October 11, 2025 • 41 mins
Pioneering primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall died last week at 91. Nate and Maria talk about Jane’s career path and how her research influenced the fields of both animal and human cognition. They also discuss the significance of the outsider status she held when she began her research, and what everyone can learn from outsiders.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making
better decisions.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm Maria Kanakova and I'm Nate Silver.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
So today on the show, Nate, we're going to be
talking about someone who was an absolute pioneer in not
only her field, but just in general in the world.
Jane Goodall, who died last week. You know, she came
to a lot of her breakthroughs from a very untraditional
outsider perspective, and so we'll be going a little bit
(00:56):
into her legacy and also talking about, you know, just
the importance of outsider thought, curiosity, the things that make
people truly successful in whatever field they choose to pursue.
You know, how can we learn from Jene Goodall and
actually apply it to our own careers, our own approaches
(01:18):
to life. And we'll talk We'll get into a lot
of detail about Jane Goodall's own life and the fact
that she was known mostly for her work with chimpanzees.
But there's a funny answer that she gave when she
was asked about her favorite animal.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
My favorite animal, everybody thinks is a chimpanzee. But it's
not true. Chimpanzees are so like people that you know,
some chimpanzees are really not nice at all, just like
some people really not nice. My favorite animal altogether is
a dog, because dogs have taught me so much, and
dogs are so faithful, and dogs give unconditional love, and
(02:00):
I don't like to think of a world without dogs.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
So let's let's dive right in, Nate. Jane Goodall. She
was someone who was very influential to me as a psychologist,
but I'm assuming she was probably not quite as front
and center to you, right, I'm guessing you were aware
of her influence, but probably, you know, not someone who
influenced your career choice or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Maria, No.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
I look, I was going to make a joke that
the only thing I know about Jane Goodall is from
Gorillas in the Miss, Right, the Sigourney Weaver character.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
It's not her.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
A There's more than one woman scientist, apparently, and she
was not the scientist who inspired Grills in the Miss.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So I know not very much about her. But sometimes
it's fun. Sometimes you're the backseat driver. Today I'm the
backseat driver.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
Right, I'm gonna hear you talk about why you admire
Jane Goodall and just backseat drive.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, So let me. Yeah, let me just say a
little bit about why I really admire her. Obviously, she
was just a pioneer in terms of what women can accomplish.
She died at the age of ninety one, which just
gives you a sense of when she started her career.
(03:12):
Right at that point, you know, in when she was
just starting out, there were not a lot of role
models for women who were going into the sciences, and
I think that she really paved the way for a
lot of people to have the careers that they have today. Nate.
I think we've talked on the show before about the
(03:34):
importance kind of in career choices of role models, right,
and of being able to visualize yourself in a certain career.
And there's a ton of work that shows that. You know,
if you see someone who looks like you, who seems
like you, who's similar to you, doing something, you'd be like, oh,
maybe I can do that thing. So for Jane Goodall
to become, you know, this pioneering researcher was absolutely huge.
(03:56):
But in terms of her contribution to science, I learned
the most about her work when I was getting my
PhD in psychology in a course called animal cognition which
was all about animal intelligence, kind of animal emotions, how
animals think, and that course would have probably, well, I
wouldn't say probably, would literally have not existed without Jane Goodall,
(04:19):
because what she did was basically show that animals were
much more sophisticated than we previously thought, and that they
had a lot more in common with humans than science
had previously thought. So she observed, you know, her initial
contribution when she went to Africa to study chimpanzees in Tanzania,
(04:47):
and she observed them using tools, and not just using tools,
but creating tools, right, something that didn't exist, and she said, basically,
you know, I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Up until this point, we assumed that this was something
that was unique to humans. And so she basically change
the way that we thought about animals and what animals
were capable of. And so she gave birth to this
entire field of animal cognition and of realizing that, hey,
you know, there is actually a lot going on here.
(05:26):
Animals are capable of emotions, animals can recognize and experience death,
animals can solve problems, and so I think that is
kind of from a purely scientific standpoint, One of her
central contributions to the study of the mind. And as
a psychologist, you know, even though I don't study animals,
(05:49):
I appreciate that she gave us deeper insight into both
humans and animals through that very simple seeming in twenty
twenty five, but back in the sixties, just absolutely wow,
leap that. Hey, you know, chimpanzees think and they react,
and they're smart and they do all sorts of fascinating
(06:11):
things that people didn't really think to look for before.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Do you think like workers are pissed off that they're
They're like, we're fucking as smart as humans, right, so
have like opposable thumbs.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
This fucking sucks.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, No, I mean, I it's so funny, Like, yes,
I do think that there are lots of pissed off
animals there By the way, one of the less kind
things that Jane Goodall discovered in her work with chimpanzees.
And I was actually, you know, I remember when I
realized this for the first time. It made me very
sad because Jane Goodall, you know, you've seen pictures of her,
(06:43):
you've heard her talk. She seems like such a hopeful, optimistic,
positive person, and she she was, but she discovered that,
you know, chimpanzees, first of all, they're omnivores. They're not
herbivares as people thought, and they actually go ahead and
seek meet and they kill, and they can be violent,
(07:05):
and they have wars and they're aggressive, and so, you know,
studying studying the chimps, Jane came to the conclusion that
you know, our basically, our predisposition to violence is innate,
and it can be very contagious. Right if one chip
becomes violent all of a sudden, you have these groups
of very violent chips who can wreak havoc and who
(07:29):
can do a lot of damage. Chimps are strong, and
so given how how much we share in common with them,
she's like, I think this is true of humans as well,
right that we Yes, I'm hopeful and optimistic and people
can be good as well, and we have a lot
of capacity for good. But we have to be careful
because we have a lot of instincts towards being violent
(07:49):
to each other. And if we see that sort of behavior,
it's very easy to catch from someone else.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Same with dolphins.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
By the way, dolphins are like rapists or like kill
small porpoises and things like that.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
You know, yeah, Oh, it's actually it's actually no, it's
it's crazy. I think it's important. You know, we're laughing,
but I think it's important understand that there's a lot
of like, yes, you know, we're all one interconnected ecosystem,
but it's not like kumbayah, like we're all one big
happy family. Like there's violence and animals that we that
(08:23):
are incredibly smart can also be you know, incredibly violent,
and they have warfare their territorial I mean, shit happens.
And I think that it is important to understand all
of that about the natural world. And Jane Goodall definitely did.
And one off, you know, one of her key breakthroughs
(08:43):
that she was very criticized for at first was actually
seeing chimpanzees as individuals, seeing that they have personalities, right,
that they can be distinguished from each other. And in
her initial report that she wrote up, she didn't do
what ethnographers did at the time, which was, you know,
(09:04):
say like chimpanzee twelve x B three said this like
she gave them names, right, she gave them She actually
empathized with them, she spent time with them, She got
them to trust her. She figured out how to win
their trust and was able to kind of observe them
closely because they let her. And that's crucial, right, they
(09:25):
actually let her, and they have to let you. Chimpanzees
are violent, like if they don't let you observe them,
you ain't see enough. This was before the day when
we could hide tiny cameras, right, So the chimpanzees got
to let you in and she was able to kind
of establish that trust and to be able to see
them in that way.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Is that a monkey in your background, Maria, or your shoulder?
Speaker 1 (09:48):
It is, see and it's not a chimpanzee. Do you
know why?
Speaker 2 (09:55):
No, it has a tail.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Chimpanzees do not have tails.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
I did not know that.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, yes, you learn something new from Jay. I didn't
do that on purpose. That is hilarious. Yeah. No.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
There's a famous scene from two thousand and one A
Space Odyssey, I think, in which like the monkeys, I
think they're monkeys.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Maybe they're champanzees. Now I don't know.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
When I saw the film, I was nineteen years old,
maybe not have been in a dose.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Of psychedelic mushrooms. But like they know, it's a famous scene.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
You didn't notice the bit? Are they had tails.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Didn't know it's where they had tails.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
But there's a famous scene where there's like a monolith,
but it basically the monkeys discovering how to manipulate tools.
