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Talks at GoogleTalks at Google

David and Goliath | Malcolm Gladwell | Talks at Google

Malcolm Gladwell, the original speaker for the Authors at Google series, returns to Mountain View for a discussion about his latest book: "David and Goliath".

Prasad SettyhostMalcolm Gladwellguest
Oct 16, 201357mWatch on YouTube

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

Transcript

  1. 0:00 – 0:05

    Intro

    1. PS

      [gentle music]

  2. 0:05 – 2:46

    What the book argues: underdogs, asymmetrical conflicts, and how we misread advantage

    1. PS

      Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our Talks at Google session today. Um, we are very fortunate to have a guest amongst us who doesn't need any introduction. Seriously, how many people need an introduction to Malcolm Gladwell?

    2. SP

      [laughs]

    3. PS

      [laughs] Uh, M- Malcolm is, uh, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, et cetera. He has received many honors, but I think what he's probably proudest of having accomplished in his life must be the fact that he was our very first Authors at speaker way back in 2006.

    4. SP

      [laughs]

    5. PS

      And so that has started off a tradition-

    6. SP

      [clapping]

    7. PS

      ... um, where we now have had more than 1,000 speakers come over to Google and share with us their ideas. Um, Malcolm has recently w- have written a new book called David and Goliath, and that is what we'll be talking about today. Uh, the format for this, as you can guess, is more of a fireside chat. I have a set of questions that many colleagues have, uh, shared with me as things that they'd be interested in hearing Malcolm's perspectives on, but we'll certainly open it up for Q&A with all of you folks, too. And so, uh, there are mics and, uh, when it's time, I'll ask you to, uh, line up out there. Uh, and then we do have certainly books, uh, to pass around, um, of, uh, David and Goliath. So let's give a, a very warm round of welcome to, to Malcolm Gladwell.

    8. SP

      [clapping]

    9. PS

      Um, Malcolm, just to kick this off, what would you like to tell us about this new book and why you choose to write it?

    10. SP

      [laughs]

    11. MG

      Uh, well, it's a book called, uh, David and Goliath, and it's about underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants. Um, it's about a number of things, but it's principally about asymmetrical conflicts, um, and the strategies that are available to the, uh, weaker side. And, um, then sort of sec- secondarily, it's about, um, the accuracy of our assumptions about advantages and the nature of advantages and disadvantages. Um, so is our perception of, uh, in an asymmetrical conflict of one side as the favorite and the other side as the underdog accurate? Um, uh, or is it an illusion based on our own faulty assumptions about the nature of advantage? And then the third argument in the book is that, uh, has to do with, um, uh, uh, whether adversity is a more useful way

  3. 2:46 – 6:22

    Re-reading David vs. Goliath: superior weaponry and a giant’s possible impairment

    1. MG

      of learning certain kinds of lessons than, um, uh, than conditions without constraint. Um, so the... It's called David and Goliath because the story of David and Goliath is, in fact, a perfect illustration of this very thing. Um, David's choice of weapon, the sling, is actually an incredibly devastating weapon. Uh, it, uh, a rock pla- You place a rock in a leather pouch, and you swing it around at roughly six or seven revolutions per second. You release one of the chords. The rock goes forward at speeds, depending on the weight of the rock, speeds of probably, uh, 30 meters per second.

    2. PS

      Mm-hmm.

    3. MG

      Um, the stopping power of a typical projectile, um, launched in that way is the equivalent of a 45-caliber handgun. Um, and the accuracy of people in those years with one of these things was extraordinary. Ex- We know from primitive tribes that use slings in our, in our, um, that, uh, somebody with a couple of years of experience can, can hit a, could hit, could hit the center of that clock very easily from where I'm standing. Um, so David, up against Goliath, has superior technology. Um, routinely, slingers defeated heavy infantry, which is what Goliath is, in combat in m- in ancient times. In fact, ancient armies had slingers on their kind of payroll for that precise purpose. The minute he takes out the sling and changes the rules of combat, he is the favorite. He's not gonna lose, right? Because I think Goliath is lumbering... And then the other fascinating thing about that story is that Goliath, there's been this, all this speculation in the medical literature about what's going on with Goliath 'cause there's all these weird things he does. He moves very slowly. He's led onto the valley floor by an attendant. And the thinking is that he has what's called acromegaly, which is, uh, the condition caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes overproduction of human growth hormone. He's tall. He's a giant. Giants are often, you know, Andre the Giant had acromegaly. Uh, we think Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly. When people are unusually tall, that's one of the explanations. And acromegaly has a side effect, which is it compresses the optic nerves, and it, people with acromegaly are often have severe vision problems. Goliath is probably half blind, in other words. So a guy who's half blind goes up against another guy with an incredibly lethal weapon, accurate to within, you know, a hair's breadth from 50 yards away, and with the stopping power of a .45 pistol, and yet for 3,000 years, we've insisted that that guy is an underdog. It's insane, right?

    4. SP

      [laughs]

    5. MG

      It's, it's the most irrational reading of the allocation of advantages and disadvantages in that conflict. So the question is, if we are so profoundly irrational in the way we have read, um, the relative strengths of the two parties in that most famous of conflicts, how many other situations do we misread? And that's what the book's about, and I think the answer is lots.

    6. PS

      Hmm. A- a- and you do talk about quite a few real underdogs in the book as well, and one of the examples you were mentioning at, uh, lunch today was, uh, was about this girls' basketball team.

    7. MG

      Yeah.

    8. PS

      Tell us about that and how-

    9. MG

      Yeah

    10. PS

      ... that was shaped.

