Re:Thinking with Adam GrantWhat makes great athletes? with Chuck Klosterman | ReThinking
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
35 min read · 7,102 words- 0:00 – 0:59
Rethinking the GOAT: why “latest and best” isn’t necessarily greatest
- CKChuck Klosterman
My argument is that it's the first elite rendering of something whose qualities are still contained through all the later versions that come along. The real complex part about this is identifying when the modern version of that thing begins.
- AGAdam Grant
[upbeat music] I think the place we have to start is you made me think twice, but I'm not sure you changed my mind when you argued that Tom Brady is not the GOAT. Why do you think he's not the GOAT? Let's begin there.
- CKChuck Klosterman
It's not really about football as much as it's about the concept of greatness and how we should think about greatness. The argument being that if you're gonna call something the greatest of all time, it can't just be whatever the latest version is. Because of technology and because of the way the world changes, the most recent version will probably always be, like, the most effective or the most dominant, or whatever word you wanna use. But we're using the word greatness now, right? So we're thinking of sort of a, a, a meaning that kind of goes outside merely ranking these things in order. My argument is
- 0:59 – 2:42
The Beatles, templates, and why originality can outrank superiority
- CKChuck Klosterman
that it's the first elite rendering of something whose qualities are still contained through all the later versions that come along, and I use The Beatles as this example. That an artist could record more pop songs that are gr- you know, wonderful than The Beatles, a better, thicker, kind of deeper sort of, uh, you know, catalog of music, but as long as they're still working in the same modality The Beatles created, they can't be greater than them. If they're still using that as the template, that is the greatest version, and that is my argument with Jim Thorpe, that Jim Thorpe is the earliest rendering of what we view a great football player to be. Um, now you could make the statement that he played in the '20s, so it's not really modern football yet. Maybe it should be Jim Brown. I can understand that. But the larger idea is how we view this, right? It's, it's less about the answer and more about the process of thinking about this.
- AGAdam Grant
So interesting. Okay, so I agree with you on The Beatles. I agree with you on The Beatles because I think music is a domain where creativity is part of, and maybe foundational to, how we think about excellence. I don't think creativity really matters in sports. When I think about excellence in sports, I think about two variables. One is the peak of their success, how great were they at their greatest, and then the second is the duration of their success, how long could they sustain it? And I think by that standard, [chuckles] I think Tom Brady, Brady clearly wins on, on the sustained excellence front. And I don't really care if he changed the game, and I think if, if we were to take a basketball analogy, by, by your creativity or reinvention or redefining of the game standard, you would say the GOAT is not Michael Jordan, it's not LeBron James, it's Dr. J because he popularized the dunk, or it might be Steph Curry because he transformed the game with the three-pointer.
- CKChuck Klosterman
No, I wouldn't say that.
- AGAdam Grant
You wouldn't say that? Okay, tell me why not.
- 2:42 – 3:13
When does the modern sport begin? Picking the start line for fair GOAT debates
- CKChuck Klosterman
The real complex part about this in terms of as it applies to football or any sport is identifying when the modern version of that thing begins, okay? So I am using basically when football becomes an 11-man sport with four downs, six points for a touchdown, passing, all of these things. I'm using that as the origin, okay? In basketball, I would say, especially as the way the game is played now, the modern era we would talk about would really begin after the NBA-ABA merger and the introduction
- 3:13 – 3:56
Is there creativity in sports? Objectivity, reinvention, and hidden innovation
- CKChuck Klosterman
of the three-point line and all of these things now that have had dramatic effects. So if we start from 1977, '78, '79, I think the argument is then again that Michael Jordan is the first really elite rendering of greatness within that time period, okay? That's kinda where it begins. You say about creativity, that's also, like, a, a, really, a kind of complicated idea. Led Zeppelin borrow most of their riffs from old blues songs. Is that not creative? Or is it more creative 'cause they're reinventing something that pre-exists? I mean, I think there is creativity in sports. We don't think of it that way because it is... You know, it seems so objective. I mean, that's, that's always the thing that also complicates this, the difference between subject- objective greatness and objective greatness.
