Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Adam Grant:

I think it’s a travesty that people are losing relationships over politics. And how dare you be a liberal who might talk to a conservative, especially a MAGA conservative. You’re guilty by association. And I just look at that and think, how does it go when you don’t talk to each other?

Preet Bharara:

My guest this week is Adam Grant. He’s an organizational psychologist at Wharton and the host of the ReThinking Podcast. He’s also a bestselling author many times over. His new book is called Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. Adam Grant, welcome back to the show.

Adam Grant:

Thanks, Preet. It’s always fun to be here. I have no idea where this is going to go as usual.

Preet Bharara:

Well, and you know what? Neither do I. Neither do I. So congratulations on the new book. It’s called Vibe. You put the subtitle above the title, The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. I’m going to begin the interview a little bit sort of oddly.

Adam Grant:

I’m ready.

Preet Bharara:

So you’ve been on the podcast a number of times and you are an incredibly relevant person, I think, to any issue that anybody would care about. And I think this book is incredibly relevant in a lot of ways. Now, some subset of my listeners, and you know who you are, when I have a guest who is not very targeted in their expertise on the war in Iran or Congress or President Trump’s corruption, what’s the relevance of these issues of loneliness and friendship and connection to what’s going on in our world politically and otherwise?

Adam Grant:

That one I think is actually pretty clear. I think we live in a time where we’ve never been more connected or more disconnected simultaneously. Everybody is only a keystroke away, and yet we have people that are not talking to their friends and family because of political or personal divides. We have people who are increasingly choosing to interact with chatbots because they prefer the sycophantic praise and validation over the friction of having messy human interaction. We have people who have come out of a pandemic with rusty social skills. And we know, there’s a lot of research on this, social skills are like muscles. If they don’t get exercise, they atrophy.

We’ve seen that when astronauts come back from the space station after months that they often stumble through their conversations with people back on earth. We know that when prisoners leave solitary confinement, they have a harder time reintegrating. And we saw basically the entire globe went through this after COVID, and I’m not sure we’ve recovered. We have more people not only bowling alone, but also dining alone. We have a decline as Derek Thompson has documented recently in people hosting each other for dinners and all kinds of events and gatherings that used to bring people together. Even the neighborhood block party is on decline. And I think we’re losing our connection and with it, we might be losing some of our humanity.

Preet Bharara:

I agree with all that. And I don’t understand how you can think about solving the problems of polarization and division and for that matter, racism, bigotry, discrimination, sexism, violence against women, solving any of those problems without understanding the psychology behind connection. You and I have offline had many discussions about it. My view is it should replace the requirement of teaching property in law school, among other things, with a requirement to teach relevant psychology courses.

Adam Grant:

I’m preaching to the choir there and I also want to replace Trig in high school with psychology.

Preet Bharara:

Well, isn’t that a useful exercise in learning about disappointment, I guess? I don’t know.

Adam Grant:

It might be.

Preet Bharara:

But I find just a general point about psychology that you and I have had some discussion about, in whatever endeavor I engage in, whether it’s podcasting or writing a book or talking about the book that I’ve just written, I only wrote one, you’ve written a number, or going into negotiation with an opposing party if you’re a transactional lawyer, or if you’re going into a negotiation with a defense lawyer and you’re a prosecutor, or if you’re trying to figure out how to get a judge to reverse her decision from the week before. Every single one of those things occurs for people who are not in therapy but are just doing their jobs and they all involve not just a little bit of psychology, but a lot of psychology.

Adam Grant:

I mean, you should just be a walking billboard for our field because not only do you need to understand yourself, you need to understand others in order to have successful interactions.

Preet Bharara:

In fact, I don’t know if you… I think you probably need to understand the other party even better than you understand your own psychology because as a lawyer at least, you’re kind of doing what the client asks you to do, right? And so where the client is coming from can be important when you’re trying to articulate to the other side why you’re taking the position you’re taking, but that’s not always necessary. It seems to be always necessary to understand where they’re coming from so you can understand your best response and to get the thing that you want.

Adam Grant:

I think that’s true in the courtroom. It’s also true at every bargaining table in human history. Wars have been fought because usually old men could not figure out how to vibe, right? Wars have also been prevented because more often, if you look at the data, women at the table understood how to build an alliance. There’s some good evidence that when women are at the table for peace treaties, they’re more likely not only to get formed, but to last at least 15 years.

Preet Bharara:

15 years.

Adam Grant:

And tell me again that women are too emotional to lead.

Preet Bharara:

What about Mean Girls? What’s that phenomenon about?

Adam Grant:

Oh, so there’s a whole body of research.

Preet Bharara:

Every time I say anything that sounds familiar, semi-obscure or pop culture, there’s a whole body of research.

Adam Grant:

I mean, conveniently there is on almost everything you’re curious about when it comes to human behavior, but there’s a whole literature on the queen bee effect and also on catty women. Marianne Cooper’s done some of the best synthesizing of that research.

Preet Bharara:

That doesn’t sound politically correct at all.

Adam Grant:

Not at all, but-

Preet Bharara:

Just the phrase catty woman sounds problematic to me.

Adam Grant:

I would not have chosen it, but the women who spearheaded this body of research wanted to describe it as it gets characterized in pop culture. And here’s what I’ve learned from reading that research is those dynamics are not a cause of divisiveness. They are a response to inequality. We see queen bees because there’s a zero-sum world in a lot of workplaces where only one woman has a shot at getting ahead and basically the door is closed to others. And that is a reaction to an unfair world. It’s not the reason the world is unfair to women in the first place.

Preet Bharara:

I hadn’t really thought of it that way. So there’s a paragraph in your book in the prologue that you kind of just channeled, and at the end of the paragraph you say this quality of vibing, of connection with people even determines whether countries go to war or find peace, as you just said. But then you also cite some other things, including this one, which is relevant. Studies show that professional golfers miss more putts when they’re playing alongside peers who don’t share their politics. First of all, who financed that study?

