# Why Following Your Dreams Isn't Enough  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: Why Following Your Dreams Isn't Enough - Show: Hidden Brain - Owner / Host: Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam - Guests: [Robb Willer](https://share.snipd.com/person/32b9b1cc-1359-496a-afb5-c8f4e7531870), [Huggy Rao](https://share.snipd.com/person/2ca5c914-4bec-4ef5-b788-8f488b5826a0) - Episode publish date: 2025-11-10 - Episode AI description: Huggy Rao, a Stanford professor specializing in entrepreneurship and organizational design, and Robb Willer, a sociologist focused on political engagement, dive into the complexities of pursuing dreams. Rao discusses the critical balance between creative vision and practical execution, using case studies like the failed Fyre Festival and the DMV's successful reforms. Willer answers listener questions about bridging political divides, emphasizing the importance of respectful dialogue and understanding different perspectives to foster better engagement. - Mentioned books: [Scaling Up Excellence, Getting to More Without Settling for Less](https://share.snipd.com/book/12a77e08-7b9b-49a9-8b7c-51c5d1cd505f) by [Robert Sutton](https://share.snipd.com/person/afa986d8-6aeb-4877-88ac-bac3b2ebd034), [Huggy Rao](https://share.snipd.com/person/2ca5c914-4bec-4ef5-b788-8f488b5826a0), [The Friction Project](https://share.snipd.com/book/5364e530-b034-40e1-ae9d-4a254dcd3b99) by [Robert Sutton](https://share.snipd.com/person/afa986d8-6aeb-4877-88ac-bac3b2ebd034), [Huggy Rao](https://share.snipd.com/person/2ca5c914-4bec-4ef5-b788-8f488b5826a0) - Duration: 01:30:07 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/55115ea2-3661-40ee-8e9b-5a1a5bf5f193) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/c94a26f6-1a03-4020-a574-bec10c59f432) - Export date: 2026-02-17T23:26:28 ## Snips ### [When Hype Outran Capacity](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93522fb0-0a44-4384-b08b-27d4b42f66be) 🎧 04:39 - 10:36 (05:57) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/4806cb11-1a98-417e-974b-2bbccdd93b50" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - The Fyre Festival promised luxury domes and celebrity chefs but delivered disaster relief tents, soaked mattresses, and cheese sandwiches. - Attendees were stranded without shelter, money, medical care, or flights, leading to lawsuits and prison for organizer Billy McFarland. #### 💬 Quote > They didn't have expertise, they didn't have experience. You know, they were trying to do something within a period of six to eight weeks that takes about 12 months to accomplish. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao on the failures behind the Fyre Festival #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** In 2016, an American businessman named Billy McFarlane had an app that he was looking to promote. It was called the Fyre App, F-Y What was this app designed to do? Well, **Huggy Rao:** the idea behind the app, Shankar, was to connect artists with clients for performances, appearances, and the like. Part of what they wanted to do was to have a luxury music festival, And initially, the idea was to sort of promote the app, if you will, for booking musical talent. But then what happened was the festival itself took on a momentum of its own and swiftly overshadowed the app. **Shankar Vedantam:** So I understand they began selling tickets and some VIP packages ran to $12,000. What were ticket buyers being promised for that kind of money? **Huggy Rao:** Very exotic things, I might add. They promised accommodation in geodesic domes that were eco-friendly and presumably modern. And celebrity chefs would provide them meals. That was the launch of the app, if you will. So **Shankar Vedantam:** I understand that this event was going to take place in the Bahamas, and Billy McFarlane had heard rumors that the island on which they were going to host the event was associated with the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. And this becomes part of the marketing, the branding, the hype, right? Completely. **Huggy Rao:** You know, the moment you say Escobar, I mean, you know, quickly, you know, you get notoriety, you get kind of visibility. For this one, they released material saying this festival was being organized on Pablo Escobar's private island. You know, the sad reality was it was a remote parking lot north of the Sandals Resort. Oh, **Shankar Vedantam:** my gosh. Wow. So the language used to describe this festival, it was called an immersive music festival, two transformative weekends. It was supposed to be on the boundaries of the impossible. I mean, this was really being pitched to the sky. But as the big day started to approach, major musical acts started to pull out. Why were they pulling out, Hagi? **Huggy Rao:** Well, they had, if you will, aspirations of what this festival ought to be. But they completely overlooked the details. There wasn't enough dirt underneath the fingernails of people who were responsible for making this happen. So they didn't have expertise, they didn't have experience. You know, they were trying to do something within a period of six to eight weeks that takes about 12 months to accomplish. **Shankar Vedantam:** Billy McFarlane and the other organizers elected to house the guests in tents. The day before the festival was to start, heavy **Huggy Rao:** rains lashed the island. By then, the first flights were already landing in. People were there, and these initial arrivals were brought to an, I guess what can be described as an impromptu beach party that lasted for six hours. Basically, they were plied with alcohol and they were just waiting where people were scrambling to build the site. **Shankar Vedantam:** I mean, that's just horrifying. At some point now, the people need a place to sleep at night. What happens? Were there enough tents for everyone? **Huggy Rao:** Not really. I mean, you had scattered disaster relief tents with dirty floors, with soaking wet mattresses and the like. And you can imagine and visualize that late arrivals were being brought to the festival by school bus. as soon as they came in the disarray and the lack of infrastructure was very very clear to all of the incoming guests. The gourmet food of course was nothing more than cheese sandwiches served in foam containers. **Shankar Vedantam:** Yeah, yeah. So apparently there were the problems included a lack of medical personnel on site. There wasn't running water. People were told that this was a cash free festival. And so they hadn't brought money to the event and they couldn't even figure out a way to to make alternate arrangements. **Huggy Rao:** That's