What the Return-to-Office Debate Gets Wrong

Welcome to the Curiosity Shop. A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network. Hi everyone, I'm Brane Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're having fun on the podcast. More than I expected. So what's been surprising to you about the pod so far? I think what's been surprising is how often we agree. That's interesting. I think. I think I'm surprised by how much I'm learning. You didn't expect that coming in. Come on! I mean, I expected to learn, but I. I can feel it shifting my thinking. Oh, for sure. Yeah, in uncomfortable ways. I wake up thinking about things that we talked about several weeks ago thinking, "Oh no, I missed a chance to ask about. " Wait, we do this every week. We can follow up. No, that's one of the biggest things for me is the hangover. The residual like we should have said this. Or I want to press him on this or wait, how does that work? So I. It's a productive hangover. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right, we're going to do three things today. We're going to talk about the Return to Office debate. We've been avoiding this one for a while. I know. I actually don't know if we're in violent agreement on return to office or really deep disagreement, but. Maybe both. Maybe both. The second thing we're going to do is I am going to introduce a tool from systems theory that I am obsessed with. We use all the time to look at problems. I thought we could apply it to this question about Return to the Office. Oh, interesting. Yeah, to see. Okay, good. At what level of the issue does our cohesion fall apart? Great. It does. And then is the third item? I've pulled some listener questions for us. Let's do it. Let's get started. Okay, you launch this off. Return to the Office. Yeah, because you're very. You're very. Committed. I am committed to following the evidence, which I've been doing for the last decade. And I think the evidence is very clear that if you give people one to two days a week to work from anywhere, they are at least as productive if not more so. They're more satisfied. They're more likely to stay. And there's no cost to relationships or collaboration. God, this is going to be really boring. I think I agree. Really? I thought you were. I thought you were much more against that model of hybrid work. No, no. I. I think I agree with what you just said. One of the things that I. What I was anticipating, disagreeing with you on, was that the frame of return to office, just being about productivity is not the right frame. I think we're in agreement on that. Okay. So I have my 24 page lit review, because I really came. I mean, I came like, you want to dance? We'll dance. Oh, I'm ready to dance. Did you bring Nick Bloom's research? I did. Did you bring the good gender in that all meta-analysis for last year? I did. Okay, good. But I also brought other things like MIT Sloan's Linda Gratton on kind of what productivity metrics miss. I hope. I hope you all caught that in the camera when he went like this. Yeah, no. I got to have frickin lit review here, dude. So let's go. Okay. So, Blueman colleagues, this is the 2024 nature, right? Equivalent productivity, equivalent performance review scores, and equivalent promotion rates. For hybrid workers compared to full-time office workers. Correct. So, quoting here from Blueman's HBR article, "Hybrid and fully in office showed no differences in productivity, performance review, grade, promotion, learning, or innovation, hybrid had a higher satisfaction rate." Yes. Okay. So, I'm going to go now to this is MIT Sloan, Linda Gratton, London Business School. Three decades of workplace research argues that the productivity debate is largely fought with the wrong metrics. Oh my god, you're doing it. I'm skeptically intrigued. How about that? I really hope, Aaron, that you got to zoom in of this face. All right. I want to hear it. Okay. Most roles, strategy coaching, creative work, lack easily verifiable comparative productivity measures. She's going to argue that hybrid work is better understood as a job design option. The question isn't, where do people sit? But what tasks need which environment? Yeah, I agree with Linda. I agree with Linda. Okay. Okay. So, I think the key aspect of work design is asking how interdependent are people in their jobs. So, in organizational psychology, there are three kinds of interdependence. They're called pooled sequential and reciprocal. It's easier to think about them as gymnastics, relay race, and basketball. So, if your job is gymnastics where everyone does their own beam, vault, floor routine, and then you just add up the individual scores, you hardly ever need to be co-located. Because everybody can do their own thing and have their own focus time at home. But if you're running a relay race, then you need to have some time with the people that you're handing the baton to and receiving it from. And if your work is mostly playing basketball where you're passing the ball back and forth and doing a lot of dynamic coordination, that's I think when you need the most time physically together. Give me an example of the gymnastics. Call Center work sales teams are almost exclusively designed this way. Everybody has their own clients. They have their own customer base. They have their