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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's on! It's on!
Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naima Raza. Today our guest is Adam Grant. He's the organizational psychologist and the Wharton Business School professor who's just launched his sixth book. It's called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
Kara, have you unlocked your hidden potential yet? No, I don't agree with him on everything. I do think certain people are talented at certain things. I think a lot of people can find potential they didn't have, but I'm more of a, there are some special people in the world that are good at art or math or different things, but that's not his argument.
which I appreciate his argument. Yeah, the nut graph of this book is that achievement is not based on your innate talent. And he gives the example of himself being someone who could barely touch his toes to becoming someone who qualified as a junior Olympian as a diver. It's kind of like Malcolm Gladwell's tendency
10,000 hours, but it's more woo-woo, I think. More scientific and more woo-woo. Yeah. A lot of organizational psychologists and others are trying to figure out how and why we do things. Malcolm is a more popular one, I would say. You know, the idea of how things happen or why we choke or whatever the topic happens to be. In this case, a lot of people wonder why people are good at things, the idea of exceptionalism.
There's a big deal in tech is tech exceptionalism, that they should be allowed to do different things because they're special. And I think it's a real disease, actually. They're not special, Kara. No, they're not. No. And so... You fact-checked that. I fact-checked that for many decades now. But that there is that mythology and this idea of the genius versus everybody else, you know, that someone is... And there are certain skills that actually you can learn over time. And some people are advantaged because of wealth or money or anything that puts them ahead of others. Right.
But he's saying don't walk away from something you want just because it's not easy for you at the first blush, kind of, is part of his argument. And he and Malcolm Gladwell, they're part of this kind of
popular science culture, and Adam Grant in particular had a hit TED Talk, I think, if you can call TED Talks hits. Thank you. You can. It's on the theme of languishing. He's done a couple more. He's drilling into the science of motivation and really all things. I kind of feel like positivity, motivation, burnout, what he calls bore out, which is the opposite of burnout, which is probably something we're more likely to suffer from. And a lot of
touchy-feely stuff, to use a business school term. Adam Grant is also one of these people who's become a personality out of business schools. Scott Galloway from NYU, your pivot co-host, of course, is another. Graham Weaver from my alma mater at Stanford is another person. And business influencers, I guess you would say. Yeah, business influencers. What do you think of that genre? I think it's fine. I think it's great. You know, it depends on how you take it. I think a lot of people do consult, you know, whether it was the Six Sigma with GE. You know, they all have their own little
versions of how to manage a company and how to figure out people. And there's a lot of softness to managing that's not, you know, just numbers, just get the numbers done. And so I think it's important to, especially if you're a manager, to understand where achievement comes from. You know, a lot of it changes over time. Like, oh, you're supposed to do this. Then you're supposed to, it's like that with food or health or things. Oh, you shouldn't eat, you know, Atkins, but not Atkins. Yeah, right, exactly. And so, you know, these things tend to come in and out.
But I do think there's some truisms here about how to do better. And a lot of people are trying to better themselves, whether it's through diet or through meditation or reading books like this, right? Because it's sort of better your ability to manage people.
I think to some extent, as someone who attended business school, it's kind of a disruption to campuses, to the degree itself, actually. Because in this modern world, you need to go to business school for two years. There's clearly a value in that. But there is some format of self-help education that you can build yourself at home through books, through access to these professors, through attending their talks and events. And so it's a disintermediation that's happening there.
which is interesting to follow. It's important too, because, you know, a lot of what's happening after the pandemic and everything else is people reevaluating work and how to manage people. And nobody really has answers. So, you know, it's like a lot of things you, you know, you have to read around to see what works for you and your company. There was a good article about his new book about unlocking your hidden potential, you know, and there was a picture of a kitten and a lion. Well, a kitten's not a lion, right? Right.
A kitten's never going to be a lion. But it's interesting to think about things you left behind and you might have done better. I have one photography. I was a very good photographer, and I just didn't push it. I think I still could be a good photographer. I don't think it was hidden. I just didn't pursue that. And at the same time, I wanted to be an architect, and I was terrible, and I knew I was. So I don't think, no matter how much reading of Adam Grant, I'm not going to become a good architect. I'm just not. I was a really good math student. I was actually a mathlete.
I don't want to brag too much about my varsity letter in math. Good for you. Junior varsity letter in math, actually. But you've interviewed Adam before. What do you want to catch up with him on this time? Well, I think we talked when he did Think Again. And, of course, he wrote a book with Sheryl Sandberg after the death of Dave Goldberg about grieving, really. Who was a good friend of yours, Dave Goldberg. Yes. Yes.
You know, I want to talk about where we are, about some things, some tips, people that this is more what you can do to make a better career for yourself, especially in these really difficult times. And also a little bit about the changing workplace. I think we're at a real change point for workplace now. Again, once again, it happens again.
from time to time. 100%. People think they're going to be back in the office. Adam Grant says that's not going to happen. At least full-time isn't going to happen. We'll see. But we also wanted to get his thoughts on what's happening on college campuses right now with this conflict in the Middle East playing out in the conversation at home. There are obviously protests across college campuses.
