Malcolm Gladwell
Appearances
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
One season of Revisionist History, we wrote the ending to The Little Mermaid over the course of four episodes, which is possibly three episodes too many, but it was very fun. Because you know, and it's all wrong, the ending, right? Yes. And I had run across this- All wrong because- Well, I'll explain to you. Thank you. Conan. Do you have daughters, by the way? I have a daughter and a son.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Oh, so only two. That's unusual for someone of-
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
No, no, you can't resist. O'Brien is the last name.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
You guys, you're the last. We're the last. We can sort of open season. No, it's fine.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Yeah. No, no. It's great. No, I asked only because you must have seen The Little Mermaid when you have a daughter. And I had read this Law Review article by this professor who was watching The Little Mermaid. She was a contract law professor with her kids. And she got outraged at the way The Little Mermaid story portrays contract law. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Because, of course, the plot twist in The Little Mermaid is that The Little Mermaid enters into a contract with Ursula that she will give up her soul unless she gets the hand. There's no way that contract would be upheld by a court of law. And this law professor got very angry that... Disney was deliberately perpetrating this kind of injustice on contract law.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And so she wrote... She has no issue with there being no such thing as mermaids, though? No, no, no. Also, she points out, the mermaid is underage. You cannot... An underage person can't... So there were so many red flags. So many red flags. So she writes this very angry law review. And I remember I was reading it... You remind me never to watch a movie with this person. I know.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And I was like... I had one thought and only one thought on me, and that was, this woman is the greatest genius. I basically ran back to the office and called her up, and it turns out she was hilarious. And she inspired me. So then it turns out there's multiple problems with The Little Mermaid. I'm not going to get into it.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And so the screenwriter actress, Britt Marling, a friend of mine, I said, Britt, I have this problem with The Little Mermaid. She said, so do I. And so she rewrote. I got her on the case. And then we performed it. I got Jodie Foster and Glenn Close to play key roles. And what I really wanted, the final piece was, I wanted Disney to sue us. Because I've heard they're famously litigious.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And I thought, this is the greatest marketing opportunity in the history of my podcast. My podcast is not as big as yours. I need to have these kinds of Yes. And so I did everything in my power to bring this to the attention of the attorneys at Disney. Nothing. To this day. Basically, I accused them of everything under the sun. I ripped off their content.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
I did everything you're supposed to do to get a lawsuit. No lawsuit.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
It was like when they, remember they were banning books again in like Florida. And the first thing they did was like, am I on the list? Am I on the list? Oh, please. Oh, please, please, please. I wasn't on the list.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
You know, the story that got me writing this book is I wanted to say something about the opioid crisis, which I think is kind of the most under-discussed thing going on in our society right now. And I wanted to understand how it was that OxyContin makes this happen. I mean, it's not the first painkiller. It's not the first opioid painkiller. It's not the first addictive painkiller.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Yet it's the one that sets in motion this epidemic that now kills over 100,000 Americans every year, which is such an astonishing number. I don't understand how we even wrap our minds around how many Americans die every year of overdoses.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
But understanding that there was this very, very deliberate Machiavellian, brilliant but evil strategy they followed, which was an epidemic strategy, which was all about... understanding that they did not need to convince the majority of doctors to prescribe opioids to start an epidemic.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
They only needed, in fact, they end up, the statistic I was, is at the core of this was, they ended up, we ended up with a situation at the end of OxyContin's life where 1% of American doctors were prescribing 50% of the OxyContin. Yes. And that's the whole game. They understood, we don't even have to worry about, we can basically ignore 99% of doctors. Our concern is with the 1%.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
A couple thousand doctors in the whole country will be sufficient to get this thing rolling because those guys at the fringes will prescribe so many prescriptions of OxyContin, that's all we need. And so they take... A sales apparatus, which typically if you're a drug company, you build a sales apparatus to reach the broad middle of doctors.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And they just deployed it towards these kind of like whack job doctors who were way out of, you know, the norm in, you know, in small town Tennessee and visited them hundreds of times. Wined and dined them. Wined and dined them and convinced them to write thousands of prescriptions for OxyContin. That is the distillation of an epidemic strategy.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
None of them went to jail. If you think about it, Sam Bankman Freed, who, I guess, committed a fraud and went, although very few of the people who he apparently defrauded actually lost money, he's in jail for how many years? Eight years? That's right. You can mislead rich people and you're in jail for eight years, but you can kill a couple hundred thousand Americans and you're fine.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
I find that very curious. I don't really understand how. I mean, I realize it was a legal settlement and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But still, it's kind of shocking. It is shocking. And then you're talking about when they testified before Congress, they talked as if this whole epidemic had been started by someone else.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Or this company, Purdue Pharma, that their family had started and created and run for two generations was a kind of third party off by the side that they had no connection to. I mean, I just find the whole, everything about the opioid crisis is astonishing to me.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Yeah. One more welcome to the world of parenting. One more thing I have to worry about.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Oh no! Conan, you're just bringing us down. I know. What happened to your famous joie de vivre?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
You'll see. We're getting there. We're getting there. All right. We're getting there. This does not end well. Okay. If I have a sense.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Four part miniseries. So if you go back and you look at, I got... When I got interested in this, I got all the textbooks you would read in freshman year European history, in the 60s and the 70s. And if you read them, and you're reading, they got like four chapters on the Second World War. You read all four chapters, and you're looking for when they discuss the Holocaust.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And you look and you look and you look, and there's nothing there. There's like two sentences. There's like, and then the Germans created camps where they put displaced persons, gypsies, communists, and Jews, period. And then they go on to something else. You're like, wait, how is this? These are serious textbooks. And then you look, you can keep going.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And there's actually been a whole scholarship about how they weren't denying the Holocaust. They just weren't mentioning it. It wasn't discussed. It just wasn't. There's only one Holocaust museum in this country prior to the 1980s. And that's actually here in L.A. And that was one that was created almost by accident. I tell that story in the book.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
A bunch of survivors are at Hollywood High learning English together, and they want a place to put their stuff, the stuff they can't bear to keep in their house, right? The uniform from Auschwitz or whatever. And then what happens, so this is, and if you look at, like, how often is the word Holocaust used in books, magazine articles, newspapers, up until 1979?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And the answer is, it's almost never used. Then there's a four-part miniseries on NBC starring Meryl Streep and James Woods called Holocaust, which half the country, it has a 50 share, half the country tunes in to watch it, and boom. Yeah. After that, that's when we get all the Holocaust museums.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
No, you, I mean, there are these little mentions here. There's Diary of Anne Frank, obviously, which is on Broadway and also a movie. But even that, remember, that's really about Anne Frank's story in Holland. It's not really about what's going on in the camps in Central Europe.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
The average American, when they finally run that miniseries, most Americans were dimly aware that there had been, the term that was used back then was that there had been atrocities. But the idea that there was this kind of systematic destruction of European Jewry at the scale that it was and what that meant was sort of absent from discussion.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And then the miniseries then gets resold to German television. And the same thing happens only times 10, because the Germans had just not mentioned the Holocaust at all. And all of these Germans discover for the first time what their country did. And there's a whole literature about what happened when the Germans finally watched this NBC. I mean, the country was in an uproar.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
I mean, you cannot imagine, there's almost no analogous media event to what happened when the Germans watched this. It was on late night cable, and the whole country tunes in. And it just kind of, there was, you know, all the major newspapers ran these huge sections discussing what had happened, and people were like, wait.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And that's when, now you have in Germany a real heightened awareness of their responsibility for the Holocaust.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
The whole thing goes to this question of that there can be, I mean, what interested me was that there can be a moment when public opinion or acknowledgement or knowledge of an event can kind of shift overnight. I mean, that was what attracted me to that story.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Yeah, so this work, I've ran across this really wonderful TV scholar named Bonnie Dow, who does this analysis. First, she starts with the way that Hollywood talked about women's issues. So remember that wave of kind of feminist shows starting in the 70s, Mary Tyler Moore show. Right, Rhoda. Rhoda. Yeah. Yeah, Cagney and Lacey, is that? Yes, I think that's part of that.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And she points out that you would think watching those that those were shows that were kind of pro-women's liberation or whatever, feminist, but they follow an implicit set of rules about how a woman is allowed to proceed. She says that in every case, the woman was only allowed to succeed if she was succeeding in a man's world, and all of those heroes were childless, and not in a relationship.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
So the real message of those shows were, yes, you can get ahead if you're a woman, but only if you give up any chance of having a family.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
There's no domesticity. So it's not really, are those shows pro-feminist? Or when you watch them, do you think, oh, wow, that's the price I have to pay if I want to participate? Then she says, there's a similar set of rules about the way Hollywood dealt with gay topics. And the rule was, homosexuality was always a problem to be solved.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
In other words, the plot surrounding the gay person had to turn on the fact that everyone else in that person's life was trying to fix All of the crisis that had been caused by this person's sexuality. The gay character was only ever seen in isolation. So they didn't have a community. They weren't in a relationship. They were just off by themselves.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
It was like the typical one would be you find out your 16-year-old son is gay, right? And so the whole family is left to deal with this intense problem. Another rule was no sex. So you can't ever see what this thing is about. It's always an abstraction. Oh, and then the last one was that the gay character cannot be the center of the narrative. They have to be peripheral to the narrative.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
The narrative is about it. So, you know, you add these up and you get... You could watch a made-for-team movie that might be, on its face, might be quite sensitive and sympathetic to the gay character. But all of these rules are telling the audience that... This guy's off in the margins. He's on the fringes. He's incapable of participating fully in modern life. And there's a wonderful book.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
This film scholar does a book where he looks at every single film from 1940 to 1975 or 1980 that had a gay character. And he just shows like every single one of them meets a bad end. They either are killed, commit suicide, end up in prison, or like every single one. There's like 48 characters and like every one of them.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And what happens with Will and Grace is that Will and Grace comes along and breaks every one of those rules. So Will's gayness is not a problem to be solved, right? Never. It's never perceived to be a problem. He's never, he's not seen in isolation.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
He's not peripheral. He's not peripheral. He has Jack and he has boyfriends. He's part of a community. You know, go on and on and on. He's at the center of the show. He's not, and the effect of that, so if you're someone who's watched TV your whole life and all you've seen is gay characters in this very specific context where there's something deeply problematic about them,
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And all of a sudden you're exposed to a show where there's a gay character and there's nothing, I mean, he has problems, but they're not problems related to his sexuality. He's just a neurotic, just another neurotic. He's like the rest of us. He's got problems, we all have, yeah. Living in an apartment in New York, which is what all sitcoms were about in those days, right?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
So there's something with that show that is a revolutionary show. It completely rewrites the rules. I think it's always a fun experiment to say, what are the five most important television shows of the last 50 years? I think Will and Grace is like, I would put it, I don't know, second, third. I think it's ahead of Archie Bunker. They always say 60 minutes is one. I usually get three.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
I should not have laughed so heartily at your suggestion.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Can I make a peripheral point about late night and the decline? What late night is meant? Oh, sure. So for several generations, this is not related to my book, all of America, not all of America, a huge chunk of America every night watches some version of either Jimmy, Johnny Carson or someone else interview somebody, engage in a conversation with somebody.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And it's highly entertaining, but also what they're seeing is a masterful interviewer interview someone, right? So you're getting, it's kind of like interviewing class conducted on a national basis for everyone in America. That goes away. And I have become convinced that no one knows how to interview anyone anymore. Or even have, really what Johnny Carson is having is conversations, right? Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Really fun conversations. I think the art of conversation has declined at the same time as the decline of late night. I don't think people, you need a model. No one has a model anymore. They're not, it's like. You're being incredibly rude right now.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
No, you're part of, you grew up on these people, right? You know what I'm talking about. You grew up on, and various versions of that, all of the different late night hosts offered you a different version of how to do it, right? And when that goes away as a model, who's left?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
I mean, to some extent, podcasts such as this have filled that void because we're slowing down, right? We are. We're basically killing time right now, Conan. Oh, we are killing time. We are. I don't have anywhere to be. Do you have anywhere to be? I don't have anywhere to be. I haven't had anywhere to be in four years.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
I've noticed that you, there's a chapter of this book that you have not mentioned at all. Which is? For reasons that I think will become obvious. Okay. It's the chapter where I attack Harvard University. You're on the water.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
First of all, I should say parenthetically that no one spends more time attacking the Ivy League than me. That's why God put me on this earth, I feel. That's my... I've done it so many times on my podcast that whenever I come up with my new attack, which I do every year, everyone in the room just rolls their eyes. We could do a whole put Malcolm on the couch, why is he so obsessed with him?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
But put that aside, the particular argument here is based on, I'm trying to figure out Harvard University, where you attended,
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
uh is i can't hide from that anymore you can't hide from that 1981 to 85. yeah um they plays more uh division one sports than any other college in the country no one else is even close everyone people don't realize this you always think the big sports sports school is like clemson or something no no it's harvard they have more student athletes than anyone else and not only that they give a massive admissions preference to their recruited athletes
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
So the easiest way to get into Harvard is not to be the best student in your class. It's to be the best athlete in your class.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Yeah. So the sports they really, really, really, really care about are, and let's see whether you can detect some kind of common denominator, rowing, fencing, sailing, rugby, tennis. It's country club sports. So I do a whole chapter on why would they bend over backwards to participate in all of these country club sports?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And not only that, to give massive, basically to do an affirmative action program for the athletes in the sports. And the answer is because a sport like tennis, to be a recruited tennis player, you have to play division one tennis. To play Divinity 1 tennis, your parents have to be willing to spend $50,000 to $100,000 a year on your game. It's enormously expensive. Enormously expensive.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
So when I say I'm setting aside four admission slots every year for tennis players, what I'm really saying is I'm setting aside four admission slots for the children of people who have enough money to spend $100,000 on their kids' ground strokes. So it's a way of making sure that enough rich kids attend your school. It's really obvious. Yeah. Right? And, like, this...