right. You know, initially, as a matter of fact, I think there were about 500 or so people. They just didn't have enough tents. And they just stole them from others. And the attendees couldn't even go to the nearby Sandals Resort because it was actually peak season. So, you know, you can imagine people without food, without shelter, without money. You can imagine what kind of social disintegration quickly enshrows. **Shankar Vedantam:** So eventually, apparently, only a small number of local musicians ever played at this festival for a few hours. And of course, people started to see that things were falling apart. They were scrambling to get home. But even here, it was difficult to get flights back. People were stuck at the airport for hours. So even the evacuation turned out to be something of a disaster. Completely. **Huggy Rao:** First of all, I mean, there was, you know, an onrush of potential passengers to the airport. Even that was really delayed. And so you've got people essentially in a trap. **Shankar Vedantam:** What was the aftermath of all of this, Hagi? What happened to the organizers, Billy McFarland and his colleagues? Did they face any penalties for doing this? **Huggy Rao:** They certainly did. --- ### [A Monument Left Half-Built](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2d83e63d-997d-4f86-b820-409a0a2ce020) 🎧 14:10 - 17:17 (03:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/2667e898-de60-4c75-b2e4-49f1b537a656" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - North Korea began building the Ruigyong Hotel to outdo a South Korean skyscraper but lacked materials and expertise. - Construction halted amid economic crisis, leaving a structurally unsound 'hotel of doom' abandoned for decades. #### 💬 Quote > The building just simply sits there. It sits unoccupied, vacant for decades. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao on North Korea's abandoned Ruigyong Hotel #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** In Pyongyang, North Korea, construction begins on a new hotel. But it's not any old hotel. It's supposed to outdo a South Korean hotel that was, at the time, the tallest hotel in the world? **Huggy Rao:** Yes, absolutely. This was the Rugeong Hotel, I think also called the capital of the willows, I believe, given the older name for Pyongyang. And indeed, it was a response to what the South Koreans were doing with the Olympics. So they wanted to build a hotel for a socialist version of the Olympics, the World Festival of Youth. And the idea was to build this massive hotel called the Roo Gyeong Hotel. And to me, Shankar, the rivalry between two nations and two leaders and all of that, it really makes me wonder about how leaders can easily be seduced by the edifice complex, if you will, as opposed to the edifice complex. And this is a stellar example of the edifice **Shankar Vedantam:** complex. So the building was to have three wings, each sloped at a 75-degree angle that converged into what looked like a pyramid, 3,000 rooms, 1,000 feet tall. It was supposed to be an engineering marvel that would demonstrate that North Korea was superior to South Korea. The only thing was **Huggy Rao:** the North Koreans didn't have expertise and experience with a variety of building materials. So typically, they build things with concrete. And to gain that thousand feet height and all of that, you truly had to have an enormous base. And that kind of made it for **Shankar Vedantam:** an even larger kind of footprint, if you will. So **Shankar Vedantam:** almost right from the beginning, the construction project runs into problems. It was to be built in time for this major sporting event, but I understand it wasn't ready by the time the sporting event rolls around? Yes. **Huggy Rao:** In fact, it wasn't because of a variety of engineering issues, even though the government had spent, you know, I assume billions of dollars. They'd also improved the airport, they'd kind of improved roads and everything. Unfortunately, at around this time, the Soviet Union was actually disintegrating, and aid and investment that the North Koreans were accustomed to from the Soviet Union, they actually kind of dwindled to a trickle. And North Korea was headed for an economic crisis. So it was this economic crisis that kind of led to the abandonment of this project. **Shankar Vedantam:** I see. So in 1992, this is five years after construction begins, the project is halted. And in fact, a crane is abandoned on top of the building. It must now look like a very strange pyramid. And the building just simply sits there. It sits unoccupied, vacant for decades. --- ### [Poetry Before Plumbing Is Dangerous](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf4bc462-7daa-44b9-9c3b-5726f95490d0) 🎧 18:36 - 20:04 (01:28) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/1776eb82-a774-48b6-8b3f-5a6c304f2ca9" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Jim March framed leadership as a balance of 'poetry' (vision) and 'plumbing' (operational detail). - Excessive focus on poetry without plumbing creates illusions that doom ambitious projects. #### 💬 Quote > If we get seduced only by the poetry and we forget the plumbing, we are going to be in the grip of, frankly, an illusion. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao explaining Jim March's 'poetry and plumbing' leadership idea #### 📚 Transcript **Huggy Rao:** Yeah, thank you. You know, I should immediately give credit to my wonderful colleague who sadly passed away several years ago, Jim March. He wrote a brilliant book. And that's kind of where he said, hey, leadership is a mix of poetry and plumbing. And he used poetry as a shorthand for purpose, if you will, lofty goals, lofty visions, and the like. And plumbing for operational details, efficiency, routines, and the like. And for him, you know, it was, how shall I put it, he saw this as part of like a perennial duality of leadership. The exuberant part of a leader's job, the poetry and the purpose, and the prosaic part of the job. And the prosaic part of the job had to do with simplicity, detail, and kind of making sure things kind of got done. And what the Fyre Festival and the Hotel of Doom are compelling examples of is how if we get seduced only by the poetry and we forget the plumbing, we are going to be in the grip of, frankly, an illusion. --- ### [When A Big Launch Breaks](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fdb83324-d3ea-40ae-9239-90141e58be79) 🎧 22:56 - 24:56 (01:59) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/3a53fb52-399e-40af-86a8-721d02bc2ec1" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - HealthCare.gov launched with huge traffic but catastrophic failures: millions visited and only a handful registered successfully. - The rollout failed because integration, verification, and system complexity were underestimated, later corrected by leadership changes. #### 💬 Quote > On the first day that HealthCare.gov was launched, four million unique visitors visited the portal, but only six were able to successfully register themselves. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao on the disastrous HealthCare.gov rollout #### 📚 Transcript **Huggy Rao:** Oh, my God. You know, this was after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. And then there was a website that was to be launched, and it was called healthcare.gov. The hope was that the platform would enroll lots of uninsured Americans, but the rollout was an exercise and complete disaster. As a matter of fact, on the first day that HealthCare.gov was launched, four million unique visitors visited the portal, but only six were able to successfully register themselves. Can you imagine that? You know, and then over the next few days, their site had 8 million visitors, but only 1% enrolled in that healthcare plan. And even those who enrolled encountered lots of errors and so on and so forth. Because, you know, it's like healthcare.gov was not a simple app. It was very complicated because it needed to integrate data from different sources. You needed data on social security numbers, data on income, and then you needed what the states were doing and all of that before matching people with private purveyors of insurance. You had to have ID verification. All of this is like pretty complex. And it's not just putting like an app out there. And that was why it actually ballooned into this tragic disaster. But subsequently, you know, it must be mentioned, there was remarkable recovery. The CTO of the Obama presidency, Todd Park, I think they changed the leadership. They fired a bunch of people. lots of other things happened in order to retrieve ground. And eventually it did kind of do better, much better. --- ### [Power Creates an Information Blindspot](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c9a72a0-a58b-4ba1-a910-08485d8b96ea) 🎧 25:00 - 26:14 (01:14) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/6f6310da-4d2f-41fd-b31e-b0327dae2ae1" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Powerful leaders often stop searching for problems and receive filtered feedback from aides, creating dangerous illusions. - That silence plus impatience drives competent doers underground and multiplies incompetence in organizations. #### 💬 Quote > People who are powerful and who feel they have power, they actually don't search much. It's people without power that search and figure out why things are happening the way they are. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao on why feedback fails up the hierarchy #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** former Hidden Brain guest, you both say that another reason we tend to prioritize poetry over plumbing is that the feedback mechanisms are broken and problems are not being reported to leaders. So people become silent and it creates the illusion that everything is working well? The reason you have illusion is 30 years of research shows **Huggy Rao:** us that people who are powerful and who feel they have power, they actually don't search much. It's people without power that search and figure out why are things happening the way they are. The other thing is, to your point, not only is there silence, people in power have an army of people making their life easy. So they also don't know how jobs three levels beneath them are done. So illusion hardens into impatience. Why couldn't we get it done yesterday and so on? And the moment you multiply illusion with impatience, what happens is the really competent doers, they go underground because they know this is a fast train right to nowhere. So you have incompetent people who are available to help you proceed with whatever you're doing. And now you have incompetence, multiplying, impatience and delusion. --- ### [Go See Ground Reality](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29d37c55-a81d-4773-9bb4-82f5265bed87) 🎧 35:43 - 37:27 (01:44) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/7460b295-6227-46c4-85e6-29756a8c60d3" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Visit frontline sites and collect direct observations rather than sampling superficially to understand operational reality. - Use that knowledge to redesign services so the organization 'goes to' users and reduces queues and friction. #### 💬 Quote > Steve visited all 90 field offices. He actually came back with something that was simple and profound. People don't need to come to the DMV. The DMV can go to them. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao on the California DMV transformation #### 📚 Transcript **Huggy Rao:** Yeah, Bob and I had the pleasure of writing a story about the transformation of the DMV in California. And there were two people from the outside, Steve Gordon being one of them. And what kind of fascinated me, and Bob as well, is Steve visited all 90 field offices. And, you know, I was kind of a little surprised by that. And I sort of wondered whether sampling might have helped. I mean, maybe one could have sampled 40 out of the 90 field offices or whatever. But, you know, Steve said something interesting and he said, look, you know, each field office feels it's unique. And so when we asked him, what was your big aha after you visited all of these field offices? He actually came back with something that was simple and profound. And his realization was, people don't need to come to the DMV. The DMV can go to them. So you don't have long queues and people waiting and so on. So how can the DMV go to them? One answer is through the web. You can, you know, renew your tags, your driver's licenses, pay the registration fees, all of that online. What if you don't have access to computers and tablets and so on? Well, they actually thought of a very cool thing. Look at the plumbing. People go to Safeway to buy groceries. Let's actually have kiosks where people can do all of that. What did they do? They concentrated immediately on reducing queue length by going to the users of the DMV. --- ### [Schedule Plumbing Sessions](https://share.snipd.com/snip/82ad0b20-69c5-40ff-bee6-11b6ae5e63a2) 🎧 40:36 - 41:12 (00:36) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/e92f7394-d21e-496b-afb0-00a9960becab" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Carve out dedicated time and scaffolds