Hey, worklifers, it's Adam Grant.

Welcome back to Taken for Granite, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective.

I'm an organizational psychologist, and this series is about rethinking assumptions we often take for granted,

about how we work, lead, and live.

Today's guest is Esther Duflo, the MIT economist who won a Nobel Prize in 2019, along with two of her

peers, Michael Kramer and Abhijit Banerjee, her husband. Esther was tenured in her 20s and has

done groundbreaking experiments to fight poverty in the developing world. She's the co-founder and

co-director of J-PAL, a poverty action lab. She's a prolific writer and widely cited scholar,

and she's served on the Global Development Council at the White House. Her work challenges conventional

wisdom about what motivates people, how to break glass ceilings, and what it takes to solve

big problems. Fantastic. Esther, it's great to meet you virtually.

Nice to meet you.

How did you end up becoming so passionate about studying the developing world?

So I think it started relatively early.

I grew up in a very sheltered, intellectual middle-class life with my mother being a doctor,

my father being a professor. But the one sort of

wrinkle to that or a slight difference to that is my mother was and still is very active in

organizations of doctors dealing with kids victims of war. And therefore she spent quite a bit of time in various countries, starting with Moroccan

Sahara and then in El Salvador, in places that were dealing with various kinds of crises,

usually man-made.

And when she came back from the trips, she always organized a little slideshow from us.

We had these slideshows that looked like, you know, actual little squares, if you remember

...