What Jane Goodall Teaches Us About Outsider Thought

Transcript

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Konakova.

Speaker 5 And I'm Nate Silver.

Speaker 2 So today on the show, Nate, we're going to be talking about someone who was an absolute pioneer in not only her field, but just in general, in the world. Jane Goodall, who died last week.

Speaker 2 You know, she came to a lot of her breakthroughs from a very untraditional outsider perspective.

Speaker 2 And so we'll be going a little bit into her legacy and also talking about, you know, just the importance of outsider thought, curiosity, the things that make people truly successful in whatever field they choose to pursue.

Speaker 2 You know, how can we learn from Jane Goodall and actually apply it to

Speaker 2 our own careers, our own approaches to life. And we'll talk, we'll get into a lot of detail about Jane Goodall's own life

Speaker 2 and the fact that she was known mostly for her work with chimpanzees. But there's a funny answer that she gave when she was asked about her favorite animal.

Speaker 7 My favorite animal everybody thinks is a chimpanzee, but it's not true.

Speaker 7 Chimpanzees are so like people that, you know, some chimpanzees are really not nice at all, just like some people are really not nice.

Speaker 7 My favorite animal altogether is a dog, because dogs have taught me so much and dogs are so faithful and dogs give unconditional love and I don't like to think of a world without dogs.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 let's dive right in.

Speaker 2 Jane Goodall, she was someone who was very influential to me as a psychologist, but I'm assuming she was probably not quite as front and center to you, right?

Speaker 2 I'm guessing you were aware of her influence, but probably, you know, not someone who influenced your career choice or anything like that.

Speaker 5 Maria, no. Look, I was going to make a joke that the only thing I know about Jane Goodall is from Gorillas in the Mists, right? The Sigourney Weaver character.

Speaker 2 It's not her.

Speaker 5 There's more than one woman scientist, apparently. And she was not the scientist who inspired Gorillas in the Mists.
So I know not very much about her, but sometimes it's fun.

Speaker 5 Sometimes you're the backseat driver today. I'm the backseat driver, right? I'm going to hear you talk about why you admire Jaden Goodall and just backseat drive.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So let me, yeah, let me just say a little bit about why I really admire her.
Obviously, she was just a pioneer in terms of what women can accomplish.

Speaker 2 She died at the age of 91, which just gives you a sense of when she

Speaker 2 started her career, right? At that point, you know,

Speaker 2 when she was just starting out, there were not a lot of role models for women who were going into the sciences. And I think that she really paved the way for

Speaker 2 a lot of people to have the careers that they have today.

Speaker 2 Nate, I think we've talked on the show before about the importance kind of in career choices of role models, right? And of being able to visualize yourself in a certain career.

Speaker 2 And there's a ton of work that shows that, you know, if you see someone who looks like you, who seems like you, who's similar to you doing something, you can be like, oh, maybe I can do that thing.

Speaker 2 So for Jane Goodall to become, you know, this pioneering researcher was absolutely huge.

Speaker 2 But in terms of her contribution to science, I learned the most about her work when I was getting my PhD in psychology in a course called Animal Cognition, which was all about animal intelligence, kind of animal emotions, how animals think.

Speaker 2 And that course would have probably, well, I wouldn't say probably, would literally have not existed without Jane Goodall because what she did was basically show that

Speaker 2 animals were much more sophisticated than we previously thought and that they had a lot more in common with humans than science had previously thought.

Speaker 2 So she observed, you know, her initial contribution when she went to Africa to study chimpanzees in Tanzania and she observed them using tools and not just using tools, but creating tools, right?

Speaker 2 Something that didn't exist. And she said, basically, you know, I'm paraphrasing, holy shit, up until this point, we assumed that this was something that was unique to humans.

Speaker 2 And so she basically changed the way that we thought about animals and what animals were capable of.

Speaker 2 And so she gave birth to this entire field of animal cognition and of realizing that, hey, you know, there is actually

Speaker 2 a lot going on here. Animals are capable of emotions.
Animals can recognize and experience death.

Speaker 2 Animals can solve problems. And so I think that is kind of from a purely scientific standpoint, one of her central contributions to the study of the mind.

Speaker 2 And as a psychologist, you know, even though I don't study animals, I appreciate that she gave us deeper insight into both humans and animals through that very simple seeming in 2025, but back in the 60s, just absolutely

Speaker 2 wow, leap that, hey, you know, chimpanzees think and they

Speaker 2 react and they're smart and they do all sorts of fascinating things that people didn't really think to look for before.

Speaker 5 Do you think like orcas are pissed off if they're like, we're fucking as smart as humans, right? We don't have like opposable thumbs.

Speaker 2 This fucking sucks. Yeah, no.
I mean, I, it's so funny. Like, yes, I do think that there are lots of pissed off animals there.

Speaker 2 By the way, one of the less kind things that Jane Goodall discovered in her work with chimpanzees, and I was actually, you know, I remember when I

Speaker 2 realized this for the first time, it made me very sad because Jane Goodall, you know, you've seen pictures of her, you've heard her talk. She seems like such a hopeful, optimistic, positive person.

Speaker 2 And she was, but she discovered that, you know, chimpanzees, first of all, they're omnivores.

Speaker 2 They're not herbivores, as people thought, and they actually go and seek meat and they kill and they can be violent and they have wars and they're aggressive. And so,

Speaker 2 you know, studying, studying the chimps, Jane came to the conclusion that, you know, our basically our predisposition to violence is innate and it can be very contagious, right?

Speaker 2 If one chip becomes violent, all of a sudden you have these groups of very violent chips who can wreak havoc and who can do a lot of damage. Chimps are strong.
And so, given how

Speaker 2 much we share in common with them, she's like, I think this is true of humans as well, right? That we, yes, I'm hopeful and optimistic, and people can be good as well.

Speaker 2 And we have a lot of capacity for good, but we have to be careful because

Speaker 2 we have a lot of instincts towards being violent to each other. And if we see that sort of behavior,

Speaker 2 it's very easy to catch from someone else.

Speaker 5 Same with dolphins, by the way. Dolphins are like rapists, they'll like kill small porpoises and things like that.
You know, yeah.

Speaker 2 No, it's actually,

Speaker 2 it's actually, no, it's, it's crazy. I think it's important, you know, we're laughing, but I think it's important to understand that there's a lot of like, yes, you know, we're all one

Speaker 2 interconnected ecosystem, but it's not like kumbaya. It's like we're all one big happy family.

Speaker 2 Like there's violence and animals that we that are incredibly smart can also be, you know, incredibly violent.

Speaker 2 And they have warfare, they're territorial. I mean, shit happens.
And I think that it is important to understand all of that about the natural world. And Jane Goodall definitely did.

Speaker 2 And one of, you know, one of her key breakthroughs that she was very criticized for at first was actually seeing chimpanzees as individuals, seeing that they have personalities, right?

Speaker 2 That they can be

Speaker 2 distinguished from each other. And in her initial report that she wrote up, she didn't do what ethnographers did at the time, which was, you know, say like, chimpanzee 12XB3

Speaker 2 said this, like she gave them names, right? She gave them, she actually empathized with them. She spent time with them.
She got them to trust her. She figured out how to win their trust

Speaker 2 and was able to kind of observe them closely because they let her. And that's crucial, right? They actually let her and they have to let you.

Speaker 2 Chimpanzees are violent. Like if they don't let you observe them, you ain't seeing nothing.
This was before the day when we could hide tiny cameras, right? So the chimpanzees got to let you in.

Speaker 2 And she was able to kind of establish that trust and to be able to see them in that way.

Speaker 5 Is that a monkey in your background, Maria?

Speaker 2 Over your shoulder?

Speaker 2 It is. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 See?

Speaker 2 And it's not a chimpanzee. Do you know why?

Speaker 2 No. It has a tail.
Chimpanzees do not have tails. I did not know that.
Yeah. Yes.
You learned something new from Jay. I didn't do that on purpose.
That is hilarious.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there's a famous scene from 2001, A Space Odyssey, I think, in which like,

Speaker 5 The monkeys, I think they're monkeys, maybe they're chimpanzees now. I don't know.
When I saw the film, I was 19 years old. May or may not have been on a dose of psychedelic mushrooms, but like

Speaker 2 you didn't notice whether they had tails.

Speaker 5 Didn't notice whether they had tails. But there's a famous scene where there's like a monolith, but basically the monkeys discovering how to manipulate tools is this canonical metaphor for like

Speaker 5 human progress.

