Adam Grant: Don't Trust Your Gut. Test It.

October 13, 2026 · 44 min

Show notes

When two people are vibing, their brainwaves synchronize and so do their heartbeats. That is not a metaphor. It is a measurable physiological event, and organizational psychologist Adam Grant has spent his career figuring out how to make it happen on purpose. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Grant’s new book Vibe is his seventh. It argues that the science of human connection has been hiding in plain sight for a century, and that most of what people do to build relationships is either backwards or unnecessary.

The episode covers why the highest sign of chemistry between people is enjoying your disagreements rather than avoiding them, why remote work produces boreout rather than burnout, and why your first impression of someone is a snapshot of one situation that may not represent the whole person. It also covers burstiness, confident humility, and why universities have survived COVID, AI, and every other disruption that was supposed to end them.

What you’ll hear:

Why the pendulum clock experiment from 1665 explains what happens when people stop trying to force a connection
What the HiPPO effect does to a team and why the highest paid person’s opinion kills creative ideas
Why Grant ran experiments on university fundraising callers that tripled their revenue with a five-minute intervention
What desirability bias is and why Grant thinks it is more dangerous than confirmation bias
Why Grant A/B tested the subtitle of his own book and what “relationships” signaled that “connections” did not
What Grant and Brian agree on about false certainty and thinking in conditional probabilities

“The highest sign of chemistry between people is not agreeing with them. It’s enjoying your disagreements.” — Adam Grant

CHAPTERS

00:00 Vibing is real. Your brainwaves prove it.

05:30 Task conflict vs. relationship conflict

07:40 Who is actually in charge: parents or infants?

10:14 Burstiness: the remote work pattern that works

14:24 Don’t trust your gut. Test it.

19:34 Confident humility: the essence of a good scientist

21:32 Desirability bias is worse than confirmation bias

29:00 Zoom fatigue is boreout, not burnout

30:02 The A/B test that killed “relationships”

34:14 Don’t disbelieve what can’t be falsified

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Featured Guest:

Adam Grant website: https://adamgrant.net/

Vibe (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPHPNZ14

Adam Grant on Twitter/X: https://x.com/adammgrant

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog