This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Fetantham. In 1950, before he directed the film On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan made another dramatic thriller, a movie called Panic in the Streets. There's a reason you probably haven't heard of it.
It isn't a great movie. Here with recorded is the story of a silent static menace. The events, incidents and emotions of the people who were apart who found time running out as they looked into the face of mortal peril. The film tells the fictional story of a murder in New Orleans where the police investigate.
They find the victim suffered from a deadly infectious disease, a version of the plague. Public health officials believe the killers may have contracted the disease as they carry the victim's body away. What follows is a race to track down the criminals and halt an epidemic, a collision of law enforcement and public health. If the killer is incubating your money plate, you can start spreading it within 48 hours.
48 hours? Yes, we have 48 hours. Shortly after that, you'll end up making some epidemic. In the first half of our show, we have a story about chaos and an effort to contain it.
It's a story about life imitating art. It's a story about disease and panic, but it's also a story about psychology. To control an epidemic takes more than medical skill. It requires an understanding of human behavior and the forces that drive people to act in certain ways.
Our story starts in Monrovia, capital of Liberia. A deadly crisis was sparking fear. News reports were filled with dramatic language and catastrophic warnings. The Ebola virus is back.
An Ebola breakout in West Africa is, quote, totally out of control. The catastrophe is unfolding. The world's deadliest outbreak of Ebola. Highly infectious, quick to kill, with no vaccine and no cure.
The Ebola outbreak reached its peak in the fall of 2014. By the end of the year, it was subsiding. But then, in early 2015, in a poor part of Monrovia, there was a new outbreak, or cluster, and it led to the complex case we're focusing on today. I got a call from someone who said, if your passport isn't in my office in the next two hours, you won't make your flight to Liberia.
Athelia Christie is an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. She flew to Monrovia to help track and stop the outbreak. Lots of CDC officials joined her, like Frank Mahoney. People were scared.
It was a crisis. You could drive to the city and see people that were being left out on the street, you know, for people to come pick them up. Frank and Athelia told me how the case we're following today started. Police in Monrovia discovered a body in a warehouse.
A young man, dead, with multiple stab wounds. Police were called in. A swab was taken, as mandated by the official policy that any dead body be swabbed. So even though the police who arrived there initially thought they were investigating a murder, they did follow the procedures and have the body swabbed, at which point we were alerted because the test came back positive.
Positive for Ebola. Once police identified the youth, they quickly realized they had a major problem on their hands. It turned out the young man was actually part of a large street gang. Yeah, it was like a gang.
One of them, for whatever reason, he got stabbed by other members of the group. As we understand it, there was a knife fight, and we're not quite sure how it happened, but the friends turned on him. Just a review. A young man contracts Ebola, he gets in a fight, and is stabbed repeatedly by fellow members of his gang.
Ebola, remember, is highly contagious. Come into contact with an infected person's sweat or blood, and you could fall sick too. The gang had as many as 35 members, each had connections far and wide across the city. And just like in that movie, Panic in the Streets, public health officials needed to quickly stop the outbreak from spreading.
They needed to try and find every person who could have come into contact with a young man. It's a process called contact tracing. It's exceedingly difficult to do if you try to imagine constructing the last three weeks of your life and determining every single person that you came into contact with, whether it was casual contact or a family member who you saw every day. It's extraordinarily difficult to do.
So we interview people multiple times, and we also talk to their family members and their friends to try to determine everyone who might have had any contact with this person during the time that they could have been infectious. If Thalia and Frank knew the young man who died had sought medical treatment for his stab wounds, had a health care worker suture the young man's wounds and come into contact with his blood? And Thalia visited a lot of clinics trying to track down facilities the young man may have visited. She paves through logbooks of patients' names with no luck.
Then she got to one clinic. And I took this big, dusty logbook, and I opened it up, and literally the page I opened it to, there's maybe 30 names to a page, and I read down them, and there he was at the bottom of the first page. A health care worker at this clinic had sutured the young man's knife wounds. Thalia knew what she had to do.