own industry potentially. And the team's metrics are basically the sum of the individual metrics. Okay, so I'm trying to think through this rationally and calmly because. I wish you the best with that. I think I disagree. Good, tell me more. And wait, I should just say the Nick Bloom data often are looking at call center jobs. Right. Where people are pretty independent. Yeah, I think. Do you. would you consider those knowledge workers? I think. I think I'm doing service work more than knowledge work. So that's right. Maybe there's a mix. Yeah. Okay, so let's. Let's go here. So this is me making my case for in person. Culture, creativity, and mission. Okay, I agree right off the bat on culture and mission, definitely not on creativity. Okay. So the evidence for in-person work, I think, becomes strongest around three kind of interconnected organizational dynamics that I want to get into. And I want to talk about it because I'm open to learning. Me too. Like a little crack in the door. Weak tie innovation networks, tacit knowledge and cultural transmission, and shared mission organizational identity. Okay, so let's talk about weak tie. Weak ties is the hidden. It's kind of. I think the hidden engine of creativity and innovation. So weak ties, connections with colleagues outside your immediate team are the primary carriers of novel information, cross-disciplinary insight, and breakthrough ideas. Robust finding. Robust finding. So who are you? I'm Yang at all. 2021. I mean, there are. Just me. There's a. There's a. Marcus Bairn meta-analysis that spends 50 years of evidence that, yeah, you get more fresh ideas from people you don't know well and don't talk to every day. Right. So I'm thinking that being in the office is less about socializing and more of a creative infrastructure that when it disappears, I think there's two things that happen. I think there's less innovation that is the product of those weak ties. And I think teams without weak tie. I don't know why we call it weak tie. Why do we call it? Classic, grand of that. Yeah. Sociology. Yeah. These kind of. I'm sort of strong ties. Yeah, like a loose relationship exposure. I don't know what's another way to say weak tie. Yeah, loose. Yeah. I think they also help prevent teams both. I think all teams have to be innovative and creative these days. But I think they reduce teams from turning into self-referencing systems. Yeah, they prevent groupthink. There's another way to say it. Yeah. Okay, so I agree with all that. And I think your instincts are right that when people are physically together in person, they're more likely to bump into their weak ties. This is the whole kind of Steve Jobs designs that fix our headquarters so that everybody has to walk by each other to get to the bathroom. Right. I think that there are counterarguments, though, that don't get weighed when people say, "Well, we need people to come in to have these creative collisions." The first one is, there's no reason why you can't structure that unstructured interaction and remote work. So there's research on pairing people up randomly for virtual lunches, showing that their productivity goes way up afterward because they end up just learning from weak ties. And you don't have to. What I mean is you don't have to randomly bump into them, right? You could have just a, hey, every week, we're going to connect you with somebody that you don't know. And you're going to compare notes and you're going to learn from each other and we'll create that way. I think the second thing is we don't need constant weak ties stimulus because this is Ethan Bernstein's work. Intermittent interaction is actually better for creativity than constant communication. Because we also need some distance from other people to not get sucked into their ways of seeing the world. And that separation then allows us to develop divergent perspectives and then come together and get a good mix of convergence and divergence. Last thing is, there's a study by science teams showing that up until around 2010, remote science teams that published breakthrough kinds of discoveries, they were less creative than teams that were co-located. And around 2010 that reversed. And ever since remote teams have massively outinnovated teams that are in person. Why? We think there are two things going on here. Number one, the remote technology was bad before. We didn't have good systems for sharing files, editing documents together. We didn't have good ways of communicating for over distance. Now we do, right? Secondly and more importantly, you have access to the whole world's talent in remote teams, whereas you're stuck with the people who happen to be in your science lab. If you're together and so, I'm like, yeah, you can have creative collisions with the people who happen to be in your headquarters. But why not have creative collisions with the best people in your whole field wherever they live? Hey, I'm Matt Bouchel, comedian, writer and floating head. You may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like A Lot. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. That sounds like a lot part of the Vox Media podcast network. So what I'm listening to this, what I'm wondering, and I know this is a kind of a constant debate that you and I have. Stepping away from the data, like stepping away from what you're citing, stepping away from my 25-page let-review. I can't step away from data. I know, but let's just step away from it. You're stealing my identity. I know. All right, let's do it. Unwanted identity. Shame. Episode six. How do you reconcile this with just who we are as human beings? Like from mirror neurons to. Yeah, I mean, this is why I'm not saying we should work remotely all the time. This is why I want us to be co-located three or four days a week, so that we can build meaningful relationships so that we can establish culture, so that we can live experiences that become stories, so that we can connect to the mission and identify with the organization. I think all of that requires shared time in the same room. But I don't think we need to impose that five days a week. I think you know what you look like. We have a relationship built. I think we can have great conversations by text and phone and zoom and email, right? And so I just, I think it's arbitrary to say all the time needs to be in the same place. No, I think I agree with that. It's just, it's so interesting to me, especially, you know, we're filming this while Artemis too is up and just belowing my mind. It's like I'm such a space nerd. I know you're a space nerd. It's a clever. Yeah, let's go. You know, and I think I have, you know, as he's telling me, I've got friends that work for DASA, obviously. Talk about remote work. Yeah, a lot. We fly by the dark side of the moon. And it was interesting because we took all of the earthbound astronauts through dear to lead. And we talked about the ability, maybe to do it remotely. And it was so important for them to get them in the same room. Yep. For these three or four days that we spent together. And for my friends who are engineers, when they get to something that's very difficult, even if they're on remote teams. And these are globally remote teams. They find a way to get together in the same room. Yes. And so it's like, I mean, I think we're in violent agreement because I actually am a big believer in hybrid. I'm not in a forced return to office five days a week. And I'm not at all a believer, just as a human being, that we never have to be together physically. Yeah, I think we're on the same page there. And just so I have to come back to the data now. Yeah. There's a ding-and-mah paper from 2024 looking at four years of return to office mandates, showing that they failed to improve from financial performance metrics. But they reduced satisfaction and work-life balance. Yes. And then there's follow-up research showing that you also struggle to attack great talent when you have a return to office mandates. So all the people who are claiming, "Well, but the tech leaders who are demanding everyone comes back to the office and the finance leaders who are demanding that they were doing a wailing and calling strategy of trying to get rid of people who are committed without having to pay them severance, guess what? You failed to attract great people moving forward." And also, the people who are most likely to leave, it turns out are the most talented people who have options elsewhere and they want flexibility. So it sounds like we have mostly landed on the same page about this. NASA. Yeah. Lots. So I think it's one of both of our favorite organizations to study. I learned so much from John Canegator, who led, you could call it, almost dare to lead, beta for NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts for years. And one of the really interesting hazes that I had when I was studying John's work and working with some of his teams was they did not care about making sure that astronaut crews were together for weeks at a time doing training. What they did was they picked short windows to do very deep dives. Yes. So they would get lost in the Utah wilderness. And John was a no-alse guide and he would say, "Good luck, find your own way and then disappear." And they had to navigate those situations together. And what the astronauts would always come back saying is one or two days with a group getting lost in the wilderness and having to navigate our own way, the stress we underwent together, the problem solving we did together, so much more meaningful than if we had sat at desks next to each other for a year. And so I'm curious to hear how you think about this idea of Atlassian does this, right? They've shown in their data that how often you come to the office has no bearing on how much belonging you feel. But attending a quarterly three to five day offsite is very powerful for connecting you to your team and to the firm. What do you think about the idea of like we do a deep dive together and then we go off and do our own focus work and then we reconvene? It's probably the way I think about the future of medicine, which is personalization, personalization, personalization. I want to my objection to return to office, not return to office, bring them together for off-sites, not bring them together for off-sites. My objection to the whole that of that discussion comes down to an overwhelming frustration that I cannot pen leaders down to a why that makes sense. It's not intentional. They're not examining beyond the problems they can see. They're not getting underneath to mental models. They're not getting underneath to. And so for