Adam Grant:

This is a wild study.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t understand. Who finance… Did the academic get to play a lot of golf? Is that the-

Adam Grant:

Did not have to be financed. I think this is a team of researchers who have school provided funding for whatever projects they are curious about. But what blew my mind on that research, Preet, is these are professional golfers. They do this for a living. They’re not even collaborating with the other golfers who happen to be at the tee with them. They’re just nearby. But just the thread in the air, the sense that, oh, I might not get along with this person or we don’t see eye to eye on ideology is enough to interfere with their accuracy. That I thought was staggering.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I mean, is that the reason why Trump engages in such extreme MAGA politics because it improves his golf game? I guess it might.

Adam Grant:

That is a hypothesis I’ve not heard before.

Preet Bharara:

Well, someone should study it because I’m sure everything else has been studied.

Adam Grant:

I will tell you there have now been multiple studies by economists showing that when CEOs are golfers, their companies are less profitable than if CEOs don’t play golf. And the better your golf handicap, the worse your company performs if you are at the helm.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. But that is correlation.

Adam Grant:

I’m not going to say it that way but… Of course.

Preet Bharara:

Can you just explain that to people? It comes up in the law and I see people in political argument and other argument, you’re properly circumscribing the things that you’re saying and people don’t do that. People think that if you have a correlation, it’s causation. Is that the biggest sort of logical fallacy that people make?

Adam Grant:

I think it’s one of the most common ones I see followed closely by claiming a causation relationship. A causal relationship is just a correlation. I see people make that mistake too. So let’s take the golf data as a quick example. So we see a correlation between CEO golf skill and poor company performance. There are basically only three reasons why that correlation can exist other than it being spurious or random, but when you replicate it, you realize it’s pretty robust. So there are three possibilities.

One is that golfing causes you to be a worse CEO. The second is that being a bad CEO causes you to be better at golf. So reverse causality, which is possible, right? It might be that you’re really struggling in your job and you try to go find something else to master and boost your ego with. And then third, there’s a common cause of both, like people who are, let’s say, hedonistic are both bad leaders because they tend to be too short-term focused and great golfers because they love to play a sport where you’re just kind of walking around and talking most of the time. And all those things are possibly true, but here’s what you can do to try to isolate the cause and effect relationship.

You can ask how much time do CEOs spend on the golf course and does the time spent on a golf course actually correlate with worse performance? And what you start to see if you do that analysis is, okay, the better golfers are good in part because they play a lot of golf. And in general, the more time you spend on the golf course, the less time you spend on your job, and that does predict how well your company does. And so I’m not saying that all great golfers are bad leaders. I’m not saying that non-golfers are always good leaders, but on average, if somebody is an amazing golfer and spending a ton of time on the golf course, I might say that’s a red flag for whether they’re qualified to be the President of the United States.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, you made the leap. It was not much of a leap. It was a little step. It was a tiny little step. Just further to this political issue and friendship, you also say that research suggests that most of us would rather interact with a stranger who shares our political ideology than a friend who doesn’t. Well, what kind of friend is that?

Adam Grant:

Not going to be a friend for very long, I don’t think.

Preet Bharara:

We haven’t really talked about politics much. I actually don’t know much about your politics. I have a sense of your politics, but have you ever had a rupture in a relationship? You talk about some others based on other things, which maybe we’ll get to, but have you ever had a rupture in a friendship over politics?

Adam Grant:

Only once.

Preet Bharara:

Can you say anything about that and how you dealt with it given your excellent training in psychology?

Adam Grant:

When I was in college, I think I was either a junior or a senior, and I found out one of my friends from high school came to visit me and had never heard of Al Gore, who was vice president.

Preet Bharara:

You know what they say? It isn’t worth a bucket of spit.

Adam Grant:

I mean, it had nothing to do with politics. I couldn’t imagine how somebody could be living under that much of a rock that they didn’t know who their own vice president had been.

Preet Bharara:

Do you know what’s so funny about that? So when I was a freshman in college, this is 1986, it’s six years into the Reagan presidency and we had to take composition. We had take a writing class as a freshman at Harvard. And the name of the teacher, if he’s still out there or anybody knows where you can find him, I think his name was Mr. Doolittle, not a doctor, just a Mr. Dolittle. I don’t know why it was relevant, but he cited some poll about Ronald Reagan’s approval rating, which also had a line that showed what percentage of people knew who Ronald Reagan was, and it was less than a hundred. It was like 98 or 99%.

Probably one of the only things I remember clearly from a professor in my freshman year sort of aligned with you, except it tickled him as opposed to bothered him, that oh, to be so cloistered that you live six years in America and it wasn’t the vice president, not know who Ronald Reagan is.

Adam Grant:

It’s the president.

Preet Bharara:

It’s like what peaceful bliss is that ignorance?

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I just find that unfathomable, but to the larger question, I think it’s a travesty that people are losing relationships over politics. And somebody wrote on Threads not too long ago that the way they put it, I thought was really clever. They said the right has loyalty tests and the left has purity tests. And how dare you be a liberal who might talk to a conservative, especially a MAGA conservative. You’re guilty by association. And I just look at that and think, how does it go when you don’t talk to each other?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So if you would ask me that question five years ago, I would’ve said I never had a rupture in a friendship or politics and I have very strong views, but I’ve always been proud of the fact that I’ve had a lot of people who were conservative as friends and Republicans as friends when I work in the Hill. That was not only just the way I operated and the way a lot of people operated, but also important to business. I mean, by definition, almost nothing gets passed by one party alone. My boss at the time said the first thing he said, and people might be surprised, Senator Schumer gets a lot of flack these days.