Those have really escalated in recent days. I mean, Bill Ackman came out to dock some students who had signed a letter that was placing full blame of the attack on Israel itself. What do you think of that? I didn't like that, but I know he did write a very thoughtful letter today. There was one that was much more thoughtful than...
about his feelings about what's going on at Harvard. Obviously, Penn is another flashpoint. All these colleges are. And I think it's complex. It's complex. And it was interesting to see Bill Ackman because he's such a free speech warrior. He's like, we need to hear RFK and Joe Rogan debate the vaccine. Or I want to know what Kyle Rittenhouse thinks. And then he led this charge to kind of
out students for their position, which was... I get it. But there's always a line of hate speech, which I've always maintained. You know, they're suddenly realizing hate speech is a problem. Oh, really? You're kidding. And it's not just hate speech now. I think at Cornell, a student, Patrick Dye Jr. there is behind bars after online threats to...
kill members of the Jewish community at the university. There's a Muslim student at Stanford who was hurt in a hit and run on campus, which is now being investigated as a hate crime because the person apparently said, you know, you people when doing it. So it's really coming to a head. No, that's just hate. It's not speech. It's just hate. Hate and violence. And so you see throughout social media, like videos of kids ripping down signs or concerns about chants and
I mean, honestly, I think kids are entitled to have an opinion. University students, that's where you want an open conversation where people can talk and can, but they're also being so unstrategic. Like maybe instead of ripping down a poster, why not add thousands more posters? That's correct. If my kid did that, my kid's hands would not be doing well at this moment in time. It was such an incredibly cruel thing to do. I think it's just cruel and stupid. You're both cruel and you're stupid. Yeah.
And people are animated right now by a lot of fear and also by a lot of intensity and passion for something that's very far away. And we should just say Penn in particular is under attack. Well, Penn has got Mark Rowan, who is the head of Apollo, has been pushing hard and creating signatures around the reaction of the heads of the school. Yeah, Mark Rowan, the chief executive of Apollo, who you saw the other day. Yeah, I recently saw him.
He is concerned that this university's first statement didn't condemn Hamas strongly enough. Later statements did, but he's leading this push to get people who are big donors to donate just $1 and assign a protest. That's the way it works. That's how it works. He's also concerned about the decline in the numbers of Jewish students on campus. The decline has been somewhere from, I think it was a third to...
still double-digit percentages over the last 30 years. But he is fighting the fight. It'll be interesting to see if Adam can even talk about that. Yeah, he's giving a lot of money to the school. We'll say, you know, everyone has their opinion and they can pay with their wallet if they want to or not, whatever. So that's what he's doing. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with Adam Grant so we can unlock our hidden potential. ♪♪♪
It is on. Adam, thanks for joining us. So let's start with your new book, Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. As you write, we're in a world obsessed with innate talent, creativity,
High-achieving culture is also obsessed with perfection. Obviously, I come from an area that I've covered where people try to constantly perfect themselves. There's also an idea of tech exceptionalism, that these are geniuses that are different. This high-achieving culture is due to something innate in them. So explain how potential gets lost in the world where we sort of celebrate genius, outward talent, perfection, and innateness, I guess.
Yeah, I think the mistake we make is we assume that potential is about where you start. So we admire child prodigies and gifted athletes and these geniuses who are superstars right out of the womb.
And we forget that ultimately potential is not about where you begin. It's about how far you can travel. And if we look at distance travel, that opens the door for a lot of late bloomers, underdogs, imposters, long shots, who might rise more slowly, but ultimately can still achieve great things. All right. So let's talk about that idea of people that are stars from the beginning, because that does get celebrated. Again, the last decade, couple decades have been about that.
about perfectionism, about exceptionalism, about specialness, and holding them as heroes of our society. Yeah, I don't think we should do that. I don't think it's been good for our society, but I also don't think it's been good for them. Why has that been the case? That's the idea, is people are born that way. Yeah, I think people assume it's born because it's hard to explain otherwise when a four-year-old can play Mozart.
Like, wow, that must be, that person is cut from a different cloth. Innate. Yeah. And there is, let's be clear, there is innate ability there. There are differences between people and where they start. But learning speed is not ultimately the most important determinant of growth. What matters is the quality of learning that you do.
And that can evolve over time. I know, I mean, there's so many examples. I think for, we all focus on Mozart, but for every Mozart, there are multiple Bachs. Bach was not a prodigy, not a standout at all. Went on to do great things. Some would say just as great as Mozart. And so I just, I think because those kinds of examples don't stand out early, we don't celebrate them as much. And then we kind of forget that they're possible. I think what you're trying to do in this
book is talked about how you want to improve how we improve ourselves, and then we also have this high-achieving culture that's a problem. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is they assume that if I want to determine what my potential looks like, I've got to either be a genius or I have to be the world's hardest worker.
And ideally both. Right. And I don't think that either is actually necessary. I think the evidence is pretty clear and consistent that being a good learner is not about just sort of mastering the daily grind and pounding the pavement. And it doesn't require you to be the person with the highest IQ. It often requires putting yourself in situations that allow you to make dramatic leaps.
And doing that requires not just skills of the mind, but skills of the heart and skills of character, which we don't talk about enough. Which you talk about quite a bit. And that's how you open the book with this chess club who had character, right? Yeah, the Raging Rooks in Harlem, I thought, were such a striking example of this point about character skills because you've got a group of poor racial minorities who,
who don't have all the chess advantages of the elite private schools. They haven't gone through years of training. They don't have world-class coaches. They do have this amazing young chess master, Maurice Ashley, who, yes, teaches them all the rules of the game. But he realizes, you know, as much as people think chess is a game of brain power, it's also a game of willpower. That they need to learn character skills, like being disciplined, to not seize the first good move, but wait for a better one. Like determination, right?
to not give up when they lose their queen, like being proactive, trying to anticipate their opponent's moves. And then he even teaches them to be pro-social and takes this individual game and turns it into teamwork where after every game that they play, they review the board and the moves and they coach each other on how they can improve. And, you know, ultimately this takes this group of kids that nobody saw hidden potential in
all the way to the finals of the National Chess Championships. And you have another compelling story about Evelyn, a young deaf musician who learns to think of her body as a giant ear to master music. Talk about that story and what inspiration you hope people would draw from it. Evelyn Glennie was such an interesting case for me. So if you're profoundly deaf, it's awfully difficult to imagine becoming a musician, let alone a world-class one. And yet she's won the Nobel Prize equivalent of music. She's amazing.