- 3:56 – 4:28
The Fosbury Flop case: calling the inventor “greatest” despite lower measurables
- AGAdam Grant
So interesting. So let's, let's take maybe a simpler example then. If you were to look at track and field through your lens, I think you would say the greatest high jumper in history was Dick Fosbury because he invented the Fosbury Flop, and every high jumper today, even though all of them can out-jump him-
- CKChuck Klosterman
Yes
- AGAdam Grant
... has, you know, has failed to do the, like, "Okay, I go up in the air, I twist over onto my back, and then I fall."
- CKChuck Klosterman
That would be my argument, yes. I would argue that Dick Fosbury is the greatest high jumper of all time.
- AGAdam Grant
Why do you wanna call him the greatest when he's objectively [chuckles] worse than so many others? It's because he invented this new art of high jumping, is that right?
- 4:28 – 7:07
Why time machines don’t work: context, incentives, and the environment that makes greatness
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, I mean, we're really getting into the semantic part of this, but, like, we look at greatness as something that is more than just measurables, right? It's more than just being able to say that if we paired these things up, who would be greater? 'Cause when you look at Dick Fosbury now, you're looking back at a time when everything about track and field culture was different. Everything about nutrition was different, and there were certain sports, basketball being one, high jumping being another, where the idea of lifting weights could somehow be a detriment. You also have to imagine what the individual experiences in reality. You know, I mean, this is, like, the big... Uh, and going back to the Jim Thorpe, Tom Brady thing, you know? Like, you can't just imagine a time machine where you move Tom Brady back in time and you move Jim Thorpe forward in time. If that happens, yes, Jim Thorpe probably can't play for South Dakota State, okay? Uh, Tom Brady not only is the greatest football player of all time, he would become the greatest athlete that had ever existed. It would blow people's... He'd be the greatest basketball player of all time.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- CKChuck Klosterman
He would be, he would be the greatest baseball player. All of these things. But that's not how it would work. I mean, that's not how it would be. You have to imagine what that person was born into. You take Tom Brady as a newborn, you move him back and have him raised in, you know, rural Oklahoma in the late 19th century, beyond any athletic skills he may or may not have, what is his motivation for playing football now? Like there is so much motive for someone to be a great athlete now. Not just the monetary side, but just, you know, if you're a great high school student and a great high school football player, the status that that attains for you, the ability to go to college and have a different life.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah.
- CKChuck Klosterman
There are all these things that did not exist in the past. We always want to think about time and difference and greatness in this way, as if everything is what it is independent of its surroundings, and that's never how it is. The Beatles, the idea of four artists, all, you know, we're all writing our own material. We're not just taking songs from Tin Pan Alley, we're creating them. We're creating them as reflections of our personality. We're incredibly musical, that the fact the relationship that we have could only occur because it's us four. We'll all have solo careers, all of them will be okay, none of them will reflect sort of the alchemy of that union. There were all these things that had to be the case, you know? And you can't think of like, well, what if The Beatles had come along in, you know, 1980? If The Beatles had come along in 1980, would they just be R.E.M. or something? It's impossible to do.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs] Yeah.
- CKChuck Klosterman
'Cause R.E.M., even though R.E.M. didn't love The Beatles so much, or at least Michael Stipe didn't, The Beatles did exist. Once something exists in reality, we have the ability to use that to create something else, you know?
- 7:07 – 9:49
Team-sport greatness and the “irreplaceability” test (and why football complicates it)
- AGAdam Grant
Okay, good. So this, I think this leads us into the other fight I wanted to pick with your standard of greatness.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Sure.
- AGAdam Grant
Which is, I think in a team sport, the GOAT is not just the most elite player, but the most irreplaceable player. So how much did they elevate their team? And, you know, how much better does the team get when they join? How much worse does the team get when they leave? I think by that standard, Brady's case even gets stronger, right? Because-
- CKChuck Klosterman
Mm-hmm
- AGAdam Grant
... I, the, the, the Patriots weren't great before he arrived, and then he leaves, and we think he's over the hill. He joins the Bucs, and all of a sudden the Bucs become great. And I, I just think it's, I mean, it, to me, this is missing from the whole GOAT debate, right? As an organizational psychologist, I look at greatness and I say, look, if your team is measured by the whether you win championships or even just how good a collective is, then why are we only looking at the player's individual stats? Shouldn't it be about your contribution to the group?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Football is an especially difficult sport to isolate greatness in because it is not just a team sport the way basketball or baseball or hockey is. It's the strange sport where if someone argues, "Well, Joe Montana, uh, is the greatest player of all time," and someone else says like, "Well, you know, it's Lawrence Taylor," they might play against each other, but they're playing completely different positions. You only play half of the game anyway. So football makes this hard, which is why this kind of chapter in this book about this is, is like, in some ways, I'm sure some people would say overly complicated. You know, I get into the idea-
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- CKChuck Klosterman
... of sort of this natural greatness. The idea of that if you take away things like hard work and, um, sort of the mental time that they invest in all these things, just look at the athlete themselves, the way it would be in the schoolyard. You know, we're picking guys to play a game. Who do we pick first? That's also a different kind of greatness. There's also sort of like the idea of a collective greatness. Like with Tom Brady, if you ask the average person who's the greatest football player of all time, they're going to say Tom Brady. And since this is a s- in some ways a subjective thing, well, in every way a subjective thing, you have to s- in, to some degree give credence to the fact that most people agree this to be true. But I'm not writing a book to show things that I agree to be true with other people. It's like I have a-
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah
- CKChuck Klosterman
... different way of thinking about this. And it's never my idea. I gotta convince people to agree with me. I gotta convince them to think Jim Thorpe's the greatest player of all time. But I want them to think outside of the way we typically think about greatness now, which is the way we tend to think about it like in business or whatever. It's like, well, you know, Tom Brady has the most numbers. He has the most championships. He was there the longest. It's almost like he's a CEO or something, and this was the most successful company of all time, and he had the mo- he earned the most revenue or wha- That's... I, I don't think sports should be considered in that way. I don't think anything really should be considered in that way if it's an interesting topic.
- 9:49 – 11:00
What today’s stars would need: Caitlin Clark, era changes, and being the “first modern exemplar”
- AGAdam Grant
I think that makes a lot of sense. So I wanna, I wanna then think a little bit about what your standard means for present day athletes. So Caitlin Clark is on the record saying she wants to be the GOAT. What would she have to do in order to enter that conversation for you?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, I guess what she's actually in, not in a terrible position to do that because she seems to be entering the league at a time, due to her and a handful of other people, where the WNBA is completely changing. I mean, you can see with just the fact with their, like their negotiations right now with the players' union and all that, the mon- their salaries are gonna change entirely. It's gonna be an entirely different sport. I think that it will be possible at one point to make the argument that women's basketball really changed during this five-year window we're in right now, that everything, the way we think about it, the way we respect it, the way we view it, all of these things has changed in this time period. In which case, if she is the best player from this period, that would mean she is the first elite rendering of a modern women's basketball player. So what she would need to do is perform basically at the highest level of women's pro basketball right now, if we assume the stage begins right now.
- 11:00 – 12:07
If basketball becomes all threes: new eras, Steph Curry, and why obvious ideas take decades
- AGAdam Grant
And okay, so, you know, if we take the Caitlin Clark example, or Steph Curry for that matter, does that mean that if we watch basketball for both women and men evolve in the next few decades, and basically we're only shooting threes, and there's a four-point line, and we're shooting those, and, and nobody's really driving or dunking, does that change the equation?
- CKChuck Klosterman
What we would be arguing is if there would almost be a new modern era that would begin. So then who is the greatest player from that period? It may be Steph Curry if he's still in the league. He may be, 'cause he, he really was the person who in a, in a way mainstreamed this idea. Like this thing that had always been obvious in a way, but yet was overlooked, which is that you can shoot 33% from one part of the court, and it's the same as shooting 50% from another part of the court. It took, what, 30 years before people really accepted that? That's the real mystery. But we sort of understand that now, and we see this, you know, you see it already at the college level, at the high school level particularly, there are some teams who basically don't do any- it's layups and threes and that's it. If that's becomes what basketball is, if the mid-range game completely disappears, then I suppose the argument you're making makes sense.