for plumbing work and force teams to plan under constrained resources. - Ask what you'd stop or change if you had half or a quarter of the resources to avoid uncontrolled addition. #### 💬 Quote > When you set aside time, you're signaling the importance of some activity. Let's assume you have half the resources. What would you do differently? > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao advising how to balance poetry and plumbing #### 📚 Transcript **Huggy Rao:** The kinds of scaffolds I'd recommend are, hey, let's assume you have half the resources. Let's assume you have quartered the resources. What would you do differently? What would change? What would you stop doing? And I think that's kind of what you want to orient people to do. So another way to think of plumbing and poetry, at least in the context that you've alluded to, Shankar is poetry, if you're not careful, can result in a lot of addition. Attention to plumbing. Make sure that whatever you're adding is balanced by **Shankar Vedantam:** whatever you're subtracting. --- ### [Use Premortems To Find Hidden Risks](https://share.snipd.com/snip/585742a0-b069-4083-8c4f-147e4a50d850) 🎧 41:23 - 46:53 (05:30) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ad4aeba2-5371-4580-8949-479bba3c0953" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Run premortems: imagine failure paths before spending money to surface hidden risks and staffing needs. - Use diverse teams to generate failure and success scenarios and let those findings reshape plans and budgets. #### 💬 Quote > The premortem is actually an exercise in time travel and storytelling. We're not doing this after the event occurred to assign blame. We're doing this even before we've spent any money. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao explaining premortems with Stanford Medicine example #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** The **Huggy Rao:** idea behind the premortem is, as the name itself implies, it's the opposite of a post-mortem. So we're not doing this after the event occurred assign blame. We're doing this even before we've spent any money, you know. So the premortem is actually an exercise in time travel and storytelling. We have a brilliant dean of the medical school at Stanford, Lloyd Minor, and he came here at roughly the same time I did, and he reached out to me and he said, you know, you study scaling, and he said, I want to scale Stanford medicine. And he had like a compelling idea. He said, hey, we have two hospitals on campus at Stanford and we have lots of molecular biologists. Wouldn't it be cool if we put them into teams, they develop new drugs, the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA gives us approval, and we can run clinical trials here. But he said, I want to do a premortem. I said, okay. And so I said, we need roughly 10 people. I said, let's randomly choose a couple of molecular biologists, a couple of MDs, a couple of nurses, a couple of pharmacists, and a couple of medical administrators. I took these 10 people. I randomly assigned them into two groups. So in one group, they were in the premortem of failure. The other group was in the premortem of success. The dean hasn't raised a dime of money. He hasn't hired anybody. Now to the five people in the premortem of failure, I gave them a made-up headline in a major newspaper dated six months out. And the headline read, Debacle at Stanford Medicine. And the first two lines of the story were, Patients are dying in clinical trials. Of course, nothing like this has happened. It's all time travel and exercise and imagination. So I told these five people, you write a one-page story of the four or five key events that culminated in the headline. Conversely, to the people in the success condition, I gave them a different headline, and the headline said, Stanford drugs save lives. And the first two lines were, new drugs from Stanford University are saving the lives of the very young and the very old and they had to write a story one page of the four or five events that led to the headline I got 10 stories **Shankar Vedantam:** So to recap, the premortem that Huggy organized for the dean of Stanford's medical school included about 10 people. They were a mix of biologists, physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators. Half the people were assigned to imagine a failed expansion of the medical school, and half were tasked to imagine a successful expansion. What did the volunteers assigned to the failure group think would be the reasons the plan went astray? What did the volunteers assigned to the success group think would be the reasons the plan succeeded? Hagi assigned them their writing task and waited to see what would come back. **Huggy Rao:** Interestingly, whenever I've done the premortem for hiring a CEO acquisition, premortems of failure arrive first in your inbox. And that tells you immediately, Shankar, that people in the organization find it far more easier to imagine failure than success. And the molecular biologist said, look, you know, people die in clinical trials because there's a lag in the transfer of knowledge to doctors. The MD said, we'll tell you why this is happening. They said, you know, the molecular biologists, sometimes they think the patient is only consuming the drug they've come up with. But patients take 10 other, 12 other drugs and interactions matter. And if you don't pay attention to that, that would be a problem. The third thing was people wrote and said, you know, we're doing lots of low power trials, you know, taking notes on patients, basically, you know, symptoms and the like and providing them to various organizations that want this to be done. And they said we do so many of them on top of them. If you have big trials, that would be a huge problem. On the success side pretty much everybody wrote and said Stanford succeeded because we subordinated our ego to the lives of patients. A number of people wrote and said Stanford succeeded because the molecular biologists consulted the statisticians early on in the design of the trial. The third thing that people wrote which surprised the dean and the others was Stanford succeeded because they hired very capable nurses who knew how to manage large-scale trials. Until then I don't think there was any budgetary provision to hire nurses and I remember asking the dean what did what pre-mortem do? And he put it beautifully. He said, you know, when I came in, he said, I fell in love with the poetry of my job. He said, raising money, hiring world-class talent. And I said, now, and he looked at me and he said, I got to fix the plumbing here. It's part of my responsibility. So as you can see, the dean knew that he had the plumber self in him and he had the poet self. Coming in, he had activated the poet self to the exclusion of the plumber self. What the premortem did was it activated the plumber's self. --- ### [Hire Sherpas Over Superstars](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d5fa379a-879a-46d3-bb33-3115b60aed9f) 🎧 47:33 - 48:56 (01:23) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b60db649-5e76-4b72-871c-97aa72102d0a" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Hire Sherpas not just stars: look for generous people with high energy who do extra, community-focused work. - Reward team players who understand ground reality and enable scaling rather than just spotlight talent. #### 💬 Quote > If you want to really hire good Sherpas, ... how generous are they? ... And how much energy do they have? Positive energy. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao on hiring Sherpas who enable execution #### 📚 Transcript **Huggy Rao:** Yeah, we shouldn't always think of the stars, the two people who ascend Everest. Because without the 50 Sherpas, they couldn't have done very much. So their performance, it's outcome of a team, in this case a very large team. And so it's the Sherpas that matter, it's the Sherpas that need to get rewarded. So what I always ask people is, if you want to really hire good Sherpas, at two things. One is how generous are they? Because without generosity it's very hard to do much in organizations. So that's one thing you've got to do. The other is how much energy do they have? Positive energy. You how much do they bring in? And in a lot of organizations quite honestly people don't know who their best sharpers I've actually had to go to organizations and tell them, if you really want to find your best Sherpas, comb through their LinkedIn pages, you'll see them doing a lot for the community. They're volunteering for the church, the Little League, and they're doing all these things. They have so much energy. How come that's not being channeled inside the organization? And I think those are the people who have contact with ground reality. They're observing interactions. They're having the interactions themselves. --- ### [Hands-On Leadership Turned A Defeat Around](https://share.snipd.com/snip/06bbc4d8-7167-44ce-9533-2364ca61e5fe) 🎧 49:18 - 52:37 (03:18) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/0a2253fc-90ec-4c9a-82dd-e11b633711a9" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - General Matthew Ridgway personally scouted Korea and demanded commanders know terrain; he fired those who didn't know and handed gloves to freezing soldiers. - His hands-on, no-nonsense plumbing leadership restored morale and turned retreat into offense. #### 💬 Quote > He calls all of these commanders ... If the guy said, you know, I don't know ... he'd fire them on the spot. You're jeopardizing my men. > — Huggy Rao Huggy Rao recounting Matthew Ridgway's leadership in Korea #### 📚 Transcript **Huggy Rao:** Matthew Ridgway, for me, arguably was the best U.S. general in the 20th century. Ridgway was actually a divisional commander in World War II and Ridgeway actually shot into the national limelight when Truman fired MacArthur and appointed Ridgeway as the commander-in of all forces in Korea, South Korea. By then the Chinese offensive had already pushed the US troops back. And there was even a talk of like a Dunkirk-like scenario unfolding. Can you imagine your Ridgeway? I mean, you've got like thousands of demotivated, demoralized, tired troops. You can't ask your boss for more fresh troops from the U.S. That'll take six months to come there. By then, it'll all be decided. And the marvel behind what Ridgeway did was the same overwhelmed, demoralized group of people, Ridgway actually got them to move and push the Chinese and the others. And how did he do it? You know, there are lots of things he did. I just want to give our, you know, listeners a couple of things he did. One of the very first things Ridgway realizes is, you know, I've never fought in Korea. I don't even know how the land looks like. Where are mountains? Where are rivers? Where are lakes? So he actually persuades a bomber pilot to take him on as a navigator and says, I'll help you navigate. I just want to see what's ahead. And, you know, there he is. And he actually now understands, oh my God, there's this complicated landscape. Now, what he does then is fascinating. He calls all of these commanders, commanding troops, and he asks them questions about their understanding of the landscape. Hey, what do you think is ahead 25 miles from us? If the guy said, you know, I don't know, or I don't know that there's a river there that needs to be crossed, or a lake, or a mountain, or whatever it is, he'd fire them on the spot. And he'd say, you're jeopardizing my men. And the most interesting thing about example of plumbing was he didn't stand there and give great speeches like Patton might have done or somebody else might have done. Ridgway always drove in a jeep without fighter escort and they would say you know you need fighter escort and he'd say you know my men are being shot at I think I can do okay. But anytime he would meet an American soldier many of whom were young kids, 1920, 21, the first thing he realized is, man, they're working in bitter cold in Korea. They can't even hold the carbine up. It's so cold. The hands are frozen. So at the back of his jeep, he would always have gloves. And any time he saw a young soldier with bare hands clutching a carbine, he would always give them gloves. --- ### [Winning Arguments Rarely Wins Hearts](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d997ea15-4cfe-445f-be3b-03079292f9cb) 🎧 56:22 - 01:00:59 (04:37) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/7549096d-1497-4047-9a66-9210e653a735" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Debating to 'win' often provokes defensiveness and entrenches views instead of changing minds. - Organizing and warmth — showing shared purpose first — prove more effective for persuasion. #### 💬 Quote > Coming right back at somebody with another set of facts and an alternate way to reason about some issue is a recipe for competition, for making somebody mad and defensive in the face of your arguments. > — Robb Willer Robb Willer on why debate fails to persuade #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** There's a narrative that we hear over and over again in news reporting and on social media. People are more divided than ever, by class, by education, and especially by political beliefs. We see evidence for this