1
SPEAKER_01
 It's a totally different conversation when you know the person in there from your community and he would know whether I was a bad kid or a good kid or a well did I have a daddy pulled me over three times before for drinking or not, or was I a good kid who just did something stupid in the case of.
1
SPEAKER_01
 that officer in Sandra Bland, he doesn't know anything about her and she doesn't know anything about him.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that requires of him principally, a wholly different set of behaviors and strategies.
1
SPEAKER_01
All of a sudden, what things he's holding in his head and what assumptions he's using to understand her and what biases he's carrying are super consequential.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that's what I was trying to get at in the book.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And of course, he completely misread in that situation.
1
SPEAKER_00
He botches it.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
What are those things that we then are, what are like the biggest pitfalls in our assumptions and biases when we're first meeting a stranger?
1
SPEAKER_00
Where is it that we naturally go wrong?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because in the example you gave of speaking and communicating with your father, it's almost like you're on the same algorithm and the Google auto fills there.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you know, it's, it's like Google reading your mind and knows what you've typed in or what most people type in.
1
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes I think we think we can do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like we almost have,
1
SPEAKER_00
 I feel like, and maybe it's just me, but I feel like we have an intuition where we sometimes feel like just by meeting someone, we know whether they're right for us to marry, date, do business with, collaborate with.
1
SPEAKER_00
We almost trust ourselves enough to figure that out in one meeting.
1
SPEAKER_00
But in this book, you're almost telling us that it's not that easy.
1
SPEAKER_00
We're often making mistakes.
1
SPEAKER_00
What are those key mistakes?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, the most, there's three I talk about.
1
SPEAKER_01
 The one, I'll start with the second that I talked about, and it's this, what I call the illusion of transparency.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that is this idea that what can I tell about you from observing your facial expressions, your body language, how you carry yourself and hold yourself?
1
SPEAKER_01
We as human beings place a great deal of emphasis on that kind of evidence.
1
SPEAKER_01
 We use that evidence to send people to jail, to judge guilt or innocence, to figure out whether someone likes us or doesn't like us.
1
SPEAKER_01
And if you ask us, we're pretty confident in the judgments that we make based on that kind of evidence.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the truth is we're terrible at decoding people's emotional states from observing the outward manifestations of those states.
1
SPEAKER_01
I cannot look at you right now, Jay, observe your
1
SPEAKER_01
 facial expressions and have the slightest clue what you're thinking.
1
SPEAKER_01
You could think, I can't believe this guy, he's such a moron.
1
SPEAKER_01
You could be thinking, this is so much fun.
1
SPEAKER_01
You could be thinking about what you're gonna have for dinner tonight.
1
SPEAKER_01
I have no idea, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
I can certainly try.
1
SPEAKER_01
I am looking at your face right now.
1
SPEAKER_01
And some part of my brain is saying, okay, is he interested?
1
SPEAKER_01
Is he not?
1
SPEAKER_01
I think he is.
1
SPEAKER_01
I'm drawing all kinds of conclusions.
1
SPEAKER_01
 But if I am completely honest, I have to own up to the fact, admit to myself, that almost all of those conclusions are false.
1
SPEAKER_01
Or at least, I'll put it better, I have no way of knowing whether my conclusions are true, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
 So if you're my dad and I've known you for my entire life, I'm not bad at making sense.
1
SPEAKER_01
I know that when my father looks a little puzzled and perplexed, it's not that he's angry at anyone, it's just that he's daydreaming.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Or I know that when he hems and haws about something, it's not that he can't make up his mind, it's because he's just weirdly inarticulate sometimes, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
I know that about my dad, I don't know that about you, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
And until I've spent all that time with you, I can't be drawing conclusions from that kind of stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it is astounding,
1
SPEAKER_01
 how many mistakes we make because of this simple assumption that we think we, you know, what's the whole job interview based on?
1
SPEAKER_01
You meet someone, you ask them a bunch of questions, and mostly what you're doing is you're looking at their body language, and you're looking at the facial expressions, and you're trying to decide, is this a nice person?
1
SPEAKER_01
Is this an honest person?
1
SPEAKER_01
You can't tell that from looking at them, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So it's like, that's a kind of,
1
SPEAKER_01
 That's a big thing that I explore in the book.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that's what happened in the case of Sandra Bland.
1
SPEAKER_01
The cop observes her behavior, and he thinks that she's behaving in a way that is suspicious and dangerous, is the furthest thing from dangerous.
1
SPEAKER_01
And she's not behaving suspiciously.
1
SPEAKER_01
She's upset.
1
SPEAKER_01
She's mad because she got pulled over for no reason.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he doesn't understand that.
1
SPEAKER_01
He confuses, you know, her
1
SPEAKER_01
 being upset with her being dangerous.
1
SPEAKER_01
Those could not be more different, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
That is a, if you're a police officer about to make a consequential judgment about how to deal with someone, if you confuse those two emotional states, you're making a huge error.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And I guess in that situation, of course, the police officer or someone in that role has the pressure of feeling, or there's a feeling of a pressure to make a decision in a short period of time.
