth saying that this is good and people have recourse with the retailer and so on and so forth. They'll never buy a book from us again. So I think that's good. The other medium that I think has good incentives or economics for the most part, I mean, they're certainly bad ones, but I think podcasts, even though podcasts are advertising supported and most people don't pay for them,

the other thing about podcasts is that, again, because they're long form, you and I have talked for 43 minutes already, it's much more than we'd go back and forth on social media, but podcast episodes don't seem to be outside of the social media, but podcast episodes don't seem to be outside of the social media ecosystem, so they don't go viral. So there's not really any pressure exerting, there's not even really a publication bias.

It's just like, is it good? Do I subscribe to the Adam Grant podcast? If so, I like it. I'm not hearing about it on Twitter or Facebook or or even over email. It's just if it's good, I listen to it, right? And I think the things that are, have sort of opted out of these feedback loops tend to be of higher quality. That's interesting because my first instinct coming into this discussion would be, would have been that podcasts are vulnerable to some of the same pressures that, you know,

it's easy to attract a tribe who believes a certain set of things and then create must listen episodes around your daily outrage about whatever's happening in the political cycle. And then pretty soon, people are trapped in an echo chamber and they're surrounded, they're encased in a filter bubble and nothing can penetrate it.

It's true. I mean, right wing talk radio definitely is suffers from that. But I think maybe it's the scale that podcasts are currently being done that insulates it a little bit. But I also think like because it tends to be two people talking, there is just more of a so critic element to it that I think

is good for the most part. I'm not saying it's a flawless medium, but I would certainly, I think there's probably less disinformation or misinformation from an hour podcast of two people than a 15-minute CNN talking heads segment where the people are all trying to get their quick hit in and sort of battling for attention in a very, very noisy cycle. Yeah, I think sound bite culture is definitely part of the problem. And yes, ideally, right? Before we let, I mean, nobody's ever going to watch this let alone participate in it.

But I think in an ideal world, what we would do is we would record half hour, hour long conversations and then extract sound bites from them after the fact when people have had I think in an ideal world what we would do is we would record half hour hour long conversations and then extract soundfights from them after the fact when people have had the more nuanced conversation and then the hope is that they've arrived at some elegant simplicity, supposed to ignorance simplicity. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. I don't know, that's a good point. Maybe it's the live element of television that's sort of problematic. And it's, you know, Neil Postman would say probably

that it's the visual medium that's adding the extra layer of it, which is that you have to look a certain way, you have to capture the attention in a certain way. I think one of the reasons podcasts are exempt from social media is that we just for whatever reason don't share audio the same way, right? So clips of somebody doing something on television

seems to be much more viral than a clip of Ryan Holliday and Adam Grant talking about something because I don't know, it's just less exciting and I think therefore less pressure. Are you saying Ryan that this conversation is not gonna go viral? I am fairly certain it will not go viral. Well, we need a creative outreach.

Exactly. Hey, last thing I wanted to ask you about, because I think it goes, it's not technically from the new book, but it goes to the ideas in the new book. I felt like I was fascinated. I think the story is in originals where you tell the story of not investing in War B Parker or not advising it, even though they were your students and that company went

on to be this huge company. What did that exchange, maybe tell that story, but what did that exchange teach you about your own thinking? Because it seemed like to me, it sort of, the reason you didn't invest is you had these sort of rules or assumptions about what a good investment was versus a bad investment, and they violated all the rules. So in that sense, it was a good decision, but maybe it, in retrospect, challenges some of those assumptions for you.

Yeah. My experience with the Warby Founders definitely led me to rethink a bunch of my assumptions about how to invest in entrepreneurs and startups. So I think coming in, I hadn't really started doing much investing yet, so my assumptions were much more implicit, but I assumed that if you wanted to be a successful entrepreneur,

you needed to be committed, you needed to be ahead of things as opposed to falling behind. And you probably also needed some degree of first mover advantage. And when I looked at what the Warby founders were doing, it was very obvious to me that they were not gonna make it. So from a commitment standpoint, three of the four founders had lined up backup jobs and internships, just in case their idea didn't work out, how serious can you be? When it came time to name their

company, they dragged their heels for about six months and just could not settle on a name, and they lacked the decisiveness and the conviction that I thought that a great entrepreneur was supposed to have. And when they're finally their company launches, they are an online retailer. They don't even have a functioning website. And so they've just been procrastinating way too much for my taste. And of course, you know, now they're a unicorn startup. I did rethink my view of them. I actually invested last year, finally, better late than never. But I think I learned a couple things from that experience. The first one is that commitment signals are not what we think they are.

So if somebody is hedging their bets, it doesn't mean that they're not passionate about their start-up. It means they have a healthy relationship with risk. And I've started to think about risk a little bit like a stock portfolio, where if you're gonna bet on a very risky set of stocks, you better have some of your money in some boring mutual funds. And that's what they were doing with their backup plans with the jobs and internships. They were, you know, instead of being risk lovers, they were being risk hedgers, which I think is a smart thing to do. And the data even suggests that entrepreneurs who keep their jobs, instead of going all in,

are 33% less likely to fail than the ones who, when they have an idea, quit right away. I think there's another benefit too of hedging, which is it's a little bit easier to rethink your own strategies. So if you quit your job to work on a startup, or if you're completely focused on the startup, you have all your eggs in that basket.

Whereas if you treat it as a little bit of an experiment, you're not sure if it's gonna work. It's a lot easier to say, all right, you know what? That idea tanked, let me move on to something else. So that was a big a haw for me. And then the other, I guess the other thing that I rethought based on that experience was the procrastination was always a bad thing.