  4. 6:22 – 10:38

    A true underdog strategy: the girls’ basketball team that never learned to play “normal” basketball

    1. MG

      Well, this is one of the things I got, reasons I got started writing the book, is that I ran into a guy, some of you may know, the guy who founded TIBCO, this Vivek Ranadive. I met him at a conference and didn't realize who he was. Weirdly, by the way, I had another experience o- with the, i- in this exact same thing, where I met someone at a conference, did not realize where they were, who they were, and just had a conversation about sports as a result. The first person I did this with was Larry Page-

    2. PS

      [laughs]

    3. MG

      ... who I thought, I met him years ago, and I thought he was just a graduate student.

    4. PS

      [laughs]

    5. MG

      And I had no idea. And so I was like, "Where did you go to school?" He went, "Oh, you know, I'm from Michigan." So we just talked about Michigan State basketball for about 45 minutes, and then afterwards people were like, "Do you know who you were talking to?" I had no clue. Anyway-

    6. PS

      [laughs]

    7. MG

      I did the same thing with this guy, Vivek. So he started telling me about how he coached his daughter's, 12-year-old daughter's basketball team, and because he's Indian, he had no clue about basketball. So he goes to... I mean-

    8. PS

      [laughs]

    9. MG

      I-

    10. PS

      I can relate to that. [laughs]

    11. MG

      Okay, good. Just checking. He had, there was no natural reason to assume he would know a lot about basketball. Uh-

    12. PS

      Underdogs. [laughs]

    13. MG

      That's right, exactly.

    14. PS

      [laughs]

    15. MG

      Uh, although only India, a country of a billion people, could claim to be an underdog.

    16. PS

      [laughs]

    17. MG

      Um, so Vivek goes and studies, in his kind of software engineer kind of way, goes to study basketball games, and becomes convinced that Americans are completely irrational in the way they play basketball because he doesn't understand why, if you are the weaker party in a game, you don't do the full court press all the time, because you're gonna lose otherwise, right? And by not playing the full court press, you are allowing your opponent to do the, precisely the thing that your opponent excels at, which is to, to pass and dribble and execute choreographed plays. Why would you speed their, uh, their, um, uh, their, uh... Why would you, why would you allow them to get... Why would you l- uh, w- why would you give them the easiest possible route to doing the thing that makes them better than you? So he says, "Your only hope is to slow them down and to defeat them at the things they're not expert at," i.e. play the full court press. If it fails, so what? You're gonna lose anyway. But at least you-

    18. PS

      [laughs]

    19. MG

      ... you've raised your chances of losing from, uh, 95% to something, to something less than 95%, right? So he teaches this, takes this group of... And he, this is relevant to him because his daughter's team is utterly without any talent whatsoever.

    20. PS

      [laughs]

    21. MG

      These are, these are the very, very, very skinny, somewhat nerdy daughters of programmers from Silicon Valley.

    22. PS

      [laughs]

    23. MG

      Um, so he does this, and he, his strategy is, "We're not gonna learn, you're not gonna learn how to shoot, dribble, or pass."

    24. PS

      [laughs]

    25. MG

      Um, "We're not even gonna practice any kind of offensive plays. What you're gonna do is w- I'm gonna get you in really, really good shape, and I'm gonna teach you to do this for the entire game."

    26. PS

      [laughs]

    27. MG

      And what happens is that if you do this for the entire game in a basketball game made up of 12-year-old girls, the other team will not advance the ball past mid-court. And so Vivek's team starts to win by scores like eight-nothing, and-

    28. PS

      [laughs]

    29. MG

      Um, and they advance to the national championships. Um, it's so... It's such a hilarious story. And of course, the opponents are so, um, flummoxed by this, first of all, and then outraged, because the thing that Vivek is playing with his girls is not actually basketball, right?

    30. PS

      [laughs]

  5. 10:38 – 13:04

    Innovation from having nothing: why the middle is sometimes the worst place to be

    1. MG

      And, uh, but I lo- what I, it, that's a, that is a lovely illustration of my very point, because why does Vivek, why is he compelled to follow this strategy? Because he's got nothing, right? He's got bupkis. He, his girls are incapable of playing the game of basketball, right? So what does that do? It spurs him to find a completely alternate strategy that's far more successful. And this is, of course, the great story of innovation, right? That nothing, um, uh, uh, nothing acts as a greater spur to innovation than, um, the absence of advantage. Um, so if that's the case, you know, there must be situations where it is not an advantageous to have advantages, right? If his girls... The only situation where he's better off is if his girls are really talented. So there's a series of conditions. You can be, you could have no talent, you can have massive talent, and you can be anywhere in the middle. The only situation where he could also have reached the national championship is in the 99th percentile condition, where his team is massively talented. But, but had he been in anything other... So he's in the 1% condition. That's advantageous, 'cause that forces you to play the full court press. The 99th percentile condition is advantageous. But the 2 through 98 is not advantageous, because you have no incentive from 2 to 98 to try anything new, right? Your instinct is just to play the game the way the game is supposed to be played. So had his girls been even a little bit better, they would've been worse off.

    2. PS

      [laughs]

    3. MG

      Right? Yeah.

    4. PS

      So, so you're saying we should be as bad as we can be.

    5. MG

      Well-

    6. PS

      Is that it? [laughs]

    7. MG

      ... I'm saying that there are- there are situations where being bad is highly advantageous. Um, and, you know, if you read... I don't go into this in the book, but if you've read, you know, Innovator's Dilemma, that's what Innovator's Dilemma is all about, right? The disruptive outsider is the one who is incapable of meeting the marketplace needs as the market is traditionally defined. They can't do it, right? So what do they do? They, they try a completely new half-assed approach, which in the beginning doesn't work, right? But by that very nature of trying something completely outside the mainstream, they end up upending the, um... Were they any good, they would never be forced to do that. Um, so it's the same kind of principle.