And the way that she learned was she would put her body up against the wall and feel the vibrations that different sounds made. And she noticed that, I think it was higher-pitched notes would resonate in certain parts of her body, lower-pitched, she might feel in a different part, and then she could make these finer and finer distinctions. Well, at some point, she learns to play. She plays the piano. She also is really skilled at the drums.
And she sees all of her peers just kind of slaving away at scales in endless hours of repetition. And some of them burn out and some of them experience something else that psychologists call bore out, which does not need to be defined. We all know the feeling of being bored out of our minds. What's so fascinating to me is that Evelyn refuses to engage with the boring monotonous slog. She decides to take the daily grind and turn it into daily joy.
The way she does that is she builds novelty and variety into her practice. She sustained her motivation for half a century now as a musician. I think the lesson for all of us is,
that we need to look for those sources of joy in the grind. Rather than grind it out. Now, you write, everything has hidden potential. You don't have to be a wunderkind to accomplish great things. We can all rise to great things. This is sort of the, it sounds nice, but tell me why you think it's a differentiated message. It's a lot of movies. There's a lot of movies where this happens, obviously. And second, how do we do this very nice thing to rising to achieve great things?
Well, I think what's differentiated about it is that it's grounded in social science. So, you know, I think anybody can say, "Look, everyone has hidden potential." Yeah. My job as an organizational psychologist is to ask, "What are the best randomized controlled experiments and longitudinal studies teach us about how possible it is and how to do it?" And I think, you know, when I look at the character skills that I wrote about in the book, one of the big things I learned was
I've always thought that feedback is critical to growth. From reading the research, I found out I was a little bit wrong and maybe a lot wrong.
That when you ask for feedback, you get a lot of useless information. Because people tell you what you did right and that can make you complacent when they're just cheerleading for you. Or they tell you what you did wrong and that can make you demoralized if they're just criticizing you. What you want are not just cheerleaders and critics but coaches who see your hidden potential and then help you become a better version of yourself.
And what the research that's just emerged in the last few years suggests is that instead of asking for feedback, it's more helpful to ask for advice.
If I say, hey, Kara, what's one thing I can do better? You're much more likely to give me something actionable that I can use tomorrow as opposed to something that's going to discourage me from yesterday. So you're essentially saying eliminate feedback now? Please, that would be great. I mean, I don't know if I want to limit it altogether, but I think I want to at least pivot it, no pun intended, in the direction of forward-looking advice. Advice makes it much easier to educate your future self.
So instead of wallowing in despair or ruminating about all the things that are wrong with you, it shifts attention away from the self and toward behavior, which about a century of research suggests makes the input that people give you more useful. If you can focus the comments on the behavior and tell people here's a concrete thing that you could adjust or do differently, then, you know, they take it as somebody trying to help them as opposed to trying to judge them.
I see. So it's a question between judging and actionability. Yeah, there's actually a great experiment that was done a few years ago at Stanford where it turns out you could make people much more receptive to constructive challenges and suggestions just by saying about 19 words up front. And those 19 words are roughly, I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I'm confident you can reach them. Yeah.
completely changes the tone, right? I'm not attacking you. I'm trying to help you get better. So Kara, I taught that a few years ago for the first time with my students at Wharton. And then a few weeks later, I gave out my mid-course feedback forms.
At the top, three different students had written, I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations. I'm confident you can reach them. I'm like, no, no, you don't have to use the words verbatim. You have to communicate that you believe in the person's potential and you care about their success. Right. Rather than just here's what you did wrong. Here's what you did right. Here's why you suck. Here's why you suck or here's what you did right even. But is positive feedback better? Yeah.
Not necessarily. So in the meta-analysis, negative versus positive didn't drive the effect, whether it was behavior-specific as opposed to about the person. And then there's some Ayelet Fischbach work suggesting that if you're a novice, you gravitate more toward praise because it builds your motivation and confidence. As you become an expert, you're much more interested in criticism. You know you can do it. Now you want to know how you can do it better. One of the things I tend to do...
Science is actionable things. I'm always giving people actionable items versus advice, you know, not like, what do I think of you? Some people don't like that, actually. I've noticed that they don't want to hear, okay, here's the three things you could do. Like, let's stop focusing on whether you're happy or not. You know what I mean? I tend to go right to action, and it's not always welcome, I would say. Why is that?
I don't know. Maybe I'm just tough or tougher in the voice. I don't say I have confidence in you. Maybe I don't say that or something like that. But I tend to just say, well, you're in a jam. It doesn't really matter why you're here or what you're doing. What do you want to do to get out of it kind of thing? So I always think about what's the...
I suppose I'd be very good in a crisis. If there was an apocalypse, I'd be excellent. That's what I kept thinking. I'd be able to be like, "Okay, we're going to go here now, then we're going to go here." That kind of thing. So that's my mentality. I wonder if what you're running into is, I guess I'm just thinking through, what do we know about this? One finding that I think speaks to this is the psychology of solution aversion.
which is the idea that if you give people a direction and they don't like it, their instinct is to ignore the problem altogether or deny that they have it. And so maybe they're not buying into the specific advice you're giving. True. The other point I think you're raising is you are very direct. I don't think we need to tell anyone that.
And maybe people are feeling the tough part more than the love part. Oh, there really isn't a love part, but okay. I don't know if I agree with that. I think you challenge people because you care about pushing people to get better. I don't think you do it just because— I wanted to stop whining, Adam. Well, okay, fine.