I went on to do some research with G. Hishin, where we showed that moderate procrastination can make you more creative if you're putting the task off because it's a hard problem and you haven't figured it out yet. And you have the intrinsic motivation to actually solve it. You just know that you can't force it. So that's exactly what the War of the Founders had done. They had spent six months testing over 2, 2000 different ideas for what to name the company, knowing that branding was important.

And the reason they didn't have a functioning website was they were trying to work out the best way to be able to sell eyeglasses over the internet, and ultimately landed in a much better spot than they would have if they had gone forward with their first plan. So yeah, very different view of how I would now invest in startups than what I had before, but I'm glad that I learned it that way. Well, see, if we were trying to make this go viral and we were doing two minutes on television or I was doing a Huffington Post article, it would be, you know, Adam grants $30 million mistake, right? It would be all about, you know, the sensational elements of it. But I think what I'm interested in is, yeah, like how, how does one sort of have a set of rules talk about, you know, learn from it and grow, although I've got to imagine, to a certain degree,

those rules that you had probably served you well, 99% of the time. They might have, although I think, you know, there's a sound bite version of this, and you can decide whether this is ignorant or elegant simplicity. But the sound bite version of this is that if you wanna be a great innovator, you don't have to, well, I guess I'd say it differently. The sound bite version is that great innovators

hedge their bets. They sometimes procrastinate, and they're willing to let other people create a market as opposed to doing all the work themselves. Yeah. Oh, the other lesson you could probably take from what you went through, which I, I've struggled with a bit myself is it's like, Hey, also maybe I'm just not cut out for this, right? Like maybe, maybe my level of thinking my impulses, the rules I've developed for going through the world are not particularly conducive

to a cutthroat unpredictable industry like venture capital. Are you trying to tell me I should stop angel investing, Ryan? No, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to go a little myself. I'm just saying that that one of the things, I think at the core also of the new book and what where we started is sort of humility knowing, you know, what you're knowing that the thing you're doing is very hard and that just because

you're good at writing books or teaching classes doesn't necessarily mean that those same sort of voyeuristics are going to be really successful in a totally different field. Yeah, I think that kind of humility is obviously needed and it's funny when I a few years after passing on Warby, so I said no when they first took up, well actually I said no back in 2009, which was when they were just beginning to start the company and they hadn't even gotten off the ground yet. And a few years later I reached out to a venture capitalist and I know, well, and said, all right, I'm thinking of doing more investing in what would your advice be?

And he said, well, my advice is really simple. You should invest if number one, you're willing to put in the same amount of energy and effort that you do to writing a successful book or publishing research. You know, this is not something you can do well as a person, hobby. You have to take it seriously.

He said number two, you could do this if you want to be a philanthropist. And the group that you really want to donate your money to is entrepreneurs. And number three, you could do this if you want to be a gambler. And you think this is more fun than blowing your money in Vegas or the slot machine. And I thought, okay, don't number one is clearly the way to go. But also there are ways to leverage some of my existing knowledge. So I'm going to invent more in people, culture and HR related startups than I will in tech. I'm probably also, and I ended up doing this, I'm going to focus on a couple of consumer

products that I feel reasonably knowledgeable about and I'm excited to learn more about. Or I'm going to partner with investors who know the areas that I don't. I'm only going to go in after their due diligence says yes. And I think I've made fewer mistakes since adopting those practices, but you'll be the judge. You're totally right. It's sort of like where do you have an unfair advantage? Go there, as opposed to, I'm sure you hear from, I was just hearing from one the other day, you all hear from Venture Capitalists who are like, oh, I want to write a book and they think because they're good at Venture Capital, of course, they will be successful at this thing, which I know everything about, right? So it's like when we watch other people get out way over their

their skis, we go, how stupid, how could you do it? And then we turn around and do that in other industries because of our own intellectual hubris. It's hilarious how often that happens. Every time I get a request from somebody in the business world or in the sports world who wants to write a book, my first question to them is, do you actually want to be a writer? If you're going gonna write one book, you should have a ghost writer, you should have a co-author, you should have a researcher with you,

or you should consider whether there's a more efficient and effective way to get your knowledge out, like writing an article first and seeing if anyone reads it or joining a podcast and seeing if people are interested in your ideas and insights. And it's funny because I've started telling people, look, if you want to write a book,

you're basically starting a business around your book. And you're going to invest at least, if it's going to be any good, you're going to invest. It's very minimal upside your life in it. Sorry. I'm business with very minimal upside compared to the businesses you normally do.

Minimal upside if you measure the returns financially. Yes, I would say the you know, the intellectual engagement and the impact are definitely worth the trade-off if it works. Oh, totally. It's, I mean, I love it, but your point is when I tell people all the time, too, it's like, oh, you don't want to write a book, you want to have a book,

and that is very different than just like I would love to have a billion dollars And that is very different than just like I would love to have a billion dollars. I just haven't taken the time to figure out how one might make that, you know, inventing a new biotech, you know, company or something, right? Like wanting to have the end result is not the same as being willing to go through all the steps of the process that one would actually have to do to get it.

Yeah, it's amazing how many people like the idea of having created a product, but are not all interested in the process of producing it. Adam, thank you so much. This was awesome. I love the new book and of course love the old ones too. Thanks Ryan, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, whatever you want. We'd love for you to have a copy. I know I love signed copies of some of my favorite books. If you love a signed copy of

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