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Drives me crazy because I am someone who believes very strongly in the idea of a meritocracy. And I think it's one of the most beautiful things about this country. And the idea that the reigning symbol of meritocracy in this country is essentially going out of its way to reward kids who play rich kids sports. Think of it as admissions preference for kids who are good at sailing.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
You know, what is going on? I once, you know, speaking of the SAT, I once challenged my assistant to the LSAT. I thought it was really fun. I got a tutor. I went through that whole process. And the hilarious thing, of course, about the tutor was the first thing he said, I had to learn to, quote, process without understanding. What?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Meaning, which I thought was hilarious because it's a test designed to measure your aptitude for being a lawyer. Mm-hmm. And the test for being a lawyer can only be – you can only do well if you learn how to process without understanding. If my lawyer came to me and said, I processed your case without understanding it, I think I'd be a little bit alarmed. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
So it was like – Sounds like a good lawyer, though.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
No, but it does. I was part, I never, because in Canada we don't have, I'm Canadian, we don't have standardized tests. I knew nothing about these. I moved to America after college and I hear people talk about the SAT and it sounds like some kind of strange holy rite. And I was so kind of curious that at a certain point in my life I decided I had to do it.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And I went and I sat in that big room with hundreds of other people. I was the only person over the age of like 25. And I ended up tying my assistant. Oh, okay. Which I thought was good. The money was on her because she's 24. And the general consensus around the office is I didn't stand a chance because I've obviously lost so many brain cells. What was your score? I don't remember.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Hi, my name is Malcolm Gladwell. Well, I didn't think about this. Well, I have mixed feelings about being Conan O'Brien's friend. Now, wait a minute. Why would you say that? I'm a huge admirer of your work. Can I do a long explanation of why? Is it going to be another book? No, no, no, no.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
It was not impressive. Basically, I was headed for a mediocre law school, which... That's fine. Someone's got to be.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
No, I had that chapter, another chapter of the book, where I ran across a bunch of articles by these two sociologists, Anna Muller and Seth Arberton. And they were talking about a town they would only call Poplar Grove. And they had been working there, studying it for years. And they described it. And I later figured out what town it was and went there for myself and confirmed it.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
It's the perfect, it literally is the perfect community. If you went there, you would say, it's like upper income, on the water, incredibly tight knit.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
No, no, so it's- So Poplar Grove, yes. Poplar Grove, high school best in the state. Amazing, yeah. You know, every amenity under the sun. And they had had a suicide epidemic at their high school that had gone on way, way, way, way longer. And it was incredibly heartbreaking. And these two, Mueller and Arbiton, sort of do all this analysis.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And their conclusion is that one of the big problems with the town, the reason this has happened, is that it was a high school that only had one culture, right? So, you know, I'm sure your high school's too. My high school, like a normal high school, it had like 10 different cliques you could join, you know, the jocks and the nerds and the whatever.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And the point of that is it's powerfully protective that any child coming into that high school, no matter how dysfunctional they may feel, can find a home. There was a place you could go if you were, you know, we called them stoners, but in my high school, which is rural Canada, that meant you smoked cigarettes, which is quite quaint.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
But if you wanted to be a quote unquote stoner and smoke Marlboro Lights, there was a place for you, right? How'd you make it out of there? No, no. Yeah, exactly. My high school was so tame in retrospect. I don't even know. It seems like a kind of fantasy that it even existed.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And the thing you understand is, yeah, so imagine what Poplar Grove is, is a city, a town, and a high school where there's only one of those groups, where every child is required to conform to the super sporty, socially successful, on their way to Ivy League model. And so if you don't fit and work in that incredibly narrow description, there's nowhere for you to go. There's only one culture.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And the epidemic they had was the result of, was the consequences of that kind of narrowness. And it made me, it's interesting because it made me realize, you know, in all of our discussions about diversity, we sometimes make diverse, achieving a diverse environment, make it seem like it's medicine, like it's the right thing to do, but it's hard.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
But in fact, in this example, diversity is what makes a community resilient. It means that any problem that one group has isn't necessarily going to spread to other groups because they're different, right? They're And I just thought that was really, you know, and the idea that the parents of this town, this is the community they wanted for their kids. They moved there because it was perfect.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
They are the ones who supported the notion that we should have this incredibly strong unified set of values about what it means to be a successful student at the school. And then they were somehow baffled by the fact that everything went sideways. And I, you know, this as a, coming back to my new parenthood,
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
The only observation I will make about parenting is that this confusion between what we want and what our children need seems to be the principle. That's the principle conflict. I always catch myself thinking, and I'll very confidently say to Kate, my partner, I'll say, you know, I think Edie should do this.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And in fact, what I'm saying is, I would like to do this, and I'm using her as a kind of front. You want a cigarette. But this was the worst. This was the kind of the this was the biggest version of that problem that like parents are just like I there's a there's this woman who wrote a book.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
A woman named Linda Flanagan wrote a book called Taking Back the Game, which is all about what's wrong with youth sports. And she was a coach for many years. It's a really brilliant book. And she has this moment when she talks about possible fixes. And one of her fixes is that parents need to stop going to games. And it's the same idea.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Because what happens, of course, it's pleasurable for the parent to go to the game. No one's denying that. But the parent is confusing what's pleasurable for them and what's pleasurable for their kids. Yeah. And the question is, does your child want you there really deep down?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And by what we're doing when we show up for those games is we are intruding on what should be this time for kids to play with other kids without the scrutiny of and the pressure that comes from parents watching. That's the perfect example of this. And it made me wonder, how many times do we, is this what, I'm a young parent, is this what parenting turns into, this constant conflict?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
But- I was bored for the first eight years of my life. And I would complain to my mother and she would say exactly that. She would say, it's good for you to be bored. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
I have a confession to make, which is that the entire time we've been talking, you have your notebook open. I've been trying to read upside down. Because I want to know, when you made notes to yourself, were they different from the things where you're like, book's terrible? Oh, I can read it to you right now.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
You shouldn't do that. Why do you leave it out like that? It's distracting.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
That is so fantastic. Rybakov, the senator from New York State. Was he New York State or was he? I want to say it was Connecticut.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Wait, Conan, we're born in the same year. When's your birthday? April 18th. Okay. I was just checking to make sure we weren't, in fact, born on the very same day.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Turns out you're the Jamaican. Against all odds.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
As did I. Thank you, Conan. Next time I'll be nicer about the, I feel, I'm going to say, I'm going to come up with something really, I'll think, spend the next couple years coming up with just the right word.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Why do you have mixed feelings about being my friend? I hope you take this in the right spirit. Okay. I walk in, and you come and say hello to me, and I see the famous hair. You, for your entire career, have been the king of the flamboyant hair club. You have been, and I'm someone who has flamboyant hair. Yes. All of us have looked towards you. Thank you.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
As a kind of leader in the flamboyant hair. Thank you. And I look, and it's not that flamboyant today. No. I felt a little let down. I was like, here I was to get a kind of dose, a kind of feeling that I'm on the right track, that when I let the whole fro thing go crazy, there's someone else out there doing it from the Irish perspective. Yeah, I have an Irish fro. You do.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Out loud. I should say, my feelings of disappointment are, they're moderate. I'm not... Wow. For me, that's pretty good. Yeah. No, it's just a little. I'll take that. It's just I came all pumped up. Yeah. Because like I said, you know, in every generation has a kind of flamboyant hair leader. Einstein in his day. Thank you. Angela Davis in the 60s. Right. We can go down the list.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
There's always someone. Those of us who are trying to do something with our hair look towards.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
You're really anxious to change the subject from your hair, aren't you?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
No, no, no. In fact, the exact opposite. And the thing I realized really early was that every observation I had about my children, every other parent in the history of parenting had already had about their children. So my entire life, I had been Burdened by the obligation of originality. The burden has now been lifted. And as a parent, I am free to say the most banal thing about my kids. Great.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
And everyone's like, oh, yeah. No one has ever, ever said when I've – because I've turned into the person I once despised. All I do is show people pictures. Yeah. Non-stop. Non-stop. By the way, in fact – Oh, let me see. There they are. Oh, my God. Beautiful. Look. Adorable.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Adorable. Adorable. Oh, they're so cute. Very, very cute. We could go on. I could sidetrack this whole thing. No, no one has ever said when I make my observations, no. They always say, yeah, that.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
But I do like... It's the secret club. You know, before you have kids, you're not a member of the club. And then you join the club. And it's like, did you get a whole new lease on life?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Malcolm Gladwell Returns
Oh, video that I'm taking of them. I thought you meant video that I'm showing them. Lots of screen time. Just set them in front of an iPad. I thought you were just saying.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Revisionist History
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here. Today, I'm in the studio with my producer, Lucy Sullivan. Lucy?
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
I understand you have a story for me about a particular misunderstanding.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Oh, my goodness.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Of me? Of you. Oh, my God. Where are we?
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Can you tell me what the name of the coffee shop is?
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Oh, it's that good.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So J.J. and Missy are sitting down together. What happens?
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
But these two, and there's nothing romantic going on here.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
He ghosts her.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
She's reeling. She's reeling.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. And since we're talking about misunderstandings, whatever you think is going on in this story right now, I promise you, you've got it wrong.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Like nothing happened.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Yeah.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Yes, yes, that's true. This happens to me all the time. I need to be exposed to a face, a person, on multiple occasions before their face becomes meaningful. Or even there, I don't know whether their face is becoming meaningful or that I'm developing so many other ways of recognizing them that I feel on safer ground.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
No, there's no chance that I will. It's actually funny because I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop and I see this guy who runs the wine shop across the street. His name is Michael. I'd known Michael for years. And I see Michael, or I think it's Michael, and I see a Slender Man in his 50s, about 5'9", with glasses and a baseball cap, across the street from the wine shop.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
And I think, oh, that's got to be Michael. And I go, Michael! And the guy looks at me like really weird and comes over. And it was like my nightmare. It was like, oh, my God, no, it's not. It's just another dude who's in town who looks a lot like Michael. But that was my system failed.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
It's very rare for me to risk it like that. But I risked it because I thought if Michael thinks... I had the reverse JJ. If Michael thinks I'm ignoring him... then that's really bad because I go to the wine shop all the time and I like Michael.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So completely foreign. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Yeah, no, no, I do. And it makes me feel bad because I, you know, I mean, I feel for JJ because, It's you in this constant state of worry about that you're going to be perceived as cold or aloof and you're not.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
After the break, Lucy Sullivan takes us behind the face and into the brain.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
You're like the LeBron James of facial recognition.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
My experience of you is dramatically different than your experience of me. I am forced to find alternate means of recognition. What those of us who have impairment in this area do is we get obsessed with all the other possible cues that we can use to identify somebody. And because they're not as reliable as the face, we're always getting into trouble.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
That is really beautiful.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Lucy? That is, you are Lucy, right? Yes, that's me.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
This has been a lot of fun.
It's Been a Minute
Can doctors test embryos for autism? And should they?
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-20-2025 4PM EDT
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-10-2025 11AM EDT
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-04-2024 8PM EST
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
Today on our show, Ben-Nanaf Hafri relays, for the very first time in history, the truly screwy story of the making of the oddest Christmas film of all time. Trust me, you have never heard this story before, ever.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
Nor have you ever seen the movie in question, unless you're a member of the extended Nadaf Hafri clan or were recently incarcerated in a state that limits prisoner streaming access to obscure television movies of the 1990s. But when you listen to what follows, you're going to ask yourself the same question I asked myself when Ben first told me this story. How did I miss this?