Is this canonical metaphor for like human progress maybe to
her ultimate death ultimately? Right?
Speaker 2 (10:42):
And so you know that alone.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Kind of kind of changes a narrative, not just a narrative,
but like the bilogical facts about like things that we
regard as fundamentally human.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
You know, the Holo scene is the name.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
For for the era in which mankind or humankind begins
to manipulate its environment with tools and technology. Right, And
if that kind of predates the rise of man, or
if the man the rise of mass more complicated, and
that has all types of implications for evolution and psychology
and everything else.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point because it
does once you realize that your conception of the what
makes you know man unique versus not, once that shifts,
then that's that's a huge that's a monumentally important change
in just what you see, you know, how you study,
(11:32):
how you conceive of humanity, and how you conceive of like, okay,
what's unique to people? And if this isn't unique, then
it actually prompts other questions and prompts a redefinition, and
it prompts a kind of reconceptualization of our past.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And we'll be right back after this break.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
One of the interesting things beyond Jane Goodall, but in
the center of psychology for us to talk about today night,
is you know how much that outsider perspective actually enabled
her to see things that people who had gone through
a more traditional, rigorous education system up to that point
(12:27):
could not see. I did a little bit of research,
because you know, it's obviously easy to kind of mythologize,
and I wanted to know, like, how how often is
it right that people who come from a less traditional
background are the ones that end up making these huge changes?
(12:48):
And it seems like Jane Goodall actually had a really
interesting combination of insider outsider kind of status that helped
her do what she did because she was an outsider.
She never went to college, she didn't have a formal education,
and yet from the tiniest age she was fascinated with
(13:10):
animals and became fascinated very early on round age four
is when she when she thinks it started with chimpanzees.
In particular and monkeys and primates, and so she didn't
end up going to college, and instead she went to
secretarial school learned how to be a secretary, and she
(13:34):
ended up you know, by the time she had finished
secretarial school, she had basically on her own read every
single book that was out there about Africa, about chimpanzees,
about apes, about all all about all of these different
different species, and about everything that she could basically that
(13:55):
you could find, and there wasn't much, but she had
read it all and she did. By the way, I
end up getting a PhD from Cambridge because her initial
work was so compelling that with the help of the
person who became her mentor, doctor Leaky, who was the
pre eminent ethnologist of the day, she was able to
(14:16):
get accepted into Cambridge University without an undergraduate degree to
end up getting a PhD. And so when she ended
up meeting doctor Leaky, he was very impressed because she
could basically answer any question that he asked her, even
though she had never gone to school. And so in
that sense, it's not like she was a total outsider
who was trained in I don't know, baseball and somehow
(14:38):
ended up coming to Africa and was like, ooh, I'm
very good at observing this. It was something that she
was passionate about and she was curious about, and that
she had on her own kind of taught herself as
an autodidect. But she when she came to Cambridge was
just criticized by everyone saying, you're doing it all wrong.
(15:00):
You are not supposed to look at chimpanzees this way.
You are not supposed to empathize. They don't have minds
of their own, they don't have personalities. You are project
onto them. And she was like, fuck you, I know better,
and she was right. And I think that that's, you know,
something where we can actually see a broader point, which
(15:20):
is that because she hadn't come up in academia, she
didn't know that she was doing anything wrong right. She
didn't know that you were quote unquote not supposed to
look at them a certain way or describe them a
certain way, and instead she just let her experience guide her.
And I think that that's a really interesting point because
(15:43):
if you look at a lot of people in a
lot of different fields who make really big discoveries, they
often don't come from kind of the traditional hierarchical background.
So I come out of academia, and I know that
you know, some of the people who are the toughest
to to change, right, the people who will really not
change their mind about anything, The people who argue basically
(16:07):
until death's door. That know, to stay with Jane Goodall
chimpanzees can't really use tools. Are people, you know, who
have established themselves in the field and whose work your
new ideas might challenge, right, kind of the the old establishment,
the real in group. Those are often the people who
(16:29):
are the most resistant to change. You. I'm sure you
read Nate. You went to the University of Chicago, so
I'm assuming that this is something that you read, maybe
in more than one class, Thomas Kuhne's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
Yeah, basically, you know, one way to simplify the argument,
right is like basically have to wait for people to
to die, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
That's a very.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Good way of simplifying, because yeah, that's how you get
what's what Kuhn calls paradigm shifts, because otherwise, you know,
the the in group, they want to protect their old guard, right,
they want to protect kind of their their ideas, their legacies,
and so if you want scientif revolution to happen, don't
kill them. That's that's not the takeaway. But you do
(17:14):
need fresh eyes, fresh blood, people who don't feel threatened.
And so I think that that is kind of that's
some of why outsiders like Jane Goodall might end up
being successful. But you also need someone like a doctor Leaky,
who is the old guard and who is somehow not threatened, right,
who lets her in because she wouldn't have ever gotten
(17:34):
into Cambridge without him.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
Yeah, in my field term, you know, probably not as
earth shattering as Jane Goodall or the fundamental biology of
what makes us human and statistical and sabermetrics. I know
people know that urn probably our audience half of them do, right.
Sabermetrics is the statistical study of baseball that could be
expanded to other sports. You kind of saw a structure
(17:56):
of scientific revolutions thing occurring where like, you know, there
were these huge moneyball wars so called, where you have
the stat heads and they're kind of banished into like
a broom closet, right versus like the jocks, right, and like,
and now like basically every major sports franchise is like
a whole department of like stat nerds, right, they're often
running the teams or if they're not, the owners of
the teams and like, and that happened in that was
(18:18):
generational turnover in essence, right, Basically after ten years, the
wars just kind of disappear and the stat heads the
imates are running the asylum, right, the stat heeads are
in charge after all. Right, Which is the other thing
about like insiders outsider paradigms or knowledge is that, like
you know, there are a lot of, if you will,
evolutionary advantages for outsiders, right.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Number one, And I guess I'm going with the evolution metaphor.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
They have like kind of more variation in terms of
not genetic variation, but in terms of ideas. Right, They're
going to try new things and they might try and fail,
but we're in a competitive world.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
We discover this idea is eventually.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
I mean, there is like kind of an irony slash
paradox where like, you know, you want to be an outsider,
but not too much of an outsider, right, So it's
like there's a lot of there's a lot of kind
of qualifications on like who is outsider enough, But like
you know, First of all, as you get to be
more of an insider, than various bad things happen.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
Number one, you become more more risk averse, more defensive
of your position. Number Two, you kind of gain more
political power. And there are things that are burdensome about
having power, literally, everything from having more meetings to if
you say.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Things off the cuff and people will look at you funny,
you have more to lose, right, you know.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
I think there's also a thing where, you know, as
people age, then they may lose some degree of initiative
and energy. And if you're kind of in a comfortable position,
then you may kind of stop fighting for new ideas
so much, stop changing your mind quite so much. Right,
you know, if you acquire power, then you can become
(19:55):
either a target for or a conduit for political power too, right,
so you can become the target of your political opponents.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
You can become a politicized yourself.