people who I think I'll be honest with you, I think it would be I would be very challenged to understand anyone that says everyone's back all the time for everything. And I'd be very challenged even if it was call center work to say no one ever has to do anything. Because I worked in a call center in Spanish. Yes, see. And so that is brutal work. The turn in that work is huge. So I don't I come into that research with a different understanding of what that work is. And I do think it's gymnasts. Oh, yes. And I think we're in agreement there too. My first real job was in the ad sales. And I needed other people around me after the 19th rejection in a row to process that. But also after studying call centers, it is really easy to see how people are better able to focus when they don't have to be surrounded by a cacophony all the time. Oh yeah, just I mean, we were just like hundreds of us and like, you know, in cubes. So I think it really comes down for me to what is driving your decision? What are, you know, maybe this is a good place to introduce this. So this is a this is a this comes out of Dana Meadows work from she's a systems theorist. I'll link to her book and her work. And I'll share the PDF with you that we used to teach it. So it's probably it's basically a problem solving method with systems theory where you have the iceberg, which is the problem you see. So leaders are like, okay, here's the problem we see. Do we let them work remotely? Do we force them back into the office? Do we do a hybrid? And they're just looking at the top of the iceberg. They're not getting under what are the patterns of behaviors that we need to build, deemphasize, strengthen, get rid of like what are the patterns of behaviors that we need underneath that? What are the systems and structures of support that lead to performance and impact? Yeah. And then even below that at the deepest level in this iceberg are the mental models. So what, you know, if I ask a leader like if you're running a company, Flowers Inc, let's say, or, you know, I'm looking you the wallpaper, pink flowers, ink. And as you know, you're like, I'm having everyone come back to work. Why? Because I need to see them. They need to be there. Like, what kind of strategy is that? What kind of strategy is that? And I want to, so tell me what your mental model is. Tell me how you're making sense of work. Well, how do I know if they're working? Well, you don't know if they're working in the office unless you're staying over them, or you don't know either way, so I don't get that. You know, they need to have friends. Well, that's not really what does and they could have a lot of friends. It's better for them. Have you asked them? No. Yeah, right. And the thing I love about this problem-solving with systems thinking iceberg is we know from the research that the lower you go in the iceberg to answer the questions, the greater leverage and more lasting and meaningful the change. Yes. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It's very similar actually to the shy and culture iceberg. Oh, oh, God, yes. Which, I mean, it's almost identically. You see the artifacts and practices that are the most visible manifestations of a culture. Those ideally are created to reflect and reinforce a set of values, but the values themselves are not as transparent. And then underneath those values are these deep assumptions that are rarely even articulated. And they're just taken for granted. Those are the hidden mental models. The mental models. And mental models, man, people always say, when you go in to do work in a company, Renee, how do you know whether it's gonna be incremental change or transformative change? Like real, and I said, listen, if you have to change mindsets and mental models, you're talking about transformation 'cause you have to break very sacred things. Yeah. So let's take a concrete example. Yes. Last year, I was at an event where CEO who had very publicly announced a return to office mandate was on stage. And the moderator asked for questions. I couldn't resist. I put my hand up. And I summarized the evidence we've been talking about. And I asked the CEO, what do you know that organizational psychologists and economists don't? And he said, well, I just believe that we're better at mentoring and innovating when we're all in the same room together. And I just thought that was such a primitive mental model. Like, okay, yeah, but how many hours a day do we need if we have the same room together? How many days a week do we need to be in the same room together? Have you thought about different ways of solving for mentoring? That, you know, deal with the fact that you are a multinational company and some of your most important roles are not physically in the same country as the people that you expect to be doing the mentoring. What do you do when you work with someone whose mental models are not flesh out? 