Speaker 5 maybe to our ultimate death, ultimately, right?

Speaker 5 And so, you know, that alone kind of changes a narrative, not just a narrative, but like the biological facts about things that we regard as fundamentally human. You know, the Holocene is the name for

Speaker 5 the era in which mankind or humankind begins to manipulate its environment with tools and technology, right?

Speaker 5 And if that kind of predates the rise of man or if the man, the rise of man is more complicated and it has all types of implications for evolution and psychology and everything else.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's a really good point

Speaker 2 because it does once you realize that your conception of the what makes you know man unique versus not, once that shifts, then that's that's a huge, that's a monumentally important change in just what you see, you know, how you study, how you conceive of humanity, and how you conceive of like, okay, what's unique to people.

Speaker 2 And if this isn't unique, then it actually prompts other questions and prompts a redefinition and it prompts a kind of reconceptualization of

Speaker 2 our past.

Speaker 5 And we'll be right back after this break.

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Speaker 2 One of the interesting things beyond Jane Goodall, but smack in the center of psychology for us to talk about today, Nate,

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 how much that outsider perspective actually enabled her to see things that people who had gone through a more traditional, rigorous education system up to that point could not see.

Speaker 2 I did a little bit of research

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 it's obviously easy to kind of

Speaker 2 mythologize. And I wanted to know like how how often is it, right, that people who come from a less traditional background are the ones that end up making these huge changes?

Speaker 2 And it seems like Jane Goodall actually had a really interesting combination of insider-outsider kind of status that helped her do what she did because she was an outsider, right?

Speaker 2 She never went to college. She didn't have a formal education.
And yet,

Speaker 2 from the tiniest age, she was fascinated with animals and became fascinated very early on, around age four is when

Speaker 2 she thinks it started

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 chimpanzees in particular and monkeys and primates.

Speaker 2 And so she didn't end up going to college and instead she went to secretarial school, learned how to be a secretary.

Speaker 2 And she ended up, you know, by the time she had finished secretarial school, she had basically on her own read every single book that was out there about Africa, about chimpanzees, about apes,

Speaker 2 about all of these different

Speaker 2 species and about everything that

Speaker 2 she could find. And there wasn't much, but she had read it all.

Speaker 2 And she did, by the way, end up getting a PhD from Cambridge because her initial work was so compelling that with the help of the person who became her mentor, Dr.

Speaker 2 Leakey, who was the preeminent ethnologist of the day. She was able to get accepted into Cambridge University without an undergraduate degree to end up getting a PhD.

Speaker 2 And so when she ended up meeting Dr. Leakey, he was very impressed because she could basically answer any question that he asked her, even though she had never gone to school.

Speaker 2 And so in that sense, it's not like she was a total outsider who was like trained in, I don't know, baseball and somehow ended up coming to Africa and was like, ooh, I'm very good at observing this.

Speaker 2 It was something that she was passionate about and she was curious about and that she had on her own kind of taught herself as an autodidact.

Speaker 2 But she, when she came to Cambridge, was just criticized by everyone saying, you're doing it all wrong. You are not supposed to look at chimpanzees this way.
You are not supposed to empathize.

Speaker 2 They don't have minds of their own. They don't have personalities.
You are projecting onto them. And she was like, fuck you.
I know better. And she was right.

Speaker 2 And I think that that's, you know, something where we can actually see a broader point, which is that because she hadn't come up in academia, she didn't know that she was doing anything wrong, right?

Speaker 2 She didn't know that you were quote-unquote not supposed to

Speaker 2 look at them a certain way or describe them a certain way. I mean, she's instead she just let her experience guide her.

Speaker 2 And I think that that's a really interesting point, because if you look at a lot of people in a lot of different fields who make really big discoveries, they often don't come from kind of the traditional hierarchical background.

Speaker 2 So I come out of academia and I know that, you know, some of the people who are the toughest to

Speaker 2 change, right, the people who will

Speaker 2 really not change their mind about anything, the people who argue basically until death's door that no, like to stay with Jane, good, all chimpanzees can't really use tools, are people

Speaker 2 who have established themselves in the field and whose work your new ideas might challenge, right? Kind of the old establishment, the real in-group.

Speaker 2 Those are often the people who are the most resistant to change.