Speaker 4 (20:05):
There's not often not that much self awareness from insight
in general, whereas like outsiders who don't fit in have
to be a little bit more aware of their of
their surroundings so to speak, right, and they have to
know how to like code switch and things like that
you know, you also can just kind of get there's
a little bit of the innovator's dilemma thing too, where like,
(20:26):
as you've become more powerful, you develop more commitments to
your constituents, to your employers, to everything else, you get
bogged down, hard to innovate and so forth. Right, However,
when the outsiders become powerful or become insiders, they can
have gigantic egos. Right if you have had a contrarian
(20:47):
idea a couple of times and then later been proven
to be right and or to win the kind of
acclaim of the broader community, boy, that's a really fucking
nice feeling, right, It's kind of up there with like
in our world, like winning the main event of the
World Series of Poker or something, right, like no one's
ever gonna no one's ever gonna take that away from me,
and I prove my doubters wrong, because you.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Know, anytime you do something, it's really hard.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
It's hard to be a paradigm shifting scientist in general,
especially if you're you're a woman. Right until later win
the admiration and respect of so many people, and I
Jane Goodall seemed to handle that fame pretty well. But
I'm not sure that everybody does, right. She had a
funny line. She shot a video. I saw it on Twitter.
She said, I want us to be released until I'm dead, right,
(21:31):
And she put it very gently. She's like, you know,
if there were a rocket ship that were beamed out
to space and had certain people on it, I'm not
gonna say who, maybe Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
And President She she said.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Well, I would put put in there, and I would
put President She. I'd certainly put Patanyahu in there and
his far right government. I'm all on that.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Spaceship putting five on there. Yeah. That is, by the way,
from a Netflix documentary that's called Famous Last Words. So
she recorded it this past March, and it was only
to be released after she died.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
So just came out of those five. If you had
to have a bunk mate, right, you come in late
to the Space Shuttle, you have to bunk with somebody.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
You don't. Don't do that to me. No, I can't.
I can't. I think I would. I think I'd probably
kill myself before getting off the shuttle.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
She might be fine, right, Well.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Since I don't speak Chinese, I guess I guess. So
if we wouldn't be able to because all the other
ones there would be no Yeah, if you put me
with Putin, I think I think one of us is
gonna be dead very quickly, and it's probably gonna be me.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
If you could play video games with Elon, right, he might,
he might be fun.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I don't know. I wouldn't mind, you know, Trump, I'd
be fun for a night.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
I think he's actually like kind of like prissy about
some stuff though, right, he'd probably be Anyway, let's not
get into that.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Well, what we're talking about, DA were talking about speaking.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Of Okay, this is actually meant to be long circuitous
transition talking about like you know, Elon Musk is an
example of somebody who sees himself as an outsider, right,
I think is more of an outsider than like the
Libs would give him credit for. Right, Like you know,
(23:27):
Elon Musk is somebody you might say, is not very
aware of kind of what his own limits are necessarily, right,
So that can be a big That can be a
big problem potentially.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, No, that can definitely be a problem because you
do need to walk a fine line. And I think,
you know, like I said, Jangudal was an outsider, but
with like you know, someone from the inside who who
championed her, and she had a lot of insider knowledge
in terms of her in terms of her curiosity. I
think that she also seemed to have that kind of
(23:59):
golden personality that allowed her to transition to not just
insider status but trailblazer, right leader, paradigm shift creator, and
not lose her groundedness and her her curiosity and her
genuine sense of fun exploration, just wanting to do this
(24:21):
for the sake of science. And as you point out, Nate,
like that doesn't have to happen, right, A lot of
those same insiders who are the crusty old men, and yes,
I'm going to say men, because for the most part
they are, and we'll say maybe there's a crusty old
grand dame in there as well, but they were a
(24:42):
lot of them were trailblazers in their own day right.
A lot of them were kind of really innovative thinkers.
And then something happened, right, age happened, success happened, financial
success happened, success within academia, within your peers admiring you.
(25:03):
Kind of that happened, and then you have a lot
more to lose and including your kind of the things
that made you great. And it takes a very rare
person who would actually be able to withstand that. My
graduate advisor, Walter Michelle, who's someone who was, you know,
a trailblazer in the field of in the field of
(25:24):
psychology personality psychology, and he was someone who was incredibly
supportive of outsiders. I mean, he accepted me from a
very weird background to come into his program.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
I came to him from television. I was working as
a producer for Charlie Rose. I did, you know, study
psychology before. But I explained to him that I wanted
to be a writer and I just loved his work
and I really wanted to you know that I was
motivated and I'd do my own research and all this stuff,
but that I wanted to kind of to be a
(25:58):
writer and not be a psychologist. And he loved that,
and he was like, this is amazing. You know, we
need more people who just are genuinely curious. And most
people would have shown me the door, right and be like,
get the fuck out of here. If you don't want
to actually.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
Reporting on Charlie Rose. You probably were doing some field
work in psychology.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
I would oh, absolutely, I say that that, yes, that
is definitely the uh yes, that is definitely an accurate observation.
But I still and I think I might have told
this story on Risky Business before, but you know, with
(26:35):
the if I did. I'm sorry for repeating myself. But
let me remind our listeners that when I started working
with Walter Michelle and did some of my initial studies
on self control, I found the opposite of the results
we'd been expecting, and found that the people highest in
self control actually did the worst on these like stock
(26:55):
market you know, decision tasks because they didn't take negative
feedback well, right, They just they assumed that they were
a lot smarter and they didn't learn, which was this
very avrrent find. And I was really scared of telling
Walter that this was the case, because his entire career
(27:18):
was built around the notion that self control good, right,
delay of gratification good. And I was like, uh, oh right,
self control people not doing well, and I like I delayed.
And I remember standing outside his office being like, fuck,
you know, this is bad. And then he was just
he was like a child. He was so excited. He's like,
(27:39):
I'm so excited that you found something bad about self control. Yes, like,
let's see where it goes. Get more data, Like do
this again, does it replicate? You know, this is great,
and that is I think that's very rare. But that's
the hallmark of someone who was in it for the
right reasons and who was motivated by kind of curiosity
and genuine love of learning. And I don't think that
(28:00):
it's actually I don't think that it's an artifact. I
think it's a feature that Walter Michelle was also someone
who was an artist. He actually had some solo shows
while he was alive and kind of experimented in all
those media that he read avidly outside of psychology that
(28:21):
he loved that I wanted to write, like, I think
that those things go hand in hand, right, because it
helps you stay outsidery while being on the inside, and
I think that that is crucially important.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
No, it's a good I mean this is putting it
way too clinically, but like it's also a good life practice.
But like it's a good hedging strata. I mean, this
is want to stop piece of advice I give to
like any young person choosing your career right, make sure
that all your friends, all your network. If you want
to talk about peopleho are more frenemies whatever, Right, make
(28:55):
sure they're not all in your field of work a
because they'll provide opportunities to escape that field you need to.
But like, you know, like I don't spend a lot
of time talking to political insight, even though in principle
I'm like, well I can have a have coffee with them,
and if they're if everything they tell me is bullshit,
(29:18):
then I don't have to let it influence my judgment
at all. Right, I just think it involves like a
lot of work to maintain those relationships, and it's kind
of hard.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Not to me even, you know, even you know, in media,
I know more people, right, And so with media, I
you know, I'm like, okay, well I want to you know,
maybe when.
Speaker 4 (29:37):
I criticize this person, and and but like I know
this person and I know the person who knows them,
and so I'm like, you know, you have to be
a little bit more careful, right.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
You know. There's a lot of.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Value in in in not giving a fuck, And one
way you cannot give a fuck without facing existential risks
to your career is to have other fallbacks that you
can have potentially and by the way, can also be
like I think, you know, I think Jane goodall embraced.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
It or at least came to peace with it. But
like being a.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
Hero to people or becoming this I mean, you know,
one way to find celebrity is that, like, you no
longer have control of your own image and likeness in
a way, right that people will have ideas about you
that don't match the real you, and in fact are
some stylized version of you that maybe weaponized against you,
(30:30):
or if not against you, then at you know, perpendicularly
to like what you're trying to accomplish, right, you become
an avatar for something and like, and that can be
quite difficult, you know. I think I've I've dealt with that,
where you know, I do a lot of things. I'm
like way more famous on the election forecast and anything else,
which I kind of give the least a fuck about, right,
I think it's good work, but like I don't really.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Give a fuck, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
But at the same time, like I wouldn't have like
the privilege in the income and things like that if
if I weren't well known for that and so so
you know, any type of like nerd who makes it famous.
