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This is Vantage Point, the podcast for critical thinkers, where we make sense of and excel in our lives, our jobs, and our world.
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We're not political, just critical.
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Thank you for joining each week as we continue in our campaign to revive critical thinking.
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I'm your host, Ellie Amdur.
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Happy to have you with us and looking forward to continuing our march together.
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If you've enjoyed the journey so far, if you've gained something from it or believe you will, or if you know someone who might, please forward this or repost.
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Today, we'll take a close look at how critical thinking turns ideas into practicality.
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Before we do that, here's something I want to let you know.
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Starting this week, we are adding a second weekly episode to the lineup.
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So keep an eye out this Thursday and every Thursday from here on.
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This week's is a fun one.
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What happens when 11 days just vanish and an entire country loses its mind over it?
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Okay, back to today's topic.
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Let's ask the question: will you recognize the next great idea?
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Suppose, as the leader of your organization, you decided that starting immediately, all ideas were to come to you anonymously, and the source would be revealed only after you evaluated the idea on its own merit.
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How many ideas that you ultimately accept do you think would come from expected sources or unexpected sources, or new sparks and non-traditional sources, or from the usual same old, tired, boring chair warmers?
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Because of a phenomenon called cognitive bias, our own construct of reality, a reality we often seek in advance, tends to override objectivity in assessing the input.
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As such, cognitive biases can easily lead to perceptual distortion, narrowed options, faulty judgment, and lost opportunities.
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Groundbreaking work on cognitive bias was done by Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli psychologist and economist, noted for his work regarding the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well as behavioral economics.
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For his work, beginning in the 1970s, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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Kahneman's work challenges the assumptions we make regarding our own human rationality.
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If we apply in everyday scenarios what he states, we start to realize the frailties and foibles of our decision-making processes and the biases that make them vulnerable.
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We freely use the term paradigms, but that is not the root of the problem.
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Paradigmatic constructs are caused by the more fundamental and systemic cognitive biases.
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For example, we're more likely to freely accept ideas from senior members and leaders of the team than from young members of the project team.
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Or from executives with three degrees, not smart, creative, fearless thinkers with the ink still wet on their bachelor's degrees.
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Why?
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When ideas are presented to us, the immediate need is for us to be persuaded.
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Persuasion, we know, depends on four factors.
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Factor number one, credibility.
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The idea must be believable, sensible, and practical to one degree or another, or any combination of those characteristics.
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Factor number two, authority.
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The idea must come from someone whom we recognize as an authoritative voice.
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How we assign real or perceived authority is often a pathology all its own.
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Feedback you get back in.
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But this is an intimate dance performed together by the persuader and the persuaded that serves as milestones along the path to recognition of the persuasion itself.
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It's not just an end result, it's part and parcel of the process.
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The more these four factors are given equal values, the more objective the process becomes, and the more reliable the decision will be.
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That is cognitive objectivity, which we commonly call open-mindedness.
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But when, for instance, we assign too much authority to an individual simply because of age, seniority, position, or credentials, or when we dismiss others for exactly the opposite characteristics, we engage in cognitive biases and we endanger the integrity of our thought processes and ultimately our decisions.
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In this age of unparalleled nature, pace, and scope of change, keep that phrase in mind: nature, pace, and scope.
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Leaders not only have to think out of the box to use a worn-out cliche, but it fits here.
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They have to make sure they're just not in a bigger box.
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One of my greatest warnings to all my clients when you think you're thinking out of the box, look around.
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You may just be in a bigger box.
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Ideas, truly original ideas, come from more places, that's the nature.
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Arise and develop much faster, that's the pace, and reach much farther, that's the scope, than ever before.
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Nature, pace, and scope.
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And our cognitive biases will only get in the way.
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They're not easy to shed, but shed them we must.
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For example, Alan C.
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Greenberg, the iconic legendary Ace Greenberg, who was long time head of Bear Stearns in its heyday.
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As a matter of fact, he held a position for 15 years, 1978 to 93, had a famously contrarian attitude towards hiring MBAs.
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As you'll see, he was not the biggest fan of MBAs.