1
SPEAKER_00
But in some areas of our life, we don't really have that.
1
SPEAKER_00
We almost place a false pressure on ourselves because we don't really have a window to decide.
1
SPEAKER_00
Just with the hiring example, I was recently reading a leadership and recruitment book and there was a theme in it that was called,
1
SPEAKER_00
 higher, slow, fire, fast.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it was just talking about like the hiring process needs to be much slower because what we usually do is higher, fast, and fire, slow.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so saying that there needs to be that shift, but we almost put a pressure on ourselves like, but if I don't know if he or she's the one in this meeting, then I'm going to be single forever or whatever it is.
1
SPEAKER_00
So is it time?
1
SPEAKER_00
Is it more interactions?
1
SPEAKER_00
What is that that's going to allow us to improve that?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Well, time, I mean, time is actually a big part of this.
1
SPEAKER_01
And funnily enough, you know, in the wake of the George Floyd case, a lot of it was a lot of really interesting things that I.
1
SPEAKER_01
 I mean, I listened to a number of people who've studied law enforcement in the United States.
1
SPEAKER_01
And one of the most interesting thing I heard was there are an awful lot of police departments in this country that place very strict time limits on officers when they're out dealing with the public.
1
SPEAKER_01
You are required to wrap up
1
SPEAKER_01
 your encounter in a given amount of time and you are applauded and rewarded when you deal with people quickly and you are penalized when you're slow.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's crazy, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
You can't do that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Similarly with doctors, we make doctors
1
SPEAKER_01
 You know, insurance companies make doctors, they give them clear incentives to be as quickly, to deal with patients as quickly as possible to the point where doctors feel like they're on an assembly line.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's also, that's a way to create misunderstanding and mistakes, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
You cannot speed up some of these encounters.
1
SPEAKER_01
So time's a big part of it.
1
SPEAKER_01
Another big part of that is empathy.
1
SPEAKER_01
 is you need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone else for a moment.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that is both, in order to do that, you need both more information about that person, but you also need to be trained in the capacity of sitting outside your own perspective.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And you know, I can't believe I'm saying this to someone who spent time as a monk.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, a lot of what you do when you are in that environment and when you do things like meditate, is you train yourself to do that kind of thing, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
To step outside your own consciousness.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And a police officer has to be, in a way, a social worker, a psychologist.
1
SPEAKER_01
And all of us have to play that role.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that requires a real act of humility to do that, to set aside your own feelings and instead ask the question, what would I be thinking if I was in this person's shoes?
1
SPEAKER_01
And what are the range of possible reasons why this person is behaving the way they are?
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And today we have such an incredible ability to do that because like you said, a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, we wouldn't be talking and people wouldn't be listening to this.
1
SPEAKER_00
We wouldn't have the opportunity to listen to this.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Because of that, we're today exposed to more ideas, more cultures, more backgrounds, more walks of life, which means our compassion and empathy should actually be increasing because we have the ability to hold more knowledge and depth about a number of backgrounds and walks of life, which we wouldn't have had before, which naturally closes our mind.
1
SPEAKER_00
But it seems like
1
SPEAKER_00
 Sometimes the more exposed we get, the more judgmental we can become too, because of the differences.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's almost like you said before, like 100, 150 years ago, or the town you grew up in where your police officer knew your name, which is insane for me to think about.
1
SPEAKER_00
I was born and raised in London and that was definitely not the case.
1
SPEAKER_00
 From going from that, where you feel like you know everyone, you trust everyone, you know everyone's parents, you know where they live, that creates somewhat of a safety net, whereas there's so much more fear in today's society because there is so much of an unknown.
1
SPEAKER_00
I would say that
1
SPEAKER_01
 I think you're right that we're better at this than we were.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that's what I was talking about earlier.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the problem is that the task is harder.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's sort of what it is.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like 50 years ago in the workforce, virtually everyone I would have dealt with would have been a college-educated white male.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I could probably go further.
1
SPEAKER_01
 if it was 75 years ago, a college-educated white Protestant male.
1
SPEAKER_01
 You know, it's not when everyone is cut from the same, coming from the exact same slice of, and middle class to upper middle class.
1
SPEAKER_01
In the media world, that's what it was, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
I'm a journalist.
1
SPEAKER_01
At the Washington Post in 1970, everybody is a white, pretty much everyone is a white upper middle class male, either Protestant or Jewish, who went to one of 10 colleges, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Now it's not that way, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
And it's just harder now.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we're better, but I think the difficulty of the task before us is accelerating faster than our own abilities.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think that's probably the best way to make sense of the dilemma we're in.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah, and I think that's been accelerated even more today in digital communication.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like obviously we're not sitting next to each other right now and everyone listening and watching us is not sitting next to us right now.