I'm I'm I'm sympathetic, and I'm sympathetic if they if
(31:12):
they keep it real by like, yeah, you know, the
different ways to keep it real. Maybe you speak truth
to power, maybe you're very judicious in what you say, right,
But like, I think they're definitely better and worse.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Ways to do it.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
And there are different versions of it that don't become
it don't well becoming a boring old number of the establishment.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
You know, Yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely, and I do you know,
I do think that maintaining that vitality is crucial to
making sure that you do stay relevant up until the
very last day. Right, that you're someone like good all
that when you die, like the world mourns, right, the
world notices because you've been advancing the field the entire time.
(32:00):
And we'll be back right after this. There was an
interesting study that I saw that came out a few
years ago. You basically how much does an outsider status
actually matter? And this was done by Gino Katani and
(32:25):
Simone Feriani, and they actually looked at Hollywood, So they
looked at around twelve thousand Hollywood professionals and creative success
you know awards, you know, critical acclaim, et cetera, et cetera.
And they basically did one of those you know charts
(32:46):
where you look at kind of the the networks, like
the circles of influence, where you have like the center
of the network and then you have the periphery of
the network. There's a specific word for that, right, And
I'm not sure what the specific word for it is,
but you understand what I'm talking about visually. And so
they wanted to see kind of where are kind of
(33:07):
the most successful artists. Are they at the center, right, Like,
are they like really in the middle of things? Are
they at the periphery of connections? And they found that
it was neither. That it was actually people who were
kind of at the uh, the nexus between the center
(33:28):
and the periphery, right, So they actually had like they
weren't really on the outside, but they also were not
in the center, so they had outsider connections and kind
of outside our cred but they also had some industry
inns and people who supported them from the inside, which
I actually found remarkably similar. If you think about Jane
(33:52):
Goodall to kind of what she looks like in the
sense that she was on the outside, and yet she
did have someone who was at the very center. He
was the single, you know, most famous I think primatologist
at the time, who was her champion and who was
able to kind of push her along. And so yeah,
it was And by the way, I found this very
(34:12):
funny in the study of Hollywood. Basically, critics like it
if you look kind of outsidery, they give you really
good critical reviews. But if you want to get like Oscars,
and you want to get really high awards, you need
the industry insiders to vote for you as well, so
you have to walk this fine line. So it was
(34:32):
Actually it's an interesting study, but I think it's a
little bit flawed because you do Hollywood is a weird
place where you have these weird arcane voting systems, and
you really have to have some sort of politicking to
get into those systems as well. And that's not I mean,
that's true of academia. It's it's not quite the same,
(34:53):
but academia also has a lot of politicking and a
lot of those arcane systems in place, I guess, and
who gets tenure, who doesn't get tenure. All that stuff
is also incredibly fraught. So I take it back. I'm
just thinking out loud here. Maybe holly Wood isn't a
bad facsimile of academia.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
No, Look, I think it's true.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
In a lot of you know, everyone's maintaining their independent,
outsider cred and most people also like power and access
to power, you know what I mean, And there are
trade offs between those things, and there's a lot of
walking the tightrope brand management, whatever you want to call it,
(35:37):
involved in trying to kind of have your cake and
eat it too.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, Nate, what do you find the hardest kind of
the I don't even know how to phrase this, but
like the idea generation, all of that, like the creative
stuff or I think that's different for different people, like
the marketing and the actually like being able to get
it heard because there is I mean, those are skills
(36:02):
that are not always complementary, and there are some people
who are very good at one and not great at
the other, and in order to be successful in a
lot of industry, you really need both. And I'm gonna
say something that's very politically incorrect and people might get
really mad, but I'm just gonna say it anyway. Jane
(36:24):
Goodall was a knockout. She was hot, Like she is
a tall, gorgeous blonde like I see her and I'm
like whoa, Like holy shit, girl, like you're stunning and
I'm sorry, Like that couldn't have hurt. I'm not saying
that it had any like her, she is a genius,
like her mind, her observational ability, like all of that is.
(36:48):
We're not doubting any of that. But she was her
own marketing in a way, right, Like you put her
on a poster and people are going to be interested.
And I'm not trying to diminish in any way what
she did, which is why I'm saying this at the
very end of the show and not the beginning, but
like it helped her with things that she probably would
(37:09):
interested in because she was just interested in the chimps.
But she ended up being such a forceful I think,
such a forceful marketing phenomenon, partly because of the full package.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
No, Look, I think there is some minimum thresh of
for looking at successful people who are successful intellectuals, right,
particularly the ones that become like more kind of commercially successful.
I think it's important distinction, right, people who like become
well known generally and or make some money from that, right,
Like there's usually a fairly high baseline of charisma of
(37:50):
some kind. Yea, right, yeah, no, Look, I'm always motivated
myself by like the word. You know, my satisfaction is
when I published something, I finish a model, you finished
a book chapter, right, and like file it. Like that's
more satisfaction from me than like whether it gets like
praised or whatever or not later on and right, But
at the same at the same time, you know, I
(38:14):
kind of was an internet entrepreneur in my own way,
and you have to market your content. And if you're
an artist in particular, even more than a scientist, you
really have to market the fuck out of out of yourself, right.
And that's like, you know, it's like it's like half
the game, I think, and there are different ways to
play it. You don't have to do ways that are
fake or uncomfortable, right, I think sometimes you know kind
of people who like who need to be more deliberate
(38:35):
about it.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
It's true, and Jane Goodall definitely wanted her work to
be known. I Mean, one of the first things she
did when she came back and started kind of getting
her PhD is write a popular book about what she discovered,
not an academic treatise, and people at academia hated this,
but she knew, right, she knew that she needed to popularize,
and to her that was incredibly important. And so because
(38:58):
for her, you know, she wanted to protect the natural environment,
she wanted people, she wanted to protect the rights of
the chimpanzee. She wanted all of these things that could
only come if she became a very powerful spokesperson for getting.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
It can be one way to have this best of
both worlds scenario where like, you know, you're very tenure
and you're able to be intellectly free, but you can
gain variety notoriety, right, you have fewer restrictions on like
outside activity than you would at a corporate employer.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Can also be the worst of both worlds.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Though, right.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
It can also be like that, like, you know, there's
a ton of group think, there's a ton of academic politics,
and soe you kind of like very restricted that way,
and you maybe don't realize how poorly the communication you're
encouraged to use an academic paper will come across to
like a smart outsider, right, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
And I think just to Just to sum up, Jangodall
someone who just intuitively understood all of this, and someone
who managed to not only maintain her relevance but stay relevant,
stay outsider even as she became the most insider of
them all. And so I think that we can even
(40:11):
if you have nothing to do with psychology or animal
cognition or any of that, I think that there's a
lot here that you can take away from this in
terms of, you know, how to think about approaching your careers,
how to think about thinking, how to think about making
an impact on the world. Even at the very end.
She said, even if the world is going to go
(40:33):
up in flames, go down kicking and screaming.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Even if this is the end of humanity as we
know it, let's fight to the very end. It's better
to go on fighting to the end than just to
give up and say okay.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
And I think that that's a you know's that's a
great message for insiders and outsiders alike. Let us know
what you think of the show. Reach out to us
at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM. Risky Business is
hosted by me Maria Kanakova.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
And by me Nate Silver. The show was a cool
production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced
by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya gerwit Lydia,
Jean Kott and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our
executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
If you like the show, please rate and review us
so other people can find us too, But once again,
only if you like us. We don't want those bad
reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.
Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making
better decisions.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm Maria Kanakova and I'm Nate Silver.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
So today on the show, Nate, we're going to be
talking about someone who was an absolute pioneer in not
only her field, but just in general in the world.
Jane Goodall, who died last week. You know, she came
to a lot of her breakthroughs from a very untraditional
outsider perspective, and so we'll be going a little bit
(00:56):
into her legacy and also talking about, you know, just
the importance of outsider thought, curiosity, the things that make
people truly successful in whatever field they choose to pursue.
You know, how can we learn from Jene Goodall and
actually apply it to our own careers, our own approaches
(01:18):
to life. And we'll talk We'll get into a lot
of detail about Jane Goodall's own life and the fact
that she was known mostly for her work with chimpanzees.
But there's a funny answer that she gave when she
was asked about her favorite animal.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
My favorite animal, everybody thinks is a chimpanzee. But it's
not true. Chimpanzees are so like people that you know,
some chimpanzees are really not nice at all, just like
some people really not nice. My favorite animal altogether is
a dog, because dogs have taught me so much, and
dogs are so faithful, and dogs give unconditional love, and
(02:00):
I don't like to think of a world without dogs.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
So let's let's dive right in, Nate. Jane Goodall. She
was someone who was very influential to me as a psychologist,
but I'm assuming she was probably not quite as front
and center to you, right, I'm guessing you were aware
of her influence, but probably, you know, not someone who
influenced your career choice or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Maria, No.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
I look, I was going to make a joke that
the only thing I know about Jane Goodall is from
Gorillas in the Miss, Right, the Sigourney Weaver character.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
It's not her.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
A There's more than one woman scientist, apparently, and she
was not the scientist who inspired Grills in the Miss.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So I know not very much about her. But sometimes
it's fun. Sometimes you're the backseat driver. Today I'm the
backseat driver.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
Right, I'm gonna hear you talk about why you admire
Jane Goodall and just backseat drive.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, So let me. Yeah, let me just say a
little bit about why I really admire her. Obviously, she
was just a pioneer in terms of what women can accomplish.
She died at the age of ninety one, which just
gives you a sense of when she started her career.
(03:12):
Right at that point, you know, in when she was
just starting out, there were not a lot of role
models for women who were going into the sciences, and
I think that she really paved the way for a
lot of people to have the careers that they have today. Nate.
I think we've talked on the show before about the
(03:34):
importance kind of in career choices of role models, right,
and of being able to visualize yourself in a certain career.
And there's a ton of work that shows that. You know,
if you see someone who looks like you, who seems
like you, who's similar to you, doing something, you'd be like, oh,
maybe I can do that thing. So for Jane Goodall
to become, you know, this pioneering researcher was absolutely huge.
(03:56):
But in terms of her contribution to science, I learned
the most about her work when I was getting my
PhD in psychology in a course called animal cognition which
was all about animal intelligence, kind of animal emotions, how
animals think, and that course would have probably, well, I
wouldn't say probably, would literally have not existed without Jane Goodall,
(04:19):
because what she did was basically show that animals were
much more sophisticated than we previously thought, and that they
had a lot more in common with humans than science
had previously thought. So she observed, you know, her initial
contribution when she went to Africa to study chimpanzees in Tanzania,
(04:47):
and she observed them using tools, and not just using tools,
but creating tools, right, something that didn't exist, and she said, basically,
you know, I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Holy shit.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Up until this point, we assumed that this was something
that was unique to humans. And so she basically change
the way that we thought about animals and what animals
were capable of. And so she gave birth to this
entire field of animal cognition and of realizing that, hey,
you know, there is actually a lot going on here.
(05:26):
Animals are capable of emotions, animals can recognize and experience death,
animals can solve problems, and so I think that is
kind of from a purely scientific standpoint, One of her
central contributions to the study of the mind. And as
a psychologist, you know, even though I don't study animals,
(05:49):
I appreciate that she gave us deeper insight into both
humans and animals through that very simple seeming in twenty
twenty five, but back in the sixties, just absolutely wow,
leap that. Hey, you know, chimpanzees think and they react,
and they're smart and they do all sorts of fascinating
(06:11):
things that people didn't really think to look for before.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Do you think like workers are pissed off that they're
They're like, we're fucking as smart as humans, right, so
have like opposable thumbs.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
This fucking sucks.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, No, I mean, I it's so funny, Like, yes,
I do think that there are lots of pissed off
animals there By the way, one of the less kind
things that Jane Goodall discovered in her work with chimpanzees.
And I was actually, you know, I remember when I
realized this for the first time. It made me very
sad because Jane Goodall, you know, you've seen pictures of her,
(06:43):
you've heard her talk. She seems like such a hopeful, optimistic,
positive person, and she she was, but she discovered that,
you know, chimpanzees, first of all, they're omnivores. They're not
herbivares as people thought, and they actually go ahead and
seek meet and they kill, and they can be violent,
(07:05):
and they have wars and they're aggressive, and so, you know,
studying studying the chimps, Jane came to the conclusion that
you know, our basically, our predisposition to violence is innate,
and it can be very contagious. Right if one chip
becomes violent all of a sudden, you have these groups
of very violent chips who can wreak havoc and who
(07:29):
can do a lot of damage. Chimps are strong, and
so given how how much we share in common with them,
she's like, I think this is true of humans as well,
right that we Yes, I'm hopeful and optimistic and people
can be good as well, and we have a lot
of capacity for good. But we have to be careful
because we have a lot of instincts towards being violent
(07:49):
to each other. And if we see that sort of behavior,
it's very easy to catch from someone else.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Same with dolphins.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
By the way, dolphins are like rapists or like kill
small porpoises and things like that.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
You know, yeah, Oh, it's actually it's actually no, it's
it's crazy. I think it's important. You know, we're laughing,
but I think it's important understand that there's a lot
of like, yes, you know, we're all one interconnected ecosystem,
but it's not like kumbayah, like we're all one big
happy family. Like there's violence and animals that we that
(08:23):
are incredibly smart can also be you know, incredibly violent,
and they have warfare their territorial I mean, shit happens.
And I think that it is important to understand all
of that about the natural world. And Jane Goodall definitely did.
And one off, you know, one of her key breakthroughs
(08:43):
that she was very criticized for at first was actually
seeing chimpanzees as individuals, seeing that they have personalities, right,
that they can be distinguished from each other. And in
her initial report that she wrote up, she didn't do
what ethnographers did at the time, which was, you know,
(09:04):
say like chimpanzee twelve x B three said this like
she gave them names, right, she gave them She actually
empathized with them, she spent time with them, She got
them to trust her. She figured out how to win
their trust and was able to kind of observe them
closely because they let her. And that's crucial, right, they
(09:25):
actually let her, and they have to let you. Chimpanzees
are violent, like if they don't let you observe them,
you ain't see enough. This was before the day when
we could hide tiny cameras, right, So the chimpanzees got
to let you in and she was able to kind
of establish that trust and to be able to see
them in that way.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Is that a monkey in your background, Maria, or your shoulder?
Speaker 1 (09:48):
It is, see and it's not a chimpanzee. Do you
know why?
Speaker 2 (09:55):
No, it has a tail.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Chimpanzees do not have tails.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
I did not know that.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, yes, you learn something new from Jay. I didn't
do that on purpose. That is hilarious. Yeah. No.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
There's a famous scene from two thousand and one A
Space Odyssey, I think, in which like the monkeys, I
think they're monkeys.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Maybe they're champanzees. Now I don't know.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
When I saw the film, I was nineteen years old,
maybe not have been in a dose.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Of psychedelic mushrooms. But like they know, it's a famous scene.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
You didn't notice the bit? Are they had tails.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Didn't know it's where they had tails.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
But there's a famous scene where there's like a monolith,
but it basically the monkeys discovering how to manipulate tools.
