Speaker 1: Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making
Speaker 1: better decisions.
Speaker 2: I'm Maria Kanakova and I'm Nate Silver.
Speaker 1: So today on the show, Nate, we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about someone who was an absolute pioneer in not
Speaker 1: only her field, but just in general in the world.
Speaker 1: Jane Goodall, who died last week. You know, she came
Speaker 1: to a lot of her breakthroughs from a very untraditional
Speaker 1: outsider perspective, and so we'll be going a little bit
Speaker 1: into her legacy and also talking about, you know, just
Speaker 1: the importance of outsider thought, curiosity, the things that make
Speaker 1: people truly successful in whatever field they choose to pursue.
Speaker 1: You know, how can we learn from Jene Goodall and
Speaker 1: actually apply it to our own careers, our own approaches
Speaker 1: to life. And we'll talk We'll get into a lot
Speaker 1: of detail about Jane Goodall's own life and the fact
Speaker 1: that she was known mostly for her work with chimpanzees.
Speaker 1: But there's a funny answer that she gave when she
Speaker 1: was asked about her favorite animal.
Speaker 3: My favorite animal, everybody thinks is a chimpanzee. But it's
Speaker 3: not true. Chimpanzees are so like people that you know,
Speaker 3: some chimpanzees are really not nice at all, just like
Speaker 3: some people really not nice. My favorite animal altogether is
Speaker 3: a dog, because dogs have taught me so much, and
Speaker 3: dogs are so faithful, and dogs give unconditional love, and
Speaker 3: I don't like to think of a world without dogs.
Speaker 1: So let's let's dive right in, Nate. Jane Goodall. She
Speaker 1: was someone who was very influential to me as a psychologist,
Speaker 1: but I'm assuming she was probably not quite as front
Speaker 1: and center to you, right, I'm guessing you were aware
Speaker 1: of her influence, but probably, you know, not someone who
Speaker 1: influenced your career choice or anything like that.
Speaker 2: Maria, No.
Speaker 4: I look, I was going to make a joke that
Speaker 4: the only thing I know about Jane Goodall is from
Speaker 4: Gorillas in the Miss, Right, the Sigourney Weaver character.
Speaker 1: It's not her.
Speaker 4: A There's more than one woman scientist, apparently, and she
Speaker 4: was not the scientist who inspired Grills in the Miss.
Speaker 2: So I know not very much about her. But sometimes
Speaker 2: it's fun. Sometimes you're the backseat driver. Today I'm the
Speaker 2: backseat driver.
Speaker 4: Right, I'm gonna hear you talk about why you admire
Speaker 4: Jane Goodall and just backseat drive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So let me. Yeah, let me just say a
Speaker 1: little bit about why I really admire her. Obviously, she
Speaker 1: was just a pioneer in terms of what women can accomplish.
Speaker 1: She died at the age of ninety one, which just
Speaker 1: gives you a sense of when she started her career.
Speaker 1: Right at that point, you know, in when she was
Speaker 1: just starting out, there were not a lot of role
Speaker 1: models for women who were going into the sciences, and
Speaker 1: I think that she really paved the way for a
Speaker 1: lot of people to have the careers that they have today. Nate.
Speaker 1: I think we've talked on the show before about the
Speaker 1: importance kind of in career choices of role models, right,
Speaker 1: and of being able to visualize yourself in a certain career.
Speaker 1: And there's a ton of work that shows that. You know,
Speaker 1: if you see someone who looks like you, who seems
Speaker 1: like you, who's similar to you, doing something, you'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe I can do that thing. So for Jane Goodall
Speaker 1: to become, you know, this pioneering researcher was absolutely huge.
Speaker 1: But in terms of her contribution to science, I learned
Speaker 1: the most about her work when I was getting my
Speaker 1: PhD in psychology in a course called animal cognition which
Speaker 1: was all about animal intelligence, kind of animal emotions, how
Speaker 1: animals think, and that course would have probably, well, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say probably, would literally have not existed without Jane Goodall,
Speaker 1: because what she did was basically show that animals were
Speaker 1: much more sophisticated than we previously thought, and that they
Speaker 1: had a lot more in common with humans than science
Speaker 1: had previously thought. So she observed, you know, her initial
Speaker 1: contribution when she went to Africa to study chimpanzees in Tanzania,
Speaker 1: and she observed them using tools, and not just using tools,
Speaker 1: but creating tools, right, something that didn't exist, and she said, basically,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2: Holy shit.
Speaker 1: Up until this point, we assumed that this was something
Speaker 1: that was unique to humans. And so she basically change
Speaker 1: the way that we thought about animals and what animals
Speaker 1: were capable of. And so she gave birth to this
Speaker 1: entire field of animal cognition and of realizing that, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, there is actually a lot going on here.
Speaker 1: Animals are capable of emotions, animals can recognize and experience death,
Speaker 1: animals can solve problems, and so I think that is
Speaker 1: kind of from a purely scientific standpoint, One of her
Speaker 1: central contributions to the study of the mind. And as
Speaker 1: a psychologist, you know, even though I don't study animals,
Speaker 1: I appreciate that she gave us deeper insight into both
Speaker 1: humans and animals through that very simple seeming in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, but back in the sixties, just absolutely wow,
Speaker 1: leap that. Hey, you know, chimpanzees think and they react,
Speaker 1: and they're smart and they do all sorts of fascinating
Speaker 1: things that people didn't really think to look for before.
Speaker 4: Do you think like workers are pissed off that they're
Speaker 4: They're like, we're fucking as smart as humans, right, so
Speaker 4: have like opposable thumbs.
Speaker 2: This fucking sucks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I mean, I it's so funny, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: I do think that there are lots of pissed off
Speaker 1: animals there By the way, one of the less kind
Speaker 1: things that Jane Goodall discovered in her work with chimpanzees.
Speaker 1: And I was actually, you know, I remember when I
Speaker 1: realized this for the first time. It made me very
Speaker 1: sad because Jane Goodall, you know, you've seen pictures of her,
Speaker 1: you've heard her talk. She seems like such a hopeful, optimistic,
Speaker 1: positive person, and she she was, but she discovered that,
Speaker 1: you know, chimpanzees, first of all, they're omnivores. They're not
Speaker 1: herbivares as people thought, and they actually go ahead and
Speaker 1: seek meet and they kill, and they can be violent,
Speaker 1: and they have wars and they're aggressive, and so, you know,
Speaker 1: studying studying the chimps, Jane came to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: you know, our basically, our predisposition to violence is innate,
Speaker 1: and it can be very contagious. Right if one chip
Speaker 1: becomes violent all of a sudden, you have these groups
Speaker 1: of very violent chips who can wreak havoc and who
Speaker 1: can do a lot of damage. Chimps are strong, and
Speaker 1: so given how how much we share in common with them,
Speaker 1: she's like, I think this is true of humans as well,
Speaker 1: right that we Yes, I'm hopeful and optimistic and people
Speaker 1: can be good as well, and we have a lot
Speaker 1: of capacity for good. But we have to be careful
Speaker 1: because we have a lot of instincts towards being violent
Speaker 1: to each other. And if we see that sort of behavior,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to catch from someone else.
Speaker 2: Same with dolphins.
Speaker 4: By the way, dolphins are like rapists or like kill
Speaker 4: small porpoises and things like that.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, Oh, it's actually it's actually no, it's
Speaker 1: it's crazy. I think it's important. You know, we're laughing,
Speaker 1: but I think it's important understand that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like, yes, you know, we're all one interconnected ecosystem,
Speaker 1: but it's not like kumbayah, like we're all one big
Speaker 1: happy family. Like there's violence and animals that we that
Speaker 1: are incredibly smart can also be you know, incredibly violent,
Speaker 1: and they have warfare their territorial I mean, shit happens.
Speaker 1: And I think that it is important to understand all
Speaker 1: of that about the natural world. And Jane Goodall definitely did.
Speaker 1: And one off, you know, one of her key breakthroughs
Speaker 1: that she was very criticized for at first was actually
Speaker 1: seeing chimpanzees as individuals, seeing that they have personalities, right,
Speaker 1: that they can be distinguished from each other. And in
Speaker 1: her initial report that she wrote up, she didn't do
Speaker 1: what ethnographers did at the time, which was, you know,
Speaker 1: say like chimpanzee twelve x B three said this like
Speaker 1: she gave them names, right, she gave them She actually
Speaker 1: empathized with them, she spent time with them, She got
Speaker 1: them to trust her. She figured out how to win
Speaker 1: their trust and was able to kind of observe them
Speaker 1: closely because they let her. And that's crucial, right, they
Speaker 1: actually let her, and they have to let you. Chimpanzees
Speaker 1: are violent, like if they don't let you observe them,
Speaker 1: you ain't see enough. This was before the day when
Speaker 1: we could hide tiny cameras, right, So the chimpanzees got
Speaker 1: to let you in and she was able to kind
Speaker 1: of establish that trust and to be able to see
Speaker 1: them in that way.
Speaker 2: Is that a monkey in your background, Maria, or your shoulder?
Speaker 1: It is, see and it's not a chimpanzee. Do you
Speaker 1: know why?
Speaker 2: No, it has a tail.
Speaker 1: Chimpanzees do not have tails.
Speaker 2: I did not know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, you learn something new from Jay. I didn't
Speaker 1: do that on purpose. That is hilarious. Yeah. No.
Speaker 4: There's a famous scene from two thousand and one A
Speaker 4: Space Odyssey, I think, in which like the monkeys, I
Speaker 4: think they're monkeys.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're champanzees. Now I don't know.
Speaker 4: When I saw the film, I was nineteen years old,
Speaker 4: maybe not have been in a dose.
Speaker 2: Of psychedelic mushrooms. But like they know, it's a famous scene.
Speaker 1: You didn't notice the bit? Are they had tails.
Speaker 2: Didn't know it's where they had tails.
Speaker 4: But there's a famous scene where there's like a monolith,
Speaker 4: but it basically the monkeys discovering how to manipulate tools.
Speaker 4: Is this canonical metaphor for like human progress maybe to
Speaker 4: her ultimate death ultimately? Right?
Speaker 2: And so you know that alone.
Speaker 4: Kind of kind of changes a narrative, not just a narrative,
Speaker 4: but like the bilogical facts about like things that we
Speaker 4: regard as fundamentally human.
Speaker 2: You know, the Holo scene is the name.
Speaker 4: For for the era in which mankind or humankind begins
Speaker 4: to manipulate its environment with tools and technology. Right, And
Speaker 4: if that kind of predates the rise of man, or
Speaker 4: if the man the rise of mass more complicated, and
Speaker 4: that has all types of implications for evolution and psychology
Speaker 4: and everything else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a really good point because it
Speaker 1: does once you realize that your conception of the what
Speaker 1: makes you know man unique versus not, once that shifts,
Speaker 1: then that's that's a huge that's a monumentally important change
Speaker 1: in just what you see, you know, how you study,
Speaker 1: how you conceive of humanity, and how you conceive of like, okay,
Speaker 1: what's unique to people? And if this isn't unique, then
Speaker 1: it actually prompts other questions and prompts a redefinition, and
Speaker 1: it prompts a kind of reconceptualization of our past.
Speaker 2: And we'll be right back after this break.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things beyond Jane Goodall, but in
Speaker 1: the center of psychology for us to talk about today night,
Speaker 1: is you know how much that outsider perspective actually enabled
Speaker 1: her to see things that people who had gone through
Speaker 1: a more traditional, rigorous education system up to that point
Speaker 1: could not see. I did a little bit of research,
Speaker 1: because you know, it's obviously easy to kind of mythologize,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to know, like, how how often is
Speaker 1: it right that people who come from a less traditional
Speaker 1: background are the ones that end up making these huge changes?
Speaker 1: And it seems like Jane Goodall actually had a really
Speaker 1: interesting combination of insider outsider kind of status that helped
Speaker 1: her do what she did because she was an outsider.
Speaker 1: She never went to college, she didn't have a formal education,
Speaker 1: and yet from the tiniest age she was fascinated with
Speaker 1: animals and became fascinated very early on round age four
Speaker 1: is when she when she thinks it started with chimpanzees.
Speaker 1: In particular and monkeys and primates, and so she didn't
Speaker 1: end up going to college, and instead she went to
Speaker 1: secretarial school learned how to be a secretary, and she
Speaker 1: ended up you know, by the time she had finished
Speaker 1: secretarial school, she had basically on her own read every
Speaker 1: single book that was out there about Africa, about chimpanzees,
Speaker 1: about apes, about all all about all of these different
Speaker 1: different species, and about everything that she could basically that
Speaker 1: you could find, and there wasn't much, but she had
Speaker 1: read it all and she did. By the way, I
Speaker 1: end up getting a PhD from Cambridge because her initial
Speaker 1: work was so compelling that with the help of the
Speaker 1: person who became her mentor, doctor Leaky, who was the
Speaker 1: pre eminent ethnologist of the day, she was able to
Speaker 1: get accepted into Cambridge University without an undergraduate degree to
Speaker 1: end up getting a PhD. And so when she ended
Speaker 1: up meeting doctor Leaky, he was very impressed because she
Speaker 1: could basically answer any question that he asked her, even
Speaker 1: though she had never gone to school. And so in
Speaker 1: that sense, it's not like she was a total outsider
Speaker 1: who was trained in I don't know, baseball and somehow
Speaker 1: ended up coming to Africa and was like, ooh, I'm
Speaker 1: very good at observing this. It was something that she
Speaker 1: was passionate about and she was curious about, and that
Speaker 1: she had on her own kind of taught herself as
Speaker 1: an autodidect. But she when she came to Cambridge was
Speaker 1: just criticized by everyone saying, you're doing it all wrong.
Speaker 1: You are not supposed to look at chimpanzees this way.
Speaker 1: You are not supposed to empathize. They don't have minds
Speaker 1: of their own, they don't have personalities. You are project
Speaker 1: onto them. And she was like, fuck you, I know better,
Speaker 1: and she was right. And I think that that's, you know,
Speaker 1: something where we can actually see a broader point, which
Speaker 1: is that because she hadn't come up in academia, she
Speaker 1: didn't know that she was doing anything wrong right. She
Speaker 1: didn't know that you were quote unquote not supposed to
Speaker 1: look at them a certain way or describe them a
Speaker 1: certain way, and instead she just let her experience guide her.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's a really interesting point because
Speaker 1: if you look at a lot of people in a
Speaker 1: lot of different fields who make really big discoveries, they
Speaker 1: often don't come from kind of the traditional hierarchical background.
Speaker 1: So I come out of academia, and I know that
Speaker 1: you know, some of the people who are the toughest
Speaker 1: to to change, right, the people who will really not
Speaker 1: change their mind about anything, The people who argue basically
Speaker 1: until death's door. That know, to stay with Jane Goodall
Speaker 1: chimpanzees can't really use tools. Are people, you know, who
Speaker 1: have established themselves in the field and whose work your
Speaker 1: new ideas might challenge, right, kind of the the old establishment,
Speaker 1: the real in group. Those are often the people who
Speaker 1: are the most resistant to change. You. I'm sure you
Speaker 1: read Nate. You went to the University of Chicago, so
Speaker 1: I'm assuming that this is something that you read, maybe
Speaker 1: in more than one class, Thomas Kuhne's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Speaker 4: Yeah, basically, you know, one way to simplify the argument,
Speaker 4: right is like basically have to wait for people to
Speaker 4: to die, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: That's a very.
Speaker 1: Good way of simplifying, because yeah, that's how you get
Speaker 1: what's what Kuhn calls paradigm shifts, because otherwise, you know,
Speaker 1: the the in group, they want to protect their old guard, right,
Speaker 1: they want to protect kind of their their ideas, their legacies,
Speaker 1: and so if you want scientif revolution to happen, don't
Speaker 1: kill them. That's that's not the takeaway. But you do
Speaker 1: need fresh eyes, fresh blood, people who don't feel threatened.
Speaker 1: And so I think that that is kind of that's
Speaker 1: some of why outsiders like Jane Goodall might end up
Speaker 1: being successful. But you also need someone like a doctor Leaky,
Speaker 1: who is the old guard and who is somehow not threatened, right,
Speaker 1: who lets her in because she wouldn't have ever gotten
Speaker 1: into Cambridge without him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in my field term, you know, probably not as
Speaker 4: earth shattering as Jane Goodall or the fundamental biology of
Speaker 4: what makes us human and statistical and sabermetrics. I know
Speaker 4: people know that urn probably our audience half of them do, right.
Speaker 4: Sabermetrics is the statistical study of baseball that could be
Speaker 4: expanded to other sports. You kind of saw a structure
Speaker 4: of scientific revolutions thing occurring where like, you know, there
Speaker 4: were these huge moneyball wars so called, where you have
Speaker 4: the stat heads and they're kind of banished into like
Speaker 4: a broom closet, right versus like the jocks, right, and like,
Speaker 4: and now like basically every major sports franchise is like
Speaker 4: a whole department of like stat nerds, right, they're often
Speaker 4: running the teams or if they're not, the owners of
Speaker 4: the teams and like, and that happened in that was
Speaker 4: generational turnover in essence, right, Basically after ten years, the
Speaker 4: wars just kind of disappear and the stat heads the
Speaker 4: imates are running the asylum, right, the stat heeads are
Speaker 4: in charge after all. Right, Which is the other thing
Speaker 4: about like insiders outsider paradigms or knowledge is that, like
Speaker 4: you know, there are a lot of, if you will,
Speaker 4: evolutionary advantages for outsiders, right.
Speaker 2: Number one, And I guess I'm going with the evolution metaphor.
Speaker 4: They have like kind of more variation in terms of
Speaker 4: not genetic variation, but in terms of ideas. Right, They're
Speaker 4: going to try new things and they might try and fail,
Speaker 4: but we're in a competitive world.
Speaker 2: We discover this idea is eventually.
Speaker 4: I mean, there is like kind of an irony slash
Speaker 4: paradox where like, you know, you want to be an outsider,
Speaker 4: but not too much of an outsider, right, So it's
Speaker 4: like there's a lot of there's a lot of kind
Speaker 4: of qualifications on like who is outsider enough, But like
Speaker 4: you know, First of all, as you get to be
Speaker 4: more of an insider, than various bad things happen.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: Number one, you become more more risk averse, more defensive
Speaker 4: of your position. Number Two, you kind of gain more
Speaker 4: political power. And there are things that are burdensome about
Speaker 4: having power, literally, everything from having more meetings to if
Speaker 4: you say.
Speaker 2: Things off the cuff and people will look at you funny,
Speaker 2: you have more to lose, right, you know.
Speaker 4: I think there's also a thing where, you know, as
Speaker 4: people age, then they may lose some degree of initiative
Speaker 4: and energy. And if you're kind of in a comfortable position,
Speaker 4: then you may kind of stop fighting for new ideas
Speaker 4: so much, stop changing your mind quite so much. Right,
Speaker 4: you know, if you acquire power, then you can become
Speaker 4: either a target for or a conduit for political power too, right,
Speaker 4: so you can become the target of your political opponents.
Speaker 2: You can become a politicized yourself.
Speaker 4: There's not often not that much self awareness from insight
Speaker 4: in general, whereas like outsiders who don't fit in have
Speaker 4: to be a little bit more aware of their of
Speaker 4: their surroundings so to speak, right, and they have to
Speaker 4: know how to like code switch and things like that
Speaker 4: you know, you also can just kind of get there's
Speaker 4: a little bit of the innovator's dilemma thing too, where like,
Speaker 4: as you've become more powerful, you develop more commitments to
Speaker 4: your constituents, to your employers, to everything else, you get
Speaker 4: bogged down, hard to innovate and so forth. Right, However,
Speaker 4: when the outsiders become powerful or become insiders, they can
Speaker 4: have gigantic egos. Right if you have had a contrarian
Speaker 4: idea a couple of times and then later been proven
Speaker 4: to be right and or to win the kind of
Speaker 4: acclaim of the broader community, boy, that's a really fucking
Speaker 4: nice feeling, right, It's kind of up there with like
Speaker 4: in our world, like winning the main event of the
Speaker 4: World Series of Poker or something, right, like no one's
Speaker 4: ever gonna no one's ever gonna take that away from me,
Speaker 4: and I prove my doubters wrong, because you.
Speaker 2: Know, anytime you do something, it's really hard.
Speaker 4: It's hard to be a paradigm shifting scientist in general,
Speaker 4: especially if you're you're a woman. Right until later win
Speaker 4: the admiration and respect of so many people, and I
Speaker 4: Jane Goodall seemed to handle that fame pretty well. But
Speaker 4: I'm not sure that everybody does, right. She had a
Speaker 4: funny line. She shot a video. I saw it on Twitter.
Speaker 4: She said, I want us to be released until I'm dead, right,
Speaker 4: And she put it very gently. She's like, you know,
Speaker 4: if there were a rocket ship that were beamed out
Speaker 4: to space and had certain people on it, I'm not
Speaker 4: gonna say who, maybe Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: And President She she said.
Speaker 3: Well, I would put put in there, and I would
Speaker 3: put President She. I'd certainly put Patanyahu in there and
Speaker 3: his far right government. I'm all on that.
Speaker 1: Spaceship putting five on there. Yeah. That is, by the way,
Speaker 1: from a Netflix documentary that's called Famous Last Words. So
Speaker 1: she recorded it this past March, and it was only
Speaker 1: to be released after she died.
Speaker 4: So just came out of those five. If you had
Speaker 4: to have a bunk mate, right, you come in late
Speaker 4: to the Space Shuttle, you have to bunk with somebody.
Speaker 1: You don't. Don't do that to me. No, I can't.
Speaker 1: I can't. I think I would. I think I'd probably
Speaker 1: kill myself before getting off the shuttle.
Speaker 2: She might be fine, right, Well.
Speaker 1: Since I don't speak Chinese, I guess I guess. So
Speaker 1: if we wouldn't be able to because all the other
Speaker 1: ones there would be no Yeah, if you put me
Speaker 1: with Putin, I think I think one of us is
Speaker 1: gonna be dead very quickly, and it's probably gonna be me.
Speaker 4: If you could play video games with Elon, right, he might,
Speaker 4: he might be fun.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I wouldn't mind, you know, Trump, I'd
Speaker 2: be fun for a night.
Speaker 4: I think he's actually like kind of like prissy about
Speaker 4: some stuff though, right, he'd probably be Anyway, let's not
Speaker 4: get into that.
Speaker 2: Well, what we're talking about, DA were talking about speaking.
Speaker 4: Of Okay, this is actually meant to be long circuitous
Speaker 4: transition talking about like you know, Elon Musk is an
Speaker 4: example of somebody who sees himself as an outsider, right,
Speaker 4: I think is more of an outsider than like the
Speaker 4: Libs would give him credit for. Right, Like you know,
Speaker 4: Elon Musk is somebody you might say, is not very
Speaker 4: aware of kind of what his own limits are necessarily, right,
Speaker 4: So that can be a big That can be a
Speaker 4: big problem potentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, that can definitely be a problem because you
Speaker 1: do need to walk a fine line. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, like I said, Jangudal was an outsider, but
Speaker 1: with like you know, someone from the inside who who
Speaker 1: championed her, and she had a lot of insider knowledge
Speaker 1: in terms of her in terms of her curiosity. I
Speaker 1: think that she also seemed to have that kind of
Speaker 1: golden personality that allowed her to transition to not just
Speaker 1: insider status but trailblazer, right leader, paradigm shift creator, and
Speaker 1: not lose her groundedness and her her curiosity and her
Speaker 1: genuine sense of fun exploration, just wanting to do this
Speaker 1: for the sake of science. And as you point out, Nate,
Speaker 1: like that doesn't have to happen, right, A lot of
Speaker 1: those same insiders who are the crusty old men, and yes,
Speaker 1: I'm going to say men, because for the most part
Speaker 1: they are, and we'll say maybe there's a crusty old
Speaker 1: grand dame in there as well, but they were a
Speaker 1: lot of them were trailblazers in their own day right.
Speaker 1: A lot of them were kind of really innovative thinkers.
Speaker 1: And then something happened, right, age happened, success happened, financial
Speaker 1: success happened, success within academia, within your peers admiring you.
Speaker 1: Kind of that happened, and then you have a lot
Speaker 1: more to lose and including your kind of the things
Speaker 1: that made you great. And it takes a very rare
Speaker 1: person who would actually be able to withstand that. My
Speaker 1: graduate advisor, Walter Michelle, who's someone who was, you know,
Speaker 1: a trailblazer in the field of in the field of
Speaker 1: psychology personality psychology, and he was someone who was incredibly
Speaker 1: supportive of outsiders. I mean, he accepted me from a
Speaker 1: very weird background to come into his program.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I came to him from television. I was working as
Speaker 1: a producer for Charlie Rose. I did, you know, study
Speaker 1: psychology before. But I explained to him that I wanted
Speaker 1: to be a writer and I just loved his work
Speaker 1: and I really wanted to you know that I was
Speaker 1: motivated and I'd do my own research and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: but that I wanted to kind of to be a
Speaker 1: writer and not be a psychologist. And he loved that,
Speaker 1: and he was like, this is amazing. You know, we
Speaker 1: need more people who just are genuinely curious. And most
Speaker 1: people would have shown me the door, right and be like,
Speaker 1: get the fuck out of here. If you don't want
Speaker 1: to actually.
Speaker 4: Reporting on Charlie Rose. You probably were doing some field
Speaker 4: work in psychology.
Speaker 1: I would oh, absolutely, I say that that, yes, that
Speaker 1: is definitely the uh yes, that is definitely an accurate observation.
Speaker 1: But I still and I think I might have told
Speaker 1: this story on Risky Business before, but you know, with
Speaker 1: the if I did. I'm sorry for repeating myself. But
Speaker 1: let me remind our listeners that when I started working
Speaker 1: with Walter Michelle and did some of my initial studies
Speaker 1: on self control, I found the opposite of the results
Speaker 1: we'd been expecting, and found that the people highest in
Speaker 1: self control actually did the worst on these like stock
Speaker 1: market you know, decision tasks because they didn't take negative
Speaker 1: feedback well, right, They just they assumed that they were
Speaker 1: a lot smarter and they didn't learn, which was this
Speaker 1: very avrrent find. And I was really scared of telling
Speaker 1: Walter that this was the case, because his entire career
Speaker 1: was built around the notion that self control good, right,
Speaker 1: delay of gratification good. And I was like, uh, oh right,
Speaker 1: self control people not doing well, and I like I delayed.
Speaker 1: And I remember standing outside his office being like, fuck,
Speaker 1: you know, this is bad. And then he was just
Speaker 1: he was like a child. He was so excited. He's like,
Speaker 1: I'm so excited that you found something bad about self control. Yes, like,
Speaker 1: let's see where it goes. Get more data, Like do
Speaker 1: this again, does it replicate? You know, this is great,
Speaker 1: and that is I think that's very rare. But that's
Speaker 1: the hallmark of someone who was in it for the
Speaker 1: right reasons and who was motivated by kind of curiosity
Speaker 1: and genuine love of learning. And I don't think that
Speaker 1: it's actually I don't think that it's an artifact. I
Speaker 1: think it's a feature that Walter Michelle was also someone
Speaker 1: who was an artist. He actually had some solo shows
Speaker 1: while he was alive and kind of experimented in all
Speaker 1: those media that he read avidly outside of psychology that
Speaker 1: he loved that I wanted to write, like, I think
Speaker 1: that those things go hand in hand, right, because it
Speaker 1: helps you stay outsidery while being on the inside, and
Speaker 1: I think that that is crucially important.
Speaker 4: No, it's a good I mean this is putting it
Speaker 4: way too clinically, but like it's also a good life practice.
Speaker 4: But like it's a good hedging strata. I mean, this
Speaker 4: is want to stop piece of advice I give to
Speaker 4: like any young person choosing your career right, make sure
Speaker 4: that all your friends, all your network. If you want
Speaker 4: to talk about peopleho are more frenemies whatever, Right, make
Speaker 4: sure they're not all in your field of work a
Speaker 4: because they'll provide opportunities to escape that field you need to.
Speaker 4: But like, you know, like I don't spend a lot
Speaker 4: of time talking to political insight, even though in principle
Speaker 4: I'm like, well I can have a have coffee with them,
Speaker 4: and if they're if everything they tell me is bullshit,
Speaker 4: then I don't have to let it influence my judgment
Speaker 4: at all. Right, I just think it involves like a
Speaker 4: lot of work to maintain those relationships, and it's kind
Speaker 4: of hard.
Speaker 2: Not to me even, you know, even you know, in media,
Speaker 2: I know more people, right, And so with media, I
Speaker 2: you know, I'm like, okay, well I want to you know,
Speaker 2: maybe when.
Speaker 4: I criticize this person, and and but like I know
Speaker 4: this person and I know the person who knows them,
Speaker 4: and so I'm like, you know, you have to be
Speaker 4: a little bit more careful, right.
Speaker 2: You know. There's a lot of.
Speaker 4: Value in in in not giving a fuck, And one
Speaker 4: way you cannot give a fuck without facing existential risks
Speaker 4: to your career is to have other fallbacks that you
Speaker 4: can have potentially and by the way, can also be
Speaker 4: like I think, you know, I think Jane goodall embraced.
Speaker 2: It or at least came to peace with it. But
Speaker 2: like being a.
Speaker 4: Hero to people or becoming this I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: one way to find celebrity is that, like, you no
Speaker 4: longer have control of your own image and likeness in
Speaker 4: a way, right that people will have ideas about you
Speaker 4: that don't match the real you, and in fact are
Speaker 4: some stylized version of you that maybe weaponized against you,
Speaker 4: or if not against you, then at you know, perpendicularly
Speaker 4: to like what you're trying to accomplish, right, you become
Speaker 4: an avatar for something and like, and that can be
Speaker 4: quite difficult, you know. I think I've I've dealt with that,
Speaker 4: where you know, I do a lot of things. I'm
Speaker 4: like way more famous on the election forecast and anything else,
Speaker 4: which I kind of give the least a fuck about, right,
Speaker 4: I think it's good work, but like I don't really.
Speaker 2: Give a fuck, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: But at the same time, like I wouldn't have like
Speaker 4: the privilege in the income and things like that if
Speaker 4: if I weren't well known for that and so so
Speaker 4: you know, any type of like nerd who makes it famous.
Speaker 4: I'm I'm I'm sympathetic, and I'm sympathetic if they if
Speaker 4: they keep it real by like, yeah, you know, the
Speaker 4: different ways to keep it real. Maybe you speak truth
Speaker 4: to power, maybe you're very judicious in what you say, right,
Speaker 4: But like, I think they're definitely better and worse.
Speaker 2: Ways to do it.
Speaker 4: And there are different versions of it that don't become
Speaker 4: it don't well becoming a boring old number of the establishment.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely, and I do you know,
Speaker 1: I do think that maintaining that vitality is crucial to
Speaker 1: making sure that you do stay relevant up until the
Speaker 1: very last day. Right, that you're someone like good all
Speaker 1: that when you die, like the world mourns, right, the
Speaker 1: world notices because you've been advancing the field the entire time.
Speaker 1: And we'll be back right after this. There was an
Speaker 1: interesting study that I saw that came out a few
Speaker 1: years ago. You basically how much does an outsider status
Speaker 1: actually matter? And this was done by Gino Katani and
Speaker 1: Simone Feriani, and they actually looked at Hollywood, So they
Speaker 1: looked at around twelve thousand Hollywood professionals and creative success
Speaker 1: you know awards, you know, critical acclaim, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And they basically did one of those you know charts
Speaker 1: where you look at kind of the the networks, like
Speaker 1: the circles of influence, where you have like the center
Speaker 1: of the network and then you have the periphery of
Speaker 1: the network. There's a specific word for that, right, And
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what the specific word for it is,
Speaker 1: but you understand what I'm talking about visually. And so
Speaker 1: they wanted to see kind of where are kind of
Speaker 1: the most successful artists. Are they at the center, right, Like,
Speaker 1: are they like really in the middle of things? Are
Speaker 1: they at the periphery of connections? And they found that
Speaker 1: it was neither. That it was actually people who were
Speaker 1: kind of at the uh, the nexus between the center
Speaker 1: and the periphery, right, So they actually had like they
Speaker 1: weren't really on the outside, but they also were not
Speaker 1: in the center, so they had outsider connections and kind
Speaker 1: of outside our cred but they also had some industry
Speaker 1: inns and people who supported them from the inside, which
Speaker 1: I actually found remarkably similar. If you think about Jane
Speaker 1: Goodall to kind of what she looks like in the
Speaker 1: sense that she was on the outside, and yet she
Speaker 1: did have someone who was at the very center. He
Speaker 1: was the single, you know, most famous I think primatologist
Speaker 1: at the time, who was her champion and who was
Speaker 1: able to kind of push her along. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: it was And by the way, I found this very
Speaker 1: funny in the study of Hollywood. Basically, critics like it
Speaker 1: if you look kind of outsidery, they give you really
Speaker 1: good critical reviews. But if you want to get like Oscars,
Speaker 1: and you want to get really high awards, you need
Speaker 1: the industry insiders to vote for you as well, so
Speaker 1: you have to walk this fine line. So it was
Speaker 1: Actually it's an interesting study, but I think it's a
Speaker 1: little bit flawed because you do Hollywood is a weird
Speaker 1: place where you have these weird arcane voting systems, and
Speaker 1: you really have to have some sort of politicking to
Speaker 1: get into those systems as well. And that's not I mean,
Speaker 1: that's true of academia. It's it's not quite the same,
Speaker 1: but academia also has a lot of politicking and a
Speaker 1: lot of those arcane systems in place, I guess, and
Speaker 1: who gets tenure, who doesn't get tenure. All that stuff
Speaker 1: is also incredibly fraught. So I take it back. I'm
Speaker 1: just thinking out loud here. Maybe holly Wood isn't a
Speaker 1: bad facsimile of academia.
Speaker 2: No, Look, I think it's true.
Speaker 4: In a lot of you know, everyone's maintaining their independent,
Speaker 4: outsider cred and most people also like power and access
Speaker 4: to power, you know what I mean, And there are
Speaker 4: trade offs between those things, and there's a lot of
Speaker 4: walking the tightrope brand management, whatever you want to call it,
Speaker 4: involved in trying to kind of have your cake and
Speaker 4: eat it too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Nate, what do you find the hardest kind of
Speaker 1: the I don't even know how to phrase this, but
Speaker 1: like the idea generation, all of that, like the creative
Speaker 1: stuff or I think that's different for different people, like
Speaker 1: the marketing and the actually like being able to get
Speaker 1: it heard because there is I mean, those are skills
Speaker 1: that are not always complementary, and there are some people
Speaker 1: who are very good at one and not great at
Speaker 1: the other, and in order to be successful in a
Speaker 1: lot of industry, you really need both. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say something that's very politically incorrect and people might get
Speaker 1: really mad, but I'm just gonna say it anyway. Jane
Speaker 1: Goodall was a knockout. She was hot, Like she is
Speaker 1: a tall, gorgeous blonde like I see her and I'm
Speaker 1: like whoa, Like holy shit, girl, like you're stunning and
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Like that couldn't have hurt. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that it had any like her, she is a genius,
Speaker 1: like her mind, her observational ability, like all of that is.
Speaker 1: We're not doubting any of that. But she was her
Speaker 1: own marketing in a way, right, Like you put her
Speaker 1: on a poster and people are going to be interested.
Speaker 1: And I'm not trying to diminish in any way what
Speaker 1: she did, which is why I'm saying this at the
Speaker 1: very end of the show and not the beginning, but
Speaker 1: like it helped her with things that she probably would
Speaker 1: interested in because she was just interested in the chimps.
Speaker 1: But she ended up being such a forceful I think,
Speaker 1: such a forceful marketing phenomenon, partly because of the full package.
Speaker 4: No, Look, I think there is some minimum thresh of
Speaker 4: for looking at successful people who are successful intellectuals, right,
Speaker 4: particularly the ones that become like more kind of commercially successful.
Speaker 4: I think it's important distinction, right, people who like become
Speaker 4: well known generally and or make some money from that, right,
Speaker 4: Like there's usually a fairly high baseline of charisma of
Speaker 4: some kind. Yea, right, yeah, no, Look, I'm always motivated
Speaker 4: myself by like the word. You know, my satisfaction is
Speaker 4: when I published something, I finish a model, you finished
Speaker 4: a book chapter, right, and like file it. Like that's
Speaker 4: more satisfaction from me than like whether it gets like
Speaker 4: praised or whatever or not later on and right, But
Speaker 4: at the same at the same time, you know, I
Speaker 4: kind of was an internet entrepreneur in my own way,
Speaker 4: and you have to market your content. And if you're
Speaker 4: an artist in particular, even more than a scientist, you
Speaker 4: really have to market the fuck out of out of yourself, right.
Speaker 4: And that's like, you know, it's like it's like half
Speaker 4: the game, I think, and there are different ways to
Speaker 4: play it. You don't have to do ways that are
Speaker 4: fake or uncomfortable, right, I think sometimes you know kind
Speaker 4: of people who like who need to be more deliberate
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 1: It's true, and Jane Goodall definitely wanted her work to
Speaker 1: be known. I Mean, one of the first things she
Speaker 1: did when she came back and started kind of getting
Speaker 1: her PhD is write a popular book about what she discovered,
Speaker 1: not an academic treatise, and people at academia hated this,
Speaker 1: but she knew, right, she knew that she needed to popularize,
Speaker 1: and to her that was incredibly important. And so because
Speaker 1: for her, you know, she wanted to protect the natural environment,
Speaker 1: she wanted people, she wanted to protect the rights of
Speaker 1: the chimpanzee. She wanted all of these things that could
Speaker 1: only come if she became a very powerful spokesperson for getting.
Speaker 4: It can be one way to have this best of
Speaker 4: both worlds scenario where like, you know, you're very tenure
Speaker 4: and you're able to be intellectly free, but you can
Speaker 4: gain variety notoriety, right, you have fewer restrictions on like
Speaker 4: outside activity than you would at a corporate employer.
Speaker 2: Can also be the worst of both worlds.
Speaker 1: Though, right.
Speaker 4: It can also be like that, like, you know, there's
Speaker 4: a ton of group think, there's a ton of academic politics,
Speaker 4: and soe you kind of like very restricted that way,
Speaker 4: and you maybe don't realize how poorly the communication you're
Speaker 4: encouraged to use an academic paper will come across to
Speaker 4: like a smart outsider, right, yep, yep.
Speaker 1: And I think just to Just to sum up, Jangodall
Speaker 1: someone who just intuitively understood all of this, and someone
Speaker 1: who managed to not only maintain her relevance but stay relevant,
Speaker 1: stay outsider even as she became the most insider of
Speaker 1: them all. And so I think that we can even
Speaker 1: if you have nothing to do with psychology or animal
Speaker 1: cognition or any of that, I think that there's a
Speaker 1: lot here that you can take away from this in
Speaker 1: terms of, you know, how to think about approaching your careers,
Speaker 1: how to think about thinking, how to think about making
Speaker 1: an impact on the world. Even at the very end.
Speaker 1: She said, even if the world is going to go
Speaker 1: up in flames, go down kicking and screaming.
Speaker 3: Even if this is the end of humanity as we
Speaker 3: know it, let's fight to the very end. It's better
Speaker 3: to go on fighting to the end than just to
Speaker 3: give up and say okay.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's a you know's that's a
Speaker 1: great message for insiders and outsiders alike. Let us know
Speaker 1: what you think of the show. Reach out to us
Speaker 1: at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM. Risky Business is
Speaker 1: hosted by me Maria Kanakova.
Speaker 4: And by me Nate Silver. The show was a cool
Speaker 4: production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced
Speaker 4: by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya gerwit Lydia,
Speaker 4: Jean Kott and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our
Speaker 4: executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please rate and review us
Speaker 1: so other people can find us too, But once again,
Speaker 1: only if you like us. We don't want those bad
Speaker 1: reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.