1
SPEAKER_00
And everyone's been, you know, forced into this Zoom conversation or digital conversation that they're having right now.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I wonder what your thoughts are on digital communication and how that's
1
SPEAKER_00
 And hey, let's be totally honest, even before this, when you were referring to my generation or the generation after, especially the generation after and the one after that, most of the communication is happening digitally and potentially not even through face.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's happening through text and it's happening through words.
1
SPEAKER_00
Where does that leave us to really feeling like we understand people and that they understand us and that feeling of feeling understood and understand?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah, well, I mean, I guess what I would say is, I mean, let's talk about this conversation we're having over Zoom.
1
SPEAKER_01
What is it we can't do over Zoom?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, I can't see you.
1
SPEAKER_01
One is that we're probably going to hang out less than if I had come to your office.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so we might have chitchatted before.
1
SPEAKER_01
We might have chitchatted afterwards.
1
SPEAKER_01
 we might have, if we'd gotten along, we might've had a meal.
1
SPEAKER_01
Imagine if we'd gone for a walk and instead of talking face to face, we'd spoken side by side.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now that sounds like a
1
SPEAKER_01
 a trivial thing, it's not a trivial thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have different conversations when you walk with someone, because you're not looking at them.
1
SPEAKER_01
And all of a sudden, like, people always talk about how they took these, you know, with their best friend, a wonderful car trip across country when they were 19 years old, and what amazing conversations they had.
1
SPEAKER_01
A lot of that is about being in the same place with someone for hours and hours on end.
1
SPEAKER_01
A lot of that is like side by side and not face to face.
1
SPEAKER_01
 You could have a different conversation.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then when someone is eating, they're relaxed and you see a different side of them than you would.
1
SPEAKER_01
And you learn something new, like even something that may seem trivial, like what someone chooses to eat and how they eat it, what they say about the food they're eating.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, these are all like, they just help you fill out the picture a little bit.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think what it does is it softens
1
SPEAKER_01
 I took an interview with a guy who's a journalist who's made his living doing really, really confrontational interviews with people, and he was being interviewed about his technique, and the interviewer asked him, do you prefer to do these
1
SPEAKER_01
 face-to-face or on telephone or online.
1
SPEAKER_01
He goes, oh, always on the telephone.
1
SPEAKER_01
Never, ever face-to-face.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because he knows he can't be mean face-to-face, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So I think it softens the encounter when you can spend unstructured time with someone.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think that's what we see in social media, is the harshness of the tone has to do with the fact you're never meeting the person that you're attacking.
1
SPEAKER_01
You wouldn't say that if
1
SPEAKER_01
 They were sitting next to you, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
That's my worry about these times.
1
SPEAKER_01
I worry that too much of this digital thing is going to remove the possibility for
1
SPEAKER_01
 but I'm going to go on another tangent.
1
SPEAKER_01
I've been interviewing for a project, the singer Paul Simon, spent many, many hours with him.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I've decided my favorite Paul Simon song is a song which is called Tenderness.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the chorus is, just try some tenderness beneath your honesty.
1
SPEAKER_01
And my argument to him was that that's the story of his
1
SPEAKER_01
 life in some way he's someone who is trying to convince people to not to be dishonest keep your honesty but put a little tenderness in it and i think that what meeting face to face about is all about is it doesn't change the honesty of the conversation it means this much when the taliban banned music in afghanistan millions were plunged into silence
1
SPEAKER_02
 Radios were smashed.
1
SPEAKER_02
Cassettes burned.
1
SPEAKER_02
You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules.
1
SPEAKER_02
And yet, Afghans did it anyway.
1
SPEAKER_02
This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
1
SPEAKER_02
The danger they endured.
1
SPEAKER_03
They said my head should be cut off.
1
SPEAKER_02
 the joy they brought to the nation.
1
SPEAKER_05
You're free completely.
1
SPEAKER_05
No one is there to destroy you.
1
SPEAKER_02
I'm John Legend.
1
SPEAKER_02
Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_05
 Parents, ready to discover a new educational and interactive podcast for kids?
1
SPEAKER_05
Join Stories for Kids by Lingokids, where episodes are packed with fun activities.
1
SPEAKER_05
Right, Elliot?
1
SPEAKER_05
Oh, yes!
1
SPEAKER_05
We learned how to recycle at the beach.
1
SPEAKER_05
 That was great fun!
1
SPEAKER_05
Cowie, what do you say?
1
SPEAKER_05
It was!
1
SPEAKER_05
And that time when we did the science experiment and Billy made raisins dance!
1
SPEAKER_05
That is so cool, Billy!
1
SPEAKER_05
He did!
1
SPEAKER_05
Not to mention when a certain Elliot took up swimming classes with Lisa.
1
SPEAKER_05
That was me!
1
SPEAKER_05
Bet you can't catch me!
1
SPEAKER_05
I'm going to get you!
1
SPEAKER_05
 All this fun and more in our Stories for Kids.