Okay, you can be both annoyed and wanting the person to improve. Fair, fair. But, you know, getting back to your book, how do you, and I specifically ask about inequity. There are people who really are in positions that they don't have access to the same resources. I've always thought, someone told me this, it may have been Gene Case, is that there's talent everywhere, right? That there's talent all over the world, but not opportunity. And that's a very big saying. They say it a lot in tech. And I think that's absolutely true.
Yeah, I think, so my read of the evidence is we have a few options. One is we can try to get people access to mentors, coaches, and role models, which is very hard to scale. Yes. That's a lot of relationships to build. A second is we can try to democratize access to that information so that you don't need the relationship. I think this is what Khan Academy has been trying to do for a long time. I think that this is, frankly, one of the reasons we ought to be excited about generative AI tools is...
to the extent that people didn't have access to models that they could follow and all of a sudden YouTube created this whole DIY culture. I think we're going to see another wave of that with Claude and ChatGPT and some of their competitors.
And I think the big question there is how do we make that personalized and tailored? So this is one of the things that I've been intrigued by with Conmigo as an example of saying, look, you might have a personalized AI tutor that gets to know your strengths and your development in areas and then can start to give you the coaching that you're looking for. It's not the same as opening opportunity and giving you a door to walk through that was closed to you before.
But it does give you some of the skills that you need to build your own door. So I don't know. You know much more about this world than I do. I haven't seen enough. I think we spent a lot of time on the silly parts of AI at this point. But yes, there are certainly ideas around education. Let's talk about that because one of the things, as you know, Raj Shetty said third grade determines the future. And you recently wrote an essay about our education system. Talk about looping and what is this education technique and why should we care? Yeah.
Well, looping is the finding, this has been demonstrated in North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, and Chile, that if a student has the same teacher for a second year, they do better in math and in reading on standardized tests, which is surprising to a lot of people. It's a small effect, but it's robust. And it turns out that when you have a teacher again,
you end up building a personalized relationship. Your teacher can specialize in students, not just in a subject. That teacher gets to know your strengths and development areas. There's not all this information lost in the handoff. The teacher can do more coaching and mentoring as opposed to just instructing. Parents in the U.S. hear about that and they're like, no, what if my kid gets Professor Snape or Miss Viola Swamp? But
My read of the evidence is that it's actually the struggling teachers and students who benefit the most from looping.
that they actually end up growing together as opposed to having to start over. Right. So let's talk about the role of parents in achievement culture. You also tweeted, your success as a parent is not determined by whether your kids get into elite schools. A real test of parenting is not what children achieve, but who they become and how they treat others. I couldn't agree more, obviously. Can success be both what kids achieve and how they act? Maybe. I'm sorry. I'm really struck by you agreeing with me. Ah!
I don't know what to do with that. I know. I know. Well, here's the deal. I do think that I think they get on the hamster wheel. I don't care if they go to college. I think I care if they're nice to women, my sons, my older sons. I care if they're nice to their friends. I care if they have friends. Achievement seems to follow those things, you know, in my in my book. And they then they then do well. And in fact, my kids are more they're more homeworky than I'd prefer. Yeah.
You know, it's funny that you say this. I wrote an article in The Atlantic a few years ago with my wife, Alison, about how teaching kids kindness actually prepares them for success. And this is actually, I didn't expect this, but if you want to predict which third graders will end up doing the best in eighth grade, it's not the kids who got the best grades in third grade. It's the kids who were the most helpful to their classmates in third grade. Hmm.
There's something about teaching kids to care about others that actually improves their success. And this has been shown in a bunch of different studies in different countries at different stages of life. I think part of what's going on is that when you teach your kids to care, it gives them a sense of meaning and purpose. That their studies aren't just for them. They're actually thinking about why learning whatever I'm learning might be relevant to the world. And that's motivating.
I think also what helpful kids do is they do a lot of peer tutoring and mentoring.
And we all know that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. And so if you're really interested in helping your classmates learn, guess what? You're retrieving your knowledge more often. That means you remember it better. You're also explaining it more often, and that means you understand it better. And so I think that teaching kids to care about helping others, ironically, is a great way to turn them into high achievers. But if you do it to make them high achievers, it probably won't work.
Well, talk a little bit about that role of, you know, parents in achievement culture, because a lot of parents are exhausting. I don't know what else to say. They're super exhausting in terms of talking to them. And it's often about themselves. And it's always about themselves, pretty much. And one of the things you also tweeted is, comparison is not the thief of joy, envy is. It often has felt like
It's like a fear and loathing kind of thing. It's like if you don't get in, if you don't get this. And then it definitely translates to the kids, you know, wherever they are, including kids in higher income brackets. They've never been felt less achieving. There's so much to react to here. I think maybe the place to start is to say that there's a study a few years ago showing that if you ask parents what they want most for their kids, they say, I want my kids to be caring. That was number one priority.
If you ask their kids what their parents want for them, they think achievement is number one. Why? Because they see their parents on the sidelines screaming because after school their parents ask, "How did the test go?" And we don't have enough dialogue about the dimensions of a character that you've said really matter to you and that I know matter to most parents.
One of the ways I think we can change that, we've started a weekly tradition a few years ago of asking our kids, usually on Fridays, who did you help this week? And we found that as we started doing that, they would look for opportunities to be helpful. You know, at first it was like I shared a toy, then it was, you know, I helped a classmate who was stuck on a homework assignment, but they knew they were going to be asked about it. And they started looking for ways of, you know, of caring that they really were energized by.
And then Allison said to me, why don't we also ask them who helped them? And I thought, why? I want our kids to be givers, not takers. What is this about? And I thought this was brilliant. She said, I want them to pay attention to which kids are kind instead of just gravitating toward the most popular kids. I see. Hold on one second. Speaking of kids, hold on. Speaking of kids, my kids are at the door. Oh, go for it. Hey guys, I'm working right now. Oh no. We'll be back in a minute.
