The 12 Books of Christmas | Adam Grant on The Science of Achieving Greatness
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Whether you're looking to sell your car right now or just whenever feels right, go to Carvana.com and sell your car the convenient way. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. We're looking back at some of our favorite books of the year in our 12 books of Christmas.

Today's episode is with author and psychologist Adam Grant. Grant joined us alongside columnist Tim Harford to discuss the science behind achieving success in work and in life. Themes from his book Hidden Potential, the science of achieving greater things. Let's go to the episode now.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Connor. Thank you, everybody, for coming on such a miserable, miserable cold evening. It's really, we can all huddle together for warmth like penguins and we'll be fine. I am Tim Harford, as you heard. It is my pleasure to introduce Adam Grant. And what can I say about Adam? I mean, he's one of the most

exciting and most readable thinkers in the world today. He's also a man who once had hidden potential. He was a competitive diver who was afraid of heights,

When he was admitted to university, he was asked to take a writing test and his writing was so disastrous, he was told that he needed remedial lessons to improve it. Now, of course, he's an enormous success, a professor at Wharton, the author of multiple best-selling books, including Think Again, which is a book I really love, including Hidden Potential, the book we'll be discussing tonight.

presenter of various podcasts, Work Life, from TED, New York Times, op-ed writer, I could go on and on and on. Please don't. But yeah, we should probably talk to Adam about his book. I should also say, I feel like we're friends, even though this is actually, the first time we met each other was an hour ago.

And I think that says something about Adam's charm and his generosity. I feel we're in incredibly safe hands tonight.

So we should begin by talking about Hidden Potential. I read this book over Christmas, I loved it. It's just full of notes and scribbles, so many fascinating ideas about hidden potential, about who can be successful and how to become more successful, and not just to become more successful, but how to achieve more in life.

It even made me cry. I am an economist with a heart made of dollar bills, so it's not easy to make me cry. So we should talk, Adam, and hopefully we're going to go all over the shop tonight, but I'm going to start with a fairly basic question, which is, you opened the book...

with a story about a school who get into chess and competitive chess. Why did you start with this story and what does it teach us about the messages you're trying to get across in the book? Well, I do want to weigh in on that, but first I have to say that was the most positive introduction I've ever heard from a British person. I'm like, what country is this? Where are we?

I used to live in Sheffield and no one ever talked that way. You used to live in Sheffield? Yes. So I grew up in Chesterfield, just about 10 miles south as you would know. So what were you doing in Sheffield? Sorry, excuse me. What were you doing in Sheffield?

Apparently watching a lot of snooker was the takeaway, but I did a sabbatical at the Institute of Work Psychology, so my wife and I moved here. It was about 17 years ago and had a blast. Excellent. And did you spend time at the Crucible watching the snooker or indeed anything else? Mostly on TV at night, but we spent a lot of time in the Peak District and the Lake District. So thank you for adding a little bit of upbeat enthusiasm to those memories. Yeah, it's how we do things up north. Okay.

Now, where were we? Chess. Yeah, let's talk about chess. So, I actually, you know, I backed into chess. I didn't set out to write about it in the book. I like chess. It's a fun game to play. I'm not particularly good at it. But I was reading some research and when I read a book, I think as you do, I always start with the evidence and then say I need to find a story and play journalist that will bring the evidence to life.

life. And so the evidence that I was trying to capture showed that if you had an experienced kindergarten teacher, you ended up being more likely to graduate from college and also you earn more money in your career. Wow, kindergarten teachers matter that much? The person who taught you when you were five years old, if you were lucky to have somebody who had 20 years of experience, that set you up for success.

And I just couldn't believe that at first. And then after I looked through the evidence from economists, it was very rigorous and very compelling, and the mechanism stunned me. I thought that the experienced kindergarten teachers were great at teaching math and reading, and they'd give you a cognitive edge. But as you know, that's not what the data showed. What really mattered was they taught you character skills. They taught discipline, they taught determination, they taught you to be proactive in seeking new knowledge, and pro-social in sharing your knowledge.

And I wanted to write about the importance of character skills and driving growth. And I was looking for a story, and I spent a good three months spinning my wheels trying to find, is there one magical kindergarten teacher who has three students over the course of decades who have gone on to achieve extraordinary things? And I couldn't find one. And then eventually I gave up, and I said, what's the closest thing to a kindergarten teacher? A coach.

And so I started searching for coaches of teams that had unlikely success. And I stumbled, it was literally a Google search, into a story about the Raging Rooks. And I was so moved by them and their coach, I said, this actually could be the whole book, but at minimum it's got to be the intro. - Yeah, and the Raging Rooks, this is a team of kids who often never played chess before. They go to a rough school, they come from a rough area, they have a lot of disadvantages.

And we don't want to spoil the story completely, but they end up

in very, very competitive chess environments, playing chess against kids who have every advantage and every privilege and, frankly, who are better chess players than them? And how do they deal with that and rise to that challenge? And it's all about character. It's not just about how good you are at playing chess, it turns out. Surprisingly. So their coach, Maurice Ashley, he had immigrated to New York from Jamaica, and he wanted to create opportunity for kids who had been denied it.

