#112 Adam Grant: Rethinking Your Position

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/10c7ea2a832559df

Yeah, you're entitled to your own opinion.
If you keep your opinion to yourself.
If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind.
In the face of better logic or stronger data.
And so I think if you're willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion.
It goes right back to something we talked about earlier, which is to say, Okay, when would I change my mind?
If you can't answer that question.
You are no longer thinking like a scientist, you've gone into preacher prosecutor mode.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
This podcast is packed with timeless ideas and practical insights to help you get the most out of life and business.
If you're listening to this, you're not currently a supporting member.
If you'd like special member only episodes, access before everyone else, transcripts, and other member only content.
You can join at fs.blog slash podcast.
Check out the show notes for a link.
Today I'm speaking with Adam Grant.
Adam has spent the past 15 years researching and teaching evidence-based management, helped the likes of Google, Pixar, and the MBA reexamine how they can design meaningful jobs.
build creative teams, and shape collaborative cultures.
Adam's latest book, Think Again, is his best yet.
We're gonna talk a lot about thinking, or more specifically rethinking, attempting to answer the questions of how we update our own views, how we change the views of others.
And how we create a community.
This podcast is an invitation to let go of the knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well.
and to tie your identity to flexibility and not consistency.
It's time to listen and learn.
Can you tell us in your own words how you came to write about rethinking?
This is such a hard question to answer because everything I wanna say
I'm tempted to rethink. So
I I really started thinking
Deliberately about it when
I just had experience after experience of
going into a new organization and you know usually I'd either give a keynote speech or
the CEO or founder would reach out for some advising
And I'd start to walk through the evidence on whatever their question was.
And more often than not, I'd get answers like
Well that won't work around here.
Or
That's not how we've always done things.
And
At some point
I just started saying

Blackberry?
Blockbuster?
Kodak, Seers, should I keep going?
It was both surprising and mildly annoying to me that the very people who had called me, because they thought I could help them rethink their vision.
their culture, their strategy.
We're we're close to the best evidence I could find.
And
I got really curious about why that was.
And then I saw a lot of the same thing with my students.
Where
You know, they'd come in completely locked into being investment bankers.
I I've had enough students regret that path that I've spotted some of the warning signs that somebody might not find Nirvana going down that road.
And I'd you know, I'd try to encourage them to reconsider.
And I got the same resistance.
And any time I see a twenty one year old
And a sixty one year old grapple with the same exact problem. I think there's something really important and interesting to explore.
So here we are.
Yeah, definitely. We always it's easy to see that other people should rethink things. Like we're we're looking at them going like, Oh, you know, that's blockbuster. They should have rethought that or they should be rethinking that. It's really hard.
For us to rethink.
Ourselves. Why is that?
There are probably multiple reasons for it, but
I think two of the reasons why people are really hesitant to rethink things are one, it makes the world feel much more unpredictable.
Uh you know, if if if my views aren't fixed.
then who am I? And
How do I navigate a a really confusing and often turbulent world?
And two
It makes me feel like I am not an expert. Right. And a lot of us take pride in our knowledge.
You know when when I think about power.
There's a a classic French and fr uh French and Raven framework.
Uh where they said look, you know, there's
There's expert power.
There's what's called referent power, which is basically being liked and respect.
And then there's coercive reward.
And legitimate power.
And most of the bases of power that people have in life come from a position.
that they happen to hold. Right. So my ability to reward you or punish you, my ability to get you to listen to me because I have a role of authority is not something I can carry with me.
And so the knowledge I have is is one of the few things that I get to hold on to. And the idea that that might be fragile
It not only questions my identity, it also, I guess, questions my status and my standing in the world, which is something pretty uncomfortable to do.
Let's double click on that identity concept because I think that you sort of said our views are almost tied to our identity and that gets in the way sometimes.
This is this is something I'm always puzzled by and I I feel like I see it in every field.
There are professionals in almost every field who not only are interested in in particular ways of being or particular practices.
But they actually define themselves by living those practices.
You you know this already, but when I was writing the book
I I started thinking through, you know, how how terrible would the world be?
If some professions had not rethought some of their convictions.
So imagine for example that you went to a doctor
Whose identity was to be a professional lobotomist.
That would that would be extremely dangerous.
And yet there was a time when a lot of physicians define themselves by that method, by that set of tools.
Um we've seen the same thing with you know with police officers, right, who
uh who identify themselves as the kinds of people who would stop and frisk because you never know where a criminal could be.
Um and we know from the evidence that that that just had horrendous effects.
uh particularly when it comes to, you know, disproportionately um
Arresting and uh and prosecuting people of color.
Uh, particularly black people here in the US.
You know, we've we've had
Teachers and parents who identified with with practices that were just highly ineffective and maybe even harmful.
I think that it's dangerous, right? I think that
For me an identity is not about what you believe, it's about what you value.
And so I wanna have a set of principles. For me, my highest values are generosity, excellence, integrity, and freedom.
And
I am completely flexible on the best ways to live those values.
And so you might come tomorrow and tell me, you know what?
The randomized controlled experiments that you do, the longitudinal studies you do, there's a fatal flaw in them and there's a better way.
To be helpful and excellent at your job.
And I would be skeptical because I believe in science.
But I would be open to hearing the idea.
How did you get to that point? Like how do we convince ourselves to attach our identity to values and not beliefs? Like that's a that's a tricky path, isn't it?
Do you think so?
I don't know, like how do you well it seems like it is, otherwise we'd just be rethinking all the time.
I mean th isn't that part of the fun of being human though?
Re to me, rethinking is it's code for learning.
Isn't it?
Well, it is, but we don't update our views very often. That's that's part of the issue. Our own and others, right? It's it's hard to see it when we don't do it.
It's really easy to see when others don't do it. What is the process by which we update our views?
That's a great question.
The the way that I've I've landed it thinking about this is to say, look
When
When you have a belief
You have two options.
One is you can subject it to a rethinking cycle.
The other is you can fall victim to an overconfidence cycle.
So an overconfidence cycle
is you know something we've all both committed and uh and witnessed probably too many times. But
The basic idea is we start by being proud of something that we think we know.
And that leads us then to feel a lot of conviction.
that kind of launches us into confirmation bias, where we look for information that confirms our expectations, as well as desirability bias, where we look for information that that basically reinforces what we want to be true.
And then we see what we expected to see and what we wanted to see, and we get validated and that only makes us prouder of what we know.