'Cause I just wanted to smack that down. Yeah, I think, I think what's really hard is in my experience, no matter who that leader is, and I could take a while to guess about who this leader is and be so right. But you know exactly who it was. I think the problem is it's the parenting equivalent, and I don't like to use parenting stuff with work because it infantilizes work, but here, you know, it's the parenting-- How you gonna say infantilizes parents? (laughing) It's the parenting equivalent of, because I said so. Yes, exactly. And it actually creates a lack of respect and distrust. It really creates distrust. And I think what we've seen working, 'cause we were working so closely with leaders during the pandemic and right after as they were making these decisions, that if you believe it enough to mandate it, then you should have the discipline to get under the mental model and walk people through it. Yes, and explain why. Right, and if you can't be bothered by that, and you're gonna rely on just because I said so, say goodbye to your top talent. Yep. And not because even they have to go in, because they don't wanna work for someone who's treating them, infantilizing them, with because I said so. That's a great meta argument. I wonder what would have happened if I made that point. Say that again, what do you mean? Well, just to even say back to the CEO, that sounds a lot like what a parent says, because I said so. Can you walk me through what is your evidence and what is your proof that this is so important? So here's where I think I would differ in the way that I would challenge someone like that. I don't think I'd ask for evidence. No one's gonna be able to out-evidence you. I know, that's why I'm- That's what I'm going to. I'm not going to. I know, I know. Well, so that's the highest quality information available, right? But I think I've never had experience using that to get to someone's mental model, because they immediately get defensive. Yes. So I think what I would say is, what are your core beliefs about what happens when people are at home? And what are your core beliefs about what happens when people are at work? Yes. What keeps you up at night when people are working from home? That's so helpful. Okay, and then one of the core beliefs is, I think this is obviously easy to debunk, but there's still a, well, people are, they're slacking off at home. And once somebody says that, yeah, I can say that's interesting, because what Nick Bloom has shown in his experiments is that when people are given a chance to work from anywhere a day or two a week, they save about an hour on average of commuting time. And guess how much of that time they spend working? More than half of it. Yeah, I've read that. So you just got an extra half hour work plus out of your employee. And guess what? The other 20 or so minutes, they get to use family time, health, hobbies, friends. Deliberate. Deliberate recovery. Yeah, which, I'm like, wow, you have literally found a way to do something that biologists and physicists told me it was impossible. You created more hours in the day. And I can't have that conversation without them being defensive until they've told me here's what my belief is. Yes. And so I think the way that you get to that is the question about what's on your heart and mind. What are you afraid of? What do you make up as happening? I think if you can get on the table, the fears, the mental model, the how people make sense of their world, how people think people contribute value, and you can say to them, that makes sense. Yeah. Are you open to challenging it with what we know to be true from research? Yes. Or complicating it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think if you missed the step of, I've never successfully had anyone, including myself. Like we just did this with our company. We got into some mental models. And one of them was super painful. It took us like three hours. We had to stop. People had to walk out. People went like under the line and to get back out. But one of the mental models that we uncovered was that we make excuses for our behavior during unique situations. And when we gave three examples of unique situations, there was nothing unique about that. Right. There's a pattern. There's a pattern. Yeah. We had handled things exactly like that in different contexts for 10 years. Yes. But we use uniqueness as-- This is a smoke screen. It's a cover. It's a smoke screen to come out of our integrity and what we know is best in terms of leaving sometimes. Yeah. No, that's really helpful. And it makes me think about what this also unlocks as a chance to then even redirect the conversation away from what might be a bit of a red hair. So I'm thinking about George Kelly's classic work on slott rattling. Are you familiar with this? No, I don't know it. So George Kelly studied the mental models. He thought of them as goggles that you wear to make sense of the world. And I always remember this case that he wrote about of-- there was a guy who got discharged from the military. And his life fell apart. And Kelly was analyzing why. And it turned out he had spent his whole career in the military analyzing things through that lens. His mental model was military good, non-military bad. And so once he was even honorably discharged, he had put himself in the bad category. So what most people do when one of their constructs is violated when one of their mental models is challenged is Kelly described it as slott rattling, where he's like, oh, OK, well now I have to convince myself that non-military is good. And maybe military is bad. Even if it's a military. Right. And you just kind of end up playing this-- you're on a seesaw. And what Kelly said is no, you