Speaker 2 I'm sure you read, Nate, you went to the University of Chicago. So I'm assuming that this is something that you read maybe in more than one class, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Speaker 5 yeah basically you know one

Speaker 2 way to simplify the argument right is like basically you have to wait for people to to die you know what i mean that's that's a very good way of simplifying it because yeah that's how you get what's what kuhn calls paradigm shifts because otherwise you know the the end group they want to protect their old guard right they want to protect kind of their their ideas, their legacies.

Speaker 2 And so if you want scientific revolution to happen,

Speaker 2 don't kill them.

Speaker 2 That's not the takeaway. But you do need fresh eyes, fresh blood, people who don't feel threatened.

Speaker 2 And so I think that that is kind of, that's some of why outsiders like Jane Goodall might end up being successful. But you also need someone like a Dr.

Speaker 2 Leakey, who is the old guard and who is somehow not threatened, right? Who lets her in because she wouldn't have ever gotten into Cambridge without him. Yeah.

Speaker 5 In my fields, which are, you know, probably not as earth-shattering as Jane Goodall or the fundamental biology of what makes us human. And statistical and sabermetrics, I know people know that term.

Speaker 5 Probably our audience, half of them do, right? Sabre metrics is the statistical study of baseball that can be expanded to other sports.

Speaker 5 You kind of saw a structure of scientific revolutions thing occurring where, like, you know, there were these huge money ball wars, so-called, where you had the stat heads and they're kind of banished into like a broom closet, right, versus like the jocks, right?

Speaker 5 And like, and now, like, basically, every major sports franchise is like a whole department of like stat nerds, right?

Speaker 5 They're They're often running the teams or if they're not the owners of the teams. And like, and that happened in, that was generational turnover, in essence, right?

Speaker 5 Basically, after 10 years, the wars just kind of disappear, and the stat heads, the inmates are running the asylum, right? The stat heads are in charge after all, right?

Speaker 5 Which is the other thing about like insider versus outsider paradigms or knowledge is that like, you know, there are a lot of, if you will, evolutionary advantages for outsiders, right?

Speaker 5 Number one, and I guess I'm going with the evolution metaphor, they have like kind of more variation in terms of not genetic variation, but in terms of ideas, right?

Speaker 5 They're going to try new things and they might try and fail, but we're in a competitive world. We discover these ideas.

Speaker 5 Eventually, I mean, there is like kind of an irony slash paradox for like, you know, you want to be an outsider, but not too much of an outsider. Yeah.

Speaker 5 So it's like there's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of qualifications on like who is outsider enough.

Speaker 5 But like, you know, first of all, as you get to be more of an insider, then various bad things happen, right? Number one, you become more risk averse, more defensive of your position.

Speaker 5 Number two, you kind of

Speaker 5 gain more political power. And there are things that are burdensome about having power.

Speaker 5 Literally everything from having more meetings to if you say things off the cuff and people will look at you, funny, you have more to lose, right?

Speaker 5 You know, I think there's also a thing where, you know, as people age, then they may lose some degree of initiative and energy.

Speaker 5 And if you're kind of in a comfortable position, then you may kind of stop fighting for new ideas so much, stop changing your mind quite so much, right?

Speaker 5 You know, if you acquire power, then you can become either a target for or a conduit for political power too, right? So you can become the target of your political opponents.

Speaker 5 You can become a politicized yourself.

Speaker 5 There's not often not that much self-awareness from insiders in general, whereas like outsiders who don't fit in have to be a little bit more aware of their surroundings, so to speak, right?

Speaker 5 And they have to know how to like code switch and things like that.

Speaker 5 You know, you also can just kind of get, there's a little bit of the innovators dilemma thing, too, where like as you become more powerful, you develop more commitments to your constituents, to your employers, to everything else, you get bogged down, hard to innovate, and so forth, right?

Speaker 5 However,

Speaker 5 when the outsiders become powerful or become insiders, they can have gigantic egos, right?

Speaker 5 If you have had a contrarian idea a couple of times and then later been proven to be right and or to win the kind of acclaim of the broader community, boy, that's a really fucking nice feeling, right?

Speaker 5 It's kind of up there with like, in our world, like winning the main event of the World Series of poker or something, right?

Speaker 5 Like, no one's ever going to, no one's ever going to take that away from me.