  6. 13:04 – 16:01

    Elite institution cognitive disorder: when prestige harms outcomes

    1. PS

      Hm. Uh, one of the things that you talk about in the book, uh, which hinders your chance of improving your success is something that, uh, y- you say that we are all susceptible to, uh, and the acronym that you use is EICD-

    2. MG

      Yeah

    3. PS

      ... elite institution cognitive disorder.

    4. MG

      Disorder.

    5. PS

      Tell us about that-

    6. MG

      Well, that actually-

    7. PS

      ... because that's something I'm sure we don't know anything about.

    8. MG

      The-

    9. PS

      [laughs]

    10. MG

      I-

    11. PS

      Google

    12. MG

      ... I gave a talk on this at the Google Zeitgeist conference, and because I was having fun with it, I invented the acronym for the conference. It's not actually in the book. Um, elite, uh, institution cognitive disorder is the-

    13. PS

      [laughs]

    14. MG

      ... mistaken belief that attending the most elite institution you can get into is always in your best interest. This is false. Um, there are a number of many, many situations where it is not in your best interest to go to, for example, the best school you can get into, but rather it's in your best interest to go to, at the very most, your second choice, and probably, ideally, your third or fourth choice. Um, the reason is as follows: that the best predictor of success in a highly competitive environment, like for example, law school, or more relevant, the one I use in my book, is, uh, getting a STEM degree, getting a science and math degree. So we- science and math education at the, at the university level is marked by dropout rates that are north of 50%. Most people who try to get a science and math degree fail, right? So the question is, what is the... If you would like to get an, a science and math degree, what is the optimal strategy? And the optimal strategy is not to go to your best sc- the best school you get into. Why? Because the best predictor of success in getting a degree is not your absolute level of intelligence, but your relative level of intelligence. It's your class rank, not the, uh, not the, uh, not your, um... It's your, it's your rank relative to your peers in your class, not your SAT score or your IQ. So you wanna basically... Anyone who, uh, the, the... If you fall in the bottom third t- of your class, your chances of dropping out, uh, rise astronomically. So you should basically follow a strategy that minimizes your chances of falling in the bottom third of your class. What does that mean? Don't go to a good school.

    15. PS

      [laughs]

    16. MG

      Right? Now, what's fascinating about this, the, the amazing thing about this is that we appear to have consistently undervalued the psychological costs of, um, uh, finishing in the bottom half of any competitive situation. In other words, what we overvalue is the prestige of the institution, and what we undervalue is the cost to you of not succeeding at that institution. And so there's a beautiful illustration

  7. 16:01 – 19:28

    Evidence examples: economics PhDs and the psychological cost of being mid-pack

    1. MG

      of this in this study that was done of economics PhDs. So we, we do is we take the top 30 PhD programs in economics in America, and we break the students down by their, how they ranked in their class, um, in their graduate class, and then we look at their publication rate six years out of a- attaining their PhD. These are those who take the academic route. So in ac- in a- in something like economics, we use your publication rate as a, the number of journals, of papers you get accepted by prestigious journals, is used as a proxy for your success as an economist, right? What do we find when we look at that? What we find is the 95th percentile student at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, et cetera, publishes a lot of papers, as you would expect. They're brilliant. But the drop, the drop-off from the 95th to the 80th percentile is astronomical, and by the time you get to the middle of the cla- of the PhD class at elite schools, they're not publishing at all, right? In fact, the 95th percentile student at the worst PhD program you can find will publish more and be a more successful economist than the 75th percentile student at Harvard, p- MIT, and Stanford. Now, that is- there are many explanations for that, but the most parsimonious explanation is, it is so traumatic and humiliating and overwhelming to be in an elite program and see a handful of people just beat the crap out of you-

    2. PS

      [laughs]

    3. MG

      ... that you are permanently impaired.

    4. PS

      [laughs]

    5. MG

      The other... The, and my message at Google Zeitgeist was that the, the, that I think the logical response to this line of reasoning is that you should hire only on the basis of class rank and not on the basis of institution. In other words, you should have don't ask, don't tell, uh, when it comes to the name of your undergraduate and graduate institution. We should be indifferent to where you went to school. We should only care about how you ranked, because it's so, if it's so devastating to be anything, in, in anything other than the top third of your class, I don't want you-

    6. PS

      [laughs]

    7. MG

      ... if you weren't in the top third of your class, right? Now, I'm being playful a little bit here. But the point is- That we have... Do you see how we have allocated our strengths and our, our, our notion of what is an advantage and what is a disadvantage are allocated in an irrational way. We've, we have, we've become obsessed with the advantages of prestige, but we have not paid attention to the disadvantages of prestige, and that's a mistake.

    8. PS

      Some people seem to get motivated by being surrounded by people smarter than they are, right? So that's sort of-

    9. MG

      Well, not, not economics PhDs apparently.

    10. SP

      [laughs]

    11. MG

      Um, no, I mean, I would've... I intuitively I agree with you.

    12. PS

      Yeah.

    13. MG

      Right? I want to find reasons to like elite institutions. All my friends went to elite institutions. Should I have children, I would want them to go to elite institutions. You know, we're all powerfully... But the problem is that when we go and systematically look for those advantages, we can't find them.

    14. PS

      Mm.

    15. MG

      So there's a long, I don't go into my book, but there's a long and rich tradition, um, in economics, um, in which people hunt for the value of an elite insti- of elite education, and y- they can't find it.

    16. PS

      Mm.

  8. 19:28 – 21:48

    Does elite education add value? Selection effects and what studies fail to find

    1. MG

      Right? So we know that, uh, it is the case that a student who goes to Harvard earns money, more money in the course of their career than a student who goes to the University of Tennessee. Okay, but that's, doesn't tell you anything at all. What you really need to do is to find two students, both of whom go to Har- get into Harvard, one of whom goes and one goes to University of Tennessee, and then see what, compare their career earnings. And when you equalize for the person, you can't find any difference. In other words, it's not that Har- that Harvard is making you earn a lot of money, it's the kind of person who gets accepted by Harvard makes a lot of money.