- 12:07 – 13:55
Football’s future: receding from the monoculture and the limits of perpetual growth
- AGAdam Grant
Yep. Okay. So you are You're, you're a former high school football player. You, you have gone on the record arguing that football is gonna fade as America's favorite sport.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, I think that it still might be the favorite sport, but what's going to happen is it's going to recede from the center of the monoculture. I mean, it's sort of the last vestige of the monoculture. I mean, right now, it's not just that football is America's most popular sport, it is more popular than all the other sports combined. It's like, th- football has a dominance now that defies logic in the sense that everything else has splintered. But I don't think that football is immune to this. I think we're two generations away from people having a very different relationship to football, partially be- for economic reasons, partially for social reasons. And essentially what I'm arguing is, in 50 years, the world might be different, and people are like, "No way. No way. There's no way. What's popular now is gonna be popular forever." In a kind of a banal way, I'm making the most straightforward, obvious argument possible. Like things-
- AGAdam Grant
Yep
- CKChuck Klosterman
... as they are won't be the same, and particularly as society changes, big things, hyperobjects, have a harder time reacting to that than small things. You know, small things have the ability to sort of change what they are. Football cannot. Pro football and college football are designed now to expand. That's the only thing they can do. Every year, the revenue has to go up. The interest has to move into more and more casual fans. It has to stretch across the oceans and be played in Germany, and be played in, you know, Brazil, and all of these things. I don't think that that is a reasonable way for anything to exist and succeed in perpetuity, in part because nothing like that ever has.
- 13:55 – 17:30
Can football be safe without losing its soul? Violence, stakes, and the Everest analogy
- AGAdam Grant
And so, you know, as, as I think about how the game might need to evolve in order to not lose fans, the thing that, uh, for me is, you know, is the most problematic is just how dangerous the game is. Like, I don't, I don't wanna watch people suffer season-ending or career-ender ending, or sometimes life-shattering injuries. And at this point, I would prefer if the NFL were a flag football league. I wanna watch the passes, I wanna watch the running, I wanna watch everything but the collisions. I think I'm in the mi- minority on that. Am I?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, I think you are, and I mean, you know, I, I can't say you don't really realize what you actually believe, but in a sense, I do think that there, when people say that, they are overlooking, I think, a key component to why football in some way does need to be violent, okay? Now, football is not consumed as a blood sport. I mean, it, it is not something that people watch with the hope that they would see someone injured. What they like are all the things you're talking about, right? Strategy, the passing, the ideology of one team matches with the ideology of another. The idea of can you outthink your opponent? Can you... All of these things. All of these details are what people like. But in order for them to have stakes, the risk of violence must exist. And even though nobody says in a straightforward way, "I want this to be violent," it is an essential part of it, in that what you're seeing on the field matters more because of what you know the risk inherent is. I mean, the example I often use is, like, say somebody wants to climb Everest or wants to climb K2, okay? They don't wanna die on that mountain. They do not want to die climbing K2. And yet, if there was zero risk of that happening, the meaning of that would be so much less. The reason that people see it as this sort of moment in their life that, that they have to spend years and thousands of dollars, and all this time to pursue, is because they know that they're doing something that is putting them in real risk in order to achieve something that is rarefied.
- AGAdam Grant
I don't know if I buy it. I d- I'm not s- I'm not sure I'm persuaded. I think it seems to me that it's the difficulty that's the draw, right? That I want to accomplish something really hard, not that it has to be unsafe, and it's the uncertainty of whether I can do it and push myself through that challenge that holds the real appeal.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Okay, can you, uh, uh, build 15 boats inside of glass bottles in a month?
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- CKChuck Klosterman
That would be extremely difficult, but why would that not be satisfying in the same way? Or you say, "Well, it's not physical." Okay. Well, then you could say like, okay, can you do 1,000 pushups and 500 sit-ups every day for a year? That's extremely difficult to do, okay?
- AGAdam Grant
Nobody looks at those, those challenges and just feels pure awe-
- CKChuck Klosterman
Yeah. Why? Why?
- AGAdam Grant
... the way people do when they look at a high mountain peak.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Yes.
- AGAdam Grant
I don't think that's because it's dangerous. I think it's because it looks like something humans could never reach.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Why can't they reach it? 'Cause you would die doing it.
- AGAdam Grant
Because it's hard.
- CKChuck Klosterman
People would be impressed if there was a staircase as high as K2, and you could walk up the staircase.