And he said, "What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna teach you that mastering the game of chess is all about honing your character skills. So we're gonna teach you to have the discipline to not take the first good move that you see, but actually do the analysis and look for a better one. We're gonna teach you to be proactive in anticipating your opponent's moves and trying to see the endgame from the beginning. We're also gonna teach you to be prosocial in reviewing every game you play with your teammates and coaching each other on how you could have made better choices."

And guess what? When you get into a high pressure moment in the national championships, no matter how good you are at chess, if you don't have those character skills, you fall apart. You don't have the discipline to pause and have patience under pressure when the clock is ticking. You haven't necessarily thought far enough ahead when you've made a move and somebody's about to checkmate you and you feel like you just have to dodge and you miss the opportunity to go on offense.

So I think that Maurice was an incredible teacher of character skills. And for me, it was a powerful story because he demonstrated that if you can get good at teaching and learning the skills of character at any stage of life, you can actually achieve more than you thought was possible and more than other people expected of you.

And these are the so-called soft skills, which I was blown away when you revealed what the origin of the phrase soft skills was. Does anybody know where soft skills comes from as a term? And if you've read the book, you can't. No, that doesn't count, but thank you for reading.

I was really disappointed to learn this. So the origin of the term soft skills is the US Army back in the 1960s was trying to classify a set of skills that they didn't know how to describe. And they called them soft skills. They were basically leadership skills, collaboration skills, character skills, resilience. They called them soft because they didn't involve working with tanks or guns.

So there was no metal, the hard skills were the literal weapon skills and then all the important stuff that they thought really drove growth and team success, those were soft skills and they basically ruined our ability to take soft skills seriously for the next half century. Thank you US Army. So, I mean the book is in large part about soft skills and the building of these soft skills, the building of these character skills, how to cultivate them in ourselves, how to cultivate them in other people.

One of the things that I think is unusual, very unusual about the book... I mean, we're blessed. It's a golden age of kind of thoughtful books full of great stories and interesting research. One of the things that is different about this one is it was so full of practical ideas. So, for example, you talk about pro-sociality. You have this example in the book of how you, with your own students...

You were giving them these tough tests and these multiple choice tests. And you said, "Oh, I will give you in some circumstances, you're allowed to basically say, 'Hey, instead of using my answer, I'm going to nominate someone else in the class, and whatever they say, you can give me the grade for that answer.'" And that, I think, unlocked something very interesting. And I don't think it was... You weren't intending to do it, right? It was an accident. Complete accident.

So, I went into class one day, I had a group of undergrads, mostly 20 and 21 years old, and I told them that the final exam was going to be extremely challenging because I think what I teach matters. I think understanding human psychology is relevant to your success and your happiness and your relationships with other people, and I want you to know this material cold. So, I'm going to give you not just multiple choice questions, I'm going to give you multiple multiple choice where we've got five answer options and you also have, it could be A and B or A and C or A and D or A, B and C or A and D.

And they looked at the sample questions and freaked out. And they said, "Even if we know the material, we're never going to figure this out." And I didn't want to reduce the challenge level, but I did want to reduce their anxiety. So I said, "All right, I'm going to let you pick the hardest question and write down the name of a classmate who you think will know the answer. And if they get it right, you get the points too."

And all of a sudden they were like, "Great! Yes! We're all gonna memorize the name of the smartest kid in the class. We're all gonna then write it down and then we're good." And I gave out the final exam and the class average went up by, I think it was 3%, with an identical degree of difficulty from the previous year's exam. And then it happened again the next year. And I thought, "Oh, they're just getting the extra points because they wrote down the name of someone who knew the answer that they didn't." But actually the gain had nothing to do with that.

What happened was, and a group of students explained it to me, was once they needed to know who was the expert, they had to study together instead of alone. And so they started organizing group study sessions and class study sessions. And then each student became an expert on a different segment of the material. And then their job was to summarize it and teach it to the rest of the class.

And lo and behold, the students who did the teaching were actually the ones who learned the most. Yeah. I mean, that's so, I forget, that's the coach effect, that's the teacher effect. So talk us through this because I found this very interesting. Okay, so the original finding here, can I just get a show of hands, how many of you are first born in your family? Oldest child or only child? Okay, technically only child, you get to pick your order. You can be first or last. Okay, and how many of you are later borns? You have an older sibling. Okay.

Okay, let me apologize in advance. I don't want to offend any of you. But there is an empirically robust finding in psychology that firstborns score slightly higher on IQ tests than later-borns. I knew it. As a firstborn, I was delighted by this evidence. My sister was really pissed. So the question is why? And you all know in birth order, it can't be genetics, right? There has to be a nurture component, not a nature component. Or maybe something in between, which we probably won't talk about today. But

One of the findings is that actually the more younger siblings you have as a firstborn, the more of an IQ boost you get. And it's a very small effect, by the way. But it comes from the fact that the older kid has to teach the younger siblings. And the more time you spend teaching your younger siblings, the more you have to retrieve information in your head, which means you remember it better. And the more you have to explain it, which means you understand it better.

And so I think this is what was happening with my students is they were teaching this material over and over again and eventually as they talked it through, it clicked and it stuck. And by the way, later-borns, you just need to teach other kids and you're good. Three younger sisters, two younger step-siblings, just saying. So... Where is your British humility now? I mean, like... Scott, I'm not taking credit for it, I'm just saying, like...