The most difficult part of these investigations come when you need to tell the clinicians and all of the staff who work in these health care facilities that someone with Ebola entered the facility. And I remember how nervous the individual was when I told him that the person he sutured had been positive for Ebola at the time. It's hard to imagine what he was going through. Can you recall what you told him and what he said?
We were standing in the hallway, and I told him that there's no easy way to tell anybody this, and so we just told him very matter-of-factly that we needed to maintain daily contact and monitoring with him coming in for treatment the moment that you have symptoms. And the reason I remember this so clearly is that he didn't do that. He was very reluctant to go to an Ebola treatment unit. The health care worker refused to be quarantined.
He insisted he'd follow all safety procedures as he bandaged the young man's wounds. He told Thalia he'd get in touch if he started to have any symptoms. Thalia knew there was a reason the health care worker had refused to come into an Ebola treatment unit. It had to do with a lack of trust in the system.
In fact, the more Thalia and Frank saw, the more they realized that Ebola wasn't the only enemy they were fighting in Monrovia. They were dealing with an epidemic of mistrust. After a long history of civil war and corruption, a lot of people in Liberia simply didn't trust the government or international organizations. When Ebola broke out, the government's first response was to try and control it using coercion, cordoning off sections of towns.
It created panic. The government had attempted involuntary quarantine, and they had a really bad experience in the slums of Monrovia. And so we talked about, you know, is this a viable strategy? And we all agreed, no, we can't use involuntary quarantine.
This is not something that's going to build trust in the community. It's not a way to manage the outbreak. People also worried that if they did go into quarantine, they would never come out. Thalia pointed to the construction of one of the largest Ebola treatment units in Liberia.
And it was chaotic and difficult, and they built it all, and they forgot to put an exit in. They didn't build an exit because we weren't thinking about survivors at that time. And although this was many months later, many people understandably so thought that going to an Ebola treatment unit meant that you would not come home. Dealing with mistrust that public health officials knew was central as they began to trace all the leads of this complex case.
As Thalia had been tracking down the health care worker, Frank had been pursuing a different strand of the investigation, tracking down the members of the young man's gang. This was a community that was not on best terms with the government. You know, they were very suspicious of the government. So it really is a trust-building exercise to go into this community to piece together all these pieces of the story.
Very quickly, Frank and Thalia realized they were in over their heads. They needed help. So when we did the investigation, I went with this Liberian. Fantastic Liberian epidemiologist.
Person named Musaka Fala. Musaka Fala. I am Musaka P. Fala.
As a Liberian, Musaka Fala understood things far better than the Americans. He also understood the horrors of Ebola firsthand. The disease had killed his sister. Musaka's first order of business was to help track down the young men in the gang.
Surprisingly, they weren't hard to find. But they were scared. Scared that the police, who were still investigating the case as a homicide, would arrest them for their role in the knife fight. The police wanted to go in.
However, if we allow the police to go in, the gangsta will all escape and we'll have pretty close to 35 young men who have all had risk contact on the loose. This is similar to what happened in Panic in the Streets. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Wait for what?
Somebody else to die? Frank suggested that there should be no arrest. Musaka says Frank sat down with the police. He told them that any investigation of the murder would send gang members into hiding and potentially spread Ebola further.
They should allow the Ebola team to go in and negotiate so that we can have the contact. And the police agreed and the police withdrew their arrest and that's how we went in to negotiate. And this, everyone told us, is what allowed public health officials to start talking to the young men in the gang. So, to recap.
Public health officials had tracked down the healthcare worker who treated the young man and identified all the people they could tell the young man had come into contact with. The epidemiologists quickly found themselves staring at a growing web. There were three important strands. First, the young men in the gang would have to be persuaded to enter an Ebola quarantine facility for 21 days.
Second, there was a woman running a drug house who was connected to the gang. Gang members were in and out of her home all the time. Most worrisome, the public health officials heard the woman was sick and they thought that she might have Ebola. She had had diarrhea for two days and she was getting sick.
Finally, there was one member of the gang they could not track down. During the fight, this man had held down the stabbing victim as the blades came out and the blood splattered. And now, Frank and others found, he'd run away. What was his name?