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- CKChuck Klosterman
But it would not be the same. One thing that I think has happened is that, you know, the world has changed in this way where a lot of the physicality and risk of life has been removed by modernity. Like, I, I can live my entire life in pretty much, you know, safety all the time. Like, I, like it's... The, the most dangerous thing I do is, like, drive my car or whatever, you know? What something like football does, and what something like mountain climbing does, or a lot of these things, is it is this sort of way to remember that there is a physicality to nature and a reality to the world. Sports allows us to have a little controlled glimmer back into that.
- 17:30 – 19:01
Why football dominates TV: scarcity of games, but also a “perfect” broadcast format
- AGAdam Grant
You know, I wanna, I wanna pick up on your point about stakes, because this is, this is a big conversation right now around why is football so much more popular than other sports? And I think one of the, one of the theories that gets a lot of support is the other sports have too many games, and they don't count. And if, you know, the NBA, for example, were to go to a 16 or 17-game season, all of a sudden everyone would be into it. Agree or disagree?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, well, for sure. I mean, that's a huge part of it. The reason football is so much more popular, though, it is its relationship to television. Football is accidentally the greatest possible product for the television experience, and this is completely by accident. Like, football started after the Civil War. There's no idea of what television's going to be. Television comes into prominence in the 1950s. If you describe football, it seems like it should be the worst thing. For television. A three-hour game has 11 minutes of action.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah.
- CKChuck Klosterman
There's a stoppage of play constantly. The clock runs while nothing is happening. You're watching the game from the side, for the most part, from a view where you can't even see the free safety. There's all of these things that if you just describe them one by one, would seem to suggest that football shouldn't be on television at all, and yet it's the best product possible because it's closer to what our subconscious mind actually wants from entertainment. Like, we think to ourselves, "Oh, I want wall-to-wall dynamic entertainment. I want just nonstop action." That's not how it is. What we say we want and what we actually want are very different.
- 19:01 – 23:16
Soccer vs. football: practicality, class dynamics, and the “true fans” problem
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah, I, I agree with you on that. I think where, where I struggle is this idea that the risk element, the safety factor, is an ingredient in that. Maybe in America, where generations of fathers have raised their, their sons primarily to, like, to think of this as the ultimate expression of manhood, right? That, like, football players are tough. But the most popular sport in the world by a long shot is soccer, right?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Sure, yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
And soccer is not a dangerous game at all compared-
- CKChuck Klosterman
It-
- AGAdam Grant
... to football
- CKChuck Klosterman
... yeah, it's not. But at the same time, soccer's the most popular sport in the world in part because it is the most practical to play. All you need are two sides and a kickable object. You know, you can use a can. You can use a human skull if you had to. Like-
- AGAdam Grant
Let's not. [laughs]
- CKChuck Klosterman
Yeah. Um, what, what also is just sort of fascinating is, like, you know, in soccer in most places is seen as the sport of the working class or the underclass, that, that they have the interest. Football in the United States doesn't operate in that way. To go to a football game in the United States, tickets tend to be hundreds and hundreds of dollars. The experience with parking and all that, it actually, in some ways, the live experience appeals to only the affluent. But it is also completely consumed by the underclass on tele- Like, it hits all demographics in a way that is different. Now, you might say, like, "Well, what does that have to do with violence or whatever?" Well, you know, maybe nothing, you know? Like, may- maybe what you're saying is true, that if somehow we made the game, like a, a flag version of it, maybe it would be just as popular, but I don't think so. I mean, because what, what you're talking about is something that is true about lots of things, which is that attempts to get more and more people to like something very often repels the people who love it, and that's who really matters.
- AGAdam Grant
This is the Kevin Kelly argument that you should aim to have 1,000 true fans when you're launching a product.
- CKChuck Klosterman
What's happening in college football right now, in the short term, is going to expand the popularity of the sport. If they make it more professional, if they, th- if they sort of allow, you know... The situation as it is, a team like Indiana, who's historically one of the worst programs in the country, can win the national championship. For people in Indiana, that's a magical thing. You know, that's gonna change the average football fan casually in Indiana. But over time, it's gonna be catastrophic for the sport, because it's not going to have the things that the people who love it still want. I mean, what people like about college sports is that it's regional. It's based on tradition. In a sense, when you watch a college game, you are unconsciously rooting for or against the kind of person you assume go to that institution, even though it doesn't really make sense, and that is what college football is moving away from. They are making it more into a professional sport. In the short term, that will be to their benefit. It will not in the long term.