Now I understand that my brilliance has nothing to do with me. Ah, you're trying to give credit to your younger sisters for giving you the privilege of teaching. I understand now. Credit for something anyway, for sure. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

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Whether you're looking to sell your car right now or just whenever feels right, go to Carvana.com and sell your car the convenient way. Terms and conditions apply. So I mentioned that the book has all these various practical ideas. One of the things that really grabbed me was your description of your process for getting started.

Or actually, you said, don't ask for feedback. So let's not say feedback. Getting information from other people that will help you perform better. So what is your basic approach to getting useful advice, useful feedback from others? Talk us through it. Do you want the quick tip or do you want the story that leads into the tip? What do you reckon, Guy? Yeah.

All right, we're going to do the quick tip. No, okay, so the story, I guess what really taught me this lesson was I was 25 years old. I had just finished my doctorate, and I got an invitation to teach Air Force generals and colonels in the U.S. I was supposed to teach a four-hour class on motivation and leadership, and I was supposed to do it twice, two different groups, one week and then another group the next week.

I felt completely underqualified. I felt like a huge imposter. These colonels and generals, they had multi-billion pound budgets. They had thousands of flying hours under their belt. They had cool nicknames like "Out of Top Gun." They were called "Gunner" and "Striker" and "Sand Dune." I was intimidated out of my mind, but let's be honest, I had never tried to serve my country before, and I felt like they asked I should try to contribute. So I said yes.

And I showed up and I thought what I got to do is convince these people that I know what I'm talking about. So I opened by describing all my credentials and talking about my expertise and all the research I'd done. And then I taught this four-hour class and the feedback afterward was brutal. I read the feedback forms and one comment said there was more knowledge in the audience than on the podium. Facts. Facts.

Another had written, "I gained nothing from this session, but I trust the instructor got useful insight." Now, you all are amused by this? This was not fun for me. My first thought was like, "I wonder if humans can hibernate like bears. How many months can I go to sleep for until this doesn't hurt anymore?" And I had a problem, which is I had committed to teach another session, and I didn't have time to reboot my material. I'd crammed everything I knew into four hours.

I also didn't have much time to make any real changes. So all I could do was I could take my critics and try to turn them into my coaches. And I wasn't sure how to do that. I had these people who were just trashing not only my knowledge, but also the way I delivered the knowledge. And I thought, all right, their feedback was not helpful. Instead, let me ask them for advice. So I went to a few of the participants and I said, can you give me one suggestion for what I could do better next time?

and I got a lot of useless tips, like, "Why don't you go run a bunch of organizations and, you know, lose all your hair? Check. Now." But, like, you know, "Be experienced and seasoned before you try to tell us how to lead." I'm like, "I can't do anything with that. I don't have a time machine." But I also got a really useful tip, which was one person said, "Well, you know, we can tell that you're half our age. Why don't you call out the elephant in the room?" I thought, "Okay, that's something I can control and I can change my intro."

So, Tim, I showed up the next week, I looked out at the audience, and I thought, "I have nothing to lose. It could not go worse than it did." I picked one guy in particular. I looked at Sandoon, and I said, "I know what you're thinking right now. I know exactly what's on your mind. What could I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old?" Sandoon was not at all entertained by that question. But another participant jumped in and said, "Oh, that's ridiculous. You've got to be at least 13."

And that broke the ice and the whole room burst out laughing. I taught the same material I had before, but the feedback was completely different afterward. I got comments like, "Although junior in experience, he dealt with the evidence in an interesting way." And, "The professors seem to get younger every year." Or, "Is it just me getting older?" And, "I like learning about how to motivate millennials from someone who almost is one."

And it was a great lesson for me to take myself off a pedestal and try to show a little bit of vulnerability. But I think to now answer your question, I think the mistake that we had made before is when we gave out the feedback forms, when you ask people for feedback, they tell you what you did wrong or right yesterday, which means you have a bunch of critics and you have cheerleaders. And neither of those groups is helping you grow. They might actually demotivate you if they're critics. And if they're cheerleaders, they might make you complacent.

What I wanted were coaches, people who saw my hidden potential and were willing to help me develop it. And it turns out, the research shows that when you ask people for advice rather than feedback, they give you more constructive tips. Instead of looking backward, they look forward and they say, well, here's a specific thing that I think you could adjust. And so I actually think we should stop having feedback conversations and start having advice conversations. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Do you? I do, I do. Although if I could give you some advice. No, I...

I've become very interested in this question of feedback and how difficult it is to get useful feedback. And I think framing it as advice works for me. Very often, I give a lot of talks, for example, and you come off stage and the instinct is, you say, well, you know, how was it? Like, how did I do?