Speaker 5 And I prove my doubters wrong because, you know, anytime you do something that's really hard, it's hard to be a paradigm-shifting scientist in general, especially if you're a woman, right?

Speaker 5 And to later win the admiration and respect of so many people. And

Speaker 5 Jane Goodall seemed to handle that fame pretty well, but I'm not sure that everybody does, right? She had a funny line. She shot a video.

Speaker 5 I saw it on Twitter. She said, I don't want this to be released until I'm dead, right? And she put it very gently.
She's like, you know, if there were a rocket ship.

Speaker 5 that were beamed out to space and had certain people on it. I'm not going to say who, but maybe Elon Musk and Donald Trump

Speaker 5 and President Xi, she said.

Speaker 2 And then I would put Putin in there, and I would put President Xi.

Speaker 8 I'd certainly put Betanyahu in there and his far-right government.

Speaker 2 Put them all on that spaceship. Putting five on there.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 That is, by the way, from a Netflix documentary that's called Famous Last Words. So she recorded it this past March, and it was only to be released after she died.
So it just came out.

Speaker 5 Of those five,

Speaker 5 if you had to have a bunk mate, right,

Speaker 5 you come in late to the space shuttle, you have to bunk with somebody. Who do you want to do?

Speaker 2 Don't do that to me, Nate. No, I can't.
I can't. I think I would,

Speaker 2 I think I'd probably kill myself before getting off this shuttle. She might be fine, right?

Speaker 2 Well, since I don't speak Chinese, I guess

Speaker 2 we wouldn't be able to, because all the other ones,

Speaker 2 there would be no, yeah.

Speaker 2 If you put me with Putin,

Speaker 2 I think one of us is going to be dead very quickly, and it's probably going to be me.

Speaker 5 You could play video games with Elon, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, he might be fun. I don't know.
I wouldn't mind, you know, Trump might be fun for a night. I think he's actually kind of like prissy about some stuff, though, right?

Speaker 5 He'd probably be, anyway, let's not get into that.

Speaker 2 What were we talking about? Shingredale. Were we talking about

Speaker 5 speaking of, okay, this is actually meant to be a long circuitous transition, talking about like, you know, Elon Musk is an example of somebody who

Speaker 5 sees himself as an outsider, right? I think is

Speaker 5 more of an outsider than like

Speaker 5 the libs would give him credit for, right? Like, you know, Elon Musk is somebody who you might say is not very aware of kind of what his own limits are necessarily, right?

Speaker 5 So that can be a big, that can be a big problem potentially.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, that can definitely be a problem because you do need to walk a fine line. And I think, you know, like I said, Jane Goodall was an outsider, but with like, you know, someone from the inside

Speaker 2 who championed her and she had a lot of insider knowledge

Speaker 2 in terms of her curiosity, I think that she also seemed to have that kind of golden personality that allowed her to transition to not just insider.

Speaker 2 status, but trailblazer, right, leader, paradigm shift creator, and not lose her groundedness and her kind of her curiosity and her genuine sense of fun exploration, just wanting to do this for the sake of science.

Speaker 2 And as you point out, Nate, like that doesn't have to happen, right? A lot of those same insiders who are the crusty old men, and yes, I'm going to say men because for the most part they are. And

Speaker 2 we'll say maybe there's a crusty old grand dame in there as well.

Speaker 2 But they were, a lot of them were trailblazers in their own day, right? A lot of them were kind of really innovative thinkers. And

Speaker 2 then something happened, right? Age happened, success happened,

Speaker 2 financial success happened, success within academia, within your peers admiring you, kind of that happened. And then you have a lot more to lose, including your kind of the things that made you great.

Speaker 2 And it's, it takes a very rare person who would actually be able to withstand that.

Speaker 2 My graduate advisor, Walter Michel,

Speaker 2 who's someone who was, you know, a trailblazer in the field of,

Speaker 2 in the field of psychology, personality psychology, and he was someone who was incredibly supportive of outsiders. I mean, he accepted me

Speaker 2 from a very weird background to come into his program, right? I came to him from television. I was working as a producer for Charlie Rose.

Speaker 2 I did, you know, study psychology before, but I explained to him that I wanted to be a writer and I just loved his work and I really wanted to, you know, that I was motivated and I'd do my own research and all this stuff, but that I wanted to kind of to be a writer and not be a psychologist.

