Debbie Millman:
Some people think that race is a fiction, yet it is a fiction that our society has kept lethally alive for a long time now. How? Well, it is all about the details. To make a fictional world seem real, you have to fill it in with images and sensory information. You also have to leave most of the real world out. But if you succeed, the real world will look a little different for your readers.

In her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Sarah Lewis traces the visual history of race in America. She explains how art, photographs, movies, and pop culture turned the fictional idea of race into a destructive cultural fact. It’s a scholarly tour de force and a literal eye-opener.
Sarah Lewis is a celebrated art and cultural historian and a professor at Harvard University. She’s also the founder of Vision and Justice, a civic initiative to reveal the important role of visual culture in shaping how we think. Sarah Lewis, welcome to Design Matters.

Sarah Lewis:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s really an honor to speak with you.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah, I understand when you were in high school, you were a 400-meter sprinter.

Sarah Lewis:
How did you find this out? Yes, I was. I loved running. That was my race, hard, hard race.

Debbie Millman:
And so did you have hopes to be an athlete of some sort?

Sarah Lewis:
I did. I grew up in that era when Flo-Jo was running and made us understand that dreams were realized on the track, and those dreams I thought might be mine too. I thought I might run professionally, and genetically I was fast. But I didn’t love the training, I didn’t love the regimen. So in the end, I still run. I don’t run competitively, but I keep threatening I’ll do more marathons and things like that to keep it going.

Debbie Millman:
You were born and raised in New York City and you were named after your grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, with whom you share the initials S-E-L. In 1926 when he was in the 11th grade, he was expelled from a New York City public school for asking why his history textbooks only showed images of white Americans. Can you talk about what happened next?

Sarah Lewis:
My grandfather went through the experience that you described so beautifully, and I knew nothing about it until he died. When I was in college getting ready to go to his funeral, I asked my mother why he didn’t have a high school diploma. He was so sharp and understood so much. I didn’t understand. I was in college at Harvard at the time, and she told me this story.

She told me that what came next is, and that’s really what transformed my own understanding about the power of the arts, was it was startling to me. She told me that he dared to ask his teacher why he was perceiving that answer that African-Americans, in particular, had done nothing to merit inclusion in those textbooks. And he was asking about the whole world. He wanted to know where Asian Americans were, Latin Americans were, Indigenous folks were.

He didn’t accept her answer, and he was expelled from public school from high school for his so-called impertinence at refusing to do so. He became an artist, he became a musician. And in those paintings, drawings, he created the very genre scenes he knew he should have been able to find in those textbooks. He was consistent and insistent on ensuring that the whole world was present in those images. I grew up at his knee wanting to draw, learning to paint from him as stunned by this visual display that I described.
And so when I learned about what he did next, there really that day at his funeral, I realized, well, of course that in bearing his initials, S-E-L, my name is so much less cool than my grandfather’s though, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee. I was in lineage and I realized in that moment I could be in lineage with a set of questions that I now realize and occupy the mission of my life. What is the role of art for justice in American society? And that’s really what he was asking his teacher. And the answer is one that he lived out.

At that time in college, I think many of us studying the arts were not told much about the connection between culture, art and racial politics. So I began to teach myself and that work results in the courses I teach at Harvard and many of the publications that have come out since.

Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up in addition to sprinting, you also took salsa lessons and inspired by your grandfather. You also started painting. What kinds of things were you painting at that time?

Sarah Lewis:
I was painting the way that my grandfather did. I was in a class, I went to Brearley all-girls school in New York growing up. The program, the curriculum there really focused us on still lives and figurative painting. So I was doing what was asked of me as I learned to paint, but I was without knowing it making sure the whole world was present too. My mother showed me recently a very early painting I made when we were asked to paint pilgrims and it was maybe an eight or nine. My pilgrim was Black. My pilgrim was Black, but these same kind of black buckled shoes.

And I love that no one corrected me, that yuck age. No one told me about this history, and in so doing, they were letting me create a visual image that inserted my own identity as the center. And of course, I now deeply understand the tensions in the fabric of this country between slavery and freedom and teach on this of course at Harvard. But at the time, the paintings I made telegraphed that I understood that we all count in American society.

So that’s what I was up to. I thought I might, after I abandoned my running ambitions, be an artist. And even in my first year, not really after that, but first year at Harvard, I thought I would be a painter still, but love that I’m able now to think about the significance of the arts in a broader way than I probably could have if I was an artist full time.

Debbie Millman:
When you applied to Harvard, you wrote your application essay on failure. Why that topic?

Sarah Lewis:
Can I just say I need to salute the extraordinary research you do with all of your guests, and I’m feeling the benefit of it here myself. Oh my goodness, you know so much about the journey. Thank you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Sarah Lewis:
I did. I wrote about failure from my application essay to Harvard, and it was, I thought without even asking anyone such an ill-advised idea, I didn’t tell anyone about it. I made this decision and I remember even asking my parents to leave the house one day over the weekend so I could write the piece in piece, and then it was a Sunday the next day and bring it to school and submit it.

It was about failure broadly, but really more about the gift of failure that comes and that we all know happens in the creative arts. I was interested in the improbable but irreplaceable foundations of these experiences we wish we didn’t have for the transformation and potentially the triumphs that could come.
I’d had this experience that was unique at the time, and I wrote about it, that experience. It was the NAACP when I was growing up had an Olympiads. It was this Olympic competition, multiple fields, so you could enter it in painting or the sciences, and every state had a competition and then there was a national competition and it would take place in an arena the size of a football field. The awards were given out to an audience that large. It was extraordinary.

And I had won in the painting category in one year and as a ninth grader and then won at the national level. The prize was a computer and some money, and so as a kid it had a huge impact on me and I didn’t think anything of my work on that level until that award. I tried again two years later and I don’t think I even placed enough to go to the national level, and it felt like a massive failure because of how public it was for my peers.

It began my own just pursuit, which led to other work, other publications about the gift of failure because I think especially when you’re going to schools that really condition you to believe in your own success, failure goes against your very understanding of who you are and can rock you to your core, especially as a young person. So I wanted to write a piece that was a vulnerable one for the application to speak to a kind of resilience that I thought I’d cultivated through the process. And I’m glad it worked.

Debbie Millman:
How did you cultivate, but how did you… I mean, that’s pretty young to cultivate. I’m still working on trying to understand my own rejections and failures in a more sort of productive, mature way. How were you able to do that at such a young age?

Sarah Lewis:
It’s a great question. I’m not sure that I can process it with you. I don’t know that I’ve asked myself that question internally. But at that age, I was 17, 18 young Black woman growing up in New York City and Manhattan at that, I think I had learned even then to take the gift of being underestimated seriously. And it’s connected to the idea of failure, right? Because when you’re underestimated, you are seen to be a failure in effect in the eyes of whomever is judging you as compared to who you actually are and who you could be, and you’re aware of that gap in their perception of you and the fact of who you can become.

And that gap is failure. That gap is a failure of imagination. It’s a failure of judgment. It’s a failure of the history of narratives that have told women who they can be, that told Black women who they can be.
So what I was already gleaning from what the world was telling me was that I was going to have to contend with this sort of environment, which failure was around me despite my successes. That experience is one that I drive strength from now still because I think the odds of me just walking a street and someone assuming that I do what I do if they look at me are pretty low still, right?

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I hate to say yes, but yes.

Sarah Lewis:
Even though I’m a deep optimist.

Debbie Millman:
How do you feel about failure now?

Sarah Lewis:
I’m inspired by failure and try to push myself to that edge. As you know, I wrote about failure in the Rise nearly 10 years ago now. What that book taught me was just how little we speak about the importance of failure in our lives. And so on a personal level after publishing it, I challenged myself to try to be as brave as the entrepreneurs and athletes and explorers and artists that I profile in the book.

When you work as a writer or an academia or even in the arts, you have to secret away those experiences of failure. So what I try to do is create space for the innovation that happens only through failure. In, say, teaching with the students, I’ll ensure that there’s a gift-of-failure policy in the larger classes so they can experiment with, say, one piece of writing and then produce another piece of writing and drop the lower grade of the two so they can feel free in that sense.

So I think you have to build it in programmatically, and I build it into with my own experiments in writing in particular, but lately I’m trying to do it through pursuits. I used to mention salsa dancing. I used to dance a lot after work and things and just, I love taking classes and now I want to do that too. I’m going to try to pick up another form of dance. I know I’m not going to be good it at the start. I think that’s part of the point.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, one of the issues that I contend with on the regular is feeling afraid to start something new because somehow I’ll humiliate myself with the lack of talent or knowledge or just sort of savoir faire, but I’m trying to work on that. I’m working on it.

Initially you went to Harvard pre-med, which I read and was sort of shocked at. But I understand a Proctor in your freshman dorm room gave you a copy of Richard Powell’s book, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. Is that what sort of motivated you to begin to shift your idea about what you wanted to study?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Yes. That sweet Proctor, that spirit, she’s actually a dear friend of mine now, April Yvonne Garrett. That was a moment. I really hope and I know that people are, but I really hope people pay attention to those dewdrops on your journey, those moments that feel amplified in your own sense of what happened during the day because it matters. That moment mattered when she gave me that book and I sensed it, and I knew it at the time.

It mattered because, well now I think people privilege and honor the role of the artist even more so than they did say 20 years ago. But to go to Harvard and to be a young Black woman going to Harvard with the sacrifices my family made for generations for me to be there, being in the arts was nearly the last advisable path to take.

So yes, I was pre-med. I was thinking I would be a doctor that’s safe and I can help people and my spirit is to help and to help heal. So it was necessary for me to have lanterns on an alternate path, and that book was one of those lanterns. It was to say, this can be done, you can be a writer and do this. There’s a whole history that you could be part of. And this book really was the guide to looking at that path, Richard Powell’s book.

Debbie Millman:
You went on to get a master’s in philosophy from Oxford University and a master’s of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Sarah, why two master’s degrees? Were they concurrent? How did you manage this?

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah, so I received a Marshall Scholarship to go to study abroad for three years after college, and it gives you this opportunity. It’s fantastic to study anywhere in the UK that you can get in. And I decided to do two degrees, one in economic and social history at Oxford, and the other in art history. Hadn’t yet committed to a doctorate and at the time certainly wasn’t going to do it in the UK because I wanted to be around my friends, and so I wanted to come back.

But I hadn’t, you can see with the choice the sort of split between economics and social history and the arts. I hadn’t yet found a way to bring together this connection between art and politics. So I felt as if I had to go down two different paths to give myself the arsenal I needed to understand it more fully.
So it’s not an unusual thing to do on that fellowship, though. A lot of people end up with those two degrees, but it was also right after 9/11. And I think because I had lost a good friend in the towers and had a lot of friends just pass from accidents of different kinds, I really benefited from having a three-year period to figure myself out to understand how I could best contribute if I could to society.

Debbie Millman:
I understand that when you were in London, you saw Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. I just interviewed Olafur about his current exhibits that he’s having in London, in New York, in Korea, about how we see what we see reflected back to us, which I think has some really interesting overlaps with your work. What was it about The Weather Project that inspired you so much?

Sarah Lewis:
My God, do you know, I think I’ve just put together for the first time when I became interested in studying vision itself. It was through that exhibition, it was through seeing that show.

Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.

Sarah Lewis:
So at the time, I was curating at the Tate Modern in London, working with Donna De Salvo who came over to Whitney after that. And throughout the time of that, really was an internship as curatorial assistant, The Weather Project was up. So every day, I would leave my office and experience people having a Truman Show-like experience in effect. They were able to see themselves seeing and see the artifice of the world around them.

But what stunned me most and just for those who haven’t seen it, it’s in the Turbine Hall at the Tate. Olafur Eliasson created an extraordinary half dome that feels like a sun, and then with mirrors completes it so that it appears to be a circle. And you look up at it and can see the artifice, but the response to it was people lying on the ground as if they were on a beach somewhere underneath a sun.

And it was stunning to witness because of course it would be winter months and people were doing that and the floor is the floor. And you know what happens on the floor, people were just so… It was such an embodied response and it made me think about how seeing transforms being, how just the act of looking at something can change your, not just behaviors but your even rational sense of what to do in a space.
So that probably was the moment I wrote about that piece for one of the masters papers, and I loved, I still remember how much the research excited me. And it gave me a sense of just how much we miss when we don’t address the power of the arts for transformations in society. That was the beginning.

Debbie Millman:
In one of the interviews that I read, you said that that experience got you thinking about James Joyce. And of course my eyes and ears perked up because I’m a big fan, and you described it as a kind of wonder and aesthetic experience that you’re not moved to possess or critique or judge but simply to behold. And I think that’s such a wonderful way of thinking about what art can do, how you just behold it and it sort of takes you over in some way.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s it. I mean, even the words as you so well know to describe, the power of an aesthetic experience conveys that we’re in an altered state. We’re stunned or dazzled or we’re knocked out, these are the words we use because there’s a suspension in those judgments. It’s as if you vividly describe it with those words. And that’s why the arts have, I think, the capacity to transform how we see the world. In that altered state, you can revise what you see when you emerge out of it.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. So you published The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery in 2014. And I believe that you actually began working on your book first from that experience writing your essay for your application to Harvard. But then when you were getting your PhD from Yale, you’ve said that writing that book was an audacious act. In what way?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Well, for a number of reasons. Practically speaking, when you’re a graduate student, you’re supposed to be, and I was writing a dissertation. You’re not supposed to be writing another book alongside of it with, of all places [inaudible 00:22:12] publisher.

Debbie Millman:
Unless you’re Sarah Lewis. Sarah Lewis does that.

Sarah Lewis:
Apparently. Apparently, ignorance is bliss, I guess. So I did it and my commitment to myself was, you can do this so long as the excellence of the academic work doesn’t suffer. So in my mind, it was anytime I would say take a break from academic work and binge something, I would be writing instead. So I wrote The Rise instead of doing those other things.

And it gave me so much nourishment. My God, that process of writing that book is one of the greatest gifts I gave to myself. I had no idea what it would do in the world. I did not write that book thinking that it would go on to be translated into seven languages and take me around the world in terms of the conversations it would prompt. No idea.

I wrote it really to save my own sense of possibility and sense of becoming. It’s a book that looks at those improbable foundation’s so-called failure, near wins that artists of all kinds have that led to the works we celebrate, whether it’s a Kafka or a Faulkner or a Cézanne or you name it, and how that takes place in the lives of those who are innovators, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and explorers.

But it really is a book that is helpful for anyone who wants to understand the process of their own becoming, because no matter what our role is, that is going to be an experience that we have. We are going to fall short of a goal that we have. The question becomes how do you give yourself the propulsion to move forward to become the self you know can be.

So I wrote it because I wanted to understand that myself truly, and then realized that the guides and the different themes that were emerging through interviews and research were not just helpful for me, but apparently helpful for others. So doing all of that while being a student, I did seem audacious.
But I now look at the lifespan of an artist process and actually look at what’s happening in their twenties and thirties differently as a result. I think there is an increased risk-taking that can come when you simply don’t know what an endeavor entails, and so you’re willing to do it. If I really knew, I don’t think I would’ve, but thank God I did it anyway.

Debbie Millman:
There were some lines that I found in the book and also in my research that really sort of stopped me in my tracks. You said that failure is not something that might be helpful, it actually is the process. And it sort of made me reconsider how much I avoid doing anything that I’ll fail at in that process I’m avoiding actually doing the thing.

But then you also said that success is a hollow word, and it is typically a designation that someone else gives you. So it’s an evaluation, which also kind of took me, it seemed like I could understand the steps to get to the unseen truth in terms of what people tell you that something means.

Sarah Lewis:
I love that you’ve landed on the term evaluation. Evaluation and assessment, that really is the bridge between the projects. The term failure was once used to describe financial ruin, bankruptcy. It was never meant to be applied, I don’t think, to the human spirit, but we do use it, and it’s a term applied to us from others. So it’s an evaluation which never really takes into account someone else’s goals for themselves or who they will become after that moment.

In writing The Unseen Truth, I was interested in evaluations of other kinds to do with race and society, and it led to that book writing, The Rise. There’s a chapter in The Rise where I meditate on leaders like Frederick Douglass, thinking about societal failure. Frederick Douglass gives a speech that was really unknown when I began writing The Rise in 2010 about the power of pictures in the middle of the American Civil War, and it stunned his audience.

He delivers it in 1861 in Boston, and they’re expecting, you can imagine him to think about anything else but the power of imagery, this new technology. He became the most photographed American man of the 19th century because he understood the function and the force of images to change how we evaluate who counts and who belongs in society.

And so he’s thinking through the impact of this technology for societal failure, to not understand the dignity and humanity of all. That chapter, Beauty, Error, and Justice in The Rise led to the work Vision and Justice, but specifically The Unseen Truth, because I wanted to understand really the failures of evaluation in a more rigorous way, in a more detailed way.

Debbie Millman:
Well, what’s so interesting to me about your notions of failure and success, we do so much to avoid failure. Yet when we achieve success, for most people, they’re never content with just that. Then there’s the next success and then the next. And so there’s this really interesting tension between the sort of avoidance of failure and the pull towards more and more success, and it seems like you can’t really have one without the other.

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah, that’s exactly the irony, right? And the paradox. I love, there’s a parable and effect that opens the book, my barn having burned down, I can finally see the moon. There’s this way.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. I love that quote.

Debbie Millman:
In 2008, President Obama formed an arts policy committee and invited you to serve on it, and he was actually the first presidential candidate ever to form an arts policy committee during his campaign. What was that experience? How did that, one day like, “Hey, Sarah. It’s Barack.” How did that happen?

Sarah Lewis:
I do remember receiving a call from the co-chair. And around that time, I was up for a position at the National Endowment for the Arts that I accepted and then realized wasn’t exactly right for me as deputy director. And being, I think at that stage in my career, I had a sense that there’s more writing I wanted to do, curating I wanted to do, and not policy work just then. So at the time, it was probably natural for me to be part of it and he was the first. I think if we think back to the impact of Shepard Fairey’s poster, Hope poster, it’s probably really easy to envision why this extraordinary presidential candidate would understand the importance of visual messaging for politics.

Debbie Millman:
Yes. And language, just the word Hope and what that signifies. Was that the most important thing you learned from President Obama? You mentioned language, and…

Sarah Lewis:
His ability while speaking in conversation or in speeches to let silence speak and to allow himself time to consider how an idea will land, I think, was instructive for me as a young Black woman in particular because in those pauses, in that silence, there is a modeling of the mindfulness, I think, that’s still required in our civic life to ensure that especially I think African-Americans are not misunderstood.

Debbie Millman:
Or underestimated.

Sarah Lewis:
Or underestimated, exactly. So that model has stayed with me for some time, I will say. He’s a generational talent. There’s so much we learn from the Obamas: both the model of their partnership, their love, the bravery. But in terms of how we present ourselves as Black people to the public, I think that what I’ve just described he was able to do so effectively is I think the most salient lesson.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve stated that “In the history of the United States, perhaps the biggest question we have is how to tell the story of who we are. And in representational democracy, the answer has always been representation itself. The arts, images, culture, performance have long been a way to work through the blind spots of norms and laws that did not honor the full humanity of all those who in this extraordinary country.” Sarah, is that what first inspired your Vision & Justice project in 2016?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. Where would we be in our understanding of the United States without culture, without art? Try to explain it to someone and you really can’t. The project began with that idea, but it found its roots and I think its fire through honoring the legacy of which we’re a part. Frederick Douglass really first had this idea in American politics, and to see as I did this speech, he delivers about that in the Library of Congress untouched, as I did as a student, gave me a sense of lineage, made me understand that yes, the realization I had about the function and power of art and culture for justice was important, but I was certainly not the first to have it. And I’m not even speaking about my other colleagues who’ve written about this too.