narrative in lots of places. People ignore those who disagree with them, or gaze upon their political opponents with a mixture of bewilderment, contempt, and anger. What we hear less often are ideas for how to change this narrative. Is it possible to actually find common ground with someone whose worldview is the polar opposite of your own? How can we actually persuade someone else of our point of view? What would it take for us to be persuaded by theirs? We pondered these questions some time ago with Rob Willer. He's a sociologist at Stanford University, and he joined us for an episode titled, Win Hearts, Then Minds. Today, he returns to the show to answer listener questions about engaging with people who are different from us. Rob Willer, welcome back to Hidden Brain. **Robb Willer:** Thanks for having me. **Shankar Vedantam:** Rob, in our earlier conversation, we talked about how when you were a kid, you moved from Kansas to South Carolina. The community you moved to was, politically speaking, very different from the one you'd left, and it was something of a culture shock. What were some of the things that stood out to you when you first arrived in South Carolina? Well, **Robb Willer:** when I moved from Kansas to South Carolina, a key thing was that I was moving from this small college town, Lawrence, Kansas, that was very politically, culturally progressive, not that religious, fairly secular. And I moved to South Carolina in 1988 and found myself in just a very different political, cultural environment. And a place that was characterized as much as anything by deep scars from racial segregation, Jim Crow, and even the Civil War. Even the wounds of the Civil were still healing on the surface. And it was for me just really striking to start to be interacting every day with people who might have racial prejudices, hearing the N-word on the playground. Just was really, really shocking. And also just the degree of racial segregation that just happened spontaneously, even amongst 10, 11, 12-year kids. People were getting signals about who was supposed to interact with whom, and they were following them. Our teachers had, you know, at least half of them had taught in racially segregated schools, schools that integrated less than 20 years earlier. All the kids I was going to school with, basically their parents had gone to all black or all white schools. And so it was really striking to me coming from a progressive community where the kind of moral battle of the 60s around civil rights was fairly settled. And if you expressed racial prejudice in public, you were a moral or social pariah in that community. And it just wasn't the same way in the place I'd moved to. Did **Shankar Vedantam:** you find yourself getting into arguments with people, Rob? I **Robb Willer:** did, yeah. As much as anything about race and religion, the things that we had the starkest differences on, there were also, and still are, deeply held beliefs that I would encounter about how the poor were responsible for their own fate and didn't deserve sympathy and just a lot of cultural beliefs that were very new to me and, for me, very objectionable. And my first reaction on this was to debate. I've been raised in this very intellectual household, and I came right back at a lot of these views to the extent that I could without becoming like an outcast in my community. And that was a really intense and rich experience because I didn't find I was changing a lot of folks' minds. So **Shankar Vedantam:** I think many of us approach disagreements and disputes the way you did, as if they're a debate that we can either win or lose. And so we believe that if we can just present our case clearly and have the best argument and the clearest facts, we're going to persuade the other person of our point of view. You've learned over the years, not just when you moved to South Carolina, but later on when you became a researcher, that this does not tend to work. Why not, Rob? **Robb Willer:** Well, for one, just coming right back at somebody with another set of facts and an alternate way to reason about some issue is a recipe for competition, for making somebody mad and defensive in the face of your arguments. --- ### [Draw Out Motivations First](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a4dd8db-1b5d-4e8c-8191-3be6526d5cf8) 🎧 01:03:14 - 01:04:19 (01:05) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/201ee6d2-e4b8-4b51-84d7-b6ec23c49e50" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Ask open-ended questions to draw out why someone holds objectionable views and what outweighs their concerns. - Use that information to show respect and gather leverage for constructive engagement. #### 💬 Quote > Try to draw them out, try to get a better sense of why they have the views that they have as much as possible without debating at first. > — Robb Willer Robb Willer advising how to engage with people who endorse troubling views #### 📚 Transcript **Robb Willer:** mean, I think it's an excellent question, and it's really hard. My first thought is the last thing that Scott highlights here of try to draw them out, try to get a better sense of why they have the views that they have as much as possible without debating at first. And so if they say they don't care about someone they voted for openly lying and that being more or less objectively proven, like ask them why they don't care about that or like, what is it that outweighs that for them that leads them to vote the way they do? This has a few functions, like the most obvious function is you're showing some sort of interest in their perspective. So you're setting a decent kind of foundation for an interaction that could go somewhere. You're showing some, you know respect, but you're also getting a lot of really valuable information. You're figuring out where they're coming from and why they think the way they do, how they're balancing things in their head, or maybe there's something sacred involved related to religion or something like that that really matters to them. --- ### [Disagreements Often Reflect Different Info Worlds](https://share.snipd.com/snip/17d018b6-c1e2-4df8-94cb-3742d58adb0a) 🎧 01:04:56 - 01:05:58 (01:01) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/9e850f6b-acc0-4847-bd48-359dd85be9d2" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Many disagreements hide deep information gaps: people simply operate from different lived experiences and sources. - Recognizing these structural gaps reframes empathy as learning others' information environments. #### 💬 Quote > There are also these big information gaps. Try as I might to take your perspective, there