Speaker 2 And he loved that. And he was like, this is amazing.
You know, we need more people who just are genuinely curious. And most people would have shown me the door, right?

Speaker 2 And be like, get the fuck out of here if you don't want to be an actor.

Speaker 5 If you were reporting on Charlie Rose, you probably were doing some field work in psychology i would oh

Speaker 2 absolutely um i i i i say that that yes that is definitely um the uh yes that is definitely an accurate observation but um i still and i i think i might have told this story um on risky business before but

Speaker 2 you know with uh if i did i'm sorry for repeating myself but let me remind our listeners that when i started working with Walter Michel

Speaker 2 and did some of my initial studies on self-control, I found the opposite of the results we'd been expecting and found that the people highest in self-control actually did the worst on these like stock market, you know, decision tasks because they didn't take negative feedback well, right?

Speaker 2 They just assumed that they were a lot smarter and they didn't learn,

Speaker 2 which was this very aberrant finding.

Speaker 2 And I was really scared of

Speaker 2 telling Walter that this was the case because his entire career was built around the notion that self-control good, right? Delay of gratification, good. And I was like, uh-oh, right.

Speaker 2 Self-control people not doing well. And I like, I delayed.
And I remember standing outside his office being like, fuck, you know, this is bad. And then he would just, he was like, a child.

Speaker 2 He was so excited. He's like, I'm so excited that you found something bad about self-control.
Yes. Like, let's see where it goes.
Get more data. Like, do this again.
Does it replicate?

Speaker 2 You know, this is great.

Speaker 2 And that is, I think, that's very rare, but that's the hallmark of someone who was in it for the right reasons and who was motivated by kind of curiosity and genuine love of learning.

Speaker 2 And I don't think that it's actually,

Speaker 2 I don't think that it's an artifact. I think it's a feature that Walter Michelle was also someone who was an artist.

Speaker 2 He actually had some solo shows while he was alive and kind of experimented in all those media, that he read avidly outside of psychology, that he loved, that I wanted to write.

Speaker 2 Like, I think that those things go hand in hand, right? Because it helps you stay outsidery while being on the inside. And I think that that is crucially important.

Speaker 5 No, it's a good, I mean, this is putting it way too clinically, but like, it's also a good life practice, but like it's a good hedging strategy.

Speaker 5 I mean, this is is one of the stock pieces of advice I give to like any young person choosing your career, right?

Speaker 5 Make sure that all your friends, all your network, if you want to talk about people who are more frenemies, whatever, right? Make sure they're not all in your field of work.

Speaker 5 A, because they'll provide opportunities to escape that field should you need to. But like,

Speaker 5 you know, like, I don't spend a lot of time talking to

Speaker 5 political insiders.

Speaker 5 Even though in principle, I'm like, well, I can have a have coffee with them. And if they're if everything they tell me is bullshit, then I don't have to let it influence my judgment at all, right?

Speaker 5 I just think it involves like a lot of work to maintain those relationships. And it's kind of hard not to, I mean, even, you know, even,

Speaker 5 you know, in media, I know more people, right?

Speaker 5 And so with media, I, you know, I'm like, okay, well, I want to, you know, maybe want to criticize this person and, and, but like, I know this person and I know the person who knows them.

Speaker 5 And so like, you know, you have have to be a little bit more careful right um you know there's a lot of value in in in not giving a fuck um and one way you cannot give a fuck without facing existential risks to your career is to have other fallbacks that you can have potentially by the way can also be like i think you know i think jane goodall

Speaker 5 embraced it or at least came to peace with it but like being a

Speaker 5 a hero to people or becoming a celebrity. I mean, you know, one way to define celebrity is that like

Speaker 5 you no longer have control of your own image and likeness in a way, right? That people will have ideas about you that don't match the real you. And in fact,

Speaker 5 are some stylized version of you that may be weaponized

Speaker 5 against you, or if not against you, then at,

Speaker 5 you know, perpendicularly to like what you're trying to accomplish, right? You become an avatar for something.

Speaker 5 And that can be quite difficult. You know, I think

Speaker 5 I've dealt with that where, you know, I do a lot of things. I'm like way more famous than the election forecast than anything else, which I kind of give at least of a fuck about, right?