Let me shift gears and talk about the work and return to office, a conversation everyone seems to be having. I'm sure you're dealing with it a lot. 90% of companies says they'll return to office by the end of 2024. You've tweeted, ding dong, the five-day office week is dead.
But you think mentoring is important, obviously, in-person mentoring and a community and seeing and imprinting, I guess, is a way you could describe it. Explain where you think this is going and the impacts. Well, I feel like my job is to track the data and
Nick Bloom is an economist who's been doing this more effectively and thoroughly than anybody that I've encountered. Nick's data showed that we've basically stabilized at hybrid and people are going to work three to four days in most organizations on-site and one to two days from anywhere. I'm not suggesting that we should all be in a remote world. We know that that's really difficult, not only for mentoring and learning, but also for culture building.
It was never ordained from on high that we had to be physically co-located for five days. And we've had evidence now for decades that as long as you're together about half the week in person, there's no cost to relationships or collaboration to be flexible the rest of the week. And so
I think, you know, a lot of companies are experimenting with anchor days. They're trying to figure out, okay, do we bring people together on the same days so that there actually is a vibrant culture when they come in, but then we have too much office space. So do we stagger people and try to have you in contact with different people? That's, I think, the challenge. It's not the number of days in, it's the coordination part.
But then how do new generations develop in a world of, you know, this hidden potential of seeing it, of being coached, these ideas that you're talking about in this book? How do they develop in a world of hybrid or even more remote work than ever? Well, let's take an example I think we're all worried about, which is we've lost our creative collisions. People think, oh, that water cooler conversation is really critical to unlocking people's creativity, to discovering, you know, who might be a great innovator, and I didn't realize it.
Well, guess what? It turns out there's nothing about creativity that requires a collision. There are only two ingredients that matter. All of Silicon Valley just destroyed itself, but go ahead. Oh, I mean, let's blow that up. You do not need a spontaneous interaction. There are two things about those collisions that really matter. One is that you're interacting with weak ties, not strong ties. People who you don't know well, who travel in different circles, who learn different things and give you new ideas.
And you run into those people, and your office is not normally next to them. Two, you have unstructured informal interaction with them. There's not an agenda. It's not limited to whatever's on the meeting list today. So there's no reason why we can't do that outside of the in-person gathering. We can say, let's randomly pair people up with people they don't know well, and let's give them time to talk about ideas without a formal agenda. There was actually a study of salespeople a few years ago showing that
On average, if you paired them up for lunch once a week, salespeople who didn't work together, their revenue went up over the next four months. They started coaching each other. They exchanged tacit knowledge. They came up with new ideas. They learned from each other. It's more fun to do it in person. It's easier. There's not a big tech barrier, but it doesn't always have to be that way. Right. All right. I want to do a lightning round of the idea of the next generation and some of the data perception out there. We're going to do lightning rounds so quickly.
A survey earlier this year said that 74% of managers and leaders find Gen Z more difficult to work with than other generations. They don't really want to coach them, in other words. Is generational research about work harmful or helpful? I think it's neutral. I think it's in the eye of the beholder. I will say generational differences are probably overrated and age differences are underrated. There's some good research suggesting that a lot of what we attribute to generation is actually a function of age and life experience. So if you're mad at 21-year-olds today, guess what?
Last generation's 21-year-olds were a little bit like that. They may have a different style of communication. They may have different expectations. I don't think that their personalities and values are fundamentally different than the 21-year-olds of other generations, if you look at the data. All right. A new study shows that less than half of Gen Zers are thriving lower than other generations, and mental health is now a core aspect of managing classrooms and teams at work. What are we getting wrong about Gen Z, and how should we be making way for them in the workplace? Yeah.
Oh, that's a really good question. That's a hard lightning round question. What can I say rapid fire on that? I can say, I think we're assuming they're fragile because they're very open about their mental health challenges. And I think a strong Gen Z norm is vulnerability is not a sign of weakness. It's a source of strength.
So I guess what I'm saying is we need to let people speak up about their well-being challenges and not immediately assume that they can't handle challenges, period, because of that. Right, right. One of the things you hear a lot from younger workers is burnout culture and the word toxic, which also comes up a lot in your work. It seems like everything is called toxic nowadays. Is workplace softening or are they right?
Can I say both? Yes. Go ahead. You say whatever you want. Both. I'm going with both. Why? You must explain yourself then. On the one hand, I think that toxic cultures have in some ways gotten worse. I think that...
Yeah, I mean, you've seen a ton of this in Silicon Valley, which was supposed to make work better. Leaders who have gotten away with being abusive to their people and then achieve great success. And then everybody thinks, well, I can get away with that too. Or worse yet, I have to be that way if I want to be successful.
On the other hand, I think it's problematic to call every unpleasant experience toxic because sometimes our most uncomfortable moments are the ones that fuel our growth. And just as Van Jones would say, I want people to be strong, not just safe. I want to put you in situations that might be hard for you, and that's how you're going to build your skills and your motivation, right?
I don't want people to lose that and just use toxicity as an excuse to avoid every situation they'd rather not be in. Ah, so there are snowflakes then. No, I'm kidding. I think there are. I think there are, actually. Older Americans are putting off retirement. Are we going to have to find their hidden potential and then find out what else they can do? Is that a good or bad thing? Maybe. We're seeing more encore careers now than we did in the past. You retire and then you take on basically a new path, which I think I'd love to see more of that.
I think there is evidence that older workers actually contribute more to suggestion boxes and innovation tournaments than younger workers do. We see this actually with tech entrepreneurship too. An entrepreneur in their 40s is, I think, about twice as likely to be in the top 0.1% of startups as an entrepreneur who's in their 20s. So
I think there's something to be said for, I don't know whether it's going to be upskilling or reskilling or career reinventing or mentoring, but yeah, we're probably going to have to figure this out. So one area where it's really clear is government, where leaders are reluctant to create space for next generation. Just the recent New York Times Sienna poll showed a lot of people feel President Biden, good president, too old. And same thing with Trump. How do you look at the likely octogenarian presidential election ahead?