    2. PS

      Yeah.

    3. MG

      Right? And then there's an even cleverer line of thing which there's now been, like, 10 studies on this and it's so interesting, which is they now look at elite high schools. So what is the benefit of going to a selective high school? Now, intuitively you would think the, it must show up. There must be some, you must be able to see, whether in test scores or the quality of the h- college you go to, or somewhere we must see some impact of that, and we can't find, uh, we can't find any advantage. It just, everything seems to... Once you do that equalization thing, um, uh, you, if you are a smart kid, in other words, it doesn't matter what school you go to. Um, you'll, you know, smart is smart, um, which is intriguing, um, finding.

    4. PS

      Very neat. Thank you. Um, I wanna switch topics a little bit. Um, you know, you do a remarkable job of popularizing, uh, social sciences and, uh, by the way, I forgot to introduce myself. Uh, I'm Prasad Setty. I'm part of People Operations, and I lead the analytics group, which is composed of many social scientists, um, who, who love the fact that, uh, Malcolm's work and, uh, you know, gets, gets their kind of thinking into the public limelight. Um, how do you distill and aggregate all of this research that's done in the social sciences and come up with what you think are the most, uh, cogent arguments? Because, uh, as you've mentioned, there are lots of studies done on similar topics, and some of them are, uh, point towards one direction and others point towards a different direction, et cetera.

  9. 21:48 – 24:13

    How Gladwell synthesizes social science: looking for clusters, not lone outliers

    1. MG

      Yeah. Well, I mean, you're looking for trends in the research. Um, and so for example, the studies I was just mentioning about trying to measure the value of elite schools, that's a very clear trend, and you've got a cluster of studies that have been done in the last two or three years using pretty rich data sets that are all coming to roughly the same conclusion. So when you see that kind... That's the sort of thing I'm looking for, is what you wanna steer clear of are the one really wacky study that is sitting all by itself. Um, that doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just you have to be approach it with more caution. But, um, there's no shortage. I mean, the thing that's fascinating about being a sort of a student of academic research is that, um, the number of things that on an academic level are being, ideas that are being, um, pursued and conclusions that are being drawn that are quite dramatically at odds with conventional wisdom-

    2. PS

      Mm

    3. MG

      ... is enormous.

    4. PS

      Mm.

    5. MG

      They're... If you're in the game of, in other words, looking, um, in academic research for ways to challenge the way we s- think about things, there's an embarrassment of riches out there. I mean, it's not hard to do. So, um, to me, what always amazes me, uh, is how much, um, fascinating and useful material, um, lies buried-

    6. PS

      Mm

    7. MG

      ... in academia. Just never sees the light of day because n- no one, uh, bothers to go and, and write about it and popularize it. I mean, it's astounding how... Then, you know, if you talk to academics, they have the list of things that they think that the rest of the world is doing wrong. It's like, it's like this long, right? Um, so it's like, it's, it's, it's e- it's, it's not a very difficult process to, um-

    8. SP

      [laughs]

    9. MG

      ... to, to do so.

    10. PS

      Yeah. Um, related question. Uh, you use a lot of stories to bring your thoughts to life, and the stories add a lot of emotional richness, and you can really connect with them. Uh, but how do you, how do you ensure that the stories that you're picking are the most representative of the-

    11. MG

      Yeah

    12. PS

      ... the phenomena that you're trying to describe? Because, uh, you could probably find a story to fit any theory that you want-

    13. MG

      Yeah

    14. PS

      ... one story.

    15. MG

      Yeah.

    16. PS

      Yeah.

  10. 24:13 – 26:15

    Storytelling vs. representativeness: using narrative to carry research, not replace it

    1. MG

      Um, yeah, you ca- I mean, that, so the, there's a whole set of trade-offs here. Um- Storytelling, by definition, has one great disadvantage, which is you are representing a single narrative, a single experience. Um, on the other side of the equation, the story has a massive- storytelling has a massive advantage, which is there is no better way to communicate and move people than through story. Um, so you- what you look- what I've always tried to do is, th- the reason I try to balance storytelling and kind of social science research is that I'm trying to find some kind of middle ground. I'm trying to find an observation that is being made in the literature or by academics, and to illustrate it by means of a story. So it's, it's rare that the story comes first. It's not that I hear something cool and then hunt for data to fit that. It's the other way around. I look for an idea that's been expressed in academia and I say, "Well, how will I, uh, how can I make that story, uh, resonant? Um, uh, make that sort of observation resonant?" So you, you, you hunt for stories that match this kind of, um, uh, idea that you feel has some, um, firepower behind it. Um, so there's... But you know, that said, it's a necessarily imperfect process. All my books are massively imperfect. I don't imagine that anyone will ever agree with 100% of the things in my book. I don't even want them to agree with 100% of the things in the book. I- i- that's not what you w- you, you're not looking for converts, right? You're, you want people to start conversations. And, um, uh, people, writers who are looking for converts are scary. Um, I think you should... What you're looking for is you wanna, you want people to engage

  11. 26:15 – 29:48

    An example of provocation: performance-enhancing drugs and inconsistent moral logic

    1. MG

      with the ideas and say, you know... I, I did a s- a piece for The New Yorker a couple weeks ago about, uh, doping in sports. And I happen to be, I'm a big runner, I happen to be, I'm a huge fan of track and field. If my favorite runners were found to be using some kind of PEDs, I would be devastated. Nonetheless, my piece is all about look at it from Lance Armstrong's point of view, right? Or look at it from Alex Rodriguez's point of view. I was simply pointed out that the arguments that we use to justify our prohibition on performance-enhancing drugs are really lame.