Frederick Douglass states at the end of his speech so poignantly, “It might take over 150 years for this idea to be understood about the importance of representation in our democracy.” And it’s a humble line and it really was a call to action as I read it. It really was stating, will you be one of the individuals I had in mind to continue this work?

And so Vision & Justice was born of answering that call and pointing, as I did in the first “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture in 2016 in the publication, to the many artists who I know Douglass had in mind, whether it’s LaToya Ruby Frazier or Carrie Mae Weems or Awol Erizku, Deborah Willis, so many others, and the writers who give us a sense of the importance of understanding visual literacy for racial literacy like the late Maurice Berger, so many others. And that convening through the framework of Vision & Justice of makers who are transforming narratives of who counts and who belongs is really how Vision & Justice began.

Debbie Millman:
The Vision & Justice project is now part of your core curriculum at Harvard. Your Vision & Justice organization has become an initiative that marshals resources, whether it’s public-facing courses, publications, conferences, to educate the public about the urgent work of art and culture for equity and justice in the United States. And I think from my understanding of your body of work and your practice, all of this has led to the publication of your new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. Would you say that’s correct?

Sarah Lewis:
Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:
Would you say that’s accurate?

Sarah Lewis:
That is accurate.

Debbie Millman:
Now, the book took you over 10 years to write, and in the process you had a near-death experience in a gruesome car crash. How did you recover? How did you survive? How did you recover? And how did that impact the journey of this book?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. That experience was a miracle, and I truly have nothing but gratitude for it. It is not a physical experience I would wish on anyone. It was a pandemic experience. It was pre-vaccine when I was driving on the West Side highway and a car hydroplaned after a long day of rains or hours into my vehicle, lost control of his car. And my own nearly flipped over, hit the concrete divider, and the airbags deployed in the car. And it’s really because of that fact that the airbags deployed when they did, and I’m sure divine intervention, that I’m still here. When the EMTs came, they kept asking at least twice, “Is there anyone else in the vehicle?” because of the speed of the impact that they registered and all the rest. And I didn’t have any… I think I have a minorly fractured rib, which we realized later, but really nothing that you would imagine would’ve taken place given that the car was totaled.

The gratitude that I have for that experience is to do with how intensely I experience this just love for the fact of life itself. It’s indescribable because I would walk around with gratitude for life before, but to come so close and know that unless there’s some kind of intervention, you are going to go. And you don’t and you’re all right and it’s painful. You can walk around, you can heal and continue to do this work. I don’t take a second of it for granted, a second of it. I look at a little flower on the street and I just think of just the gift I had to still be here to enjoy these small beauties, these large experiences of other kinds.

The Unseen Truth was on my laptop in that car. I was driving up to Harvard to keep writing. And as I healed, I realized that I had to include a lot more fire. The foundation of the book was there and the research was there. But when you crawl out of a burning car that has just crashed to save your own life, and I’ve seen way too many movies. You know what can happen when you open those car doors. I, despite thinking that, did that and are all right, changes your filter for what you think you’re actually afraid of. So this is a book that required me to be fearless, and I hadn’t yet arrived at that point when I began. So thanks to that experience, the book, I think, is what it needed to be. And I’m in the place I need to be be excited about life in all of its forms.

Debbie Millman:
The book tackles one of the greatest lies in American life, in American history, that there is no basis to the radicalized world of American society that puts white Americans on the top. And the true significance of this history has gone unseen until now. This all began for you with an image you discovered in your first week at Yale in the library. Can you describe the image for our listeners?

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. I came across a photograph taken by the most celebrated photographer of the era, Matthew Brady, of a woman who was standing full-frontal to the camera looking quite powerful in a dress, the sash. Her hair is teased to look as if it’s in an afro. She herself was alabaster white in terms of her complexion. And I learned that she was a performer known as a Circassian beauty performer, a so-called exemplar of white racial purity put on stage by PT Barnum in the 1860s. And she would go on to become his highest-grossing performer at the time. I could find so little scholarship on what the real implications of that performance was for the American public that I decided I had to write. So that was the photograph I landed on. And there were others I did find that same day that showed the development of the performance into one that really lampooned the idea of race itself, women who looked like Angela Davis being put on stages as exemplars of white racial purity, that kind of thing. That’s what began.

Debbie Millman:
You begin The Unseen Truth by detailing the story of the Caucasus during the Civil War era in America. So, for our listeners that might not know, what was that, and who were the Circassian people?

Sarah Lewis:
We use the term Caucasian and we think we know what it means.

Debbie Millman:
Wrong.

Sarah Lewis:
Wrong. And that’s what American society understood in the 19th century. So we think we’re referring to a group of people that we consider to be white. Why do we use the term Caucasian? Well, it came about the work of a naturalist who designated the Caucus region in the Black Sea area as the so-called homeland of the white race for reasons that seem ridiculous to us today because there weren’t white people there. There were no white people there. Exactly. So how did that come about?

Well, this is how racial lore gets hardened into fact. The lore was to do with the beauty of the women, which became an indication of racial superiority. It was the symmetry of a skull is another indication of racial superiority. The lore of the skin and the complexions of the women there, which proved to be false, and biblical lore in the Bible and Genesis, Noah’s Ark, it’s claimed it comes to rest in the region. This was the so-called data that was used to define that region and inaugurate it as the homeland of whiteness, and the terms stuck for centuries. It was debunked, though still used, during the American Civil War. And this is what’s been forgotten in history, and it’s critical that we recall it now.

So at that same time, there was something happening called the Caucasian War. And not a metaphor, an actual Caucasian war. And it’s taking place because Russians and the Ottoman Empire are battling for access to the Black Sea and are creating incursions on the Caucus region itself. It results in what many now consider to be a genocide of the peoples in the Caucus region. But the reporting that comes out in the newspapers at the time debunks all of the different lies that had hardened into fact about the type of people that were actually there. So it became clear that there was no such thing as racial whiteness in the region. And you can see what could have happened next but didn’t. When you see a very lie at the basis of the whole regime of racial hierarchy, you realize that you must dismantle it. But we didn’t.

Debbie Millman:
So, an 18th-century German physiologist coins the term Caucasian as a synonym for white in color and claims that the Circassian people were the purest Caucasians of all. PT Barnum, who I think was reincarnated to Donald Trump, then brings these women we think, maybe, who knows if they were really Circassian, in 1864 to his museum on Broadway as the purest example of the white race. And this is the origin story of Caucasians in America.

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. And he puts them on stage as a visual exam and a prompt and a prodding to really ask the American public if they’re willing to hold onto this term, because the performers he’s putting on stage are meant to represent white racial purity but look nothing like that idea. We forget how central the world of performance and the entertainment complex was for dealing with racial politics. So Barnum’s American museum, which we think of as all these humbugs and fakes and curiosities, he was provoking the American public. He was creating a space to work out how these fictions had become fact. So that’s exactly what happened in 1865.

So that, seeing that image, made me think about what has been unseen in American life. I don’t know that I would’ve written the book though if not for stumbling across in the footnote of someone else’s book, Charles King. The fact that Woodrow Wilson himself was fixated and interested in this idea, and we can talk about that too. But at the end of World War I, he effectively creates a PT Barnum spectacle. He asks in 1919 from his chief of staff of the Army stationed and Azerbaijan if he can have a report about the look of the women from the Caucus region. And in the archive you see it, they produce a report. They produce a 70-person party of so-called Circassian women that they admit we’re not really Circassians, some were Georgian, et cetera, and they say no one can tell the difference anyway. It doesn’t matter.

But why? Why would he ask for this in the middle of the codification of a racial regime that seems to be absolute in American life. This is a period where the Klan is active. We have white racial supremacy dominating the land in terms of the history of racial terror. Why ask for a report? Well, it indicates the nervousness at the heart of the racial project about whether there’s really any factual basis for racial domination at all, and there is no basis for this.

Debbie Millman:
So essentially he got this information but ignored it.

Sarah Lewis:
Accident of history. He asked for the information, he suffered a stroke so he never could receive it. But it didn’t really matter because he threw his administration through the federalization of segregation and through his understanding of the power of visual culture cohered a regime to instantiate racial domination with impunity despite the fiction of it all.

Debbie Millman:
Woodrow Wilson authorized the widespread imposition inside the federal bureaucracy. He opposed women’s suffrage. He was very much an orchestrator of segregation at that time. Yet I discovered that and I learned from your book, scholars have generally ranked Wilson in the upper tier of US presidents.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s right.

Debbie Millman:
It’s another perpetuated misrepresentation of reality.

Sarah Lewis:
Exactly. And flies in the face of what he actually did, which was not to represent the type of racism that existed in the period but, in fact, to go steps further. Another way in which we distort our own history.

Debbie Millman:
So your discoveries show that there was really a widespread confirmation bias to secure very intentionally this vision of white, physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual superiority that were completely based on lies.

Sarah Lewis:
Yes. And to do one thing more, which is to instantiate that unspeakable idea that there is a basis for legitimating racial hierarchy without using outright decree. He inaugurates the idea that we’re working through today, that we can use tactics that are aesthetic, that are creative, that are about public and signaling through monuments to state what will never be said publicly.

So what I most was excited about in the book was being able to salute the Black clerks who work for Woodrow Wilson who see that he’s using visual tactics to cohere this racial regime. One of them is Freeman Henry Morris Murray, who’s an activist, a writer, and sees what Wilson is doing and writes the first book in the United States about the relationship between race, politics, and aesthetics. In 1916, on his own printing press, publishes this book, tries to get it published by others and they reject it. It really details and outlines the origins of the debates we’ve had about monuments today. He saw these Confederate monuments going up on courthouse lawns and understood what it meant and what it allowed politicians not to say because the monument spoke. So Wilson’s work was to marshal the force of this and signaling power of the arts to cohere this regime of racial domination. And that’s what’s so insidious and that’s what is part of the legacy we’re working through right now.

Debbie Millman:
I want to read a couple of paragraphs that you write in The Unseen Truth. You state, “The project of modernity requires that we modulate our understanding of how race transformed what we even call vision.” And you quote WJT Mitchell who said that, “Race is a medium and a frame, something we see through.” And you go on to state that race is a frame, a window, a screen or lens rather than something we look at, and you call this condition sight or visual conditioning. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how we are conditioned to see the things that we see.

Sarah Lewis:
One of the avenues and case studies that might be most vivid is to think about how in fact the court system worked through these lies that became facts to think about how our sight was conditioned. So what happened when the lies the fiction of the Caucus region was laid bare through visual culture? The Supreme Court needed to figure that out because immigration cases were based upon the terms, these fictions themselves. Racial science created the term Caucasian, and you see Supreme Court justices trying to work out whether they could use this term anymore at all.

And what happens in the 1870s is they begin to state instead we’re just going to use, quote, common knowledge about the idea of who’s Caucasian and who’s not. Literally that’s the term, common knowledge. So what that comes to mean is that every day evaluative modes of determining who is who form the basis of Supreme Court cases regarding who is granted entrance into the United States.

Debbie Millman:
Right.

Sarah Lewis:
So when we describe in this seemingly abstract way, race is a frame, well, it’s a quite literal frame for the portal of entrance even into the United States. Visual tactics we use to determine who enters the category of whiteness that has stakes and consequences for who is demonized, who is exalted, who’s granted citizenship and who is not. Visuality is a deeply political tactic and we’ve been conditioned to think to understand how we utilize it best through this account of racial narratives over time.

Debbie Millman:
So when white people are filling out a form or a census, they really have no idea that the term legitimizes a racial regime.

Sarah Lewis:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And those that fill out that form and happened to be from the Caucus region know it best. I went there to finish the book with Nell Painter, the extraordinary historian, and I heard a number of those stories of them, actual Caucasians coming to United States and being completely confused about why the term for their ethnic group was used as an umbrella for racial whiteness. And there’s the irony. And also when you look at the accounts of the attempts to make sense of the languages that those, the Adegui people in the Caucus region speak, it’s just, it’s comical because there’s the use of the term doesn’t match the understanding of what’s actually happening there. The details about the language are completely misunderstood.

Debbie Millman:
There is another term that I learned while reading The Unseen Truth, and that is an aesthetic encounter. If you can please, for our listeners, share what an aesthetic encounter is because I think anybody living in America has experienced at least one or two.

Sarah Lewis:
A way to consider it’s how many movements began when a work of art with extraordinary aesthetic force transformed our perceptions of the world entirely, and it’s more times than we could possibly know. I began The Unseen Truth after learning about a few of these aesthetic encounters. One most gripping for me was learning about the life of Charles Black Jr. who listens to Louis Armstrong, understands the genius and the lyricism coming out of his trumpet, his horn. And it’s 1931, it’s deep segregation in Austin, Texas where he’s hearing Louis Armstrong. And because of this aesthetic encounter, he is able to question the rational world around him that has legitimated segregation. He asks himself, “If there is genius coming out of the body of this Black man, can segregation be right?”

So much of what we owe the arts is the ability to understand and see what we don’t know we don’t know about ourselves and about each other. And Charles Black Jr. goes on in that moment after really processing what he doesn’t know he doesn’t know to walk towards justice as he describes it. He goes on to become one of the lawyers in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, that outlaw segregation in the United States or works to. And he goes on teach constitutional law at Columbia and Yale and he holds this annual Armstrong listening night to honor the aesthetic encounter, to honor the power of the arts for the transformational moments that lead to justice with a capital J in public life.

These aesthetic encounters, I think we don’t honor enough because they are so often private, not discussed, unheralded. In The Unseen Truth, I write about these aesthetic encounters as moments which I myself was forced to reckon with, the false construction that legitimates racial hierarchy. In The Metropolitan Museum, I passed one day, actually after that miracle car collision, I was healing and taking my time doing things and walked through an area of The Met. I’ve never gone in fully the arms and armor collection in Wayne.

Debbie Millman:
Oh yes, this is a good story.

Sarah Lewis:
And there saw arms and armor that were labeled Caucasian armor. And I thought, because I had sustained a concussion, “Okay, I need to read this again.” And I read the label more closely and realized that it referenced armor from the Caucus region, but the term Caucasian was not being used to signal whiteness necessarily. But the label counts on my knowing the difference, counts on my holding and suspension that for the moment, we’re not going to think about racial whiteness. We’re going to look at the actual geography and ignore the fact that there is this contradiction in the two terms.

And there are other encounters. The MFA Boston had a painting called A Circassian from 1870 of the first that enters the museum collection, later called The Caucasian Soldier, and it’s just nested up in this wall and salon hang of other works by American painters who travel abroad. And I stopped in my tracks and thought, “Wait a second, is this meant to be a painting of a quote-unquote white person, or is it meant to be a representative figure from the Caucus region?” And where’s the arena to process this? There’s none. So, writing about these aesthetic encounters surface the way in which visual culture gives us evidence of these moments of fracture, when you see the breakdown of terms that we’ve used just to cohere this regime racially in American life.

Debbie Millman:
You write how seeing is not just a retinal act. It’s never been about observation only. Seeing is about reading the world. And it seems as if these experiences have really solidified how the world is presented to us and then the bias that we have in believing it all. How do we begin to create more representational justice?

Sarah Lewis:
So I find the most important way to slow down and ask yourself what you are seeing and why. What’s the strategy behind it?

I recently went to a building that made the importance of this seemingly simple act very significant, and it was the Washington National Cathedral. I went and I was asked to speak on a panel about the removal of the Confederate stained-glass windows that that cathedral had for decades. And after the killing of the Emanuel IX by Dylann Roof, white supremacist, the dean and canon decided to remove the propaganda that saluted the Confederacy in this building.

Now, this building is meant to be a place of worship for all, and it’s set on a mountain site in DC that really rivals the height of the Capitol. So you can imagine my surprise when I went into this building and saw something that seemed to contradict the very ethos of the building itself. The canon, Leonard Hamlin, beautiful spirit, he took me through and I wanted to see the site where the newly installed windows would be. These are now installed. Kerry James Marshall created the new stained-glass windows, and Elizabeth Alexander, the poet, offered the text and the tablets below. So we walked towards this site in the nave and I stopped because to the right directly next to these new windows was a tomb, and the tomb is that of Woodrow Wilson himself.

Debbie Millman:
Oh my God.

Sarah Lewis:
He’s the only president who’s buried there. And I was stunned by the juxtaposition, the redemptive, racially redemptive, new windows and his tomb. Now, when I say tomb was right there, I mean ground floor of the nave where parishioners worship is his tomb is to the right. So you could be in your chair and his tomb would just be directly next to you. It felt as if I was looking at an American portrait.

Debbie Millman:
You were, yeah.

Sarah Lewis:
And so you have to pause long enough to ask what you’re seeing and why. The tension though being willing to reside in that tension, in that moment was key for me. We could talk forever about the history of that church and just how many civil rights leaders were part of that work as well. It’s the site where Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his final Sunday sermon and where there was a memorial week later for him with 4,000 attending. But yet, and still we have a marker and a reminder of the extension of Jim Crow rule through Wilson’s tomb and the stained-glass windows that are meant to honor his regime.
How could that have gone unmentioned in all the reporting about the new stained-glass windows? I wondered. There was no article mentioned which Wilson’s tomb was there, and I wouldn’t have known myself unless I stopped and took the time to think through how we construct narratives to bolster regimes of who belongs and who counts through the visual landscape.

What we are seeing and why, well, this is a question that we see our politicians taking more seriously. Think of the work of Bryan Stevenson, the leader who is really focused on criminal justice reform, who’s argued successfully before the Supreme Court countless times. He has taken to what he calls narrative work. He has decided to marshal the resources of the Equal Justice Initiative to create a complex of memorials and monuments to honor lives that have not been saluted, that were taken unjustly from racial terror and lynching. This is a lawyer who’s seeing the importance of cultural work, of what we’re seeing, not seeing and asking why. Sherrilyn Ifill, the former NAACP legal defense fund leader, has taken to having conversations with artists from Mark Bradford to Glenn Ligon, to Carrie Mae Weems about the importance of the cultural narratives that they’re putting forward to right this balance.

So if we start to get away from the idea that as you know, culture is not a respite from life, design is not just a kind of luxury, but instead salute the indispensable work of visual culture for conditioning us to see each other justly, then I think we’ll be on a path to a more true sense of the levers that have been required for justice in the United States.

Debbie Millman:
In Susan Sontag’s book On Photography, she asked if we’ve become desensitized to images because there are so many around, and it seems like we’re also doing that with language and the general acceptance the public seems to have now more than ever for the racist language we’re experiencing from politicians that at one point would’ve outraged us, and we’re now just like, “Oh, boys will be boys, men will be men, politicians will be politicians.” Are we becoming more and more conditioned to not see and not hear what we don’t want to? What is around in surroundings?

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah. I share your same concern. I see it the same way. One of the questions though I have is whether we are becoming less tolerant of viewpoints that aren’t our own or whether we are letting the switches that shift through just technology itself with the algorithmic changes determine what we see and what we don’t. Meaning I don’t know that it’s will. I don’t know that it’s personal choice. I think it’s programmatic and platform decisions that by and large shifted our viewing tactics.

You would think given the coarseness of our politics, the teaching Vision & Justice as I do at Harvard would be a really contentious process that I would have a lot of rancor in the classroom. I’m teaching some of the most difficult topics in American life. That’s not the case for me. Why? Well, I should say it’s been difficult for a lot of us, but when you’re teaching from an object, when you’re teaching from an image, it depersonalizes the history or even the current event you’re dealing with. So it’s no longer a fractious debate about what I think and what you think. It’s about a fact in the room embodied by that object, embodied by that sculpture or that image. And it allows for, I think, the creation of a kind of arena as opposed to a conflict.