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In a May 5, 1981 internal memo to his executive team, Greenberg noted that other Wall Street firms were making a point of recruiting MBA graduates.
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Bear Stearns, he argued, should continue doing something different.
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His memorable formulation was the firm wanted people, not with an MBA, but with PSD degrees rather than simply any MBA credentials.
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PSD stood for poor, smart, and a deep desire to become rich.
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Greenberg wasn't really literally banning MBAs.
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He wrote openly that if someone with an MBA applied to Bear Stearns, Bear Stearns would not hold a degree against the candidate.
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His point was that routine credentials were secondary to favorable traits.
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And when I do my presentation to you on new models of hiring and team building, that's where it comes from.
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He also strongly favored promoting people from within.
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Greensburg's philosophy reflected his own experience, having come to Wall Street without an elite school pedigree and was rejected by several firms before Bear Stearns hired him.
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Keep in mind, this is a guy who came to the United States as an immigrant with barely a dime in his pocket.
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He subsequently rose to become one of Wall Street's best-known and clearly most successful executives.
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There's an interesting irony in Greenberg's little acronym.
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He wasn't really arguing against education.
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He was arguing against credentialism.
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His hiring question was essentially don't ask where did this person go to school?
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Ask, is this person smart, hungry, resourceful, and determined to succeed?
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Surely there have been other successful executives, but on Wall Street, in that period of time, there were many executives, but there was only one, Alan C.
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Greenberg.
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He collected this and many of those other unusual management memos in his delicious little book, Memo from the Memos from the Chairman.
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It attracted the eye of Warren Buffett, who wrote the foreword for it.
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So let's get back to the opening hypothesis to think about our openness to new ideas from new sources.
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Will you recognize the next great idea?
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Because you never know where the next great idea is going to come from.
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And you don't want to miss it.
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This is not about throwing the old sources out, it's about letting the new ones in.
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Let me take a break.
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Turn this over to our sponsors, and I'll be back.
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This episode is really about not letting bias about where an idea comes from, stop you from recognizing a good one.
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And that is exactly the spirit our sponsors have shown in backing this show early.
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Thank you to Stephen Boser, our founding sponsor.
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And thank you to Cottom Consulting for standing behind this work.
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And since we are on the subject, I want to mention something new.
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Vantage Point is now looking for a few more sponsors to join them.
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We came out of nowhere in June with no advanced advertising, and by our first week, we were already in the top half of 5 million podcasts worldwide.
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By week eight, we were in the top quarter.
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If your organization wants a personal connection with a thoughtful, engaged audience while it is still early, I would love to talk.
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Sponsorships are limited, so if you are interested, come visit my website, eleander.com.
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I am back as I threatened I would be with a handful of aphorisms.
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Which, thank you for all your feedback.
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I'm getting a lot of positive results and reviews from.
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My aphorism number one for today.
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Turning education over to AI and robots will be about as effective as kissing through a glass window.
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There are just things that AI and robots can't do, and we can.
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Studied pre-med and decided to go to med school.
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And when he finished medical school, he went into research.
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All of his classmates went into private practice and made oodles of money.
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Jonas Salk did not.
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Jonas Salk changed the world.
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He went to the University of Pittsburgh, began working in the laboratory, made so many great advances that they named the laboratory after him and gave him a staff of researchers to run it.
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Fast forward a little bit to 1953, when the research had been going on since the end of the war.
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And he produced the vaccine.
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The Eisenhower administration had seen to it that six pharmaceutical companies get together and make sure that they were ready, willing, and able to produce one dose of the vaccine of the vaccine for every person in America, and then as many more as they could for people around the world.
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And they told him it it it protects the rights to the product and you know blah blah blah.
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You all know what a patent does.
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And Salt, who was also very intuitive, interrupted them and said, Hold everything here.
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How long will this take?
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What's involved?
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And so they explained the process.
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You do this, you do that, and you file this paper and that paper, and you're on another trial, and blah blah blah blah blah and you go on and on and on and on.
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And he lost patience and he said, Just a second now.
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How long is this gonna take?