Well, if we have an age minimum, we ought to have an age maximum. If you're too old to fly a plane, you probably are too old to run a country too, would be my hunch. Okay. But we haven't seen any legislation to try to get people who are capable and qualified into office. I think we have a lot of work to do there. Kara, it's madness to me that you have to take a civics test to immigrate to the U.S., but not to run the U.S.,
So what do we do about that? How do you look at it?
I don't know. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not a policymaker. Look, if it were up to me... You did write an opinion essay titled, The Worst People Run for Offer. It's Time for a Better Way. The data suggests that randomly chosen leaders are potentially more effective at leading democratically. But then you wrote on Substack, it's a thought experiment, not a literal proposal. Take us through the thought experiment. Well, thank you for framing it that way. I got a lot of flack for playing with that idea. Mm-hmm.
I think this is a real proposal for me with Congress. I think, you know, if we're going to take a few hundred people and let them become legislators, there's good evidence to suggest that narcissists and Machiavellians and sociopaths are more interested in running for office and also more charming, especially on first impressions. And that superficial charm comes across as confidence that we mistake for competence and then we elect them. And they do a terrible job.
And there's no reason why we couldn't try an experiment of randomly selecting people. There have been now multiple papers showing that if you're randomly chosen to lead, it's less likely to go to your head. You're more likely to realize it's your responsibility to serve and do what's best for the group as opposed to just trying to take over decisions and basically get your way and impose your will on everyone else.
So I think that would be an interesting experiment. I think that when it comes to, you know, positions where individuals have real influence, we ought to have assessments that allow for gauging somebody's leadership skill and their willingness to put their mission above their ego, which is, I think, in short supply right now. So you do tweet a lot. How do you think about preserving nuance in the reductive online environment? It's hard. Do you think you do a good job at it?
I don't think it's my place to judge. I think you have to ask the audience. What do you think? Well, talk about how hard it is. Talk about the difficulty of it. Look, I think— I stopped doing it as much. Well, I think sometimes I've done it effectively, and I can see that with people coming back and saying, oh, I never saw that perspective before, or I never thought about it that way. That's a sign that I changed somebody's mind by highlighting a nuance that they didn't have access to. Mm-hmm.
On the other hand, I see a bunch of, "Oh, this is oversimplified." Like, "Yeah, I had 280 characters." My old thing that I go back to over and over again is engagement leads to enragement almost continually. And one of the things you've been commenting on a lot is the crisis in the Mideast, speaking of engagement and enragement.
You've waited to say no one should die over disputes about land, no one should fear for their safety due to their faith, no matter what people, where people live and what they believe life is precious. I'm curious, did you get pushback for that? A ton. Because it seems like, tell me about that, because no one could say anything right now that seems to please anybody at any one point. No, I don't think you can. And I said it irrespective of the consequences because I'm expressing one of my core values.
Yeah, I mean, there was pushback on, you know, you need to condemn Hamas more strongly. There was pushback on, you know, what about all the, you know, the wrongs that have been done to the people of Palestine and to Gazans. And I was, look, I'm not a political scientist. I'm not a policymaker. I'm a psychologist. And so I was trying to step above the fray and say, look, these should be principles that we all agree on, which...
Actually, in my previous book, and think again, I wrote a whole chapter about how this is an effective way to bridge a conversation when conversations are polarized. Right. And people were not ready for it, very clearly. Yeah.
I'm seeing a little more receptivity now, but still a ton of outrage on both extremes. Yeah, I would agree. About the war you also tweeted on October 11th, don't mistake silence for apathy. When people are quiet, they're often busy thinking and learning. Extroverts like to process ideas by talking them through. Introverts prefer to reflect before they speak. I'm not disengaged. I'm listening to your views and formulating mine. Is there space right now for that?
I hope so. I mean, I actually wasn't posting that about the war. I was just, I was seeing all these people trying to bully others into using their platforms particularly. Yeah, silence is violence. That's the... Yes, and there's a reason those statements were made pre-social media, before every person had a microphone. I don't know that we need every person's voice on every issue. I think that what we need to hear from are people who are informed and
And I think we're going to have better conversations offline than we do online. So, yeah, I think people have a right to silence. And it doesn't mean that they're not doing a lot behind the scenes or that they're not having thoughtful conversations. It means that they've chosen not to broadcast those. You're also on a university campus. There's a lot of protests and consternation. Talk a little bit about what's happening at university campuses because it's a management issue, actually, if you think about it.
with the Middle East war and how students are showing up. There's a lot of pushback from alumni, powerful ones. Can you talk a little bit about this? Because it is a management challenge. It's also a moral challenge, but put yourself as an organizational psychologist. Yeah. I mean, obviously I've been horrified by some of what I've seen on campus. I'm on sabbatical, so I haven't seen a lot of it in person. But I think from a management perspective, the real challenge is to have clear policy.
And I think most university leaders hadn't. They assumed that there was a bright line between free speech and hate speech, and then discovered that they didn't have clear definitions.
and that students didn't know what the consequences were of using hate speech. And so I think trying to define what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable with specific examples is probably where I'd start. I'd want to let people know what the consequences are. If you're calling for violence against any individual or group of people, that should be grounds for expulsion, would be kind of a place to start. And I think those conversations were suddenly happening as these campus events are occurring.
And it's really hard to formulate policy while people are demanding that you make public statements at the same time, which then may violate the policy you're trying to formulate. So I think, look, if I were coaching university leaders, which I would not do under any circumstances right now because I don't know that there are easy answers, I would probably start coaching.
by saying, look, we've got to get better at seeing around corners. Let's try to anticipate what the next crisis could be.