On my first day on the job, he said, “I want you to get to know your Republican counterparts and become friends with them because that’s how business get… That’s how you pass anything. You need some votes from the other side, whether you’re Democrat or Republican.” And sort of famously, I won’t mention the name here, I’ve talked a lot over the years about my best friend from college. We’ll talk about who’s a best friend and what your taxonomy of friendship is in a moment. And I would say proudly that I have this conservative friend and we don’t agree on really anything politically, but I value his friendship. He’s a brilliant person. And I was best man at his wedding. And then during MAGA and during COVID, we had an argument. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this, and we stopped speaking.

That’s the first time in 35 years. You want to know how we broke the chain of that? It was very simple. And just tell me how this plays out in your studies and in your writing. I was very angry about a view that he had taken and that we just couldn’t talk about certain things and we tried to avoid them during our time as friends over decades. It’s very hard not to talk about Trump and COVID. And I probably said a couple of things I shouldn’t have said, same for the other party. We didn’t talk for months and months. And then I realized one day it was his birthday and I just texted him. I said, “I love you, man.” It was a very guy I think to do. And that was it, forgotten and we’re back to normal. How does that strike you?

Adam Grant:

It strikes me as exactly what I would expect of two men.

Preet Bharara:

We didn’t have to go to couples therapy. We didn’t have to go play trust games. We just like, “You know what? Months had gone by. It was kind of shitty and it was just, I love you, man. I love you too.”

Adam Grant:

It’s very sweet.

Preet Bharara:

Is that a good way to solve it or not?

Adam Grant:

I think it depends on what you’re trying to solve for. Are you okay with not changing each other’s minds and can you respect each other based on other values despite your differences on politics?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, because we did before, and so why not again? But look, but there’s some people who would never be friends with someone who has his views, and there are people on the other side who wouldn’t be friends with somebody like me who has my views. I think that’s shortsighted and I think you’re missing a lot of understanding and perspective if you don’t do that.

Adam Grant:

I think that’s true. I also think the test of a relationship is how does it withstand friction? And if you have an argument and that’s the end of the connection, it probably wasn’t a meaningful connection to begin with.

Preet Bharara:

Right. But not after 30 years of friendship. That’s just… You think-

Adam Grant:

If you hope to change his mind at any point or open his mind even, you’re not going to do it by ending the relationship.

Preet Bharara:

So there are four types of what, friendships or connections?

Adam Grant:

Connections.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Four types of connections. There’s the associate, the ally, the pal, and the companion. Are these your terms?

Adam Grant:

They are. I mean, I didn’t invent the language, but I put them together in the framework, yes.

Preet Bharara:

And all connection falls in one of those four. So what do those mean because we’re going to be using them?

Adam Grant:

I think of those as the four kinds of people that you need in your life. So I’ve come to call them associates, allies, pals, and companions. Different people have different labels for them, but they show up in most cultures around the world as the different kinds of bonds that we have with people. So associates are kind of the most basic. They’re people who fulfill a need for you. Your carpenter is an associate. He comes and he fixes something that’s broken in your house and you help him pay his bills, right? Your neighbor who carpools, he’s basically a carpool neighbor, your kids need to go somewhere, their kids need to go somewhere, you take turn driving. The relationship is essentially transactional. You’re fulfilling needs for each other.

I think the three kinds of meaningful bonds that we have are allies, pals, and companions. So allies are people who share your goals. You are on a mission together, you’re solving a problem together, you might start a company together, you’re excited to collaborate with them, and you think you can achieve something that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own if you partner up with them. They’re your best teammates, basically. Pals are people who share your interests. You have fun together. You enjoy hanging out. You invite them to pickleball and karaoke. You go see a movie with them. They’re the people that you probably want to plan your bachelor or bachelorette party. Then companions are-

Preet Bharara:

That’s an important role. That’s a very important role.

Adam Grant:

Oh, that’s a key role. That is a very key role. Companions are people who share your values and you have deep affection for each other. These are the people that you confide in. They provide you emotional support. They show compassion. They console you. And I don’t think they are always the people that you want as your best man or as your maid of honor because they don’t necessarily create the most fun experiences, but they are there for you when you need them.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Adam Grant after this. How would you describe, and I know what you say in the book, but how would you describe in these four categories a parent-child relationship?

Adam Grant:

Oh. Oh, that’s so interesting. Well, I think that’s-

Preet Bharara:

It’s got to be one of the four. Somebody told me there’s only four.

Adam Grant:

I think it depends. It depends on the parent and the child. It also depends on their life stage and how old they are. I think that when kids are young, I think that parents are primarily providing companionship and allyship. They’re basically there to help their kids grow and provide them with unconditional love. And then as kids start to learn how to play, parents become pals. You build Legos with your kids, you build Jenga towers, you’re playing board games.

Preet Bharara:

So you can be multiple categories.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, of course.

Preet Bharara:

I see.

Adam Grant:

Of course.

Preet Bharara:

Can you have all four or any of them incompatible with the other?

Adam Grant:

I know of no inherent incompatibilities between them. I think often our closest relationships fit in multiple categories.

Preet Bharara:

So you could have a friend who is an associate, maybe somebody you work with at your job who also planned your bachelor party.

Adam Grant:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Who’s your friend and also is your best man and also is an ally, right?

Adam Grant:

All of the above. However, two caveats. First one is if all of your friends fit in all of those buckets, you on average have lower wellbeing than if you go to different friends for different things.

Preet Bharara:

Well, why is that? That’s interesting.

Adam Grant:

In the research, I think the most compelling explanation is that you end up putting too much strain on the relationship. So if somebody is your go-to ally and pal and companion, you’re basically overloading them and it becomes a burden. Whereas if you’ve got one person that you go to to cry on their shoulder and another person that you reach out to to laugh with, it ends up not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Preet Bharara:

That’s super interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Let me just talk about how salutary friendship is. As I’ve gotten older and read these reports and studies about loneliness, particularly among men who not only have fewer good friends or people they could describe as good friends as they did 20, 30, 40 years ago, one of the saddest things that I read and makes me understand how lucky I am, I know you’re just as lucky if not luckier, even though you always talk about yourself as an interest-

Adam Grant:

It’s not a competition, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

You know what, Adam?