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And one of the lawyers responded, probably another year or so until we get the patent.
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And Salk shut the conversation down and said, No way.
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Now we're into 1954 now.
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The vaccine is ready, it's going out.
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And they tried to argue to save the the uh the patent reservation, and Salk explained to them that for us to wait another year, 60,000 people or so will come down with polio.
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A very significant portion of them will die, many of them children.
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Do you want me to approve that?
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And because he had control over it, he gave the vaccine to the health administrators of the Eisenhower administration, and they vaccinated everyone in America, or almost everyone.
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On a personal note, I can tell you that I was part of the final human trial in a school that I was where I was going to school, where I was in first grade, in Mamarinick, New York.
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And half the uh subjects got a placebo and half got the real vaccine.
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I was the recipient of the real vaccine, and I have my polio pioneer card on my desk at home to prove.
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Jonas Salk potentially saved my life and the life of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of others.
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Because, as he said, our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
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I think we have a Jonas Salk among us.
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I think that that person is Dr.
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Kismesia, Kismecia Corbett, who made the final progress in developing the mRNA vaccine against COVID 19.
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It wasn't ten seconds after that was announced that she was scooped up by Harvard.
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They gave her a lab, and now she's busy doing what Jonas Salt did.
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If you thought when I started this riff that I was exaggerating by calling him one of the most important persons of the century, now do you feel the same way?
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Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
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Okay, let's get into our what if section of the episode.
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And I think we're going to attach this to what we discussed about endangering the integrity of our thought processes.
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I take you back to 1804, July 11th, when a bitter dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr came to a culmination in a way that many were done in those years with a duel of pistols.
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Aaron Burr was vice president of the United States.
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Alexander Hamilton, as much as anyone, if not more, contributed to building this country from the very beginning.
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Alexander Hamilton created our Treasury Department.
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He created and championed the idea of public debt.
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He built the United States Coast Guard and later the United States Navy.
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He established the Bank of New York.
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He established the New York Post newspaper.
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And he was a trusted advisor to George Washington and to others as well.
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One of our Alexander Hamilton's problems was, if I can say this in the slang version, he had a big mouth and never held it closed when it came time to criticize others.
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The problem for them was that he was always right.
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He was absolutely brilliant.
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And when people talk about the most intelligent, most intellectual leader of the country in the early days, they talk about Thomas Jefferson.
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I beg to differ.
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Alexander Hamilton was above and beyond.
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Never was a popular favorite of many of the uh players at that time because he arrived here at the age of eleven from St.
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Kitts and Nevis.
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He was the product of a mixed race, illegitimate marriage.
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He was scrappy.
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He was almost always right.
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And he was appreciated for many things that he instituted, but at a certain point one would get annoyed or worse by Alexander Hamilton.
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Well, he made Vice President Burr reach that point.
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And Burr challenged him to a duel.
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They both lived in New York.
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They chose the field, the open field in Weehawk in New Jersey.
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And on the morning of July 11th, the duel took place.
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Now many times people sent in their seconds to deal with the duel.
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But Burr and Hamilton agreed that they had to fight it out like two men.
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So you hear the drum roll, you hear everybody lining up, etc.
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etc.
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etc.
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And they took the ten paces, turned, and fired.
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Hamilton missed Burr.
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Found its target, the midsection of Alexander Hamilton.
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He was taken by barge across back across the river and brought to his home in Lower Manhattan, where he died the next day on July 12th.
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What if Burr missed?
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What if the day ended with the two of them going home?
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Historians love this question.
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We could go on and on, and I'm not a historian, so I'm not going to pretend to be one, but I but I do appreciate what one thing that could have happened and one thing that could not have that might not have happened.
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We could very easily have had a president, Alexander Hamilton.
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Because if people weren't ready to be persuaded and convinced by Alexander Hamilton, they wound up being so when they spent some time with him.
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He was a most persuasive arguer.
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And I'm going to leave you with this.
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Had Alexander Hamilton lived, had Aaron Burr missed, there probably would have been no civil war.
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If you're interested, the books on Hamilton are plentiful.
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They're worth reading.