Is this canonical metaphor for like human progress maybe to
her ultimate death ultimately? Right?
Speaker 2 (10:42):
And so you know that alone.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
Kind of kind of changes a narrative, not just a narrative,
but like the bilogical facts about like things that we
regard as fundamentally human.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
You know, the Holo scene is the name.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
For for the era in which mankind or humankind begins
to manipulate its environment with tools and technology. Right, And
if that kind of predates the rise of man, or
if the man the rise of mass more complicated, and
that has all types of implications for evolution and psychology
and everything else.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point because it
does once you realize that your conception of the what
makes you know man unique versus not, once that shifts,
then that's that's a huge that's a monumentally important change
in just what you see, you know, how you study,
(11:32):
how you conceive of humanity, and how you conceive of like, okay,
what's unique to people? And if this isn't unique, then
it actually prompts other questions and prompts a redefinition, and
it prompts a kind of reconceptualization of our past.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And we'll be right back after this break.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
One of the interesting things beyond Jane Goodall, but in
the center of psychology for us to talk about today night,
is you know how much that outsider perspective actually enabled
her to see things that people who had gone through
a more traditional, rigorous education system up to that point
(12:27):
could not see. I did a little bit of research,
because you know, it's obviously easy to kind of mythologize,
and I wanted to know, like, how how often is
it right that people who come from a less traditional
background are the ones that end up making these huge changes?
(12:48):
And it seems like Jane Goodall actually had a really
interesting combination of insider outsider kind of status that helped
her do what she did because she was an outsider.
She never went to college, she didn't have a formal education,
and yet from the tiniest age she was fascinated with
(13:10):
animals and became fascinated very early on round age four
is when she when she thinks it started with chimpanzees.
In particular and monkeys and primates, and so she didn't
end up going to college, and instead she went to
secretarial school learned how to be a secretary, and she
(13:34):
ended up you know, by the time she had finished
secretarial school, she had basically on her own read every
single book that was out there about Africa, about chimpanzees,
about apes, about all all about all of these different
different species, and about everything that she could basically that
(13:55):
you could find, and there wasn't much, but she had
read it all and she did. By the way, I
end up getting a PhD from Cambridge because her initial
work was so compelling that with the help of the
person who became her mentor, doctor Leaky, who was the
pre eminent ethnologist of the day, she was able to
(14:16):
get accepted into Cambridge University without an undergraduate degree to
end up getting a PhD. And so when she ended
up meeting doctor Leaky, he was very impressed because she
could basically answer any question that he asked her, even
though she had never gone to school. And so in
that sense, it's not like she was a total outsider
who was trained in I don't know, baseball and somehow
(14:38):
ended up coming to Africa and was like, ooh, I'm
very good at observing this. It was something that she
was passionate about and she was curious about, and that
she had on her own kind of taught herself as
an autodidect. But she when she came to Cambridge was
just criticized by everyone saying, you're doing it all wrong.
(15:00):
You are not supposed to look at chimpanzees this way.
You are not supposed to empathize. They don't have minds
of their own, they don't have personalities. You are project
onto them. And she was like, fuck you, I know better,
and she was right. And I think that that's, you know,
something where we can actually see a broader point, which
(15:20):
is that because she hadn't come up in academia, she
didn't know that she was doing anything wrong right. She
didn't know that you were quote unquote not supposed to
look at them a certain way or describe them a
certain way, and instead she just let her experience guide her.
And I think that that's a really interesting point because
(15:43):
if you look at a lot of people in a
lot of different fields who make really big discoveries, they
often don't come from kind of the traditional hierarchical background.
So I come out of academia, and I know that
you know, some of the people who are the toughest
to to change, right, the people who will really not
change their mind about anything, The people who argue basically
(16:07):
until death's door. That know, to stay with Jane Goodall
chimpanzees can't really use tools. Are people, you know, who
have established themselves in the field and whose work your
new ideas might challenge, right, kind of the the old establishment,
the real in group. Those are often the people who
(16:29):
are the most resistant to change. You. I'm sure you
read Nate. You went to the University of Chicago, so
I'm assuming that this is something that you read, maybe
in more than one class, Thomas Kuhne's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
Yeah, basically, you know, one way to simplify the argument,
right is like basically have to wait for people to
to die, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
That's a very.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
Good way of simplifying, because yeah, that's how you get
what's what Kuhn calls paradigm shifts, because otherwise, you know,
the the in group, they want to protect their old guard, right,
they want to protect kind of their their ideas, their legacies,
and so if you want scientif revolution to happen, don't
kill them. That's that's not the takeaway. But you do
(17:14):
need fresh eyes, fresh blood, people who don't feel threatened.
And so I think that that is kind of that's
some of why outsiders like Jane Goodall might end up
being successful. But you also need someone like a doctor Leaky,
who is the old guard and who is somehow not threatened, right,
who lets her in because she wouldn't have ever gotten
(17:34):
into Cambridge without him.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
Yeah, in my field term, you know, probably not as
earth shattering as Jane Goodall or the fundamental biology of
what makes us human and statistical and sabermetrics. I know
people know that urn probably our audience half of them do, right.
Sabermetrics is the statistical study of baseball that could be
expanded to other sports. You kind of saw a structure
(17:56):
of scientific revolutions thing occurring where like, you know, there
were these huge moneyball wars so called, where you have
the stat heads and they're kind of banished into like
a broom closet, right versus like the jocks, right, and like,
and now like basically every major sports franchise is like
a whole department of like stat nerds, right, they're often
running the teams or if they're not, the owners of
the teams and like, and that happened in that was
(18:18):
generational turnover in essence, right, Basically after ten years, the
wars just kind of disappear and the stat heads the
imates are running the asylum, right, the stat heeads are
in charge after all. Right, Which is the other thing
about like insiders outsider paradigms or knowledge is that, like
you know, there are a lot of, if you will,
evolutionary advantages for outsiders, right.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Number one, And I guess I'm going with the evolution metaphor.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
They have like kind of more variation in terms of
not genetic variation, but in terms of ideas. Right, They're
going to try new things and they might try and fail,
but we're in a competitive world.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
We discover this idea is eventually.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
I mean, there is like kind of an irony slash
paradox where like, you know, you want to be an outsider,
but not too much of an outsider, right, So it's
like there's a lot of there's a lot of kind
of qualifications on like who is outsider enough, But like
you know, First of all, as you get to be
more of an insider, than various bad things happen.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
Number one, you become more more risk averse, more defensive
of your position. Number Two, you kind of gain more
political power. And there are things that are burdensome about
having power, literally, everything from having more meetings to if
you say.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
Things off the cuff and people will look at you funny,
you have more to lose, right, you know.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
I think there's also a thing where, you know, as
people age, then they may lose some degree of initiative
and energy. And if you're kind of in a comfortable position,
then you may kind of stop fighting for new ideas
so much, stop changing your mind quite so much. Right,
you know, if you acquire power, then you can become
(19:55):
either a target for or a conduit for political power too, right,
so you can become the target of your political opponents.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
You can become a politicized yourself.
Speaker 4 (20:05):
There's not often not that much self awareness from insight
in general, whereas like outsiders who don't fit in have
to be a little bit more aware of their of
their surroundings so to speak, right, and they have to
know how to like code switch and things like that
you know, you also can just kind of get there's
a little bit of the innovator's dilemma thing too, where like,
(20:26):
as you've become more powerful, you develop more commitments to
your constituents, to your employers, to everything else, you get
bogged down, hard to innovate and so forth. Right, However,
when the outsiders become powerful or become insiders, they can
have gigantic egos. Right if you have had a contrarian
(20:47):
idea a couple of times and then later been proven
to be right and or to win the kind of
acclaim of the broader community, boy, that's a really fucking
nice feeling, right, It's kind of up there with like
in our world, like winning the main event of the
World Series of Poker or something, right, like no one's
ever gonna no one's ever gonna take that away from me,
and I prove my doubters wrong, because you.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Know, anytime you do something, it's really hard.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
It's hard to be a paradigm shifting scientist in general,
especially if you're you're a woman. Right until later win
the admiration and respect of so many people, and I
Jane Goodall seemed to handle that fame pretty well. But
I'm not sure that everybody does, right. She had a
funny line. She shot a video. I saw it on Twitter.
She said, I want us to be released until I'm dead, right,
(21:31):
And she put it very gently. She's like, you know,
if there were a rocket ship that were beamed out
to space and had certain people on it, I'm not
gonna say who, maybe Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
And President She she said.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Well, I would put put in there, and I would
put President She. I'd certainly put Patanyahu in there and
his far right government. I'm all on that.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Spaceship putting five on there. Yeah. That is, by the way,
from a Netflix documentary that's called Famous Last Words. So
she recorded it this past March, and it was only
to be released after she died.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
So just came out of those five. If you had
to have a bunk mate, right, you come in late
to the Space Shuttle, you have to bunk with somebody.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
You don't. Don't do that to me. No, I can't.
I can't. I think I would. I think I'd probably
kill myself before getting off the shuttle.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
She might be fine, right, Well.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Since I don't speak Chinese, I guess I guess. So
if we wouldn't be able to because all the other
ones there would be no Yeah, if you put me
with Putin, I think I think one of us is
gonna be dead very quickly, and it's probably gonna be me.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
If you could play video games with Elon, right, he might,
he might be fun.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I don't know. I wouldn't mind, you know, Trump, I'd
be fun for a night.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
I think he's actually like kind of like prissy about
some stuff though, right, he'd probably be Anyway, let's not
get into that.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Well, what we're talking about, DA were talking about speaking.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Of Okay, this is actually meant to be long circuitous
transition talking about like you know, Elon Musk is an
example of somebody who sees himself as an outsider, right,
I think is more of an outsider than like the
Libs would give him credit for. Right, Like you know,
(23:27):
Elon Musk is somebody you might say, is not very
aware of kind of what his own limits are necessarily, right,
So that can be a big That can be a
big problem potentially.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, No, that can definitely be a problem because you
do need to walk a fine line. And I think,
you know, like I said, Jangudal was an outsider, but
with like you know, someone from the inside who who
championed her, and she had a lot of insider knowledge
in terms of her in terms of her curiosity. I
think that she also seemed to have that kind of
(23:59):
golden personality that allowed her to transition to not just
insider status but trailblazer, right leader, paradigm shift creator, and
not lose her groundedness and her her curiosity and her
genuine sense of fun exploration, just wanting to do this
(24:21):
for the sake of science. And as you point out, Nate,
like that doesn't have to happen, right, A lot of
those same insiders who are the crusty old men, and yes,
I'm going to say men, because for the most part
they are, and we'll say maybe there's a crusty old
grand dame in there as well, but they were a
(24:42):
lot of them were trailblazers in their own day right.
A lot of them were kind of really innovative thinkers.
And then something happened, right, age happened, success happened, financial
success happened, success within academia, within your peers admiring you.
(25:03):
Kind of that happened, and then you have a lot
more to lose and including your kind of the things
that made you great. And it takes a very rare
person who would actually be able to withstand that. My
graduate advisor, Walter Michelle, who's someone who was, you know,
a trailblazer in the field of in the field of
(25:24):
psychology personality psychology, and he was someone who was incredibly
supportive of outsiders. I mean, he accepted me from a
very weird background to come into his program.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
I came to him from television. I was working as
a producer for Charlie Rose. I did, you know, study
psychology before. But I explained to him that I wanted
to be a writer and I just loved his work
and I really wanted to you know that I was
motivated and I'd do my own research and all this stuff,
but that I wanted to kind of to be a
(25:58):
writer and not be a psychologist. And he loved that,
and he was like, this is amazing. You know, we
need more people who just are genuinely curious. And most
people would have shown me the door, right and be like,
get the fuck out of here. If you don't want
to actually.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
Reporting on Charlie Rose. You probably were doing some field
work in psychology.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
I would oh, absolutely, I say that that, yes, that
is definitely the uh yes, that is definitely an accurate observation.
But I still and I think I might have told
this story on Risky Business before, but you know, with
(26:35):
the if I did. I'm sorry for repeating myself. But
let me remind our listeners that when I started working
with Walter Michelle and did some of my initial studies
on self control, I found the opposite of the results
we'd been expecting, and found that the people highest in
self control actually did the worst on these like stock
(26:55):
market you know, decision tasks because they didn't take negative
feedback well, right, They just they assumed that they were
a lot smarter and they didn't learn, which was this
very avrrent find. And I was really scared of telling
Walter that this was the case, because his entire career
(27:18):
was built around the notion that self control good, right,
delay of gratification good. And I was like, uh, oh right,
self control people not doing well, and I like I delayed.
And I remember standing outside his office being like, fuck,
you know, this is bad. And then he was just
he was like a child. He was so excited. He's like,
(27:39):
I'm so excited that you found something bad about self control. Yes, like,
let's see where it goes. Get more data, Like do
this again, does it replicate? You know, this is great,
and that is I think that's very rare. But that's
the hallmark of someone who was in it for the
right reasons and who was motivated by kind of curiosity
and genuine love of learning. And I don't think that
(28:00):
it's actually I don't think that it's an artifact. I
think it's a feature that Walter Michelle was also someone
who was an artist. He actually had some solo shows
while he was alive and kind of experimented in all
those media that he read avidly outside of psychology that
(28:21):
he loved that I wanted to write, like, I think
that those things go hand in hand, right, because it
helps you stay outsidery while being on the inside, and
I think that that is crucially important.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
No, it's a good I mean this is putting it
way too clinically, but like it's also a good life practice.
But like it's a good hedging strata. I mean, this
is want to stop piece of advice I give to
like any young person choosing your career right, make sure
that all your friends, all your network. If you want
to talk about peopleho are more frenemies whatever, Right, make
(28:55):
sure they're not all in your field of work a
because they'll provide opportunities to escape that field you need to.
But like, you know, like I don't spend a lot
of time talking to political insight, even though in principle
I'm like, well I can have a have coffee with them,
and if they're if everything they tell me is bullshit,
(29:18):
then I don't have to let it influence my judgment
at all. Right, I just think it involves like a
lot of work to maintain those relationships, and it's kind
of hard.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Not to me even, you know, even you know, in media,
I know more people, right, And so with media, I
you know, I'm like, okay, well I want to you know,
maybe when.
Speaker 4 (29:37):
I criticize this person, and and but like I know
this person and I know the person who knows them,
and so I'm like, you know, you have to be
a little bit more careful, right.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
You know. There's a lot of.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Value in in in not giving a fuck, And one
way you cannot give a fuck without facing existential risks
to your career is to have other fallbacks that you
can have potentially and by the way, can also be
like I think, you know, I think Jane goodall embraced.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
It or at least came to peace with it. But
like being a.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
Hero to people or becoming this I mean, you know,
one way to find celebrity is that, like, you no
longer have control of your own image and likeness in
a way, right that people will have ideas about you
that don't match the real you, and in fact are
some stylized version of you that maybe weaponized against you,
(30:30):
or if not against you, then at you know, perpendicularly
to like what you're trying to accomplish, right, you become
an avatar for something and like, and that can be
quite difficult, you know. I think I've I've dealt with that,
where you know, I do a lot of things. I'm
like way more famous on the election forecast and anything else,
which I kind of give the least a fuck about, right,
I think it's good work, but like I don't really.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Give a fuck, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
But at the same time, like I wouldn't have like
the privilege in the income and things like that if
if I weren't well known for that and so so
you know, any type of like nerd who makes it famous.