Adam Grant:

Who has more and better friends?

Preet Bharara:

You know what, Adam?

Adam Grant:

Let the games begin.

Preet Bharara:

Everything is a competition. You don’t need to win every competition, but everything is a competition.

Adam Grant:

It almost sounds like you went to law school.

Preet Bharara:

Almost. I think that I’m rich beyond belief because I have a lot of friends, but I didn’t growing up and I saw we had some similarities as nerds and geeks.

Adam Grant:

Were you also bullied as a kid?

Preet Bharara:

I was. I was, but I wasn’t a great athlete. I wasn’t a spectacular diver like someone named Adam Grant.

Adam Grant:

I wasn’t good at diving until junior year of high school.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Well, that’s still pretty early. I wasn’t good at diving until, let’s see. Oh, never. Oh, never.

Adam Grant:

It’s never too late.

Preet Bharara:

Or any sport. What made me kind of sad was a study, and I don’t remember the details, and I don’t think it was cited in your book, but I may have missed it, was data that showed that for most people at this moment, the last good friend they made was decades earlier, if you’re my age, was decades earlier, that most people never make a good friend, meaning they never make a decent connection after they’re something like 30 years old. Do I have that right?

Adam Grant:

I’m not familiar with that evidence. I don’t find it entirely surprising if it’s true, but look, it sounds sad on its face. I don’t know if it’s quite as bad as we think it is, because people have different definitions of what a good friend is, and they may have some new casual pals that they just didn’t put in the good friend bucket, or they may have some amazing allies that they don’t even think of as friends, but who play really important roles in their lives. I do think also there’s a natural process that psychologists call socio-emotional selectivity, which is a lot of syllables for saying-

Preet Bharara:

It’s a lot of syllables, my friend.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, we filter over time. We are more judicious as we get older with who we spend our time with. And so my favorite evidence on this shows that if you want to predict your happiness in your 50s, what matters is the number of friends you had in your 20s, the quantity, but the quality of your friendships in your 30s. And so there’s this kind of natural process of you’re young, you meet a lot of people, you build a wide network, you’re not going to click with everybody. And then you start to winnow a little bit. You figure out who your people are in your 30s, and having a real sort of tight-knit group of friends or some great pals, allies and companions is enough and you don’t need four or five dozen of them in order to be happy at midlife. So maybe a lot of people don’t need a new good friend at your age.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, that’s kind of an optimistic view. I feel like whatever I was reading that points to that study or studies like that are talking about people who actually feel lonely and it’s not by choice.

Adam Grant:

Well, that would obviously be sad.

Preet Bharara:

So Adam, you and I saw each other last weekend. You talk about a conference, a retreat that’s curated that you have begun to lead, and I was very honored to be invited. I appreciate it.

Adam Grant:

Honored to have you.

Preet Bharara:

A lot of great people at that. But I felt more like an imposter than usual, which was the feeling of a lot of people there. But you asked a question when there was a session about friendship and we were talking about some of the themes of your book, and you asked people to raise their hands and hold up the number of fingers that designated how many… I forgot what the phrase you used was, but very close friends. I don’t know if you said best friends or close friends, but something-

Adam Grant:

Close friends. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Close friends. I mean, I thought about it and I don’t know if my definition, my threshold is low, but I put up 10 fingers. And I think there were some people who had 10 fingers around the room, probably a lot of people had 10 fingers around the room, but is that too many or is it not possible to have that many good friends? I mean, I think when you reach a certain age, the other theme you have in the book is the question of how your connection holds over time. And so one of the reasons I had 10 fingers up is it doesn’t mean that every week I have 10 great friends that I see that I’m in touch with.

But the person I refer to as my oldest best friend, before any other friend, before I met my wife, before I had children, is my friend from high school, Jessica. I don’t see her that much, but when we do, it’s the same. So she has to be on the list. Then there are people I’ve met more recently that I do spend a lot of time with. They have to be on the list. What’s the ideal number of friends, Adam?

Adam Grant:

I wish I had a good empirical answer to that. I dont-

Preet Bharara:

What was your answer? You must have a lot.

Adam Grant:

I had all the fingers up as well. But I’m with you. I have some of my closest friends, I sometimes go multiple years without seeing and months and months without having a conversation, and that’s okay. We’re all busy. We know that we have an important place in each other’s lives and we’re there for each other if we need each other. I think, honestly, there’s only one bad number when it comes to close friends, and that is zero.

Preet Bharara:

You know what? You only need one. When my kids went to college, it’s interesting because I didn’t think this would be my view, I probably cared more that they were okay socially and had at least one or two good friends than I cared about their grades, which is not how you would think raised by a tiger mom and a tiger dad from India. You would think my dad’s going to listen to this and he’d be like, “What are you talking about? Well, that’s not your priority. Your priority is to study.” Because college is weird. And I didn’t have a lot of friends in college, so I’m able to boast 10 fingers now. But that’s sort of the second half of my life. Growing up, I didn’t have any. Single digits maybe through my 20s. And so I don’t know, maybe I came out of my shell and I was able to make friends more later. Is that the right thing for a parent… Of all the things for parents to worry about, am I wrong to worry about that a little bit more even than academic success?

Adam Grant:

No, I’m going to give you some ammo for your debate with your dad actually. So if you look at the research by Nancy Cantor and her colleagues, what you see is that kids who actually focus their first semester of college on making friends and academics take a little bit of a backseat, end up getting better grades in college-

Preet Bharara:

Oh my goodness.

Adam Grant:

… than the ones who buckle down and focus immediately.

