Gautam Mukunda | What Presidential Elections Can Teach us About Leadership

Srini Rao: Gautam welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Gautam Makunda: Thanks so much for inviting me. This was this is something I've been looking forward to for a while, and I'm, I can't wait to get started. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Likewise you have a book out called picking presidents, which I just finished reading.

And even though I'm not particularly interested in politics, the book was fascinating because it I think was about far more than just how we choose presidents, but how we choose leaders in general. But before we get into all of that I wanted to start by asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up influencing what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

A lot. Okay. So my father is they're both retired now. But my father was an engineer with the, for, with for most of my life with the government, with the First Department of the Navy and the Department of Energy. And he focused the Department of Energy on a sort of working on nuclear waste reprocessing.

Gautam Makunda: Building facilities that take care of, say, the nuclear power, the waste from building nuclear weapons and reprocessing them to make them safe. So that was it. That was what he worked on. And so my mom is a nuclear physicist who spent her entire career consulting for NASA. Yeah, so she so she got her PhD in nuclear physics when she was 22.

And do you ever see the Martian? Yeah the Matt Damon movie. Yeah, the Matt Damon movie. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a scene in the Martian where he goes and grabs a space like a one old Mars rover and uses the power source to heat his vehicle. And so that was my mom's last mission.

She helped to design that. And in fact we flew down to see the launch because that was her last mission. And when, so I remember when she saw the Martian, I got like a five page technical analysis of everything. Wow. Okay. So many questions come from that alone, right? I would imagine just based on what I know from your background, where you've been to school, what you've done for work that the narrative was like a typical Indian kid narrative.

Srini Rao: Doctor, lawyer, engineer, failure, correct me if I'm wrong. More importantly your parents have pretty impressive credentials. I wonder, did you ever feel that there's just an incredibly high expectation to live up

Gautam Makunda: to? Yeah my parents were great about not not pressuring me in such a way.

I occasionally joke that my psychology makes sense if you realize that I'm, like, the only member of the Harvard faculty who thinks of themselves as the dumb one in the family. But but so what I say is the doctor, lawyer, engineer thing would not in my case, definitely not lawyer doctor doctor, engineer, physicist was it was definitely the like you should do one of those three and I started out in the hard sciences, right?

Like when I was in high school and I'm a sort of got, when I went to Harvard, the expectation was that I was going to be a physics guy and I'd always been interested in other things, but I had never like I did physics research in high school at MIT and things like that. I never like.

Realize that there was another option. So my first year the the head advisor for the physics department at Harvard actually took me aside and said people with your background, they burn out sometimes, right? So I think you should take a year away from what do others that you seem that seems curious and that you seem curious or interested in and see what happens, I'm like, sure, that's that seems like good advice.

And so I took a political science course called war and politics entirely because I looked at the syllabus and the list of books were all books that I had always wanted to read. And I was like, okay, sure, let's do that. Now, what I hadn't anticipated was this brutally hard course where the first half week, the reading was Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian war entire, right?

And so this is your freshman year of college. You're like, what did I get myself into? But I loved it and I was like wait, I get to do you like this is an option I can do this. And I realized what it really appealed to me was I am one of my colleagues is to say like a pathological level extrovert, right?

Like I need to be around people at all. And I loved the I love the way you think in physics, the taking a complex problem and abstracting until you really understand it. And what political science gave me was the chance to do that. In a thing that involves people, right? Take complicated problem and you've read the, you've read the book.

So you now know exactly what I'm talking about, right? Because this is what the book is about and drill out to a sort of an abstract model that tells you something profound and interesting and new about the world and then and then ground it in data and history and things like that. And that was just an enormous amount of fun for me.

And so then I was at McKinsey for a while. Then I went back to my PhD at MIT and, and then I got recruited to join the Harvard Business School faculty and I was there for seven years because it turns out that when you build an abstract model of the world and you apply it to politics, sometimes it applies to other things too.

And the business school was like, I think this is just as much about business as it is about politics. So you should come here for now. And it was great. And I did. And when you say that about my book, you're exactly right. So the book was, we can talk about what particularly motivated the book and why I was focused on the presidency.

But the broader intellectual agenda was that the presidency is the greatest laboratory for leadership the world has ever known because we know more about the presidents than we do anyone else. Put that in perspective, there are more books about Abraham Lincoln than there are any other person who has ever lived except Jesus.

Wow. Yeah. So we get to study the presidency. I'm not saying like leading in the presidency is not the same as leading in other situation, but we can learn about leadership by looking at the presidency. And that's one of the things that really appealed to me too. We'll come back

Srini Rao: to that one thing that I think is really fascinating is that you had somebody who actually told you to go and explore your curiosity.

And I was just talking to a friend of my parents last night, I was having dinner with her. She's an English professor at community college. And I was telling her I, as an undergrad at Berkeley, I never took classes based on what I was curious about. It was always like, what do I think will get me a job?

And that was a huge mistake because I did terrible in all those classes. I told her, I was like, I don't think I have one, maybe have one memory of a class that I was really enjoying while I was there. But then in addition to that, I was talking to my niece the other night. She's a freshman at UCR and she was telling me about the classes that she has to take and she's yeah, we have these required classes for graduation.

And I was thinking about, and you're in the education system and anytime I talk to educators, I have tons and tons of questions because I consider myself a failed byproduct of the system. One thing I realized, I was like, the whole idea of graduation requirements, classes that are mandatory, seems absurd in the metaphor that I came up with.

I said, listen, can you imagine if you went to a restaurant where you're the one paying to be there and it's your money? And the restaurant says, yeah, you can eat here, but only if you order the things that we insist you order, otherwise you can't leave the restaurant. Or if you went to Macy's with a thousand dollars and they're like, yeah, you can buy whatever you want as long as you buy this other thing that you can't stand either.

So naturally that, that raises a lot of questions about the education system itself, because you're pretty enmeshed in it at what is arguably. One of the most elite institutions in the world. So if you were tasked with redesigning the entire thing from the ground up, what would you change about it?

So

Gautam Makunda: a lot of things, but the first thing I say is I questioned the assumption underlying your question, right? Which is a customer service model of education. So there's an old line at Harvard Business School about an MBA student who was demanding something from one of the, from one of the, from one of the faculty assistants, right?