And less than
Open to rethinking.
The rethinking cycle is is very much the opposite.
It starts for me with intellectual humility.
Which is about knowing what you don't know.
you know, no matter how much of an expert you are in a given field or a given topic, uh, you have a long list of things that you're clueless about.
And being aware of of what your ignorance is.
leads you to doubt your convictions. It makes you curious about what you don't know.
And that opens your mind to new discoveries. And then every time you learn something new.
It's not this sign that oh
Now I'm an expert.
It's this sense that
Well
There's so much more to learn, right? And I've I've made a tiny, tiny dot of progress.
in you know a whole universe of knowledge.
And I can't wait to to see what I learn next.
And so I think one of the things we need to do is we need to give ourselves permission to enter rethinking cycles.
And there are a lot of ways to do that we could we could talk about. But Shane, I I'm gonna ask you about this because
Couple a couple of years ago, you wrote a post about how we should have more second thoughts.
And I had literally started writing about that. I think it it must have come out around the time that I was writing the Think Again book proposal. And I I had proposed a tent for this book as Second Thoughts.
It's like this is amazing. You're on the exact same wavelength as me. And this is what you do for a living, right? You you rethink things. You also ask the Farnum Street community and your whole audience here at the Knowledge Project to rethink a lot of their convictions. So where do you start your rethinking cycles and how do you know when it's time to enter one?
I I think like I I've just summed this up as like outcome over ego. And so I usually try to wrap my outcome.
uh or wrap my my sense of identity or or ego in the outcome. And that's something I learned when I was working for the intelligence agency, right? Like it wasn't about m me having the best idea.
is like who's got the best idea because that's gonna get the best outcome and then
You sort of grow up in an environment where that becomes, I would say, the norm by and large. It's hard in a knowledge environment though, right? Because you have so much of your your worth. You you wanna contribute to something. I think there's a biological need to contribute to something larger than us.
And if your identity you're not mechanically making something, you can't see there's nothing tangible to what you're producing.
then you you you effectively are a knowledge worker in one way or another, and then you're paid for your judgment. So if your judgment isn't right, what is it?
And then what you do is you you
You force your way, right? Like you
You don't intentionally sabotage other people, but you only look for confirming evidence. You you're not open to changing your mind because your sense of identity is tied to being right, because that's how you contribute to the organization.
It's it's interesting, but not at all surprising to me that that you really learn this in the intelligence community, because the way you're describing your process of rethinking is exactly what what I learned from studying super forecasters.
Right, which is they they will often come in to making a judgment and say, Okay, the only way to to have a better shot at at being right.
is to recognize all the places where I'm wrong.
And I I love this practice in particular of the they came from one of the super forecasters in the book, Jean Pierre Bagom.
Who when he forms a tentative opinion will actually make a list of the conditions under which he would change his mind.
And I've actually started doing this over the the past few months because
I don't want to get locked into something that was, you know, maybe
Sort of a a a soothing belief, but ultimately one that's not gonna serve me well.
I wanna come to something you said about Blackberry and Blockbuster. I was thinking, you know, like how do you balance this notion of okay, we don't know everything, there's a lot of uncertainty in what we're doing.
I I'm open to rethinking it, but I also I need to take action.
And I need to do something. And then you have an escalation of commitment the more action you take, which it becomes harder and harder to rethink. You have these sunk costs building up, you have other sort of escalations.
H how do you balance those two things between being open and also affording yourself the the the choices that you need to make to exist in an organization and seize opportunity?
I don't know that there's a way to get the best of both worlds in every situation.
I do think though that you can create conditions that in at least increase the probability.
Uh that you end up both open and decisive.
at the same time, which is a a sort of strange combination. So
For me that's really about changing the way that we we reward people.
So in too many organizations, people are basically counted as successful if they get a good result and failed if they get a bad result.
And the problem is it often takes years to find out what the results were. It's very easy for people to persist with a failing project for a long time and convince themselves and everyone else around them that you know that that they're on the right path.
What a lot of the research on this suggests is that we want to shift to process accountability, not just outcome about accountability. And ask people to really think seriously about, okay.
How would I know that this is a thorough and thoughtful decision process as opposed to one that's driven, you know, purely by whim or intuition.
Um and ends up being much more shallow.
So I I drew this a little two by two that I've I've found helpful where I cross the quality of the outcome with the quality of the process.
And I think w we need to stop rewarding good outcomes with bad processes.
Because that's just luck.
That's kind of a boneheaded decision that that happened to turn out well.
And we need to start
Either celebrating or at least normalizing good processes with bad outcomes.
Because if you have a very thorough process, let's say for example you're gonna launch a new product.
Or you're going to even try to reinvent your culture a little bit, or you're trying to figure out, you know, should we should we hire somebody or not.
Um in all of those decisions, the the common ingredient is you don't know what the outcome is gonna be a year, two years, five years down the road.
What you do know though is that there are more systematic, more rigorous ways of evaluating the decision now.
And so if you can score yourself on a set of benchmarks around, okay, was my process thorough
then even if the outcome wasn't good, you could say, well, that was an experiment worth running, because that's part of how you become a learning organization.
And I I'm constantly shocked by how few people actually think this way.
How do you judge a process?
Like how how do you walk through judging that and knowing that the outcome won't happen for years, but also knowing that
You need to update the process as you go along to get better and better with and incorporate new knowledge. So let's take a specific kind of decision. So let's let's do a hiring decision, uh, since that's easy to work with.
So Shane, if if you and I are going to make a hiring decision together and we're I'm delegating to you for sure. No, you shouldn't. What you want is for me to weigh in on how to design the process and you want to be the one that implements it. What what I would do is I would start by saying, okay, most basic mistake that people make in these kinds of decisions is
Uh they don't consider criteria before looking at candidates.
Right. So they they interview their three people and they start to compare them as opposed to saying, No, I should have an independent standard for the skills and values that I'm trying to select on.
And let's identify those really clearly.
Let's not just do those from my opinion. Let's you know, let's try to build some wisdom from a crowd here. Uh and of course not all crowds are equally wise, right? So let's let's go to people who are knowledgeable about the key
uh the key dimensions of our culture, the key challenges of the job.
And then once we built out the criteria we're looking for, the next step is to say, okay, how do we rigorously and comprehensively assess people standing on those criteria?
And you know, in a lot of cases there's one interviewer we know that it's better to go up to three or four.
Uh empirically, in too many cases also.