are fundamental things I don't know about your life that get in the way. > — Robb Willer Robb Willer on information gaps beneath political disagreement #### 📚 Transcript **Robb Willer:** Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think this is a hugely overlooked aspect of empathy and connecting. We tend to think of empathy in terms of compassion and sympathy for other people, and then also perspective taking, like am I trying to think from your perspective? But one thing that gets, I think, overlooked there that's maybe more structural, that adheres in the structure of the situation and people having just fundamentally different experiences of their lives, is that there are also these big information gaps. Try as I might to take your perspective. There are fundamental things I don't know about your life that get in the way of me doing so authentically or accurately and well. And so this is a huge barrier. And so you can even have people that are fairly motivated to consider one another's perspective, but they just have such different lived experiences that they can't construct a narrative to understand how this person they disagree with is saying something that sounds so vile and objectionable. --- ### [Pause And Breathe Before Responding](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb90937c-326f-4888-a487-9086d304d669) 🎧 01:06:41 - 01:07:44 (01:02) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/7810e3da-c83b-4070-a8e0-1cae0dd7b4ef" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Manage your physiological reaction: pause, breathe, and relax your diaphragm before responding in heated political exchanges. - Use that beat to ask questions and craft a calmer, more persuasive reply. #### 💬 Quote > Take a beat, take a pause, ask them an open-ended question ... see if you can settle yourself well enough to make the argument you're going to, you know, tomorrow wish you had made. > — Robb Willer Robb Willer on calming physiological reactions during disputes #### 📚 Transcript **Robb Willer:** And so if somebody's saying something that seems offensive to you, take a beat, take a pause, ask them an open-ended question, draw them out, have them fill the space with some more information you can take in. And in that time, see if you can settle yourself well enough to make the argument you're going to, you know, tomorrow wish you had made, rather than the one that feels like the one you need to say in that moment. Because when we're sensing like a really significant disagreement that's freighted with all this moral baggage, when we see that coming, I mean, most of us, we start to get short of breath, our heart rate quickens, our diaphragm is up higher inside of our chest, and we're breathing shallowly, and we're just not calm. We're ready to fight or to flee or what have you. And if you can that beat and try to relax the diaphragm, take a deeper breath, listen, and think about what you really would like to say to the person, you'll do better. --- ### [Define Terms Before Debating](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c90a9acd-ce8f-4243-9f15-e62ace3e6fd7) 🎧 01:19:54 - 01:21:47 (01:53) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/2e2f1ff4-44bf-412c-a3c6-6cb6830fca87" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - On a TikTok live, Lucia asked a man to define 'critical race theory' and corrected his misperception with examples, moving him toward agreeing it could be an elective. - Clarifying definitions surfaced common ground and shifted his view. #### 💬 Quote > Stop and asked him like okay you share with me what you believe critical race theory is and what you think is happening in the schools. > — Lucia (listener) Listener Lucia describing a TikTok conversation about critical race theory #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** And in this situation, this was around the time that there was this big debate about critical race theory and whether or not it should be in classrooms. And there's a lot of misinformation floating around. And I kind of just disregarded anybody who was on the other side of the political spectrum, that they just didn't know what it was and they didn't want to take the time to understand. And so on a TikTok live, I was debating back and forth with some individuals on this live about critical race theory and one gentleman came up and instead of just going back and forth with him on the facts I kind of just stopped and asked him like okay you share with me what you believe critical race theory is and what you think is happening in the schools. And so when he explained to me what he thought it was, and then I explained to him, I said, well, the thing that people are labeling as critical race theory is simply just, for example, talking about the impacts of slave labor on the U.S. economics as part of its history. You know, something as simple as talking about the export of cotton and sugar and where that's coming from, the fact that it came from slave labor, they're labeling that as critical race theory. And they want us to take that out and not teach the whole history. And when I explained that to him, he actually understood and understood that his idea of critical race theory was misinformed. And so when we were able to kind of start a conversation from that point, and I met him where he was at, it was actually a lot easier to bring him to my side. And at the end of the conversation, he actually said, yeah, it makes total sense that critical race theory be taught as an elective in college. And so that's, again, it's something that it sounds so simple, but yeah, just people where they're at and starting a conversation there. --- ### [Two Paths To Reduce Polarization](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c33f221d-b07e-4ad6-b7d6-5aa71b12606e) 🎧 01:26:47 - 01:29:12 (02:24) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/f712c281-e60e-4209-9d9e-93cfb670eeb8" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Effective depolarizing interventions either build a shared identity or show respectful, relatable members of the other side. - To reduce anti-democratic attitudes, vivid examples of democratic collapse and norm erosion can shock people into protecting democracy. #### 💬 Quote > The interventions that were most effective ... drew a common identity connection ... or presented vivid examples of people they disagree with actually being respectful and curious. > — Robb Willer Robb Willer summarizing his mega-study on reducing partisan animosity #### 📚 Transcript **Robb Willer:** Yeah. So this research started a couple of years ago when we were trying to find interventions that