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Coming up in the next few weeks, we're going to take an entirely new look at hiring and tea building.
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I'm going to tell you the story about ascending Everest, and we're going to look more clearly where ideas come from.
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In the meantime, thanks for listening.
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Thanks for being with me.
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Thanks for being my audience.
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And thanks for sharing the ideas.
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Talk to you next time.
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Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.
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This is Vantage Point, the podcast for critical thinkers, where we make sense of and excel in our lives, our jobs, and our world.
00:00:17.760 --> 00:00:21.519
We're not political, just critical.
00:00:23.519 --> 00:00:29.920
Thank you for joining each week as we continue in our campaign to revive critical thinking.
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I'm your host, Ellie Amdur.
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Happy to have you with us and looking forward to continuing our march together.
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If you've enjoyed the journey so far, if you've gained something from it or believe you will, or if you know someone who might, please forward this or repost.
00:00:54.479 --> 00:01:02.479
Today, we'll take a close look at how critical thinking turns ideas into practicality.
00:01:03.439 --> 00:01:07.120
Before we do that, here's something I want to let you know.
00:01:07.439 --> 00:01:11.760
Starting this week, we are adding a second weekly episode to the lineup.
00:01:12.079 --> 00:01:16.640
So keep an eye out this Thursday and every Thursday from here on.
00:01:16.879 --> 00:01:18.560
This week's is a fun one.
00:01:18.640 --> 00:01:24.159
What happens when 11 days just vanish and an entire country loses its mind over it?
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Okay, back to today's topic.
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Let's ask the question: will you recognize the next great idea?
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Suppose, as the leader of your organization, you decided that starting immediately, all ideas were to come to you anonymously, and the source would be revealed only after you evaluated the idea on its own merit.
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How many ideas that you ultimately accept do you think would come from expected sources or unexpected sources, or new sparks and non-traditional sources, or from the usual same old, tired, boring chair warmers?
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Because of a phenomenon called cognitive bias, our own construct of reality, a reality we often seek in advance, tends to override objectivity in assessing the input.
00:02:35.759 --> 00:02:51.840
As such, cognitive biases can easily lead to perceptual distortion, narrowed options, faulty judgment, and lost opportunities.
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Groundbreaking work on cognitive bias was done by Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli psychologist and economist, noted for his work regarding the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well as behavioral economics.
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For his work, beginning in the 1970s, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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Kahneman's work challenges the assumptions we make regarding our own human rationality.
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If we apply in everyday scenarios what he states, we start to realize the frailties and foibles of our decision-making processes and the biases that make them vulnerable.
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We freely use the term paradigms, but that is not the root of the problem.
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Paradigmatic constructs are caused by the more fundamental and systemic cognitive biases.
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For example, we're more likely to freely accept ideas from senior members and leaders of the team than from young members of the project team.
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Or from executives with three degrees, not smart, creative, fearless thinkers with the ink still wet on their bachelor's degrees.
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Why?
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When ideas are presented to us, the immediate need is for us to be persuaded.
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Persuasion, we know, depends on four factors.
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Factor number one, credibility.
00:04:48.959 --> 00:05:00.000
The idea must be believable, sensible, and practical to one degree or another, or any combination of those characteristics.
00:05:01.519 --> 00:05:04.879
Factor number two, authority.
00:05:05.439 --> 00:05:10.480
The idea must come from someone whom we recognize as an authoritative voice.
00:05:10.720 --> 00:05:16.639
How we assign real or perceived authority is often a pathology all its own.
00:05:54.319 --> 00:05:56.000
Feedback you get back in.
00:05:56.160 --> 00:06:08.879
But this is an intimate dance performed together by the persuader and the persuaded that serves as milestones along the path to recognition of the persuasion itself.
00:06:09.600 --> 00:06:15.120
It's not just an end result, it's part and parcel of the process.
00:06:17.439 --> 00:06:28.319
The more these four factors are given equal values, the more objective the process becomes, and the more reliable the decision will be.
00:06:30.319 --> 00:06:37.519
That is cognitive objectivity, which we commonly call open-mindedness.