Uh it's each interviewer's job to make an overall assessment of the candidate, which makes it too easy to decide you like someone and then confirmation bias and desirability bias are uh are basically driving the process.
Uh so what we do instead is we we break this down and we say, Okay
Shane, I'm looking for somebody who's a giver, not a taker.
Your job when you meet this candidate is to solely assess them on that dimension and come back with your behavioral data on whether they, you know, they fall more on the selfish or the generous end of that spectrum.
And then we have someone else assessing their intellectual humility and curiosity.
We have somebody else who's, you know, maybe gauging their levels of integrity.
And so nobody has a conviction about whether the overall candidate is good or not. Uh they're building the pieces of the puzzle to say, Okay, does this person meet our criteria? And then after that's done, we would then come together and say, Okay, now let's make an overall judgment, having pooled all of our knowledge, right? That's a thorough process and it's very different from how most organizations hire.
W why is it so different from what most people do? Just because it's time consuming and
I think it's less about the time.
And more about
The gospel of intuition.
Too many hiring managers are afraid.
that if they
Essentially delegate I mean, this is a more algorithmic it's a more algorithmic approach to decision making, right?
If I if I deleg delegate my knowledge and my experience
Uh to
What feels more like a formula.
Then maybe I'm out of a job.
And maybe also, you know, my my superior intuition.
My gut feeling about a candidate is gonna get ignored and that's what I've you know, I've hung my hat on for a lot of my career.
I also think it's boring.
Right. So managers love having the freedom and flexibility to go wherever the interview takes them.
And you know, the idea of being much more structured in your interview process of saying, Okay, let's get a a well defined work sample.
Let's, you know, figure out if somebody says they're a good salesperson, let's actually ask them to sell us something. And let's compare all the candidates on the same t selling task.
It kinda reduces the variety that I get in my job.
Uh and I think that's th those are a couple of the reasons wh why it's uncommon. But
I I think to your point, yeah, it's expensive, right? So
It
ultimately will require a bigger investment of time. It probably requires more people involved too.
Uh that time has an opportunity cost and so maybe we feel like we're giving something up. I don't know about you.
If I'm gonna hire someone and commit to working with them
I cannot invest enough time up front to decide that that's a good choice. It's interesting to me to to listen to you say that because what comes to mind is like there are
Organizations that invest
Incredible amounts of energy, time, money.
into this. They're sports organization. All sports, you know, before they draft somebody, it's like who what is the person's character?
How well do they recognize the players? How well do they is it in
intuition versus professionalism on their part, right?
And they they have these ways of evaluating that special forces the same thing. They're investing a lot in sort of determining these recruits and
Uh, why do you think they're so variable? Like it it's hit or miss, right? Like they they haven't
cracked that code, if you will. I think I I think it's it's hit or miss for a few reasons. One is
We we don't have all the criteria that we need.
I I've worked with a a whole bunch of professional sports teams over the past few years on this exact problem.
And they're
At best assessing on
you know, maybe seven or eight attributes when there might be two hundred that are going to drive people's future performance, right?
So I think that's that's the first problem. The second problem is the measures are extremely noisy.
So it's one thing to say, okay, you know, if I'm trying to hire a a Tor if if I wanna draft somebody to play for the Toronto Raptors
Right. I can I can figure out how tall they are.
I can figure out how how high they can jump.
But when it comes to, you know, quickness in diving for a loose ball
I can't measure that as precisely as I would like. And then I'm also trying to come up with a score for grit and generosity and humility.
Good luck with that, right? They're they're very, very intangible factors to measure.
And then how you would weigh them would vary based on the individual candidate too, I would imagine, and team character and a whole bunch of other things. Exactly.
The the aggregation problem is huge. So
I actually had this question posed uh by a sports team last year that was hiring a c a head coach.
And they had used some of my assessments and
The question was, okay, do we go we have two finalists, do we go with the coach?
Who scored higher in intelligence or the coach who was more of a giver?
I don't know what the right answer to that is. Was this in the MBA? I I'm not at liberty to say.
But
Uh the coach they they ended up choosing the coach with the higher intelligence score and firing that coach at the I think at the end of the season or or shortly thereafter. And
I don't know what the right answer is there, right? I I think there's you know, there's probably a threshold. I I would not want a coach who's extremely selfish.
I also wouldn't want a coach who's not you know, reasonably intelligent. But then when you get into the ranges of well well anybody could
with these attributes could succeed. I don't know how to trade those off and then
To your other point, well, how are they gonna gel with the culture of the team?
and with the players involved, right? Th those are all open questions. And so this is a very messy problem.
Let's come out of this problem a little bit and I'm gonna hire you as an advisor and I I wanna how do I encourage my organization, the culture within the organization.
that people are are
They feel psychological safety, I guess. That's the core requirement to rethink as an individual is like you feel it's not threatening to your identity.
it's not gonna have an impact on your job, your career
Um nobody's gonna hold it over your head. How do we build psychological safety within an organization?
So Constantino Scudafaris and I just finished uh some studies on this exact topic and
We started from the premise of saying, look, if if you're a leader
And you wanna build psychological safety. You wanna give people the freedom to take risks and to know they won't be punished if if they rethink something or they voice a problem.

Um then what most leaders think they should do is ask for feedback.
Because then the door is open.
And we did find that CEOs who seek feedback more often uh had s higher psychological safety in their top management teams.
Uh but we found that when we went and encouraged managers to go and ask for feedback.
It didn't have a lasting effect on psychological safety.
And it seems like a couple of things broke down uh in our in our follow up analyses. The first one was sometimes leaders and managers would ask for feedback.
And then they didn't like what they heard and they got defensive.
Which immediately says
Nope, guess the door is closed.
The second problem was even when they were open to ideas, sometimes the feedback was irrelevant.
Or it
addressed areas that were outside their span of of control. And so they said, okay, this is not a priority for me, or I can't do anything about it.
And that led them to stop asking and it led their employees also to stop giving and to stop speaking up because it seemed like an exercise in futility. Right. So even if you took the fear away, that doesn't mean that that I can have an impact if I raise an idea or I I challenge my leader to rethink something.
So we we got curious about alternative approaches that that might have a more lasting effect on psychological safety.
And the one we we tried out that that worked effectively was
Instead of just asking for feedback.
We actually had leaders criticize themselves out loud.
In some cases, managers would bring in their performance review and they'd say to their team
Hey, here's what you know, what my boss told me I need to work on.