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
Christmas is one week away. And how am I celebrating? With restraint and circumspection. In the Gladwell family, we do a mid-century modern Christmas. Spare, elegant, minimalist. Lots of the baby Jesus in a tasteful Scandinavian leather and rosewood manger. No Santa, no reindeer, no elves. Not so for my colleague, Ben-Nadav Haffrey.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
Wait, we should probably do this before we get too far afield. On the music thing, if you've been talking so much, you will note that behind you, there is a Korg.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
And we have a request that you play one of your most famous compositions. Which... You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Cooking for Two from the legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger 1992 made-for-TV movie Christmas in Connecticut. Yeah.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
Mitch, no, no, this, for some reason, I have no idea, my colleague Ben is obsessed with this and really wanted us to do this. And I thought, how great would it be for you to sing one of our songs? Just like, just give us a little taste.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
The Glavos impose a dollar limit on gifts, like price controls in some socialist state. The Nadav Hafris spend months thinking of what to get one another. The Glavos buy a tree at the last moment and would be happier if we could just move the whole operation outside around the Douglas Pine in the backyard.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
Ben's family has a tree, a little model village covered in snow, and his father's vintage electric train set, plus a little metal tree with ornaments that's up year-round. So when I told Ben that I had never watched It's a Wonderful Life, he was stunned. Then he reached out to me, as the good Samaritan did to the traveler lying bereft by the side of the road. How could this be? He asked me gently.
Revisionist History
A Very Terminator Christmas
Because, as you can imagine for the Nadaf Hafriz, It's a Wonderful Life is a sacred text. Then Ben told me another story about what, in his mind, is an even more important Christmas tale. A story that he regards as the apotheosis of all Christmas movies. A story not in a film, but of the making of a film. Welcome to Revisionist History. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Revisionist History
The Formula
And they sued one of them to keep him from taking another job, which set off a whole race in corporate America to lock up as many trade secrets as possible. Soon, the corporate world could look a lot more mystical and secretive. And all this led Ben, many, many years later, to wonder, how hard can it be to make a muffin?
Revisionist History
The Formula
So he set out to try and reverse engineer the famous Thomas' English muffins recipe.
Revisionist History
The Formula
A while ago, my colleague Ben-Dadaf Hafri and I gathered to eat English muffins at the Pushkin office. Ben had the idea to do a story about the famous secret recipe for Thomas' English muffins. It sounded like a fun romp. Go for it, I said. Have a good time. Enjoy yourself. And then, a couple months down the road, Ben recorded the following voice memo.
Revisionist History
The Formula
You're coming after my livelihood? Ben! But it's too late to turn back. He's in too deep. He's told me he might even have to go to the CIA. I'm Malcolm Glebel. You're listening to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. This season, we've taken on a great many foes. The haters of Paw Patrol, the absurd claims of RFK Jr., the lazy interviewing style of Joe Rogan.
Revisionist History
The Formula
But now we're taking on our biggest opponent yet. Big Muffin. Because their trade secret represents a rising tide of secrecy that's coming for us all. And so we shall persist despite our nightmares. We must reverse engineer the English muffin.
Revisionist History
The Formula
The secret recipe for Rachel Wyman's improved Thomas's English muffins can be found in our show notes. We've put the vinegar version in there too. If you want the authentic Thomas's flavor, leave them in a bag for a week so they get stale. The key thing is to overproof and refrigerate the dough. Why? Just ask Rachel.
Revisionist History
The Formula
Revisionist History is produced by Ben-Nadav Hafri with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Bird Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Production support from Sarah Bruguere and Luke Lamond.
Revisionist History
The Formula
At Pushkin, thanks to Karen Shakerji, Jake Flanagan, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler. Amy Hagedorn, Kira Posey, Morgan Ratner, and Jordan McMillan.
Revisionist History
The Formula
It was clear that Ben had gone very deep into the nooks and crannies of this story, but this work was too important to stop. In case you missed our previous episode, let me catch you up. One of the most famous trade secrets of all time is the recipe for Thomas's English muffins.
Revisionist History
The Formula
It involves how they create their famous nooks and crannies, the most distinctive feature of a nearly half a billion dollar product. The owner of Thomas's, Bimbo Bakeries, Grupo Bimbo, say this secret was allegedly known to only seven employees at the company.
Revisionist History
In Defense of PAW Patrol
There's some things that really piss me off when it comes to Paw Patrol.
Revisionist History
In Defense of PAW Patrol
Baby's a toddler. Baby's not a baby. Baby's not a baby anymore. Yeah, she's huge. Three and a half. Three and a half.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
It chronicles the life of the iconic Tennessee sheriff who inspired several books, songs, and a half a dozen movies, including the 2004 remake Walking Tall, starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson. But recent findings suggesting Pusser played a role in his wife Pauline's death have called his legacy into question. Here's the episode.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here. We'll be back with new Revisionist History episodes in January, but today we're going to bring you something a bit different. It's an episode of the podcast Gone South. Each week, writer and host Jed Lipinski shares a different story about a fascinating crime that took place below the Mason-Dixon line.
Revisionist History
Presenting Gone South
Often told from the perspective of the perpetrator, the investigator, or both, Gone South explores not only the criminal mind, but also the distinctive culture and rich characters of the South. This episode is called The Real Buford Pusser Part One.
Revisionist History
The Joe Rogan Intervention
My mom, I was talking to my mom. My mom is 93. And she just turned 93. And I was talking to her. And it was her birthday. And she just, she's a twin. She was talking to her. So she just called her twin sister who lives in Jamaica. And she said to me, She was a little emotional, which is rare for, Gladwell's also not terribly emotional.
Revisionist History
The Joe Rogan Intervention
And she said to me, you know, I look back on my life and I cannot believe how improbable it was.
Revisionist History
The Joe Rogan Intervention
I mean, I do cry every time. He's been gone five years. And a friend of mine said, two friends of mine said two very beautiful things that I've always remembered. One was a friend of mine who was writing something about his father, and he said, My father died 20 years ago today. I know him better today than I did back then.
Revisionist History
The Joe Rogan Intervention
And I think about that nearly every day, because I think I know him better now. And another thing a friend of mine said in trying to console me was that grief is the way we keep someone alive. And it's a gift, in other words. Yeah. And I think that's, I can't, I think I continue to grieve because I can't, I can't let it go.
Revisionist History
The Joe Rogan Intervention
He was, so he was an Englishman with a big bushy beard. And he was such a stereotypical Englishman. He liked going for long walks in the rain with dogs. He was a gardener. That's what he loved to do above all else. He only ever cried when he was reading Dickens to his children.
Revisionist History
The Joe Rogan Intervention
He was a mathematician and a very good one, I think, although I have no idea because I could never follow what he was doing. He was a... He was completely indifferent to what the world thought. He just did whatever he wanted to do, which I thought as a kid was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Tell me a little bit about your interest in trust. How did you come to this subject?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
And you were drawn to this because is this something we do naturally and well or something that we're bad at?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
What would be some of the most common mistakes we make when we're trying to kind of make a trust evaluation?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. I'm reminded of years ago, I read this study of student evaluations of professors and how the evaluation a student makes after like five seconds is the same as their evaluation they make at the end of the term. And they're clearly not making a reasoned decision about whether this teacher is good or whether they should trust this information or
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
they never get beyond the initial question of, do I like this person? The snap judgment. Yeah, the snap judgment. They never transcend the snap judgment.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. You spend a lot of time on the question of transparency. Can you talk a little bit about what do we gain from adding transparency into these? And what do you mean by transparency in this context?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
but does that you know when you said earlier that um one of the things we need to do is to not make decisions quickly and gather more information what's the difference between gathering more information and transparency it's a great question so it sounds like semantics but there's a difference between openness and transparency so if i came to you and said um
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. So just put this in the context of leaders who are managers trying to create high trust teams. What advice do you give people who are trying to do that?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So tell me, we're about to listen to a chapter from your book or an excerpt from your book. Can you tee it up for us? What are we about to hear?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. Wonderful. Rachel, this has been really fun. And I think I speak for all of my listeners when I say that we are looking forward to hearing what follows.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. And the name of your book is?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. Thank you so much, Rachel.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
How to Trust and Be Trusted by Rachel Botsman is available on Pushkin dot FM, Audible, Spotify and anywhere you get audio books. Keep listening for a preview of the audio book.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners. Malcolm here. Today we have a special guest in the house, Rachel Botsman. Rachel is a lecturer at Oxford University and a world-renowned expert on the topic of trust. And importantly, not most importantly, but importantly, She's the author of a new Pushkin audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
After more than 15 years teaching trust to CEOs, entrepreneurs, world leaders, and all kinds of students, she's now sharing these powerful lessons with you in her new audiobook. You're going to get a chance to hear one of her lessons from that audiobook in just a moment. But first, I want to speak with a woman herself. Rachel Botsman, welcome to Revisionist History.
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
A sign of moral weakness, moral and sort of a lack of real kind of fiber when it came to eating your food. Or Ben takes a bite and suddenly he's off for the millionth time about Proust.
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
Our breakfast mystery comes in packages of six, but they cannot be eaten right out of the box. Each item inside must be split in two, then toasted, then buttered for the magic to work. And oh, the magic works. I'm talking, of course, about Thomas's English muffins, the most iconic breakfast bread of all time.
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
Oh, let's take a little bite here. One morning, not long ago, my colleague Ben-Nadav Hafri and I huddled in a small back room at Pushkin Industries to solve a mystery.
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
What sets a Thomas's English muffin apart from all the others? It says right there on the package, nooks and crannies. The recipe for Thomas' English muffin has been one of the most closely held trade secrets there is. Until, allegedly, one baking executive tried to make off with the family's jewels. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
You're listening to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. Today on the show, Ben-Nedaf Hafri peers into the nooks and crannies of one of the greatest legal cases you've never heard of. It's a big story, this muffin case. Today, you're getting part one.
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
Through the glass wall of the room, we could see our fellow Pushkinites working on various prosaic podcasts and audiobooks. while we alone wrestled with an eternal question involving toasted bread. Just from a sensory perspective, there's a lot of crunch. Let's also not forget its size. Yes. Palmable. It's palmable.
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
breakfast is the meal you make when you're barely conscious so the breakfast table is a super bowl for food companies lunch is eaten out dinner if you're lucky is prepared from scratch but think about breakfast all the day lies before you and you are in need of sustenance you want something wholesome but crucially easy a little ready-made breakfast foods become lifelong habits
Revisionist History
Nooks & Crannies
Brands fight tooth and nail for a prime spot at that table. Many have fought valiantly. Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Pop-Tarts, Rice Krispies. But there's only one breakfast item, legendary enough, that when I take a bite, suddenly I remember my childhood. Also, how my father felt about cutting the croissant bread. I think he viewed that as a kind of a sign of, as a kind of a defeat move.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
We take the hint, not the superspeeders. On average, that group of 186 each had $11,000 in unpaid traffic fines. In my last book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, I had a whole chapter on COVID. You know what COVID was? Fat tail. Most of us, when we were infected with COVID, emitted such a small amount of virus that we didn't pose that much of a danger to others.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
But there are a very small number of people who, for reasons we don't entirely understand, when they have COVID, produce a massive amount of virus. Superspreaders. Those are the ones who cause outbreaks. I could go on.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
The lesson of New York's super speeders and COVID's super spreaders is that before you figure out how to solve a problem, you have to ask yourself, am I dealing with a skinny tail distribution where everyone plays a roughly equal part in contributing to the issue? Or do I have a fat tail distribution where my problem is a very small number of very rotten apples?