And he said I'm the customer. The customer is always right. And the faculty assistants who, as in any educational institution, are the people who actually run the school. The assistant says back to them, you're not the customer, you're the product. And that is actually something to think about from the perspective of the school, right?

That when you were coming, it's true you're paying money, but but when you're coming there, you're coming like literally to be educated, right? And the assumption there is that there are things that you don't know. And you're in an institution that is about taking taking people who have big things they don't know and teaching them.

So I'm not opposed to graduation or to to distribution requirements because I think institutions, and in the case of a lot of these institutions, these are institutions that are hundreds of years old that have spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of issue question, have decided there are things that's really important for people to know, right?

There are things that it's really important for people to come out of our institution having a grounding. And so I love autodidacts, right? Like people who are self educated and who learned about the world because they were just really curious. I think they are like uniformly the most interesting people you will ever meet.

I just I just think they're really great, but they're often like holes in their knowledge. So there's someone I know who I is brilliant and owns like 20, 000 books, incredibly well read, incredibly knowledgeable about about and any number of subjects, like routinely ask them for advice about any number of things.

And we were watching a Star Trek episode once, and I discovered that this person did not know that there's no such thing as as Gr or Fishbrain. Just looking at Star Trek, they were like look. I just thought spaceships have gravity. And I was like how did you know? You're wait, what?

That's a kind of like baseline. This though thing where he goes, no, you hadn't spent much time in college or like you didn't really care about school. You didn't get into this thing until the idea that education is really important until later in life. And so you're an autodidact, right?

You're incredibly knowledgeable about a lot of things and there's some surprising, and that to me was one. So that's a sort of a lateral, but there are things I would change and the biggest one I would change is. I would, for most subjects, I would kill the lecture, like I would like with a stake through its heart, kill the there are people who are such fantastic lecturers that they can make it an incredibly compelling educational experience.

Those people do exist, but there are not many of them. And the business school that way where I learned to really learn to teach it is used the casement. Where one of my colleagues said, your rule of thumb should be that the less you talk, the better your class will be. And that was a really good rule of thumb.

And that kind of model of nowadays, the term for it is the flipped classroom is, I think, an infinitely superior educational experience. So having done both lecturing and case studies, now when I have the option, I pick case studies 100% of the time. This ACAST podcast is sponsored by NetSuite. 36, 000.

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Srini Rao: Yeah I think that the thing that I appreciate about that because I was a Pepperdine MBA and I just felt like I was going through the motions, but I remember watching a Harvard lecture and I thought, look, this is actually really an interesting way because it forces you to think it's not just about regurgitating.

Which makes sense as to why Harvard MBAs are so sought after based on that. Outside of graduation requirements, there's one thing that struck me about what you said. And I realized I never had that experience where I had somebody say go explore this thing you're curious about.

I don't ever remember being asked what I was interested in learning about. I felt like I was just choosing from the options in front of me. Part of that is also cultural conditioning, right? You, I remember when my dad had one of our uncles over and he's asking about his son who's in ninth grade.

He was like, does he want to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer? And it's you've limited this kid's options to his future to three options before he's even finished freshman year. And my uncle's like, all he cares about right now is girls. I'm like that's all he should care about. He's in ninth grade.

Gautam Makunda: Absolutely. Absolutely. But so that makes me wonder, like, why is that not more common? And then as far as culture goes you and I are both of Indian descent. Did you find that was, were your parents encouraging about the things that you were very curious about?

Srini Rao: And if you have siblings... Where do you fall in the birth order and did the advice change based on siblings? So I'm

Gautam Makunda: an only child, so no siblings. I would say my parents were not thrilled when I decided, to put it mildly, when I decided to do political science. I occasionally teased them that that they did not forgive me for deciding not to be like a quote unquote real scientist until I ended up on the Harvard faculty, which You know, in, in the Baroque status competition, that is the Indian American community.

My son is a Harvard professor is worth like 2 billion points. So yeah. So you know, like then it was okay but try your

Srini Rao: son as the host of a podcast and an author who graduated with a C average from Berkeley author in Berkeley that works well for you. So no they weren't they were not.

Gautam Makunda: They, I would say is they like partly the same thing that I, I did not know political science exists as a profession until I went to college. I think they were like, what is this? And that continued for the rest of my career. Then I went to McKinsey and it turns out that if you try to explain to someone who doesn't already know what McKinsey does, it's really hard it's like we you solve problems for businesses. Like what? And so I do think there's this cultural, it's starting to erode, right? We start to see Indian Americans who are, who have branched out in lots of different ways. We see Indian like Indian American actors we see I'm blanking. I'm gonna, I'm gonna kill him, kill his name. Kumail Narangi, right? From, yeah. Who was like on the cover of Men's Fitness. And I was like, I've never hated another person so much in my entire life. You and other, apparently so

Srini Rao: did Trevor Noah. And

Gautam Makunda: speaking

Srini Rao: of Indians in the media, Cal Penn is apparently hosting the Daily Show

Gautam Makunda: this week.

Yeah. So this is awesome. And like fantastic. And as a as a member of the community. And we could actually talk more about that is even when I got married, my wife is

Srini Rao: Swedish. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I remember seeing that in the book.

Gautam Makunda: So yeah, we have we had both like a like a Western ceremony and an Indian ceremony was we talked about why we did Indians at the thing and why it was important to us that we did.

But OK, so let's let me split out. You brought out several points and all of them are really cool and really. Taking a break in curiosity. So the biggest mistake I have made in my professional career was not taking a year off after high school. Like I can, anytime I talk to a high school student, who's like about to go to college.

I'm like, if there's a way for you to take a year off, take a year off. You will benefit from it so much that you cannot even imagine. And they're like the old question is what should I do? And the answer is you should do something do something. There are lots of options.

But if all you do is work at a restaurant, you will still be better. Yeah. The value of that is just incalculable. So first, second is in the curiosity thing. So I am like, I guess basically a pathetic lack of self discipline. I'm just unable to do stuff that I'm not interested in.