And I would love your input on whether I'm making progress in these areas.
And not only did CEOs who did that naturally have higher psychological safety in their top management teams.
But when we randomly assign managers to kind of criticize themselves as opposed to asking for criticism.
Just inviting them to do that once increased psychological safety in their teams for at least a year.
Which is a staggering effect.
And there are a couple of things that that happen that are are really different from what happens when you just seek feedback. So
One thing that happens when you criticize yourself is you show you can take it.
And it makes people immediately less fearful about challenging you.
The second thing that happened, which I I think is in some ways even more interesting.
Is it created mutuality?
There's there's now a dialogue that's going on where I've said, You know what, Shane, here are all the places where I I just I stink.
And I really need your help in getting better.
And you now not only have the freedom to tell me how I can improve
But you feel like you can be more vulnerable with me.
Uh there's basically a normalization of vulnerability that happens.
uh where, you know, once I say, hey, I'm a work in progress, everybody on my team is more comfortable acknowledging that too.
And it makes it easier too for the team to hold me accountable.
So let's say for example
I have a tendency to talk too much in meetings.
And I come into my team and and one day instead of saying, Hey, could you give me some feedback on our meetings, I say, You know, I've realized I have a tendency to not shut up when I should.
I would love you all to help me with this.
Then two meetings later I'm rambling and that gives permission to my team to say
Hey, you know how you said you wanted to talk less? Hasn't happened yet, right?
Uh so then you know, what what we saw is a lot of the teams work together to create practices for keeping the door open. Uh they do uh first five minutes of every meeting check-in. Is there anything anyone can do to improve?
They'd hold a monthly m vulnerability meeting in some cases where people would just talk about their development areas and their progress and where they were struggling and
I think that we could all be more open in criticizing ourselves. And I'm not saying, you know, that that every leader should stand up in front of the thousands of people who work below them and talk about all the things they're bad at.
Uh, but I think with the core people that you work with, odds are they know what your weaknesses and shortcomings are anyway. And if you can own up to them.
People are much more likely to help you rethink your ways of fixing those flaws.
And I think ironically, knowing that people might be a little bit
On guard or a little bit suspicious.
Actually led leaders to be more authentic.
And to come in and say, You know what?
The whole reason that I'm gonna talk about areas for growth
is I wanna get better.
And so the more honest I can be about that, the more likely I am to grow. And so I think
It's the responsibility of people in power to open that door and keep it open. Right. And this this step to prove, right, here is the stuff people told me I am terrible at
Here's how I benefited from hearing those things in the past.
Uh that's one of the best ways that you can show that you really mean it.
I think when I asked this question about psychological safety, I actually presumed to know what some of those variables are, but maybe you can help what are the variables that go into feeling safe
psychologically either at home in a relationship with your spouse or at work, are they the same? Are they different?
So in the early research on psychological safety by Amy Edmondson and Bill Kahn and some of their colleagues, uh the the two foundations were really trust and respect.
And I think a lot of people, as as Amy has pointed out, get psychological safety wrong.
They think it's about being nice to everyone.
Or being tolerant of everything.
Or having no standards.
Or not holding people accountable.
No, it's none of those things.
psychological safety is knowing that other people are gonna treat you with respect.
And trusting that if you go out on a limb
And say something uncomfortable.
Or challenge a a deep seated belief.
that you are not going to be punished for that.
you know, the basic ingredients, right? Trust and respect.
Those those matter in any relationship, right? Whether it's it's romantic or professional. I mean, one of the most basic mistakes people make on this is they forget that one of the the most effective ways to earn trust is to show trust.
And I think that's why
I want leaders to to begin with vulnerability.
When you ask somebody for feedback.
You are saying, Hey, I respect you, right? Shane, I want your input. I want you to tell me
what I should rethink in my book about rethinking.
But
If I don't criticize myself out loud.
then you can't really trust that I'm gonna listen to you and that I'm not gonna bite your head off or get offended in some way. I think I'd get a much more honest answer from you if instead of saying, Hey, tell me what I should rethink,
I came in and I said, You know what?
I think one of the biggest mistakes I made in writing this book was I really understated
the importance of uh of preaching and prosecuting.
relative to being in scientist mode, which maybe is something we'll talk about. Maybe we won't
Uh but once I say that, like, hey, you know what? I I know this book is not perfect. I poured a lot of energy and time into it. Uh, but I really want to find out how I can evolve my thinking and
You're a great person to help me do that.
Let's talk about the preachers
Prosecutors and politicians and scientists. Yeah. So credit to Phil Tetlock for bringing this framework onto my radar.
Uh Phil wrote this amazing paper uh almost twenty years ago now.
Where he said, look, you know, a lot of a lot of research on decision making and judgment assumes that people are are thinking like
hyper rational economists or scientists.
And
We're not, actually. We're much more social creatures than that.
And
As I read this paper, it it suddenly dawned on me that
This is this is a perfect metaphor for me as an organizational psychologist.
Because
We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking.
Like professions we have never held.
Like occupations we were never trained in.
So think about how much time you spend in your life preaching.
Right. You've already found the truth and your job is to proselytize it.
Prosecuting.
You find somebody who you think is wrong and your job is to prove it and win your your case or come out ahead in the argument.
And politicking.
Where you think, okay.
Uh I've got a base of people who I'm trying to curry favor with.
And so I've got a campaign for their approval and support.
Wha what I started realizing as I was uh I was actually about halfway through writing think again
I realized it needed an organizing framework. And so much of what I was trying to encourage people to do was about getting out of the mode of of preaching, prosecuting, and politicking and into the mode of thinking more like a scientist.
And part of the reason that I wanted to do that is I think that, you know, the danger of preaching and prosecuting
is that you don't change your mind.
You're right. Everyone else is wrong.
And so you might be very motivated to get other people to rethink, but your views are frozen. They're set in stone.
And politicking is interesting because when we're being political, we're actually more flexible.
Right? We might even flip flop.
But we're doing it at the wrong times and we're doing it for the wrong reasons. Because we're just doing it to appease our tribe as opposed to doing it to find the truth.
And so I think
We could all get better at thinking more like scientists.
To say, you know what?
Your views they're actually just theories.
Right. You could
You could kinda make them into hypotheses.
And then you could run little experiments in your life to figure out whether they're true or false. And that should leave you not only more mentally flexible, but also more likely to change your mind at the right times for the right reasons.
If it's not a law of nature.