His name, ironically, was Time Bomb. Coming up, how to stop the outbreak and find Time Bomb. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantham. This week, we're talking about chaos. How we struggle to control it and why it might sometimes be best to embrace it. The first story we're telling is about a dangerous kind of chaos in a poor slum in Liberia in 2015.
There had been a murder connected to a gang. The victim's body tested positive for Ebola. And now, epidemiologists were in a race against time to stop another outbreak. There were three fires to put out.
An accomplice to the murder, ironically, named Time Bomb, had gone missing. The rest of the gang had been identified but they were reluctant to be quarantined. And then there was a woman known as Drug Mama. She was the godmother of a drug den frequented by members of the gang.
She was in her 30s and appeared to have symptoms that suggested Ebola. If Ebola took hold in her drug den, it would spread very quickly through the community. Frank and Mosoka realized they had to quickly run a test to get Drug Mama diagnosed. But they anticipated problems.
Our dilemma was, how do we approach her such that she accepts us to do an Ebola test? The mere mention of Ebola was sending people into a panic. If they told her they were worried she had Ebola, would she vanish and go underground? They didn't want to take the chance.
So rather than take her into confidence, they decided to trick Drug Mama. It wasn't ideal, but they were dealing with a crisis. They had to improvise. So Frank being a smart guy he is, we stopped at a pharmacy and we bought her malaria medicine.
And we went there at night and Frank said, I heard you not so well, so we brought you some medicine. This is around 9 p.m. She said, yes. So Frank said, take this medicine, I will come back tomorrow and check on you.
And so the goal was the next morning, we asked for her blood to go check if she had malaria and then we'll run the Ebola test. The trick worked up to a point. The problem was the next morning when they took Drug Mama to the hospital to get her blood drawn, they had to tell healthcare workers at the hospital what was going on so everyone would take proper precautions. A nurse got scared when they told her they wanted to test for Ebola.
Drug Mama noticed the nurse acting oddly. And then she suspected something else. The Drug Mama left and went back home and became angry with us. Mosoka and Frank realized the trickery was backfiring.
So, they tried bribery. We started with how we negotiated and we told her we gave her $100 US if she allowed us to do a blood draw at her house. So we took the blood and 7 p.m. that night, we got her response that she was negative.
And we all went to bed bringing a side of release. Frank and Mosoka turned their focus to the second strand in the web, the young men and the gang. Patiently, they explained to the young men that they would be safe from police harassment in the Ebola treatment unit. We worked it out with them.
We worked out an arrangement where if they agreed to come into the isolation facility, the CDC, I think we ended up paying their families some support costs because they were no longer able to earn money for their families. And the government provided the families with food. And so it worked out really well. But even this was not enough.
It turned out some of the young men were drug addicts. Frank realized he had to keep asking the government to bend the rules in the Ebola treatment unit or ETU. I told the government that we had to anticipate that some of these young men may be drug users and they may go into withdrawal if we put them in the ETU. And in fact, that was the case about two to three days later.
There were some of them getting agitated. And somehow they found a way to support their needs for drugs. Did you have to do some of that to help them get what they needed to keep them in this facility where they could be quarantined? No, the CDC didn't pay for that or do that.
But the government found a way for the communities to support them. So they were doing that. But in some ways, it's sort of an awkward situation for the government because in some ways, you're asking the government to look the other way while someone's doing something illegal here. Yeah, I think that they, at the same time, it'd be like any withdrawal.
They needed treatment. It wasn't a conventional treatment, that's for sure. It was hard for public health officials to be sanctioning illegal drug use. But again, when you're in the middle of an unfolding catastrophe, you sometimes have to bend the rules.
Even though CDC wasn't actually supplying anyone drugs, the arrangement produced lots of double takes. One day, a Liberian government minister turned to Frank during the discussion and joked about the backdoor drug channel. And he says, and I understand that CDC is providing them with the marijuana. And I said, excuse me, sir.
He said, I'd like to correct that. He said, CDC is not providing the marijuana, but we're providing the cocaine. Incredibly, the epidemiologists actually managed to quarantine the gang members. These were young men who no one thought would listen to the authorities.