It's like you said, you're just, you're bad at it. And I just tune out. I'm no, sorry, I can't I don't care about this, I'm out. Yeah. And so that for me was, it was, like, pursuing my curiosity was less about a need to do it than just, I didn't have other options if I had tried to force my way through stuff that I care, that I didn't care about, I would have...

It would have been and the lucky thing for me was being put in a position thanks to this person's advice where

,

I had the chance to read.

Srini Rao: So you know, it's funny you talk about this idea of not taking a year off after high school because I feel like that's quite common in other cultures, but it's not in the United States.

I wanted to bring a clip back from an old episode. That we did with David Epstein, who wrote the book range, which I think is very relevant to what you just said. Take a listen.

Gautam Makunda: We will underestimate future change at every time point, even when we're very old at no time. Is that more true than from about 18 to the late twenties?

That's when you undergo the fastest time of personality change. And so essentially right at the start of that period, we're telling someone pick now, which is really asking them to pick for a person they don't yet know. And certainly in a world they can't yet conceive unless they have a crystal ball that most people don't.

And so I think it's a particularly bad time to make ironclad long term plans. And we should be much more oriented toward pick something and I'm stealing this idea from the economist and statistician Robert Miller, is we should orient people toward do the thing that's going to give you a high information signal about whether it fits you or not.

Srini Rao: Given what you just said about not taking a year off after high school what do you make of that? And one, how would you convince Indian just to let

Gautam Makunda: you take a year off? First I am such a fan of both David, who was on my podcast and Range, both of his books, but Range, that when any of my wife and my friends have kids, we send them a copy.

Wow. So Could not phrase him and the book. And so what my comment on it is the only thing I say is, and I want, is when I work with PhD students, this is something I always caution them, right? As I always say that if you ask someone like me, was this a good strategy?

It's like asking a lottery winner, is it a good idea to play the lottery? There's a selection effect. I adopted this bizarre random path where I did a PhD in political science focused on leadership, which is, which when I did, it was considered career suicide. And then did a postdoc in biological engineering and a professorship a business school like none of those things make sense, right?

And that worked out for me, but it had a lot of risk, right? It has to work out. So I think I was a pretty good graduate student. I ended up as a faculty at Harvard, but I over the course of two years on the job market applied to something like 80 schools. Got three interviews and one offer and the one offer was from Harvard.

Suppose Harvard hadn't been hiring that year. This would have been a very bad situation, right? And so there, so the, there are two reasons people do the specialized. Three, right? So one is it's safe. You will not, your ceiling, I genuinely believe, is generally not as high as someone who as David talks about, has the range to pursue many, but getting your total place can be really, yeah, second, academic institution. are incredibly centered around, right? For both good and bad reasons. And since so much of your, the shaping period of your life is when you're in academic institution, they channel you in ways that are direct that way, where it's just it's almost hard to imagine being something.

And then the third one is just that being a generalist is difficult, right? So I in any given day in my when I'm at, when I'm an I also work at a venture capital firm, right? But when I'm in my, wearing my academic In any given day, I need to be conversant in the literature and like political science, organizational behavior at least some knowledge of economics, psychology, three or four others on any given day.

So my colleagues who are political scientists peer players just have to do one. Yeah, that's very tough. It's like it's time consuming just to keep up with all with just with, Oh, that's interesting. And figure out what that's about at all. So all of that being said, why would I then tell you to do one is it's just more interesting.

Yeah, we all, unless you are a seriously devout Hindu, you only get to do this once,

right? You only get to do this once. You should enjoy yourself while you're doing it. You should like being miserable is just not the second is once you leave academia, institutions outside of academia massively reward generals because there is no such thing as a pure play specialist outside of it.

Right now I'm a venture capitalist and I I look at companies in spaces ranging from biotechnology to advanced and if I didn't have enough of a general background that I could at least speak to people in those fields on in terms I would be helpless, right?

So that's so being a generalist is just usually, and the third one is almost all interesting ideas now happen at the intersection between, right? And there are lots and lots of reasons for that. There are lots of good books about that. But the simplest reason is because if you're in the center of a field, you're in a place where everybody else has always been.

If you're at the edge of a field, but you're often in a place where no one else has been and therefore you might see stuff you don't actually have to be smarter than everyone else to have a new idea when you're at the edge of a field. If you're at the center of the field, you better be smarter than everyone else to have a new idea.

And I'm not saying there are people who are smarter than everyone else and the odds are you are not one. So given that, I think that, how would you convince Indian parents to do that is a question that wish I I wish I could tell, answer to my 18 year old self.

I think the first is, I think the culture is more sympathetic than it used to be to it. I think the task is just easier. I'm on the board of a scholarship that gives that we give scholarships to Indian American students, South Asian students, I should say, coming out of high school.

Who are who are disband and who need help. It's striking how much the other members of the board who were like all born in India, all of whom came have been they've adapted. They don't need people to be lawyers and doc doctors and anymore.

In fact, for a while we actually had a special award for like arts students. So those, so part of it is that yeah. The other one is, When you are in India, that you have to do one of these three professions actually makes sense, right? India is, from an American perspective, unimaginable, and focusing on that is really important.

But when you were it's like, when you were here, you should be, and the, one of the great advantages of American life is the the sheer sort of, I think Americans rarely understand just how stratospherically wealthy their country actually is. This is one of my favorite statistics because it's so shocking when you hear it my wife is from Sweden.

If Sweden was a United States state by per capita income, what is the state that would be closest to Sweden? Sweden, an incredibly wealthy country, well off, everybody's tall and healthy. What's the U. S. state with the per capita income closest?

Srini Rao: I would guess California, but something tells

Gautam Makunda: me I'm wrong.

Yeah, that's usually people guess California, New York, Connecticut, it's Missouri, right? Like Sweden would be a relatively poor U. S. That's how rich the country and when we put it, when you frame it in that way that opens up lots of opportunities to do things that you just shouldn't, you don't, there's no reason to play it safe in a country with so many paths to success and so many safety nets if you try if you fail.

No I think that you made some really interesting points about why that makes sense in India, because I really, it took me a long time to recognize that my parents were giving me advice based on the context that they were raised in, where their outcomes were binary. It was poverty or security.