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
The world's problems are divided into fat tales and skinny tales. And policing is most definitely fat tale.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
That's Andrew Papachristos, a criminologist at Northwestern University. If you're a regular listener, you've heard him on this podcast before. He's talking about a police officer named Jason Van Dyke, another member of the Chicago Police Department Use of Force Peloton, who shot a teenager, Laquan McDonald, 16 times for no apparent reason.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
It's not just, though, that the officers at the very edge of the distribution do more bad things than anyone else. It's that, and this is crucial, they lead others, people who wouldn't otherwise be in the fat tail, to do bad things as well.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
This is called network spillover. And Papa Christos was part of a group of criminologists who used the Citizens Police Data Project to figure out exactly how large this spillover effect is. They looked at that mountain of data and grouped all of the officers in networks, drawing lines between the people who worked together.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
They found that if there was no one in your network who received a use of force complaint, then your chance of getting a use of force complaint was minimal. But if you had even a modest number of aggressive officers in your circle, your chances of being accused of violence went up by 26%, which is massive. And this is the problem with Derek Chauvin.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Lane and his partner, Alexander King, walk across the street to the parked Mercedes. There are two men in the front seats. Lane knocks on the window with his flashlight. The men turn and see the officers.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
He's in the Minneapolis Police Department's fat tail. He was the poster child for the Minneapolis fat tail. He had a mountain of complaints. And because he's a training officer, a 19-year veteran, the senior officer in nearly every crime scene he arrives at, he spills over into his network.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
If Chauvin had never shown up that night, if the second squad car never got called, if the whole incident was managed entirely by Lane and his partner, George Floyd would have lived. Thomas Lane would have rolled him over. There would have been no national eruption of pain and outrage. You wouldn't even know the name George Floyd. But Chauvin shows up.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
That's the core of the problem on the corner of 38th and Chicago.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
That's Amanda Sertich, one of the U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Lane. She knows the evidence well, and specifically the role Lane and his partner Alexander King played that day.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Lane ended up spending two and a half years in federal prison for his part in Floyd's death. Sertich and her colleagues felt that he bore at least some portion of the blame. I understand their argument, although I have to say I do not agree with it. A rookie cop on his fourth day on the force tries to right a wrong and fails because his superior officer is a bad apple. Can we really blame him?
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Haven't all of us, in other situations, done a version of the same act of mitigated speech? Are you sure we should do that? That's a little much, don't you think? Is that really safe? But where I hope we can all agree is on the broader lesson here. One bad apple can infect the whole barrel. The fat tail matters.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Which is why the first step in any attempt to fix a problem with a fat tail distribution is to get rid of the fat tail. Target the super speeders. Contain the super spreaders. Get rid of Jerry Finnegan. Stop Derek Chauvin before he kills someone. Not afterwards. Right? if only it were that simple. In the fever days after Floyd died, there were hundreds of people on the streets of Minneapolis.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Peaceful protests turned into riots and lootings. Buildings were burned. Hundreds of millions of dollars of damage was done. And one night, the crowd came calling for Jacob Fry, the mayor of Minneapolis.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Fry was 39 at the time. He'd been elected mayor three years earlier.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
In the footage of the demonstration that played on the evening news, you can see the mayor walking stiffly through the crowd, wearing a mask that says, I can't breathe.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Fry was following the logic of the fat tail. Yes, there may have been frustration with law enforcement at large, but if the problem is a small number of bad apples, then what sense is there in upending the whole institution? What you should be doing is cutting off the fat tail. The crowds outside chanted, defund the police. But in response, Fry started making a different argument.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
This is what the mayor said at one of the first of the many press conferences he gave after the death of George Floyd. Unless we are willing to tackle the elephant in the room, which is the police union, there won't be a culture shift in the department. Could you talk a little bit more about that in the context of Minneapolis? When you said that, what did you mean?
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
The issue Fry is talking about, the police federation or the union, having more authority than it should, has become a common complaint in many other cities as well.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
That's Daniel Oates. He started his career in the 1980s in the NYPD and rose to be chief of four separate big city police departments. After George Floyd was killed, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post. You could be forgiven if you missed it. It was a pretty technical analysis of law enforcement collective bargaining agreements.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
At one point in his career, Oates was chief of police in Aurora, Colorado, a mid-sized suburb of Denver. He had 650 officers in his department. In his more than eight years as chief, there were 16 he wanted to fire. That was his fat tail. A very small number of his officers were proving to be a problem. They were violent. They had drinking problems.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
He caught them lying on their field reports, on and on. he negotiated complicated severance agreements with 12 of the 16. They agreed to leave the Aurora PD, but with a clean record, so it was possible for them to get a job somewhere else. The remaining four he fired, but then in three of those cases, his decision was reversed on appeal.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
So of the 16 bad apples who he thought were not worthy of a role in law enforcement, he succeeded in removing one. The problem is that many police union contracts are full of provisions that hamper internal investigations of wrongdoing. In a normal criminal investigation, the police question any suspect as soon as possible.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
But in investigations of allegations against officers, many unions delay that first round of questioning for days, if not weeks, long enough for stories to be straightened out.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
And before that first interview in some cities, the police department has to hand over all of its evidence and witnesses in advance to the defendant's attorney, a practice that would be highly unusual in a standard criminal investigation. Daniel Oates says that he ran into this problem when he was called in to clean up the Miami Beach Police Department.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
How much did that, in the end, frustrate your ability to improve the quality of policing in Miami Beach?
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
A small number of officers betray the standards of the profession, but unions protect that fat tail. It's not the 95% of honest, hardworking police officers who need an extra few weeks to get their story straight or who require advanced access to all the evidence and witnesses against them. Jerry Finnegan needs all those things. Derek Chauvin needs all those things.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Somehow a system intended to serve the interests of the many in the thin tail has ended up serving the interests of the crooked few in the fat tail.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
That's Kathleen O'Toole. She ran both the Seattle and Boston police departments.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Now, suppose, even given all these impediments, a police chief does manage to terminate a problematic officer. The fight isn't over. There is one final impediment, maybe the biggest of all. The officer has the right of appeal.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
In many cases, the accused officer is allowed to restart the entire process from scratch, only this time not with an impartial judge, but with an arbitrator that the union plays a role in choosing. With the result, well, you can guess. A law professor in Chicago named Stephen Russian recently made a list of how often a fired police officer gets reinstated on appeal in most big American cities.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Ready? Miami-Dade, 37%. Oklahoma City, 40%. Phoenix, 40%. Washington, D.C., 45%. Philadelphia, 62%. Denver, 67%. And finally, the grand prize winner, San Antonio, 70%. And where did this exact scenario play out? Minneapolis, in the years leading up to the death of George Floyd.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is part two of our examination of Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd. In this episode, I want to look at the case from a different perspective.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Jacob Fry had first-hand evidence of what happens when you can't set the tone. Derek Chauvin. He didn't suddenly emerge as a bad apple on the night of May 25, 2020. He'd been a bad apple for a long time. You heard the tape in the last episode.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
In 2017, he beat a kid over the head with a flashlight, opening a wound that required stitches, then put him in a chokehold, threw him on the ground, and put his knee on his neck, while the boy sobbed in pain, all for no reason. That was his trademark move. The other officers didn't say anything. They just walked silently out of the room.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
So the bad apple stayed in the barrel for three more years until he comes across George Floyd on the corner of 38th and Chicago and puts his knee on his neck and just stays there, even after Floyd has stopped breathing. And Thomas Lane tries to get him to stop multiple times. But then he just gives up and sits there on Floyd's dead body, just like Derek Chauvin.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf-Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Fact-checking, Sam Rusick. Mastering by Jake Gorski. Production support from Luke Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix. And El Jefe, Greta Cohn. I'm Malcolm Grabow.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Get ad-free episodes of Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
through the eyes of the first police officer to approach George Floyd, Thomas Lane, who at the time had been a fully-fledged member of the Minneapolis Police Department for only four days. May 25th, 2020 was Memorial Day, a lovely Minneapolis summer evening. People are outside, walking about. It's just after 8 p.m.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
A small group of people gather in a room somewhere in downtown Minneapolis.
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Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
when Lane and his partner pull up to the Cup Foods on the corner of 38th and Chicago. Lane pulls Floyd out of his car, handcuffs him, sits him on the sidewalk, takes his information, then walks Floyd over to the squad car and puts him in the backseat. Only Floyd doesn't want to get in the backseat, so Lane and his partner King try to force him into it. Then a second squad car pulls up.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Derek Chauvin gets out. Floyd is struggling so much with Lane and King that he cuts his mouth, badly enough that Lane calls an ambulance. Lane thinks Floyd is on drugs. He's acting erratically, and they found a glass pipe on him when they searched him. They decide to keep him restrained so he can't move or hurt himself anymore.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
They call EMS a second time and upgrade their request to Code 3, the most urgent level. Life-threatening. Immediate response. Lights and sirens. So far, all of this is nothing out of the ordinary.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Excited delirium is something that Lane must have learned about at the police academy, a state of extreme agitation, aggression, and distress. It's not an officially recognized clinical diagnosis. Listen.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Chauvin puts his knee on Floyd's neck. Lane turns to Chauvin and shares his concern. This man's not doing well.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Two investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, one FBI agent, two attorneys, and the first police officer to arrive at the scene at the corner of 38th and Chicago that day, Thomas Lane. He's there to give a statement about what happened.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
You want him on his side? No, he's staying put where we got him. Okay, just worry about the excited delirium or whatever. That's why we got the ambulance coming. Okay, I suppose. A minute later, Lane says, I think he's passing out. Meaning, Floyd's in trouble. Let's get off him. Nothing happens. A minute after that, Lane says once again, want to roll him on his side? No.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
As in, he shouldn't be on his stomach. Lane is trying to do the right thing. He understands the gravity of the situation. But the crucial thing here is the way Lane sets out to convince Shulman. He doesn't make a declarative statement. We should put him on his side. He has to be on his side. He asks a question. He softens it. Should we? Should we put him on his side? He mentions excited delirium.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
He's concerned about Floyd's safety, but he undercuts that concern with words that soften his alarm. I just worry about excited delirium or whatever. And then finally, after Chauvin shuts him down, okay, I suppose. Passive-aggressive agreement. Sociologists call this mitigated speech. One of the greatest causes of plane crashes for years was mitigated speech in a cockpit.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
The first officer would see something dangerous and try to let the captain know, but he would do it in such a mitigated way that the captain wouldn't take the new information seriously. I wrote about one of those cases in my book, Outliers. It involved a 1982 Air Florida flight out of Washington, D.C., It was a snowy day. The plane had been in line for takeoff for an unusually long time.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
And the first officer thinks the plane has a dangerous amount of ice on its wings and should go back for de-icing. Listen to how he tries to convince his superior officer, the captain. Look how the ice is just hanging on this back back there. See that? The captain says nothing. The first officer tries again. See all those icicles on the back there and everything? The captain ignores him.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
The first officer tries a third time. Boy, this is a losing battle here, trying to de-ice those things. Gives you a false sense of security. That's all that does. Nothing. The plane is inching to the front of the line. Let's check those wingtops again, since we've been sitting here a while. The first officer starts with a hint. Look at that ice. Then a question. See those icicles?
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
If you've ever watched videos of the death of George Floyd, Lane is the tall one, 6'7", right next to Derek Chauvin, restraining Floyd's legs.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Then a suggestion. Let's check those wingtops. Each time, he's removing one layer of mitigation, getting closer and closer to what is really on his mind, which is that he's terrified. But only at the very end does he finally get there. It's just after takeoff, as the plane plunges into the Potomac. We're going down, Larry. And the captain says, I know it.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Thomas Lane is in exactly the same position as that first officer on the plane. Both of them understand the gravity of the situation they're in. The plane has ice. The man on the ground is in trouble. But they have a superior who is fixated, who doesn't see what is happening, who is either incapable of processing any new information or doesn't want to.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
And neither of the subordinates feel they can just come out and say, no, because they're subordinates. The state investigator questioning Lane about what happened that Memorial Day picked up on this very thing.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Lane had been a police officer for four days. Then he reveals another crucial fact. Listen.
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Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
He had given me guidance on how to handle certain calls, he says.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Thomas Lane's problem wasn't just that he had only been on the force for four days, that he was a rookie, and Chauvin was a 19-year veteran. It's that Lane knew Chauvin. He went to Chauvin for advice. How do you defy someone in that position? Not long ago, a retired Chicago police officer named Jerry Finnegan gave an interview to the Dog Walk podcast hosted by Eddie from Barstool Sports.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Finnegan is fit, close cropped hair. I don't think a cop movie has ever been made that didn't include someone who looks and sounds just like Jerry Finnegan.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Eddie and Finnegan talked for almost an hour. Finnegan was promoting his new podcast, the magnificently titled Finnegan's Take, reminiscences from his years on the force. And at some point, Finnegan starts to speculate about why his path to promotion was so often blocked by his boss.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Wait, Chicago police officers are ranked by their complaints the way pop music singles are ranked on the Billboard charts? Yes, they are. The rankings are compiled by an organization called the Citizens Police Data Project. Their website consists of a searchable online database of 250,000 complaints lodged against members of the CPD from 1988 to 2018.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
And what you learn from looking at the list is that the distribution of problematic police officers within the Chicago Police Department is not uniform. Those quarter of a million complaints are not evenly sprinkled across all the many thousands of officers in the database. A few cops have a lot of complaints, but the majority have almost none.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
If you made a graph out of the whole Chicago Police Department, there would be a long low line stretching as far as the eye could see, hovering just above the horizontal axis until the very end, when the line would suddenly jump. As the statisticians would say, the distribution of complaints has a fat tail. And who stands at the very fattest part of the tale?