But by reposing trust in them and treating the young men as partners, the public health officials had found a solution that seemed to work better than coercion or trickery. Still, this wasn't the end. There was a third strand of the web they had to track down. At first, gang members did not want to tell Musoka or Frank where Timebomb was.
There, they found a young man, a young woman, and a baby. The epidemiologist asked the young man if he was Timebomb. He said, I'm not Timebomb. Timebomb is going out.
I'm his younger brother. But if he comes back, I'll let you know. Then I said, okay, thank you very much. It was at this point that Musoka and Frank did something very kind and very wise that led to a breakthrough in the case.
Your wife had a young baby. And I remember giving the wife a hundred dollars and said, go ahead and buy a meal for the baby, feed the baby, and we'll take care of you. Something changed in the young man's demeanor. After I did that, he turned to me and said to me, I am Timebomb.
Frank and Musoka told Timebomb and his wife that they would be back that night. They promised they would return with more food. Frank came to me with the food and said, Musoka, we need to go to meet this guy. This was in the ghetto.
I went with Musoka and it was like 10 o'clock at night. There was no electricity. This place was pitch black. We had to go and drive to the grass.
This was like a slum community. It's known to have against us. And that's why Frank was emphasizing that we had to keep our word. They had to trust us.
This was the key. So we brought food to him and his family and a couple of stacks of rice and things. As we walked towards them and they saw us coming with rice when I was showed up, for some reason they trusted us and they came to the car to help us take the rice. Frank and Musoka gently asked Timebomb whether he was willing to come to the Ebola treatment facility to be quarantined.
Timebomb said he wasn't ready to do that. Frank and Osofa said they understood that they were willing to trust him to do the right thing. If you get sick, you call us. And he said, I would do that.
I trust you guys. And so I think it was a matter of building up a trust and comfort level for him to talk to us. In the end, none of the young gang members contracted Ebola, not even Timebomb. The cluster did not spread in the ghetto.
Drug mama recovered from her illness. Only one person connected with the cluster was affected. The medical worker who'd sutured up the young man's wounds, the one that went into hiding after Athalia talked to him, he came down with Ebola-related symptoms. Eventually, he did seek treatment.
But it was too late. He died, unfortunately, unable to treat me again. We started today's episode with a 1950 movie, Panic in the Streets. At the end of that movie, the hero, a public health worker, ends up in a warehouse with the criminals who are carrying the deadly plague.
I'm a doctor and I can kill you! He pleads for them to hand over their guns. Come on now, surrender! And I promise nothing will happen to you!
But, they get into a climactic shootout and the criminals are killed. The public health workers in Liberia never solved things with guns. And really, when it came down to it, Athalia says, they achieved some of their best results without coercion or trickery. Building those invisible but very real bonds of trust took time, but it was essential to stopping an outbreak.
When it comes down to what we were asking people to do, either to trust the healthcare system or to trust the government enough to agree to this voluntary precautionary isolation, that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. You're asking people to leave their friends and family for 21 days or we were asking people to change their burial customs and it's difficult. It can sound simple and I know that I spoke to people here who would say, I don't understand, why can't they just change the way they bury the dead or change the way they care for their family members if they're sick? But as a mother, I can't imagine not touching my child if he was sick and not trying to provide comfort.
So much of being human is chaos. The doctors in Liberia found an innovative way to try and fight it. In fact, that's what we usually do when it comes to chaos. We try to find ways to control it, to manage it.
If you're a parent, you've probably told your kids a thousand times your room is a mess, clean it up. Managers tell their employees to get organized. Here in the United States, we elect presidents to go clean up Washington. In the next half of our show today, we explore a very different idea.
What happens if we treat chaos as our friend instead of our enemy? Tim Hartford believes we should do just that. He's the author of Messi, The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. He joined us recently for a live taping.
We were just blocks from the White House at NPR's Weekend in Washington. It's an annual event that brings together public radio fans and supporters. Tim Hartford, welcome to Hidden Break. Thank you very much, Hancock.
I want to begin by playing you a piece of music, Tim. How did that piece of music come back? What's the story? It's beautiful, isn't it?
Two of my children were born to that. It was played by Keith Chowatt, a great jazz pianist, in 1975 in Cologne. And if you had been there two or three hours before the concert, you would not have expected things to go well. Keith Chowatt had just refused to play.
And the reason he refused to play is because he had arrived on stage, met the piano. He was supposed to be completely improvised, by the way. The whole thing was going to be improvised. Met this piano and realized that there'd been a mistake.
And the thing was literally unplayable. Without a tune, black keys were sticking, the pedals didn't work, the upper register of the keyboard so he didn't have enough volume to reach the back of the Cologne auditorium. And so of course he refused to play. And the organizer of the concert, who was this young German girl, she's just 17 years old, desperately tried to fix the piano, to replace the piano.
She managed to get it somewhat in tune, but basically she couldn't really improve on it and she couldn't get it replaced. And so the only option she had was to beg Keith Chowatt to play. And of course he saw this teenager, thought of the 1,400 people who were about to show up and listen to the concert, and said to her, never forget, only for you. And he went on stage and he and his producer recorded the concert because they wanted documentary evidence of what a musical catastrophe sounds like so they could play it to future promoters to do a good job and get a proper piano.
But in fact it's a masterpiece. It's Keith Chowatt's most popular work. In fact it's the best-selling jazz album in history, solo jazz album in history. And the best-selling piano album in history is the Cologne concert.
And the surprising thing is that all the adjustments that Chowatt had to make to cope with this bad piano made the music better. So he avoided the harsh upper registers. He stucks in the middle of the keyboard. That makes it sound very soothing.
But he also had to compensate for the fact that the piano was so quiet. So he had these rolling repetitive riffs in the bass to try to get some resonance. He also just stood up and pounded down on the keys. So you can hear him moaning in frustration during the concert.
He's hating it. But it is amazing. And that combination of the peacefulness and the dynamism makes this electrifying piece of music. So he did not expect that a bad piano would produce a great concert.
But in fact it did. And the argument in my book is very often we're faced with the unplayable piano and that she would produce something great out of it. You have a number of examples besides Keith Chowatt about how disruptions and inconveniences and surprises can sometimes have paradoxically good effects on us even though we all try to avoid those disruptions. You talk about commuters, for example, who suddenly have to find a new way to work or scientists who are working on so many projects that they're discombobulated because they don't know what they're working on.
In many of these cases you find that disorder and confusion could actually be helpful. Yeah, so in the case of commuters there was a transport strike in London a couple of years ago. It shut down not all but most of the London Underground stations for 48 hours. It's not a long strike.
But most commuters in London use public transport. It's not really set up for the car. You could travel on the bus, there are overground trains or you could use some of the tube lines that were not shut down. There are various other options.
And economists who studied this got hold of the data as to the trips that people were making. They identified people who took the same route to work every single day. There's a technical term for this. It's called commuters.
You would think that these are the people who have absolutely perfected their route to work. Surely commuters, they know every step. They know where to stand on the platform. And yet, the economists found looking at the people who took the same route to work every day who then changed their route during the strike thousands of them, about 5%, thousands upon thousands stayed with a new route.
So these are people that this is the optimal population for having honed their route to perfection. And yet one in 20 of them discovered that when they were forced to find a new way they found a better way. And I think that's quite a common situation. We get into particular habits whether it's creative or whether it's just trying to get to work.
We get into particular habits. We're knocked off course. And very often, of course, our original habit was the right way to do things and we go back. But often enough to be useful, we find that the new way of doing things is actually better all along.
And if only we'd been forced into it, we would have discovered that years ago. One of the things I want to do in this conversation is try and tease apart when messiness can be our friend and when it can be our enemy. There's a reason many of us try and avoid messiness. It's because messiness causes delays.
It causes disruptions or ending up being late for some things. And I'm wondering, as I read some of the examples in your book, whether it was the case that messiness helps people who actually have a base of preparation. So in other words, Keith Jarrett, he's a professional musician. He's very gifted.
He's practiced and he's learned the rules of how to play a proper piano for years and years and years. You place me before that piano and what you're going to hear is not genius. What you're going to hear is just a mess. And the reason Keith Jarrett could adapt was because he had the base of knowing the rules to now say I can throw out the rule book and create something brilliant.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, Shankar. Can I open a big bag of complexity science on you? Absolutely. Basically, if you are trying to solve a very complex problem, we have various algorithms that try to solve this.
I'll come to the question of skill in a second. The algorithms, a computer algorithm is searching for solutions in a very complex problem space. One possible approach is to look for step-by-step improvements. So that's the equivalent of skill you're looking for, step-by-step improvements to get from a bad solution to a better solution and a better one and a better one and eventually you find the perfect solution.
It turns out that way of looking at complex problems doesn't usually work. And the reason is the algorithm as it looks for these small improvements gets stuck. So these algorithms that search for solutions, they work much better if you add random shocks. Lots of different ways to do that.
But basically, for most of the kind of problem I'm discussing, a computer scientist would approach it by saying we're going to have a step-by-step quest for improvements but we're also going to have lots of randomness, lots of shocks. Just keep knocking the algorithm of course because then it won't get stuck. So now we come back to Keith Jarrett. He's like an algorithm that's searching for step-by-step improvements.
He's a great musician. He's always looking for the perfect concert. Clearly he's a very creative person because he's improvising every night but he always starts with a good piano. Always.
And then there's one night where they say, you know what, Keith, 12 of these notes don't work and you should probably avoid most of that part and that thing with the pedals but then he sits down and then his skill gets in and he's looking for the incremental improvements. He's looking for a path to find great music and he finds it. So yes, you need skill but the random shocks help. So for all the children who are listening to this podcast I want to make clear that you're not saying that every time your parent tells you to clean up the room you should just say Tim Hartford says I shouldn't.
Well, I have to say since writing the book I have stopped asking my children to clear up their room. And the reason is I read an amazing study that had been conducted by two British psychologists Alex Haslam and Craig Knight. What they did was it wasn't anything to do with children but it was to do with clean desk policies. They got people to sit down and work in artificial office environments so we've created an office for you here are some tasks sort this paperwork do these puzzles handle these emails make it a sort of knowledge worker task it's a standard stuff and they measured how well people did.
And there were four different arms to this experiment. People randomised in different arms. So in one case the office was very, very minimalist just a chair, a pencil, paper no distractions. People did fine in that they didn't really like it.
On average, it suits some people. The second approach there were more decorations in the office there were pot plants there were posters some distractions but it felt friendlier people liked that more. But here's the real kicker to this research. The other two treatments that were two parts of the research.
First the research has said you can organise this office how you like bring in the posters send away the posters put the pot plants how you like or if you want they'll take the pot plants away however you want. People loved that. They got so much more done they felt happier they were more productive significantly more productive. In the fourth part of the trial they did that they said arrange it however you like and then the experimenter came in and said I'm sorry this isn't appropriate for the experiment and rearranged everything put it back the way it was in the second part of the trial where people would be perfectly happy to work in these decorated offices what they weren't happy with was having someone come in override their decisions take away their control take away their autonomy they felt physically sick and they hated everything about it they hated the work they hated the space they hated the company that was hosting space and they absolutely hated the experimenter and after that I made two vows to myself number one if I'm ever a boss nobody should make me a boss by the way if I'm ever a boss I will never impose a clean desk policy and number two me and my wife we kind of are the boss in our house and I no longer ask my children to tell you their rooms and you know what we don't argue about it as much and the rooms are kind of as messy as they ever were it hasn't made any difference to the physical stage of the rooms it's just a little bit more peace alright so that's a perfect segue to what I want to talk about next because I actually want to talk about office space and how we organize office spaces and in fact I have a clip from the cult classic movie Office Space which I'm going to play for you hi Milton what's happening I'm going to have to ask you to go ahead and move your desk again so if you could go ahead and get it as far back against that wall as possible that would be great that way we'll have some room some of these boxes and things we need to put in here and uh oh there it is let me just go ahead and get that front great so if you could just get to that as soon as possible that would be terrific okay thanks a bunch Milton bye I can set the building on fire so I take a chance that you're not a fan of fascist office managers but you do also tell the story in the book about Steve Jobs at Pixar and some of the ideas he had about how to organize office space to make people more collaborative and some of the ways that might have backfired yeah the Pixar story I think is fascinating so Steve Jobs majority shareholder at Pixar had a big hand in designing the Pixar building and one of his big ideas is we are going to make all the bathrooms in this building in the middle of the building we're going to have two big restrooms pair of restrooms in the half of the building and what that will do is everyone will come together brought together by a shared human need to urinate and there will be serendipitous interactions and that's going to be great and I'm all in favour of serendipitous interaction we silo ourselves off that's a major theme in the book but maybe Steve had taken this idea too far what's interesting though Steve Jobs had this reputation as being brilliant but real control freak is control freak and just ordering people what to do there was a rebellion in Pixar led by pregnant women who said I know this sounds like a great idea on paper Mr.