Srini Rao: So risk has some significant downside. The other thing, as I've talked to people on this show who've come from really disadvantaged backgrounds, like I thought it was fascinating, you mentioned disadvantaged South Asian kids, because For the most part based on how it sounds like you are brought up and how I was brought up, we grew up in fairly privileged circumstances.

My dad's a college professor, like it's not like we were filthy rich, but we were definitely not in a situation where there's any question as to whether we'd have to go to college or any of those kinds of things.

Yes in my case, we were not rich, but there was nothing, there might have been things I wanted we didn't have, but there was never anything I needed.

Totally. One more question that has nothing to do with the book, and I promise we'll get

Gautam Makunda: to the book. No I've talked about the book enough.

If you want to go in different directions,

Srini Rao: there's no problem. No, I do want to talk about the book because I think there's a lot to learn there, but you mentioned that your wife is Swedish and this is something I always wonder about people who marry somebody outside of their own race is how you think about preserving culture and heritage.

Because even my sister we're from South India we speak Telugu. Her husband is Bengali and they have this kid and I keep thinking, I was like, what language is this kid going to speak? And in my mind, I'm like, okay, if I even don't marry an Indian girl, the first thing to go is going to be language.

I'm pretty sure. And so I think, I wonder how you think about preserving culture and

Gautam Makunda: heritage. So we do think about it I'll say first is like I I am a perpetrator here more than a victim, right? Like my, my, my Tamil and it is awful. And my Hindi is non existent. So well, my parents,

Srini Rao: I don't know about you.

My parents refused to teach us Hindi because when they wanted to talk about something that they didn't want us to know about. They spoke in Hindi. I was like, you morons, you could have taught us Hindi, right? You realize that would be a thousand times more useful than Telugu. What the hell can you do with Telugu if you're not an

Gautam Makunda: Andhra?

My grandfather, who was of all things head of research and development for the Indian army, refused to learn Hindi his entire life on the grounds, he said, and I quote, I refuse to waste my time with a language that has the same word for yesterday and tomorrow. But but yeah I, my parents chose to speak only to me in English because because when I was growing, I did not start speaking until very late and they were absolutely terrified that I was developmentally developmentally disabled and they were like maybe we're just making too hard on him with multiple languages and just pick one language.

And as they said in retrospect, they deeply regret this message, this choice, because once I started talking, I never stopped. But but there you go. So circle back to something I said earlier. So our, we had two weddings, right? We had a sort of a traditional not traditional, pretty untraditional Western term.

And then we had a very traditional Indian ceremony. And so after the Indian ceremony, including the priest who goes rogue and keeps going for about 45 minutes and things like that, which I said was the most Indian thing you could possibly do. The bride and groom give a little talk and I said, look why are we doing it this way?

And the answer is the Indian community and American community and say, sorry, we have benefited enormously by like Indian Americans are probably, I believe. the wealthiest single ethnic group in the United States which is astonishing. And so we are we are quite privileged here, but at the same time we both do podcasts, right?

So I listen to podcasts too. There's a podcast in which somebody's doing interview two people are, one person's being interviewed, the person's being interviewed starts talking about, about, about immigration policy. And the person's being interviewed says like most immigration is bad, but some immigration is useful because it's good for the economy.

And the person who is interviewing him says no, that's wrong. Says one third of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are Indian American. And however good that is for the economy, it's not worth the cultural damage. And then the person he says this to says no, that's a good point. Yeah. You're right. I'm paraphrasing, but that is now, why do I care about this podcast?

The person who is doing the interview is Steve Bannon and the person who was being interviewed was of course, Donald Trump. And that's a very direct attack on on the community, right? Like I said I have friends who are the Indian American CEOs of high tech companies. I very briefly was one myself.

And very briefly. And And like it's pretty something for this president, the United States to say that my existence is bad for the country, right? That's significant. And so I think any community has a choice, right? Which is essentially they can, if you're in the United States, you can choose to embrace your identity or run from your identity.

And you can say Oh we're like, we are the way I, the ultimate is I'm going to curl up in a ball, please don't hit me. Or I am proud of who I am and you're going to accept me. And I'm proud of and the answer is, I think that for us and I think for the community, but certainly for my wife and me is we were not interested in curling up into a.

That we wanted to say that we are here, we are every bit as American as everyone else. We can be fully in touch with the cultures of our ancestors, but Swedish or Indian and still be no less American because of that fact. And so that was really powerful for us to say that it's really important for us to make that statement, even in the context of our wedding.

And so for me, when I think about it. My kids can I don't believe in forcing kids into culture. I hope that my kids get interested in Indian culture. I hope that they become knowledgeable. I hope they're, I hope they know more about it than I do. Or I hope they're better about it than I am.

Yeah. I don't want force them to do it. My wife would very much like our kids to learn. Sweet. That's fine. I was teaser about it. I'm like is, this is very valuable for the three people in the world who speak Swedish but not English . I said this to her mom and her mom's answer was that three is probably high.

But but because she she spends a lot more time in Sweden than I ever have in India and she wants them to be in touch with that culture. I would like my kids to respect Indian culture. I would like them to understand Indian culture. And if they want to go deeper than that would be wonderful.

And if they don't, that's okay too, right? At a basic level, I guess I'd say there are a lot of us. Indian culture is not in danger of vanishing away anytime soon. And that does make me a little bit more relaxed about it too.

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com slash unmistakable. Let's get into the book. You, you early on in the book that say a leader's impact cannot be understood without understanding how they got the job. Consider what I call the paradox of leader selection. The more effort you put. Into picking a leader, the less it matters who you pick.

Let's unpack that. The more people think leadership is, the more effort that important, the more effort they'll put into picking their preferred leader. The path to power will become so rigorous that it filters out liars and the remaining candidates will all resemble one another. When a selection process is perfect, then which person it picks doesn't matter.

Only the process does. So my immediate reaction to that is Our selection process must be a disaster for for the presidency. Yeah. Considering what we've seen in the last few years, it is highly random. So even if you just back out from just the last few years about the United States picks what I call unfiltered leaders, people who have not been evaluated by the process about half the time, that is more.

Gautam Makunda: That is a higher frequency than just about any other major country in the world. So American presidents matter very often, much more often than, say, British prime ministers or Canadian prime ministers do. Like that can have advantages. Any country that it's moments of three greatest crisis got George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, right?

There's a probably apocryphal quotation by Bismarck that God looks after children's fools in the United States of America. And you're rolling the dice pretty hard on those and somebody's looking out for you. If you get that's what you get what went on those three critical moments and in a purely filtered process, one where everybody was thoroughly valued.

That's not what would happen. We would have gotten people who were made pretty competent, but we would not have gotten Abraham Lincoln. But, and this is the this is the thing that I say, if you only take one thing away from the book, this is the thing is. The risks are too high to keep doing right.

The fact that you, the fact that you played Russian roulette and one does not mean that you should keep playing Russian roulette. It means that you should stop.

Srini Rao: Give me examples of unfiltered and filtered presidents. I think just to frame this for people, because you say that if we're picking a president, we should understand that highly filtered and unfiltered presidents are different. Highly filtered presidents will generally be competent, but unexceptional.

Unfiltered ones are often remarkable for better or worse. Unfiltered presidents, in other words, are a gamble. Unfortunately, they're generally a bad gamble, which I think you just alluded to. They have a unique impact by doing what others in the same situation would not do. It's just a sad fact of life that there are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed.

The easiest way to be a high impact president is to make mistakes that would never have been made by someone else or execute your policies with far less energy or skill than a different president would have. Yeah I don't know if this is just me, I feel like a lot of people in the United States feel that the actions of the government don't represent the interests of the citizens.

Like it's just a giant dick measuring contest.

Gautam Makunda: I think a lot of people do feel that way. So let's let's take out there are a few points we could both boil out in order. Yeah. So one is in terms of this question of impact by easier to succeed than fail. So I just I say that all life wisdom is in fact contained in the Simpsons, right?

And Marge Simpson once said, it's true that one person can make a difference, but they usually shouldn't. And that is a thing we need to keep in mind, right? If I have 10 options and everyone in the world. Would pick one of those ten and I pick the other one. I might I pick a different one I might be right.

But the odds are not in my favor. Yeah and, but if I pick the one that's the thing that no one else would do, I will have had an impact and probably not a good one once in a while. So if you think about give you examples, right? So a filtered president, the class the one that the easiest one that springs to mind is George H.

W. Bush, right? So the older George Bush. So George H. W. Bush had been vice president of the United States, had been a member of Congress. He'd been ambassador to China. He'd been head of the CIA. He'd been chairman of the Republican National Committee. He had been banging around the upper levels of the American political system for forever.

Everyone knew exactly who he was, what he, and what he was capable of. And the elites of the Republican Party, and in fact, the elites of the Democratic Party the elites of the Republican Party looked at that and were strongly in favor of it. And the elites of the Democratic Party looked at that and they were okay with it.

They were like he's not our guy. But he's not a bad guy, right? And that idea of filtration, that's really important. Because that, when you're talking about someone who literally controls enough nuclear weapons to end human civilization, having the people who know the person best and who know the job best say, yeah, this is this is gonna be okay.

Is a really important bar that you want to make sure you get over. So that's a filtered president, right? And other than plenty of other examples, Bill Clinton, just in modern history, Bill Clinton would be like this as well. The ultimate example the most filtered person in American history, and it is not close almost twice as much as any of any president before him.

Is Joe Biden, who has been was a member of Congress for a member of the Senate for 36 years and then a vice president for eight more on top of that's 44 years, right? Everybody knew who Joe Biden was unfiltered leader, on the other hand, is you say is like the opposite of that. So Barack Obama, right when Barack Obama ran for president.

He had been a member of the Senate for about three years. That's just not a lot of time, right? People did not know a lot about him and his capabilities. And so he had the ability to surprise us in a way that a George H. W. Bush or a Joe Biden rarely, if ever, actually will. The least filtered president of the United States is, of course, Donald Trump, right?

Who had, before he became president of the United States, had spent zero days in government, right? Not, forget about the number of years, he hadn't spent a single day. And so he was as different from everyone else who has ever been president as it is possible to imagine someone being and that had huge consequences.

So you asked me, so those are examples, right? So unfiltered and help me out with what's the next question. Yeah, let's talk about the

Srini Rao: personality traits that matter here. You talk about this idea of intensifiers charisma, narcissism. So talk to me about those ideas in the context.

Let's just frame it. So we have something concrete. In the context of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, because they're the most recent people in memory for most people. So talk to me about these intensifier ideas.

Gautam Makunda: So intensifiers of this concept they're things that make otherwise ordinary ordinary things big.

So what I mean by that is charisma. So you are a really charismatic leader and it's it's actually quite hard to define charisma when you see it, when you see people who do research on it. And what I say is Chris, I think of charisma as the ability to persuade someone to do something through force of personality that you could not do through rational art.

I am not a Donald Trump fan. I'm not, I don't hide that, but I would never deny that by that definition, he is one of the most charismatic figures in American history. He doesn't have to be appealing to everybody to be charismatic. And when he said I could shoot someone on fifth Avenue and everybody would still, and all my book supporters would still vote for me.

I'm not sure he was like, I'm not sure he was exaggerating. It genuinely seems that level of hold that he has on people is the definition of a care of charisma that we cannot understate. And what that means is if he if you have, if you are highly charismatic and you have a good idea.

You can carry people along with you and implement even if someone else could not. But if you're very highly charismatic and you have a bad idea, you can carry some people along with you and implement it even if someone else could. So charisma is an intensifier. It makes good leaders better and bad leaders worse, it doesn't help you, it doesn't improve your change.

Your average. It changes your changes, your variation. What about narcissism

Srini Rao: and

Gautam Makunda: sociopath? Yeah. Okay. So narcissism and sociopathy are not right intensifiers. They are negative traits, but they are negative traits that help you get through the filters. And the reason for that is if you look at narcissists, right?

Narcissist is someone who thinks that they are like the greatest person in the world, right? They're the most handsome, they're the most, they're the smartest, they're everything. Narcissists are not, when you describe them, they are not appealing characters. But the funny thing about narcissism is that on initial encounter, they are very appealing character.