would be effective for reducing American partisans' dislike of rival partisans or their animosity towards rival partisans. And we were also interested in seeing if we could find interventions that would reduce people's tolerance for undemocratic actions by the leaders on their own side. And what we found was really, really interesting. So the interventions that were most effective in reducing Americans' partisan animosity were ones that drew a common identity connection, such as we are all Americans. Or another strategy that was very effective was one where people were presented with vivid examples of people they disagree with actually being respectful and curious in their engagement. So sympathetic, relatable people that kind of disabuse them of their stereotypes of rival partisans. Then for anti-democratic attitudes, it was a different set of strategies that were most effective. So one was the strategy of disabusing people of their inaccurate stereotypes of rival partisans as themselves big fans of anti-democratic actions. And another strategy that was very effective here was actually a video that was submitted by a PhD student here at Stanford, Katie Clayton, and her advisor, Mike Toms, which highlighted how bad democratic collapse looks in countries that have had to deal with it, like Russia, Venezuela, Turkey, you know, places where democratic backsliding has accelerated and gone into full-on autocracy or what have you. You know, it gets really bad. And there's, you know, social unrest in the streets. There's violent police repression. It's really scary. And then that video culminated with footage from the January 6th Capitol riot, as if to say, well, if you think, you know, America is immune to this with its longest standing constitutional democracy in the world, well, look at this. This actually looks a lot the footage you're seeing in these other countries. And that, I think, shocked a lot of folks out of complacency around the health of democracy made them think, oh, wow, I need to enforce these norms on my leaders as well as rival leaders. I need to take this more seriously. --- ### [Debunk Dangerous Stereotypes Directly](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38507e9f-ef05-46bd-8eb1-14ef7801398f) 🎧 01:29:29 - 01:31:08 (01:39) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b9d47651-9ea5-4209-8ee8-6d08ae82a0b0" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - When engaging across parties, disabuse opponents of stereotypes that your side prefers undemocratic actions or violence. - Explicitly affirm your commitment to democracy to reduce fears and reciprocal escalation. #### 💬 Quote > Be sure to disabuse someone of stereotypes they might have of the folks on your side. Make sure they understand there isn't an active preference for undemocratic action. > — Robb Willer Robb Willer on reducing support for undemocratic behavior #### 📚 Transcript **Robb Willer:** mean, I think when you're having an interaction across political lines, one lesson you can take from this is be sure to disabuse someone of stereotypes they might have of the folks on your side. Like make sure they understand there isn't an active preference for undemocratic action. Make sure that they don't think there's an active preference for political violence. And again, this goes for the left and the right. You like, if you're a Democrat, and you're engaged with a Republican, you know, disabuse their specific stereotypes about how Democrats are censorious or dying to morally judge people for falling short of a very specific set of moral standards. That is seen as undemocratic by many Republicans because it's seen as suppressing free expression. So disabuse them of that notion to the extent you can, you know, and definitely disabuse them of the notion that Democrats political violence. You know, remember that, you know, a lot of Republican voters just saw their political candidate, you know, subjected to two attempted assassinations in the last presidential race, one that was, you know, a couple inches from being successful. So they also think about political violence and think that it's meaningful and it's coming from their rivals. So think about, and likewise, if you're a Republican, you can tell Democrats about how you're supportive of democracy and that there's other reasons that they voted for Donald Trump. These are the kinds of stereotype-busting interactions that could be effective at actually de-escalating that what support for undemocratic actions does really exist on each side. --- ### [Start With Life Stories, Then Debate](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44b8ff15-30a3-489a-9b48-02999324e0c7) 🎧 01:35:54 - 01:37:12 (01:18) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/0de1d8b0-210d-4aae-8968-99c7f0595ad9" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Start conversations by sharing life stories and vulnerabilities before political topics to build quick trust and empathy. - Use guided, brief personal exchanges to create relational hooks that make later disagreement productive. #### 💬 Quote > They bring pairs of people ... and they want to start way before you get into the politics. Let's start as human beings. > — Robb Willer Robb Willer describing Civility's guided interactions to bridge divides #### 📚 Transcript **Robb Willer:** And their approach is really, really similar to her idea, to Emily's idea. They bring pairs of people into what they call like heavy touch interactions where they're really going to just get two people in a room that they need. You know, they want to try to get these folks to bridge whatever divided is religious, racial or ethnic, political, obviously. But they want to start way before you get into the politics. Let's start as human beings. And they, you know, go to person A and say, Scott, why don't you tell us the story of your life? And Scott explains who he is and where he's coming from. And then be like, Janet, why don't you tell us the story of your life? Janet explains where she's coming from, who she is, what she's about. And they kind of scaffold off of that. That goes on for 15 minutes, people sharing who they are. And who people really are is usually something that's pretty sympathetic to hear and pretty relatable. And so they start from this kind of position of vulnerability and build a kind of trust and commitment where by the end of that, when they get into the divisiveness and the political problems, they've got something to build on. And these two people often really can care about each other a lot in just 15 minutes with this guided interaction. --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts