What do long-haul truck drivers talk about on the CB radio? Do ice cream truck drivers get sick of the ice cream truck song? What’s in a mystery novelist’s search engine history?
Dan Heath created his podcast, What It’s Like to Be…, to indulge what he calls a “missing curiosity” about what other people do at work. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, our jobs dictate what we’re doing, thinking, and feeling for about a third of our waking life. But even with the people we know best, Dan contends that we often don’t really know the answer to: What did you do at work today?
One year into the show, Dan has amassed an eclectic collage of answers. Leslie the TV meteorologist starts her workday at 3:30 a.m., picking through a mountain of atmospheric data until she goes live in Oklahoma City at 5:30. Eric the archaeologist also works early mornings, but he does his picking with an actual pickaxe, unearthing clues about what life was like thousands of years earlier at places like the Mound of Megiddo (biblical Armageddon). Beyond what people do, we also glimpse why they do it. Erin the ice cream truck driver talks about a girl who grew up coming to her truck. Now 25 and visiting her hometown, that girl made sure to stop by to see Erin for her childhood favorite, a cotton candy ice cream bar.
These conversations are a refreshing complement to the scientific perspectives on work that we typically feature on Behavioral Scientist. One way we learn about work is by reading Barry Schwartz on how we’ve too often built organizations that strip our work of meaning, or Amy Edmondson on why people who feel psychologically safe report more mistakes but perform better. We learn from Cal Newport about the ways busyness makes us less productive, not more, and Nobel-winning economist Simon Johnson explains what AI might mean for work in the future.
Science is valuable precisely because of its capacity to uncover these kinds of patterns in what we do. But a focus on trends and tendencies can mask the individuals underneath. That’s why Dan’s approach is so valuable. Each conversation offers an intimate, n = 1 investigation about how someone spends their day.
Recently, editor-in-chief Evan Nesterak spoke with Dan to ask about what he’s learned one year in, how this project has changed how he interacts with strangers, and the moments that have stuck with him—like the surprising sentimentality of interviewing a London cabbie in an increasingly Uber-dominated world. The conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.
Evan Nesterak: In your article introducing the podcast, you write, “Curiosity can be a means to an end. But couldn’t it also be … the end? A reward in itself?” Then you reflect on a few of the first conversations: “There is something that has been profoundly healthy for me about unclenching my brain and just listening. Relishing my own ignorance. And enjoying what it feels like to lose some of it.”
So that was the spirit that you began the podcast with. Now that you’ve published over two dozen episodes, how is the experiment in slow curiosity going?
Dan Heath: I still stand by that mission, and this podcast continues to be a pleasure to work on. It’s like that quote—there’s a sense of relief in not having to scramble for the answers and to relax into observation and curiosity.
There are continually surprises on the show, which is the fun part. Sometimes there are surprises driven by situational extremity—the long-haul truck drivers hauling 32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats. That is something that never would have intersected with my reality in the absence of the podcast. Right before we spoke today, I was interviewing an interior designer. She was talking about how she has a lot of rich New York clients. In one case, a piano had to go from one apartment to another, but you can’t get a piano in the elevator. So they had to rig up a crane to hoist the piano through the skylight so that it could be transported to its new home. I love details like that.
I don’t think either of those speak to anything profound about the human condition, but I think that there is something exhilarating about getting to peek inside someone else’s existence.
Before you recorded any of the pilot episodes, you had some expectations about what these conversations might be like. What was one expectation that you felt became reality?
To my great delight, there are people who share my unnatural curiosity about this piece of work. I always knew that if people listened to these episodes, they would get something from them. But I worried that it would be the way that we get something from asparagus. If we eat it, we probably feel good about ourselves, but we don’t find ourselves walking around the street like, “Damn, I wish I had some asparagus right now.” My wish was that there would be people for whom this show was craveable, but I didn’t know whether those people existed. I now know that they do.
We did an elaborate listener survey a few months back, and one of the comments was from someone who said, “I find that this show has changed the way that I interact with other people in my life. I was eating out for dinner the other night and I found myself thinking, What would it be like to be this waiter? What’s going on in their mind right now?”
And I was like, man, I should print that on a bumper sticker for the show. That was the dream.