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Jerry Finnegan, recipient of a grand total of 175 complaints.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
Finnegan ended up doing 10 years in prison for tax evasion and planning a murder-for-hire plot against a fellow officer. He also cost the city over a million dollars in legal settlements, which, given his position as the Lex Luthor of rogue Chicago police officers, shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Problems with fat tails turn out to be everywhere. Here's another one.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 2
New York City has 2,500 automated cameras, which in 2023 handed out 7 million speeding tickets. But are those tickets evenly distributed across all the city's drivers? No. There's a fat tail. There were 186 drivers who got more than 100 tickets in one year. That's an average of one ticket every three to four days. Superspeeders. Most of us get a ticket and slow down next time.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
But if there was no difference in the experience of those two groups, it would suggest any associated problems were just the kind of health problems that you'd expect to see as a matter of course in a very large group of babies. All of this data is laid out in the package insert.
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The RFK Jr. Problem
The table is a comparison of side effects in the kids who got the vaccine and the kids who didn't.
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The RFK Jr. Problem
Together, we went through every one of the medical problems listed on the chart. We kept finding the same thing. No difference. No difference. Any difference? Let's see, 0.6, 0.6.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
But somehow, Kennedy reached the opposite conclusion. In his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy writes, quote, since its approval, Dr. Offit's rotavirus vaccine has caused a wave of catastrophic illnesses and agonizing death.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
He looked at the same thing you looked at. and decided that the rotavirus vaccine was causing this enormous burden of adverse reactions. I have to say, I got completely obsessed with this. Where is RFK Jr. getting his information? And what about the data from the clinical trial? Did he not read it? Did he read it and not understand it? Or did he read it and understand it and just say, eh?
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The RFK Jr. Problem
You have a simple chart that has two columns. One column's called placebo and one column's called treatment. And he decided to completely ignore the column called placebo, right?
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
He decided to reach a conclusion about the vaccine by fundamentally, not just misinterpreting, he's 180 degrees positive. wrong in his interpretation of the data. It's as if he took his hand and placed it over the side of the chart that says placebo. There has to be some agency here that allows you to look at something that has two rows and only see one row.
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The RFK Jr. Problem
half of an entire chapter denouncing the rotavirus vaccine. It's not like this is, this is not a, he's not making this observation in passing. He's going after, at length, one of the most significant public health advances of the last 25 years, right? Something that has saved millions of lives. This is not trivial stakes here, right? He's big game hunting here.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
But if you were a lawyer and made this argument in court, you would be humiliated by opposing counsel. Yeah, I mean, it would take five seconds. You would just hold up the chart and say, oops, that's the other side. Yeah. One last question, but a very specific one, which is, if you're going to do this, why does he link to the source that refutes his argument? So I can understand, I want to...
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
I want to completely misinterpret the clinical data on Rotatech. I want to make this argument about vaccines, and I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that 95% of my readers don't notice. But then he gives you the link to the very thing that shows you that he's absolutely wrong. Who does this? He's not even a good liar.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
By the way, this isn't even the half of it. If you spend any time at all immersed in the words and thoughts of R.F.K. Jr., it's pretty clear that the person who he hates above all others is Anthony Fauci. Kennedy really, really doesn't like Anthony Fauci. He wrote a 492-page book about how much he hates Anthony Fauci. But do you know who's a close number two? Paul Offit, the inventor of Rototech.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
In the real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy spends pages on Offit. He writes, Offit, quote, represents himself as an authoritative source of reliable information, but he is actually a font of wild industry ballyhoo, prevarication, and outright fraud, end quote. Tune into any of the countless podcast interviews Kennedy has given, and you'll find the same thing.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
After he's gone after Fauci, he goes after Offutt. To the point where after Kennedy goes on Joe Rogan and went on one of his usual Paul Offutt rants, Offutt got death threats and hate mail.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Yeah. I keep seeing him go after you, and I'm trying to sort of understand, but he's never, to your knowledge, has he ever kind of acknowledged what you guys created was of value to mankind? Has he ever acknowledged that? No. 165,000 people a year. Doesn't believe it. But did he actually work through the logic of this, or did he just...
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
I'm sorry to keep harping on this, but this is just bizarre. If I was someone who really didn't like vaccines, and I was writing my massive opus on the subject, I'd pick a really marginal vaccine to go after. Something with dubious benefits, lots of side effects. Something where the VAERS data was really alarming.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
I don't know, an inexplicable wave of strokes or seizures or something worrisome in people who got the vaccines. But what does Kennedy do? The opposite. He goes after maybe one of the most important public health triumphs of the last hundred years. A vaccine with a package insert that is so immaculate that he literally has to create an objection that is transparently false. It makes no sense.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
By the way, if you're wondering why we didn't just call up RFK Jr. himself and ask him directly, oh, we tried. Over and over again. Calls, emails, right up to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
I recently called up my friend Safi Bakal. I wanted to see if he could correctly guess the answer to a puzzle. First of all, before we start, I just wanted to briefly establish your bona fides for this conversation. You have a PhD from MIT, is that correct? Stanford. Stanford, Stanford. And you went on to work on the development of a number of different drugs, is that correct? I did.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Total runaround. Then to his lawyer and longtime confidant Aaron Seary, who was all willing to be interviewed until I told him I wanted to talk about the rotavirus vaccine. At which point, he put all kinds of stipulations and restrictions on how our interview would proceed, including the fact that we couldn't tape record it.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
And then, when we finally did talk, Seary couldn't come up with any kind of plausible explanation for what his good friend and client was doing either. I thought, is there someone else I could call? Was I ever going to get to the bottom of this? And then I realized, maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe I just need to keep reading Kennedy's book. And so I did. And sure enough, there it was.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
The answer. In Chapter 9, entitled, The White Man's Burden. One of the preeminent figures in modern medicine was the 19th century French microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur is the pioneer of germ theory. Infectious diseases are the result of foreign microorganisms that invade the body.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Every time you get a vaccine created specifically against a particular virus, or take an antibiotic optimized to fight a specific strain of bacteria, you are following Pasteur's logic. Germ theory is one of the foundational ideas of modern medicine. And in Chapter 9 of The Real Anthony Fauci, we learn that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't believe in germ theory.
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The RFK Jr. Problem
Yeah. If I told you you had a drug under development that had efficacy data where there was a 50X difference between treatment and control, what word would come out of your mouth?
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The RFK Jr. Problem
He is, instead, a follower of Pasteur's nemesis, another 19th century French microbiologist named Antoine Béchamp. Bichamp argued that Pasteur had it backwards. You don't get sick because you've been infected by a bug. The bug emerges in response to the fact that your body was already sick. The bug is a symptom, not a cause.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
What matters is the terrain of the body, an individual's internal state of health. It's really hard to find people who believe in Antoine Béchamp's theories. I spent hours on the internet looking before finally stumbling upon another disciple. Maybe you'll recognize his voice.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
This is the actor, Woody Harrelson, on Joe Rogan, of course.
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The RFK Jr. Problem
I should point out, guess who Woody Harrelson is good friends with? RFK Jr. So maybe what we're looking at here is not two Beshampians who arrived at the same conclusion independently, but one Beshampian who infected another. In defiance of everything Beshampian. Of course, there is some truth to terrain theory.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Diabetes and heart disease are the result, in part, of what Béchamp would call a disturbed terrain, a body that because of obesity or smoking or bad nutrition or a lack of exercise has become vulnerable to chronic disease. But Kennedy doesn't stop there. He's a radical Béchampian. He believes that if you're otherwise healthy, the cold virus is just not going to be an issue.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
HIV is probably not going to give you AIDS, not if you take care of yourself. There's a whole chapter on HIV and AIDS in his book, making a version of this argument. Early in his time as Secretary of Health and Human Services, there was a major outbreak of measles in Texas. And Kennedy's response was so lackadaisical that his press secretary quit, it seems, in disgust. Measles?
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
It's only a problem if you're unhealthy. The virus is the symptom, not the cause. It took several months, two children dying, and over 500 cases for him to finally give an interview where he said, OK, you should get the measles shot. Kennedy is unhappy to this day that in the 19th century battle between Louis Pasteur and Antoine Béchamp, Pasteur came out on top.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Listen, this is from the audiobook version of the real Anthony Fauci, being read by what really, really seems like AI.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Just so you're aware, if you're thinking of getting the audiobook, you're in for 27 hours and 20 minutes of this.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
What doesn't RFK Jr. like? Pills, powders, pricks, and potions. The very things that the Department of Health and Human Services brings to the world. And of all the pills and powders and pricks within his domain, the one he hates the most is Rodotech. And why does he hate Rodotech? Because he's a Bishampian. And a Bishampian has to hate Rodotech.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
And now that Safi knew what we were talking about, it was time to see if he could answer my little puzzle. A puzzle connected to the co-inventor of Rototech, a man named Paul Offit. I want to read to you, now that we've done this, I want to read to you from a book. I'm going to have to tell you who wrote it, but it's someone in a position of real authority in the world.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Because if Kennedy admits that Rodotech works, then the whole edifice of 19th century pseudoscience that he has committed himself to comes tumbling down. RFK Jr. likes to pretend that he is alarmed by vaccines that do not work. No, he's alarmed by vaccines that do work. Heaven, help us. Next time on Revisionist History, the plot thickens and the virus spreads from RFK Jr. to Joe Rogan.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence, and Ben-Nadav Hafri. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Fact-checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Marcelo D'Oliveira. Production support from Luke Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Jefe Greta Cohn. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
The best evidence indicates that Dr. Offit's rotavirus vaccine causes negative net public health impacts. In other words, Dr. Offit's vaccine almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Oh, Safi, you win the prize. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is the very strange story of Rodotech, a vaccine that every American infant is supposed to get three times in their first eight months of life.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
or rather, the very strange campaign waged against Rodotech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the man in charge of every aspect of health, medicine, and research in the United States. If you are the parent of small children in the developed world in the 21st century, Diarrhea is not high on your list of things you worry about.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
But that was not true of your parents when you were a child. Or your parents' parents. Or anyone else, for that matter, going back as far as human beings go. Particularly those living in the poorest parts of the world. This is what it used to be like.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
This is Vishwajit Kumar, a pediatrician and public health researcher in Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorest states in India, remembering his days as an intern in the 1980s.
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The RFK Jr. Problem
A small child would get sick with the rotavirus. They would run a fever. They would start vomiting. They would develop severe diarrhea as the virus wreaked havoc in their stomach and intestines. That's three sources of dehydration, suddenly and simultaneously. And if the child was far from a hospital and already malnourished, they were in trouble.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
The best estimates at the time were the children in developing countries had between four and eight episodes of severe diarrhea in their first five years of life, each lasting from two to ten days. For Dr. Kumar, this meant a giant room full of shrunken infants, two and sometimes three to a bed.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
I mean, to lose one, To be a doctor and lose one baby is emotionally overwhelming. You're talking about over the course of working in a ward, you would lose dozens of children over the course of months.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Safi ran a drug company for a long time that worked on some of the hardest problems in cancer treatment. In preparation for our call, I sent Safi the package insert for something called Rotatec. As I'm sure you've noticed, when you get a prescription drug, there's a leaflet inside the box, all folded up, tiny print. That's the package insert.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
The battle against rotavirus took years. First, the virus itself had to be identified, separated out from all the other pathogens that can cause diarrhea in young children. Then a vaccine had to be constructed from that newly identified virus. Another time-consuming task. One of the leading groups working on the problem was at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, at a lab run by Paul Offit.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
2006. How long did you work on that? 26 years. Wow. Why was that a hard problem to solve?
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The RFK Jr. Problem
Offit's group took their candidate vaccine to the drug company Merck, which spent well over a billion dollars to bring the candidate vaccine to market. The result was Rototec.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Other rotavirus vaccines followed. A group of scientists in India developed their own in 2016. Also around this time, many developing countries made huge strides in sanitation, which cut down on the spread of the virus. Oral rehydration therapy became widespread. And now the dedicated diarrhea wards that were such a big part of Kumar's training are all but gone.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
It's hard to find anyone who works with children and remembers the way things were who isn't in love with the rotavirus vaccine. And you sort of list the most important innovations that you've seen that have affected the lives of children. Where does this rank? At the top. Amongst the top.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
It tells you in great detail every benefit, every side effect, every clinical study associated with your medication. The Food and Drug Administration and drug companies spend years working out the exact wording of that leaflet. And I'm assuming you've never read this before. Never read it before.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
This is Dr. Zulfikar Bhutta, co-director for the Center of Global Child Health at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. He spent years as a pediatrician in his native Pakistan.
