Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: Everything You Need to Know About Choosing a President
Slate Books
Slate Podcasts
3.8 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Dickerson talks with author Gautam Mukunda about his new book Picking Presidents: How to Make the Most Consequential Decision in the World. They talk about how Mukunda’s first book, Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter laid the groundwork for Picking Presidents. Later, Dickerson and Mukunda dig into why ‘intellectual brilliance’ – which goes beyond IQ - is a strong predictor of presidential performance and how the human portion of the job of president is changing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of December. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm John Dickerson, one of the hosts of the Slate Political GabFest. |
| 0:13.0 | As you know, my guest today is Gotham McHunda, author of Picking Presidents, How to Make the Most Consequential Decision in the World. |
| 0:21.0 | He is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership and also |
| 0:25.8 | the author of Indispensable when leaders really matter. Welcome to the show. |
| 0:30.6 | Thank you, John. A pleasure to be here. Let's start with Indispensable because we have to tell |
| 0:34.6 | the backstory of how you and I know each other. So I am reading |
| 0:38.9 | Eric Barker's book, and in it he cites you, and he cites the study you did on presidents. |
| 0:45.5 | And I thought, this is something I've been trying to get my hands around for so long. Talk about |
| 0:52.2 | that book, indispensable, before we get to your current book. The backstory for |
| 0:56.1 | indispensable is simple. Everybody. I bet you've done this. Everyone has ever had a dorm room |
| 1:01.9 | debate in college has sort of thought about this question. Do individuals matter? Right. |
| 1:06.3 | And this goes, I mean, it goes back to the ancient Greeks. You can see Thucydides and Plato having implicit |
| 1:12.4 | discussions about do individuals matter or is it all about systems? Is it all about circumstances? |
| 1:17.8 | And so I was in grad school and I read the research on leadership and sort of across this, |
| 1:24.3 | and I'm in political science, but across fields and economics and psychology, you name it. |
| 1:28.3 | And they all say leaders don't really matter that much. And I came from the private sector. I didn't really believe that, right? I had too many encounters with leaders who really seemed to make a matter, make a difference. In your own personal experience. In your own personal experience. Yeah, you felt the pull of a person who's leading. I'd worked with team leaders who were disastrous, |
| 1:45.3 | and I'd work with team leaders who were disastrous, and I'd work with team leaders who |
| 1:46.9 | were magical. |
| 1:48.2 | And so I really just kind of dived into this question. |
| 1:51.4 | And what I discovered was that leaders don't matter most of the time, and that most of the |
| 1:57.5 | time is really important because they're selected. |
... |
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