And what you really want to be told is, "You did great!" And actually that's what happens, because you step off stage, because it's hard, people know it's hard, people pat you on the back and go, "You did a great job, you did a great job." Very, very unusual for someone to say, "Maybe next time you could do the following thing and it would be better." And they don't say that because you didn't ask, actually. Possibly because you didn't really want to hear, but the best

feedback I've ever got is from people who volunteered that. So I once gave a speech and one of the senior folk in the TED organization was in the audience and I came off stage and a whole bunch of people saying, "Great job, great job." And I could see him lingering. I thought, "I want to hear what he has got to say." And he came up and he said, "You talked about this British fighter plane, the Spitfire,

but a lot of the audience are international, they wouldn't necessarily know what a Spitfire is. So next time, I think you should include a photograph of a Spitfire. And it was like, it's great, it's specific,

here's exactly what you need to do, here's why you need to do it, and this is why TED is such a brilliant organization for coaching speakers and presenting speakers. So you're gonna say something. - Well, no, I think what's interesting here is, and some of you have lived this, the more senior you get, the more success you achieve, the harder it is to get people to tell you the truth. I've worked with some leaders where I kind of imagine that they come into work in the morning and they say good morning, and a bunch of people are like, great point.

Maybe some of you work for those leaders. I hope none of you are those leaders.

One of the things I've learned is, so after every talk I give, every event I do, as soon as I get backstage, I ask, what's the one thing I can do better? That's my advice question. And sometimes people don't have notes, and I'm so disappointed. - Yeah, often they don't have notes. - And sometimes they were-- - Because people do not expect to be asked the question. - No, they don't, apparently it's rare, but sometimes I think they were just absorbed or engaged, and they weren't really thinking critically about it. But other times they're afraid. They don't wanna hurt your ego, they don't wanna damage the relationship.

And I ended up studying this a few years ago, and I found with Constantinos Koutifouros in a series of studies that criticizing yourself out loud can help.

Yeah. So when I get kind of deer in headlights reactions, I have to say, well, here are the three things that I think I did poorly. I rambled way too long on this current answer. I'm doing it right now. I feel like I missed an opportunity to tailor one of the points to your industry or to the culture I'm in right now. What do you think about those things? And then what else did you see? And

It's so interesting to watch people's reactions when I do that because I'm not just claiming that I want feedback or information or advice I'm demonstrating to them live that I can take it. Yeah, and that I'm not here to you know to prove that I'm a great speaker I'm here to improve my ability as a speaker and I think some I've gotten this question a few times when I talk about this research people are like wait But isn't it scary to admit the things you screwed up? Guess what the people who interact with you? They already know what you're bad at

You can't hide it from them. You can't. So you might as well get credit for having the self-awareness to see it and then the humility and integrity to admit it out loud. I think. And I'm going to give shorter comments now. Where did you want to go with this? You don't have to? Well, okay. Do you think we need more questions and shorter answers? Or is it fine as we are? Okay, there's the feedback. It's fine.

Don't agree with him just because Tim lives here and I don't. This is like a home field advantage. You can give me a shorter answer to this one because on the same subject, you specifically say you ask people to give you a score out of 10, which I found counterintuitive, but it made sense when you explained it. So why do you do that? I learned this as a springboard diver. Every time I hit the water, my coach would give me a zero to 10 score.

And it was the only thing that helped me calibrate, do I need to make a major change or a minor change? So actually before I ask what can I do better, I ask people for the zero to 10 score. And if somebody says eight, I know they really meant a six and they were being nice. But I'm gonna make some significant adjustments. If somebody says four, I need to go back to the drawing board. And so it's a way for me to gauge,

how big is the comment you're about to give me? Yeah. What happens if someone says 10? Which I imagine does happen. It does happen, and I tell them I don't accept 10s. And then they're like, well, okay, nine and a half. I'm like, great, well, what would have made it a 10? You're like...

Now that would be annoying, but okay. You specifically, what would I do to attend? You accepting my first answer. I'm willing to be annoying in service of being better. In service of personal growth. That's fair enough. So, okay, personal growth. So, just asking for a friend. So, let's say that there was like a 50-year-old economist, grew up in Chesterfield, and he...

He had got interested in calisthenics. So we kind of like, you know, there's fun, you know, there's funny sort of gym rings and kind of like doing stuff on that and so on. But he wasn't very good at it, mainly because he's a 50-year-old economist. And it's kind of, it's hard work, actually, trying to get better. Give me, give him, this friend of mine, some advice based on your research, based on the ideas in your book.

how to learn more effectively at this difficult discipline. Okay, so I have two questions first. Number one, why? Why are you doing calisthenics and trying to get better at it? Yeah, it's, I want to get fitter, stronger. I mean, my friend wants to get fitter, stronger, maybe look slightly better on the beach. Also, it's fun. Your body is moving in unusual ways that you've never, you've tried to do things you've never done before. That's interesting.

- Okay. - Don't grow up. There was nothing rude about that. - No, nothing you just described sounds fun at all. - Yeah. Says the springboard diver. - That's different. You get to feel like a bird for half a second. - Okay. - And then a dolphin. It's fun. - Okay. It's the transition from the bird to the dolphin that worries me, but fine. - Fair enough. Okay, the other question is where are you stagnating? What's the specific thing you want to get better at? - Yeah, okay.

So I need to go and ask my coach about that. It just feels hard. It's just hard. My coach is currently in Morocco for reasons, so I'm going to the gym by myself with a spreadsheet.

do these exercises by myself. It's very easy to just kind of cheat, slack a bit, I'm a bit busy, or my back hurts a bit, maybe I won't do the abs work. So there's that barrier to pushing as hard as you should to get the maximum benefit. - Got it, okay.