Preet Bharara:

That’s so interesting.

Adam Grant:

And not only that, there have been some great experiments by Greg Walton, David Yeager and their colleagues where they do these social belonging interventions where they help kids make friends at the beginning of college. They encourage you to join a group. They let you hear from older students, especially if you’re a first generation college student about their struggles with finding their people and their place and basically encourage you to keep looking for your niche. Those kinds of interventions not only help boost belonging, they increase the likelihood that you graduate from college and that you do well in college. And so I think friendships are a vital source of social support at any point in life. In college, if you do not have a community around you, it’s really hard to excel in your classes. You don’t have anybody to study with, you don’t have anybody to take a study break with, you don’t have anybody to enjoy-

Preet Bharara:

Blow some steam.

Adam Grant:

Good luck with that.

Preet Bharara:

My best friend from college, the arch conservative, that’s what the friendship was a lot. We would go in one of our dorms, go shoot pool for two hours while we were studying and just blow off some steam. And to talk to somebody who’s not necessarily your political twin, but who’s really, really smart and really open to discussing, I probably had more growth from that intellectual friendship than almost any other.

Adam Grant:

Well, it’s interesting that you give that example because I can picture your playing pool that feels like a pal activity, but the conversation because of your differences and your passion for arguing about them, it becomes sort of an unexpected allyship where you see the holes in each other’s reasoning, you stretch each other’s arguments, and ultimately you make each other smarter.

Preet Bharara:

You know what’s funny? When you go to college, at least I learned all these concepts and I think back on them and they were really eye-opening. They’re basic things. For example, I was talking to my kids about when I took the basic economics class where I went to school called Economics 10 and just concepts like opportunity cost and supply and demand. I didn’t really know what those terms meant before, but the same thing is true with a lot of political concepts and political arguments. So I spent a lot of time in college because I was a government major and political theory in particular, understanding and writing about and arguing outside of class with people about abortion. When does life begin? And what faith has to do with it and what all sorts of other intersections of logic, reason, science, philosophy, medicine have to do with it.

And that was a lot of the conversation I would have at the pool table with my friend. And it was exhilarating because I was understanding the arguments and refining my arguments for the first time. We were the opposite sides of that debate, as you might imagine. Do you know what I never debate anyone about ever anymore? That topic, abortion. I have kind of come to the view that people have their positions and that the arguments and the things that we talk about in the podcast now are limited to… I guess it’s not fully true because Dobbs overruled Roe, so that sort of came back to the fore. And tell me if this is a terrible thing or not. I kind of leave aside debating in real life, maybe not so much on the podcast, but in real life, arguments about things where I think that minds generally are frozen and won’t change. Is that a bad attitude to have?

Adam Grant:

I’m not here to be your judge or your jury.

Preet Bharara:

You can, you can.

Adam Grant:

I don’t think it’s a bad attitude to have. I do wonder about the opportunity cost of it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I don’t know if there’s enough demand or supply.

Adam Grant:

But the demand in this case is a functioning part of supply.

Preet Bharara:

Just to show you how disorganized my interviewing arc is, I want to go back to something we were talking about with friendship and sort of immediate connection. You talk in the book about this idea of love, falling in love, love at first sight. And you say very disappointingly that psychologists with their fricking studies say that’s really love at first lust because you have no basis to be in love. It’s really lust and immediate attraction. Now, this is not friendship at first sight, but only after a little while, the phenomenon that you acknowledge of people becoming friends, platonic friends, and the best sort of articulation of that, you do this thing in your book where you have a quote from someone at the beginning of every chapter, which I like, not everyone likes that. And my favorite one is there’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.

Adam Grant:

Jim Henson.

Preet Bharara:

So I love that. I love that. How does that happen as distinguished from love at first sight?

Adam Grant:

How does that happen? That’s such a great question. I think what you’re describing is the feeling when you meet somebody that you’ve known each other for a long time.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Grant:

Or that you have a real bond.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Adam Grant:

I mean, it seems like it defies logic. There have been a lot of experiments that psychologists have done basically to try to reverse engineer that dynamic. And from all the ones that I’ve read, I think probably the most consistent pattern is you skip small talk and you go right to deep talk. So Preet, you and I are going to meet and we’re going to be randomly assigned not to have idle chit chat about the weather or about traffic or even our favorite sports teams. No, we’re going to be asked to have a little bit of emotional intimacy. I’m going to be prompted to talk with you about-

Preet Bharara:

Wait, are we doing a simulation right now?

Adam Grant:

Well, let’s do it. Here we go. You ready, Preet? Let’s have some deep talk.

Preet Bharara:

Oh my goodness. Wait, who’s going to go first?

Adam Grant:

I’ll kick us off as the psychologist in this relationship. Here we go. Preet, let’s do these in rapid fire just to illustrate them.

Preet Bharara:

I’m nervous.

Adam Grant:

What’s your biggest regret?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t have a lot of regrets. I really don’t. I’ve thought about this. You get this question a lot when you’re in the public square, interviews ask them. I have, for the most part, taken jobs that I though were interesting to take. I’ve not let opportunities go by. I mean, there may be small things along the way, but I feel like when people ask the question, “What’s your biggest regret?” And it’s something like not going to Egypt because there was a worry about safety doesn’t count. It’s very trivial. So I have regrets all the time about decisions I made as a leader of an office, classes I didn’t take, things I’ve said a million times probably. There are things that I’ve said that I regret saying, but I feel like when that question is asked in this context, it’s a great regret and I don’t have any of those.

Adam Grant:

All right. Well, you can make that your number one regret is that you don’t have enough meaningful regrets to make more stupid decisions so you can answer that question.

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask you a question because I will also mention that we did this exercise at your retreat and the other person asked me a question I will ask you. And it actually, I think it resulted in a bonding experience in a minute because it was such a good question. What’s the greatest gift you’ve ever received?