Speaker 5 I think it's good work, but like, I don't really give a fuck. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 But at the same time, like, I wouldn't have like the privilege and the income and things like that if I weren't well known for that. And so,

Speaker 5 so, you know, any type of like nerd who makes it famous, I'm, I'm,

Speaker 5 I'm sympathetic toward, and I'm sympathetic if they

Speaker 5 if they keep it real by like,

Speaker 5 you know, and the different ways to keep it real. Maybe you speak truth to power.
Maybe you're very

Speaker 5 judicious in what you say, right?

Speaker 5 But like, I think there are definitely better and worse ways to do it.

Speaker 5 And there are different versions of it that don't become it, don't involve becoming a boring old member of the establishment.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 And I do, you know, I do think that maintaining that vitality is crucial to making sure that you do stay relevant up until the very last day, right?

Speaker 2 That you're someone like Goodall, that when you die, like the world mourns, right? The world notices because you've been advancing the field the entire time.

Speaker 2 And we'll be back right after this.

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Speaker 2 There was an interesting study that I saw that came out a few years ago,

Speaker 2 kind of basically how much does an outsider status actually matter.

Speaker 2 And this was done by Gino Catani and Simone Fariani, and they actually looked at Hollywood.

Speaker 2 So they looked at around 12,000 Hollywood professionals and creative success.

Speaker 2 you know, awards,

Speaker 2 you know, critical acclaim, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And they basically did one of those, you know, charts where you look at kind of the the networks like the circles of influence where you have like the center of the network and then you have the periphery of the network there's a specific word for that right

Speaker 2 and I'm not sure what the specific word for it is but you you understand what I'm talking about visually and so they wanted to see kind of where are kind of the

Speaker 2 most successful artists are they at the center right like are they like really in the middle of things are they at the periphery of connections um and they found that it was neither that it was actually people who were kind of at

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 nexus between

Speaker 2 the center and the periphery, right? So they actually had, like they weren't really on the outside, but they also were not in the center. So they had outsider connections and kind of outsider cred,

Speaker 2 but they also had some

Speaker 2 industry ins and people who supported them from the inside, which I actually found remarkably similar if you think about Jane Goodall to kind of what she looked like in the sense that she was on the outside and yet she did have someone who was at the very center.

Speaker 2 He was the single, you know, most famous, I think, primatologist at the time who was her champion and who was able to kind of push her along.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, it was, and by the way, I found this very funny in the study of Hollywood. Basically, critics like it if you look kind of outsidery,

Speaker 2 They give you really good critical reviews, but if you want to get like

Speaker 2 Oscars and you want to get really high awards, you need the industry insiders to vote for you as well. So you have to walk this fine line.

Speaker 2 So it was actually, it's an interesting study, but I think it's a little bit flawed because you do,

Speaker 2 Hollywood is a weird place where you have these weird... arcane voting systems and you really have to have some sort of politicking to to get into those systems as well.

Speaker 2 And that's not, I mean, that's true of academia. It's not quite the same, but academia also has a lot of politicking and a lot of those arcane systems in place, I guess.

Speaker 2 And who gets tenure, who doesn't get tenure, all that stuff is also incredibly fraught. So I take it back.
I'm just thinking out loud here. Maybe Hollywood isn't a bad

Speaker 2 facsimile of academia.

Speaker 5 No, look, I think it's true in a lot of, you know, everyone wants to maintain their independent outsider cred,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 most people also like power and access to power. You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 And there are trade-offs between those things. And

Speaker 5 there's a lot of walking the tightrope, brand management, whatever you want to call it, involved in trying to kind of have your cake and eat it too.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Nate, what do you find the hardest? Kind of the,

Speaker 2 I don't even know know how to phrase this, but like the idea generation, all of that, like the creative stuff, or I think this is different for different people, like the marketing and the actually like being able to get it heard, because there is, I mean, those are skills that are not always complementary.

Speaker 2 And there are some people who are very good at one and not great at the other.

Speaker 2 And in order to be successful in a lot of industry,

Speaker 2 you really need both. And I'm going to say something that's very politically incorrect and people might get really mad, but I'm just going to say it anyway.
Jane Goodall was a knockout. She was hot.