need more mental models. You need more lenses. And you need other ways to see the world beyond military, non-military, in order to complicate your worldview. Wait, wait, I gotta stop you there. Yeah. This is so interesting. So the mental model made something good and something bad. The answer is to not just switch them. Yes, exactly. But to get a whole new pair of goggles. Exactly. You need more mental models. And I'm thinking about this in the context of the hybrid. We're to work to bait because we're doing this slott rattling right now. It's often a tug of war between leaders saying, I want you in all the time, and I'm going to force it. And employee is saying, no, you can't. And I don't want to work here if you do that. And then, well, I'm going to measure. But can you really measure? And are you really going to fire me if you value me? And it's the wrong conversation. The conversation should be, how do we achieve organizational goals in ways that are respectful of individuals' lives? If we have that conversation-- and one thing that jumps out in the data very clearly is deflection. People want most is not where they work. It's when and how much. - Yeah, that's it. - They wanna control their time, not their place. And so if a leader were to realize that, it would be very easy to say to somebody, hey, are you telling me that if I let you leave the office at three o'clock so you can be home with your kids? - Couple, yeah. - You will come to the office every day? Maybe that works. That requires another mental model. I mean, this is so interesting because it's getting caught in the binary, even if you switch sides. - Classic binary bias. - Binary bias, yeah. So this is why I love this tool, 'cause this is how I spend so much of my time that I get asked to come in and see a problem. And my work is really so, you know, I have to get on my scuba gear and do this deep dive to be like, are we, can we go below the patterns of behavior, below the systems and structures, to figure out how do you make sense of the world? How do you think people contribute value? And if you think they contribute value by with mentoring, coaching, feedback, there are many ways to build that into remote work. - Yeah, exactly. And, you know, what's the old joke about consultants that do you know this one? - No, I don't know. The consultant is somebody who borrows your watch, tells you the time and then charges you for the privilege. (laughing) I think that gets something really fundamentally wrong, which is when I'm not good at consulting, but as an advisor or a researcher, when I come into an organization, I am holding up a mirror and helping them see their mental models. And once I've done that, they are much better equipped to solve their problems than I am. - Yes, yes. And that's why, you know, someone asked me the day they're like, when did you become an expert on manufacturing and supply chain? And I'm like, that's the problem you see. That underneath it is mental models. And there's a finite group of those, you know, that we have to challenge and then we use data. And then, but getting underneath there, even challenging my own mental models is really hard. So this is interesting. So, violent agreement. - Yeah, I mean, a ton of it. - Have your why? Understand the mental models from which you work. Challenge your mental models with evidence and data. - And I think that lands us at, we want people to be together a reasonable amount of time and not all the time. - For the right reasons. - Yes. - And when you ask the Alasian thing, I do think the one thing I would say about companies that, and I'm not, this is not a endorsement or our criticism of how Alasian does it, 'cause I am not familiar with it, but what I would say is for purely remote organizations that rely on all hands. The one thing I would say that I see consistently being helpful is scheduling in more white space. And more open time and not scheduled plan time for people who don't always get to get together. - Yes. Yeah, they need time to actually incubate ideas. - It's our program. - Yes. - Yeah, I agree. - Yeah, okay, good. - Go to questions. - Yeah, let's go to questions. So there were two that I thought were really interesting. One has, I thought I had nothing to do with our conversation from the first part of the episode, but it does relate to mental models because I think a lot of our mental models are wrong on this. The question, this comes from Bree, was can the two of you talk about birth order? - Yeah. So where do you want to start on that one? - I just feel like there are some things where you and I are not going to see eye to eye. Which is birth order, any a Graham. We'll probably see the same on horoscopes, but in astrology, 'cause I'm not for that, unless that's a good one for the day. But I think birth order is really, can be very significant and very helpful. I don't think it's predictive, but I think it can be a data point. - How did you know I was going to land in a different place that I met? - Because the research is so not compelling. - Yeah, it's a mess. - Yeah, but the lived experience is super compelling. - I think it's hard to study. I think it's hard to study. - And I think there's so many complex variables that interact with birth order. - Right. - But let's put something on the table then. I think