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The RFK Jr. Problem
And this is the vaccine that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hates. I have to confess that I knew very little about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before he ran for president in 2024. But as he loomed larger and larger in the news, I realized I had his most recent book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
His publicist must have sent me a review copy when it came out in 2021. I found it in a big pile of books on the porch. So I decided to read it. All 492 pages. And it was there in Chapter 3 that I discovered the particular loathing that RFK Jr. has for the rotavirus vaccines. I couldn't make head nor tails of it, which is why I had to call my friend Safi Bakal up.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
We were going over the package insert, which you thought was clean as a whistle. Yeah. Right? And so I was trying to figure out why, if it was as clean as a whistle, does Kennedy have such a problem with rototech and rotavirus vaccines in general?
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
And I want to read to you the key paragraph in his book, which, and we're going to try and solve this puzzle together because I have a vague idea, but I think I'm, I can't, my idea is so, reflects so poorly on him that I, part of me thinks it can't be the right idea. This is the key paragraph. Reported adverse reactions from Dr. Offit's Rotatec vaccine range from 953 to 1,689 per year.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
These included fever, diarrhea, vomiting, irritability, intussusception, SIDS, severe combined immunodeficiency. Kennedy lists 20 different really bad things he thinks are associated with Rotatec, ending with gastroenteritis, pneumonia, and death.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Then he writes the paragraph that I read to Safi at the beginning of this episode, that the list of adverse reactions is so long that Rotatech, quote, almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine's introduction.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Now, I have to say that at this point, things get deeply confusing, because I couldn't figure out where that number, 953 to 1,689 adverse reactions a year, comes from. In the real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy lists as his source the package insert, but those numbers aren't in the package insert.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
We hired a fact checker with a PhD in biology, and she couldn't figure out where Kennedy's numbers come from either. Then we thought, oh, he got the numbers from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which is the government-run database where anyone can report a side effect that they think is associated with a vaccine. Keyword, think. But VAERS isn't Kennedy's source either.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
Rototec is a vaccine to protect babies against a very nasty intestinal bug called rotavirus. What Safi first noticed was how well it worked.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
We found the numbers. VAERS only has 344 reports of side effects over 15 years for all rotavirus vaccines, of which only 32 are serious, which is like miles and miles away from the massive number of problems that Kennedy's talking about.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
And even if he just made a typo and read the numbers wrong, it still doesn't prove his case because, as the CDC says, quote, a report to VAERS does not mean a vaccine caused an adverse event, end quote. So just because a baby vomited after getting his Rotatec doesn't mean Rotatec caused the vomiting. Babies vomit all the time.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
To prove the vaccine was the cause of the side effect, you really have to dig into the data, look for patterns, or better yet, go back to the original clinical trial and see if there were any clues when the vaccine was first tested for side effects. In the case of Rotatech, the clinical trial was enormous. 12 countries, 34,000 infants were given the vaccine. 34,000 were given a placebo.
Revisionist History
The RFK Jr. Problem
The babies were followed for a full year, and absolutely every medical event that happened to them was recorded and analyzed. 68,000 babies. If, in the course of a year, the babies who got the vaccine had more complications than the babies who got the placebo, then that would raise a red flag. It would suggest, wait, maybe the vomiting was the result of the vaccine.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
I'm talking with intrepid investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, Amy Dempsey-Raven. Typically, she covers police wrongdoing, child welfare, controversial homicides. But in 2016, when Toronto declared a war on raccoons and unveiled a new raccoon-resistant composting bin, she realized it's time to get serious.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
For a little while now, I've been interested in how the lab rat has shaped our understanding of human beings. Rats are all over the history of psychology. Rat studies of depression. Rat studies of cooperation. Rat studies of rationality. Think about the way we speak. Rat in a maze. The rat race. Mall rat. Gym rat. Smell a rat. A rat's nest. It's all rats all the way down.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
I figured if anyone could tell me about how exactly this all came to be, it would be one of the leading rat behavioral researchers in the country, Dr. Kelly Lambert at the University of Richmond.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Lambert loves rats. She's written a book called The Lab Rat Chronicles. A neuroscientist reveals life lessons from the planet's most successful mammals. She's particularly famous for experiments where she taught rats to drive cars, which, if we're being honest, is really why I got into Richmond.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
If you've seen Stuart Little in his red convertible, you're not even half prepared for the image of a lab rat hunched over the dashboard on what appears to be a monster truck, just careening towards a bunch of Froot Loops. Lambert loves working with her rats. But lately, she's also been questioning how the rat became the be-all, end-all for understanding human beings.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Basically, it's the lab rat industry. There was a whole factory line system around producing lab rats via mass inbreeding, premised on the fantasy that the inbred rats were basically interchangeable with one another.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
This was all taking off around the time Lawrence Cole's work with raccoons was being cast aside. That kind of inbreeding helped create rats who were much more docile and easier to control than wild rats, and certainly than raccoons. Which meant it gave the behaviorists easier, more reliable data. And then it just took off.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Soon, a prominent psychologist described the field as being infected by a plague of rats. Millions of dollars poured into rat studies. The leader of the Yale Institute of Human Relations announced that anything he observed about rats' behaviors, among other animals, was, quote, end quote. Let me play you a bit of film that Yale Institute produced.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
I think it goes a long way to showing exactly how confident these people were in what studying rats could tell us about people.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
This film has always freaked me out. There's a rat in a cage with an electric current running through the bars. He's gotta figure out how to turn it off.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
The whole time that tone is sounding, the rat is just frantically scrambling around his cage trying to figure out how to make it stop. Then he starts pawing at a wheel and it turns off.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
It turns out zapping a rat is a good way to get it to do anything, including violence.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
If you could teach a rat to do anything, why not a person? Suddenly, the scary world of the 20th century began to seem a lot more manageable. Mass movements, Great Depressions, whatever. Just find the right set of incentives or punishments, and all of human behavior could be predicted and controlled.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
This raccoon-resistant bin cost the city 31 million Canadian dollars. But Toronto is known as the raccoon capital of the world. Theoretically, it's a point of pride, but it's a little more complicated than that. If a race of Martians took over your city, would you call it the Martian capital of the world? Only if you'd already admitted defeat.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Few people questioned the dominance of the rat at first. Why bother when it was working so well? This kind of thing has always bothered me on a gut level. I look in the mirror every day and I do not see a rat staring back at me, at least not since patching the hole in my bathroom wall. We aren't rats.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
I'm not saying we can't learn anything about ourselves from animals, but I am saying that you should never underestimate how many of the things we think we know about human beings are actually things we know about inbred rats with brains the size of grapes kept in cages that sometimes electrocute you.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
We built a science of human nature, and one of the strongest pillars was the lab rat. And who is the lab rat? He's crucially not the raccoon. The raccoon lets it all hang out. He's defiant, mischievous, crafty. If asked to participate in a scientific experiment, he will inquire about payment, then call in sick. Not the rat. The rat is hardworking by instinct, diligent. He gnaws away.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
He navigates complex warrants. He gets a perfect score on his SATs. He's rational. Build the maze, and he'll fall in line. He is, in short, a good animal for running the same test again and again and again, without complaint, while delivering consistent, reliable data suggesting that we humans behave in consistent, reliable ways.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
For all this, the rat has been rewarded by becoming the only animal synonymous with the scientific laboratory. It's not lab pigeon. It's not lab monkey. It's lab rat. But I was beginning to wonder, what if it should have been lab raccoon? We'll be right back.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Some years ago, when Michael Pettit was working on his ingenious article about raccoon erasure, he took a colleague out to lunch, Suzanne MacDonald, behaviorist and expert in animal cognition. He told her what he'd been learning about Lawrence Cole and the early raccoon studies. She, a fellow Torontonian beset by the plague of raccoons, was like, oh my god, how did we miss this?
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
By monkeys of North America, you mean they fill a certain ecological niche?
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Traveling to study monkeys was expensive. If raccoons were like monkeys, then living in Toronto was like living on safari. So McDonald caught the Lawrence coal bug. She began to study raccoons, and she's been doing it ever since.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
McDonald has become one of the world's leading experts in raccoons, and in particular, the urban raccoons of Toronto, with whom I think she feels a strong kinship. For instance, I've seen people saying that there are 100,000 raccoons in Toronto. Where did they get that number?
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
McDonald told me that she was the origin of that statistic, and she just made a number up, which is exactly what a raccoon would do. She gets it. So after a century of waiting, I prepared to receive the good news about the raccoon's true intelligence from the source. I leaned back in my desk chair.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
How intriguing, I thought. Maybe the raccoon's super intelligence develops at a later age?
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
I was at this point trying not to look hugely depressed, but McDonald just kept going.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Here, I should just say that there's a lot we still don't know about raccoons. And indeed, McDonald's still gets a lot out of studying them too, especially the particularities of urban raccoons. But still, I had wondered about this question for years. Hearing that raccoons were morons, actually, was kind of a bummer in my book. But you know who was thrilled when I told him about it?
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
That was about 40 years ago. Things have gotten much, much worse.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Rats are very hardworking. You give them a task, and they will do it ad nauseum. They're happy to just keep getting the job done. They live in little warrens. You put a rat in a maze, it knows exactly what to do, and it's kind of like fine being in a maze. Problem solvers. They're problem solvers. They're sort of cautious about new things.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
You talk to any exterminator, it's very hard to get a rat to eat poison. They are very careful about what they eat, what risks they take. Raccoons are extremely disinhibited. They aren't wary at all. A raccoon can live to like 20 in a lab. In the wild, they tend to live two to three years because they're just sort of like, what's that do? And they just like jam their fingers in a socket.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
It's like, and that's the end of the raccoon. We built the world for rats, but we are functionally raccoons. And so we are dissatisfied with the rat world. But it is the fact that we have the rat world that has kept us from blowing it all up in our face so far.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Raccoons in the garbage. Raccoons on the train. Raccoons on the back deck.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
I did a complete 180 on this story. I started thinking that the rat model was a disgrace because I had rats all wrong. I see now it was kind of utopian. Every need could be anticipated, every behavior nudged, every outcome predicted, and every person satisfied. But there is no one animal model for human behavior.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
A rat's its own thing, a lab rat's its own thing, raccoons are really their own thing, and we're not one or the other. We're all of the above and something else. But these days, it seems clear. We definitely did ourselves a disservice when we forgot about the raccoon. Sadly, I never got to come face-to-face with a raccoon in reporting this story, but I did get to meet a lab rat.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Kelly Lambert now studies all kinds of animals in all kinds of places. She's particularly interested in wild animals these days. But Lambert still has a soft spot for the lab rat. When I visited her at the University of Richmond, she took me back into a locked set of rooms. There were signs up that said, quiet, behavioral testing in progress.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
And behind one of the doors, a cage with two rats she's been teaching to drive.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
I leaned closer to the rat. Lambert seemed to think he was showing an unusual interest in my microphone.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Actually, the rat was really grabbing at the mic, pulling it closer to its snout.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
It was really weird. He wasn't climbing on the mic. He was just yanking it right up to his face. Not something you would have predicted if you know about rats and how wary they are. A mystery. I felt like maybe that rat was trying to tell me something. Rats communicate via ultrasonic frequencies. So a few days later, when I got home, I processed the audio, pitch shifted it down, and hit play.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Raccoons have taken over the attics in a whole street of houses and refused to leave. They brought traffic to a screeching halt on Toronto's highways and just stood there. They figured out how to open doors to houses and refrigerators and stood on top of countertops, leftovers in their paws, staring at freaked out homeowners as if to say, if I wanted you here, I would have rung the bell.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Sorry, buddy. I know you're right, but it's the raccoon's time now. Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Nadeff-Haffrey, Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shikurji. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Special thanks to Lizette Barton at the Doctors Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. And to Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn. I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffrey.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Hence the pricey raccoon-resistant bins, which surely no raccoon would be able to open.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Amy found herself wondering, how are raccoons smart enough to open that bin? This was the question a historian of science had found himself wondering one night when he looked at his back deck in Toronto and saw compost all over the place. He had an earlier version of the compost bin, but here too, the raccoons had picked the lock. Are they really just that smart? It turned out nobody really knew.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Raccoons had hardly been studied, basically not at all compared to other animals like, say, rats or monkeys. This historian wanted to know why. The midnight raid on his compost bin would set in motion a sequence of events that in my own estimation have come to topple an entire century of psychological theory and restored the raccoon to its proper place.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Many historians of science will write about the greats. Einstein, Freud, Oppenheimer, the kind of research project not usually begun while scooping up trash in your bathrobe on your back deck in Toronto. But Michael Pettit's always gotten into things sideways.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Pettit is a historian of psychology at York University in Toronto.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Pettit knew all about scientists putting rats in mazes and puzzly cages, the mainstream stuff. Who cares? But in all his studies, he had never heard of a raccoon in a puzzle box. And yet here on his deck was evidence that they were basically able to outsmart any human system.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Michael was curious for good reason, not just because of the locks situation. We've basically never known quite what to make of raccoons.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
For a while, there wasn't even consensus on how exactly they evolved. The famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus called them Ursus Loder, or washer bear, because they liked to rinse their food in water and he thought they descended from bears. Now, for any true raccoon fans out there, I should note that, yes, they aren't actually washing their food.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
They basically see with their paws, and their paws are more sensitive in the water. This, by the way, is the instinct behind that amazing Japanese TV show where they gave a raccoon cotton candy, which the raccoon dutifully washed until it vanished. But no, they're not washing, and they're not bears.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
When Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World, he remarked upon its, quote, clown-like dogs, to which the people of Italy said, Chris... What the hell are you talking about? Until centuries later, another naturalist realized, oh, he's talking about raccoons.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Pettit went looking for a history of raccoon science, specifically about people investigating their intelligence, and found basically nothing. A handful of scientists, and one slim volume in particular, from 1907, titled Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons. It was written by a man named Lawrence Cole, frontier raccoonist.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Lawrence Cole had done his graduate work at Harvard and was part of a psychological movement that studied animals to understand humans. In the 19th century, psychology had largely been based on what people said about how they felt, which was not super reliable. So why not instead observe how animals behave and just extrapolate up the chain from there?