I'm I'm I'm sympathetic, and I'm sympathetic if they if
(31:12):
they keep it real by like, yeah, you know, the
different ways to keep it real. Maybe you speak truth
to power, maybe you're very judicious in what you say, right,
But like, I think they're definitely better and worse.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Ways to do it.
Speaker 4 (31:29):
And there are different versions of it that don't become
it don't well becoming a boring old number of the establishment.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
You know, Yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely, and I do you know,
I do think that maintaining that vitality is crucial to
making sure that you do stay relevant up until the
very last day. Right, that you're someone like good all
that when you die, like the world mourns, right, the
world notices because you've been advancing the field the entire time.
(32:00):
And we'll be back right after this. There was an
interesting study that I saw that came out a few
years ago. You basically how much does an outsider status
actually matter? And this was done by Gino Katani and
(32:25):
Simone Feriani, and they actually looked at Hollywood, So they
looked at around twelve thousand Hollywood professionals and creative success
you know awards, you know, critical acclaim, et cetera, et cetera.
And they basically did one of those you know charts
(32:46):
where you look at kind of the the networks, like
the circles of influence, where you have like the center
of the network and then you have the periphery of
the network. There's a specific word for that, right, And
I'm not sure what the specific word for it is,
but you understand what I'm talking about visually. And so
they wanted to see kind of where are kind of
(33:07):
the most successful artists. Are they at the center, right, Like,
are they like really in the middle of things? Are
they at the periphery of connections? And they found that
it was neither. That it was actually people who were
kind of at the uh, the nexus between the center
(33:28):
and the periphery, right, So they actually had like they
weren't really on the outside, but they also were not
in the center, so they had outsider connections and kind
of outside our cred but they also had some industry
inns and people who supported them from the inside, which
I actually found remarkably similar. If you think about Jane
(33:52):
Goodall to kind of what she looks like in the
sense that she was on the outside, and yet she
did have someone who was at the very center. He
was the single, you know, most famous I think primatologist
at the time, who was her champion and who was
able to kind of push her along. And so yeah,
it was And by the way, I found this very
(34:12):
funny in the study of Hollywood. Basically, critics like it
if you look kind of outsidery, they give you really
good critical reviews. But if you want to get like Oscars,
and you want to get really high awards, you need
the industry insiders to vote for you as well, so
you have to walk this fine line. So it was
(34:32):
Actually it's an interesting study, but I think it's a
little bit flawed because you do Hollywood is a weird
place where you have these weird arcane voting systems, and
you really have to have some sort of politicking to
get into those systems as well. And that's not I mean,
that's true of academia. It's it's not quite the same,
(34:53):
but academia also has a lot of politicking and a
lot of those arcane systems in place, I guess, and
who gets tenure, who doesn't get tenure. All that stuff
is also incredibly fraught. So I take it back. I'm
just thinking out loud here. Maybe holly Wood isn't a
bad facsimile of academia.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
No, Look, I think it's true.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
In a lot of you know, everyone's maintaining their independent,
outsider cred and most people also like power and access
to power, you know what I mean, And there are
trade offs between those things, and there's a lot of
walking the tightrope brand management, whatever you want to call it,
(35:37):
involved in trying to kind of have your cake and
eat it too.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, Nate, what do you find the hardest kind of
the I don't even know how to phrase this, but
like the idea generation, all of that, like the creative
stuff or I think that's different for different people, like
the marketing and the actually like being able to get
it heard because there is I mean, those are skills
(36:02):
that are not always complementary, and there are some people
who are very good at one and not great at
the other, and in order to be successful in a
lot of industry, you really need both. And I'm gonna
say something that's very politically incorrect and people might get
really mad, but I'm just gonna say it anyway. Jane
(36:24):
Goodall was a knockout. She was hot, Like she is
a tall, gorgeous blonde like I see her and I'm
like whoa, Like holy shit, girl, like you're stunning and
I'm sorry, Like that couldn't have hurt. I'm not saying
that it had any like her, she is a genius,
like her mind, her observational ability, like all of that is.
(36:48):
We're not doubting any of that. But she was her
own marketing in a way, right, Like you put her
on a poster and people are going to be interested.
And I'm not trying to diminish in any way what
she did, which is why I'm saying this at the
very end of the show and not the beginning, but
like it helped her with things that she probably would
(37:09):
interested in because she was just interested in the chimps.
But she ended up being such a forceful I think,
such a forceful marketing phenomenon, partly because of the full package.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
No, Look, I think there is some minimum thresh of
for looking at successful people who are successful intellectuals, right,
particularly the ones that become like more kind of commercially successful.
I think it's important distinction, right, people who like become
well known generally and or make some money from that, right,
Like there's usually a fairly high baseline of charisma of
(37:50):
some kind. Yea, right, yeah, no, Look, I'm always motivated
myself by like the word. You know, my satisfaction is
when I published something, I finish a model, you finished
a book chapter, right, and like file it. Like that's
more satisfaction from me than like whether it gets like
praised or whatever or not later on and right, But
at the same at the same time, you know, I
(38:14):
kind of was an internet entrepreneur in my own way,
and you have to market your content. And if you're
an artist in particular, even more than a scientist, you
really have to market the fuck out of out of yourself, right.
And that's like, you know, it's like it's like half
the game, I think, and there are different ways to
play it. You don't have to do ways that are
fake or uncomfortable, right, I think sometimes you know kind
of people who like who need to be more deliberate
(38:35):
about it.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
It's true, and Jane Goodall definitely wanted her work to
be known. I Mean, one of the first things she
did when she came back and started kind of getting
her PhD is write a popular book about what she discovered,
not an academic treatise, and people at academia hated this,
but she knew, right, she knew that she needed to popularize,
and to her that was incredibly important. And so because
(38:58):
for her, you know, she wanted to protect the natural environment,
she wanted people, she wanted to protect the rights of
the chimpanzee. She wanted all of these things that could
only come if she became a very powerful spokesperson for getting.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
It can be one way to have this best of
both worlds scenario where like, you know, you're very tenure
and you're able to be intellectly free, but you can
gain variety notoriety, right, you have fewer restrictions on like
outside activity than you would at a corporate employer.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Can also be the worst of both worlds.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Though, right.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
It can also be like that, like, you know, there's
a ton of group think, there's a ton of academic politics,
and soe you kind of like very restricted that way,
and you maybe don't realize how poorly the communication you're
encouraged to use an academic paper will come across to
like a smart outsider, right, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
And I think just to Just to sum up, Jangodall
someone who just intuitively understood all of this, and someone
who managed to not only maintain her relevance but stay relevant,
stay outsider even as she became the most insider of
them all. And so I think that we can even
(40:11):
if you have nothing to do with psychology or animal
cognition or any of that, I think that there's a
lot here that you can take away from this in
terms of, you know, how to think about approaching your careers,
how to think about thinking, how to think about making
an impact on the world. Even at the very end.
She said, even if the world is going to go
(40:33):
up in flames, go down kicking and screaming.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Even if this is the end of humanity as we
know it, let's fight to the very end. It's better
to go on fighting to the end than just to
give up and say okay.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
And I think that that's a you know's that's a
great message for insiders and outsiders alike. Let us know
what you think of the show. Reach out to us
at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM. Risky Business is
hosted by me Maria Kanakova.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
And by me Nate Silver. The show was a cool
production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced
by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya gerwit Lydia,
Jean Kott and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our
executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
If you like the show, please rate and review us
so other people can find us too, But once again,
only if you like us. We don't want those bad
reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.
Hosts And Creators
Maria Konnikova
Nate Silver
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