What are the dilemmas they would create? And how can we have policies that will at least give us guidelines on how to respond? Where do you imagine this going or the impact of it going forward? Because it sort of takes, everything else sort of stops right now with this, how to talk to each other in what is essentially a workplace, in this case for students and academics, but it happens all over the place. Apple is shutting down Slack rooms, etc., etc.,
Well, I think, first of all, people should be having these conversations in small groups or in pairs, not necessarily publicly online, because it's so easy to get sucked into the outrage machine. And I think it was Liv Borey who said that the problem with raging against the machine is that then the machine starts to feed on rage. I think, you know, in person, it's a little bit easier to get into that nuance, to recognize that the person who disagrees with you isn't necessarily objecting to your existence.
I think the next thing that I would want to do is I'd probably say, look, we need better role models of what thoughtful disagreement looks like. There's a great example in the New York Times recently of, I think it was a Columbia and a Princeton dean who'd been on a faculty together. One was Israeli, the other was Palestinian. And they highlighted what some of their issues of contention were, but said, here are the fundamental principles we agree on.
And I don't think we're seeing enough of that. I think that modeled, it gives us options. It allows us to say, I don't agree with what you think, but I respect your right to think it. But I can understand that you actually have some values that I share that could lead you reasonably to that position.
All right, last questions. Your insights are packaged on often what we aren't getting right. This is a more positivity one. Why things don't work, why straight-A students get wrong, why brainstorming doesn't work. What's something that isn't broken? What don't we need to rethink? What's not broken? Gosh, the list of broken things is so long. I know, there's so many brokens, yeah. What's working right now? Um...
Let me think about that for a second. Are you thinking about a particular domain or just, is this a choose my own adventure? Choose your own adventure. All right. If I had to pick something that is working, you know, you're not going to like this one, Kara Swisher. I have to say, basic technology is working. The fact that our organizations didn't fall apart during COVID and that kids were able to do online school, it's kind of remarkable that we all had an internet connection and that
People, you know, for the most part, obviously, there are dead zones that need better support and help. But for the most part, the people were able to stay connected during an unprecedented crisis of our time. I think that technology is working. I wrote a whole column saying that, Adam Grant, for the New York Times. I need to go and read this. I missed it. Yes, I did indeed. I'm not surprised. Some of it worked. It was what worked and what didn't work. Shopping worked.
All kinds of things. Work worked. School didn't work as well. It just didn't. It didn't work as well, but it still happened. It happened, but it didn't work. In any case, I'm going to end on that because it's a positive thing that we agree on, that technology works, which would be a good thing. We are going to talk about Elon, aren't we? No, we're not going to talk about Elon. No. Oh, all right. Okay, all right. You can have questions for me. Fine. We'll do it very quickly. How do you assess how he's handled that culture from an organizational psychologist point of view?
I don't think his approach tracks with most of the evidence I'm familiar with, and it's certainly not what I teach at Wharton. I think the kind of pushing and challenging he's doing of people works best in the presence of care.
And I think he's banking on the fact that in software, he has the same status that he does in cars or in rockets. And I don't think he does. That's correct. I think that if you want to go to Mars or if you want to be in the electric car industry, Tesla and SpaceX, those are the places to be. And they're, what, light years ahead of their competition? Not quite. Okay, they're significantly ahead of their competition. Mm-hmm.
You can get away with a lot as a leader when you are the employer of choice. Twitter or X or whatever it's called now, there are lots of other software jobs. There are a lot of other more desirable software jobs. There are a lot of leaders with more chops in software. And I don't think he gets the same leeway, the same what psychologists have called idiosyncrasy credit to...
you know, to violate people's expectations and standards. I have a thing I've read about in my memoir coming up called the prick to productivity ratio. And so he's failing on that one in this particular moment. Not in other places, but here, yes. You know, I have to say, I've heard you... Prick is too high. Too high of prick. I mean, it's hard to disagree with that one. Yeah, yeah. I will say, I've listened to a bunch of your conversations, and...
I'm struck by how often Elon comes up. And I've wondered, you've mentioned quite a few times that he called you an asshole. It seems like you're hurt by it. I am. I'm really surprised. Why? Thank you. Ooh, he's going for the psychology of it. Well, no, I just want to understand because you are one of the thickest skin people I know. Yes. And this really got under your skin and I want to know why. Because one, it was inaccurate.
I hate inaccuracy more than anything. And I hadn't done what he said I did or what I did. So I thought, you're smart. Why are you being so fucking stupid? That's one. Two, it drives me crazy when people with great potential, and he certainly has that and has shown it, gives into their lesser nature.
You know what I mean? And it drives me crazy. This is someone who could do great things and has decided to become a troll. And so it's disappointing. I guess if you believe in someone and then they turn out to do their basics and things, it's a disappointment. It's almost like a kid, right? It's almost like a kid. Well, I hope not, but... No.
Yeah, this reminds me of the Elliot Aronson classic finding that the people we like most are the ones we started out hating and then grew to like because we had to overcome the cognitive dissonance. And you've got the opposite. You started out liking him and now you don't like him. Yes. Well, I don't like what he's become. Well, he did tweet a few years ago. I remember this caught my eye. He said something like, if I am a narcissist, which may be true, at least I'm a useful one.