00:06:37.920 --> 00:07:00.879
But when, for instance, we assign too much authority to an individual simply because of age, seniority, position, or credentials, or when we dismiss others for exactly the opposite characteristics, we engage in cognitive biases and we endanger the integrity of our thought processes and ultimately our decisions.
00:07:02.800 --> 00:07:11.759
In this age of unparalleled nature, pace, and scope of change, keep that phrase in mind: nature, pace, and scope.
00:07:12.879 --> 00:07:19.199
Leaders not only have to think out of the box to use a worn-out cliche, but it fits here.
00:07:19.680 --> 00:07:23.279
They have to make sure they're just not in a bigger box.
00:07:23.519 --> 00:07:30.720
One of my greatest warnings to all my clients when you think you're thinking out of the box, look around.
00:07:30.959 --> 00:07:33.360
You may just be in a bigger box.
00:07:36.240 --> 00:07:43.519
Ideas, truly original ideas, come from more places, that's the nature.
00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:54.480
Arise and develop much faster, that's the pace, and reach much farther, that's the scope, than ever before.
00:07:54.720 --> 00:07:56.800
Nature, pace, and scope.
00:07:57.040 --> 00:08:01.360
And our cognitive biases will only get in the way.
00:08:01.920 --> 00:08:06.000
They're not easy to shed, but shed them we must.
00:08:06.720 --> 00:08:11.680
For example, Alan C.
00:08:11.920 --> 00:08:23.120
Greenberg, the iconic legendary Ace Greenberg, who was long time head of Bear Stearns in its heyday.
00:08:23.279 --> 00:08:33.120
As a matter of fact, he held a position for 15 years, 1978 to 93, had a famously contrarian attitude towards hiring MBAs.
00:08:33.440 --> 00:08:36.960
As you'll see, he was not the biggest fan of MBAs.
00:08:38.159 --> 00:08:52.000
In a May 5, 1981 internal memo to his executive team, Greenberg noted that other Wall Street firms were making a point of recruiting MBA graduates.
00:08:52.320 --> 00:08:57.840
Bear Stearns, he argued, should continue doing something different.
00:08:58.080 --> 00:09:08.879
His memorable formulation was the firm wanted people, not with an MBA, but with PSD degrees rather than simply any MBA credentials.
00:09:09.120 --> 00:09:15.120
PSD stood for poor, smart, and a deep desire to become rich.
00:09:16.720 --> 00:09:20.879
Greenberg wasn't really literally banning MBAs.
00:09:21.120 --> 00:09:30.480
He wrote openly that if someone with an MBA applied to Bear Stearns, Bear Stearns would not hold a degree against the candidate.
00:09:33.039 --> 00:09:39.679
His point was that routine credentials were secondary to favorable traits.
00:09:40.159 --> 00:09:52.639
And when I do my presentation to you on new models of hiring and team building, that's where it comes from.
00:09:54.559 --> 00:09:59.039
He also strongly favored promoting people from within.
00:10:00.559 --> 00:10:12.559
Greensburg's philosophy reflected his own experience, having come to Wall Street without an elite school pedigree and was rejected by several firms before Bear Stearns hired him.
00:10:12.879 --> 00:10:21.440
Keep in mind, this is a guy who came to the United States as an immigrant with barely a dime in his pocket.
00:10:23.039 --> 00:10:29.919
He subsequently rose to become one of Wall Street's best-known and clearly most successful executives.
00:10:30.159 --> 00:10:34.240
There's an interesting irony in Greenberg's little acronym.
00:10:34.879 --> 00:10:38.240
He wasn't really arguing against education.
00:10:38.559 --> 00:10:41.519
He was arguing against credentialism.
00:10:42.320 --> 00:10:50.960
His hiring question was essentially don't ask where did this person go to school?
00:10:51.200 --> 00:10:57.679
Ask, is this person smart, hungry, resourceful, and determined to succeed?
00:11:00.080 --> 00:11:09.919
Surely there have been other successful executives, but on Wall Street, in that period of time, there were many executives, but there was only one, Alan C.
00:11:10.080 --> 00:11:11.200
Greenberg.