    2. PS

      [laughs]

    3. MG

      They're insanely lame, and you can't run around, you know, condemning people and suing them and putting them in jail, whatever we do, on the basis of insanely lame arguments. So lame argument number one, for example, the one that I cannot get over is, in baseball, you are allowed, if you're a pitcher, to replace your ulnar, uh, collateral ligament in your elbow, which is the principal ligament you use when you throw a baseball, to take it out and replace it from, with a tendon taken from another part of your body or from a cadaver, if you so choose. This tendon will ba- will have performance characteristics that are infinitely superior to the ligament that nature gave you. You can swap it out, bring in the bionic ligament, extend your career, be able to throw the ball harder. And what do we do? We think that's fantastic. We embrace 75% of pitchers in the Major League have had this procedure done, right? No one bats an eyelash. The guy who pioneered the procedure is considered to be a hero, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Alex Rodriguez is a baseball player who decides to take, uh, i- uh, uh, testosterone, a naturally na- He's not taking something from a cadaver. He's taking a naturally occurring hormone approved by the FDA and available through prescription to everyone in this room, and he's decided to take it, and what happens? He's considered to be a massive villain. Lance Armstrong takes his own blood-

    4. PS

      [laughs]

    5. MG

      ... his own blood and re-injects himself with his own blood, and he's considered a villain. So wait a minute. On the one hand, people are importing cada- uh, tendons taken from cadavers, right? Which profoundly alter the performance characteristic of the arm they use to pitch, and that's fine. But you can't take your own blood and re-inject yourself with it, and, and if you do that, you're a cheater. Explain to me why that's... You know, I am perfectly willing to go after Lance Armstrong once someone explains, so once someone makes sense of that contradiction. So there is a case where, do I expect to convince all of you of this argument? No. But if I force, by writing stuff like that, force people to just sit down and actually come up with better arguments for why we hate performance-enhancing drugs, then I will have succeeded, I think.

    6. PS

      Uh, I guess, uh, that gives us a new benefits idea for Google-

    7. MG

      [laughs]

    8. PS

      ... bionic ligaments for, for our software engineers, so they can code faster.

    9. MG

      [laughs]

    10. PS

      Um, uh, y- you talk about how lots of studies in academia never find it to the outside world.

    11. MG

      Mm-hmm.

    12. PS

      What can we as society do to improve the chances of that, right? Because there is so much knowledge, and it seems like it could be useful in everyday life.

  12. 29:48 – 32:02

    Why academic knowledge doesn’t spread: the social necessity of respecting expertise

    1. MG

      Yeah. Um, it's a really interesting question. Um, the, i- in general, uh, I think we have to understand that the, the kind of respect that- the appropriate attitude of non-specialists, uh, to specialists ought to be one of respect, not, um, uh, uh, not in necessarily enthusiasm. You shouldn't always accept what the expert says is to be as true, but you should be respectful of what they know and you don't. Um- And I think that that is an ongoing- unless you take great pains as a society to constantly, um, reinforce that idea, that experts deserve our respect, experts will not get respect. You're seeing a, you're seeing, this is on display right now, right? You have a group of lawmakers who have no respect for the expertise of, uh, the economics profession. I literally saw a guy on TV the other day, uh, some lawmaker from somewhere, who's like, "I don't know anything about economics, uh, you know, I know something about what it takes to run a household" or something. This is a guy who's in Congress. I mean, it's, that's-

    2. PS

      [laughs]

    3. MG

      That's problematic, right? Um, but you, there has to be a kind of, um, uh... We, this is something that you, you can't ever let up on enforcing that as a core ethic. In a, in a technologically complex society, uh, expertise is at the heart of all progress, right? And you have to create the social conditions under which expertise is respected, and if you let, if, if you let down your guard at all on that, crazy things start to happen. You have people running around saying that they don't wanna vaccinate their children, and you have people running around saying that it's fine if we o- defaulted in two weeks. And we have, you know, there's this kind of madness that will, that will take, that will take, take over. So that's a, I mean, that's, uh, not an answer to the question because it's really hard to inculcate that, but the people in this room are, and me, we're all, we're the people who have to do that kind of work, right?

  13. 32:02 – 34:35

    Personal impact: how 'Blink' changed his confidence in decision-making

    1. PS

      Yeah. Makes sense. Um, why don't folks start lining up, uh, at the mics? I think we have one out here, um, if you wanna ask a question. Uh, but I, I'll keep going on until, uh, until you do. Um, as you think about all, all the work that you have done, has there been an insight or two that you have captured that's really profoundly shaped your own behavior, your own life?

    2. MG

      Uh, that's interesting. Um, I, uh... Well, Bl- I, the book that, Blink, my second book, was the book that affected my, uh, it so profoundly undermined my belief in my own capacity to make good decisions, that I feel I floundered for several years [laughs] after. Um-

    3. PS

      [laughs]

    4. MG

      But in all kinds of ways, I just came away from that book, um, realizing that the degree to which our, um, th- th- that we massively underestimate the role of the irrational in our own lives. Um, and we're constantly making up stories that make it sound to ourselves like we're behaving in a logical, commonsensical manner, and we're simply not. Um, you know, the... Some guy, I, one of the guys I run with is a social psychologist, and he was telling me about this study that was done in, recently, where that looked at the, um, how the, um, the willingness of a judge to grant parole varied by the time of day. So right before lunch, judges are really, really crabby and don't grant parole at all, and then when they come back from lunch, their rates soar, right? That's the kinda thing where I would imagine that if you lined up all the criminal judges in America and you told them that, they would dispute that so vigorously, right? They're convinced that they approach every case the same, and yet you do the simplest analysis and you discover a very disturbing, um, uh, pattern. Now, you know, maybe some part of that is artefactual. Who knows? But it certainly merits some, um, investigation, right? Well, I feel like there's that, there's versions of that everywhere, and we're so resistant to kind of acknowledging that about our lives. Um-

    5. PS

      Great. Why don't we take one of the audience questions?