That's correct. And I'd like to see the narcissism dialed down and the usefulness dialed up. That is correct. That is why. I'm very disappointed in him. That's how I would say it. But we'll leave it at that. He has a lot of hidden potential, Adam. He does. It wouldn't bother you if he were an idiot. No. Do you think I pay this much attention to some of the other clowns? No, I don't. Anyway, thank you. Fascinating. Fascinating. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
He really wanted to psychoanalyze you, Cara. He did. That's good luck with that. I've only went to one therapist once, a couple of therapists. It was a disaster. This is what Adam said. I don't think Elon's approach tracks with all the evidence I'm looking at. That is a very diplomatic way of saying something. Can you translate that, Cara? Can you translate? I think he said just because he's good at rockets and cars doesn't mean he's good at social media. That's all he's saying. Or he's saying the choices he's making at work are not best practices by business school, not
This is not how we would do it at Wharton. No, he's just being a, he's just, it's a scorched earth. And that's what he's doing. I actually ran into someone, another person from Twitter this weekend. They said they had not been paid their severance. And that's a very common thing. We'll see what happens with those lawsuits. I, you know, we'll have to take money from Adam from the Elon jar for bringing him up, but I'm glad he did actually. It's interesting. That's all right. It's a good point. It's probably going to be a million business school studies of what happened there over the many decades to come. The case study method.
Elon. It would be good. Yes, that's true. Yeah. That is true. And of course, Elon launched XAI. Yeah, Grok. Adam seemed to think generative AI would help solve social inequity. What do you think of that? I think it's interesting. It's the idea of a teacher. I think the whole concept of this book is that someone who believes in you over a long period of time, and that's usually been a parent, right? Yeah. Or a supportive parent. Not everybody has supportive parents. Yeah. And I think there's some validity to what he's talking about. Yeah.
If you get really good coaching, you can overcome quite a lot of other advantages other people have. Yeah. I think there's also something that he was getting out, which is separate to the book and not really touched on in the book that much, which is this layer of technology. I mean, he really had to think about that answer of what is not broken. Right. And I was surprised by that answer, technology. This is, you know, what...
what tech evangelists want us to think. This is going to fix all our social problems. And then you have Adam Grant, someone I think has a lot of respect and credibility saying, hey, you know, actually it's working in a lot of ways to help. It worked. The systems worked. It didn't mean it was good. It doesn't mean we weren't addicted to TikTok. He's leaving out that part. The
The systems worked. That means the roads worked. The water was clean. I don't know if that's such an accomplishment. But those systems are good. They provide some hope because every time we've had a conversation like this, when we had Rod Chetty on our old show, and he talked about third grade, where you live in the third grade determines where you go, right? Who has the American dream? People who got it in third grade, basically. Right. The zip code. And then Adam Grant's also saying, okay, the third grade, that's, you know, how helpful you are in the third grade as a predictor of your success in eighth grade.
So basically what I've learned as a non-parent is that I have to make sure that my children are great places in the third grade helping people. Yeah, it's true. And that they have the same teacher as second grade, unless it's Mrs. Swamp. Yeah, I actually think it's true. I think the kids that get wound up, I saw it so much with friends of mine.
kids is the kids that got wound up by their parents academically or achievement are really the ones that didn't have not thrived as much going forward in this thing um i think the over stimulation of our well-to-do kids and the under stimulation of of our our less uh less wealthy kids is a real problem there's a real there's a real middle ground there for a lot of kids and unfortunately
you know, you miss out on all the potential that exists across the world. There is a little girl in Syria right now who can solve cancer. I'm sure of it, right? It's just, we're not going to get to her. That's the issue. And I think that's absolutely true. And speaking of schools and coaches, et cetera, I thought the conversation around what's happening on campuses, it was interesting to hear him talk about it. Obviously he's been away from it. And I think
That whole conversation on the Middle East, he was kind of like, this is not my wheelhouse. I think he's talking about the middle ground, like calm the fuck down. I think what he's saying is everybody calm the fuck down. Yeah, bring the temperature down. That's what all his tweets are saying. I think that's a reasonable thing to say. 100%. And I really, I think that, you know, his advice is really good advice. The person who disagrees with you is not objecting to your existence. I think that we are at a point in the conversation where...
disagreement is seen as an attack. Right, exactly. A critique of a government can be interpreted to be a critique of a whole people. A critique of a group can be a critique of a whole movement. And that's really dangerous. We have to be able to preserve dialogue and
I do worry, even in my friend groups, I worry, like, how do you continue going when people disagree so much? I've gotten so many texts from friends who aren't speaking to each other right now. And they're all like calling me like, how can we get us talking again? I'm like, you know what, just shut up, all of you, you need to shut up.
Yes. I think that is actually the advice, like be quiet. And I was thinking, he talked about that guest essay, the dean of the Princeton School and then dean of SIPA at Columbia. And they wrote this New York Times guest essay together, which was beautiful. And it made me think these traditions, Abrahamic traditions, this region, were actually all very similar. And there are a lot of lessons for how we grieve and how we think about conflict. We have the same grieving processes in Judaism and Islam. And both of them
kind of burying your dead right away and then taking pause, like sabr, or what we call patience, or savlanuth, and like having a sitting shiva, days where you actually mourn and you don't jump into action, you know. And I think what we're having now is everyone's a billboard and everyone's jumping into action. Yeah, I think that's a thing. And he, you know, obviously Adam deals with that a lot. But nonetheless, let's all tune into Trump at the trial. That's another thing we'll jump in. In any case, let's move on. What will be your encore career, Cara? My encore career?
I'm going to run a donut shop. Donut shop in Hawaii. Donut shop in Hawaii. What did you call it? F&F donut, fried and fat donuts. Nothing's good for you here. Get the fuck out of here if you don't want to get fat. That's my whole thing. Okay. That's an excellent career care. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Rita's out.
Today's show was produced by Nei Miraza, Christian Castro Rossell, Kateri Yochum, Megan Burney, and Claire Tai. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, no bore out for you. If not, you have to listen to me and Adam Grant talk about Elon for hours.
Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.