Adam Grant:

Oh, I love that question.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, I think you made it up.

Adam Grant:

Such a good question. Oh, the greatest gift I’ve ever received. It’s hard to rank. It’s hard to pick one that’s like, who’s your favorite child that you’ve had?

Preet Bharara:

Yes. Well, so are you going to say your children?

Adam Grant:

Well, is that a gift I received?

Preet Bharara:

Well, that is super interesting, Adam. And you can see here I am not letting you talk. I didn’t even let you finish your answer. So I don’t know if that’s going to make us vibe more or vibe less.

Adam Grant:

It depends. It depends on whether we are from a high politeness or high involvement culture.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, we got to talk about that because I have interrupted people and sometimes people don’t like… I think I don’t interrupt that much as an interviewer compared to a lot of people, but some people don’t like that. I’ve always said to people over the years, including my wife and others, although she’s an interrupter too, that the fact that I’m interrupting-

Adam Grant:

Means you’re engaged.

Preet Bharara:

It means I’m totally listening. I’m totally engaged. I’m not interrupting to tell my story. I’m interrupting to ask a question most of the time. And that’s a sign that I’m very interested in you. I don’t know if that’s a cop out or not, but that’s why I was interrupting you just now.

Adam Grant:

That is exactly how people in high involvement cultures, if you look at Deborah Tannen’s work, view interruptions, people in high politeness cultures think that the respectful thing to do is to wait for the other person to finish speaking before you jump in.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. Okay.

Adam Grant:

But I see both arguments. I guess I don’t-

Preet Bharara:

So should I let you speak or should I continue with my interruption?

Adam Grant:

Well, no, I’m just thinking about the greatest gift question. If we don’t accept children as a gift, which is fascinating, I think in the pure receiving realm, I think one of the greatest gifts that I have ever received actually came recently. I don’t know if you can see it behind me. There’s a basketball there.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I can. So it’s not a virtual background?

Adam Grant:

No, it’s real. So you probably remember from the intro, we talked about, I guess we were both bullied as kids, but one of my most vivid memories from middle school was when my whole friend group dropped me and the defining moment of it was when my oldest friend in the group stole my basketball and no one told me.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. No, no. But it’s a great length. Yes.

Adam Grant:

Maybe too great length.

Preet Bharara:

No, I hope it was therapeutic for you.

Adam Grant:

I hope it’s useful for the reader. I don’t care if it benefited me, but I guess that always stuck with me as this sort of visceral vivid marker of, yeah, I lost my friend group when my oldest friend stole my basketball. And yeah, it’s not something I think about daily or weekly, but I guess it’s been in the back of my mind for over 30 years. And I got a package in the mail a few weeks ago from a guy who’s an avid reader of my work, who I’ve been emailing with for a long time. He’s like a pen pal, and he sent me a basketball. It’s the same edition of the one that was stolen.

Preet Bharara:

Oh wow.

Adam Grant:

And said, “I found your ball.”

Preet Bharara:

And who is this person?

Adam Grant:

His name is Zach Arnold. And it really moved me that he took the time to find the basketball from the year that mine was stolen, the official NBA edition and sent it to me. And every time I see it there on my shelf, I smile.

Preet Bharara:

That’s great.

Adam Grant:

Thank you, Zach Arnold.

Preet Bharara:

I have so many more things to ask. So when I did this thing at your retreat, the person asked me the question, “What’s your greatest gift?” And I then told the story about another retreat I had once been at where that was the question. And we were supposed to write down our answers to the question and unbeknownst to me, people would then be asked to-

Adam Grant:

You were going to have to read them out loud.

Preet Bharara:

Read them out loud. Not have to, but-

Adam Grant:

Encouraged.

Preet Bharara:

… clearly this was a group that wanted to read them out loud. And so you know what i-

Adam Grant:

I go to this retreat.

Preet Bharara:

We go to a lot of retreats, you and I. And you know what I wrote? I wrote, “The first most obvious answer is my three children.” Those are the gifts. But then it seems to me that that’s not what the spirit of the question was trying to get at because everybody who has a child, and that’s most people in this room, if not all the people in this room, could say that. And that strikes me as being a politician and frivolous and fighting the question. And I said all terrible things about assuming that that was a good answer. And then I wrote about some present I got at Christmas when I was a kid that meant a lot to me, which itself of course is frivolous and materialistic. And then people started to read their answers and everyone said their kids.

Adam Grant:

And you felt like a jerk.

Preet Bharara:

And I was like, “I guess I can’t read my answer.” Because obviously, I think the question, if I were to ask the question someday to some group, I would say, other than the gift of the birth of a child, what is your greatest gift? Because I had the dilemma, was I interpreting the question correctly or not?

Adam Grant:

So how did that spark a bond?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know, because she thought that was really interesting and she asked me a lot of questions about that. And it was also a confession. I was telling a mini secret, which now 40 million people will know because that’s how many people listen to this podcast. And I think, I don’t know, you tell me why. I don’t know why it resulted in a bond, but it did.

Adam Grant:

Well, it seems to me that that was a moment of what Carrie Gibson would call a disruptive disclosure where you are breaking the script of surface interaction. You’re going a little deeper. I like your term confession. You’re revealing something that you might not share with just anybody, and you’re signaling to the woman you’re talking to that you trust her and she feels confided in, and that opens up a new channel for conversation.

Preet Bharara:

Can I mention a few other things that I love that you have brought to my attention?

Adam Grant:

You’re not seeking my permission. You’re going to mention them anyway.

Preet Bharara:

That’s true. That was just polite. People still have polite verbiage.