So, I mean, thinking out loud here, I would do-- - Bear with us, sorry. - No, I mean, I would do a couple things. The first one, the place I'd want to start is to say, why are you so opposed to the feeling of it being hard? If it feels easy, then you're not challenging yourself. It's supposed to be hard, I think. Secondly, I think this seems like an opportunity for deliberate play, as opposed to deliberate practice. You claimed it was fun, but then you're talking about pushing yourself through a slog that's sort of painful.

And so, well, I'll give you my version of this. So, I run on a treadmill and the first thing I did to try to make it fun was I told my wife to delete shows from the DVR if I didn't meet my workout goals. - This is fun. - No, but if I did meet them, then they would stay there and I could watch them while I run. - Okay. - And so that was motivating, saying I really wanna know what happened in Harlan Coben's new Netflix series.

and some of you are probably watching right now. Fool Me Once, is that what it's called? Is anyone watching it?

Yeah, loved it. Anyway, so that's a reward that's sitting there that I paired with the activity that makes it fun for me. Number two, I have specific goals that I'm competing against myself for. And so personal bests are really hard. What I can do though is I can improve upon yesterday. And so what I do is I chart my progress week by week. And I'm like, okay, this is a motivating challenge now to see if I can be better than I was last week. So have you tried all of this already?

No, this is all good. This is all good. Because I feel that I'm just like, I'm just kind of white knuckling it and going, yeah, I just, yes, it should be hard. So it's going to be hard, but it can be fun as well. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. We'll find out. And you had this idea of, so there's this great chapter about deliberate play. You talk about Steph Curry's training regime. There's also this idea of interleaving, which I found interesting. Oh, yeah. So this was counterintuitive to me.

If you look at learning research, I always thought that you should practice the same skill over and over again in order to get better at it because you do one rep and you figure out what your mistake was and then you make the adjustment and then you want to see if you've been able to correct it and then you keep refining that way.

Psychologists don't find that. They find that alternating between different skills actually leads to deeper learning and faster growth. So for example, let's say you're trying to improve your basketball shot and you want to become a better painter. The advice is to alternate between those two things. Go out, take five shots, and then do a painting, and then come back. And the reason, I think there are actually a few mechanisms behind it, but the one that I've found most compelling is

that when you put it away for a little while, then you're actually, you're ingraining it more when you have to then re-rehearse it as opposed to you can go to autopilot too quickly if you do them back to back to back to back. - And do we have the data on kind of what that period should be? I mean, you said five shots and then go paint. I mean, is that it? Or is it like basketball for a day and then painting for a day? Do we, or do we not? - This is the kind of precision that economists always want in human behavior.

and psychologists cannot provide. - Yeah. So on the subject of what psychologists can teach us, and stepping away from the book for a moment, because we don't want to cover everything in the book, because you all want to buy the book, right? 'Cause it's fantastic.

Can we talk about the state of organizational psychology and sometimes called the replication crisis, various scandals which we won't go into, it's all just a bit too painful, but just this general feeling. Daniel Kahneman, I think, the great Nobel Prize winning psychologist, put it quite well recently. He said, 10 years ago when I read a surprising finding

that was backed by the data, seemed to be backed by the data, I'd believe it. And now when I read a surprising finding that seems to be backed by the data, my instinct is not to believe it. Because there have been so many, there have been some credible allegations of out-and-out fraud, but also just a lot of pretty sloppy research, a lot of stuff that turned out not to stand up. So what is your feeling about this field that you're in the middle of now?

So my job is not to have feelings about the field. It's to follow the evidence. And I think there are a couple of things I've learned from the evidence. The first one is, look, science evolves and our methods should get rigorous over time. So, you know, a bunch of my early studies were done with smaller samples than I would use today. And part of that was a problem of access. And part of that was some flawed assumptions about statistical power that hadn't been, you know, sort of made as transparent and clear as they are now.

And so I think this is science progressing, is the first thing I would say. Secondly, I would say is I think that psychologists have taken the brunt of this when all kinds of fields are struggling with replication. There's a team led by Brian Nozick that famously they tried to replicate over 200 papers in psychology and they found about half of the findings replicated. Well, we have to ask a question about what is the ideal replication rate?

I don't expect every finding to replicate. Sometimes you have different people in your studies. Sometimes changes over time or across cultures or contexts really matter. And sometimes, you know, you just, you happen to get support for something that's relatively rare and the outlier effect was there and then you run a larger version of the study and it wasn't. And we don't want 100% replication rate because then we're not learning, we're not testing surprising ideas ever. We're just confirming our intuition.

So Brian's team recently, they did replications in cancer biology research and found failed replications over 40%. And so even the hard sciences have this problem, and there are all kinds of reasons why human bodies would respond differently to different drugs at different times.

So I think we need to temper our expectations of science. We want science to get better, but I think what we want to know is that probabilistically, when you do a series of studies, that's more likely to approximate the truth than whatever your intuition is. And I guess the other thing I would say about this is I had a debate with Danny Kahneman about this. We did a rethinking podcast a couple years ago, and I was troubled by his statement that he doesn't believe a counterintuitive finding.