- AGAdam Grant
So interesting. That, that I find very compelling. Is the hypothesis then that moves to broaden the appeal of any activity or experience in the short term expand because they, they reached new audiences, but in the long term they lose the most passionate, and that is ultimately responsible for their downfall?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, or yeah, it, it's... I mean, e- even if it isn't for their downfall, it absolutely changes the meaning of everything they do and the memory of what they did. I mean, uh, uh, just using music again as an example. This was a big thing in the '90s, the idea of selling out or whatever. You get a band like Soul Asylum, and Soul Asylum appeals to a certain kind of person, and then they sign to a major label, and they have hits and singles and "Runaway Train" and all of these things. Their audience expands fivefold. Like, you know, th- they, they sold more records, uh, than they had in their entire life. But it changed the way the people who bought the original records felt about the band, saw them differently. They didn't like the new thing as much. And, uh, granted, if you're a member of that band, you're like, "Well, it was the right decision over time. I was better being in that world than the world we had." But it, it depends on how, which meaning you want your work to have. I mean, like, like Lou Reed was very... He often would say, it's like sometimes you need to alienate your fan base. You need to force them to deal with the idea that you're not giving them what they want. You're allowing them to have what you do, you know?
- 23:16 – 26:09
Lightning round: nemesis vs. arch enemy, and what readers really wanted from ethics advice
- AGAdam Grant
Excellent. Okay, let's shift gears. I wanna go to a lightning round.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Okay.
- AGAdam Grant
You ready for this?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Sure.
- AGAdam Grant
First question is, what is the difference between an arch enemy and a nemesis?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, a, a, a nemesis is someone in your life who is a problem but who in a way you still like. In some ways, they are just a s- they're similar to you. They drive you crazy. They kind of push you. You see them as competition. And yet, if they died, you'd go to their funeral. You'll always have a drink with them. An arch enemy is someone who actually you see as a person who wants to destroy what you are, and that their existence is a problem, and you want, you feel the same way about them. A nemesis is, is like, you know, the, like the villain you like, and the arch enemy is the villain you hate so much you won't even call them a villain because that might give them satisfaction.
- AGAdam Grant
Wow. All right. So we want fewer arch enemies and more nemeses.
- CKChuck Klosterman
You only need one of, you only need one arch enemy. You don't want more than... You know, if you have more than one arch enemy, you're in real trouble. You could have a handful of nemesi.
- AGAdam Grant
Those are potentially productive rivals.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Yes. They, they, they are, they are rivals, uh, that, that, you know, you, you enjoy.
- AGAdam Grant
Next question is, you wrote "The Ethicist" column. What is the column that you never wrote and wish you had?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, basically, for people who don't know what this is, it's the, "The Ethicist" is almost like a "Dear Abby" column about ethics and morality for The New York Times Magazine. And people write in with their questions. And, you know, I was consciously looking for questions that were difficult, where you could f- m- really make a full on ethical argument on either side of it. Which meant, of course, the response was often, you know, adversarial because I, I'm like, I'm, I'm picking something that is kind of a 50/50 proposition and taking one side. The other thing that, I guess I almost found this disturbing, [laughs] is that what readers of that column wanted most was a real obvious situation where then the person who wrote it in could be aggressively blamed.
- AGAdam Grant
Ooh.
- CKChuck Klosterman
What they wanted was is someone to write a question in like, "Oh, sometimes I go into my daughter's room and I steal money from her purse because, uh, I, I'm going to Starbucks. Is it okay for me to do that?" You know? And they wanted me to be like, "No, it is terrible, and you're a terrible person." That seemed what they enjoyed-
- AGAdam Grant
[laughs]
- CKChuck Klosterman
... the most. It did give me a sort of dark sense of what the average person is looking for. Like, like, like, what they really want is for someone to be wrong and blamed for being wrong, and that was just... It was weird. Yeah. [laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. So, so they were hoping for moral takedowns.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Yes. That's w- that's really kinda all they wanted. They did not want nuance, which was the exact opposite of what I assumed. I assumed that this column would be almost like, you know, like, the nuance playground, this attempt to sort of look through different ways of viewing the world and different sort of modalities of morality. That's not how it really worked out, you know?