there are a lot of theories that people hold about birth order that just do not stand up to evidence. But there are a couple that are supported in some very careful large-scale studies. One is that there is convincing evidence that later borns are more likely to take risks than firstborns. What do you think of that one? - I think that's true. And I think, I mean, what would you say about the studies that showed disproportionate number of firstborns in certain roles and certain-- - Leadership roles, for example, high achievement. I mean, I think it's the converse of that, right? And the standard explanation of that is, as a firstborn, you are drawn toward conventional ways of pleasing your elders and kind of being the model, oldest sibling. And so you get good grades and you run for student government. And that niche is not available anymore to later borns. And so they need to find a different way to stand out and they often do that by rebelling, by differentiating, taking risks, trying things that are not proven. And then also, I think there might be a parenting component of this too, which is parents are much more controlling with their first child than they are with their fourth. - I mean, my younger sisters were juggling knives, five. Like, and I'm the oldest, but I will say that, I don't know, I get, this is where I get really frustrated because there's such, you can say something that's very emotionally resonant. For example, I came across a meme on Instagram that said, were you really a pleasure to have in class? Or were you just the first born daughter with it and diagnosed anxiety disorder? - That's so bad. - Yeah, and I was like, yeah. But then, I think what ends up happening is I think this is fine, this is true. First born daughters, I could read a room before I could read a book. Like, there were things that are both resonating, helpful and painful about some of that. And then all of a sudden, the grifters get a hold of it. And now there's a trauma protocol based on this. And then now there's a, and now that if you take this supplement, so it's like, then you're like, this is why we can't have nice things. This is why we only have research. - Which people bastardize. - Yeah, and they turn it into like, if you sleep this way, this is your diagnosis. You're like, do you fuck off? Like you don't have any idea what you're talking about. What is your background? Like, so then you just go to this world that I don't live in as a deep person of faith that if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Like now I believe like if you could accurately measure it, is it really that important? - That's a great question. Okay, so let's go back then to the birth order finding on kind of conventional achievement versus risk taking. I think part of what's interesting about that is it's a really small effect in most studies. It doesn't show up in all studies. And it depends on how many siblings you have and also on age spacing. So one I think common way of like trying to make sense of this is well, if later borns are separated by five or more years from their older sibling, they kind of get a fresh start in terms of they don't have to compete with that older sibling. - Wow, that's right. - And so they can go more in the conventional achievement route if they're only a year or two apart. Is anybody's guess how might my play out? And then you look at this, but you're lumping all later borns together. What about being the last born versus a middle child? Middle child never gets covered in these studies. - Peacekeeper, peacekeeper, like in that on Instagram, that would be the peacekeeper. - It would be, yeah. - A possible truth to that, but families are so complicated. Why do you want to reduce everything to the order in which you arrived? - I don't know because we're desperate to make meaning. - We are. - We're desperate to make meaning and to make things make sense and you know, it's like, and then when we see something that deeply resonates, it gives us a sense of belonging and place. And like, you know, I'll see all the genetics, you know, shut up, we drink out of a water hose. We left on our bikes at 6 a.m. and came back at 10 p.m. Well, that's actually true, we did. - I got dysentery playing Oregon Trail. (laughing) - Yeah, so it's like, so it's also a way for us to meaningfully connect with humanity and each other and tribal in a way. And so I have this like really unspoken connection to other first born daughters. And you know, so I think there's something very human about it. It's just that anything that emotionally resonates and gives us something is very vulnerable to being misused. - Yeah, and exploited. - And exploited. - Yeah, I think that's right. - Yeah. - Okay, let's go to the other question. I thought this was an interesting meta question that actually a bunch of different people have submitted. The basic question as I tried to synthesize across them was how do you think about the trade-off between authenticity and just releasing a podcast as you run it and editing to deliver your best material. And I don't know that we have fully figured out how we're gonna do that moving forward, right? I'm a no-edit person. And I am a not editing disrespects the listener's time person. Let's cut out the fat, which might be a third of the episode. And I'm