00:11:12.960 --> 00:11:25.120
He collected this and many of those other unusual management memos in his delicious little book, Memo from the Memos from the Chairman.
00:11:26.240 --> 00:11:30.159
It attracted the eye of Warren Buffett, who wrote the foreword for it.
00:11:34.320 --> 00:11:40.240
So let's get back to the opening hypothesis to think about our openness to new ideas from new sources.
00:11:41.840 --> 00:11:45.279
Will you recognize the next great idea?
00:11:48.559 --> 00:11:52.720
Because you never know where the next great idea is going to come from.
00:11:53.120 --> 00:11:54.960
And you don't want to miss it.
00:11:55.919 --> 00:12:02.480
This is not about throwing the old sources out, it's about letting the new ones in.
00:12:05.919 --> 00:12:07.600
Let me take a break.
00:12:08.159 --> 00:12:11.679
Turn this over to our sponsors, and I'll be back.
00:12:11.919 --> 00:12:19.440
This episode is really about not letting bias about where an idea comes from, stop you from recognizing a good one.
00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:24.960
And that is exactly the spirit our sponsors have shown in backing this show early.
00:12:25.200 --> 00:12:28.960
Thank you to Stephen Boser, our founding sponsor.
00:12:29.200 --> 00:12:33.600
And thank you to Cottom Consulting for standing behind this work.
00:12:34.000 --> 00:12:38.720
And since we are on the subject, I want to mention something new.
00:12:39.039 --> 00:12:44.000
Vantage Point is now looking for a few more sponsors to join them.
00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:54.000
We came out of nowhere in June with no advanced advertising, and by our first week, we were already in the top half of 5 million podcasts worldwide.
00:12:54.399 --> 00:12:57.519
By week eight, we were in the top quarter.
00:12:57.840 --> 00:13:05.360
If your organization wants a personal connection with a thoughtful, engaged audience while it is still early, I would love to talk.
00:13:05.679 --> 00:13:12.559
Sponsorships are limited, so if you are interested, come visit my website, eleander.com.
00:13:16.320 --> 00:13:23.120
I am back as I threatened I would be with a handful of aphorisms.
00:13:24.240 --> 00:13:26.399
Which, thank you for all your feedback.
00:13:26.559 --> 00:13:30.399
I'm getting a lot of positive results and reviews from.
00:13:30.879 --> 00:13:33.440
My aphorism number one for today.
00:13:36.799 --> 00:13:44.799
Turning education over to AI and robots will be about as effective as kissing through a glass window.
00:13:46.320 --> 00:13:53.200
There are just things that AI and robots can't do, and we can.
00:16:22.559 --> 00:16:26.480
Studied pre-med and decided to go to med school.
00:16:28.080 --> 00:16:36.480
And when he finished medical school, he went into research.
00:16:37.600 --> 00:16:41.600
All of his classmates went into private practice and made oodles of money.
00:16:41.840 --> 00:16:43.840
Jonas Salk did not.
00:16:45.039 --> 00:16:47.759
Jonas Salk changed the world.
00:16:50.879 --> 00:17:06.160
He went to the University of Pittsburgh, began working in the laboratory, made so many great advances that they named the laboratory after him and gave him a staff of researchers to run it.
00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:14.960
Fast forward a little bit to 1953, when the research had been going on since the end of the war.
00:17:18.720 --> 00:17:20.880
And he produced the vaccine.
00:17:41.519 --> 00:18:01.599
The Eisenhower administration had seen to it that six pharmaceutical companies get together and make sure that they were ready, willing, and able to produce one dose of the vaccine of the vaccine for every person in America, and then as many more as they could for people around the world.
00:18:48.640 --> 00:18:53.039
And they told him it it it protects the rights to the product and you know blah blah blah.
00:18:53.119 --> 00:18:54.960
You all know what a patent does.
00:18:57.440 --> 00:19:05.759
And Salt, who was also very intuitive, interrupted them and said, Hold everything here.
00:19:06.799 --> 00:19:08.799
How long will this take?
00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:11.359
What's involved?
00:19:11.599 --> 00:19:13.119
And so they explained the process.
00:19:13.200 --> 00:19:19.920
You do this, you do that, and you file this paper and that paper, and you're on another trial, and blah blah blah blah blah and you go on and on and on and on.
00:19:20.319 --> 00:19:23.680
And he lost patience and he said, Just a second now.
00:19:25.039 --> 00:19:27.359
How long is this gonna take?
00:19:27.839 --> 00:19:34.559
And one of the lawyers responded, probably another year or so until we get the patent.
00:19:35.200 --> 00:19:40.319
And Salk shut the conversation down and said, No way.
00:19:43.039 --> 00:19:46.160
Now we're into 1954 now.
00:19:46.319 --> 00:19:49.279
The vaccine is ready, it's going out.
00:19:49.920 --> 00:20:12.079
And they tried to argue to save the the uh the patent reservation, and Salk explained to them that for us to wait another year, 60,000 people or so will come down with polio.
00:20:13.119 --> 00:20:18.480
A very significant portion of them will die, many of them children.
00:20:18.880 --> 00:20:20.400
Do you want me to approve that?
00:20:20.559 --> 00:20:32.480
And because he had control over it, he gave the vaccine to the health administrators of the Eisenhower administration, and they vaccinated everyone in America, or almost everyone.
00:20:32.640 --> 00:20:44.799
On a personal note, I can tell you that I was part of the final human trial in a school that I was where I was going to school, where I was in first grade, in Mamarinick, New York.
00:20:48.559 --> 00:20:55.440
And half the uh subjects got a placebo and half got the real vaccine.
00:20:55.839 --> 00:21:03.440
I was the recipient of the real vaccine, and I have my polio pioneer card on my desk at home to prove.
00:21:04.400 --> 00:21:14.480
Jonas Salk potentially saved my life and the life of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of others.
00:21:14.880 --> 00:21:23.920
Because, as he said, our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
00:21:25.519 --> 00:21:28.400
I think we have a Jonas Salk among us.
00:21:28.640 --> 00:21:31.920
I think that that person is Dr.
00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:44.400
Kismesia, Kismecia Corbett, who made the final progress in developing the mRNA vaccine against COVID 19.
00:21:48.240 --> 00:21:53.039
It wasn't ten seconds after that was announced that she was scooped up by Harvard.
00:21:53.119 --> 00:21:58.319
They gave her a lab, and now she's busy doing what Jonas Salt did.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:10.079
If you thought when I started this riff that I was exaggerating by calling him one of the most important persons of the century, now do you feel the same way?
00:22:11.119 --> 00:22:14.880
Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
00:22:19.440 --> 00:22:23.519
Okay, let's get into our what if section of the episode.
00:22:25.039 --> 00:22:32.319
And I think we're going to attach this to what we discussed about endangering the integrity of our thought processes.
00:22:33.279 --> 00:22:55.440
I take you back to 1804, July 11th, when a bitter dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr came to a culmination in a way that many were done in those years with a duel of pistols.
00:22:57.200 --> 00:22:59.440
Aaron Burr was vice president of the United States.
00:22:59.599 --> 00:23:11.039
Alexander Hamilton, as much as anyone, if not more, contributed to building this country from the very beginning.
00:23:11.680 --> 00:23:14.960
Alexander Hamilton created our Treasury Department.
00:23:15.200 --> 00:23:18.400
He created and championed the idea of public debt.
00:23:18.640 --> 00:23:22.799
He built the United States Coast Guard and later the United States Navy.
00:23:23.440 --> 00:23:26.240
He established the Bank of New York.
00:23:28.079 --> 00:23:30.799
He established the New York Post newspaper.
00:23:31.039 --> 00:23:39.920
And he was a trusted advisor to George Washington and to others as well.
00:23:42.240 --> 00:23:58.000
One of our Alexander Hamilton's problems was, if I can say this in the slang version, he had a big mouth and never held it closed when it came time to criticize others.
00:23:59.119 --> 00:24:01.599
The problem for them was that he was always right.
00:24:01.839 --> 00:24:03.279
He was absolutely brilliant.
00:24:03.359 --> 00:24:15.519
And when people talk about the most intelligent, most intellectual leader of the country in the early days, they talk about Thomas Jefferson.
00:24:16.559 --> 00:24:18.079
I beg to differ.
00:24:18.400 --> 00:24:21.839
Alexander Hamilton was above and beyond.
00:24:22.880 --> 00:24:32.880
Never was a popular favorite of many of the uh players at that time because he arrived here at the age of eleven from St.
00:24:33.039 --> 00:24:33.920
Kitts and Nevis.
00:24:34.160 --> 00:24:40.000
He was the product of a mixed race, illegitimate marriage.
00:24:40.400 --> 00:24:43.200
He was scrappy.
00:24:43.839 --> 00:24:48.319
He was almost always right.
00:24:50.720 --> 00:25:03.279
And he was appreciated for many things that he instituted, but at a certain point one would get annoyed or worse by Alexander Hamilton.
00:25:03.519 --> 00:25:08.480
Well, he made Vice President Burr reach that point.
00:25:09.839 --> 00:25:14.480
And Burr challenged him to a duel.
00:25:16.880 --> 00:25:18.640
They both lived in New York.
00:25:19.839 --> 00:25:26.319
They chose the field, the open field in Weehawk in New Jersey.
00:25:27.680 --> 00:25:31.359
And on the morning of July 11th, the duel took place.
00:25:35.039 --> 00:25:41.279
Now many times people sent in their seconds to deal with the duel.
00:25:42.000 --> 00:25:47.599
But Burr and Hamilton agreed that they had to fight it out like two men.
00:25:50.079 --> 00:25:53.119
So you hear the drum roll, you hear everybody lining up, etc.
00:25:53.279 --> 00:25:53.519
etc.
00:25:53.680 --> 00:25:53.920
etc.
00:25:54.079 --> 00:25:57.039
And they took the ten paces, turned, and fired.
00:25:58.559 --> 00:26:01.279
Hamilton missed Burr.
00:26:06.799 --> 00:26:11.119
Found its target, the midsection of Alexander Hamilton.
00:26:11.599 --> 00:26:21.920
He was taken by barge across back across the river and brought to his home in Lower Manhattan, where he died the next day on July 12th.
00:26:25.359 --> 00:26:27.680
What if Burr missed?
00:26:28.079 --> 00:26:32.319
What if the day ended with the two of them going home?
00:26:33.519 --> 00:26:37.519
Historians love this question.
00:26:38.480 --> 00:26:51.279
We could go on and on, and I'm not a historian, so I'm not going to pretend to be one, but I but I do appreciate what one thing that could have happened and one thing that could not have that might not have happened.
00:26:53.920 --> 00:26:58.160
We could very easily have had a president, Alexander Hamilton.
00:26:59.599 --> 00:27:08.319
Because if people weren't ready to be persuaded and convinced by Alexander Hamilton, they wound up being so when they spent some time with him.
00:27:08.559 --> 00:27:13.200
He was a most persuasive arguer.
00:27:14.559 --> 00:27:16.480
And I'm going to leave you with this.
00:27:17.200 --> 00:27:28.640
Had Alexander Hamilton lived, had Aaron Burr missed, there probably would have been no civil war.
00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:34.880
If you're interested, the books on Hamilton are plentiful.
00:27:35.119 --> 00:27:36.799
They're worth reading.
00:27:38.880 --> 00:27:47.039
Coming up in the next few weeks, we're going to take an entirely new look at hiring and tea building.
00:27:47.599 --> 00:27:56.079
I'm going to tell you the story about ascending Everest, and we're going to look more clearly where ideas come from.
00:27:56.319 --> 00:27:58.559
In the meantime, thanks for listening.
00:27:58.720 --> 00:27:59.839
Thanks for being with me.
00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:01.839
Thanks for being my audience.
00:28:02.079 --> 00:28:04.079
And thanks for sharing the ideas.
00:28:04.400 --> 00:28:05.359
Talk to you next time.
00:28:05.839 --> 00:28:12.079
Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.