- 26:09 – 28:39
What the Ethicist taught: emotional investment can ruin moral judgment
- AGAdam Grant
Well, maybe not for all your readers, but certainly it had that effect on you. So what was something that you went in seeing black and white and came out rethinking and saying, "This is a lot more gray or nuanced than I thought it was"?
- CKChuck Klosterman
Well, when I think back is like, how did the ethicist sort of change the way I viewed the world? Uh, I guess the main thing it made me think was that once someone becomes emotionally invested in any question, how they view that thing almost becomes useless. Our culture is prone to sort of make the opposite argument. You know, the person most affected by something is the person whose ideas we should listen to, right? The person who's got the most sort of skin in the game or whatever, that's the person whose idea matters. I really kind of feel the opposite. Like, you have to be emotionally distanced from the affair to look at it and say like, "Well, this actually is what should happen." I know in your situation you wouldn't want that to happen or you would need this to happen because your emotional investment tells you that this is, like, non-negotiable. But as the ethicist, everything was negotiable, and I think that that was hard for a lot of people to think that an ethicist would look that way.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. Yeah. It, I mean, it, it sou- it sounds like you've arrived at a similar conclusion to, to Jon Haidt when before The Righteous Mind, he wrote what I think is his best academic paper, The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail-
- CKChuck Klosterman
Mm
- AGAdam Grant
... about how we have these strong, emotionally laden moral intuitions, and then we go and find reasons to justify them, and-
- CKChuck Klosterman
Absolutely
- AGAdam Grant
... and those become our moral principles.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Feelings are just thoughts. Like, it's just the fact that we've decided that it comes from the heart and the gut and all these things, that's just a interesting projection. All of these things are in our mind. So even our emotions are really just a form of thought. They're just thoughts that we sort of refuse to dissect.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. And they're often very poorly formed.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Or r- the, the formation isn't as important as just sort of how they are considered. I don't like the social shift we have made that seems to be that if, that, that emotions somehow are kind of untouchable. The fact that you feel something, that's, that's enough.
- AGAdam Grant
I think we've, uh, we've, we've challenged that perspective a number of times on this show, and I think, you know, emotions are potentially clues that ought to be investigated, but they are not recipes [laughs] for behavior. All right, last thing before we wrap, Chuck. I'm gonna give you the mic and, uh, ask if you have a question for me.
- 28:39 – 35:10
Self-awareness: short-term advantage or long-term obstacle to happiness?
- CKChuck Klosterman
It's kind of a two-part question, and, um, it is about self-awareness. First of all, how do you deal with someone or an individual who lacks self-awareness about themselves, but in a larger way, is self-awareness an emotional and psychological detriment?
- AGAdam Grant
Ooh.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Should self-awareness be something that we really aspire to? Because there's a lot of thinking, a lot of like, say, you know, Buddhist thinking or whatever. It would almost be like every moment you spend aware of yourself is removing you from the present moment, and that the idea of understanding who you are and why you do things is not really something to aspire to, but really an obstacle to happiness. I mean, would you agree with that, or do you disagree?
- AGAdam Grant
Oh, this is, this is such a, a heated debate in psychology. There's a camp of researchers who argue that it's adaptive to have positive illusions, to have an overly, [laughs] an overly high opinion of yourself, and that that's good for motivation, it's good for happiness, it helps you recover from breakups and, you know, relationship failures. And then, you know, there's a, there's a competing camp that says, "No, no, no. Our data show that those illusions can be adaptive in the short run. But in the long run, if you become untethered from reality, that's a problem. And if you cannot see yourself as other people see you, then you're not gonna be able to maintain healthy relationships. You're not gonna be able to have, you know, any sense of what your strengths are and then be able to put them to good use. You're not gonna be able to overcome your weaknesses. You're gonna have Achilles' heels." And yeah, I think the jury's still out on when and where sort of accurate self-awareness versus a positive tint is more helpful. I think that I, I, I've been pretty convinced by the short-term/long-term distinction that, yeah, in the moment it's more enjoyable, um, and it's more motivating to, to think more highly of yourself than maybe other people think of you. But in the long run, I think That makes it really difficult to achieve meaningful goals and maintain meaningful relationships. And so I would love for self-awareness to be a bigger focus in schools. I think that effective workplaces actually spend a lot of time helping people align their views of themselves with what their colleagues think of them, what their bosses think of them, what their clients think of them, and I would like more of that in the world, not less.
- CKChuck Klosterman
I hope you're right. But I, my suspicion is almost the exact opposite. My suspicion is that self-awareness is extremely valuable in the short term.
- AGAdam Grant
Hmm.
- CKChuck Klosterman
You have an understanding of actually what's really happening. Like, you're trying to make a point about something, you're trying to sell something, you're trying to produce something, and you actually a- are aware of like, "Well, this is how it is seen by other people. This is how I am seen." In a sense, it allows you sort of to, uh, to move through life with an idea of, "Well, I know this is how it's gonna come off to other people." But in the long term, I wonder if, say, my own self-awareness is a detriment to my ability to be happy. Because I have written books, right? But self-aw- I'm self-aware enough to realize that some of the greatest books of the 1980s have already disappeared entirely. It would be very unlikely if my work is to live on a- in any kind of meaningful way. It's very unlikely that even if it does, that will give me any satisfaction, because I have seen other people who have had that happen, and they seem even more miserable. The greatest writers and the greatest artists and the greatest creators of the 20th century tend to be unhappy people, even if they are aware of what they have done. So it seems to me like self-awareness is actually a real valuable tool to have in the toolbox, but a way to build a house that will never feel like home.
- AGAdam Grant
Fascinating. Well, you're, so what, what you're describing to me is a particular flavor of self-awareness that involves a, a really, a heavy dose of humility, where you can see your own insignificance and you can zoom out in terms of the timescale and in terms of the number of people in the world and say, you know, "How much do I really matter?"
- CKChuck Klosterman
Or, or yes, or, or almost, almost finding a way to be happy about the fact that it's not going to last forever. I mean, I think it's... I do wonder, like, what, what does self-awareness mean to someone like Taylor Swift, okay? Where you feel, many people feel like everyone's looking at me, and then there are some people where that actually is happening. But in like, in a larger sense, she also had to be aware of like, "Well, but I just make songs." And then somebody else comes in and goes like, "But a song can change someone's life. You're changing people's lives. So when you write these songs, you have to be aware you're going to change people's lives." And then that would be like a paralyzing realization.
- AGAdam Grant
There's a difference between being aware of your qualities and being aware of the potential impact of what you put out into the world, though. And it sounds like you're struggling more with the latter than the former.
- CKChuck Klosterman
It just seems like self-awareness, for me, f- tends to make me see things as meaningless.
- AGAdam Grant
Hmm.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Because I think if you're aware about yourself, you're aware about the world as well. And you know, you, you, you think about, you know, how much of creation just becomes sort of things that we temporarily cared about and now we don't. It was just sort of an exercise. You know, like in science, you know, there's like people talk about sort of the idea of like, you know, that there are these paradigm shifts that actually happen, and in between people are just doing, you know, kinda like normal science.
- AGAdam Grant
Normal science.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah.
- CKChuck Klosterman
You know?
- AGAdam Grant
Puzzle solving.
- CKChuck Klosterman
And that's like doing something. It sounds insulting to the scientists. It's almost saying like you're doing basic science or whatever. And yet I, I think that while I know a lot of scientists question that, I think that that application is true to many things, science and otherwise. That, that most of what is done is almost like, just like running through all the things till the next thing, the meaningful thing happens. And in all likelihood, I won't be involved with that.
- AGAdam Grant
Yeah. And I, I, I guess the reframe on that for me would be one, what did you think of the process of, of doing the basic science? And two, could the paradigm shifts happen without it?
- CKChuck Klosterman
The second answer, probably no. There wouldn't be a paradigm shift if there wasn't. The first one's tougher. First question is harder because it's just harder. You know what I'm saying?
- AGAdam Grant
Well, this existential discussion was brought to you by the former ethicist.
- CKChuck Klosterman
[laughs]
- AGAdam Grant
Chuck, this was so much fun. Thank you for joining us on ReThinking.
- CKChuck Klosterman
Hey, well, thanks for having me on, man. [outro music]
Episode duration: 35:12
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