1
SPEAKER_05
Lingo Kids Stories for Kids is now available on Story Button, the kid-friendly device for screenless podcast listening.
1
SPEAKER_05
Listen to Stories for Kids on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_04
 Guess what, Mango?
1
SPEAKER_04
What's that, Will?
1
SPEAKER_04
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
1
SPEAKER_03
I know, that's why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
1
SPEAKER_03
It's about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it's called Earthquake House.
1
SPEAKER_04
Mango, I'm going to cut you off right there.
1
SPEAKER_03
Why don't we just tell people about our show instead?
1
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that's a better idea.
1
SPEAKER_03
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world's most important questions.
1
SPEAKER_03
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
1
SPEAKER_03
 is William Shatner's best acting work in Esperanto.
1
SPEAKER_03
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
1
SPEAKER_04
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
1
SPEAKER_04
How do dollar stores stay in business?
1
SPEAKER_04
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
1
SPEAKER_03
There absolutely is.
1
SPEAKER_03
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
1
SPEAKER_03
But if you love mind blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune into part time genius.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Listen to part-time genius on the I heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts tenderness Yeah, and that's and that's definitely something that's missing today I think you're so right that we're that that we've obviously been talked about before the accountability of when you're in front of someone versus when you're when you're behind a keyboard, but I think tenderness is such a great word because I
1
SPEAKER_00
 we are so much more equipped to communicate in a way that we think we're accountable to and accountable for when we're face-to-face.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I've definitely found that.
1
SPEAKER_00
I remember one of my managers saying to me that, oh, whenever there was a conflicting conversation to have, it was better to walk together.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you felt you were walking in the same direction, even if you had opposing views.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so that ability to not sit across from a table, across from each other,
1
SPEAKER_00
 I love like, that's exactly what I was talking about.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, that's so lovely.
1
SPEAKER_01
I actually had never thought about, that's a beautiful illustration or use of that side-by-side principle.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah, exactly.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Just, you know, side by side, walking in the same direction, same vision, even if you have conflicting ideas.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because when you sit like this, of course, we're not being confrontational, but an interrogation would always be like this.
1
SPEAKER_00
And therefore, I think so many people feel interrogated in interviews or on dates for that matter.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I agree with you on the side by side.
1
SPEAKER_00
I remember some of my best conversations with my friends growing up were both of us playing video games together.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And so like our almost conscious mind would be, you know, completely switched on to the game.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then our subconscious mind could actually connect with each other because we were just, you know, so wired into this game that we could play without even having to think about it, that we were able to let go and kind of get beyond a barrier that guys may never have done if we were sitting, having a drink together or juice together or something like that, it just wouldn't have happened.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Yeah, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
I've definitely experienced that over video games, or at least I can remember a lot of great conversations that happened over lost games of FIFA and other video games.
1
SPEAKER_00
I was going to say, what games do you play?
1
SPEAKER_00
FIFA makes sense.
1
SPEAKER_01
Your group in London, yeah, there's going to be a lot of FIFA.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah, I'm big into sports games, so FIFA, NBA 2K.
1
SPEAKER_00
I played a lot of Assassin's Creed growing up.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don't know if I could handle it anymore.
1
SPEAKER_00
But FIFA and football is a big love of mine having grown up in England.
1
SPEAKER_00
You can't not love football.
1
SPEAKER_00
Did you spend any time in England growing up?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Well, I was born in Kent and we left when I was six.
1
SPEAKER_00
OK.
1
SPEAKER_01
But we would go back.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, and I've been I've been I go to England, you know, once or twice a year and have done so for 30 years.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I'm very and I feel very at home, you know, going back to the contradictions to part of me.
1
SPEAKER_01
There's a there's a part of me that feels very, very, very at home in England.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah, talking about going home and revisiting, I wanted to talk about your podcast, Revisionist History.
1
SPEAKER_00
Again, as I said to everyone, it's an incredible podcast.
1
SPEAKER_00
And a big part of what the podcast is, is about looking to history and looking at the overlooked and the misunderstood.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you had to do an episode on a past event in your life, what do you think could be misunderstood or overlooked by you if you were to reflect on it?
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's a really, really, really good question.
1
SPEAKER_01
 Uh-huh.
1
SPEAKER_01
Take your time.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I guess I would go back.
1
SPEAKER_01
If I was going to do something all my life, I would do a lot of what-ifs.
1
SPEAKER_01
 I'm not someone, I'm very happy with the path that my life has taken, but I'm not someone who thinks this was the only path my life could have taken.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I really wonder, and I'm conscious of the fact that there were crucial moments in my life when I could have broadened my experience and I didn't.
1
SPEAKER_01
Instead, I chose to stay where I was and burrow deeper.
1
SPEAKER_01
And as I've gotten older,
1
SPEAKER_01
 I'm more and more convinced that was the wrong strategy.
1
SPEAKER_01
So when I was in my late 20s, I was working at the Washington Post.