  14. 34:35 – 43:16

    Audience Q&A: organizations, hierarchy, and the psychology of ranking

    1. SP

      Um, so I was really fascinated by your zeitgeist talk about elite institutions, and thinking if we take Google as a potential elite institution, I'm curious your thoughts on the potential damage we may be doing to ourselves and our employees, because not everyone here can be the superstar, and yet most of the people coming here were superstars before.

    2. MG

      Yeah.

    3. SP

      So I'm curious if you have any research or thoughts-

    4. MG

      Yeah

    5. SP

      ... on the impact of that for organizations.

    6. MG

      Yeah, so this is a very interesting question. So how do you restructure organizations such that you minimize the psychological damage of people at the bottom of the hierarchy? So one way is to limit the notion of hierarchy, right? So what is, the thing that is so toxic about, uh, elite colleges in science and math programs is that necessarily there is a hierarchy. You give out grades, and you know where you rank, and you're in a classroom setting where you're all trying to do the same thing, so you can easily compare yourself to your peers and know whether you're behind or... That, those conditions don't necessarily apply in the workplace. It's possible to construct workplaces that don't have the toxic element of hierarchy to the same degree, right? That's the-

    7. SP

      So do you think we shouldn't give grades, then, at Google? [laughs]

    8. PS

      [laughs]

    9. MG

      Well, I don't know how you, I don't know how you... No, I mean, it wouldn't be as explicit as grades, but I'm saying that there are... You can organize a workplace in a very, very hierarchical way, or you can choose not to. Um, the other thing that it would tell you is, it would, it would say something about whether, about the size of teams as well. I mean, it would seem to argue, I would think, um, although maybe not. It says, it's really about the structure of, of teams. That to the extent that you can keep things that, um, that are as flat as possible, I think you minimize the damage caused by, um, hierarchies.

    10. SP

      Hi. Thanks for coming to speak. So I just started in people operations about a month ago, and since I've been here, I've had a lot of people recommend, uh, Strength Finder and other books like that. And I've taken a look at it, and I can't help but think that things like that are kind of, uh, as the great skeptic James Randy said, "Flimflam," um, or like modern-day ps- uh, pseudo-social science. And I'm wondering what... If you have any insight into those because I know companies spend a lot of money buying those kinds of books for their-

    11. MG

      Yeah

    12. SP

      ... employees.

    13. MG

      I've, uh, I have to confess, I've never read any of those.

    14. SP

      Mm-hmm.

    15. MG

      I mean, I, um, I know that they're very successful. Um-

    16. SP

      In sal- in sales or in what they set out to do?

    17. MG

      In sales.

    18. SP

      Yeah. Okay. [laughs]

    19. MG

      Um, um, but I, I guess I would only say, it, it should... It's interesting though that there is such a hunger for that kind of thing. You know, people... I always say this, people are experience rich and theory poor.

    20. SP

      Mm-hmm.

    21. MG

      That most people necessarily, um, lack access to organizing principles in their life. Um, if you're not immersed in the world of academia, and you don't have the leisure to produ- to follow and acquire grand theories, you don't have theories to explain things. So whenever there is someone comes along with an explanatory mechanism for something that is, that you're experience rich in, it's enormously attractive. Um, so that, you know, if that's a lousy... If Strength Finder is lousy, it's incumbent on us just to come up with better and more sophisticated ways of, um... But it's, it's clear that there is a massive demand for something, um, to allow people to organize their experience.

    22. SP

      Hey, Malcolm, my name is Mike. Thanks for being here. Um, my question is kinda going back to the value of elite institutions again. Um, so, so you talk about how someone who goes to Harvard, someone who goes to University of Tennessee, they are intrinsically gonna do the same if they're, um, you know, on the same intelligence level. So I guess my question is, you know, you hear you're kind of the average of the five people you hang around. You surround yourself with s- people who are smarter than you, you will naturally elevate your level. Do you believe in that, or do you believe that's kind of, you know... It seems like your theory is, is kind of, uh, puts the merits towards that-

    23. MG

      Yeah

    24. SP

      ... you know, thought process.

    25. MG

      Well, there's a so- a couple of things. One is that, um, one of the implications of that argument is that there are a lot more very able people at, um, non-elite institutions than we think. And actually, this is kind of a fascinating thing. So to take a step backwards, uh, the larger question is, how efficient are elite educational institutions, um, in as search engines for talent? What percentage of the, of qualified students do they actually uncover and... And the answer is, we used to think they were very efficient. What we have discovered recently is they're actually quite inefficient. In other words, enormous numbers of very, very intellectually capable people never even come close to the 250 top colleges in the country. So non-selective colleges have a much larger share of, uh, of the intellectual aristocracy than we would imagine. So that's... So, so to your question, if you go to the University of Tennessee, you can find lots and lots and lots of very, very intellectually cap- capable people to hang around with. And you probably will grav... If you are that kid who could have gone to Harvard, you will probably gravitate to those five. The difference being that... So you'll be surrounded by peers who may be every bit as able. The difference is that you will almost certainly be the top of your class as opposed to running the risk of being in the middle to bottom. So you're getting two, um, benefits, intellectual benefits, as opposed to maybe only one. Um, the other thing, of course, is that, uh... Well, I'll leave it at that. There are many, many parallel arguments along these lines. Now, of course, not everyone can follow this strategy. If everyone does it, it ceases to work, right? [laughs]

    26. SP

      [laughs]

    27. MG

      Everyone can't go down a notch or [laughs] ... So the whole thing is, I... If you're gonna follow the strategy, do it quick before I sell too many books-

    28. SP

      [laughs]

    29. MG

      ... and the advantage is wiped out. But, uh... [laughs]

    30. SP

      Okay. Thank you.