I like listening to the podcast during my commute. You might be a little hungry, you might be a little tired, and your tolerance for people might be going down. But listening to it, my mindset completely changes. I’m looking at the tram driver, or somebody gets on with a set of tools or art supplies or whatever, and I’m wondering, What’s their day been like?
I appreciate that. For me personally, there’s a similar therapeutic aspect where it’s almost like an antidote to customer mindset. This is an embarrassing thing to admit, but sometimes when I’m having a really bad day, or a bad meal, or a bad flight, I’m composing the scathing review of the experience in my head. I hate that about myself and my brain, that there’s this little critic that’s going to get revenge. It’s just silly and reptilian-brain-level stuff.
I find that if I’ve just recorded an episode or listened to one during editing, it helps take the steam out. It makes me realize the obvious absurdity of venting at a flight attendant because the flight is delayed when you know full well they have nothing to do with it. So it’s a reminder: It’s not about you. Just being exposed to the complexity in different people’s lives is a way of inoculating yourself against that sort of thing.
What are some of the conversations that have stayed with you most?
I don’t claim this as the most important, but there were several times this past year when the theme of declining professions came up. The most recent instantiation of this was when I interviewed a London cabbie. There’s almost no question in my mind that the London cabbie, as it has existed, will not be around 20 years from now.
I felt a real sense of depression after that episode. To be a London cabbie, you have to pass what some people have called the hardest exam in the world in any domain. It’s called “The Knowledge,” which is an appropriately majestic name for the test, where you have to memorize not only every street and road in Greater London, but also landmarks, statues. You have to know restaurants to the point where the examiner might ask you to take them from place to place and only mention the name of the chef, rather than the address or the name of the restaurant. So you have to know not just London as a map, but London as an ecosystem.
Then Uber comes along. Now if you want a ride in London, you can either ride with the people who have basically rebuilt their brains, or the person that signed up on Uber that day because they wanted to take people around in their Camry. Uber is probably cheaper, and probably a little more convenient. I just keep turning this around in my mind: How sad should we be about London cabbies going away? I personally feel very sad, but is it irrational? Would I have mourned the phase-out of carriage drivers?
There’s this sense that we’re supposed to just let go of things like that in the spirit of technological progress. But what really burns about this particular example is it doesn’t feel like, Oh, technology has opened this new door and we’ve gone from the horse to the car. This feels like regulatory arbitrage. The reason Uber is going to replace the London cabbie is not because they’re better, but because they’ve done away with any standard that existed for this other set of people.
So that’s one thing that I didn’t see coming that I don’t know quite what to do with. It feels overly romantic to think, “Oh, woe is me. Every career that goes away is a lost language or an extinct species.” But it just feels wrong that something as proud and as distinguished as this career could be wiped away.
What job would you most like to do of the people you’ve interviewed so far and why?
Two that I interviewed almost back-to-back were a mystery novelist and a forensic accountant. I found myself fantasizing about a mystery novel series with a forensic accountant as the protagonist. So I was going to combine both of them into one master profession. Maybe I still will someday—I’m not ruling it out.
At the end of the podcast, you help us speak the language of your guest’s profession. You ask them for a word or phrase that only those in the profession would know. What’s a word or phrase you learned that sticks out in your memory?
One of my favorites was when the Secret Service agent talked about the phrase “left of boom.” Boom is the bad thing, and left of boom is what you’re going to do to prevent the bad thing from happening. So you want to be left of boom. The crisis PR communicator used the expression “break into jail,” which means when companies that have done something stupid actually communicate too much about it, which then makes other people aware and interested and appalled, though they otherwise wouldn’t have heard of it. And the archeologist explained what a “sherd” is—a sherd is a broken piece of pottery, as distinct from a shard, which is a broken piece of glass. I like that one too.
I’m curious if you think there are lessons that people who are working in behavioral science might take from these types of conversations.
For me, the best role the podcast could play for a researcher is in the discovery phase. All of us in any profession, researchers included, live in a bubble with people around us that have similar jobs, similar socioeconomic status, and so on. I think listening to the way people talk about their work and the forces that play on them—what delights them, what stresses them out, recurring tensions in their role—I feel like there are a lot of seeds for academic inquiry in there. My brother Chip and I, in one of the books we cowrote, said that data is basically an aggregation of individual stories, and one of the most powerful ways we can learn more is by diving down to the level of those stories. That’s what the podcast does.