Danny introduced us in part to confirmation bias. The problem that we all like to support the hypotheses we believe and reject the ones that don't match our assumptions and motivations. And so if you're gonna then knee-jerk reject a hypothesis 'cause it doesn't sound true to you, you're being a bad scientist. And you don't wanna have that debate with a Nobel laureate 'cause you're not gonna win.

And Danny convinced me that my thinking about this was incomplete and that there's a difference between what I've now come to think of as extremely counterintuitive findings and non-intuitive findings.

I think there are a lot of cute findings in psychology where there's like a tiny thing you do and then it changes your life. Like we should be skeptical about that. That is counterintuitive. It's the opposite of what is likely to be true. Non-intuitive is much more of what we were talking about earlier. I read the study, I never would have thought of that. And then as we unpack the mechanisms and look at the data, that makes sense to me now. And I think that that's something we should still aspire to do.

What do you make of all this? I feel that we need to do a lot of thinking about the structures involved, the incentives and just the way that the data infrastructure in a way, the process of funding research that's going to be big enough to make any sense, the support for sharing data, and you're right, it's not just social psychology. Psychology has taken the brunt of this, but talking to

epidemiologists, they're worried that basically all the medical trials are too small. And they're too small because they have various very high standards, and we like high standards, but the very high standards make the trials incredibly expensive to run. And if the trials are very expensive to run, you run the smallest possible trial that you could. And there are ways to patch that up. You go, well, you know, we'll do a meta-analysis, we'll put together a bunch of trials, but that's not as useful as just doing the first trial.

really well. And I feel, I've been doing a lot of thinking about this recently, but I feel that there is, there are some amazing things we could be doing

with the right kind of data infrastructure, the right sharing of tools, the right transparency that could just lead scientific progress ahead in leaps and bounds. And at the moment, we're still fumbling towards that much more slowly than I would like. I think you're spot on there. And I think one other thing we should add to the table is the questions we really care about, it's hard to track people long enough to know what the lasting effects are. I read a synthesis of research recently. We don't even know if dental floss works.

is useful. Like, four out of five dentists tell you to floss your teeth. The empirical evidence is not, it's not conclusive. I still floss my teeth, but I don't know that that's good for me. And no one does. Yeah. And we do have, there's amazing, so the National Health Service in the UK has got data on basically every interaction you've had with the healthcare system. Every time you went to the doctor, what you were prescribed, it's all

It's all there in these big data warehouses. Did you maybe contract a sexually transmitted infection after you got married? Interesting. Did you used to wet the bed when you were 15 years old? It's all there.

And the question is how to draw... An unbelievable amount of insight can be drawn, scientific insight can be drawn out of that data. How do you do it while protecting people's privacy? And I think we know the answer. People are nerdy enough to go and read Ben Goldacre's review for the UK government. There are solutions to this. But they involve an investment in... I've used this phrase "infrastructure" before, just the way you structure the data, the way you protect the data,

the rules you have, the norms you have for querying that data, which enables science to be done openly. So every time you make a query of that data, every other scientist with permission sees what query you made. So they can, oh, actually, there's a bug in your code. You made a mistake. So we can fix that. At the same time, you don't ever actually get

the data, you get the answer to your query. So you're protecting people's privacy while at the same time having much better structures for open science. So that sort of thing that we could be doing and we aren't. And yeah, it's not just about kind of cute social psychology research that is possibly not true at all. But anyway, there we go. Thank you for answering that question. I realize I got slightly off track. I had another...

Slightly off track question. I don't have a track. Let's be clear. We could talk about whatever you find interesting So so I just wanted to get your reflections on on Cheryl Sandberg because she's just stepped down from Meta's board This is amazingly powerful businesswoman All this influence on on Facebook she was kind of worshipped and then Facebook fell out of fashion and so she fell out of fashion and and and

I found her absolutely fascinating from a distance, but you actually wrote a book with her. So I wanted to ask you, what was that like? What did you learn working with Cheryl? Well, actually, last time I was in the UK for Intelligence Squared, Cheryl and I did an Option B event that Malala was kind enough to host. And...

I think, you know, I do want to say there are huge problems in social media to fix. It has been sobering as we watch what's happened to Twitter as Elon Musk runs it to see how much worse Facebook could be, I will say. And yes, there are many ways it could be better, and I've given a lot of input over the years. And so I think jury is out on how we solve a lot of the problems that social media creates.

I think the biggest thing that I learned from working with Cheryl is she has the highest standards of anybody I've ever met. So I was used to writing a draft and then doing a couple revisions and seeking, you know, getting the zero to 10 score and then revising some more based on the advice I got and then I'm done.

For Cheryl, a chapter would not see the light of day until there were at least 100 revisions. That was a minimum in most cases. And she was so determined to get the data right and also to be as clear as possible in her communication. And it fundamentally transformed me as a writer. And I don't know if you can see it, Tim, but when I go back and read, there's like a before working with Cheryl and there's an after working with Cheryl. Give and take remains my favorite idea I've ever worked on.

It was my first book. Oh, thank you for those of you who are familiar with it. It was the thing I'd spent-- two people loved it. No one else has read it. No. I'd chosen it as the one thing I wanted to study, and I poured a decade of my research life into it. And so it was like my baby.

I would write that book so differently now. And the post-Cheryl books, Think Again and Hidden Potential, I'm much prouder of the writing. And I think they're far better books because of the way that she raised those standards for me. And I think we should all be lucky to collaborate with someone who believes enough in our potential that they're willing to say it's not done yet, even when we're ready to turn it in. Yeah.

I wanted to ask you about your writing. You have this story in the book about Harvard saying, well, yeah, you can come to Harvard, but you really need help with your writing because it's bad. And

You make it look very easy as a writer. You're very accessible, it's very easy to follow. It's definitely you. There are certain turns of phrase that only you would use, that another writer wouldn't, and that's good. It's not kind of all just smoothed off. So you're a great writer, and you were once a terrible writer, apparently. So talk us through that process. Well, thank you, I think.

- The remedial classes worked, right? But you never went to the remedial classes. - No, I skipped it 'cause I couldn't stomach the idea of taking a class that I was told was for people who spoke English as a seventh language and heavily recruited athletes. And by the way, I got to Harvard already worrying that I was the one mistake who admissions took and I didn't belong there and I wasn't smart enough. And then they fail me on the writing test, which is the first test I take in college.

My roommate... Welcome to Harvard. Yeah, no, no, but it gets worse because my roommate was the heavily recruited star quarterback on the American football team. And he passed the writing test. Like, I should drop out. I do not belong here. But one of the pieces of feedback that I got, actually, this was more advice from the writing office, was they said, you really need to work on structure because we could not follow your argument.

And this is something that still is a challenge for me, which is I suffer more and more now from what psychologists call the curse of knowledge, which is when you know something, you can't imagine what it's like to not know it. And that means it's really hard to explain it to other people who don't understand it. It's why so many, like the worst physics teacher you could have for intro physics would be Einstein, because he cannot relate to what it's like to not understand relativity.

And actually he was a terrible teacher and had to cancel his classes because he couldn't draw enough students despite his brilliance or maybe because of his brilliance and his expertise. Anyway, so one of the things I had to learn to do was to actually explain my ideas out loud before I wrote them to somebody who knew nothing about the subject. And it's probably my most useful exercise today still. - Yeah. So what advice would you give me? I'm 10 books in, I'm working on 11th, it's hard.

How can I become a better writer? How can Tim Harford become a better writer? That's like David Beckham asking how he can become a better footballer. I dispute the premise, but still... Jeez. I'd have to think more about that, I think, to do it justice. But if you want an off-the-cuff reaction... Yeah? I think...

One thing that I would love to see you do is stay with your amazing stories longer. Your story about Keith Jarrett to this day, when I sit down to write a story or to prep a TED Talk, the Tim Harford standard is what I'm trying to hit.

And sometimes it's over too soon for me. It's so rich and so interesting. I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel a little bit of you and I have the same instincts, which is we love the data and the science more. And the story is just a vehicle. But as a reader, I'm less like myself and more like the audience, I think. And I want you to go into the full narrative more than you do. And you do that beautifully on Cautionary Tales. And I think you could do more of it on the page. Okay. Noted. Thank you. Thank you.

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See, now you have to do it. We have a whole room full of people that are expecting it. You're accountable, Tim. Yeah, no, and actually the process of writing the Cautionary Tales podcast, which is very story-driven, has, I think, changed the way I think about story. I think another thing, another idea from the book that I want to do more is...

is to get more advice earlier for more people. There are a couple of people who see everything and work over everything, but I could show the writing to more people at an earlier stage. - Try it at your own risk. - Yeah, and I don't do that because I feel, 'cause I'm scared, right? I feel uncomfortable. - How many successful books will you have written

to let go of that fear. Yeah, well, but I feel like I don't want to show it to you before it's ready, right? But actually, it's the process of...

Of course, I do in fact want to show it to you before it's ready because that's why I'm showing it to you. And that's how you get it ready. Yeah. I think. And this links into the, you've got this lovely story about these linguists who are just unbelievably good at learning French and Italian and all kinds of obscure languages. Many of whom were told... Did you just call French and Italian obscure languages? Did anybody else hear that?

I would excuse an American for doing that. You have no excuse, my friend. It's not how it sounded in my head, but okay, I'm sure that's what I said. You meant an addition of obscure languages. Yes, I'm with you. So, and many of them were just told at school they were terrible at languages, or I think one of them...

Their father spoke Spanish at home, was a native speaker of Spanish and they couldn't learn Spanish despite that advantage. And it turns out the secret's all about discomfort. - Yeah, I actually didn't know where this chapter was gonna go so I happened to stumble across a polyglot. This is somebody who speaks at least six languages fluently and can converse proficiently in another five.

And I just think that's endlessly interesting. How did you learn to do that? Did you have a language gene? Were you exposed to a ton of different languages early on during a critical period? And no, it turns out that this guy, Benny Lewis, could not learn a foreign language in school and only started learning them successfully as an adult. How did that happen?

And then I'm like, well, is Benny alone? And no, I find Sarah Maria Hasboon, who had the same problem and couldn't learn Spanish despite the fact that her father is Salvadorian. And she grew up in her childhood con un padre hispano hablante. Y todavía no puede hablar en español. So, like, how did they learn to do that? And what do they know as adult learners that we can all learn? And it turns out their core insight is really simple.

which is most of us, when we're taught languages in school, we read them and we write them. And we don't speak them yet because we don't feel comfortable. And we think we've got to master it so we don't embarrass ourselves and sound like idiots. But actually, the way to master it is to speak it. And Sarah Maria told me, she said, she said, learning to speak a language without talking day in, day out is kind of like trying to master the piano by reading a Schumann biography.

Or trying to become a great basketball player by watching videos of Steph Curry and LeBron James. Not going to happen. And in order to get over this hurdle that they faced, they had to not only embrace but amplify discomfort. So Benny, he's Irish, and he sets a goal. He moves to a country, and he says, I want to be proficient in three months. And his goal is to make 200 mistakes a day when he talks to you.

And so he literally will memorize a script in a language he doesn't understand and walk up to strangers and introduce himself and say, "Hi, I'm Benny. I'm trying to learn a language and I don't speak this language."

And then see how they respond. And every time he makes a mistake in a script, somebody gives him a tip. And every moment that he makes a mistake, he remembers the lesson better because he had that little pang of, oh, this is awkward. Why am I doing this? And I think the better you get at embracing that kind of discomfort, the faster you learn. Yeah. So seek discomfort.

I'm going to come back. I think there's an interesting tension or contradiction in the book. But before I ask you about that... Oh, good. We're going to fight about something. No, I don't think... I've been waiting for this. We'll fight about something. Wait a minute. Tim, Tim, hold on a second. You won the National Debate Championship once upon a time? Yeah, it was 1992. Okay. You were like six years old at the time.

I was 11. Okay. But I really thought that part of what I was signing up for tonight was a chance to test my debate skills against a master. And you're just, you're not challenging me enough. I mean, you're agreeing with things I say. What kind of debate champion does that? Okay, so hold that thought. I'm going to come to you guys.

Adam clearly wants your most hostile questions. No, no, no. I want to learn from you debating, really. And I want to have my arguments pressure tested. So what's something you disagreed with in the book? So...

It's a rather than disagreement, a contradiction. So something that puzzled me. You have this really interesting, I think, compelling argument that in order to learn, you need to seek discomfort. Like these polyglots who just humiliate themselves, who are just hungry to make the maximum number of mistakes. And you build on that and explore that. A couple of chapters later in the book, you're talking about the importance of play.

And play is not gamification, it's not giving yourself little scores. Play is like really having fun, just kind of messing around and just enjoying yourself. So you're telling us that in order to learn and grow, seek discomfort. And you're also telling us in order to learn and grow, like have fun, like have a great time. So does that not strike you as somewhat contradictory? Now we're talking. Okay.

Yeah, no, I don't see that as a contradiction. I see it as a tension. And you're the first person to raise it, and it bothered me while I was writing the book, and no one who read it pointed it out, and I decided it was just in my head. And now I know it isn't, and I'm mad, and I want to go fix it. But here's... So what I tried to do is I tried to write the resolution of it, and I think where I landed is there are different kinds of discomfort, and some are beneficial and some are not.

The kind of discomfort I think is not beneficial is either burnout or bore out. So you do not want to push yourself to chronic emotional exhaustion where you feel like you have nothing left to give and you're just completely drained of your energy. You also don't want to do something that's so monotonous that you can't imagine a reason to get excited about it and you're just pushing yourself and using up all of your self-control.

What you do want, I think, is the more manageable discomfort of social fear.

of what are other people gonna think of me? Can I give them this draft because they might judge me, they might think I'm stupid, or they might think I'm not as smart as I was on the last book. And then I've either lost it or I've sold out or I'm on a decline. It's that kind of discomfort that I think helps us, the hesitation to try something new and the hesitation to put our ideas in front of other people. That's what we need to get over, but I don't want you to suffer constantly.

Okay. Did I resolve? Maybe. Maybe? Yeah. Maybe, I mean, maybe the resolution is simply you can't be, you can't be uncomfortable all the time and you've got to have some fun, right? But you can also, you can learn through fun as well. This is the Goldilocks theory of psychology. Yeah. Everything in moderation. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's been amazing. Thank you, Adam. Thank you everybody for contributing so fully and so interestingly from the floor. Thank you all for making the journey. Thank you to Intelligence Squared, the amazing team there for hosting us.

Your generosity of spirit, Adam, your intellect and your creativity have been just a joy to sit with. Wait a second. Hold on. No, no. You can't end here. I want to say something first. Okay. First of all, can we thank Tim Harford for showing up? Thank you.

Tim, I really cannot believe how much time and thought you put into this book, and it made me very nervous, frankly. But I really appreciate and admire how carefully you dig into everything you read, and you always challenge me to think deeper and also broader, and tonight has been no exception, and I'm grateful for that. And now that we've met, I think we might be friends. So thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. And then... Thank you. Thank you.

And then I would love to say to the audience, did anybody see the Guardian headline? The Super Bowl of Democracy is this year, this week. I had a real problem with that headline. This is the World Cup of Democracy. But that aside, I think a lot of us are worried that we're living in a time when people are getting dumber and more tribal and more hateful.

And the intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness and compassion and courage in this room gives me real hope for democracy. And I just want to thank you all. It's been an honor to be here. Ladies and gentlemen, Adam Graham. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts and Bea Duncan.

Thank you.

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