Jobs but I need to go to the restroom three times an hour and you've just made the restroom ten minutes away from my desk and do the maths and it's not going to work and Steve Jobs did an amazing thing he backed down said I'm wrong I will find another way to create serendipitous interactions and you can have your restrooms all over the Pixar offices which is where they are and reading a recent book about Pixar by Ed Catmull who is one of the bosses there it is apparently absolute chaos in there in a beautiful beautiful way so the building is just what you would expect from Steve Jobs it looks gorgeous it's sort of exposed steel girders and brickwork and wood and all of that but the desk space the Pixar designers build Disney castles and it looks like a set of Finding Nemo and Toy Story and Wall-E all put into one it's a great collaborative space that people feel they have control over it looks like a total mess in other words it looks like your children's rooms yeah maybe slightly more creative than my children's rooms but my children aspire towards the whole Disney castle thing Tim Hartford comes from Britain we're having this chat in the United States in both countries there have been enormous political upheavals recently when we come back I'm going to ask Tim about messiness in public life and in democracy stay with us this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vitan with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump Tim we've had populist revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic that reject the advice of scientists and economists experts in general democracy of course is famously messy could you remind people why it's such a good thing? yes I think in both cases I try to remind myself of Keith Garrett's untiable people piano, actually. To me, the Brexit vote felt like an unplayable piano. The expert consensus in the UK was that this was not a very good idea.
The British people disagreed with the experts, and so they voted to leave. And so I thought, OK, well, this is going to pose all kinds of obstacles and all kinds of difficulties. In what ways might they actually turn to our advantage? So not to try to be foolishly optimistic in the face of disappointment, or disappointment for a lot of people, but to say, well, there's an opportunity in everything.
What are the solutions that we look for going forward? And I think that's an important thing to bear in mind whenever we're faced with an obstacle. It's easy to get frustrated, but we should then say, OK, how is this going to make me stronger? How is this going to make my society stronger?
What are the solutions that are going to come out of disappointment? Donald Trump ran a campaign that many people thought was extremely disordered. He didn't listen to the experts. He went off script all the time.
He said things that people said would be sure to make him lose. Now, your book came out only a few weeks ago, but clearly, he must have read an early draft. I deny leaking the book to Donald Trump. However, you're absolutely right.
There is a section in the book about Donald Trump's campaigning style that was written before he won the election, and it was published before he won the election. And I said he is a master of using chaos to his advantage. One of the interesting parallels between Trump's campaign and the Brexit vote in the UK is that the Brexit vote in the UK, there were two different lead campaigns, and they hated each other. They were taking legal action against each other.
They actively contradicted each other. This may sound familiar, I don't know. You would think that that's a disadvantage turns out to be an advantage, because they were able to coalesce two different groups of supporters who wanted different things, and they just tuned in to the things they liked to hear. Meanwhile, the opposition, the Remain vote in the UK, the Democrats in the United States, they weren't sure what to criticize, because there was no coherence on the other side, so there was no target to aim at.
Trump, by the way, is not the only person to use this. The use of chaos as a weapon works perfectly well in wartime. I talk about Erwin Rommel, the great German tank commander. It works in business.
Jeff Bezos at Hamilton, explicitly targeted, we're going to move fast, we're going to make a mess, we don't understand what's going on, but at least Barnes and Noble are more confused than we are, and as long as Barnes and Noble are more confused than we are, we're doing okay. He was very, very clear about this, and it has grew very effective. I want to talk about another example of messiness in public life, and I want you to watch this video, which describes a very famous speech, and I want to ask the question right after it. We can never be satisfied, as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity, by signs stating for whites only.
We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. So as you can see from that speech, Martin Luther King is reading from a script, and he has a nice line there, but it's a writerly line, but at a certain point in the speech, he decides to leave the script behind and turn his eyes to the audience, and here's what we see after that. I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Talk about this for a second, because you talk about this speech in the book, and you talk about this moment when King left his notes behind and essentially stepped off the ledge of what he knew and what he was certain about and just rode the wave of what the crowd was telling him and what he was feeling. He had prepared that speech meticulously the night before, set up very late.
He was operating on a number of constraints. It was quite a tight time schedule. The eyes of the world were on him. He knew that.
There were also various political constraints about what was his response going to be to the civil rights legislation. Would he embrace it? Would he criticize it? It's not going far enough.
Other civil rights leaders were making different claims. He had to balance all of those, so he took great care. The result was a speech that was well-crafted, but a little bit lifeless. And so six or seven minutes into the speech, he looks down at the script, and there's a line there that's terrible.
And it must have been terrible when he wrote it, but he looked and he realized it's not working. Now let us go back to our communities as members for the Society for Creative Dissatisfaction. He doesn't say it. He says instead, go back, go back to Alabama.
Go back to Alabama. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana.
Go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities. And there's another pause. And the people behind him on the stage know he's not on the script anymore. And Mahalia Jackson, great gospel singer, yells out to him, because she's heard him talking in church about this dream.
She yells out, tell him about the dream about him. And then he starts to improvise. And that is when he touches the crowd. I want to wrap up by asking you a few personal questions.
I understand that after writing this book, every time you find yourself in a mess and you turn to your wife for comfort, she now reminds you that being a mess is a good thing. Actually, just two days ago, Shankar, I was trying to check into a hotel at Dublin airport at midnight, knowing I was going to have to get up very early in the morning and fly and come over to Washington to speak to you. And I was just desperate to get that little bit of sleep that I would be able to get. And when I showed up at the airport hotel, they didn't have my reservation.
And they were full. So nowhere to sleep. And as I toured Dublin in a taxi looking for hotels that were open, I could just hear my wife's voice in my head saying, this is making you smarter, Tim. This is what you say.
This is making you more creative. So I really created a rod to beat myself with. But I think it's important. Look, sometimes bad news is just bad news.
Sometimes an obstacle is just an obstacle. And there is no good sign to be found. But very often, when things go wrong, we need to stop and say, well, what could come out of this? Ron, you know, a musician who I interviewed for the book, he worked with David Bowie, he worked with U2, Coldplay, an amazing producer.
He described his creative strategy as, it's a little bit similar to being in an accident. When you're in an accident, you get that sudden feeling of you're paying attention to everything because there's this tremendous sense of threat. Well, that attention, the threat is bad, the accident is bad, but the attention is good. And so he puts the musicians he works with in stressful situations so they feel almost like they've been in an accident and suddenly he has their attention.
And I think it's worth bearing in mind, even if the accident is a problem, even if the obstacle is a problem, the sudden attention, the sudden feeling of being present may lead us to some kind of solution. And that's worth hanging on to. When everything is perfect, when everything is tidy, we're on autopilot. We're not necessarily living in the moment.
We're not necessarily paying attention. And that's a problem for us. Tim Hartford, thank you for joining me today. Thanks very much.
Today's show was produced by Chris Bandereff, Maggie Penman, Jenny Schmidt, Renee Kilar, and Raina Cohen. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. Our intern is Chloe Connolly. For more Hidden Brain, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to our weekly podcast.
Each week on Hidden Brain, we name an unsung hero, someone who works behind the scenes but doesn't always get the recognition they deserve. Our unsung hero this week is Carleen Watson. Carleen is the executive producer of All Things Considered, and she's been a wonderful resource as Hidden Brain has grown and taken on different forms. Her sharp editorial judgment and kind support are equally invaluable.
Thanks, Carleen. I'm Shankar Ketantham, and this is NPR.