Adam Grant:

Please mention anything you want to mention. It’s your podcast, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Well, so Chris Rock, the great philosopher, Chris Rock, you talked about being bullied, and I once wrote a small piece about that. And one of the most eloquent things that I’ve seen written about being bullied is what Chris Rock wrote. And he tells a story, I’ve said this on the podcast before, that he was bullied by a guy pretty seriously when they were kids apparently. And then when Chris was shooting something, I don’t know if it was a movie or the Fargo series or something, he saw that guy. And I think the guy was a cameraman or something who’d done fine. And his first thought was to go punch the guy in the face or something like that because he had been tormented by this man for so long.

And the guy clearly had no recollection and was so excited that he knew Chris Rock and was seeing Chris Rock, the guy who had made Chris Rock’s life miserable when he was a kid. And then he had a revelation and the revelation was, which is much more devastating than wanting to punch the guy and get retribution. He’s like, “You know what? This guy just played it wrong. If he hadn’t been that guy, he could be back in my trailer with me with Chris Rock watching Godfather II, which I’m doing with my pals. So too bad for him.” I thought that was kind of beautiful. And the other thing from your book, because you cite many studies and you cite the great Chris Rock, for this proposition, the first impression routinely misses the mark. You make this point throughout the book, right? First impressions are not the best.

And you say people who decide things and make impressions based on the first interaction apparently miss an important memo from Chris Rock. “When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them, you’re meeting their representative.” I love that too. Explain what that means.

Adam Grant:

It’s probably my top 10 favorite Chris Rock lines of all times.

Preet Bharara:

It’s just so good. It’s like you’re meeting their representative.

Adam Grant:

You’re meeting their representative.

Preet Bharara:

I totally get it, but explain it further.

Adam Grant:

It’s every first date, every job interview, right? People are showing up with their best foot forward. You’re not necessarily seeing the real them, you’re seeing who they think you want them to be. And sometimes that leaves you with an overly positive impression, but sometimes it has the opposite effect. They’re working too hard to impress you. They’re trying to please you. They’re attempting to be something they’re not, and you end up getting off on the wrong foot and you judge them too harshly because you’ve only seen a snapshot of them. You’ve only seen a thin slice of their behavior, but you’ve also only seen them in one environment. And you know what? They might be crappy first-daters. They might be terrible job interviewees, but they might also be fantastic dinner party pals.

They might be really great allies on a project. They might be your favorite go-to companions when you’re working your way through grief and you just don’t know that yet because you haven’t seen them in that context. And so I think we should be a little bit slower to judge people when we meet them and a little bit quicker to remember, you know what? There are lots of different versions of me that come out in different settings. That’s probably true for them too.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s another thing you write in the book, and I want to believe this is true because I want to believe that this is possible and can happen and does happen. And this is the story of the camp explicitly for the purpose of bringing people together.

Adam Grant:

Seeds of peace.

Preet Bharara:

Seeds of peace, Palestinians and Israelis. And what did the study show about friendship possibility between those two groups? Even as, this I didn’t get until I got into the fourth paragraph of your description, they spent time discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s not like they’re just playing sports.

Adam Grant:

No. I mean, this camp is a bold experiment taking teenagers from Palestine and Israel and asking if we give them three weeks together at a summer camp in Maine, could they come out of it close friends and even stay friends a year later? And just the idea of trying to build bridges across that divide is a bridge too far for a lot of people. But what the camp has figured out how to do is how to get people to have real interaction. And so you see that Palestinian and Israeli teenagers are more likely to become friends if they share a bunk together, if they eat meals together, but even more powerful than socializing is being assigned to a discussion group together where they actually talk about the real issues in their countries and they are roughly 15 times more likely to become friends if they’re in a discussion group.

Preet Bharara:

That’s crazy to me.

Adam Grant:

I mean, it’s crazy. Granted, these are carefully facilitated conversations.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I was going to say that. Were you facilitating the conversations?

Adam Grant:

No.

Preet Bharara:

Because a lot of the time I could imagine this experiment where the facilitating is going on in uneven hands, having the opposite result.

Adam Grant:

It could go horribly wrong, but the point is if we can bring people together in a context where they are genuinely trying to understand each other, to learn from each other, to figure out how to solve problems together, that discussing our differences does not drive us apart. It actually brings us closer together.

Preet Bharara:

Adam Grant, I have a hundred more questions to ask you. I wanted to ask you, maybe you can come back sooner rather than later. I wanted to ask you about the use of AI for therapy. So there’s a lot of controversy about that. I wanted to talk to you more about how politicians can use the lessons from your book to connect better with… We don’t have time for that because you got to go and I got to go. The book is Vibe. Get it soon. Thanks so much.

Adam Grant:

Thank you, Preet. Always good to be here.

Preet Bharara:

In a special segment for members of the insider community, Adam Grant shares the dangerous ways AI has seeped into his classroom.

Adam Grant:

And I got these panicked messages saying some of our classmates have built a custom large language model and they’re going to use AI to cheat on the exam and basically have AI answer all the questions for them.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to staytuned.substack.com. Again, that’s staytuned.substack.com. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about the appointment of New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor in the Cornell rape investigation, plus the Justice Department’s antitrust investigation into television networks. Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes as an email from Calvin. New York’s governor recently appointed Letitia James as a special prosecutor in the Cornell University gang rape case. If she’s already the state’s attorney general, why did she need a separate appointment to prosecute the case?

Well, Calvin, that’s a great question. An attorney general’s powers actually vary quite a bit from state to state and often differ from those of the U.S. Attorney General whom we discuss a lot more frequently on the show. But before we get into those differences, let’s review the background of the case. Last month, a former Cornell student identified as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit against the university, seven men who were students or were former students, and the Chi Phi fraternity among others. She alleged that she was drugged and gang raped at the fraternity house one night in 2024, and so details of the lawsuit quickly spread online, I’m sure you’ve heard about it, and sparked widespread public outrage for good reason.