1
SPEAKER_01
I had an opportunity to go to Europe and be the Germany correspondent, basically the European correspondent for the Washington Post based in Germany.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this is early 90s, just after the wall fell.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I didn't do it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And similarly, I thought after graduating from college that I
1
SPEAKER_01
 I had a notion that I would go to graduate school in Jamaica, that it would be a really interesting way to explore that part of my heritage and broaden my perspective and live in a very different culture.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I didn't do it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And part of me regrets both those decisions, because I look at myself now and I say, what is lacking from my life?
1
SPEAKER_01
It is a little bit of that.
1
SPEAKER_01
 breadth.
1
SPEAKER_01
I would go back and I would re-examine those decisions and I would try and figure out, was I scared?
1
SPEAKER_01
What was going through my mind that kept me making much more conventional decisions than I perhaps should have?
1
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for opening up, by the way.
1
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for sharing that.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's always
1
SPEAKER_00
 It's always fascinating.
1
SPEAKER_00
I didn't think that you had anything that you regret or that you're not happy with where you are.
1
SPEAKER_00
So that was definitely not what the question was aimed at.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was definitely just an intrigue.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think that, especially with how you talk about things being misunderstood and overlooked, I think that's what I love about what you do on the podcast.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's not so much about
1
SPEAKER_00
 this is wrong or, you know, it's, it's so much of history.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we always hear that, you know, history is always told from the winner's side and history is always told from the people that benefited from what, you know, with the events that took place.
1
SPEAKER_00
I guess, how, how do you find, how, how do you think that history can be most usefully used?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because I find that because
1
SPEAKER_00
 In the past, I think hindsight was such a gift, but it almost feels like, what's that beautiful statement by Mark Twain, you know, history never repeats itself, but it always rhymes.
1
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, it's that kind of feeling of like, I feel like hindsight was such a gift, but it seems even now that because when we do hindsight, we actually realize so much was misunderstood and overlooked, that now we focus so much on that.
1
SPEAKER_00
How have you find history and reflect on history?
1
SPEAKER_00
How is it actually practical and useful in today's world, seeing as you do it so much?
1
SPEAKER_01
 Well, it goes back to what I was saying before about the importance of empathy in understanding another and how you have to be trained in that particular art.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think that history is one of the ways in which you train yourself in the art of empathy because the great luxury of history is you have time has passed.
1
SPEAKER_01
And usually many, many, many people
1
SPEAKER_01
 Serious people have weighed in on the events that you're interested in.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what you have is a breadth of perspective, a rare breadth of perspective on the actions of others.
1
SPEAKER_01
And if you do it right,
1
SPEAKER_01
 you get practiced in the art of empathy.
1
SPEAKER_01
You can look at everyone involved in any consequential moment and see it through their eyes.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, you may not agree with everyone, but you still have this opportunity to revisit something from another perspective.
1
SPEAKER_01
 So, you know, I've been working on this huge project.
1
SPEAKER_01
I did it in four episodes of my podcast were about the Second World War, this decision made by a general in the Second World War to bomb Tokyo with firebombs in March of 1945.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I've then subsequently gone back and I'm now turning it into a much larger book.
1
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, there's all these different characters in that time, all of whom have very different perspectives.
1
SPEAKER_01
 And you think when you start, that guy's wrong, that guy's right.
1
SPEAKER_01
This is outrageous.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then six months later, you don't think that way anymore.
1
SPEAKER_01
You don't even
1
SPEAKER_01
 You don't use that language.
1
SPEAKER_01
You still have a moral perspective, but the language you use is different.
1
SPEAKER_01
What you say is, I understand why that person made the decision that they made, even though I think I disagree with it.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's the way you phrase it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that's such a much more evolved
1
SPEAKER_01
 an important way of phrasing your feelings about someone and their actions.
1
SPEAKER_01
If we could all somehow use that perspective in the way we made sense of each other, I feel like the world would be so much better.
1
SPEAKER_01
That's, I think, what the function of history is.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that's such a great answer.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's a brilliant answer, actually, because
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah, if history was used in that way, like you said, it's such a rare opportunity to dive into something when it's not being defined as we're in it.
1
SPEAKER_00
Most decisions we have to make are, at least again, the false pressure or the illusion of pressure that it has to be decided today.
1
SPEAKER_00
But history gives you this complete, you know,
1
SPEAKER_00
 kind of stillness of time and just slow down in pace to just re-observe.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I love what you said about that transformational change in perception.
1
SPEAKER_00
Our instinct or intuitive initial understanding is so much about love or hate, black and white, and it's so divided even in our reaction and response.
1
SPEAKER_00
But you're so right that you can almost weave it together more as you let it settle.
1
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to dive into this season's
2
SPEAKER_03
 theme which is attachment and I think I talk about attachment in different ways in my podcast considering my monk background too, but sometimes obviously attachment hurts our perceptions of what really is and we've heard it before that we get more lost in what if rather than what is and this distortion of reality
2
SPEAKER_03
 that exists because of our attachment to illusion or ideas or hopes.
2
SPEAKER_03
Can you give an example that you've seen where attachment actually hurts or potentially even benefits us, if it does in any way?
2
SPEAKER_05
 Well, I was focused on the, on this season on the downside of attachments.
2
SPEAKER_05
Um, and what I, by attachment, I was talking about attachments to really, to ideas and practices that become, you know, so much of the reasons for the, why we do what we do are unexamined.
2
SPEAKER_05
And I was trying to examine them.
2
SPEAKER_05
So, you know, I,
2
SPEAKER_05
 One of my favorite episodes this season was about a guy, it was the second episode of the year, about this guy who goes to Bolivia and tries to convince high school students in Bolivia.
2
SPEAKER_05
Why he's in Bolivia is not crucial to the story, but he happened to be in Bolivia.
2
SPEAKER_05
He wants high school students to elect their student councils by lottery.
2
SPEAKER_05
 to choose their leaders by lottery.
2
SPEAKER_05
And he makes this very compelling argument about how you get better leaders when you choose them randomly, that more people
2
SPEAKER_05
 are involved, that they have a much broader, those who you choose have a much broader perspective on what issues they want to address.
2
SPEAKER_05
And most of all, what you learn is that there are all kinds of people who are capable of good leaders who you would never have thought before.
2
SPEAKER_05
And so what the current system does, what democratic elections do, instead of opening up possibility to everyone, they actually close possibility to many people.
2
SPEAKER_05
 What was fascinating about that is that's an incredibly incendiary idea that you would do away with an election, and we would be better off with a lottery.
2
SPEAKER_05
Why is it incendiary?
2
SPEAKER_05
Because we have this attachment to this particular ritual of choosing our leaders.
2
SPEAKER_05
And we've had it for a couple hundred years.
2
SPEAKER_05
And we've told ourselves it's the best ever.
2
SPEAKER_05
And we won't look at any other alternatives.
2
SPEAKER_05
 have kind of grew all kinds of myths have grown around this particular ritual, which we don't look at either.
2
SPEAKER_05
One of the myths is that we were good at predicting who's going to be a good leader.
2
SPEAKER_05
We are not.
2
SPEAKER_05
We're terrible at it.
2
SPEAKER_05
And we will.
2
SPEAKER_05
And by the way, there has been a
2
SPEAKER_05
 mountain of evidence as to how bad we are at it.
2
SPEAKER_05
And yet we refuse to revisit that question.
2
SPEAKER_05
We're overly attached to a particular way of choosing our leaders.
2
SPEAKER_05
That's a beautiful, really good example of how we get in, how our attachments get us in trouble.
2
SPEAKER_05
And what I would like people to be is to be freer
2
SPEAKER_05
 when it comes to thinking about possibility in the world.
2
SPEAKER_05
Another of my favorite episodes was called Hamlet is Wrong.
2
SPEAKER_05
 That's this notion of the famous economist, and that was his favorite slogan.
2
SPEAKER_05
And what he meant was, Hamlet was someone who was paralyzed by his choices, right?
2
SPEAKER_05
To be or not to be, that's the question.
2
SPEAKER_05
He couldn't decide what to, and this guy said, actually, Hamlet had it backwards, that when you don't know what's gonna happen, you're free to do whatever you want.
2
SPEAKER_05
 Right.
2
SPEAKER_05
So, you know, that's another way of saying the same thing, that freedom is being able is detaching yourself from this desire to predict the future or this phony sense that you know what's around the corner.
2
SPEAKER_05
You don't know what's around the corner.
2
SPEAKER_05
And that means you should be you should be free to follow whatever course you want.
2
SPEAKER_05
That's like such a powerful, liberating notion.
2
SPEAKER_03
 Yeah, no, I think so too.
2
SPEAKER_03
I think sometimes we feel more confined by systems than
2
SPEAKER_03
 their effect.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so one of our excuses to ourselves around questioning ideas or beliefs that we have is because we feel that they are already predefined and predetermined by the world we live in.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so it's almost like an excuse that, oh, well, I can't question this because it sits within a bigger construct that won't actually allow me to exercise that freedom.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I'm guessing you're saying that that's actually to some degree false.
2
SPEAKER_05
 Yeah, I always had this conversation.
2
SPEAKER_05
I have a lot of friends with high school age kids who are all thinking about going to college.
2
SPEAKER_05
And I always say exactly the same thing to them.
2
SPEAKER_05
I say, well, where are you thinking of going to college?
2
SPEAKER_05
And they list the same names you always name.
2
SPEAKER_05
And I always say, well, why wouldn't you go abroad?
2
SPEAKER_05
Why don't you apply for, I don't know, some school in Johannesburg?
2
SPEAKER_05
 you know, or Serbia or, I mean, there are English language universities all over the world you go to, why would you confine yourself to, you know, Brown or Williams College or whatever the favorites are at the moment?
2
SPEAKER_05
And they never have a good answer, right?
2
SPEAKER_05
They're like flummoxed by that question.
2
SPEAKER_05
Or I say, you've applied to the colleges that you think are the quote unquote best.
2
SPEAKER_05
If you went to,
2
SPEAKER_05
 you know, a, you know, a big public school in the Midwest, instead of some fancy elite, coastal private school, you would meet lots of people you would never otherwise meet, it might really expand your horizons.
2
SPEAKER_05
It's still the same person, plenty of brilliant professors at those schools.
2
SPEAKER_05
But just like, you're gonna meet kids, just a wider range of why wouldn't you go to a place where you'd meet the widest range of people?
2
SPEAKER_05
 And they don't have a good answer to that question.
2
SPEAKER_05
They're 17 years old and they're already powerfully attached to two notions which have no intrinsic validity, right?
2
SPEAKER_05
And it breaks my heart.
2
SPEAKER_05
By the way, I was the same way at that age and it breaks my heart, right?
2
SPEAKER_04
Why was I that way?
2
SPEAKER_05
Why was I conservative at 17?
2
SPEAKER_05
 There's the one time in your life when you don't have to be conservative in your choices.
2
SPEAKER_05
Particularly these kids, by the way, their parents are, you know, comfortably off.
2
SPEAKER_05
Their parents can afford to back them if they want to go somewhere weird.
2
SPEAKER_05
And their parents can afford the plane ticket to Johannesburg.
2
SPEAKER_05
Get on a plane.
2
SPEAKER_05
You know, like, it's so fascinating to me that, like, it's weird that as a teenager we are
2
SPEAKER_05
 we're terrified of like doing something, you know, out of the ordinary.
2
SPEAKER_05
 I mean, you did something, I don't know your story, but you did something completely out of the ordinary.
2
SPEAKER_05
That's super interesting to me, right?
2
SPEAKER_05
That decision that you made.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I was 22 and I decided to, I thought I was going to be an investment banker or a consultant because that was the 18-year-old me, kind of, I wanted to be in art and, you know, I wanted to be an art director or something like that, but I didn't realize, I didn't believe that could be a real career growing up.
2
SPEAKER_03
 And so I settled for business and thought, OK, I'll go and make money and be safe.
2
SPEAKER_03
And then after having interned at companies every summer from 18 to 22, but also spending the other half of my holidays and vacations spending them in India training with monks, I decided at the end of my degree that I should go off and live as a monk instead of joining a company.
2
SPEAKER_03
So that's what I did.
2
SPEAKER_03
And we can talk about it separately.
2
SPEAKER_03
 But yeah, I was really fortunate that I got to meet a monk at 18 that planted a new seed of an idea that I wasn't exposed to.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I think that's the challenge, that one side is exposure.
2
SPEAKER_03
We're highly exposed to similar ideas, the same thought processes, and the same things being rewarded in a culture.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I think reward is so important.
2
SPEAKER_03
 if you're only seeing financial fame and powerful reward being around certain areas of society, then we naturally gravitate there.
2
SPEAKER_03
Whereas no one was giving me any awards for becoming a monk or no one was giving me any, you know, there was no incentive to go off and become a monk.
2
SPEAKER_03
But I always feel like if I wasn't exposed to that person, it wouldn't have happened.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I remember a study that MIT did, which was on creativity and productivity of employees.
2
SPEAKER_03
But they showed two charts and one chart was
2
SPEAKER_03
 employees where they knew people who knew people who knew them back and then second shot was an employee who knew people who didn't know each other and they found that people who knew people who didn't know each other were more likely to be creative and innovative inside an organization because going back to how we started they were able to hold opposing views.
2
SPEAKER_03
 And that to me fascinated me.
2
SPEAKER_03
And then when you look at some of the most brilliant minds in innovation or tech, or I'm sure journalism, but anyway, it's all people who did really random things, or at least were exposed to very disconnected random ideas.
2
SPEAKER_04
 Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_03
And that's, yeah, I get fascinated by that stuff too.
2
SPEAKER_03
So I'm glad.
2
SPEAKER_03
But I want to be mindful of your time, Malcolm.
2
SPEAKER_03
I could talk to you for a lot longer, but we're going to dive straight.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I've got so many questions I wanted to ask you, but we'll save them for a part two when you write your next book.
2
SPEAKER_03
Hopefully you'll come back on.
2
SPEAKER_03
But this is...
2
SPEAKER_03
 Yeah, this is something that we do at the end of every episode.
2
SPEAKER_03
It's called the final five.
2
SPEAKER_03
So these are answers in one word or one sentence maximum.
2
SPEAKER_03
I have been known to break rules when I feel like it, but I urge all of our guests to answer in one word or one sentence.
2
SPEAKER_03
So the first question for you is, what do you know to be absolutely true about human behavior that many people disagree with you on?
2
SPEAKER_04
 Or would it have an opposing view?