more of a believer that we're trying to challenge each other in caring, respectful ways. We're trying to think of new ideas. We're trying to challenge ourselves. And I want a podcast that reflects the fact that this is, that's not a fast moving process. That there are empty spaces that people are uncomfortable with. And the rush to fill them is one of the greatest barriers to deep thought, deep thinking, deep conversation and meaningful. So I don't want to edit something. It would be like asking someone to take my wrinkles out. Like, you know, it's like, this is it. You know, I've earned all of these. The smiles, the cry, but you know, and so for me, I don't think of it as being disrespectful to the listener. I think about it as being honest. I love that framing of it. How do you think about then the dilemma of I've gotten messages over the years from people saying yours is the only podcast I listen to because it's every minute is well used. And I feel like I can fit it into my day. I don't want to lose those people. The biggest fans, the people who read all of our stuff are probably going to listen regardless. I don't know. I mean, I guess finding a happy medium. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're trying new structures. So we're doing like 30 minutes of this and we're giving people the playbook at the top. I'd be open to listen or feedback. I would have a very hard time and I know this is like, this is my number one, any grant which I believe in, that I make everything a moral issue. You're a huge moralizer. It's true. What the fuck? Jesus. It's one of your best and also most challenging qualities. Okay. Whatever. Refux, sake, y'all. But I would almost feel unethical to take a conversation where there were pauses and it was hard and we were trying to figure it out and we were looking like we're struggling to be respectful and make it sound like to do to do to do to do because that's not the way the world works and everyone's need to do to do to do to do to do to do is dangerous. And so I guess where it comes in for me is maybe the, I've been thinking about this. Maybe it's more structure, letting listeners know what's going to happen, being explicit why we leave some pauses in and finding a happy medium. Like one thing that is like one thing that's for sure, I hope that people don't confuse organic conversation with the lack of preparedness because I'm always prepared, you're always prepared. Like, no, we don't prepare together on purpose. At all. This is much more interesting. This is more interesting. The only thing we've done so far is just a line on the topic. That's it. And so I think that's important because I think that's how conversation is real. Yeah. I don't say, hey Steve, babe at six o'clock I want to have a conversation about these things. Let's prep it together. I'm going to say this and actually I don't always need to see for my conversations. I just have them with him and then I let him know whether he's in the shithouse or not. But yeah, I think we're just trying to get it right. I think there's value in maybe a distinction that just became clear to me, which is there are conversations where the process is important to show and there are conversations where we're trying to share useful content. I think the former requires more, let the episode run. Yes. And the latter, if we went down a 17 minute rabbit hole, maybe people only need to hear 10 minutes of that. I think it's a huge watch out for us. Big time. Yeah, because I could go down a 70 minute. I mean, I wanted to look at which studies you've told. I know, yeah, yeah. But let's talk about that one more. Yeah. Yeah, I know. We'll just keep practicing and I love the feedback. I get a lot of your feedback. constructive and positive on LinkedIn, which is where my comments are open and I like to get in there and respond to people. So yeah, I'm open to it, but I do think it's meaningful to show that if you're actually actively—and I have to do this with the leaders a lot. When we teach active listening, the hardest thing that we have to break is you preparing your response while someone else is talking. I don't want to miss anything you're saying when you say it. Therefore, if I'm going to respond in a meaningfully respectful way, I need a minute to think about what I'm going to say that. So I brought my notebook. Yeah, that's why I bought—yeah, I mean like— I need to capture that so it's not taking up space in my brain so that I can listen to you. Yeah, and maybe there is something about edits to make it easier for a listener. I'm not convinced that people—in fact, I've seen a lot of feedback for both of us—that people one person use this term exactly, "Thank God you're not insight machines." That's not what we need. We don't know how to talk to each other. I thought that was the compliment. I want to be an insight machine. Yeah, I do not. I want to be like a happy medium. Yes, I think so. And we'll experiment incorrect based on data. Of course. And if you're pulling from LinkedIn, I'm going to draw from Spotify and Instagram. Oh, perfect. And that way we'll have a range. Yeah, and we'll use the one I like best. The one we like best. See you next week. Yep. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Burnabra on Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.