So if that can be the case just without the power of an Instagram or another platform transforming what’s in front of me, if I can have a conversation like that with 18 to 22-year-olds, with my colleagues, I have conviction still in the power of the image to elicit extraordinary conversations. The question becomes what happens when you are only given to see a certain set of images through devices that are not your own?

I was on a panel recently at the Boston Book Festival and one question came from an individual who wanted to know what I thought of photographs of conflict, and they were thinking about Gaza and Eddie Glaude, who’s also on the panel, added that there are decisions made to switch on and off the number of images you’re seeing about a political event. So at a certain moment, you remember the glut of images we were seeing about Gaza. I don’t see as many and I have not done a thing to my own algorithm, but we know the same amount of images are being taken. I think that just speaks to the invisible actor, which behind the question that you’re asking there.

Debbie Millman:
In the epilogue to The Unseen Truth, you described the foundations of racial hierarchy as a photograph with no true negative. Where do we go from here to correct this false narrative?

Sarah Lewis:
The book presents the evidence, the evidence of the fictions that we have chosen to live with. After seeing them, where we go from here is to ask whether we have the will to no longer willfully, deliberately ignore it and move forward, but to make a new choice to see each other justly finally.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah, my last question is, it’s about a new course you’re creating at Harvard on Beyonce. Tell us about that.

Sarah Lewis:
So there’s a class on Taylor Swift. Why not a class on Beyonce? That’s first one.

Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I told my wife about it, and we decided that we’re going to ask if we could sit in.

Sarah Lewis:
Come on. I love it. I love it.

Debbie Millman:
Well, no, I understand that it’s really not about her music as much as it is on the visual stylings behind her film and videos and so forth, which is always so extraordinary. And actually, once I saw that you were doing this, I was really surprised that it’s not been talked about more in a scholarly way because it is so extraordinary and investigating where she is inspired to find these images and use them and expand upon them is such an important part of understanding who she is.

Sarah Lewis:
Well, you just created the summary for the course description that matches on my computer. So there you go. It’s exactly why I’m changing a class. And it is a Trojan horse, right? To be able to think through all the ways that she’s referencing, sources that are focused on Black diaspora, broadly defined performance, visual culture, music. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Debbie Millman:
Sarah Lewis, thank you, thank you, thank you for writing your new book. Thank you for making so much work that matters in so many ways. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Sarah Lewis:
And thank you for your extraordinary work that’s really nourished me from many years. I’m excited to have this chance to talk to you.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you.

Sarah Lewis:
Yeah.

Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Sarah Lewis’s new book is titled The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, and you could read lots more about her at sarahelizabethlewis.com. I’d like to thank you all for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the Ted Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Sarah Lewis appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

We feed them, we go on long walks with them, we groom them and rub their bellies. We even share our beds with them. But do we really know who they are? Yes, they’re dogs, but do we know what’s going on between those two floppy ears? Alexandra Horowitz knows a lot more than most people. She is a professor at Barnard College where she teaches creative nonfiction writing and audio storytelling. As senior research fellow, she also runs The Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. She’s also written some of the world’s best books about dog cognition. Her latest is the Year of the Puppy, How Dogs Become Themselves. She’s here to talk about the relationship between humans and our canine friends, and a bit about herself as well. Alexandra Horowitz, welcome to Design Matters.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It’s a complete pleasure to be here. Thanks, Debbie.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra, you were born in Philadelphia. Your family moved to Golden, Colorado when you were a child, and I read that your dad was the sun you circled, and you were influenced both by his work ethic as a litigator and his humor. How were you influenced by his humor?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I think he saw levity in everything. He took himself seriously, and at the same time, he didn’t take himself too seriously. I mean, he was born of this kind of East Coast generation of lawyers and doctors who really felt like they were making a change in this world, and at the same time, he was very ready to find the silliness in a situation and the playfulness in the situation. And that’s definitely imbued my work and made it possible for me to do what I do.

Debbie Millman:

As you were growing up, I understand you not only like to watch your dog and your cat, you like to observe the ants in your yard and counted the prairie dogs in the field on your way to school. What motivated this early interest in animals and insects?

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s some deep dive research you’ve been into my background there, Debbie. Yeah, I don’t know exactly what motivated it. When you’re growing up in Colorado, I felt very exposed to part of the natural world. We lived in a community which was, I guess, suburban by some definition, but also the community itself was enforced as a kind of natural community. People didn’t have lawns particularly. In fact, I think they were forbidden, and the mountains were kind of our backdrop ends. There were elk wandering through the foothills, and you just felt like that was part of your life, and so you observed it naturally. It was just the scene that was going by outside your window, and it was only later when I wound up moving to cities that it felt like that was quite unusual. But I retained that interest in looking closely, especially at animal communities.

Debbie Millman:

I know at that time, veterinary work didn’t interest you. At that point in your life, what were you thinking you might do professionally?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I wasn’t really on a pre-professional track. I think my father was an attorney and my mother had been trained as a lawyer as well. And I thought, “Well, that’s something that I could do with a kind of analytic acumen,” which I prided myself as a young Alexandra as having. It didn’t pan out. I didn’t, I think, have any special interest in law, although I applied to law schools. I wound up doing philosophy in college, and I also thought that that was a potential avenue, but I wasn’t an academic philosopher at heart. I wasn’t that driven by these arguments and conversations. My dad, one of the things my dad gave to me as a child was the freedom to not know what I was going to be. He really had confidence in both me and my brother that we would just wind up doing something that was appropriate for us and he would support whatever kind of thing that was.

As I say, he was a lawyer. He grew up around people with certain kind of very traditional professional roles. So for him, it was maybe a leap to say, but he did, “You should be an artist, you should go out and be an artist.” And I thought, “Well, I don’t have any particular artistic talent,” but I appreciated that for him, what that meant was you don’t have to follow a traditional path and will be there rooting for you, whatever you do. So I didn’t know. I just sort of went headstrong toward the things that interested me.

Debbie Millman:

You did study philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Why philosophy?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I had the fortune to have a philosophy class in high school, a teacher named Sean Smith taught philosophy. He was, in fact, now that I reflect back on it, a master student in philosophy himself. He was finishing a degree in Edinburgh and teaching at this Colorado school, and I loved it. I just loved the thought processes involved in setting out an argument and following in its path and the way the words kind of tumbled out a philosopher’s mouths and the things they got to think about.

So I pursued that as a degree. My mother had been a philosophy major. It was well, so it probably was a little bit my birthright to be thinking deep philosophical thoughts as a young thing. And I actually really fell in love with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of J. L. Austin, which actually led later to another career of mine. But again, it wasn’t with any thinking, this is going to pan out into a profession, a specific profession, more just this is a way of thinking that I want to encourage in myself, the ability to make an argument and follow it through to a conclusion.

Debbie Millman:

After you graduated, you worked at the Merriam-Webster dictionary. What was your job there?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I was a lexicographer, which is briefly a definer of words, which seems insane in retrospect. I was just out of college. I was a kind of dabbler in dictionaries. I was the type of person who liked to sit down, open up a dictionary and read several pages for fun. And somehow this led me to the notion that maybe a dictionary company would want to hire me as a philosophy major from Penn with no experience, particularly in linguistics or lexicography. And they did.

So I wound up being one of the maybe 20 definers on the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary of Miriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which came out in ’91, and it was kind of a fabulous gig. You just are defining new words, making sure the old meanings are still consistent with how we’re using words. For somebody who’s at all interested in language, I was the type of person who would collect big words or fun fancy words and write them down and have little boxes of three by five cards of these things. This was like a dream come true. You’re just surrounded by big fancy words and also really quotidian ordinary words that are really tricky to define and therefore become intricate and fun. So yeah, I did that for the length of that addition of the dictionary.

Debbie Millman:

I thought it was a wonderful overlap to share with you at that particular moment in time. I worked at the graphic design firm that designed that particular edition of the dictionary.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Wow.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, Frankfurt gives all kind. So I spent a lot of time looking at page proofs of that dictionary.

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Well, it was well designed.

Debbie Millman:

And I should say yes, [inaudible 00:08:23] designed most of that. And I know he did the cover and he and I went on to work for many, many years at Hot97, the hip-hop radio station. But I understand that’s also where you met your husband, who I think the first question he asked you was what the etymology was of the word pumpernickel after hearing you mention your dog’s name, which was Pumpernickel.

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s right.

Debbie Millman:

Is this true?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah, this is a kind of sorted but real tale. Well, I didn’t meet him at Miriam, although he now works at Miriam Webster. So it’s all come back round to Miriam. I was in New York and he was working as a mover, as a furniture mover, and I was helping my parents move furniture from one apartment to another and supervising this move. I barely had any furniture of my own at the time. I just finished graduate school and he came in the door and my dog Pumpernickel was barking, and I said, “Pumpernickel, you don’t need to bark.” And his response, the mover’s response at the door was, “Do you know the etymology of Pumpernickel?” And I said, “Well, I mean, I do. She’s my dog.” We had a little disagreement about the etymology because pumpernickel was this German bread, which is notoriously difficult to digest, and so pumpernickel comes from the words for flatulent goblin, but he thought that the more apt etymology was farting devil. So we had a little disagreement about the etymology of pumpernickel, and the rest is history as they say.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, you should have known instantly you were soulmates. I love that.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It was extremely unlikely.

Debbie Millman:

You then moved to New York and worked as a fact checker for the New Yorker. Now the New Yorker is one of the most notoriously difficult places to find a job, and fact-checking is one of the most difficult jobs there is. They are held to a very high standard. What was that experience like?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Also, a great experience. One of the things we did at Miriam Webster in the moments when we were not defining words was we were collecting words basically, meaning we would read prolifically and mark words that seemed to be used in such a way that it made their meaning quite visible, quite transparent, or mark new words or what seemed to be new uses of words. And one of the things that would go around that multiple people would read and mark, as we said, was the New Yorker. And so I became a New Yorker reader. I’d been a person who grew up just looking at the drawings as a kid, and one could forever just look at the drawings in the New Yorker, of course. And yet I started reading and loved the magazine as everybody around me did and just cold called them, just wrote to them and said, “Any job at the magazine, I will take.”

And it just so happened, I mean, I really don’t understand how some of these things happen sometimes, but I feel like one leans into one’s interest and it works. I mean, I guess I’m forgetting the times when I’ve leaned into an interest and it didn’t work or I tried to do something and the people, or the very many employment letters I wrote, which didn’t respond where Miriam Webster did. So it seems inevitable in retrospect but here too. I just wrote to them and they were interviewing for fact checker positions. It was right when Tina Brown had taken over editorial helm of the magazine and her interest in the magazine was in more topical articles. And of course, the New Yorker had been famously non-topical. You could do a three part 50,000 word series on bogs, but there wasn’t really anything on what had happened last week.

But when you do a topical magazine, you really need to be able to change directions quickly. New news comes out, you have a writer write something and the checker has to check it quickly or a whole team of checkers. So they were doubling their checking department, which had been pretty small, I think about eight people. And so I actually was hired freelance at first and then eventually got a staff position. And it was also terrific because a great comradery. My peers were so sharp and funny, and it was a great exciting place to be.

And it also was a really interesting place for me because as somebody who had this little bit of philosophy background, I was very interested in the nature of a fact, the nature of truth and what counted as confirming the fact, verifying truth. And that’s always been a motif for me, actually. The fact that I was able to define words in the dictionary. Sure, there were other editors who looked at those words, but it was interesting to me to be put in the position from being just a user of words to a definer of words. And here, maybe I wasn’t writing these facts, but I was confirming the truthiness of the fact. And so those turns were very interesting for me. And that was one of the, I think the things I take away from being a fact checker there was that somewhat of the slippery nature of facts and what it means to confirm fact and what knowledge is.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I mean, you’re sort of the last word on words, which is so philosophically interesting to me.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah. Right, right. So besides being just a very cool job, it had this sort of conceptual interest.

Debbie Millman:

While you were there, you worked on fact-checking several pieces by the legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote books including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and the book Awakenings, which became a very popular movie. What was it like working with Oliver?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I was never the main checker on his pieces. I was a sort of ancillary checker. And of course, his pieces were full of facts of all sorts, facts about individual people, about neurological conditions, about philosophical histories, and he was a really generous writer. He was interested in working collaboratively with his checkers to find the truth there versus being antagonistic with the checker as sometimes writers could be, right? They didn’t want to have somebody else looking over their shoulder and saying, “Well, there’s another way of looking at this, or this other person says this thing.” But he was fabulous and he was quite an inspiration as a writer for me as well as somebody who had taken his scientific career and made a writerly career out of it. So that wound up being important in my life.

Debbie Millman:

Did working with him at all influence your decision to go back to school to get a PhD in cognitive science?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Completely. It completely influenced. Cognitive science was a kind of budding field at the time, which combined the types of things one would ask questions about in philosophy. Where is mind? What is a individual? Do we have free will? With neuroscience and psychology and anthropology and computer science, all these other people who were asking similar questions in their own methodological ways. And so it was this multifaceted field. It wasn’t something that Oliver had done, but his approach was his own kind of version of cognitive science. He was taking the William James and connecting it to the Raymond [inaudible 00:15:56] neurological experiments and then writing about it in his own sort of novelistic way using very strong narrative voice. So I felt like it was of a kind with Oliver Sacks’ work. And yeah, that’s why I went back to graduate school. That’s the first time I started thinking kind of professionally, frankly, that I would like to be a scientist who dabbles in these topics in some way.

Debbie Millman:

You got your PhD from the University of California San Diego, and you described the PhD in cognitive science in the following way. It’s basically an interdisciplinary degree. Philosophers ask what is the mind. Neuroscientists are interested in examining the brain. Psychologists want to look at behavior. So those fields plus computer science with an interest in artificial intelligence and anthropology converge in this one interdisciplinary field which wants to use different methods and approaches to tackle the questions of mind. And Alexandra, to me, this sounds like the most interesting PhD on the planet. Really, truly.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It really, really is fabulous. I think that so much creativity comes from interdisciplinarity, right? You have to be skilled and trained at the thing you’re doing, but also you need the perspective from outside of your field, it seems to me to really make movement in your own field. So cognitive science had that kind of baked in.

Debbie Millman:

Initially, you trained as an ethologist, which is the science of animal behavior, and you joined two research groups observing highly social creatures, the white rhinoceros at the wild animal park in Escondido and the bonobos, which are pygmy chimpanzees at the San Diego Zoo where you learn the science of careful observations, data gathering and statistical analysis. What are some of the things you learned about these species?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Both of these projects were ongoing projects of faculty members. And in the latter case, and in the former case researchers at the zoo who wanted to basically do basic research on the animal species. So even though we’re familiar with rhinoceri and bonobos and all the other animals who are common to see at a zoo, for instance, we don’t know everything about their lives. We might not know all about their social habits. We might not know how they forage or how they identify themselves, how they identify each other.

And so each project had its own interest. The rhinoceros project was interested in … well, the white rhinoceros is a fantastic species. I didn’t know much about them at all, just except for that they were an Africans species. There were many fewer of them than there used to be. They’re not endangered, I think, anymore. They are matrilineal. So they live in groups of women and the males who are usually smaller than the females only approach when they’ve received kind of advanced word that a female is ready to mate. Otherwise-

Debbie Millman:

How progressive.

Alexandra Horowitz:

… he’ll just get beat up. Yeah, they’re really not interested in his company at all. They don’t hang out with the males at all, but they’ll endure his company if they’re interested in mating. And the way they leave this communication that they’re interested in mating is through their dung, actually. And they leave these kind of huge heaps of dung. They’re like bulletin boards with all the information about all the rhinoceros. It has all the health and mating, reproductive status, et cetera. They’re basically leaving a message. Once they leave, the male can go and sniff and see if he can pursue one of the females. So we’re basically looking at how does their behavior relate to their endocrinology and that people would go in and gather samples and check their hormone levels, and then we would try to sync it with their behavior.

So it was the first time that I’d really looked at behavior of an animal over a long period closely where you start to think about them as individuals who have their own life histories. And you also think about the fact that their individual life history, while having interesting analogs to a human life history, it was full of its own complexities, some of which I might not be aware of. For instance, I didn’t use my sense of smell to do much in my life, particularly, certainly not to find out information about other people except for maybe accidentally and even then, really inadvertently. So it made me kind of aware of the types of things that would later drive my research, like the looking closely, looking over a long period of time, the importance of sort of individual animals and the perceptual world of non-human animals, which is in so many ways, much more expansive than ours.

Debbie Millman:

You also spent many hours at the local dog parks and beaches with your famous dog, Pumpernickel, where you began to see the interplay between him and other dogs in entirely new ways. And you wrote this about the experience, and I found it so moving and so vivid that I’d really like to share it verbatim with our listeners. It’s about a paragraph, if you don’t mind.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Sure, sure.

Debbie Millman:

Where I once saw and smiled at play between Pumpernickel and the local bull terrier, I now saw a complex dance requiring mutual cooperation, split-second communications and assessment of each other’s abilities and desires. The slightest turn of a head or the point of a nose now seemed directed, meaningful. I saw dogs whose owners did not understand a single thing their dogs were doing. I saw dogs too clever for their playmates. I saw people misreading canine requests as confusion and delight as aggression. I began bringing a video camera with us and taping our outings at the parks. At home, I watched the tapes of dogs playing with dogs, of people ball and Frisbee tossing to their dogs, tapes of chasing, fighting, petting, running, barking with new sensitivity to the possible richness of social interactions in an entirely non-linguistic world. All of these once-ordinary activities now seem to me to be an untapped font of information.

When I began watching the videos in extremely slow-motion playback, I saw behaviors I’d never seen in years of living with dogs. Examined closely, simple play frolicking between two dogs became a dizzying series of synchronous behaviors, active role swapping, variations on communicative displays, flexible adaptation to others’ attention and rapid movement between highly diverse play acts. What I was seeing were snapshots of the minds of the dogs visible in the ways they communicated with each other and tried to communicate with the people around them and too, in the way they interpreted other dogs and people’s actions. I never saw Pumpernickel or any dog the same way again. It’s like one of those pristine moments for me. I just love that whole vivid experience. I saw it so deeply and with such detail, and it felt like in that experience, your whole life changed.

Alexandra Horowitz:

It really did. It’s the thing that’s right in front of you that you’ve never seen. And in fact, that way of looking has infected me in other directions as well. But just with this one subject, it’s profound to see that something you thought you knew had all this dimensionality which was invisible and which in fact makes it run, makes it work and is essential to its existence. So thank you for highlighting that. It was profound for me, and it changed the course of … It created my professional career as well.

Debbie Millman:

How did the experiences with Pumpernickel translate into even considering this line of research? Before your work, there really wasn’t a cognitive science of dogs.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah, I was sensitive to and interested in dogs. I was a dog lover. I was like all the people who were dog lovers. Identical. I just was interested in and fascinated by dogs, had the same types of generalized questions that a lot of people direct toward me now. What is my dog thinking? What does my dog know about me? I had those questions, but I just didn’t think of them as scientific questions that were answerable potentially.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra, I had those questions too, but hired a dog whisperer just to give you a difference in sort of life path.

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s right. That’s a different avenue. So I think that that was meaningful to me, not just with her, but in sort of every direction.

Debbie Millman:

Why do we love dogs so much?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Their responsiveness to us, I think, is central to it. They are not unique as domesticated animals, not unique as animals who are tamable or friendly or have the cognitive capacities they do, but they are really unusual in their responsiveness to us, their interest in us, their agreeableness with us, and their seeming ability to read us so well. And frankly, we like that a lot. That’s a kind of responsiveness that I think I look for in other human beings, this kind of sensitivity that dogs seem to come with automatically. I think that’s the center of it.

Debbie Millman:

I think having now had dogs for most of my adult life, I’ve seen how for me and for others, they sort of are able to crack hardened hearts open in a way that sometimes other people can’t. And I don’t know if it’s because of the trust or the unconditional sense of love that they provide us, but I’m sure you’ve witnessed that over and over again.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah. And when you say unconditional, I think that’s such an interesting observation that you yell at a dog, get angry at a dog, accidentally step on a dog, and you turn around and they’re completely ready to start over again. And that’s maybe sometimes not to their benefit, but they are delighted every time you return home. And who is like that? Who in our lives is like that? And I think another element of this, being able to crack someone’s veneer for instance, is I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I worked in words for such a long time. Is there a word listeness? A lot of people like to voice what their dogs are saying and that that’s a sort of way of animating the quiet member of this conversation that you always feel like you’re having with your dog. But really I think it would be alarming if they said anything out loud. There’s something about just listening, which they seem to do.

Debbie Millman:

That’s so interesting. I had never really thought of it that way. When I first met the woman who’s now my wife, she knew that I was both a dog and a cat person. At one point, I had two dogs and two cats. Now I have two cats. At the time, I had just had two cats and told her that I’d always had dogs. And she said that she was definitely not a dog person and related a story how she was bitten when she was five years old and ever since then had been deathly afraid of dogs.

And over our years together, she saw how I responded when seeing dogs on the street or with other friends dogs and ultimately thought about getting a dog, which we subsequently have done. And this person who considered herself “not a dog person” is now buying clothes for Max, takes him everywhere, talks to him, drives with him. I would say that they are by far best friends. And as someone who is as verbose as she is as a writer, I find it really interesting that that worthlessness might also be rather comforting to her. I hadn’t thought about that. I think that’s so interesting.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Just letting your own words hang into space without a judgment.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Alexandra Horowitz:

While still having that feeling of a relationship of somebody who understands you at some level, right?

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Yeah, they’re soulmates. I mean, I had a dog that was a soulmate for 17 years and I adore Max, I adore Max, but they are soul connected in a way that I was with Duff and just thrilled that she could have that experience.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Well, I’m glad because those early dog bite folks, it can be so traumatic and most people don’t recover from that, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Well, that’s why we got Max as a puppy, and I’m going to talk to you about that in a bit. But in the meantime, I want to go back to your history a little bit. Well, really your moment now even, you are a leader of a seat change taking place in science’s attitude towards studying dogs. And the transformation isn’t complete, but the landscape of dog research is remarkably different than it was when you first started 20 years ago. And you’ve said that the scientists doing this work have seen what you’ve seen, that the dog is a perfect entry into the study of non-human animals. Why is the dog the perfect entry into this study?

Alexandra Horowitz:

For the reason that I got interested in studying dogs, which is that they are ubiquitous, available and actually cognitively far more skilled than we’d given them credit for. So there was another researcher, Brian Hare, who was a grad student when I was a grad student, and who is now a leader in canine cognition who was doing research with chimpanzees where they were asking if chimps could follow a human pointing one direction or another. That human cue of a point, which all babies learn to follow very early in their life that we don’t come following a point, but we learn it pretty quickly. And it’s really essential. It seems like a simple gesture, but what it is, is an understanding that someone else’s gesture is referential, is leading to something else apart from themselves, that someone is showing you something. So understanding that is key and chimpanzees are not great at following pointing.

And that was surprising to researchers because there are closest non-human relatives and it was a type of thing that made people say, “There’s this huge cognitive gap between humans and non-humans.” And I was always dubious of this and Brian was as well, and he tried the pointing trick with his dog in the garage and his dog was perfectly able to follow his point. And many dogs, most dogs are quite good at following a point just like humans and just like almost no other animals, frankly. So dogs turn out to have some of these cognitive skills that we value because they are cognitive skills. They’re the things that make us human. And as a species we’re terribly interested and have been since the ancient philosophers in what makes humans human, what distinguishes us from non-humans. So dogs wind up being interesting cognitively, and then they’re also widely available.

These other animals whose the research projects I joined to sort of learn how to be an animal observer as a graduate student, they were with animals who were in zoos or wild animal parks. Other people study Jane Goodall, right? Find the animals in the wild. And both of those are very effortful. And in the case of studying animals in the wild takes many years just to identify animals and get them to acclimate to you. And also in some cases artificial. Studying an animal in a tiny little enclosure, even the best zoo is extremely unnatural environments.

So you’re probably not getting a lot of natural animal behavior. Here with dogs, we have an animal who is right in front of you, like widely available. People will come with their dogs to my lab and participate in studies and then go home with their dogs. I don’t have to keep dogs in a lab, feed them, have them in an artificial environment or find them out in the world. They come to us. So they wind up being terrific subjects and also at the end, you can play with them and give them a pat on the head and interact with them in a way you can’t with other non-human animals.

Debbie Millman:

Neanderthals didn’t live with dogs, but Homo sapiens have been in close proximity with dogs for thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years. How did this relationship with canines first come to be?

Alexandra Horowitz:

That is still being worked out. There is a lot of argument about how domestication started. We know that it happened multiple times in different parts of the world. One of the theories that I’ve always liked, but we don’t have complete confirmation for, is really that some wolves started to self domesticate in a way. In other words, they became less fearful of humans, more willing to approach. For instance, a village where people would throw out their trash and then that would be the bones that they couldn’t eat from their kill, for instance.

And then that would be another source potentially of food for the wolves. And that eventually those people have started taking in some of the young pups of those somewhat tamer, self-tamed wolves. And that over time found use for those wolves as guards, for instance, as giving them information about when a predator was about or even as food in a lean time, and then started selecting therefore breeding and thereby domesticating those wolves into what we see as dogs today. That’s one possible story, but honestly, we can’t know. And there is still a lot of interesting scientific discussion about what it might be.

Debbie Millman:

They are now between 700 million and one billion dogs in the world. Of those dogs, about 470 million are kept as pets. And you stated that through the artificial selection of domestication, dogs have evolved to be sensitive to the things that make up our cognition, including attention to others. How does that influence how we feel about each other?

Alexandra Horowitz:

For instance, dogs look us in the faces. One of the things that is key is central to the feeling of understanding and intimacy and connection with somebody is that you can look at each other in the face, look in each other’s eyes, right? Intimacy is in a held eye gaze. Dogs will do this with us. Now, this doesn’t seem like a big behavior, like a profound behavior, but it’s quite unusual. Eye gaze is usually a threat between animals. So a wolf, I recommend not holding long eye gaze with any wolves. If a wolf stares at another wolf, it’s considered a threat.

It’s a kind of demand to back down and one of them will, otherwise, they’re in a fight. Dogs somehow have suppressed that urge to feel like eye gaze is potentially threatening in that way and instead have started to use eye gaze the way we use it as part of forming a connection, a part of forming an understanding. And also then as information gathering, just as they follow a point, they can follow your gaze to what you’re looking at and find hidden food, find where you’re going, look at your gaze to see which direction you’re going next. Those little simple behaviors like that one have led the dog to feel like a co-conspirator with us and able to interact with us and use us to get information.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting. I was thinking about how when used aggressively, a stare can, between humans, also provoke a fight with somebody saying something like, “What are you looking at?” Kind of a thing.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Right. Right.

Debbie Millman:

How did you like that little New Yorker in me come out? But it can also be used as a flirting device. So it’s interesting that we also can use more primitive notations with our eyes.

Alexandra Horowitz:

And I think that a stare could be too long with the dog as well, right?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Sometimes I just stare deeply into Max’s eyes and he just stops. He just looks away. He goes off and plays with a toy. Your work has been influenced by Jakob von Uexküll and Uexküll believed that anyone interested in understanding the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umvelt, their subjective self world. Can you talk a little bit more about the umvelt and how that has impacted how you think about animals?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Sure. Von Uexküll’s idea, which he proposed early in the 20th century using this word umvelt, which it’s my understanding in German just means world or environment, was quite novel. His idea was that one needed to consider the sort of subjective world, the self world of each individual and also of each species to really appreciate their experience. I must have come to Von Uexküll via some philosophers when I was in graduate school and not thought about it much until I was writing my first book, Inside Of A Dog, and dived into that material again and realized that what he was doing was this beautiful combination of subjective and scientific approach to other animals.

It was trying to understand the animal through not just knowing what their sensory abilities were and their cognitive abilities were, the types of things that cognitive scientists would do, but also through trying to appreciate their perspective, the things that were meaningful to them, what they were trying to perceive with those sensory abilities and what they were trying to understand or who they were trying to interact with, with those cognitive abilities. And so that approach of imagining the umvelt of another animal became really central to my thinking about dogs from that point forward. And in fact still drives, I’d say all of my research questions, my real ultimate aim is to understand what it’s like to be a dog. And that means to me to be able to imagine what it’s like in their world from their perspective and point of view.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve stated that research hasn’t confirmed that dogs are self-aware, but it also hasn’t confirmed that they aren’t either. And you’ve said that in one study you did, watching slow motion video of dogs in social play, led you to the conclusion that dogs act as though they’re thinking about the minds of other dogs. And I just found that mind blowing, no pun intended. Can you talk a little bit more about those findings?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah, this was my very first research study with dogs and I was interested in what kind of behaviors we could see in play. Play is very essential for human development, for human social development, and especially in thinking about others. Social play often involves pretend I’m pretending to be my dad. And I have to imagine in that role, what does he want to do? What kind of thing would he do? And it’s through exercises and games like that, that we start to appreciate. Not everybody knows what we know that other people have their own beliefs and knowledge different from our own. And we go from being like the piagetian ego to being someone who appreciates that others have minds and you have to think about others’ perspectives. And that leads to our social community today. Whether non-humans could do that wasn’t obvious, but I thought maybe in play you would see it because social play is this fast paced kind of rambunctious interaction where they’re using a lot of behaviors that in other contexts might be aggressive behaviors or mating behaviors or somewhat violent, biting and tackling.

And so the whole thing can only work if each of them is gauging whether the other participant sort of understands the game and is still in the game. And so I was looking at these behaviors that the dogs did called play signals, which basically frames the whole play. It’s something like a play bow, which most people live with dogs are familiar with, where the dog puts their front legs down and the rump up high and wags their tail. And it’s an invitation to play essentially, but it’s also saying something like everything that happens after this is play. So if I do that and you play bow back and then I bite you, you don’t think, “Hey,” you don’t get defensive and bite me back except for as a play bite. You realize it’s all in play. We’re now participating in a game. So it’s like this meta-communication that changes the nature of all of the things I say after that.

And I realized that dogs were using these play signals really intentionally. They were using them with attention to whether the other dog was able to receive the signal, for instance. It’s no good doing the signal if you’ve got your back turned. It’s no good doing the signal if you’re facing the other way, you’re engaged with somebody else, you’re interacting with a person. I have to get your attention, make sure it’s at me, and then do the signal. And that’s what dogs did.

And what I loved about that was that that is the type of thinking about other minds that we do naturally all the time. If I want to talk to you, Debbie, like I wait till you’re not talking to somebody else, and then I start talking and then I pause to see if you’ve understood that I’m talking to you. If I can’t get your attention by waiting, I tap you on the shoulder or I call out or something like that. And this type of use of attention in communication is very natural to us, but it’s also indicative that we’re appreciating that other people have their own minds and they’re engaged in their own things and that if we want to communicate, we have to engage them in their attention first. So dogs, were doing precisely the same thing.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how language marks the difference between human memory and dog memory. And I recently interviewed Temple Grandin who has done a lot of work in animal cognition and she’s posited that animals might think in pictures. And I was wondering what your thoughts might be on the ways in which dogs can think.

Alexandra Horowitz:

I think that’s perfectly possible. It’s interesting because it’s very hard for humans to imagine that animals are thinking if they’re not thinking in words or pictures. But I certainly want to imagine as well that they’re thinking in smells. What would that mean for us? It’s very hard for us to think about that, right? Because again, we kind of verbalize or we image it, but the fact that they know that something’s happened, they’re anticipating what’s going to happen next, that something is happening for them at that moment. To me, that’s not a question. Thinking is happening. So then the question is, well, what was the nature of that? It’s probably the nature of their perception generally. And most non-humans are actually pretty olfactory, not just dogs, but lots of non-humans. So maybe it’s also thinking in smells and sounds.

Debbie Millman:

Well, a nose of a beagle, for example, has 300 million receptor sites compared with the human being’s nose, which has only six million. So dogs smell fundamentally differently than humans. And from what I understand, I’ve learned through reading your books that a dog’s sniff is actually different than ours, as well as their exhale. So much so that their exhale actually enhances their sense of smell. How does that actually work?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Who knew that one could have a better or worse sniff, but it turns out our sniffs are pretty bad. Their whole anatomy is set up to enable olfactory information to get to the brain, and that includes all those receptor sites where odors connect to the cell and it causes the cell to fire and it sends a signal to the brain, but it’s also just anatomy. It’s the muscles of the nostrils that allow them to sniff up to seven times a second. Something that for us would be basically hyperventilation, but an analogy would be in the 60 frames per second that our eyes are able to see and our brains make into fluid motion. Since this is their picture of the world, they don’t want to be constantly releasing the picture every time they exhale. The way we get rid of a smell is we exhale through our in nostrils.

If you are in the New York City in the summer and it smells like garbage, you might just exhale through your nose and that literally displaces the odor molecules from the back of your nose so that you, at that moment, aren’t smelling the smell of garbage. But dogs don’t want to. That’s their scene of the world. So they instead have these side slits and that’s how they exhale. And then that does kind of create a little vortex. People who’ve study airflow have shown that helps hurry in the next snout full of air. So everything about them is designed to allow them to see the world through smell.

Debbie Millman:

They can also tell time through smell, I’ve learned through your work. I’m wondering if you can share how they do that.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Well, this is my positing based on something on the nature of smell. So an interesting thing about the vision is that light travels so quickly that when we open our eyes, the world just appears, and that seems straightforward to us. But if you look at any other medium, you see that that’s not at all straightforward. That’s not how other media work at all, right? If you’re in sound travels through air. And similarly, odors need to travel on the breeze. Odors that you smell in your nose are something called volatile organic compounds. That just means molecules that are light enough to go up your nose, so they have to be in the air to be smelled. Well, they get in the air on the breeze, and there isn’t a constant breeze. It’s not like opening your eyes and seeing the room. Air flow determines how you’re going to smell something, and similarly, odors will decay over time. That determines what you smell.

So there’s been this little bit of research on tracking dogs. These researchers asked if they could tell which way a missing person had gone, and the dog was able to tell just through sniffing five footsteps which way the person had gone. And that is because they could differentiate the odor concentration from the first to the fifth footstep. There was less odor in the first footstep and more in the fifth. Another way of thinking about that is the first footstep was older. It actually told the story of something in the past, the more distant past than the fifth footstep. The fifth footstep is newer.

So I very much see odors as inherently carrying time information in them. When a dog leaves their house and they stick their nose on the ground and smell whatever is on the sidewalk or the patch of grass, they’re basically collecting information about whoever has passed by. Nobody is there at that moment, but whatever dog or person or food or bird has been by, there’s some olfactory evidence of their presence. Similarly, if they stick their nose up into the breeze, they might catch the odor of someone who’s about to come around the corner, whose olfactory information is being carried ahead of them. So dogs, in that one moment to us, for us, which is just one visual moment, are experiencing a little bit of the past and a little bit of the future.

Debbie Millman:

That’s incredible. Alexandra, what is a dog’s sense of time and absence? I’m always worried then when I leave a dog alone, when in the past when I left Scruffy and Duff by themselves or now when I leave Max by himself, he might think that we’re never coming back. Do they remember that I’ve left or we’ve left before and always come back? Is there any sort of repetitive cognition that they can sort of hang their hats on, so to speak?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yeah. I think one of the most agreeable things about dogs living with us is that they’re really creatures of habit. So if we establish patterns, habitual patterns with them, they learn those really rapidly. And this is exactly how, for instance, your dog knows if you get up at the same time of day to feed them or go for a walk, right? They are sensitive to our behavior and they learn our habits by the same regard. If you left for work every day, were gone for six hours and came back. They get sensitive to that period of time and know approximately when you’re going to return.

Now, some people think, well, that’s not the case. I just go to my basement and I come back up and my dog is so delighted to see me. But there was actually research that looked at the intensity of the greeting that dogs give to their people when somebody’s been gone a half an hour or an hour or several hours, and it’s more intense the longer you’ve been gone, right? They’re sensitive to that feeling of the time that you’ve been missing, but they all also are very adaptable and will endure the same time again and again and again without over anxiety that this time you’re gone for good.

Debbie Millman:

In addition to all of your teaching in research, you also write books. Your first book, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, came out in 2009, became a New York Times number one bestseller, spent 64 weeks on the bestseller list. I read an interview wherein someone asked you how you became a writer, and you stated, “I wrote a book and people started calling me a writer.” But you are such a beautiful writer, you have such a way with language. How did you get to be such a good writer?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Thank you. I mean, I think whatever writing skill I have is how every writer has her skill, which is through reading, through an interest in language, through an enjoyment of the playfulness of language. And here there’s an evocation of my dad again and his enjoyment in the sometimes silliness of language and how one can be playful even with a serious topic. So I was just like so many others, a profligate reader, and then whatever I create is simply a result of that plus time.

Debbie Millman:

Your most recent book, The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves, is part memoir, part book of science. The book is about your quest to understand the science of early dog development by studying the behavior of your own brand new puppy. And sort of reminded me, you mentioned Jean Piaget. Yeah, and this was psychologist before, and he used his own children as subjects in formulating his theories about developmental psychology. Was that intentional in getting your-

Alexandra Horowitz:

Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:

… puppy to figure it out?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yes, exactly. I couldn’t bear any dogs myself, but I thought I could do one better. I could just adopt a dog and subject them to the same type of scrutiny that really I subject all my subjects to, but not my child and live with them at the same time.

Debbie Millman:

Your new puppy entered your world in the spring of 2020 and your family at the time included what you’ve described as three reasonable humans, you, your husband and your son, two elderly dogs and one contented cat in a home that was replete with animal fur. The pandemic was just taking hold. What made you decide to get a puppy at that particular moment?

Alexandra Horowitz:

This was an accident. I was interested in following litters of dogs who had been fostered by shelters and individuals associated with those shelters, and then following all of the puppies during their early development. And I was looking for multiple litters to follow. I happened to be following one litter in upstate New York of 11 puppies when suddenly it was March 13th, our world shut down on itself. And I realized, “I’m probably not going to be led into people’s homes to watch their litters of puppies develop. I bet not only is this the last litter I’m going to watch for a while, but this is the litter from which we should get a puppy.” So I hadn’t been thinking that there would be a puppy in this litter. I wanted to collect a lot of information from a lot of exposures, but circumstances dictated it.

Debbie Millman:

Talk about how you chose your particular dog from that litter and why you named the dog Quiddity, which literally means the essence of something. Why that name?

Alexandra Horowitz:

And in fact, also is a title of a philosopher’s book, WV Quine, he called it Quiddities. So there was a philosophy connection, but that was unintentional. Once I realized we were going to adopt a puppy in this litter, I had a kind of panic, which was that as a scientist, even one who doesn’t proclaim to be a scientist of early dog development per se, I thought, “Well, I should be able to predict, I should be able to know which the perfect puppy is for our family.” Not the perfect puppy, they’re all perfect, but which one would suit our funny little family unit best. And I really couldn’t tell. All of them had these becoming characteristics. They were all becoming themselves. Their personalities were starting to diverge, their behavior was starting to be individuated. And I couldn’t tell happily the foster who was taking care of all these heroically taken care of all these puppies and the mother had met all the people who wanted to adopt puppies and kind of preassigned several puppies to each one as possible choices.

And in our group, she assigned one female to us and I was sort of interested in a little bit of female energy in our otherwise male environment of both dogs and my husband and son being male. So we chose the female, but it was a little bit out of my control. And I think that’s just as well actually. What we could control was her name. And I’m very keen on naming. I think naming a dog is a great part of entering them into your family. I’ve done a little study on names where of the several thousand people who contributed to this study, many of them would contribute part of each member of the family to the dog’s name.

And I think that’s just wonderful because it’s part of including them right away conspiratorially, kind of like you’re part of us already. And so our way of doing that was we just all chose names of the three humans in our family. We eliminated them in various rounds. And then my son kind of chose the final name, which was Quid. I don’t know if he knew what quid meant exactly, if he’d read it somewhere. I guess he was 10 at the time. But it sounded just delightful enough. And then with its lengthening as Quiddity as the essence of a thing, it seems like this puppy being the essence of dog, was going to really represent her for us.

Debbie Millman:

I was surprised to read that Quid’s mother, who had been extremely dotting since birth to all of her pups, began to find them irritating as they got older. Through reading the book, I began to understand that pups become much better at learning skills from other dogs or even humans, pretty much any dog other than their moms after a certain age. And even free-ranging dogs tend to drift away from their mothers and puppies form much longer-lasting bonds with their siblings. Is this an advantage from an evolutionary point because of how many puppies get separated from their mothers?

Alexandra Horowitz:

A number of interesting things have happened in the transition from wolves to dogs in wolf packs. Often the young wolves will stay with the pack. Wolf packs are really just family packs, multi-generational family packs. Maybe a male will go off and forge his own way, or female will go off and forge her way with another male. But with dogs, just think about it. They have to be flexible enough to live with another family and not just another family, but a human family, a family that’s not of their species. And the way that dogs have changed in order to accommodate this is kind of twofold. Dogs can give birth twice a year, so they go into heat approximately every six months. If that’s the case, then you have to imagine that your previous litter had better be pretty well on their way before that next litter comes along.

So kind of biology might start the process here. And then secondarily, while that mother dog is taking care of her litter, it’s a completely full-time job. I mean, this particular dog, Maze, had 11 puppies. They are born unable to do a thing they can’t see, they can’t smell. They can barely move. They could just about lift their head and suckle, they can’t maintain their own body temperature. They can’t excrete for themselves. Their mom has to prompt their excretions and then clean up after them. So it’s a full-time responsibility with these 11 puppies for several weeks of feeding, warming and cleaning them. And it’s appropriate that as they start to get bigger, more capable, a few weeks in, they can eat food other than milk that she starts to similarly distance herself from them and make things a little more challenging instead of lying down to let them nurse standing up and making them kind of reach for her belly if they want to nurse, for instance.

And then as they get more rambunctious, scolding them a little bit and telling them, you just can’t jump on me and bite me all the time, which is the type of thing a parent should do and tell their young ones. And so that’s when they start turning to their siblings more and learning more from their siblings. That actually does equip them pretty well to moving on to a different family, a different world. Hopefully in there too, there’s an exposure to people. And not in every free ranging population will there be, but ideally in any population of dogs that’s being bred or raised from a shelter, there will be humans in there from the very early weeks until they’re adopted out so that dogs just know to interact with them.

Debbie Millman:

How traumatic is it to separate a dog from their mother and siblings?

Alexandra Horowitz:

I don’t think it’s hugely traumatic. I mean, I think at its essence, the mom is ready to be done with the pups, is no longer looking to sleep with them, is no longer counting them. Sure, they are go toward each other, but I don’t think that they’re heavily bonded. Siblings too, similarly, they’re attached but not permanently bonded. What I think can be traumatic is that they’re going from this pile of dogs who they live on and around and follow everywhere and who follow them to often these very isolated situations in human families, I thought about it a lot with this puppy.

You never saw the dogs not on top of each other when they were sleeping and eating, climbing over each other in full body contact. But one of the first things that we tend to do in America, in 21st century America, with dogs is put them in a crate by themselves. And that’s very isolating, and I think that’s challenging. I think that itself is challenging, but if instead they get to be proximate to the other warm bodies in the house, it seems to me that the transition is actually often very smooth.

Debbie Millman:

You brought Quid home when she was about 10 weeks old and chartered her growth from “wee grub to boisterous sprite, from her birth to her first birthday.” And very surprisingly, you found that you didn’t quite take to Quid right away. I was so surprised by this. Why?

Alexandra Horowitz:

This is something that I hadn’t anticipated and I actually struggled with whether to put it in the book. And the book wound up being more of a memoir than I thought it would be because I included some of this reaction that I had. I just assumed because I loved visiting the puppies and I love puppies and I’m interested in dogs generally, I’d never meet dogs who I don’t like, right? Frankly, that never happens that I would adore this dog. But instead I was very conscious and with the way I was scrutinizing her behavior, hour by hour, day by day, of the ways that she was disrupting our family and all the relationships in the family between the dogs, with the dogs with the cat, us with the dogs, us with the cat, they were all disrupted by this little chaotic force.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, I’ve been there. Roxanne and I had our biggest fight the weekend we got the dog.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Absolutely. It’s three days later that everybody says, “I think I’ve made a great mistake.” And for me, it lasted longer, I think, because I was less willing to kind of suspend disbelief, and I think I didn’t give her the benefit of the doubt. I was almost too attentive. I think this is one place that maybe my kind of scientific gaze where I was looking at and assessing and analyzing everything led me to have more difficulty falling in love with her than, for instance, my husband and son who were immediately smitten and had no trouble.

And at the same time, also Finnegan, who was our older dog, who has been like, ugh, who’s one of these heart dogs, who I had a terrific relationship with. He’s in every of one of my books, and who was, at the time, 12 and a half, started to suffer from a degenerative disease and he was moving much less well. And I could see his vitality dim even as hers shown so brightly and it felt unfair. It felt like an unfair trade to me, and it was hard for me to release that and just take in the kind of joyousness of her presence purely.

Debbie Millman:

Quid is two and a half now. How has she changed and what is your relationship like with her now?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Well, I love her now. Now, she’s terrific. She’s a complete delight really. She’s her own dog. She’s not the dog I would have anticipated. She’s not the dog I would have chosen. She has energies that are inexplicable to me, could chase a ball until she’s exhausted and I don’t understand that. I don’t appreciate it. But I-

Debbie Millman:

She’s not a cerebral dog.

Alexandra Horowitz:

She’s not a thinker. I think it became easier for me actually to see her for herself after our older dogs passed, which they sadly did about a year ago.

Debbie Millman:

I know. I’m so sorry.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Thank you. I wrote an obituary for Finnegan.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. In the New York Times, which is absolutely stunning. Stunning.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Which I think there should be more of, frankly, because that’s a real relationship with a real individual whose death needs marking. And yet for the same reason, I was able to see her a little bit better and her grief actually and her feeling of loss of these siblings. She was quite close to both of them, even though I think that she kind of vexed them as well. After they died, I became closer with Quid.

Debbie Millman:

You write about how dogs are not born understanding the Byzantine rules of human social interaction and the rules of our houses and what we consider appropriate behavior. They don’t understand the pronouns we put on items. This is my bed, this is your bed. They don’t have a clue about the identities we give to objects. That’s a shoe, not a shoe, a chew toy. One of my favorite moments in The Year of the Puppy is actually near the end when you offer a list titled “What You Need to Be Prepared For Your Puppy.” And I’d like to share that list with our listeners now, if you don’t mind.

Alexandra Horowitz:

Sure, sure.

Debbie Millman:

Here’s Alexandra Horowitz’s complete list titled “What You Need To Be Prepared For Your Puppy.” Expect that your puppy will not be who you think nor act as you hope, and that is the complete list. Tell us why that is the list.

Alexandra Horowitz:

I mean, I’m playing with the fact that there are a lot of books which say, “Here’s the list of sort of items you need to buy or things you need to do to train your dog.” And then the whole thing is set, set and done, and you’ve got the good dog for life. And I think that while an attempt to at least superficially prepare people for the upheaval that is adding an individual quadruped wolf descendant to your life, it also is woefully inadequate really. And the thing that’s really happening is that you’re adding an individual person to your life who has their own beliefs and feelings and knowledge and awareness and is very young often and doesn’t know very much. And the best thing you can do is be patient with them. Give them a little benefit of the doubt and let them learn about your world. Help them learn about your world as you learn about them. That’s where the relationship that you want is going to come from, not in getting the equipment and doing the simple training. It starts with being open to a new individual.

Debbie Millman:

When I first, first, first got my dogs as an adult woman on my own, I didn’t know anything about what I was doing. My first dog, Scruffy, I decided to get him when I was going through depression and thought it might help, and bought, I don’t know, hundreds of books on dog training and had to be a good dog mom. And then over the years have been given a lot of dog books and have always been interested in sort of the inner lives of dogs. And I do have to say that there’s absolutely no comparison to the books that you write and every other book I’ve ever read on how to understand dogs.

And I only wish that I had gotten The Year of the Puppy before we got Max. It would’ve helped a great deal. I just have a few more questions for you and then I’ll let you go. Last week, the state of New York banned pet stores from selling dogs, cats, and rabbits. And the ban, which takes effect in December of 2024, is meant to prevent the sale of animals raised by commercial breeders accused of keeping them in inhumane conditions. And I agree with Martha Nussbaum who says that animals have intrinsic dignity. Aside from this ban, how can we help dogs have more dignified existences?

Alexandra Horowitz:

That’s such a great question. I think the answer is in letting them be themselves a little bit more, leaning into their dogness. And I think one of the difficult things about having a dog in contemporary society is that a lot is asked of them, which is kind of fundamentally antagonistic with who they are. They’re asked to stay by themselves for long periods of time, doing nothing, sort of waiting. They’re asked to be still when they’re young and little when they can’t still their bodies yet. They’re asked not to use their mouths when they use their mouths like we use our hands, right?

They’re asked not to sniff things when that’s their way of seeing the world. I think appreciating that the thing we enjoy about living with dogs is their otherness, is the things that are different about them rather than just trying to make them into little mini humans. I think that respects their dignity, and that would be the way, if I were king of the world and I could make us change how we deal with dogs, it would be allowing them to roll in that thing now and then and play with other dogs, splash in the puddles, sniff as long as they want to sniff, follow their impulses somewhat more and celebrate them for who they are, not just try to make them somebody they’re not.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra, my last question for you is this. Can dogs smile?

Alexandra Horowitz:

Yes, they’re smiling much of the time. It’s just not with their mouth. They’re smiling with their tail and body and ears and face, right? They certainly have muscles in their face which are expressions of a smile, but they, like the dolphin, sometimes look like they’re smiling because of their lips. We’re very convinced by that, but it’s more a full body smile, which is I think even more pleasurable.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra Horowitz, thank you so much for doing so much work in the world that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Alexandra Horowitz:

A complete pleasure, Debbie. Thanks.

Debbie Millman:

Alexandra Horowitz’s latest book is The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. You can find out more about Alexandra Horowitz and her other marvelous books at alexandrahorowitz.com. You can listen to her podcast called Off Leash, which is wonderful wherever you love podcasts, and you can also see more about the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard dogcognition.weebly.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Alexandra Horowitz appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

If you asked a child what they wanted to be when they grew up and they said, “I want to be an organizational psychologist,” you might think, hmm. But if you watch one of Adam Grant’s TED Talks on finding meaning and motivation at work, you might think, that kid was on to something. Adam Grant is a professor at Wharton school of business, where he’s been a top-rated professor for nearly a decade. He’s been recognized as one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers. He’s a columnist for The New York Times, and his last book is Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. He’s also the host of WorkLife, another podcast like Design Mattersin the TED Audio Collective. In each episode, WorkLife explores the science of making work not suck. Adam Grant, welcome to Design Matters.

Adam Grant:

Thanks, Debbie. I’m glad to be here. Although, I can assure you it’s all downhill from here.

Debbie Millman:

Well, let’s let our listeners be the judge of that. Adam, is it true that in one of your more recent class evaluations, one of your students stated, “While Professor Grants acts all down with pop culture, he secretly thinks Ariana Grande is a font in Microsoft Word.”

Adam Grant:

I wish. False, sadly. I think that comment belongs to a former professor here named Michael Sinkinson, who earned that honor. Sadly, I cannot take credit for that line.

Debbie Millman:

OK. Well, I have a couple of other course evaluation comments I’ll share with you later, but we’ll get to that later. Adam, you grew up in West Bloomfield, MI. Your dad was a lawyer and your mom was an English teacher. Growing up, your grandmother once drove two-and-a-half hours through a snowstorm so that your mother could exercise. Would it be safe to assume you come from a close, selfless family?

Adam Grant:

I think there’s variation in every family but I had some extraordinary role models when it comes to generosity, for sure.

Debbie Millman:

When you were in the second grade, I understand that you not only knew the names of all the Detroit Tigers players at the time, you also knew the names of everyone who had ever played for the team. Were you really that into baseball?

Adam Grant:

I didn’t really have anything else to do, so I guess so. My grandmother had taught me to read baseball standings and statistics when I was 7, and for some reason, it just lit a fire under me and I wanted to learn everything I could about the game. It’s safe to say I’ve forgotten now most of what I knew.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, really.

Adam Grant:

But once upon a time, I was definitely obsessed with sports.

Debbie Millman:

As you were growing up, you said that you would laser lock into one thing, which is something you use every day in your job now, and this manifested in your interest in Nintendo video games, and much has been written about this, but I do want to share some of it with my listeners. You would play for seven or eight hours a day without even getting up. This was reported in the April 17th, 1989 edition of the Detroit Free Press, which features you sitting cross-legged on the floor. This is when I really wish the podcast was a videocast. Your eyes zombie-like beneath a curly mop of brown hair, your mouth open, staring at the TV. And the headline reads, “The Dark Side of Nintendo.” So at that point in your life, would you say you were addicted?

Adam Grant:

No, I wouldn’t, because I felt like I had complete control over the behavior. It was a choice I was making. I had a goal. I wanted to master every game that I got. I didn’t succeed at all of them. But I have a vivid memory of that reporter coming. And wait, I’m sorry, my assignment is to play Nintendo? How do I get this every day? But I picked Metroid, which was a game that I had gotten to the very end of but couldn’t beat the final boss over and over and over again on. And so I just felt like I wasn’t happy when it was time to turn off the Nintendo because that was blocking me from achieving my goal. It wasn’t like I was craving it or I couldn’t function without it or the behavior was controlling me. It’s the same mentality I have now when I’m writing a book or when I’m preparing to give a TED Talk. I have a goal, there’s an idea that I want to get across, and I’m not thrilled if somebody tells me I have to put it aside if I’m in the process of focusing and concentrating.

Debbie Millman:

So it’s sort of being in that zone?

Adam Grant:

Yeah. It’s finding flow. I was totally absorbed. Cal Newport would call it deep work. I think at the time, it was deep play.

Debbie Millman:

And are you still interested in video games at all?

Adam Grant:

Well, yeah. I mean, how could I not be? Nintendo Switch is probably my current favorite and I play Mario Kart with our kids and our 7-year-old beats me sometimes, which is either maddening or awesome.

Debbie Millman:

Impressive either way. You mentioned sports and collecting other cards besides baseball. You were interested in high school in basketball, diving, and magic. And your focus on all three was rather formidable. While playing basketball, I read that you would not allow yourself to stop until you made 23 consecutive free throws, even if it meant missing dinner. What happened when you didn’t make the basketball team in high school?

Adam Grant:

It was really disappointing. It was my favorite sport to play. … And I went to sixth-grade tryouts, I didn’t make it. I went to seventh-grade tryouts, got cut. In eighth grade, I was very confident that I was finally going to make the team and didn’t make it. I remember being really disappointed. And after I didn’t make it, decided it was time to concentrate on something else.

Debbie Millman:

So you picked springboard diving.

Adam Grant:

I did.

Debbie Millman:

You initially said that you had very little talent. You walked like Frankenstein. You couldn’t jump or even touch your toes. So how did you make that team?

Adam Grant:

I was lucky to have a coach, Eric Best, who said, “I will never cut anyone who wants to be here.” And he did give me the bad news: I had no rhythm. I had to bend my knees in order to touch my toes, and so I didn’t have any of the flexibility that you look for. He jokingly mentioned that I didn’t jump very high, which would make it difficult to do complex dives. But he set a go
al for me and said, “I think you could be a state finalist by your senior year.” And that just lit a fire under me. And I kind of channeled every waking hour of extra energy and attention I had into trying to figure out, how can I master this?

Debbie Millman:

Adam, what do you think fuels your goal achievement?

Adam Grant:

In the existential sense?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Adam Grant:

I don’t know.

Debbie Millman:

I mean, I know you don’t like the whole psychoanalytic kind of Freudian stuff, but it does seem that when you’re tasked with a goal you really, no pun intended, like to rise to the occasion.

Adam Grant:

I don’t know. I think it’s part of the joy of life, is challenging myself and trying to stretch the edge of my capabilities. It’s interesting—my goals have shifted over time. I think when I was a kid, most of my goals were around personal accomplishment. And over time, I’ve gravitated more toward trying to figure out, how can I use my time and energy to benefit other people? But in some ways, the feeling is the same, right? I just find it so exhilarating to be completely absorbed in a task and trying to accomplish something that I know is going to teach me a bunch of new skills where I can see my progress and experience the thrill of getting better over time. I don’t know. There are lots of people who say, “Well, it’s the journey, not the destination that matters.” And I don’t think you can separate the journey from the destination.

Adam Grant:

I think part of the joy of the journey is knowing that there’s a destination out ahead. And, I don’t know, I’ve always found that extremely motivating. I can’t tell you why.

Debbie Millman:

When you reach a goal, do you then create another goal? Like, one of the things that my wife has told me, that when I reach something that I’ve achieved, that I then just raise the bar, that I’m never satisfied. Do you have that experience as well, or when you’ve accomplished something it’s sort of like a standalone finite thing that you hold onto?

Adam Grant:

I think I’m with you, Debbie. I had a funny conversation with a friend of mine after my second book came out. She called me and she said, “What are you doing to celebrate?” And I said, “Celebrate, what is there to celebrate? I’m a writer, we write books. That’s what I do.” And she said, “Well, don’t you think it’s a milestone to write a whole book and put it out there for the world?” I said, “Yeah, the first time, but now I’m used to it.”

Adam Grant:

And the more I thought of it, the more I realize that I wasn’t doing a good job marking the moment and appreciating a milestone. And I decided that from then on whenever I accomplish something meaningful, I would try to [take] a little bit of mental time travel and rewind to say, look, maybe this is not a big deal to me anymore. But if you had talked to me five years ago and said you’re going to publish your second book and people are actually going to read it, I would have been overjoyed. And so I’ve tried to stay in closer touch with my past self, and that makes it a little bit easier to savor.

Debbie Millman:

In going back to the idea of becoming a springboard diver, you mentioned Eric Best, and I found something that he said about diving that I thought was really interesting. He stated that, “Diving attracts the people who are too slow for track, too short for basketball, and too weak for football.” But he did tell you that if you put in a lot of energy, you would become pretty good. And you ended up becoming more than pretty good. You ended up becoming good enough to qualify for the Junior Olympics Nationals twice; you ended up an All-American in 1999, and diving at the NCAA level in college. Yet, I read that you considered yourself or maybe even you said that you were a fake athlete.

Adam Grant:

Oh, definitely a fake athlete.

Debbie Millman:

How does a fake athlete end up an All-American?

Adam Grant:

By picking a sport that meets all the criteria you just described.

Debbie Millman:

No. Adam, Adam. There is not a sport in the world that if I decided I wanted to attach myself to I would be able to be good at. I just have no coordination.

Adam Grant:

I beg to differ. Honestly, I spent enough years coaching diving; I think I could teach anyone to be a decent diver. Although it looks a lot harder than many of the sports we usually watch on TV, in some ways, it benefits more directly from practice and doesn’t require the same raw physical talent that playing many sports does. But I think I probably had a few advantages in diving, one of which is I could go in the water without much of a splash. And that was something that happened in part from practice, but in part, it’s affected by the size of your hands and the actual lines of your body. I think I had a little bit of an edge there. And that sound you hear when somebody does a dive that goes … and then they just disappear into the water, that’s called a rip entry because it sounds like a diver is tearing a hole in the water and ripping it apart to go through smoothly.

Adam Grant:

I did a dive in warmups for one of our major meets, and one of the other judges turned over to Eric and said, “Well, all he can do is rip,” as in he doesn’t jump high, he doesn’t spin fast, he’s not very flexible. And Eric said, “Yeah, so?” Because luckily in diving, entry is what matters most, and so if I can perfect that, I got away with a lot. I started pretty bad but there’s a lot of room for growth.

Debbie Millman:

In September of your senior year of high school, you had a dream that you went to Harvard, so you decided to apply. You didn’t tell anyone about the application. Why not?

Adam Grant:

I didn’t think I was going to get in, and I also wasn’t sure if I wanted to go if I got in. I just sent out the application on a whim. And I didn’t want anybody judging me on the basis of whether Harvard deemed me worthy or not, and then also whether if I got in decided to go or not.

Debbie Millman:

What was the reaction when you did get in?

Adam Grant:

I remember being shocked and excited and then a little bit apprehensive, wondering, am I going to be the dumbest person there, and will I have any friends? But as I got over that, as I started meeting future classmates, I realized, actually, a lot of these students are just regular overachievers like me—maybe this will be a decent experience.

Debbie Millman:

You studied psychology, and when you told your folks about your d
ecision, you found out that your dad had been a psych major. You’d never known that before when he was in school. And your mom had a psych minor. And you stated that you grew up as a kid thinking that normal families say things like self-fulfilling prophecy. What were you thinking that you wanted to do professionally at that time?

Adam Grant:

I had no idea. I had a list of things that I knew I didn’t want to do. So I had ruled out med school because I was just grossed out by biology. I thought about psychiatry but I wanted to work on the regular problems that we all face as opposed to just pathology, and I also didn’t think I had the patience to sit with one client at a time and talk through problems. So, I didn’t know. I decided for a while that I was going to be a diving coach because I loved trying to pay forward what I learned from Eric. I also got so much joy out of helping young divers overcome their fear of heights and taking them through the process that I went through, which is suddenly discovering I can accomplish things I never thought I was capable of. And it was such an incredible experience of personal growth and confidence building for me that I just had a blast creating that or trying to facilitate that for others. So I thought for a while that diving was going to be my career.

Debbie Millman:

You also were practicing magic at that time, and I read that you would often practice in front of the mirror for hours at a time. So what kind of magic did you like? Do you still practice, and at that point, did you consider becoming a professional magician, a Derren Brown kind of person?

Adam Grant:

No. My favorite magic was card magic. The state illusions are fun to watch but usually, the secret behind them is disappointing once you discover it. And what I loved about card tricks was you could watch them close up and you still couldn’t figure them out, and they felt like they were skill as opposed to feats of engineering. But sometimes when I did find out the secret, I was even more impressed as opposed to suddenly deflated.

Debbie Millman:

Why?

Adam Grant:

Because it was difficult to execute and I could admire the effort and dexterity that had been built to be able to pull off a trick. I don’t practice anymore but I get talked into performing a couple times a year. And probably the nerdiest thing I did in college was to start a magic club with a friend, David Kwong, who is a professional magician.

Debbie Millman:

David, yes, I love his work. Oh, my God, is he good.

Adam Grant:

He’s so good. And in fact, that was one of the reasons that I knew professional magic was not for me, was we would go to these study breaks and do small performances for 15 or 20 students, and he just electrified the audience and I was kind of stumbling my way through. And I thought, OK, that’s a magician.

Debbie Millman:

Adam, you received your degree from Harvard College. While you were there you worked at the travel guide company, Let’s Go, selling ads. The first year, you had no training, you had no idea how to do the job. By the second year, you were successfully running a team, managing a budget, motivating staff, and hiring people. How did you learn to run this business so quickly?

Adam Grant:

I had a great manager, Cindy, who the year before when I was doing ad sales she had run the agency, and so I watched her do the whole job. We were a small team, just three or four people. So I think a lot of it was just learning by observation. Some of it was experimentation too. One of the things I loved about working at Let’s Go is we were able to create jobs for college students. I paid my way through college working there and I wanted more of those opportunities to exist for other people. So one day I came into work and I went to my boss and said, “Hey, if I can hire another person and they can generate enough revenue to pay for their job, would that be OK?” And she said, “Sure.” And I posted the ad that day, and I hired the person, and she paid for herself, and it was a great lesson in the value of experimentation and it really encouraged me to be more open to trial and error than I had been before.

Debbie Millman:

You went on to do your undergrad thesis studying the team at Let’s Go and found that the best predictor of the performance of the writers and editors who were putting the books together was their belief that their books were going to have a positive impact on travelers. Did that change or influence or inspire your sense of what it means to be a good manager?

Adam Grant:

It did. It was a really fun project to work on in part because I had spent a couple years getting my feet wet in the field of organizational psychology as an undergrad, and making a list of everything that I thought might possibly matter for motivation and job performance. And I put them all in my survey, and the only one that really mattered was feeling that your work makes a difference in the lives of others. And it made me realize that I had missed something important as a manager.

Adam Grant:

So I’m running an ad sales team, I had never thought to connect that team to the ultimate readers who benefited from the books that the ad sales were funding. I mean, it’s so obvious in retrospect. Why are you selling these ads? You’re selling these ads to generate revenue. Why do you want to generate revenue? So that we can make these books that people treat as Bible or a Torah or a Quran when they’re lost in a foreign country or when they want to experience that country like somebody who actually lives there as opposed to a tourist. And to get no feedback from those readers on how much they appreciated the books was, to me, I just look back and said, “Well, maybe other managers make this mistake too and maybe we should design jobs this way.”

Debbie Millman:

You then went on to get your master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan in organizational psychology.

Adam Grant:

Go Blue.

Debbie Millman:

It only took you three years to get your Ph.D. You seem to love learning so much. Did you race through it? Why so quickly?

Adam Grant:

So two things happened. The first one was I came in with just an enormous headstart. When I started taking my first seminars in grad school, I had already read half of the articles on the syllabus because they were covered in my undergrad major and I had done three years of research in a couple different labs, and that meant that I started grad school with a couple years of doing what we were supposed to be doing when we arrived. I think I also, at the time, I subscribed to the When Harry Met Sally philosophy of career and life decision-making.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I don’t know that one.

Adam Grant:

I mean I don’t know if it’s ever described that way but I’ve always thought of
it as that line where, in the movie, I think it’s Billy Crystal, who says, “When you know what you want for the rest of your life, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

Debbie Millman:

You want it to start as soon as possible. Yeah.

Adam Grant:

And I didn’t go to grad school to be a grad student. Yes, of course, I wanted to gain all this knowledge and build my skills and that was intrinsically interesting to me, but I wanted to share my knowledge. I wanted to teach. And that meant finishing grad school.

Debbie Millman:

After grad school, after you got your Ph.D., you were hired by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You were an assistant professor in organizational behavior. You were then hired as an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. You became the school’s youngest tenured professor. You were 28 years old. Now, I want to talk about some of the evaluations. Those are early evaluations.

Adam Grant:

Thanks for that reminder.

Debbie Millman:

That’s too juicy. I can’t resist. You’ve been ranked as the best professor at Wharton for years and years, yet at the beginning of your career there, one student wrote this on your evaluation form: “You were so nervous you were causing students to physically shake in their seats.” Another stated that the instructor is sweating so much I have completely stopped paying attention to the lecture. At one point, you were so freaked out for the first class you taught that you asked your wife to pretend to be a TA so she could reassure you that the students were going to come back for the next class. At that point, you also considered quitting. So what happened? This is another one of those instances where so much defeat, rejection, failure, whatever you want to call it, and yet you not only overcome it all, you then go on to become the best that there ever was. So talk about your thinking along those steps.

Adam Grant:

Well, best that there ever was, was the overstatement of the century. But I definitely got better. And I think part of what helped was those failures and early setbacks were in a very low-stakes environment. Those comments you read actually came when I was finishing grad school at Michigan. I finished between years so I had a year where I stuck around and taught while I was on the job market. And going into that, I knew because I was so nervous on stage, I was introverted and shy, I knew I needed practice, and I knew I needed feedback. So originally what I’d done is I volunteered to give guest lectures for a couple of friends’ and colleagues’ classes. I don’t know why they said yes.

Debbie Millman:

They’re friends. That’s what friends do.

Adam Grant:

They were too kind. And I gave out feedback forms at the end of each guest lecture, and that’s where those comments came. They weren’t fun to read but I learned from them. The main thing I learned from them was that I needed a lot more practice and that the human body can only be anxious for so many hours a day doing the same task over and over again. I flash back to all the times I was nervous as a diver, about trying a new dive or going into a big meet, and how what really caused that anxiety to subside was putting myself in that same situation over and over again. I guess what I learned from that was I needed to practice under conditions that were more similar to performance. So giving practice lectures in front of an audience of friends, not the same as going in front of a group of strangers who are actually in the middle of a class and having to speak in front of them. And doing that helped ease some of the anxiety.

Adam Grant:

I also saw in the feedback forms—I asked for criticism. But some people put in compliments unprompted. And even the criticisms, some of it was, well, why don’t you do more of this, I really like that part of the lecture. And it helped me see that no matter how nervous I was and how awkward I was in front of the class, that I had something to offer.

Debbie Millman:

I’m also a teacher and we are also required to get evaluations. I’m not only required to get evaluations from myself but because I run a department, I have to read all the evaluations of my colleagues and the program in general. And I could get 500 wonderful evaluations and then one “you suck” evaluation, and that sort of demolishes me for a few hours.

Adam Grant:

Have you been living inside my head? This is the second time you’ve described your experience and I’ve said, “Wait, that’s exactly my experience.”

Debbie Millman:

It’s gotten better as I’ve gotten older. It doesn’t demolish me for a week. It demolishes me for a couple of hours. How do you find the ability to recalibrate and to sort of get back to your baseline?

Adam Grant:

I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out, honestly. I would welcome any comments that you have. How do you do it, Debbie?

Debbie Millman:

Well, I allow myself to sort of whimper. I allow myself to feel that inconsolable kind of feeling. I know now, having experienced it so many times, that it will eventually subside. But it is a painful … I don’t think people realize how painful it is. And my wife, she’ll get a negative comment on Twitter and it’ll ruin her day. It will literally ruin her day. She has nearly a million followers. People are constantly telling her how amazing she is. She gets one negative Twitter response and she cries. And I’m like, “Roxane, come on, girl.” But we take it really seriously. I wish that we didn’t, but we do.

Adam Grant:

I don’t know that I wish we didn’t, actually.

Debbie Millman:

How come?

Adam Grant:

Well, I don’t know Roxane Gay, you do.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Adam Grant:

We’ve just met so I don’t know you well, either. But I’ve found that although it’s unpleasant, it generally makes me better. This just happened—I just got my fall semester evaluations and by all accounts even though I was teaching virtually, it went just about as well as it normally does. And maybe the evaluations were a tiny bit lower but they were not statistically different and there were lots of glowing comments and I should have felt great. And in a class of over 80 students, there were three who didn’t love it, and it kind of ruined my day.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, yeah.

Adam Grant:

And I thought, OK, I don’t want to teach this class anymore. Clearly, it’s not good enough. What am I doing here? Why do I teach? This is horrible. I put all the energy in—

Debb
ie Millman:

Now you’re in my head.

Adam Grant:

Yeah. So in the moment, it’s depressing. But then what happens when I teach my next class is I’m thinking about those three students and I’m asking myself what mistakes did I make that prevented those students from getting out of this course what I wanted them to? One of the comments was actually really interesting. It said that I wasn’t available enough to the students.

Debbie Millman:

Wow, that’s shocking given what I’ve learned about you.

Adam Grant:

I was shocked too because I’ve gotten lots of feedback that I make myself too available to students and that they should be encouraged to come in prepared and make sure they use my time well. And so, wait, you can’t have it both ways. What I started thinking as I reflected on it a little bit more is, at this point, because my schedule has gotten busier and busier and there are more demands on my time and more people wanting my attention, people who are proactive are getting rewarded for it. And so when office hours were full, if students emailed me and said, “I couldn’t get a time,” of course, I made time. But what about the students who didn’t have the courage or the confidence to reach out? They might have missed out on those opportunities. And now, I need to make sure that I’m not allowing people to self-select into my calendar and I’m actually opening the door for everyone. And those moments happen every time I get negative feedback.

Adam Grant:

And I feel like, OK, it’s demotivating but it’s also an extraordinary learning opportunity. And then if enough time passes, I want to prove those students wrong next time. I want to let them know, you know what, you gave me good feedback and I don’t ever want another student to think about my class the way that you did, and so I’m going to try to change this.

Debbie Millman:

You asked what techniques I might have. I have a fortune cookie fortune taped on my laptop which is the best advice I’ve ever been given, which is “avoid compulsively making things worse.”

Adam Grant:

That’s great.

Debbie Millman:

Isn’t it the best?

Adam Grant:

That is such a good fortune cookie.

Debbie Millman:

And I find that when those situations arise, when my initial reaction is, that’s it, I’m done, I’m quitting, that’s the worst possible thing you can do. What do you do when the very thing that thrills and excites somebody is the one thing that just completely infuriates someone else?

Adam Grant:

I try to remind myself that some feedback is not evaluation, it’s just taste. Sometimes I actually, this happens in the classroom, I’ll put it out there for them. A simple example that happens every year in my mid-course feedback forms is some students will say they want me to lecture more and others will say they want me to lecture less. I’m like, well, OK. So what I do is I email out all the feedback verbatim and then I come into class and I do an analysis of it, and I say, “Here are the common themes.” And then I’ll say, “OK, I just want you to know, you’re all going to be dissatisfied by this class because some of you want me to lecture more, some want me to lecture less. And I think the perfect solution is to do neither and that will leave you all a little bit unhappy.”

Adam Grant:

And usually, the response to that is, oh, all of the sudden I realize that just because I have some feedback doesn’t mean it’s correct or it applies to everyone. And that is one of the lessons that I want to teach, is sometimes your feedback is actually just your opinion. It’s not an objective evaluation.

Debbie Millman:

That brings us right to your new book. I do want to just ask you one thing about your first book because I found something about your writing of it that I thought would be really interesting to talk about. In 2013, you wrote your first book. It was titled Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, and it explored the dynamics behind collaboration, behind negotiation, networking. But I read that you threw away 102,000 words of the first draft, which was only 103,000 words total. And you felt like you were never going to write a book and couldn’t make it as an author. A friend and mentor told you that he didn’t even know if anyone would be able to finish reading the book after he read the first draft. How did you handle this, and ultimately rewrite and finish the book?

Adam Grant:

That is all true.

Debbie Millman:

I love that.

Adam Grant:

The backstory is when I decided that I wanted to write a book, I’d just gotten tenure and felt like I didn’t have an excuse anymore just to write for academics, that I wanted to try to share my ideas more broadly. It was my students actually who talked me into it, and said, you have to start making some of your insights and your data available to people who don’t come into your classroom.

Adam Grant:

I’d read some incredible books that helped tilt me in this direction of organizational psychology and I was excited about the idea of trying to write one of my own. And I got introduced to a bunch of literary agents and was thrilled to sign with Richard Pine. And Richard said, OK, write me a book proposal, and he sent me some samples, and I started working on it. And I went into Nintendo mode and said, all right, well, I have a goal. I’m going to write the best proposal I can. I woke up the next morning, I started writing, I had all these ideas, and all of the sudden, I couldn’t stop. And after a couple months, instead of the proposal, I accidentally had written the book.

Debbie Millman:

Accidentally being the operative word here.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, no, it was an accident. Because I think Richard asked me for a proposal in June, and I sent him a draft of the book in August when he checked in and said, “Hey, how’s the proposal going?” And I said, “Well, actually I wrote a draft of the book.” And he called me and he said, “I don’t even think some of your academic colleagues will want to read this.” And I couldn’t figure it out at first and then I realized I’d gotten so lost in the weeds of all the studies that were interesting to people in my field, that I’d just completely missed the big picture. And Richard gave me some advice that has been one of the most pivotal ideas that I’ve focused on whenever I write. He said, “Write like you teach, not like you write journal articles.”

Adam Grant:

And all of the sudden, it clicked that bringing ideas to life and animating them and making them interesting and personal and practical, that’s what we do in the classroom, and if I channel that, I can do more of that on the page. Yeah, I kept about 1,000 words. I c
ouldn’t let go of a few, but the rest, I threw out and started over and there are lots of things I would rewrite today and rethink if I could, but it was a much better book than the first draft.

Debbie Millman:

Adam, why do so many people have that same knee-jerk reaction when encountering some sort of obstacle? You do it. I do it. I was listening, my brother was having a conference call while I was in the car with him. He was talking to an associate and things are going really badly. He’s a doctor. After the call, he hung up and he was frustrated. He was like, “That’s it, I’m quitting.” And I’m like, “No, you’re not. You’re not going to quit over one disagreement with a colleague.” Why do we jump to that conclusion so quickly?

Adam Grant:

That’s a great question. I think a simple explanation would be too many people have fixed rather than growth mindsets. And when we fail or when we get negative feedback, the first impulse is to say, “well, that’s a sign that I lack the ability and this is not for me.” I think there’s more to it than that though. I think part of it might be a self-protective mechanism, that when somebody trashes a book draft or gives negative feedback on a semester that I poured my heart into, the knee-jerk reaction to say, forget it, I don’t want to do this anymore, is a way of distancing and detaching. Because in the moment if I’m completely focused on, well, yes, this my identity, these are my core values, this is who I am, it’s going to hurt a lot more.

Adam Grant:

And by saying, “you know what, I don’t need this or maybe this isn’t for me,” I no longer feel the same level of intense pain around it. And it allows me to then say, “all right, that class wasn’t me, that was just an activity I did for a semester.” “That book draft isn’t who I am, it’s just a tiny snapshot of my thoughts in a bunch of days.” And that allows me to see the work more clearly and analyze it in a less defensive way. But also then to really ask myself the question, “well, should I keep doing this—is this a good time to change course, or am I going escalate my commitment to a losing course of action?” Which too many do on too many projects. What do you make of that?

Debbie Millman:

My first knee-jerk reaction to that is, yeah, I think it may be an opportunity to sort of put some distance to then try to reorganize your feelings around it. But I also think it comes from early trauma where we’re hurt by something, and then in an effort to not be hurt anymore, we retreat. For me, at least, and my brother, who was socialized in exactly the same way, it was so interesting for me to witness that because I thought, oh, wow, we both do that exact thing in the exact same way. I wonder if that’s how we were sort of trained to deal with rejection or challenging obstacles.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I can see that. One of the things I ended up thinking through really for the first time while writing Think Again was so many people experience an emotion and then start to internalize it, as if, well, OK, that’s my feeling, so it must be true.

Debbie Millman:

Fact.

Adam Grant:

Yeah. No, no, no. The emotion you feel after an intense event happens, that’s just a rough draft and you would never—you’re a designer, you’re an artist, you’re also a brand consultant—you would never frame your first draft, right? What you would do is you’d put it out there and then say, “All right, let me now look at it with a more critical eye and with a little more distance, and let me gather some feedback from other people.” And it’s surprising to me that we don’t do that more often and more deliberately with our emotions.

Debbie Millman:

Me too.

Adam Grant:

To say anytime you get some feedback or you get rejected or you fail and it makes you angry or depressed or you have some regrets, those are teachable moments. I think disappointment is often a lesson in preparing more. I think anger is a lesson in standing up for yourself. I think regret is a lesson in doing some rethinking in the moment as opposed to just in the rearview mirror. And I don’t think we learn those lessons enough and we don’t spend enough time then revising the emotions that we ultimately think better capture what the experience was all about.

Debbie Millman:

Your first book went on to be a bestseller. Millions and millions of copies. You’ve gone on to write many other books, one with Sheryl Sandberg, one with your wife. So let’s talk about your beautiful new book which is titled Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. First, congratulations on such a good book.

Adam Grant:

Thank you. I’m really honored that you read, let alone like it. This is that weird phase of book writing where I’ve rethought a bunch of things but it’s too late to change them right now.

Debbie Millman:

You rethought rethinking.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, which would be ironic if I didn’t, right?

Debbie Millman:

Right. Think Againexamines how and why we believe things and what it takes to rethink the way we think. Early on in the book, you state, “We don’t just hesitate to rethink our answers, we hesitate at the very idea of rethinking.” Why do we do that?

Adam Grant:

I think we do it in part because of the fear of regret. As you know, there’s evidence that students are reluctant to change their first answers on a test even though on average it improves their score. And that’s in part because if you had the right answer and then you undid it, you would just beat yourself up over that for hours, days, maybe weeks, if it was important. Whereas, if you did the opposite, and you said, “OK, I’m going to stick to my first answer and I should have changed but I didn’t,” there’s not really anything to punish yourself over. Because it’s not like you were so confident that that other answer was right. If it had been, you would have been more excited about it or more attached to it.

Adam Grant:

So I think we’re hesitant to not trust our guts, I would say. And then there’s also just, rethinking requires relinquishing sometimes predictability and control, and sometimes belonging as well. That if I’m going to let go of an opinion that I held dear or some knowledge that I believed was true, I might be outcast by the group I belong to, right? I’m no longer part of my tribe. And also, I don’t really know then what’s real and what’s fact and what’s fiction, and that can make it a little bit more different to navigate a complex world.

Debbie Millman:

One thing that blew my mind was the notion of humans being cognitively lazy. I learned that we’re mental misers, and I had never heard that term before, and have since, of course, heard it three times. Now it’s on my radar. We often prefer the ease of hanging onto old views over the difficulty of
grappling with new ones. Why is that so common? Why is cognitive laziness something that many of us suffer from?

Adam Grant:

I think, Debbie, that too many of us prefer the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. And it required a lot of energy and effort to change your mind. It also often requires admitting that you were wrong, which then calls into question, OK, do I have good judgment, am I an intelligent person? Those are questions we don’t like to ask about ourselves. And yet, I would so much rather find out that I was wrong so that now I can get closer to right than just continue to be wrong.

Debbie Millman:

But that takes a certain self-awareness and a certain confidence about your ability to continue to be who you are. And I think so many people hold onto things, as you said—this is the consensus, I’m surrounded by like-minded people. That’s why we all wear Nike shoes or carry iPhones and show them to others. We feel safer and more secure in groups of like-minded people once we have to rethink. It’s very vulnerable making.

Adam Grant:

It is. And I think we analyze this exactly backward, right? Because I’ve started to think now, and I really only landed at this after I finished writing Think Again, I’ve started to believe that if you don’t feel a little bit embarrassed by some of your prior opinions and assumptions, then you’re not growing.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Adam Grant:

I think about this all the time with work. I talk to writers frequently—I’m sure you do, too—who can’t bring themselves to read their earlier books, or artists who don’t want to look back at their old paintings because, I don’t know, they’re just overwhelmed with this sense of I might be incompetent, and I can’t believe I put that out in the world, and I’m just mortified. And I think that’s exactly what we should be doing because that’s how you see the progress you’ve made, that not only has your taste improved, but also your skill has grown. And I think that that embarrassment at past work is actually a sign that we’ve gotten better. And those times when we look back and say, “OK, I was wrong,” or “that was stupid,” those are moments that really signal to us that we’ve learned something.

Debbie Millman:

I have been going through old journals recently trying to sort of figure out some past stuff, and I have been for years saying, “I don’t understand how I’m getting so much older—I still feel like the same person I’ve always been, and I still feel like I’m the same person I was at 16.” I’m like, no, no, no. I read that journal. The DNA of that person isn’t even the same, and thank God for that.

Adam Grant:

Yeah. That’s exactly where we want people to land, right? Is to say, “OK, of course, there’s some connection between your current self and your past self, but the more distance exists, the more you can see your own evolution.”

Debbie Millman:

As difficult as it is for us to rethink our ideas and believes, you write how we’re awfully quick to recognize when other people need to think again. And you write this about that phenomena: “We question the judgment of experts whenever we seek out a second opinion on a medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, when it comes to our knowledge and opinions, we often favor feeling right over being right. In everyday life, we make many diagnoses of our own, ranging from who we hire to whom we marry. We need to develop the habit of forming our own second opinions.” Adam, how do you go about doing that, and how hard is it really to change our own minds?

Adam Grant:

I don’t know. My favorite practice so far is to schedule check-ups. We all go to the dentist or the doctor even when we’re healthy. I think we should do the same thing on the choices we make in our lives. For years, I’ve advised students to do at least twice a year career check-ups, where they just ask themselves, OK, is the job that I have right now still consistent with the values that I hold? Am I learning what I hope to be learning? Is this culture a place where I can express my strengths and continue to grow?

Adam Grant:

And I think that we can do the same thing when it comes to life check-ups. I’m sort of startled at how comfortable we are sticking to the ideals and images of who we wanted to be that we formed way before we should have had any business locking into plans. Whether it’s what city you wanted to live in, or what you claimed you wanted to be when you grew up, or for some people even just something as fundamental as their sexual orientation, or their political affiliation, or what country they wanted to be part of. And I don’t know about you, Debbie, but I’m not that confident in my 9-year-old self’s ideals for who I want to become. And when people are still set on those images they created, I think, OK, you are overdue for a check-up, I can see all sorts of cavities in your life plan.

Debbie Millman:

Talk a little bit about the notion of intellectual humility. That was something that really struck me in the book as something that everyone needs to be able to figure out how to find.

Adam Grant:

Yeah. I think the psychology of intellectual humility has been one of my favorite areas to learn about in the past few years. Intellectual humility is, for me, just knowing what you don’t know, recognizing all the limitations in your understanding. And it’s actually not that hard to cultivate it. It turns out that if you take high schoolers, for example, and you just introduce them to this idea that when you admit what you don’t know, you’re more able to learn, they become more comfortable doing it. Who would have thought?

Debbie Millman:

And people love teaching other people what they think.

Adam Grant:

They do. And the risk, of course, is that … what’s the saying, that fools are so full of conviction while wise people are so full of doubt? Well, the risk is that we let ignorant people do all opining. But I think that we live in a culture that stigmatizes not knowing. And I think we’d be much better off stigmatizing certainty, and saying, “look, it’s not your lack of knowledge that gets you in trouble, it’s your conviction in the very things that you don’t know.”

Debbie Millman:

As somebody who’s worked in corporate America for several decades, I’m familiar with what outline as some of the most annoying things people will say instead of rethinking. They include that “I’ll never work here”; “that’s not what my experience has shown”; “that’s too complicated, let’s not overthink it”; and, “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” How do you work with people unwilling to rethink anything or are so jaded and beaten down that they can’t see beyond obstacles and roadblocks?

Adam Grant:

Well, I think my understanding of the most effective ways to do this is really informed by the psychology of motiva
tional interviewing, which says that you can rarely change somebody else’s mind, but you can often help them find their own motivation to change their own mind. And one of the ways you do that is by interviewing them, literally, just trying to understand their thoughts or complex feelings about an issue. And when considering a change, the general premise is that people are often ambivalent. They have reasons to stick with the status quo but they also have reasons to consider a shift in their beliefs or their behaviors. And so if you can help them see that they’re full of mixed opinions, then they’re more likely to reflect and move in the direction of the change.

Adam Grant:

I think, with the business examples that you gave, I run into this a lot of the time, and my favorite place to start is to say, “That’s not the way we’ve always done it. That’s not how we do things. You know who really said things like that? BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Kodak and Sears. What do you think of that?” They usually will laugh a little bit and say, “We don’t want to be like them. What are your concerns?” And then that opens up a dialogue.

Adam Grant:

In other cases what I’ve done is, I’ve just said, “Look, if you didn’t value my expertise, why did you call me? Why am I here, I’m not really sure.” And just let’s call out the elephant in the room. And then they’ll say, “Well, I think you do have relevant knowledge but obviously, you haven’t worked in my company or my industry.” And I’ll say, “You are absolutely right. I know nothing about your specific world. I am a specialist in being a generalist when it comes to industries.” But that’s I think part of how I add value. Because what I want to do is I want to gather the rigorous evidence that you don’t have time to accumulate because you’re so busy leading from your experience. And when I see randomized controlled experiments in longitudinal studies across multiple industries show a pattern, I think it’s more likely that that pattern is the norm and something that’s different is an outlier and an exception than the reverse.

Adam Grant:

But I’m always excited to find outliers and exceptions, so can you walk me through, would it be OK if I show a little bit of what my data tells or what our field’s data suggests, and then can you show me a little bit of why you think your experience is different, and then we can try to get to the bottom of this together? And whenever I’ve remembered to do that and found the fortitude to have that conversation, it’s led in a much more productive direction.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned just a moment ago the opining overconfident people. And you quote Charles Darwin in Think Again, and state, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” And you write how in theory confidence and competence go hand in hand, but in practice, they often diverge. Why is that?

Adam Grant:

Well, the most popular explanation for that divergence is the Dunning–Kruger effect. And the basic finding there is that the people who are most overconfident about their knowledge and skills are the people with, in many cases, the least knowledge and skill. And it’s not just ego. The David Dunning observation is that when you lack the knowledge and skill to produce excellence, that often means you lack the knowledge and skill to judge excellence. I know very little about art, and by very little, I mean nothing. And so I could believe that I’m a great art critic because I don’t even know what it takes to be a good art critic. And that means that in a lot of cases, as I learn a little bit, my confidence climbs quickly and my competence doesn’t.

Debbie Millman:

So the less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our actual intelligence.

Adam Grant:

That is the case. Although I should say, total beginners are often immune to this effect. If you literally know nothing, you’re not going to walk around acting like you’re a genius. It’s when you gain a little knowledge that it starts to become precarious.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting, I recently—and it’s somewhat sad to admit that it’s a fairly recent understanding of myself, that when I don’t know something, I tend to disregard it as important. I can’t even believe I’m saying this but it’s one of the things that I’ve realized in reading your book. I tend to disregard something that I don’t think is relevant only to then find out that it’s relevant, and then I’m super embarrassed and humiliated that I ever could have considered the possibility that it was irrelevant.

Adam Grant:

Well, once again, I’ve had the exact same experience.

Debbie Millman:

So humiliating.

Adam Grant:

What’s behind that? As I hear you talk about it, it seems like part of it is just the high attentional filter strategy of being productive. To say if I allow my curiosity to get the better of me and I lower all my attentional filters and anything can come in, I will literally never get anything done because there’s always something new to learn. How much of that is your experience?

Debbie Millman:

You’re being kind to me. I don’t know. I mean, I’d like to think that. I’d love to think that. I just think that it’s sort of a tendency to disregard something that I don’t know because of what not knowing about it might reveal to me about who I am.

Adam Grant:

Is it revealing to you, or is it revealing to others, or to both?

Debbie Millman:

Oh, to others. Yeah, to others. Yeah.

Adam Grant:

Because I was going to say, it sounded like image more than identity for me.

Debbie Millman:

I think you’re probably right. But I also find myself more in the category of people whose competence exceeds their confidence, so I have more self-esteem issues than I’d like to admit.

Adam Grant:

Welcome to the club. It is interesting though because I think so much of this confidence exceeding competence trap is people getting obsessed with proving themselves instead of improving themselves.

Debbie Millman:

That’s so good.

Adam Grant:

It’s such a basic distinction. I mean, how many times—I’m embarrassed by the number of times I’ve sort of acted like I knew what someone was talking about when I was just clueless in a conversation because I didn’t want to look like the idiot in the room. When the first thing I should have done as a person who aspires to be humble and curious is to say, “Actually, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you please explain to me what in the world that means?”

Debbie Millman:

And it’s so funny how people do that. I talk to my students about
this all the time. Because then once somebody thinks that you do know what it is, then they want to go deeper, and then in you’re in this downward spiral of shame.

Adam Grant:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Because you can’t say anything meaningful, and then, of course, they know that you’re lying.

Adam Grant:

You just keep digging a deeper hole.

Debbie Millman:

Yep. Adam, one of my favorite parts of your new book is about conflict. In Think Again, you reveal that you’ve always been determined to keep the peace and suggest that it may be because your group of friends dropped you in middle school, or it may be genetic, or maybe it’s because your parents got divorced—whatever the cause, in psychology, there’s a name for your affliction and it’s called agreeableness. That is one of the major personality traits around the world. So would you define yourself as a people-pleaser?

Adam Grant:

Oh, definitely. And I think that’s part of why it hurts so much when I get negative feedback. It feels like I’ve violated the core of not only my personality but my being. And that is not fun.

Debbie Millman:

So that disappointment defines you. It defines you in that moment.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I wish it didn’t sometimes. But it’s also then it becomes part of that motivation to improve, to say, well, I don’t want to let these people down.

Debbie Millman:

You also write how agreeable people don’t always steer clear of conflict. And this is something I really want to learn more about and practice in my own life. And I read that you’re terrified of hurting other people’s feelings. When it comes to challenging their thoughts you have no fear. So, why the difference? How do you manifest these different states of mind about and through conflict?

Adam Grant:

I really wasn’t aware of it until I was writing the book because I felt for a long time, there’s this contradiction in my personality, where on the one hand, I want to please people and social harmony is extremely important to me. And some of my student feedback for years has been that I’m too supportive of stupid comments. I’ve had students write that over and over and over again. I want to encourage everyone. And at the same time, I’ve been called a logic bully and I’ve had people complain that I’m too challenging and maybe too direct with some of my constructive criticism.

Adam Grant:

Well, how can these two tendencies exist in the same person? Well, the more I’ve studied agreeableness, the more I’ve realized it’s really about social inclusion in belonging. And what agreeable people are trying to do is fit in. That means I don’t want to offend anyone. It means I don’t want to be excluded from the group. The moment that I feel that I’ve earned someone’s respect or developed trust with them and I don’t think the relationship is in jeopardy, I shift into what I think is another dominant part of my personality, which is being both curious and extremely concerned about getting closer to the truth.

Adam Grant:

And that means if somebody believes something that I think is incorrect or not supported by data, that I feel like it’s my moral responsibility as a social scientist to try to set the record straight. And that’s something we see with plenty of agreeable people: If you care a lot about trying to figure out what’s accurate, if it’s important to you to live your life by things that are true, then you have to disagree with people who are believing things that are false. And yet, of course, you can disagree without being disagreeable. Debbie, I have to say, in the hour-plus that we’ve known each other now, you strike me also as highly agreeable. Agree or disagree?

Debbie Millman:

Agree. But that’s a trick question. What else can I possibly say?

Adam Grant:

I disagree, I think a lot of people would jump on that question.

Debbie Millman:

No, I mean, it’s been something that I’ve been working on for most of my adult life, to try to get the nerve to say “no more,” to establish better boundaries. But on the other hand, I think very similarly when it comes to things that I know I know about, which really have nothing to do with my likability but more my sort of research and data and intelligence, I really am very willing to go all-in very quickly, and really fight tooth and nail about what I believe. My ex-husband said, “Debbie’s always persuasive, she’s not always right.”

Adam Grant:

That is a dangerous compliment to receive, isn’t it?

Debbie Millman:

It really is. And that’s not why we got divorced. You say that some conflict is necessary. The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy. I love that. It’s sort of like the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.

Adam Grant:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

You need some of that.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I think if you don’t ever have conflict with people you work with or people you love, then you’re either stuck in groupthink in some kind of filter bubble or echo chamber, or you just don’t care enough to disagree with them, which means they’re not learning from your perspective. And I think that’s an injustice to both of you, or to all of you, if it’s a team.

Debbie Millman:

One of the ways that I learned about challenging someone that is really, really firm in their thinking is to question, how do you know? And its value in conflict is really profound. Can you talk about what that question does, or when the appropriate time to ask that question is?

Adam Grant:

I mean, you’re the expert, right? You wrote Brand Thinking. This is what you do for a living. To me, this is part of the heart of the interaction component of design thinking. So, you tell me.

Debbie Millman:

The harder thing for me is to know what not to ask. That’s the challenge that I have. In any really good conversation, I’ll have in front of me now, in talking with you, nine pages of questions. The hard thing for me is to think about what I should edit out as opposed to keep asking because of somebody’s patience, because of somebody’s time constraint. So the how-do-you-know, for me, is a nice way of asking somebody in some ways to double down. My usual response, and this is something that I’ve grown to use more and more as I’ve gotten older, is when somebody says something that I find outrageous, I just say, “Excuse me?”

Adam Grant:

Oh, that’s good.

Debbie Millman:

It forces them to be clear about their own point of view. And I do find that whenever I say, “excuse me?” with that sort of little polite question mark at the end, uptalk, that people tend to retreat. Psychologically, you need to tell me why people do that.

Adam Grant:

No, I’m just listening to it,and especially watching your facial expression there, it’s so interesting. Your look, it’s a great combination of curious and puzzled. You’re kind of intrigued and confused at the same time. And what I think is so effective about that, and I hear it in your voice, too, is it comes across as nonjudgmental but you’re also encouraging the other person to think again and say, “Whoa, hold on. Wait a minute.” Except you’re not doing that in such an aggressive way. That is effective. Do you have people though just restate what they said and stick to their convictions?

Debbie Millman:

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Adam Grant:

And then what do you do?

Debbie Millman:

Then I tend to retreat because I know that they’re really not willing to be persuaded otherwise. When somebody says the exact same thing twice, it’s because they really don’t have anything else to add.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, that’s interesting. And then you can always say “tell me more,” and if they have nothing, they realize their thinking is incomplete.

Debbie Millman:

Believe it or not, my mother is a Trumper, and so we’ve had what’s been a really difficult estrangement over the years that has turned into an abyss, and I have just given up.

Adam Grant:

Sorry to hear that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I’ve tried to understand where she’s coming from, but there’s no there-there, and when someone says “fake news,” it is quite genius in its creation in that it just establishes that what you know and have heard is not true without any evidence to the contrary.

Adam Grant:

This is maybe my optimistic streak shining through but I wonder about how some of the principles that I found useful in other areas would work in this world. I can’t say I’ve really tried it. But I know when talking with a friend who’s very opposed to vaccinations, I found him more open when I said, “Listen, I understand that you believe that there are government conspiracies. And I would love to … I know some conspiracy theories have actually come true, right?” So I’m not just blanket dismissing them. I’m just trying to figure out how we can become confident that this particular one is true. I said, “What’s really baffling to me is you have a huge community of independent scientists, many of whom have tenure and can say whatever they want—how would you orchestrate such a complex conspiracy of famously strong-willed, stubborn people who will sometimes not change their minds or admit that they were wrong even if their careers depended on it?” And he could really answer it. And he said, “Well, maybe that’s not a total conspiracy but it’s hard to publish the studies that show the side effects and the dangers of vaccines.”

Adam Grant:

And I said, “OK, well, let’s take a closer look at the evidence there.” And I found that on a specific topic like that, just asking him “how does that work,” it led to a more open conversation because at least we could talk about the same reality.

Debbie Millman:

Right. The same reality is the key.

Adam Grant:

Yes. Is there any opportunity there or is it an uphill battle?

Debbie Millman:

At this point, I think it’s a sort of ceasefire only in that when somebody says that they only are willing to listen to their Sean Hannity, that there’s just not a real chance for any … yeah.

Adam Grant:

That’s sad.

Debbie Millman:

But that’s just also a lesson in letting go. You talk about the things you know. You know what you know, what you think you know. You know what you don’t know, and then you don’t know what you don’t know. And in this case, I don’t know how I’d ever be able to reach a place where there’s mutuality without really giving up a fundamental sense of who I am, and I’m not willing to do that anymore. I mean, I tried for years. There’s just only so much recalibrating and pretzelling that you can to please other people, and then you just have to give up.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I cannot imagine how hard that must be. I’m famously bad at letting go.

Debbie Millman:

So am I.

Adam Grant:

This is one of those afflictions of the agreeable.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Adam Grant:

If we just take this issue as an example. If we could go back to 2015, and we knew everything that we know now, one of the things that I would advocate for is a set of independent standards for how we evaluate our candidate. And I’d say, “All right, look, I don’t care whether you support Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, or anybody else who’s running, what you need though is an independent set of criteria for what qualifies as good or bad leadership. And if you make this list in advance, you’re going to hold yourself accountable, you’re going to keep yourself honest for not then excusing every single thing that crosses the line by moving the line each time.” And I think we need to do that across the board, right?

Debbie Millman:

Oh, absolutely.

Adam Grant:

This is something I’ve been rethinking. I think that if we had an independent standard for public officials, I’d even set a low bar. I would say, “if this person would be fired for their actions if they were running a public company,” which is a very low bar, “then they probably shouldn’t be an elected official anymore.”

Debbie Millman:

I think it’s really interesting to look at what we’re willing to accept from male candidates versus female candidates. Hillary Clinton never ever would have been considered if she’d been married three times and had five children with three different spouses. And you talk about, quite a bit in the book, about the different criteria between men and women and what is acceptable and believable. And that’s also another really interesting big part of the book.

Adam Grant:

I wish I had realized this sooner. I think that for a long time, I naively assumed that the early data I read on all the ways that women are disadvantaged at work, the ways that women have to be that much better in order to get the opportunity to lead, and how that’s most often magnified if women also are of color and bel
ong to a double minority group. And I think I just, in part because I wanted to believe in a just world and I just naively assumed that in the 21st century, we finally made progress and we are now evaluating people on their character and their competence or their contribution as opposed to a set of identities that for the most part they probably didn’t choose. And we are just so far from that reality. The data are staggering.

Adam Grant:

You know this from the book, but one of the data points that really opened my eyes was a meta-analysis, a study of studies of about 100,000 leaders, just comparing male and female leadership. And in self-ratings men were more confident. In 360 ratings, when they were evaluated by people who are actually qualified to judge their skill, women were rated as more competent. Debbie, do I think that women are inherently more competent leaders than men? No, I don’t think any demographic group has a premium on leadership. Do I believe though, that women had to be that much better in order to land a leadership position given all we know about the barriers and biases? Yes. And I’m embarrassed that I didn’t come across that sooner. If you’re married to a bad feminist, I just feel like I was a bad person to not be aware of this and not try to do something about it.

Debbie Millman:

But you have, you have now. I mean, this is something that we’re all socialized to feel at a young age in terms of how we’re allowed to extol our virtues, how we’re allowed to brag, how we’re allowed to have an opinion even. The whole notion of confidence is something that you write about at great length in the book, and that’s another part of what I loved so much about reading your book. You write about how there’s plenty of evidence suggesting that confidence is just as often a result of progress as the cause of it. We don’t have to wait for our confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals. We can build it through achieving challenging goals. So would you say that courage to take that first step is more important than confidence, because confidence is only going to come after you do that successfully?

Adam Grant:

I think so. And this is another moment of rethinking for me because people talk about confidence all the time and confidence just doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It usually comes through experience. And generally speaking, confidence grows when you achieve mastery, when you make progress, when you reach a goal that you thought was unlikely for you. And so I wonder if we’ve actually created a bit of a cage for people who lack confidence by saying, “Well, you need to build your confidence in order to go for it.” Like, no, no, no. You need to go for it and then the hope is through your learning and through your growth, the confidence will come.

Adam Grant:

Sara Blakely had such a good way of capturing this. I asked her a few years ago how she had the confidence to start Spanx when she had no experience in fashion or retail. She had never applied for a patent before. And she said, “Well, I didn’t have the confidence that I could do this but I knew that what I’d done throughout my life was I had built new skills and I knew I could learn.” And that was confident humility. It was her saying, “I don’t know how to do this today, but I’m confident I can figure it out tomorrow.” And then over time, the real confidence comes through, saying, “OK, yeah … I was able to apply for a patent because I sat in a bookstore and I read a book about patents for dummies. I was able to build a prototype.”

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that’s how she did that on her own because she couldn’t afford it. Yeah. I, over the years, have come to realize that confidence is really just the successful repetition of any endeavor.

Adam Grant:

Oh, that’s a great definition.

Debbie Millman:

You develop the ability. You’ve done this enough times that you can statistically predict that you’ll likely do it again. For those of us that can drive, we have car confidence. We didn’t start out with it, but we have it.

Adam Grant:

Say that again though. Tell me your definition of confidence again. I love that.

Debbie Millman:

The successful repetition of any endeavor.

Adam Grant:

That’s brilliant.

Debbie Millman:

I thought about it for a really long time.

Adam Grant:

That is really brilliant because what’s baked into it is you have to do it successfully and multiple times before the confidence comes.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Adam Grant:

That’s such a poignant way of capturing what’s missing from most people’s ideas of confidence.

Debbie Millman:

I think the first step is the courage to take that sort of blind faith step into the unknown and not knowing whether or not … sort of like the way a baby starts to walk, right? You just sort of … and then you do it. And then if you’re able-bodied you have walking confidence.

Adam Grant:

Did you watch The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary?

Debbie Millman:

No.

Adam Grant:

Probably my favorite line in the whole documentary was when the coach, Phil Jackson, said, “We’re only successful in the moment we perform a successful act.”

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Adam Grant:

And it really drove home this idea that confidence comes through repeating success but also seems like a powerful way of avoiding complacency. And you’re saying, “Wait a minute, you have to get to the repetition, the ability to do this multiple times.” And that means tomorrow, if you don’t keep practicing whatever’s making you successful, you haven’t earned that confidence.

Debbie Millman:

Right. Adam, my last question is this: When you started writing Think Again, you thought your goal was to teach the next generation how to change their minds. But you’ve stated that you now have a different view. You want to help people get, all of us, into the right mindset about changing their minds. So that’s a question of skill and more a question of will. You believe we all have the capacity to think again, we just don’t use it enough. So for all of my listeners, what would be the one tip for anyone listening to begin to rethink what they think?

Adam Grant:

Oh, if I had to pick one, the one that’s jumping to mind right now is be careful about attaching your opinions to your identity. The moment that something you believe becomes part of who you are is the moment that it’s hard to let it go. And the question always comes up then, “well if my beliefs aren’t my identity, then who am I? What
is my identity?” And I would say, “Well, I would prefer to anchor identities in values rather than opinions.”

Debbie Millman:

Or productivity. That’s a whole other conversation.

Adam Grant:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Which is also really a belief. I’m only as valuable as I produce things.

Adam Grant:

I mean that’s a great example, right? Well, what’s the value there? The value there is excellence or mastery. And who said that you have to do a certain quantity of work in order to be excellent in a given day? You made that up. It’s something that too many of us got attached to probably too young and then we really internalized it. “I am a hard worker.” As opposed to “I am someone who strives for excellence.” And there are times when I get there by working less.

Debbie Millman:

Adam, this has been revelatory. Thank you so much for helping me rethink so many things I take for granted. And thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Adam Grant:

This has been such a treat. Thank you for having me. I’m floored by how thoroughly you read the book and reflected on it, how much homework you did on my background. Can we be friends?

Debbie Millman:

Yes, absolutely. I’d love it.

Adam Grant:

Awesome.

Debbie Millman:

Adam’s new book is titled Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. His website is adamgrant.net, where you can find his books and his podcast, WorkLife. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Adam Grant appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

One can spend a lifetime working toward a singularly defined goal—a victory, a role, a result.

But then there are those achievements that simply blow in with the wind.

“Someone just calls you out of the blue,” astrophysicist David Spergel told Princeton Alumni Weekly.

It’s not exactly how you would imagine such an incredible recognition to go—but that’s what happens when you receive a MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially dubbed the “genius grant.”

Spergel’s first order of business after receiving the $500,000 award in 2001?

“I bought a foosball table,” he told Princeton Alumni. “That didn’t take up too much of the money, though.”

Rather, he said, what a MacArthur really buys you is time. And he put his to good use—something he seems to have always had a knack for doing.

Appropriately, Spergel attended John Glenn High School in Huntington, New York (the same school, in fact, that Design Matters host Debbie Millman attended). While his father was a physicist who was involved in initiatives such as the Apollo project, the elder Spergel didn’t put his son on a fixed path toward his own passions; rather, Spergel elected to participate in things such as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1978, in which high school seniors “dedicate countless hours to original research projects and write up their results in reports that resemble graduate school theses.” His work on the rings of Uranus didn’t take home a win, but it’s perhaps some consolation that he’s prominently featured on the organization's list of notable alumni today.

After heading off to Princeton, Spergel majored in physics. His close second choice was the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; one wonders who he might have become had he followed that path instead of the one leading to the cosmos. Spergel dreamed of teaching at Princeton one day—which is exactly what he did after graduating from the school and subsequently from Harvard with a Ph.D. in astronomy.

Astrophysics is not an easy thing to explain. While one should never invoke something as lowbrow and pedestrian as a meme when discussing the most brilliant among us, consider the following four-panel astrophysicist meme in an attempt to describe what one of the most brilliant among us today does. Frame one: “What people think I do”—an image of two mystic hands poised above a glowing orb. Frame two: “What my mom thinks I do”—an image of a space shuttle taking off, with an image of Gandalf thrown in for good measure. Frame three: “What I think I do”—an image of planets in space. Frame four: “What I really do”—an image of dull black-and-white computer code.

In Spergel’s world, data is where the findings are truly found.

And as he said when he received his MacArthur, money buys time—and that is what one needs to perform research.

In 2001, NASA launched the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which captured actual imagery of radiation remaining from the Big Bang. Spergel and his team took to studying and interpreting the WMAP data—and they did so with such intensity that Spergel bought his colleagues T-shirts noting Sleep is for the weak.

The team subsequently published their findings—and they were groundbreaking. Spergel and his comrades were able to nail the age of the universe down to about 14 billion years, and eventually determine its true composition: 71.4% dark energy, 24% dark matter and only 4.6% ordinary matter. The sum toll of their efforts provided what has since been dubbed “a baby picture of the universe.”

And it would seem those sleepless nights were indeed worth it: As the late astrophysicist John N. Bahcall was widely quoted as saying at the time, it’s a “rite of passage for cosmology, from speculation to precision science,” adding, “I think every astronomer will remember where they were when they heard these results. I certainly will.”

Another cosmologist noted, “You’re going to see a thousand papers based on these results”—prescient words. Spergel’s paper would go on to hold the title of the most-cited physics work of the 21st century.

Elsewhere, his formal recognitions are numerous: He received the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (dubbed “The Oscars of Science”); the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics; the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award; The Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Moreover, he was featured on TIME’s “25 Most Influential People in Space” list in 2012 alongside the likes of Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson. He has also appeared on a number of television shows, from Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe to Through the Wormhole and How the Universe Works.

This prompts one to ponder the notion of celebrity in science. In design, celebrity is generally earned by making waves as a practitioner, and then, usually, by remaining a practitioner and giving talks that expound upon said practitioning. In science, one observable path is an evolution from practitioner to full-time ponderist, career distiller of information for the masses—a crowdsourced font of wisdom, in a sense.

But what if someone could serve as that mind for the masses, while simultaneously pushing the field forward with stunning work?

That, it would seem, is David Spergel.

This episode of Design Matters follows closely in the wake of Stephen Hawking’s death, a loss unsurprisingly felt deeply by the scientific community, and perhaps a tad surprisingly by the general public. Hawking was widely memorialized in the media, social media and culture at large—which, for many accustomed to today’s mainline of political rage, worn like blinders on a horse, was a sign of hope.

Design writer Steven Heller has written about how the way we envision the future in pop culture has evolved—or perhaps better stated, devolved—over the years. We’ve gone from sci-fi projections built around hope, tech and possibility in the 1950s to scenes of dystopia and survival today.

With legendary minds like Hawking gone, it’s vitally energizing and electrifying that we have Spergel at work, sleep be damned—if only, in some small but meaningful way, to bring back the visions of the past, to see possibility, to instill the wonder in us that will cause us to look away from our screens and the 24/7 news stream, and look up.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media E
ditor-in-Chief

The post David Spergel appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

It’s easy to feel dwarfed—or, perhaps more accurately, entirely intimidated, overwhelmed, painfully daunted—by author and experimental psychologist Steven Pinker.

Pinker has written more than 10 books. Time has dubbed him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Prospect and Foreign Policy have featured him on their list of the top 100 public intellectuals working today.

And then there’s the intense output that landed him on such lists: Pinker’s life’s work is the study of the architecture of our minds and world; he explores with great zeal questions such as how language develops in children, what role evolution plays in language, the nature of human nature. Heady subjects he seemingly takes on with ease, and ones that would leave most of us weeping with frustration into the groundswell of jargon-rich research papers documenting them.

Pinker believes humans are “systematically self-deceived; each one of us thinks of ourselves as more competent and benevolent than we are.” We might, perhaps, but in the context of people like Pinker who are wickedly smart, seemingly capable of processing that which 95% of people cannot, it’s easy to feel, well, small.

There’s even the matter of his hair—his trademark plumage that led him to be deemed the first member of The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. (Seriously.)

How does one acquire such a capable mind, and the locks that adorn it?

Pinker grew up in Montreal, in a community that featured the likes of Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen and William Shatner. His father was a sales rep, landlord and lawyer, and his mother looked after the home, and later got a master’s degree in counseling, becoming vice principal of a Montreal high school. Growing up in the ’60s, Pinker regarded himself philosophically as a teenage anarchist … until the police went on strike, and looting and riots ensued. It was a formative moment that he has cited as giving him a glimpse into his future as a scientist—“Namely, that cherished beliefs can be cruelly falsified by empirical tests,” he told The Harvard Gazette.

Pinker was a self-described voracious reader, and had a keen interest in the workings of the mind, and as a result, his parents urged him to become a psychiatrist instead of an academic—the scholarly world was in turmoil in the 1970s, and many would-be professors wound up unemployed. But Pinker followed his path, seizing on the expanding field of cognitive psychology, and went from McGill to Harvard to MIT.

The root of his passion: as he told the Gazette, “What could be more interesting than how the mind works?”

In his professional life, Pinker pinged back and forth between teaching at Harvard and MIT. And then, after penning highly technical books intended for his peers, a rather amazing thing happened: Pinker decided to take his knowledge and adapt it for a general audience. 

Again, as with many of the guests featured on shows like Design Matters, it’s easy to feel dwarfed by their achievements, dwarfed by their intellects; it’s often all it takes to simply not wonder aloud, What the hell am I doing with my life? But to feel dwarfed is to miss the point.

Why does Steven Pinker choose to focus his considerable brain power on these subjects? And is it all just the Quixotic wanderings of an academic? Why do these things he documents even matter in the first place?

That’s exactly why he is such a key figure to society today: In plain language, he tells us.

In so doing, he lets us in on a conversation we might otherwise miss, and brilliantly expands our minds. When asked by The Times Literary Supplement about the best advice he has ever received, he replied, “When I crossed over from academic to popular writing, a university press editor advised me not to make the common professor’s mistake of talking down to readers, as if they were semi-literate chicken pluckers.” Rather, the editor urged him to think of readers as all sharing the same high intellect—they just happen to not know something that Pinker does. And that’s exactly how his writing comes across; in the process of blowing our minds, he refrains from shoving his IQ, and the jargon that tends to fall like snow from the clouds of scientific journals, down our throats. (In fact, he more or less later penned the book on this approach: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.)

Pinker breaks the stereotype of the staid intellectual in more ways than one. Rather than vanishing into the weeds of the subjects he is writing about or discussing, he approaches them with wit and flair. He’s personable. He’s funny.

He eschews the quietly bemoaned notion in academia that today’s Millennials are the least intelligent and laziest generation.

He knows and accepts his limits, admitting that any thoughts he might have had about writing a novel to complement his nonfiction went out the door after he married novelist Rebecca Goldstein, and saw the raw talent that truly goes into fiction.

On a wider scale, he puts his superpowers to good use, breaking down the psychology behind phenomena like the “The Dress” for Forbes, which subsequently dubbed him “Rock Star Psychologist Steven Pinker.”

He dabbles in the visual arts. Drop the “n” from “Steven,” and head over to stevepinker.com to discover that he’s a pretty damn good photographer.

His theories have been contested, and he does not shy from engaging with his detractors. As a recent headline for John Gray’s (who Pinker has sparred with before) review of his latest book in the The New Statesman goes, “Unenlightened Thinking: Steven Pinker’s Embarrassing New Book is a Feeble Sermon for Rattled Liberals.” (More on that book in a moment, from perhaps a rattled liberal perspective.)

Showcasing his sheer passion for science and the subjects he studies, on his website you can even find his genome and scans of his brain.

And finally, we circle back to perhaps the clearest indicator that he doesn’t necessarily walk the line of the expected: his hair. As critic Steven Heller wrote in Design Observer, “Arguably,
how one wears their hair is the most important sign of personal identity. A hairstyle is more than just style; it is a trademark or, if you will, a logo for a personal brand. Hair is a graphic device, every bit as designed and ultimately mnemonic as any other vivid iconography.”

Pinker breaks it down: “First, there’s immaturity. Any boy growing up in the ’60s fought a constant battle with his father about getting a haircut. Now no one can force me to get my hair cut, and I’m still reveling in the freedom. Also, I had a colleague at MIT, the computer scientist Pat Winston, who had a famous annual speech on how to lecture, and one of his tips was that every professor should have an affectation, something to amuse students with.” On a “Colbert Report” appearance, Colbert whipped out a security wand and scanned Pinker’s hair for weapons.

Pinker’s new book is Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. And in it, he reveals—using data and a host of visuals—that the common narrative that the world today is the biggest wreck it has ever been, is egregiously incorrect. Rather, Pinker details, we are thriving. Never before have humanity’s achievements been greater when it comes to health, wealth, peace, democracy, quality of life, happiness and other factors—a perspective that’s easy to overlook in a news cycle focused on the negative, that which today is dubbed newsworthy. (As Tibor Kalman once observed, “We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.”) Pinker also delves into the territory that ruffles the feathers of a loyal Trumpian base today—how a demagogue tends to thrive on the notion that a system, and the world at large, is broken.

All told, Bill Gates liked Enlightenment Now so much he dubbed it his “new favorite book of all time.”

Asked by Rolling Stone if he considers himself an optimist, Pinker said that he probably is—but reminded his interviewer that in this book, as with his others, he’s merely pointing out facts based on data. Facts that he, and he alone, I’d add, was able to obtain, digest and interpret for readers. And that is the power of Pinker—he takes his amazing mind and focus, and offers it to the world, as all those visible and outstanding talents in other fields do, from the virtuoso guitarist to the investigative journalist to the artist. It is reason to not be daunted by the Steven Pinkers of the world, but to realize what they contribute, for they make up the chorus of thought that enlightens the darkness.

In simply doing his work, Pinker gives us perhaps what we need most right now: perspective and, crucially, hope.

—Zachary Petit

A Selection of Books by Steven Pinker:

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)

The post Steven Pinker appeared first on PRINT Magazine.