Speaker 2 Like she is a tall, gorgeous blonde. Like I see her and I'm like, whoa, like, holy shit, girl.
Like, you're, you're stunning. And I'm sorry, like, that couldn't have hurt.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying that it had any, like, her, she is a genius. Like, her mind, her observational ability, like all of that is,

Speaker 2 we're not doubting any of that, but she was her own marketing in a way, right? Like, you put her on a poster, and people are going to be interested.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I'm not trying to diminish in any way what she did, which is why I'm saying this at the very end of the show and not the beginning.

Speaker 2 But, like, it helped her with things that she probably wasn't interested in because she was just interested in the chimps. But she ended up being such a forceful, I think, such a forceful marketing

Speaker 2 phenomenon, partly because of the full package.

Speaker 5 No, look, I think there is some minimum threshold for looking at successful people who are successful intellectuals, right?

Speaker 5 Particularly the ones that become like more kind of commercially successful. I think it's an important distinction, right?

Speaker 5 People who like become well-known generally and/or make some money from that, right? Like

Speaker 5 there's usually a fairly high baseline of

Speaker 5 charisma of some kind.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, look, I'm always motivated myself by like the work, you know, my satisfaction is when I publish something, I finish a model, you finish a book chapter, right? And like file it.

Speaker 5 Like that's more the satisfaction for me than like whether it gets like praised or whatever or not later on. Right.
But at the same, at the same time,

Speaker 5 you know, I kind of was an internet entrepreneur in my own way. And you have to market your content.

Speaker 5 And if you're an artist in particular, even more than a scientist, you really have to market the fuck out of out of yourself. Right.

Speaker 5 And that's like, you know, that's like, that's like half the game, I think. And there are different ways to play it.
You don't have to do ways that are fake or uncomfortable. Right.

Speaker 5 I think sometimes you encounter people who like, who need to be more.

Speaker 2 deliberate about it. It's true.
And Jane Goodall definitely wanted her work to be known.

Speaker 2 I mean, one of the first things she did when she came back and started kind of getting her PhD is write a popular book about what she discovered.

Speaker 2 Not an academic treatise, and people at academia hated this, but she knew, right? She knew that she needed to popularize. And to her, that was incredibly important.

Speaker 2 And so, because for her, you know, she wanted to protect the natural environment. She wanted people, she wanted to protect the rights of the chimpanzees.

Speaker 2 She wanted all of these things that could only come if she became a very powerful spokesperson for

Speaker 5 academia.

Speaker 5 Can be one way to have this best of both worlds scenario where like, you know, you're

Speaker 5 tenure and you're able to be intellectually free, but you can gain

Speaker 5 notoriety, right? You have fewer restrictions on like outside activity than you would at a corporate employer. Can also be the worst of both worlds, though, right? It can also be like that, like, um,

Speaker 5 you know, there's a ton of group think, there's a ton of academic politics, and so you're kind of like very restricted that way. And you maybe don't realize how

Speaker 5 poorly

Speaker 5 the communication you're encouraged to use in an academic paper will come across to like a smart outsider, right?

Speaker 2 Yep. Yep.
And I think just to, just to sum up, Jane Goodall is someone who just intuitively

Speaker 2 understood all of this and someone who managed to not only maintain her relevance, but stay relevant and stay outsidery, even as she became the most insider of them all.

Speaker 2 And so I think that we can, even if you

Speaker 2 have nothing to do with psychology or animal cognition or any of that, I think that there's a lot here that you can take away from this in terms of, you know, how to think about approaching your careers, how to think about thinking, how to think about making an impact on the world.

Speaker 2 Even at the very end, she said, even if the world is going to go up in flames,

Speaker 2 go down kicking and screaming.

Speaker 8 Even if this is the end of humanity as we know it, let's fight to the very end. It's better to go on fighting to the end than just to give up and say, okay.

Speaker 2 And I think that that's a, you know, that's, that's a great message for insiders and outsiders alike.

Speaker 2 Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Speaker 2 Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kanakova.

Speaker 5 And by me, Nate Silver. The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.
This episode was produced by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Speaker 5 Lydia Jean Cott and Daphne Chen are our editors. And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.
Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

Speaker 2 If you like this show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too. But once again, only if you like us, we don't want those bad reviews out there.
Thanks for tuning in.

Speaker 12 What's up, everyone? This is Angel, Diego, and Jason, and and we're a Gustav About Podcast. Siemporciento, Música, Regional Mexicana, pero veces, uno que Totro chisme.

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