  15. 43:16 – 46:17

    Media diet and serendipity: sports obsession, books, and physical libraries

    1. SP

      Hi, Malcolm. Thanks for coming in. Um, my question's a little bit around, I guess, your media diet. Obviously, as someone that writes a lot about social science, you have to go through a lot of academic journals. But what I was actually really interested to see was that you had a really, I think, cogent and, and fluent conversation with Bill Simmons often on his blog about sports and different topics. So I was wondering a little bit about your media diet outside the academic journal sphere-

    2. MG

      Yeah

    3. SP

      ... and, like, how you kinda keep your mind and horizons broad-

    4. MG

      Yeah

    5. SP

      ... across different topics.

    6. MG

      Well, I'm a huge sports fan, so there's an enormous amount of consumption of sports-related stuff. Uh, and, um, particularly these days, I, I spend an enormous amount of time watching obscure European track and field meets on sort of livestreams at two in the morning.

    7. SP

      [laughs]

    8. MG

      Um, so there's that. And then-

    9. SP

      [laughs]

    10. MG

      Uh, but I think, you know, my strategy has always been you can't... Y- you have to very consciously differentiate yourself from where you think your professional peer group is going. Um, so the, to the extent that people are mi- ... To the extent that people migrate to things that are accessible online, I feel I should o- migrate to things that are inaccessible online. So the value-- Or to the extent that people stop reading books and read, I feel I need to read more books. Um, so I've been tr- What I've been trying to do is to kind of... It's why I spend a lot of time in l- actual physical libraries reading things in hard copy, because there's a kind of a serendipity that you get when you... This is not in any way meant as a criticism, by the way, of search engines, for example-

    11. SP

      [laughs]

    12. MG

      ... which are incredibly useful, but they are, but they, you know, they also have limitations. They reward a certain kind of serendipity, and they punish another kind of serendipity, right? And if you really wanna, if you're interested in serendipitous learning, as I am, much of what I uncover is uncovered serendipitously. You have to be a student of all of the different mechanisms of chance encounters with the unusual and the insightful. And so that means that not only do I spend a lot of time screwing around online on databases, but I also very, very consciously make sure that I go to physical libraries and walk through the stacks. And even something as simple as you're interested in one book, and then you go and you just look at all of the books that surround it, right? And the connections are not always... The connections are, there's, there are connections between them, but it's a different kind of connection than they would be connected online. It's not a keyword connection, right? It's a thematic connection, or it's a... So there's all these sorts of... You have to be a student of these kinds of, um, of the, of the different ways in which ideas cluster. Um, and so that, and I've been, I've thought a lot about that in recent years as a way of distinguishing myself from, um, other journalists.

    13. SP

      Thank you.

  16. 46:17 – 53:24

    Reconciling advantages and disadvantages: desirable difficulty, dyslexia, and embracing contradiction

    1. SP

      Hi, I have a quick question. In your last, uh, book, Outliers, you spoke about, uh, the advantages of, you know, whether it's being born in a certain year or having access to the earliest computers and stuff like that, and in this book, you have a whole new section called The Disadvantages of Being Advantageous.

    2. MG

      Mm-hmm.

    3. SP

      I was wondering if you see a contradiction or if, how do you reconcile the two?

    4. MG

      Yeah. Well, I have several answers to that question. Um-

    5. SP

      [laughs]

    6. MG

      Uh, so there's clearly a difference between... The notion that I play with in this book is called desirable difficulty, and desirable difficulty is a class of, uh, of difficulties that have paradoxical outcomes, that force you to do things that end up being advantageous. So, um, there's a whole, there's a whole school of, of, of research around these people at UCLA called the Bjorks, who try and uncover specific examples of desirable difficulties. A good one would be, for example, a simple one would be, um, studying strategies. Uh, the, to the extent that you can make your studying process more difficult, you will retain more information. So the Bjorks have this beautiful data that says if you're learning, um, something very complex, um, the best thing to do is to learn it in small chunks. So say I have three tasks that require mastery. I have two choices. I can master the first, master the second, and master the third, or I can break up all the learning into 10-minute chunks and do 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minute, 10. They say do the latter, even though it's harder, even though you have to start over every time, right? You go 10 minutes, 10 minute, then you come back to the first thing, and you're like, "Oh, what was I doing again?" And there's, like, this re-entry problem. It's like, the re-entry problem is not a problem. It's why you will remember and master it way better. It's forcing you to, your brain to kind of go into a different mode. So they, so the idea is that, yeah, there's a set of things, getting access to... If learning programming is, requires 10,000 hours of mastery, and you're in a condition where access to computers is constrained, early access to computers will be an unalloyed advantage, right? But that doesn't mean that there aren't other situations that we could find, um, where what looks like where access to something Um, preferentially may look advantageous and not be ad- advantageous at all. So my discussion of dyslexia in the book is all about conditions under which dyslexia can... Not knowing how to read can be advantageous. Why? Because the strategies that you might follow to work around your reading problem can end up being more helpful to you than reading. So I g- I have this long thing about the David Boies, the lawyer, who basically can't read, and as a result, developed an incredible capacity to listen and c- an incredible memory. If you're a trial lawyer, believe it or not, it's more important to have an amazing memory and be a g- incredible listener than it is to know how to read. Right? Not if you're a litigator or a corporate lawyer, but if you're a trial lawyer, yeah. Not if you're a, sorry, corporate lawyer, but if you're a trial lawyer. So we can clearly... I don't think it's... We can clearly say, "Look, there are desirable difficulties, and there are undesirable difficulties." Um, that said, on a broader macro level, is there a possible contradiction? Yeah.

    7. SP

      [laughs]

    8. MG

      But-

    9. SP

      [laughs]

    10. MG

      So what? Like-

    11. SP

      [laughs]

    12. MG

      ... we're all, we're all adults. I don't know why people are so terrified of contradiction. I think contradiction is like, it's fine. I mean, I can identify hundreds of contradictions in my own life. All of you can. It's... In fact, I've, I've recently been... I've gotten so interested in this, I've... That I'm doing it... I was... This next project I'm working on is all about the centrality of contradiction in human behavior, and that instead of... The idea has always been that as human beings, what we seek to do is to locate and extinguish contradictions. I think that's nonsense, and there's a lot of very interesting social science research which suggests to the contrary. What we do is we exploit, we aggressively exploit our contradictions. They enable us to do all kinds of not always good things. Um, so I'm very interested in, I was talking about this at lunch, very interested in this notion that, um, we are sometimes behave generously or proac- or prosocially towards an outsider group in order to justify turning on them in some future situation. And I g- they... I have this, this, the, the, c- i- the incredible example of this is Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, who spends the 1930s pretending, not pretending, pretending, convincing himself that he's a Zionist. He, uh, reads books on Zionism. He goes to Jerusalem. He, uh, hangs out with the rabbis of Vienna. He, uh, teaches himself Hebrew, and he does this, and what that means is that when it comes time to... And he's responsible in the '30s for deporting thousands of Jews from Vienna to Palestine. What does that do? It enables him, when he, when he turns to exterminating Jews, to be able to say to himself, in his grotesque way, "I don't hate Jews. I was deporting them. I was saving them. I was reading Hebrew and going to Jerusalem." And, and at one of the death camps that he sets up, he builds a library, and he imports Judaica from a prominent Jewish library in Prague, and he would go and visit this place, this grotesque concentration camp, and sit in the library and read ancient Hebrew manuscripts, right? He... At his core, this man had a massive contradiction, and he wasn't driven to resolve it. He used it to justify everything he did over the course of the war, right? Now, that's a horrible, extreme, grotesque example. But my point is that we all have within us these contradictions, and I've, I, I think that's part of what it means to be human. And just as you can use contradictions for terrible ends, like Eichmann did, they are also, at the same time, the ways in which we explore new ideas and expose ourself to risky things and do all kinds of things that are ultimately positive. And if you're not willing to tolerate contradiction, um, in your own life, I think you're, you're, you're, um, limiting yourself in a certain sense. Um, uh, you're also running, you're running huge risks. I mean, you know, like Eichmann route is the risky route, right? But at the same time, someone who insists on that everything be absolutely consistent is leading an impoverished life, um, I think. Um, so I, yeah, I try to resolve time.

    13. SP

      Thank you.

    14. MG

      Why don't we take one more question?

  17. 53:24 – 57:23

    When giants fall: organizational mortality, talent recycling, and a parting provocation

    1. SP

      In the context of Google and the innovator's dilemma that you mentioned earlier-

    2. MG

      Mm-hmm

    3. SP

      ... when you are a giant, how do you stay a giant and kind of, towards the book, not be slayed by a David? [laughs]

    4. MG

      Oh, wow. Well, you know you will be eventually, right?

    5. SP

      [laughs]

    6. MG

      Um, [laughs] I mean, give me an example of... You know, there is these... What's fascinating about... So in your space, there's kind of IBM, which does this thing which in retrospect seems unbelievable, right? That they managed to kind of resuscitate themselves and transform themselves. But they had... They might be a sui generis. You know, it's... Maybe they were just in such an unusual position and had... Were so deeply rooted in so many parts of the world and had such a deep bench that that was possible. But the rule is you don't get to... It is not gonna last longer than a generation or so. And maybe that's, maybe part of the answer is that's fine, as long as you don't think about Google, as long as you think about you, right? So, um, years ago, I remember doing this. It's the first time I, this was hit home to me. Um- I went to Rochester, and in Rochester, in the, it used to be a high technology hub, right? Kodak, uh, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb. But one of the biggest employers in Rochester, high-tech employers in the 1960s, was, uh, General Dynamics, I think General Dynamics, one of the big defense contractors. They employed vast numbers of engineers, and their, they basically, their business model implodes after the Vietnam War, and they shut down their operations in Rochester and moved away. And everyone said, "Oh my God, it's over," right? One of the biggest employers in town has folded. And what happened if you went back 10 years later was you discovered that the talent that left, that was kicked out of General Dynamics, went on to start so many startups in Rochester that they sparked a whole second wave that ended up actually being, um, in terms of employment and income brought into the city, greater than the benefit General Dynamics had, had risen. In other words, so Google may f- fall one day, probably will, but you won't. You all, guys, will all, hopefully, many of you, will go on and do other incredibly cool things because of what you, in part, what you learned while you were here. So you, you can look at it two ways. There's a pessimistic view, but there's also a view that says, "No, it's part of the natural cycle." You probably don't wanna be working at Google- Am I, is this horrible to say? [laughs]

    7. PS

      [laughs]

    8. SP

      [laughs]

    9. MG

      ... um, 25 years from now. You know, you, and nor does society want you to be if, if this company doesn't evolve in dramatic... Maybe it will. I mean, I'm just using Google as a stand-in for, let's use another company. Let's say-

    10. PS

      [laughs]

    11. MG

      Let's say Microsoft.

    12. PS

      [laughs]

    13. MG

      I mean, at this point, would the world be better off if Microsoft disappeared tomorrow? M- yeah.

    14. SP

      [laughs]

    15. MG

      How many, how many unbelievably talented people are trapped working on the umpteenth version of Word, right?

    16. SP

      [laughs]

    17. MG

      Like, that's not a good use of 150 IQ points. Um, so I don't, you know, I would, I'd be, I would be less, um, I'd be more kind of sanguine about this problem than you might be at the moment.

    18. PS

      Awesome. Thank you.

    19. SP

      [laughs]

    20. PS

      I can't think of a better note to end on, so. [clapping] [outro jingle]

Episode duration: 57:23

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