2
SPEAKER_04
Oh.
2
SPEAKER_05
That even the worst of us are redeemable.
2
SPEAKER_03
So you believe that even the worst of us are redeemable.
2
SPEAKER_03
Right.
2
SPEAKER_03
OK.
2
SPEAKER_03
Great.
2
SPEAKER_03
Wonderful answer.
2
SPEAKER_03
OK.
2
SPEAKER_03
Second question.
2
SPEAKER_03
What's something that's socially acceptable that you don't agree with?
2
SPEAKER_04
 Smoking pot.
2
SPEAKER_03
Great answer, okay.
2
SPEAKER_03
We have to save that for part two, too.
2
SPEAKER_03
Question number three, the hardest recent change that you've made in your life, the most difficult.
2
SPEAKER_05
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_05
That's a hard one.
2
SPEAKER_05
Starting a company.
2
SPEAKER_03
 Hmm, yeah, I'm sure that's super hard, okay.
2
SPEAKER_03
Question number four, what was your biggest lesson that you've learned in the last 12 months?
2
SPEAKER_05
That we are, I mean, since the pandemic started, way more resilient than I would have imagined.
2
SPEAKER_05
I would have thought,
2
SPEAKER_05
 we were in chaos by this point and we're not, I mean, we've come close a couple of times, but man, we had been through a lot of in this world and in this country over the last seven months and we are, we're hanging in there.
2
SPEAKER_03
Absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_03
Okay.
2
SPEAKER_03
Question number five, if you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
2
SPEAKER_05
Oh, I'm going to follow it.
2
SPEAKER_05
I'm going to steal an idea that a friend of mine said,
2
SPEAKER_05
 The other day that I loved, I keep in mind a friend of mine who's told me this is very wealthy.
2
SPEAKER_05
She said, I would like to pass a law that everyone in the world has to put their name in a hat and switch everything about your life stays the same, but you have to switch homes with the person who you draw out of the hat permanently.
2
SPEAKER_04
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_05
That would be amazing.
2
SPEAKER_03
 Permanently.
2
SPEAKER_03
Permanently.
2
SPEAKER_03
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_03
That's incredible.
2
SPEAKER_03
That is a first on our own purpose.
2
SPEAKER_03
We've never had such a law been passed or named.
2
SPEAKER_03
So I appreciate you sharing that with us.
2
SPEAKER_03
Anyway, Malcolm, that was your Fast Five.
2
SPEAKER_03
Everyone, Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers is the name of the book that we've been discussing today.
2
SPEAKER_03
Go and grab a copy.
2
SPEAKER_03
We'll put the link inside.
2
SPEAKER_03
And like I said, I would have to say this categorically.
2
SPEAKER_03
I'm happy and I'm very comfortable saying it.
2
SPEAKER_03
Malcolm Gladwell is my favorite author of all time.
2
SPEAKER_03
 Without a doubt, Malcolm's books have been a huge influence in my life and probably were part of me becoming a monk in some way or the other anyway.
2
SPEAKER_03
So I'm very grateful to Malcolm.
2
SPEAKER_03
I would check out any of his books, not just this one, but this one's a great one.
2
SPEAKER_03
Please go and check it out and his podcast, Revisionist History, as we mentioned before and discussed as well.
2
SPEAKER_03
Go and take a listen.
2
SPEAKER_03
 And Malcolm, thank you again for coming on the show.
2
SPEAKER_03
I hope this is one of many.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I look forward to getting to know you better as well.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I hope we can do dinner or a walk sometime.
2
SPEAKER_05
That would be lovely.
2
SPEAKER_05
Thank you so much.
2
SPEAKER_03
Thank you so much, Malcolm.
2
SPEAKER_03
And look forward to everyone getting to check you out more.
2
SPEAKER_05
Wonderful.
2
SPEAKER_06
 Discover a new educational and interactive podcast, Stories for Kids by Lingokids.
2
SPEAKER_06
Our episodes are packed with fun activities.
2
SPEAKER_06
Right, Elliot?
2
SPEAKER_06
Oh, yes.
2
SPEAKER_06
We went shape hunting around the block, and we found spheres and cubes on the street.
2
SPEAKER_06
That was great fun.
2
SPEAKER_06
Join Stories for Kids, the Lingokids podcast, inspiring you to learn while having fun.
2
SPEAKER_06
Listen to Stories for Kids on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2
SPEAKER_00
 Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
2
SPEAKER_01
It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let's learn about all of it and then some.
2
SPEAKER_01
Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
2
SPEAKER_01
Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
2
SPEAKER_02
 This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
2
SPEAKER_02
The joy they brought to the nation.
2
SPEAKER_05
You're free completely.
2
SPEAKER_02
No one is there to destroy you.
2
SPEAKER_02
The danger they endured.
2
SPEAKER_02
They said my head should be cut off.
2
SPEAKER_02
I'm John Legend.
2
SPEAKER_02
Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.