This past week, my friend and colleague Mimi Rocah joined Joyce Vance and me on a new episode of The Insider Podcast, and we discussed almost for the whole hour this case, including the failures of the initial investigation and how New York law may complicate the case. So for those of you who missed it and you want to listen, you can find that discussion at staytuned.substack.com. So now back to your question. New York Governor Kathy Hochul called Jane Doe’s allegations nothing short of horrifying and directed an independent review of Cornell’s response. Then on October 1st, she appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. So you’ve asked why she needed the authority to make the switch, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first, for those of you who haven’t been following the story closely, let me address why she felt she needed to make the switch in the first place. Now, the Cornell allegations would ordinarily fall under the authority of the Tompkins County District Attorney. That’s a person named Matthew Van Houten, but DA Van Houten has come under intense fire and criticism for how he handled the matter in 2024. Most troubling, according to a lot of observers, is that in a case like this, you would want to make efforts to interview the alleged victim before making a final charging decision. Inexplicably, he did not do that here. More generally, there seems to have been very little, if any, independent investigation by his office, and critics contend he decided to decline prosecution without doing such an investigation.

As Mimi Rocah, a former New York DA herself of a significant and large county, Westchester, said on The Insider Podcast this week, “In my view, the DA really abdicated his responsibilities in making a decision this complicated based on this limited information.” So New York law provides for an alternative. It permits the governor to direct the Attorney General to take over specified criminal matters. And so Governor Hochul exercised the authority that she has in the executive order when she replaced the local DA with Letitia James. But now, James’ appointment itself is being challenged. Two of the defendants in the civil lawsuit filed a petition asking a court to invalidate James’ appointment pursuant to the authority that you were asking about. They argue that James’ public comments about Jane Doe’s allegations show bias and a presumption of guilt.

What are they talking about? Well, three days before her appointment, James posted on her official X account, “What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable.” She added, “I’m holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her and to all survivors, you’re not alone. We stand with you.” Our colleague Elie Honig wrote in an article for the Stay Tuned Substack his view that James’ appointment was a mistake. We’ll see how the court rules on that issue and probably a lot of other issues before the case is resolved.

This question came as an email from Laura. Laura writes, “What do you make of the DOJ’s antitrust investigation into television networks that declined to provide White House pool coverage? Could that decision really amount to an illegal boycott under antitrust law?” Laura, that’s a very interesting question, and I think the answer is fairly clear, but for some background. As many of you probably recall, last month, the White House revoked press credentials for journalists from CNN, MS Now, and Politico barring them from the grounds. Those outlets went to court, and the judge agreed that barring them from the grounds was a form of viewpoint discrimination under our constitution and the First Amendment.

So after that, in solidarity, the television networks that share White House pool duties, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News suspended their television pool coverage. That led to an embarrassing moment for Trump. On September 21st, he held a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new White House helipad, but television viewers could barely hear his remarks because without the pool crew there to provide a microphone, the available footage captured mostly background noise, including the whirring sounds of Marine One. And so then what did the Justice Department do? It announced that its antitrust division was investigating whether the network’s coordinated suspension of coverage violated federal antitrust law.

The department’s theory appears to be that a group boycott by competing businesses could be illegal. Now, antitrust law is complicated and difficult and there are a lot of issues involved, but as a preliminary matter or as an initial matter, I will tell you there’s no antitrust expert or general legal expert who thinks there’s ultimately a case here. Principally, antitrust law exists to protect consumers and to protect competition. Everything that you and I know about the facts of this case does not implicate commercial interests or competitive interests or anti-competitive effect or prices for consumers. This was an organized form of political speech, it seems, done in solidarity with other people who had had their freedom of speech abridged, as a judge has also found.

So violation of free exercise rights of some members of the press, other members of the press do something in solidarity, that is not by itself an antitrust violation. But I want to say something else about all of this because it’s of a piece with lots of things that Trump and the Justice Department have done in recent years, and that is not care overly about the ultimate likelihood of success of a criminal case or a civil case. What matters to Trump, in my view, after years and years and years of observation, is he really believes in the practice of harassment, not accountability as properly understood under our laws and under our constitution and under our court system.

To my mind, the origin story of all of this dates back to the Ukraine episode at the beginning of Trump’s first term when he said fatefully, “I don’t need you to actually do an investigation basically, just say there’s an investigation of the Bidens and that’ll be sufficient.” He did the same thing with respect to the election in 2020. You may remember that according to one senior Justice Department official’s notes and testimony, Trump wanted DOJ to say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to him and Republican congressmen. So that was another example, a high profile example of Trump just wanting there to be an announcement of an investigation without caring so much that it would result in a charge, an ultimate conviction or a finding of liability.

So you may ask yourself, what’s the point? In cases where Trump has a personal interest in punishing folks, sometimes the mere opening of an investigation and the public knowledge that an investigation has been opened does the work of harassment, which is what he seems to care about more than ultimate vindication. There’s a reputational cost, there’s a legal cost, and there’s a cost cost. It takes money to defend yourself in an investigation, even if it doesn’t go anywhere.

And one final point, in my view, Donald Trump probably received some encouragement and probably there are occasions where the people around him who are engaging in these harassing types of investigations take comfort from the fact that even if the claims are unlikely to be made or unlikely to be vindicated, that there is value in taking a look because from time to time the targets of Trump’s ire bend the knee. Even when the law doesn’t support the Trump administration’s position, even when the constitution doesn’t, and even when other people who don’t bend the knee are themselves vindicated in court.

That is arguably true with some media outlets themselves like CBS. Many people would say it’s also true of law firms who bent the knee as well. Ridiculous unconstitutional actions, bogus anger fueled investigations. All those things are arguably encouraged when they are receded to. Anyway, to go back to your particular question, could that decision by the press outlets really amount to an illegal boycott under antitrust law? Extremely doubtful. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Adam Grant.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Gloria Teal. The editorial producer is Claudia Hernández. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.