Effectively, it's just a theory.
Exactly. Can you say that again and repeat it to uh approximately
Eight billion people. Yeah, I wish. In that case, would you want your identity sort of tied up with your profession a little bit?
Scientists are known to sort of think and and change their mind and look for evidence and
That that is such an interesting reframing of my stance on identity. I think you might be right.
See myself as a social scientist.
Right, and thinking about myself, seeing myself as someone who likes to think and talk.
Scientifically.
And who was trained to do that.
What that means to me is I value truth.
I'm I'm more interested in
In getting the answer right.
than I am in being right.
You know, that that means lots of my opinions are still flexible, right? I have a set of tools. So I really like experiments. I really like uh doing, you know, carefully constructed longitudinal studies.
Uh and I think those those tools have been rigorously tested over centuries, right, as being the the most valid and
Probably independently verifiable, or at least most difficult to falsify.
Right, techniques for for reaching the truth or at least getting closer to it.
And I think as an identity scientist is helpful because it it reminds me how much we don't know.
And how hard it is to you know to arrive at the truth or a pro an approximation of it.
I wanna preface uh my next sort of question with I don't want to talk about politics, I don't want to talk about sort of liberal democrat, republican conservative, anything to do with that. I really what I wanna hit at is
It seems that most of our leaders we elect them for being strong minded
clear sighted, you know, often charismatic.
Is why are we drawn to these people if we know that
Actually, maybe the best elected official would be the one that gets up and says, I don't know how to fix this. I would just
Hire the best people and listen to them. But we would never elect that person. Why do you think that is? Why are we drawn to this? I don't know. I think I think we have elected that person.
Uh I don't I don't think it happens that often.
But
I think that in the US, uh Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that was literally his campaign with the new deal.
It was
It was uh it was a whole campaign to say
You know what? We're gonna we're gonna run a bunch of trial and error experiments and learn from what works.
I think it's hard for that person to get elected though, because
As we face
crises and we grapple with uncertainty.
We're drawn to people who we feel like are gonna figure it out and gonna fix it.
And so if if somebody hedges too much, if somebody shows too much humility
I think we mistake that as a sign of ignorance, right? And it's the it's the basic trap that you've
You've railed against for years, Shane, which is we should stop confusing confidence for competence.
Right. Just because somebody is is sure of an opinion does not mean they actually know what they're talking about. And in fact
Anybody who is is familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect.
Well no, that the the more sure people are of their opinions, the more hesitant we should be to listen to them, right? But there's something very intoxicating about following someone.
Who believes they've already found the way.
And I think it's a good thing.
You know, it gives us a sense of coherence, it can give us a sense of purpose.
it's easy to put our trust in people who you know who who have a clear vision.
Uh of course, you know, in the long run, those are the people that I worry most about because they're the ones who are most likely to to get too attached to that vision and stick to it long past its time.
And I I think it removes uncertainty too. We would almost rather be wrong and certain
than uncertain and land in the correct spot because it like wrecks havoc on us. At some level, you're right. It
It's a way of letting other people do your thinking for you.
And this this is why political parties have always been such a mystery to me.
Like when w you know, when people ask me what my politics are.
Uh, I think for myself I try to form independent opinions based on the impr information that I encounter.
And the idea of identifying myself as a Republican or a Democrat or a Liberal or Conservative
That's ridiculous to me because it means I've outsourced my thinking.
To some group of people that
I don't think I'm thinking very scientifically.
Let's talk about that w without using politics sort of, but like tribes. Like we we fit into these group we want a sense of belonging. It's a very human thing to want to fit in with a group, be part of a group.
um have status within that group in a hierarchy. There's a biological sort of hierarchy need that we have. Even if we're lowest on the totem pole, we sort of like wanna know where we stand in this pecking order.
And then we assume group identities and group positions and those are really hard. Talk to me about that.
Well, I think the the idea that comes to mind right away here is

the these twin desires that human beings are constantly grappling with. We wanna fit in
We also want to stand out.
Right. We want belonging, we also want status.
There's there's a theory that I love. Marilyn Brewer calls it optimal distinctiveness.
And she says, Look, there's a way to fit in and stand out at the same time.
It's by joining unique groups.
Because then you are part of something, and you're not only part of something.
You're part of something that has a clear identity because there are very few other groups like it.
But you also stand out.
because of the very way that that group has differentiated itself from from others. And so if you can join a a group that gives you that sense of optimal distinctiveness, um if you can join a kind of an unusual group or a group with with uh with clear, well defined boundaries.
then you're able to satisfy those those motivations simultaneously.
That explains the rise of a lot of movements and a lot of groups.
Where people will say, Okay
I wanna I wanna belong somewhere where where I also feel like, you know, I'm not like everyone else.
You know, it goes back to that's how people gain a sense of predictability. It's how they
They have a sense of control in their lives. It's how
They avoid feeling excluded and frankly the other function it serves is existential.
Right. One of the one of the most robust findings in in psychology over the past three decades is that belonging to uni a unique group actually serves a a terror management function.
That it helps you
Avoid threats to your own mortality.
Uh or at least it it makes you worry less about what might happen to you in the future and, you know, whether you have a legacy.
It connects you to something larger and more lasting than yourself. And so
Yeah, it's it's easy to see why people are drawn to these groups. It's also a little bit scary.
So we've talked about sort of the individual, but how do we change the views of other people, the people we work with, our partners? This is probably the part of the conversation everybody wants because we're right. How do I change somebody else's views? How do I convince them that they're wrong and I'm right?
Well it it helps to to let go of of that sense that you're right.
And say, look, if if if this is a one sided exchange and you're supposed to change your mind, but I get to stand still.
We're probably not gonna make a whole lot of progress here.
Uh unless you are a very good prosecutor.
Or the other person is very happy to be preached to.
One of the more interesting things that psychologists have done when when looking at, you know, disagreement and debate is what if we thought about it as a dance?
There's something about dancing that says, Look, we're both gonna move.
I think a good argument or you know, a a good debate or a good disagreement.
is one where neither of us has really choreographed all the steps we're gonna take.
And sometimes we step forward and sometimes we step back. Other times we sidestep. But ultimately we're actually trying to get in rhythm or in sync.
Which is a very different goal from trying to change somebody else's mind.
I think yeah, that's a much better way to frame it. So how w what are the steps that we take for this dance then
Not only for sharing our opinion.
But also receiving
Their opinion.
So
One of my favorite ways to think about that is a classic study by Neil Rackham of expert negotiators, where he compared them both pre negotiation and
actually in the live negotiations to average negotiators to look at what the two groups did differently.
And the experts
Uh they spent far more time
Planning for and then talking about common ground.
Was the first takeaway.
So a lot of people when they go to have an argument or win a debate
They think their their job is basically to find the differences quickly so that then they can they can fix them, right?
That's not at all where I wanna start. I wanna start by saying, Shane, let's identify areas that we agree on.
uh which gets us in in synchrony, right? And also says, Hey, you know what? This is somebody who shares some of my values or maybe some of my views.
That makes the conversation non defensive and collaborative right from the start.
Then a a second difference that that jumped out pretty clearly is the experts asked a lot more questions.
than the average negotiators.
And they weren't leading questions. They were questions motivated by genuine curiosity.
Let's talk for a second about how versus why questions.
So a lot of times when you discover that somebody has a different view from you.
You naturally will say, Well, why do you think that?
And the problem is you're setting the other person up for confirmation bias.
You're you're you're giving them an invitation to make a list of compelling reasons that they themselves generated for why they're going to cling to their pre existing convictions, right? So you're doing some of their work for them.
What tend to be more effective are how questions.
Where instead of asking why do you believe this?
You ask how would you implement this, or how would that idea work if we were to come to some agreement on it?
And that that cultivates intellectual humility, right? It's the the term for it in psychology is the illusion of explanatory depth.
And the idea is that people think they understand things much more than they actually do.
And if you ask them to explain how
Right.
Uh one version of that is just how does this work?
Another version of that question is
How would you explain that to an expert? Or, you know, how would you implement that in the real world?
They suddenly realize, Gosh, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
And this has been this has recently been demonstrated for policy questions where
You know, if you've if you've got somebody who disagrees with you on let's say climate change.
Or on uh tax laws.
Right, instead of asking them why they believe what they believe, if you were to just ask them
Well, how would you implement that tax law and what are all the effects it would have?
Or how would you you know how would you address this climate problem that that I know there are a range of
Complicated.
As they try to answer that, they realize how little they know, they become less polarized, they're much more open to hearing alternative views, and the hope is that you are too.
One of your pet peeves is feigned knowledge.
Talk to me about how you deal with this,'cause you must see it all the time, not only as a professor, but posturing in organizations and
Uh how do you deal with this?
It eats it eats at the core of my soul when someone claims to know something that they don't.
And I have not always dealt with this well.
So
The the story that comes to mind
I was called by an investment bank uh uh some years ago.
And
They asked me to figure out how to motivate and retain their junior analysts and associates.
So I did two months of research, I had experiments, I had longitudinal survey data
Interviews, observations, I had lots of outside research as well as in internal data.
And I came back with twenty six evidence based recommendations.
And I was presenting them, I think it was actually my first ever video conference I'd I'd done. This was
at least seven maybe eight years ago.
Um and I'm presenting to the coheads of investment banking. They're on multiple continents
And
I I think I was uh on about recommendation five or six.
And one of the co heads interrupts me and he says, Well
Why don't we just pay them more?
And if there is one recommendation that was not on my list of twenty six, it was to solve the problem with money because they had already thrown a lot of money at the problem. These people were already well paid, by which I mean overpaid. And if money were going to attract them and retain them, it already would have.
And
I'm embarrassed to say
that my response at the time was
I've never seen a group of smart people act so dumb.

That did not
Obviously accomplish a whole lot.
For me, right.
They they did they did tell me they g they got a kick out of it later because people don't normally talk to them that way. But
The mental modes other than scientists.
The one that I I spend the most time in is is prosecutor mode.
And I've been accused of being a logic bully.
From time to time.
And I decided after that that
I wanted to be in scientist mode.
if somebody had fain knowledge, right? If somebody if somebody claimed to know something that that they didn't
And what would a scientist do? A scientist would be just riveted.
Like
Who is this person? How could they possibly be possibly believe these things? And what is it that would possibly change their mind?
And so I wrote a little script for how I want to respond whenever somebody's a little bit more.
uh challenges my evidence or claims to know something that I think is false, which is just to get really curious and say
What evidence would change her mind?
And
I don't always remember to ask the question. I don't always get curious enough to really want to know.
But in the situations where I've pulled it off, it has completely changed the tone of the conversation. And often what'll happen is the person will map out the kind of study they would find convincing. And now we're on my turf, right? Because I have a mental library of studies.
that I can then cite and they're helping me figure out which kinds of data they would find compelling.
It also I I find it really helpful because
It refocuses the conversation.
in the realm of evidence, as opposed to just opinion.
Right. And so when I ask them to tell me what a well designed study is gonna look like, we can then agree on what valid methods are.
And once I tell them what the findings are using their chosen methods, it's a lot harder for for them to just have a knee jerk objection. So
I I decided after that experience that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it think.
The hope is I learned something from that conversation and and now we're we're arguing to learn as opposed to arguing to win.
Talk to me about this logic bully thing.
Well, I had a a student
Some years ago now, her name is Jamie and
She was trying to make a a big career decision about whether to do an MBA and if so, what
school she should go to. She I think she she had been accepted at two schools.
I just said Jamie, look.
Yeah.
I'm not saying
You shouldn't do an MBA.
But let me give you all the reasons why I think it might be a waste of time and money. You already have an undergrad business degree.
You don't need an MBA for any job that you want.
And okay, maybe there's some firm that will tell you you need it to get promoted, in which case I would say you probably shouldn't work at that firm because
Uh it's it's not like having an M D or a J D, right? There's not a codified body of knowledge that you need to run a business.
And I just wanted her to think through carefully would you know, was this a good use of time and money? And if you could take two years and a quarter million dollars.
Is there a better investment of that given your goals and your life circumstances?
And I so I I didn't have a stake in the outcome, but I I argued the other side as I often do. Uh I guess it she activated my prosecutor mode.
And
She just she came back and she said
You're a logic bully.
I was like what?
And she said a logic fully.
And she went on to tell me that I had overwhelmed her with rational arguments and she didn't agree, but she couldn't fight back.
And my first reaction, Shane, was
Yes.
Because I thought that was my job as a social scientist, right? I wanna come with airtight logic and rigorous data and make the most compelling case I can.
But what I was depriving her of was the opportunity to own her own choice.
Right, and to reason through this for herself.
And so I've tried to get out of logic bully mode and
the that same conversation I've had with a number of students now.
And instead of listing all the reasons, I would say, All right, Jamie, can you tell me the pros and cons?

Why are you excited about it? What are the risks?
And then I go the extra step and say, and why are you coming to me?
Are you here because you want my advice?
Are you here because you're looking for my validation of a decision you've already made?
Or are you here because you want me to challenge your thought process?
And once I know what her goals are, it's a lot easier for me to
invite her to rethink some of her assumptions without insulting her or causing her decision process to go haywire.
Or without making such strong arguments that she thinks I'm trying to give her an answer when I'm really just trying to test her thought process. I love that term logic bully. And and you know, you think initially you're like, Oh, this is so helpful, and then at the end you're kind of like, Oh, that wasn't what I thought it was gonna be. I'm curious how do you
How do you institute
rethinking or how do you help kids
Not only students but your own kids rethink.
Like how what are parents supposed to do at a young age for elementary school kids or high school kids? And
university students in terms of
opening their mind to different possibilities and w what sort of things can we do?
One of my favorite things that I learned while I was writing the book came from uh Wisconsin's middle school teacher of the year, Aaron McCarthy.
What Erin does with her students is she gives them a section of a history textbook.
And she sends them out to rewrite it.
And what they do is they you know, they look at primary sources, they interview people.
And they realize how much information is missing from the way that we've narrated past events.
And what that does is it allows them to think a little bit more when they encounter new information, like fact checkers.
Right, whereas where instead of you know, I I read something in you know in the news or
I heard it on TV, it must be true, to say, Well, what are the sources of that information? And how do we really know?
I think we should all be lucky to lucky enough to have a project where we get to rewrite a section of a textbook. I thought
I thought that was a brilliant assignment.
Um a variation on that that we do occasionally at dinner is uh Allison and I with our kids will have a myth busting discussion.
Uh and the I think originally it came about because our our kids
had learned interesting things at school that surprised us.
Like one day um one of our daughters came home and said
Uh we were we were just doing an Egypt unit.
This is an elementary school.
And uh I found out that
King Tut probably did not die in a chariot accident.
I was like, oh, that's so cool. That's not what I learned.
What else are you learning in school that is different from what we thought was true at the time?
And so it it became sort of an occasional tradition for us to to say, okay, who's gonna bring a myth or a fun, surprising fact to the table.
And what I wanna do in these whenever we have these conversations is
I want our kids to f to experience the joy of being wrong.
To say it is such a delight to discover that something you thought was true was actually false because now you know you've learned something.
I I like that a lot. I'm still grappling with Pluto not being a planet, so I'm a little I'm a little sad about this. You and me both, Shane.
I I think those kinds of moments, right? If you observe your own emotional reaction in them.
Why was I so upset when I found out that Pluto was not a
Planet.
Why was declassifying the name of an object? The object hasn't changed, right? It's still floating out there.
Uh it's you know, it's still somewhere in the same position that we thought it was. Doesn't affect my life in any material way. Why does this bother me so much?
It's because I like to have a set of beliefs about the world that I can count on.
And
You know, when it when it comes to my understanding of the solar system, it's like
I have a tower made out of Jenga blocks.
And somebody just pulled out the wrong block and now all of a sudden the whole tower's coming crashing down.
And I want a much more solid and sturdy foundation for the things I believe.
What else do you do with your kids?
One of the other things that that we
Realized a couple of years ago we weren't doing enough of.
Was
When it comes to teaching values.
Talking about how we had failed to sometimes live our values.
So you know it
Alison would would often
Roll her eyes when I would talk to our kids about being givers, not takers.
It's one thing to you know to make that case.
It's another thing to say, you know what?
Here's a time when I was not kind to somebody in my class who was being bullied.
And I regret that, right? That was me failing to be a giver.
When I tell those stories, right, when I share mistakes I've made, when I talk about embarrassing decisions I've made.
What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to signal to our kids that it's okay to be wrong.
And it's okay to rethink the choices we've made. Uh that's to me one of the functions of regret. Yeah. Right. I I think of most negative emotions as teachable moments.
And the the whole point of experiencing them is you're supposed to learn something from what you did wrong so you can make it right in the future.
And so much of regret is saying, Okay
I did something that
uh that led to an undesirable outcome or that violated one of my values.
And so how do I do this differently moving forward?
Instead of trying to deny these emotions, let's let's actually listen to them and figure out what the lesson is in them.
You mentioned rewriting the history section was one of your favorite things that you learned. What's another favorite thing you learned when you were writing the book?
I mean one of one of the things I just never thought about before was binary bias.
So I I knew I wanted to write a chapter about
having charge conversations and how people could talk about the most divisive issues that many of us have just been shying away from because it feels hopeless.
And
I really came out rethinking my view that what we need to do is is better understand the other side, which has been so much the political narrative.
I think actually that's part of the problem, not the solution.
Because there is no charged issue that's ever simple enough to have only two sides.
And the research by Peter Coleman and his colleagues on this really opened my eyes to the fact that we want to complexify two categories into a spectrum. Anytime you run into a binary like, you know, liberals and conservatives, you should picture a whole spectrum of beliefs there.
And say, Well, you know, they're relatively conservative and relatively liberal members of each of those groups. And if you break down the multiple issues, very few people agree with their party on all sixteen or seventeen of the major issues equally.
And so if I can see the nuance there.
And I can start to get people to think about, huh.
Where where in this very nuanced spectrum do I fall?
then I see more shades of grey and less black and white in my beliefs. And so
What I've been doing a lot now is catching myself in binary bias.
Right. Like I I'm I'm so glad in retrospect that give and take had three categories rather than two. Because if there were only givers and takers, I would have missed the matchers, right? The the people trading favors.
who actually are the most common at work. And
I think that there are so many this this is I mean, this is relevant to any part of life, but
It's something that runs across almost every project I've done in psychology, right?
Um
The the best leaders are not the introverts or the extroverts on average. They're the ambiverts.
who fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and are comfortable flexing and talking and listening.
Uh the most creative people are not the precrastinators like me who dive right in or the procrastinators who wait till the last minute. They're the people who are quick to start but slow to finish, somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
And I think any spectrum that you draw, you can almost
always find an advantage for being somewhere in the gray.
And I think we should all do that more often.
That's flexibility and adaptability right there, right?
Bingo.
One of the the stories from the book that I liked was Daniel Conneman teaching you about how to respond to a surprise. Can you tell us that story?
I I went to give a speech at a conference and I didn't know a lot about who was gonna be the in the audience. And I get up on stage and sitting in the audience is Danny Kahneman, Nobel Prize winning psychologist, one of the giants of our field.
Afterward I um I w ran into him.
And he s he said
Something like
That was wonderful.
I was wrong.
And those two things don't normally go hand in hand.
Right. Either a talk was wonderful because you were right.
Or it was bad because you were wrong.
My first reaction was to say, Holy cow.
Danny Kahneman liked something I said.
My second reaction was to say
This is so strange that he thought it was wonderful to have been wrong. What's behind this? And so
I ended up following up with him and I asked him, you know, why
I could literally his face lit up when he talked about how exhilarating it was to be wrong.
And he said.
It's the only way I know I've learned something.
Right, if I find out I was wrong, it means I am now less wrong than I was before.
And
He talked very eloquently about
The value of
Of detaching.
uh your like we talked about your opinions from your identities, your ideas from your identities to say look
Every idea I have.
Just a hypothesis. Might be true, might be false.
And if I if I'm if I have a vested interest in it being true.
Then I'm not gonna discover as much.
As if I really want to find out.
If it's true or when it's true.
I think Bezo's had something along these lines too, right? Where he's like people who don't don't change their mind are wrong.
So if you want to be right, you have to be somebody who changes your mind a lot.
Yeah, I I think that it's it's been one of Amazon's
persistent competitive advantages.
Love them or hate them.
Right. They are extremely adaptable and
I've I I I've thought about this in terms of another two by two. I um
I met Jeff Hazos a few years ago and I I asked him
how he goes about making hard decisions.
And he said, Okay, basically two questions. One is, is this decision reversible?
And the other is
How consequential is it? How high are the stakes?
And he's willing to act very quickly.
Any time a decision is reversible'cause he can change his mind tomorrow.
Uh or low sticks.
Because it doesn't really matter.
The decisions he puts off until the last possible minute, maybe even pro procrastinates on, are the ones that are both irreversible and consequential.
Because those are the ones that are not just gambles. They are not just experiments. Those are those are real commitments.
And I think this is as relevant to personal decisions as as it is to running a company, right? To say, okay, before I go into a major decision.
If it is both irreversible and highly consequential, then I wanna spend a lot of time rethinking my own views up front.
Whereas if it's pretty easy to reverse and undo, or it doesn't really matter
I'm gonna go forward and make the decision knowing I'll have time later and the opportunity later to second guess it.
But it's not enough to just sort of convince yourself you have the opportunity. You have to be of the mindset that that's sort of almost what you're looking to do. Did you learn anything else, um, from Jeff and or Amazon about how they make decisions?'Cause
I think they're they're one of the best large organizations we've ever seen at collectively making decisions. Yeah, I think one of the other smart things they do is they really take this idea of process accountability seriously.
So if if you ever go to a senior leadership meeting at Amazon, you'll see this
sort of awkward experience of people sitting silently reading a memo for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes.
And the reason they do that is they want everybody's thinking.
Careful, focused attention.
Around what are the alternatives.
Around this big decision we have to make.
And is it is the problem frame the right way? What's the long term impact of this decision?
It is so rare.
For
A world of people who are
Like we all live in a world where we're too busy
And we have too many distractions coming our way constantly.
How unusual is it to sit down with a group of thoughtful people.
and read and reflect on a common document.
And then say, okay, what assumptions should we be rethinking here?
And I would be thrilled to see more leaders adopt that practice.
I think it's brilliant because it it doesn't assume people have read it before they come in. It gives people time to read it and discuss it.
One of the things I I noticed when I was sort of running meetings like that is that people would come in and they would have read sort of like the first couple of paragraphs because they didn't have time. Not really their fault in some ways.
And then they would signal that they've read the document by rephrasing some of those first, and everybody would just do the same thing. And I'm like, You're all just saying the same thing. Like we can assume this is knowledge, but then you can't actually assume that people have read it.
So I like the approach of sort of like distilling it down to something digestible.
giving people time to get on the same page, allowing the time in the meeting. Most meetings don't need to be as long as they are anyway. And then everybody's talking from a common base. Yeah, I think uh it it's much more likely if if you adopt that practice that
People are actually learning.
It's also
I can't think of a better time to do it than during a pandemic.
Where we're all stretched for time.
And now if I know the first at least ten, fifteen minutes of the meeting are gonna be processing time.
That's one thing I've taken off my to do list.
Right, I can I can actually do it during the meeting as opposed to trying to squeeze it in the night before.
And I like how it's not PowerPoint and it's actually like thinking.
Instead of just point form. We could we could use more of that. Th there is a part of me that wonders whether
Yeah, especially again for a a high stakes irreversible decision. Do you want to send that out in advance?
encourage people to read it at least a first or second time.
And then really digest it again when you come together.
'Cause I I'm not sure. This goes back to that second thoughts post that you wrote you wrote
I'm not sure that our second thoughts are always our most insightful observations, right? They're usually the easiest ones to think of.
I worry a lot that we spend too much time th listening to people.
Who think fast and shallow?
And not enough time hearing people who think slow and deep.
And I think we wanna become the people who think slow and deep, because that's where most of our good rethinking happens. One of the I wanna end with sort of like this question that people say a lot in organizations, because I think you'll have a good response to this, is people say
I'm entitled to my opinion.
And you know, that's their way of ending the conversation and saying, you know, you can't change my mind on something. How do you respond to that? Yeah. You're entitled to your own opinion.
If you keep your opinion to yourself.
If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind in the face of better logic or stronger data.
And so I think if you're willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion.
I think
That's uh of course easier said than done.
But
I think it it goes right back to something we talked about earlier, which is to say, Okay
When would I change my mind?
And if you can't answer that question
You are no longer thinking like a scientist, you've gone into preacher or prosecutor mode.
That's a perfect place to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Adam.
No, we can't end it. You haven't told me what I should rethink.
I'm gonna push for this.
Ha ha ha.
Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye.
The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Furnham Street.
I wanna make this the best podcast you've listened to, and I'd love to get your feedback.
If you have comments, ideas for future shows or topics
Or just feedback in general, you can email me at shane at fs.blog or follow me on Twitter at ShaneA Parish.
You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast.
If you want a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe and join our learning community.
If you found this episode valuable, share it online with the hashtag The KnowledgeProject or leave a review.
Until the next episode.