When you meet a narcissist, you tend to find them to be incredibly charming and incredibly impressive. We do experiments where we put a bunch of people in a room and ask them to vote on who should be the leader. If they don't know each other, they tend to vote for the most narcissistic person in the room.

At some level, it's as if your self belief is so great that it convinces other people there must be truth behind it. The problem with that is that narcissists are, in fact, Catastrophically bad leaders, right? It's not surprising that someone who thinks they are the smartest person who's ever lived in every field and therefore doesn't not to listen to anybody else, right?

That person's not a good leader. Are you stunned? And so over time if you spend like 10 years with a narcissist, you will penetrate the halo and go no, this person is awful. I want nothing to do with them. But when you first meet them, they can be really, and so that.

Narcissistic halo in an unfiltered leader can catapult them to the top because people say, oh, they're so impressive and then it turns out to be psychopathy is very similar to that right? Psychopathy is, it's it's some of the literature is someone without a conscience, but it says it's someone who doesn't seem to feel negative affect, right?

So they don't feel fear in the same way. They don't feel threatened. You cannot essentially punish associate a psychopath into obeying the rules, right? Because they don't really care, right? They don't feel negative affect. The punishment doesn't bother them. And so over a long term, this is catastrophic, right?

Like this, these are people who lie constantly. They manipulate constantly. They they don't care about anybody but themselves. They're not capable of caring about themselves. But in the short term, they can be incredibly impressive. And so that is a very dangerous trait in a leader. It's worth noting that there are two types of psychopaths.

And there's like fearless dominance and is people who are just, they seem to be very brave and almost like the stereotypical, like alpha male type or whatever that's worth. Those people are not bad leaders. They're often exceptional leaders. Theodore Roosevelt was the sort of the stereotype of that and he was an awesome person.

It's the ones who are socially deviant and who like break rules all the time, lie all the time. That's a related, but not the same type of thing who are really it's

Srini Rao: funny you say that because I have friends who voted for Trump and many of them often for them, it was like, let's just throw a grenade into the system.

That sucks. That was literally their logic was let's just see what happens. Roll the dice here because clearly we're just going to get more of the same. If we have Hillary Clinton is what their attitude was, and I don't like I can see why people would believe that. And then on the flip side of that, and I've mentioned this on the show before I think that there is a stereotype of Trump voters that the media perpetuates which is horrible racist like they just showcase the worst things.

That's what media is good at doing. Is amplifying and basically finding the most extreme things and sensationalizing things. But I remember watching this documentary where this woman went to the most pro Trump town in North America which was a, some small ranching town in Texas. And I remember watching this family explain why they were voting for Trump.

Like I listened to them. They seemed like perfectly nice people. And they're like, look, if this estate tax goes through, they were ranchers. They're like, we have this ranching land. That's been on our family for decades. It's literally our livelihood. It's worth millions of dollars, but it would be worthless to somebody like you or me who doesn't know a damn thing about ranching.

They're like, we would lose this land if Hillary Clinton got elected. And I was like, okay, you know what? If your livelihood is under threat. And that's how you vote? I don't think, I think I would probably, any one of us would be lying if we said that we wouldn't do that. So I guess in that sense, talk to me about how, what does it take to actually improve this process?

And I feel like in the when I was just watching Michael Moore's documentary, where to invade next, and I feel like in the United States, and I feel like maybe the rest of the world is becoming more like this, but there's just this sort of like almost contention towards political leaders.

It's I remember watching during the pandemic when they were trying to get the next like round of stimulus and I'm like, a bunch of kindergartners could have made decisions faster than this. And again, I'm not in the same context. Like I've heard that when a president sits down on his first day and gets his first briefing, he's just holy shit.

Gautam Makunda: So let's start out. So in the particular case of the documentary, right? I have no doubt that these people like honestly having worked on the Clinton campaign's policy team, I don't think it's true. Yeah. I have no doubt that they honestly believe that and they were told that by people they trust.

But the family farm exemption on the inheritance tax is really high. I actually would say empirically, I do not believe that their, that, I do not believe that their belief was factually correct, even if, although it was surely sincerely held. And it's important to make that distinction.

And second is it's it is definitely not true that everyone who voted for Trump was racist, right? That is not true. I have plenty of friends who also voted for Trump. I've spent a lot of my career working with military. A lot of those guys voted for Trump at least the first time. Many, few, the se many fewer.

The second they like it's, it is just not true. It is true that if you were racist, the odds were very high that you voted for Trump, right? You cannot understand the Donald Trump phenomenon. If you do not understand the incredibly important role that race plays in American politics, right?

So like that distinction is intellectual, is if you want to understand what happened, it's really important. How do we make the system better? You have to taking all this into account. So there are a few things. One is like some of the people I know who voted for Trump were like, same thing, right?

We just, I just want to blow up the system. And my answer to that is always, I don't think what a blown up system actually was, right? I may not phrase it that way, but that's the sentiment that I want. There are lots of things that are wrong with the American political system. But it hasn't failed, right?

We just talked about the fact that compared to Sweden, a very wealthy country, the United States is vastly richer. Two hundred years ago, the United States was 13 colonies hanging on the edge of the Atlantic about to be like on the edge of destruction. And now the United States is the wealthiest and most powerful society in human history.

We have lots of problems where and believe me, we can spend a lot of time talking about that. The, my, my sort of shorthand for that is the United States is about to fall out of the top. 50 in life expectancy, right? Can you imagine that? The wealthiest society in human history is not one of the 50 highest life expectancy countries on earth, like just unimaginably catastrophic.

So it's clear that we have lots of problems, but a system that has blown up is like the United States in 1865 or Syria right now, or Afghanistan, right? Those are systems that have just. And so when we look at the United States and you say I just want to blow up the system. I'm like, you want to change the system.

And the band of what American life looks like in terms of success or failure is so small that we think that changes to the system are blowing it up, but that's actually not what they are at all. The president of the United States in the most basic sense controls enough nuclear weapons that 30 minutes from now he can end human civilization.

That is not hyperbole. That's not an exaggeration. He just has to give the order.

That's all it will take. And when you say I don't want to blow up the system, that's not necessarily a metaphor, right? We think no, you could literally blow up the system if you have the wrong person on the job. So what we want to do, more than anything else to say is you want to make sure that anything

,

you do doesn't destroy what you've already got.

The easiest way to think about this is Tim Cook, right? So Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple. He has arguably created more value than any other CEO in history. But Tim Cook would not say that Tim Cook defines Apple, right? Tim Cook would say that Steve Jobs defined it and what it is. And when Apple was on the point of bankruptcy and about to go under, they said, we're going to get Steve Jobs because he's the only person who can save us.

And he might bankrupt the company. He has not been successful in the past. The company he's currently running has not done well. We're already almost bankrupt. What's our worst case scenario? Our worst case scenario is we go bankrupt. We can't go more than bankrupt. So Steve's our worst case scenario and our most likely scenario are the same scenario.

So let's gamble. Let's get Steve Jobs. But when Steve Jobs steps down as CEO of Apple, he doesn't get another Steve Jobs. At that point, he is running one of the most successful companies in the world. And he says, what I need is someone who I am absolutely confident will continue to do well and will know how to execute and know how to run Apple.

So what I need is Tim Cook, a Duke MBA who's worked at a bunch of different companies and has been at Apple for a very long time and he's the guy who's made the trains run on time. And if you look at Apple, while Tim Cook has been in charge, clearly that was an incredibly successful decision, right?

That was the right choice. And Steve Jobs recognized that Steve Jobs was not, that another Steve Jobs was not the right, in that scenario. So that's the way I would think of it is, we are a country that has a lot of problems. But we're not a country that says our worst case scenario and our most likely scenario are the same thing.

The worst case scenario for the United States is unimaginable because it is the end of human civil. That's what you, the first, your first priority is you avoid that. So how do we do better? So you said that there's evidence that that people say that the American political system does not responsive to the average person.

My first answer is that's true, right? It's just true. There's there's empirical data showing essentially that the American political system is enormously responsive to the wealthy and not to anyone. That's a big problem. But the way we change, there are two ways to change that. One is one of the ironies of this is the people who talk the most about who talk the most about the populist that I want to be populist, I want to do something, I want to help people like I want to stop, break us out from the wealthy elites and power back to the people.

When they get into government, what they do is help the wealthy. The only major domestic policy initiative of the Trump administration was a gigantic tax cut for the richest people in the United States. There were individual Americans who made billions of dollars out of that tax cut.

So this is a problem. So the first thing you do is if you're going, if you, there are responsibilities for American citizens and those responsibilities might just be, hey voting is a thing that requires some level of effort on your part. If you really care about, they are about, about, about the welfare of ordinary, average Americans maybe vote for people who also care about, I in general, as a political scientist, am pretty skeptical about asking voters to change their.

I don't think they do, and I think voters in general do a great job. What you want to do is change the system, so that voters will, so that voters will get the outcomes that they really want. And there are a few I would hear. Again, with my sort of obsession about avoiding the worst case scenario, one of the things I suggest in the book is you should allow party elites to have some voice in who gets to be there.

Because,

I don't want them to pick the, I do not want The next president of the United States to be picked by 10 people in a smoky dark room who are picking someone who will just give them essentially be corrupt and give the whole thing off. We have tried that system in the United States and we got rid of it because we didn't like it.

But we should also allow people who know political elites who know the guys who are running and the women who are running and have them say this person would be a disaster. I cannot pick anyone, but this person would be a disaster and they must not be president of the United States. If we could just do that, I think we would be much, much better.

That would be a huge event. The second is we could think about ways to reform the system that would have really powerful effects, right? And systemic reforms always matter a lot. For example, an easy reform that we could do would be ranked choice voting. So when Ralph Nader ran in 2000, he cost Al Gore the presidency.

I think the empirics on that overwhelmed. If you had asked Nader voters, would you rather have, okay, your guy's not going to win. Would you rather have Al Gore or George W. Bush? My 70% would have said, I'd rather have Al Gore. But they didn't have the option to express that preference. Some states have already started to do this main, most striking.

Where he says, instead of just voting for one person, what you do is rank your choices, right? I want this person first, and if I can't get this person, I want this person second, and this person third. In and of itself, that seems to have a very powerful systemic effect on the way candidates behave and the way outcome and the way policy is framed.

And so that could do a lot to make the system more responsive. Another thing I would love to do, this is my, you're getting my pet hobby horse so my apologies for this, but you should make the House of Representatives larger, right? The House of Representatives is capped right now at at 500, at 400, at 435 members of Congress, but the population keeps going up.

So right now, a single member of Congress represents a little under a million, 430 330 million divided by 435, so a little under a million. That's just too many people. For any member of Congress to get to know the people on their district on a one on one basis, it cannot be done. If you took the House of Representatives and made it three times the size it is currently, You would break, you would you would make that make, you would increase the importance of retail politics where these people would members of Congress would actually be able to get to know their constituents.

And because of that, you wouldn't, it would make money a lot less important because it would not be, it would no longer be true that the only way to campaign is on TV. So that too would have, I think that would have a big systemic impact. There are a lot of changes like that you could make that are not blowing up the system.

They're just tweaking the system a bit to make it work a lot better. Wow. I feel like I could talk to you all day about this because it's a pretty deep rabbit hole. So in the interest of time I want to finish with my final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative.

Srini Rao: What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Gautam Makunda: Sorry, say the answer. I lost you there for a second. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something

unmistakable? Unmistakable. So now I have to ask, what do you mean by unmistakable? I, since I wrote a book called Unmistakable, as having just written a book, when you write a book with a publisher, you actually have to define your terms.

Srini Rao: Yeah. So I define it as something that is so distinctive that nobody could have done it but you, and it's immediately recognized as your own work basically you wouldn't even have to put your name on

Gautam Makunda: it. Oh, I love it. I love it. So the first thing I say is this is this is I this is what impact is all about, right?

It's something, someone who's unmistakable in your terms is someone who has an impact in their field. So can I tell you a story? Yeah. Have you ever heard of Jude? You ever heard of Judah Folkman? I haven't. Okay. So I got to meet him once before he died just by luck and spent a couple hours with him.

And then I had no idea, but then I wrote about I wrote about him in my first book. So Judah was was a scientist, he was a doctor a professor at Harvard Medical School. So he grows up in Ohio, and he and he goes to Harvard Medical School at 20. They actually have to change the rules to allow someone that young to go to Harvard Medical School.

He's the first graduate of Ohio State ever to go to Harvard Medical School. Then he, after his second year at the medical school, he takes a year off to do research, which is totally normal. Most Harvard Medical students at the time did that. In his year off to do research, he invented the pacemaker, so that's not normal he then goes on, he becomes the chief surgical resident and ma chief at mass General Hospital, and then the chief's chief of surgery at Boston Children's Hospital. In the middle of this, he's drafted into the Navy for a while during Vietnam and serves as a desert medical research in Vietnam.

And then he's obviously an astonishingly good surgeon, but what he decides to do is to get into cancer research. Because he has this idea, so his idea is he says that maybe maybe all of us have tumors in our body. But they're not dangerous until they start growing. And what happens is somehow, something changes inside the tumor that causes it, causes capillaries to grow into the tumor and feed it.

And that's what allows the tumor to grow. He has that idea. By the time that he says that, he comes up with this idea. The received wisdom in the cancer research community was that blood vessels are just dumb tubes. That was the phrase. They're just dumb tubes. Nothing interesting happens with blood vessels.

And someone who proposes a theory about blood vessels is clearly wrong. And in Folkman's case so he was a surgeon, right? He, in the medical slang is he was a cutter. He had zero days of training in cancer research. And if you're not a doctor, this doesn't make any sense, but it really is true.

In the medical world the sort of the stereotype of surgeons is that they're the dumb jocks. They're not the smart ones. They're the guys who play basketball in the breaks, not the ones who are reading. I'm not saying that's true, but that's the stereotype. And so this surgeon, this guy who's never spent a day in his life in cancer, is proposing this obviously ridiculous theory.

And so everyone shoots it down, right? He gets turned down, he get all of his grant proposals, get turned down. He's not able to get any funding for his research. It just goes on and on. It gets to the point. Where Boston Children's Hospital says to him, you need to stop doing this research because it's embarrassing us, right?

This hospital can no longer sustain the embarrassment to the hit to its reputation that your research is giving us. And so you either need to stop researching cancer or you need to resign as chief of surgery. And he had tenure at the medical school. So he was like, OK I quit. And he does.

Now you can probably guess where this story is going, right? Because it turned out that he was entirely correct. It took 24 years of searching. But it turned out that the process of capillary growth, which he termed angiogenesis, he invented that word, was crucial to the formation of tumors, to the cancer process, and crucial to the growth of tumors.

And in fact, when he died in 2008, 1. 2 million patients were being treated with drugs based on his ideas. Okay amazing story. Judah Folkman was unmistakable, if anyone has ever been but what made him do it? So one is Judah Folkman was clearly a genius, right? One of those rare people who could just, who just really was you said this you might be smarter than everyone else, but you're probably not.

He was right. He probably was. He, there was just no question. But beyond that, let me note a few things. One is. He had the resolve, right? He had the absolute commitment to be like, I think these ideas are right and I will pursue them even in the face of incredible career threatening opposition. So that resolve was vital.

It was just absolutely crucial. There are a lot of people with resolve. So what I would say is, I think you're asking me not just how do you do things that no one else would do, but how do you do good things that no one else would do. Because that's in my life, you want the high end of variance, not the low one.

I used to rise as faculty at Harvard Business School whose motto is our mission statement is educating leaders to make a difference in the world. And every year I would say, that's an awful motto what we want is educating leaders to make a positive difference in the world, but that positive word is really important.

The second half and what what enabled Judah to, I think, and to do what he did in ways that no one else could is even though he was incredibly resolved to pursue his idea, he was also incredibly open to having people say, I think you might be wrong. So he listened. He was. The word I want to use is humility, but I don't mean like humility and I don't have fancy cars and I'm retiring and I'm always, I'm doubting myself.

It's the intellectual humility of tell me why I'm wrong, right? Tell me why I'm wrong. Like actually show me the evidence and persuade me and if you can show me the evidence, I will change my mind. That was what allowed him to not just, to, in combination with the intellect and the the drive was allowed him to steer in the right direction to make sure that he could do the right thing, not just the thing that he believed in.

All the people I know well, the person who's most distinguished by that is a Stan McChrystal. The general is extraordinary in my opinion, America's greatest living soldier who led American special forces in Iraq and was a kind of JSOC. And I think more than anyone else I've ever met, Stan goes through life wanting to learn something.

Like in every conversation, he wants to learn something. He wants you to tell him, I think you're wrong about this, and I think the right answer is this, and this is why. And he will, and nothing will make him happier than that. And that's the opposite the way most people are, right? Most people Tom Clancy had this line in one of his novels most people wed their ideas more faithfully than their spouses.

And that is exactly the wrong to my opinion, more than that is the wrong way to look at the right beliefs are hypotheses to be tested. They are not treasures to be sheltered. I'm quoting someone there. I'm blank. I'm like, I'm trying to remember who the quote, who it is I'm quoting. That's a quote. It's not originally.

And so the, I think the people who are unmistakable right in the way that you sense of the, who do great things. Are the ones who combine in a single person, this extraordinary resolve, right? The willingness to say even in the face of of opposition, of career disaster, of scorn, of everything you can imagine, say I'm going to push through this because it's worth it.

And who at the same time are constantly trying to learn about this and every other problem and open to being told okay, maybe the evidence has changed I'm not going to change my mind because you, a person of authority, tell me I'm wrong, but I will change my mind if you, a person of no authority, provides me the evidence.

That is that, that duality is incredible.

Wow. This has been absolutely thought provoking and insightful as I imagined it would be. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book and everything else they're up to?

Oh, thank you so much. Both of my books are on Amazon. The first was Indispensable When Leaders Really Matter. The second is Picking Presidents. So you can, not just Amazon, you can find them anywhere books are sold. I host the podcast World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda for NASDAQ. We are just about to start our fifth season.

And you can find me on Twitter at GMukunda or on my website, www. gautamukunda. com. Amazing. And

Srini Rao: for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Gautam Makunda: This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite. 36, 000. The number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system. NetSuite by Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution, and that's NetSuite.

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