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
But which animal was best for the psychologists to study? Any of them theoretically could work. Scientists were comparing species across tests to see how they'd fare. People had studied chickens, dogs. Cole's advisor liked the idea of studying monkeys, but monkeys are super expensive.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
It would be helpful, though, if there were a kind of consensus, a lingua franca animal that people could generalize from.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Cole still had to find an experiment of his own to get his PhD. These raccoons seemed promising.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Cole began running tests on the raccoons. He put them in boxes with complicated locks every day for a whole academic year, and he found they were incredible. Any box, it seemed, any puzzle, the raccoon could solve it. And what's more, the animal wasn't just going through the motions. The raccoon seemed curious about what he was doing.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
And Cole thought there was evidence that raccoons could hold images in their mind. Nobody was making these kinds of claims about other animals. So Cole started publishing his research, writing to leading figures in psychology, saying, hey, these raccoons are really unusually intelligent, maybe as intelligent as monkeys, which seems to me like it should make them a great model organism for people.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
except there was a movement that was growing swiftly within cole's field right around then which was explicitly uncomfortable with any talk of an animal having a mind and it was fast becoming the only show in town it was called behaviorism all this history is documented in an amazing article by michael pettit titled the problem of raccoon intelligence in behaviorist america
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Which is one of my favorite academic essays of all time. Because the raccoon was indeed a problem.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Bob Bailey. He used to be the top guy at a legendary behaviorist organization called Animal Behavior Enterprises. The founders of that company wrote an infamous paper questioning the fundamentals of behaviorism, the idea that all animals were blank slates you could write whatever you wanted on. A key example? One raccoon they'd trained to put coins in a box.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Eventually, and most of the time, were bad news for people trying to turn psychology into a reputable hard science. That raccoon box situation came later on. But this exact dynamic put a bit of a target on Lawrence Cole, the frontier raccoonist. And if you know anything about the history of psychology, you'll know how the problem of the raccoon was solved. Raccoon erasure.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
The raccoon does not figure prominently at all. But you know which animal does? The rat. I'm curious about how you account for that historical process of raccoon erasure that begins around then.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
But it wasn't just about convenience. It was also difficult to generalize from raccoon experiments. Rats, for example, behaved in predictable, repeatable ways. Raccoons, not so much. How is a scientist supposed to work with an animal who each spring gets wanderlust and attempts to break out of their cage?
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
What do you do when your experimental raccoon colony does escape and moves into your lab's ventilation system? As behaviorism gained steam, scientists in the big cities attacked the nascent science of raccoons. Wasn't this all a bit silly? Meanwhile, other behaviorists complained that keeping raccoon colonies was really just a huge pain in the neck. And so we got the century of the rat.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
And to a lesser degree, the pigeon. This behaviorism is a theory of control.
Revisionist History
Rat vs. Raccoon
Behaviorists thought they were studying an animal that stood in for all human beings. But actually, they wound up studying a lot of lab rats. And that led us to some pretty flawed conclusions about people. We'll be right back.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Floyd is trying to raise his chest off the ground? Oh, that's because he's still resisting arrest. Some lady says she's a firefighter? Is she really? In fact, when Genevieve Hansen moves closer, she'll then go for his mace. Floyd's voice starts to falter. About time. Maybe he's finally going to stop complaining. One of his fellow officers says, put him in the recovery position.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Dude, I've been doing this for 19 years. Back off. The crowd that has gathered around Floyd and the four officers is becoming more and more vocal. But Chauvin isn't moving.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Check his pulse, Tom. Check his pulse. Check his pulse. One of the other cops at the scene says to the officer sitting behind Chauvin, I can't find one. Floyd is dead. And still, Chauvin doesn't move. He will remain on Floyd's neck for another three minutes, even after the ambulance arrives.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Years from now, when university professors teach courses on decision sciences, they will play this video as a textbook example of fixation. But why is Chauvin fixated? What psychological mechanism could describe why he would just sit there, In the aftermath of the murder, it was said again and again that Chauvin is a racist. But calling someone racist is a description, not an explanation.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Why is Chauvin stuck on his script? One of the most influential ideas to emerge in social psychology in recent years is something called hostile intention attribution, a theory arising out of the work of Ken Dodge.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Rocky could have interpreted that touch on the shoulder in any number of ways. He could have ignored it, shrugged it off, or assumed it was an invitation for affection and turned and smiled. But he didn't. He chose to focus on it and to assume that Dodge had a hostile intent. That's hostile intent attribution, the pattern of interpreting everything as a threat.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
You can look at someone like that kid Rocky and offer an organic explanation of his behavior. He's a bad seed. He's wired wrong. But Dodge wants us to look at problematic behavior as a developmental problem as well. Somewhere along the way, someone's personal experience left them unprepared to make proper sense of the world.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
A very small child, for example, does not understand the distinction between an intentional act and an accident. That's something you learn. You gradually figure out that actions can come with any number of different explanations.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
After talking to Dodge, I began to observe my own kids more closely. They're both preschoolers, two years apart. The big one loves to manhandle her little sister, and most of the time, that interaction is greeted with laughter. But sometimes, if my eldest goes too far, her sister cries.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
And I realize that what they are doing is, to use Dodge's phrase, learning how to make accurate attributions of each other's behavior. When the big sister's push is too aggressive, the little one learns, that seems to have a different intention from what we were doing before. She's learning the difference between fighting and playing.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
And when the little one cries out instead of laughing, the big one learns, oh, if I want to keep playing, I have to make sure that my actions are accurately interpreted. She's learning how to rein in her aggression. That kind of feedback loop is a crucial part of a child's socialization.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
But in the case of the boy Rocky, what Dodge realized was that that process of socialization, of learning how to accurately distinguish between a hostile touch and a playful touch, had been disrupted.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
If your father is violent 60% of the time and loving 40% of the time, and you can't tell in the moment which direction he's going to go, then it makes logical sense for your own physical safety just to assume that your father is always going to be hostile. But when you take that assumption into the real world, onto playgrounds, into classrooms, into the workplace, it doesn't work.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
It makes you a bully, a pariah. It makes even routine interactions deeply problematic. And nowhere is this dysfunction more problematic than policing, of course. Because if you are a police officer whose early life and experience has left them impaired in that way, who as a result makes hostile attributions all the time, then how can you be a police officer?
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
I don't know what Chauvin's upbringing was like, but I know when I saw the tape again after talking to Dodge, I wondered if Chauvin wasn't just someone like Rocky, all grown up. And the one thing Rocky can't be is a police officer.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Because being good at that job relies, maybe more than almost any other profession, on being able to distinguish in the heat of a moment between a hostile act and an ambiguous act. Between someone who is struggling because they can't breathe and someone who is struggling because they're resisting arrest.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
May 25th, 2020. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Early evening. A 911 dispatcher makes a call.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Between someone who says, I'm going to die because they're trying to trick you and someone who says, I'm going to die because they are, in fact, going to die. If you can't do that, then you can only interpret the world one way. Then, in the middle of a fast-evolving situation, when there is new information coming in all the time, you have only one way to interpret it. A threat.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
In the course of the investigation into the death of George Floyd, a second case came to light. It happened in 2017, three years earlier. A woman calls 911. She says her son has assaulted her. The police arrive, talk to the woman at length. She says her son is down the hall in his room. In the body cam footage, you can see the officers walk down the hallway.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
The boy is on the floor of his bedroom, on the phone. He's 14. The lead officer in the group is lean, in his 40s, with a passive demeanor. It's Derek Chauvin. The officers enter the room, tell him he's under arrest. He says his mom was drunk. He gets up reluctantly. His voice is calm. He doesn't act out. He's not aggressive.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
He says his mother had done this before, called the police when she's the one who has a problem. That's why his uncle left the house, he says. He seems genuinely confused as to why he should be the one under arrest. He's a teenager.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Chauvin moves towards him, starts beating the boy over the head with his flashlight, opening a wound over his ear that will require stitches, puts him in a chokehold, throws him to the ground, and then things go from bad to much, much worse.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm guessing you watched the bystander videos of what happened that night during the fevered COVID summer of 2020. I know I did. I knew the villain. I knew the victim. I thought that's all I needed to know. But then I ran across the George Floyd video again, not long ago, by chance.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Chauvin crouches down next to the prone boy and puts his knee on the boy's neck. Then he just sits there. There are at least six officers at the scene. At this point, most of them have filed out of the room as if they can't stomach what's happening. One of the remaining officers turns his body cam to the wall. Chauvin keeps his knee on the boy's neck for 15 minutes.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Even after the paramedics arrive and the boy explains to them that he blacked out after he was choked and that his ear is bleeding, Chauvin remains on the boy's neck, frozen. The boy is eventually rescued and he's finally able to get up and walk away. I have watched that body cam footage more times than I can count.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
And every time I find myself crying at the end, in a way that I never did with George Floyd. Not because it's worse than George Floyd, because of course it isn't, but because it's about a boy. And it was all recorded on tape years before it happened again. A former U.S. attorney named Amanda Sertich examined the video while prosecuting Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
There's another reason I found that tape so heartbreaking, something that I did not expect myself to feel, and something I cannot entirely explain. I felt an overwhelming wave of pity for Derek Chauvin, a man who sees every action as a threat, who cannot tell the difference between fear and aggression, who looks at a boy on his phone in his bedroom and sees a monster.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
That is a dark, joyless place for anyone to find themselves imprisoned. And by what tragic failure of administration did a man who showed on videotape that he cannot do the single most important thing that a police officer needs to do to be a police officer remain on the force for three more years? until he killed someone in cold blood. That's next week.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf-Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Fact-checking by Sam Rusick. Engineering, Nina Bird Lawrence. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorski. Production support from Luke Lamond. Thank you to Mikhail Leibovitch. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
And El Hafei, Greta Cohn. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Get ad-free episodes of Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
One of those serendipitous internet moments. And watched it for the first time in years, far from the intense emotions of the first time I saw it. And I realized I didn't understand what was happening. What Chauvin was doing. What the other police officers on the scene were thinking. which made me wonder if somehow the first time around I had missed the lesson of the case.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
So over the next two episodes, I'm going to do a close reading of what happened to George Floyd. An unfamiliar reading, starting with the perspective of the very first person to see things unfold in real time, Jenna Scurry.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Because before George Floyd stopped breathing, before the angry crowd gathered, before the scene turned into tragedy, she could see Derek Chauvin behaving so strangely that it led her, a 911 dispatcher who had seen a thousand crime scenes in her career, to stop and stare at the video feed in disbelief. As in, this can't be real. The screen must be frozen.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
In the beginning, there was nothing extraordinary about the situation unfolding on the corner of 38th and Chicago. A man passes a counterfeit $20 bill. The clerk calls 911. The suspect hasn't run. He's sitting in his car across the street. He isn't armed. He isn't hostile. He seems like he's high. Two officers approach him and tell him to get out of the car.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
He pleads and complains, more like a scared child than a grown man. He talks about his mom. He finally gets out. The officers handcuff him. They ask him his name. He says it's George Floyd. They lead him over to the squad car. But he doesn't want to get in the back seat. He says he's claustrophobic. He's having trouble breathing.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
He struggles and squirms, and because he's a big man, well over 6 feet and 200 pounds, it makes things difficult. In the struggle, he cuts his mouth. One of the officers calls for an ambulance. A second squad car arrives. There are now four police officers on the scene and one handcuffed suspect. Clearly unhappy, but deferential.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
The dispatcher is Jenna Scurry, seven years on the job. She's in a big room with multiple computer screens and televisions running live video feeds from around the city. The details from the call come over her screen. 38th and Chicago. Suspect at a grocery store.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
We know from the body cam footage that by this point he has used the words sorry and please 57 times. That's Floyd. Is he going to jail? That's Derek Chauvin. He's one of the two officers in the second squad car that just pulled up.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
As the senior officer present, he's taking control of the situation. He wants Floyd in the prone position, face down, hands cuffed behind his back. He then puts one of his knees on the side of Floyd's neck and the other between Floyd's shoulder blades, a technique sometimes used with noncompliant subjects.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Chauvin says, we'll hold him until the ambulance shows up. Floyd says, let me stand. Chauvin says, no. So what does Chauvin do next? Chauvin doesn't move. Chauvin just sits there. He's frozen. Right around this time, an off-duty firefighter named Genevieve Hansen was out for a walk. Happens upon the scene. Identifies herself as a firefighter, a trained first responder.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Later at the trial, a police surgeon named Bill Smock walked the jury through the videotape of Floyd's final moments, pointing out all the mounting warning signs.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Smock breaks down Floyd's final minutes frame by frame.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
She sends a squad car to the scene, looks up, and realizes the city has a fixed camera on that corner of 38th and Chicago, so she has a live video feed up on one of the screens. She sees the officers try to put the suspect in the back of one of the squad cars. She looks away. When she looks back, he's on the ground, handcuffed, face down. One officer kneeling on his neck.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Clear warning signs, clear red flags, not to mention Genevieve Hansen and other bystanders are just a few feet away shouting at him to get off Floyd. And then another voice joins that chorus. It's one of the other officers. He says, should we roll him on his side? Rolling him on his side is what's known as the recovery position.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Having someone prone on the hard ground with their hands cuffed and with a knee on their neck and in the middle of their back was acceptable practice in Minneapolis at the time. But the city's use of force training explicitly stated that the technique was only supposed to be used briefly and on someone, quote, "...exhibiting active aggression," unquote. It's dangerous. It's hard to breathe.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
I tried it. I had a friend put me in that position. It's scary. So when the subject calms down, you're supposed to roll them over. That's what the fellow officer is saying. We have to roll them over. But Chauvin says, no. He says, that's why we've got the ambulance coming. He's not reacting to anything. This is what so alarms Jenna Scurry when she looks back up at the scene.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
She's expecting things to have resolved themselves. Things should have happened. But nothing's happened. All she sees is Chauvin, up on the screen, sitting on Floyd's neck, his hand casually in his pocket, his face impassive. He's frozen. Or, to use a term favored by psychologists, he's fixated.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
That's Gary Klein. He consults with governments, armies, and hospitals on how to make better decisions under pressure, and wrote the classic Sources of Power, one of my favorite books ever. For Klein, one of the most revealing case studies in fixation was the actions of the Israeli intelligence chief, Elie Zera, in the weeks leading up to the Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel in 1973.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
The fixated decision-maker cannot accept new information. Every time new information arises that challenges his original conception, he explains it away. Klein once did a big project at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, looking at how physicians made diagnoses. And he found that the most experienced doctors were acutely aware of their own tendency towards fixation. It was a constant battle.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
The suspect is George Floyd. The officer on top of him is Derek Chauvin. She looks away again, takes another call. At the criminal trial the following year, arising from the events that day in 2020, Scurry was the first witness called by the prosecution. And she relived the events of that evening, step by step.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Fighting fixation means being willing to throw away all the work you've done in making sense of a complicated situation and saying, let's start over. This is what Chauvin doesn't do. He never says to himself, let's start over.
Revisionist History
Memorial Day, 2020 | Part 1
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You can't be, is it fair to say you can't be a police officer if you're not willing to revisit your script?
Revisionist History
Running Hot
Hello, hello, everyone. This is the first of what are going to be a couple of episodes in this mini-season from my colleague, Ben-Nadav Hafri. Ben is the guy, when you're hiking through the wilderness, who says, let's go this way. And there's no trail. And you think, oh, I'm going to get eaten by bears. And then, no, you find some lost civilization and large piles of glittering gold.
Revisionist History
Running Hot
Get ad-free episodes of Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. Pushkin Plus subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
Revisionist History
Running Hot
Ben started telling me this story and I stopped him halfway through and I said, oh Ben, this is a spandrel. And what's a spandrel? One of my all-time favorite concepts invented by Stephen Jay Gould. The spandrel is the thing that doesn't have a function, but which hangs around like a random hitchhiker because it happens to be riding along with things that do have a function. Like your earlobes.
Revisionist History
Running Hot
I mean, what are they there for? Doesn't it seem like they were all just along for the ride with the part of our ear that actually does useful things? Or your chin. What's up with the chin? We look at a spandrel and we assume there has to be a reason for it. And there isn't. They're just spandrels. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Revisionist History
Running Hot
This is Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, my colleague Ben-Nadav Hafri investigates a spandrel you don't even realize you've been living with, something that none of us would ever think to question. Because it's such a bedrock part of our world, we all just assume it has to be there. And it doesn't. I'm talking, of course, about Sirens.
Revisionist History
Face Value
My experience of you is dramatically different than your experience of me. I am forced to find alternate means of recognition. What those of us who have impairment in this area do is we get obsessed with all the other possible cues that we can use to identify somebody. And because they're not as reliable as the face, we're always getting into trouble.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Don't forget, listen to Fiasco, Iran-Contra, for the story of a not-so-secret scandal that captivated the United States. Fiasco is available where you're listening right now.
Revisionist History
Face Value
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revolutionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. And since we're talking about misunderstandings, whatever you think is going on in this story right now, I promise you, you've got it wrong.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Hello, hello, Malcolm Gladwell here. Today, I'm in the studio with my producer, Lucy Sullivan. Lucy?
Revisionist History
Face Value
Yes, yes, that's true. This happens to me all the time. I won't remember if I need to be exposed to a face, a person on multiple occasions before their face becomes meaningful or even there. I don't know whether their face is becoming meaningful or that I'm developing so many other ways of recognizing them that I feel on safer ground.
Revisionist History
Face Value
No, there's no chance that I will. It's actually funny because I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop and I see this guy who runs the wine shop across the street. His name is Michael. I'd known Michael for years. And I see Michael, or I think it's Michael, and I see a Slender Man in his 50s, about 5'9", with glasses and a baseball cap, across the street from the wine shop.
Revisionist History
Face Value
I understand you have a story for me about a particular misunderstanding.
Revisionist History
Face Value
And I think, oh, that's got to be Michael. And I go, Michael! And the guy looks at me like really weird and comes over. And it was like my nightmare. It was like, oh, my God, no, it's not. It's just another dude who's in town who looks a lot like Michael. But that was my system failed. Yeah. It's very rare for me to risk it like that.
Revisionist History
Face Value
But I risked it because I thought if Michael thinks... I had the reverse JJ. If Michael thinks I'm ignoring him... then that's really bad because I go to the wine shop all the time and I like Michael.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Yeah, no, no, I do. And it makes me feel bad because I, you know, I mean, I feel for JJ because, It's you in this constant state of worry about that you're going to be perceived as cold or aloof and you're not.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Pushkin. Before we get to this episode, I want to recommend another podcast for you. Fiasco Arancontra is another Pushkin podcast by the co-creator of Slow Burn, Leon Nafok. You'll learn how Ronald Reagan found himself in the middle of a scandal that looked like it just might take down his presidency. Fiasco Arancontra is available wherever you get your podcasts. Don't miss it.
Revisionist History
Face Value
After the break, Lucy Sullivan takes us behind the face and into the brain.
Revisionist History
Revisionist History is Back
Oh. And I nearly forgot to mention, we're going to spend a lot of time with the newly minted Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because I listened to Joe Rogan tell the story of how he met Kennedy, and I was riveted.
Revisionist History
Revisionist History is Back
Exactly. What's up with these guys? We have a very full year coming up. Stay tuned, my friends.
Revisionist History
Revisionist History is Back
You heard that correctly. Paw Patrol. Me and my three-year-old will defend one of the world's most popular children's television shows against its critics. Then we get serious. It's been five years since the death of George Floyd. We're going to go back and tell that story from a different perspective.
Revisionist History
Revisionist History is Back
Ben Nadaf-Haffrey, my esteemed colleague, will launch a detailed investigation into Thomas' English muffins.
Revisionist History
Revisionist History is Back
Pushkin. Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here to give you a preview of the upcoming season of Revisionist History, where we once again go where no podcast has ever been so foolish to go.
Revisionist History
Revisionist History is Back
You thought you understood all that there was to understand about English muffins? You are wrong. And then Ben takes a raccoon down a rabbit hole.
Revisionist History
Revisionist History is Back
Oh, yeah, baby. We're going to have a contribution from the newest member of the revisionist team, Lucy Sullivan.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
The even better version is you point your phone at your gut and you find out all the stuff that's in there. You're like, oh my goodness, what do they have for dinner? Yeah, exactly. It might not be good to find that out. Pick another wearable because now I'm interested. First of all, has Lily ever done a wearable before?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
So how many wearables, take me 10 years into the future. Yeah. How many wearables am I wearing? If I want to be completely, you know.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
I was going to say eyes. Eyes, yeah. I was reading a really fascinating study that was looking, trying to figure out what the difference is between a novice police officer and an expert police officer. And they used eye tracking, gave them scenarios, and figured out that they're looking at different things. So you have a...
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
scenario of like that guy here and this happening here and someone throwing this here and we see the experts like looking and the novices looking Right? Yeah. One spot versus, but I'm just curious about like, you know, my sense is this is kind of, once you start going down this road.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Yeah. Yeah. Why? One of the things you said earlier piqued my interest when you said that if you're making drugs and the question, one of the questions that comes up is, are you using something like this, a wearable, to market the drug? But I'm wondering whether that's... There's another way to frame that is...
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
You work for Eli Lilly, but you are a very unusual figure at Eli Lilly. Is that a fair statement?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Surely one logical step here is that you start to, you're not just giving someone a drug, you're giving someone a drug in combination with a set of wearables that allow us to maximize the value of the drug. therapeutic, right?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Is that what we're, are we going to be, are we going to be, are you going to be getting from your pharmacist or your doctor a package of things to take home along with your medication?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Yeah. Who controls this data? So interesting, you began this conversation in talking about the multitude of steps that exist between the manufacturer of some of these medicines and the user. That's right. Now you're talking about a system where presumably the manufacturer can speak directly to the patient.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Does this mean that you cut out some of the middlemen?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
No, no, I was talking about your background.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
My mom... is in a nursing home has arthritis yeah which acts up on and so she moves around a lot this is a perfect tool for her so somebody is so does she is the model here that she checks her movement scores and that's a way of and she can choose she can see oh this is time to share that my data with a practitioner isn't it more efficient for her to have someone who is
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
or AI or something that's continuously monitoring her?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
But we're moving. What's interesting, a lot of these things, the implication of what you're talking about is we are moving the primary point of contact from the hospital or the doctor's office to the home. Correct.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Well, one last question for you. Define what success looks like for you. So you're how old are you? I just turned 50. You're a young man. I get to hear that very often. So let's assume you retire from Lilly at 65. Okay. And so take me 15 years into the future and tell me what would have to happen for you to feel like your time at Lilly has been a success.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners. Happy New Year. 2025 is going to be a great year for this podcast, and I want to give you a little preview of what to expect. The main event of the year is going to be a multi-part series from Alabama, true crime, but with a very Revisionist History twist. So keep that in mind. Then before we drop that, we're going to do two other smaller things.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
How many people do you think have moved from Apple to a life sciences company? About five. I know them all. Do you guys get together? I recruited most of them. Oh, I see. Yeah. And how did it, sorry, this is a kind of, I want to start on this little tangent, but how did that work exactly? So somebody comes to you and says, have you ever thought, to work for a pharma company.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Yeah. I was thinking, you know, when you were talking, and this is maybe a little bit far-fetched, but in the world of deterrence, So the question is, if I have a law that punishes you for a certain crime, the deterrent value of that law is a function of three things. The certainty of punishment. The swiftness of punishment and the severity of punishment.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
And of the three, we spend the most time thinking about severity. Secondly, thinking about certainty. And the one that we neglect is swiftness. It takes years and years and years. And the argument that many people make is that swiftness is actually the most potent technique. of the three, if you know you're getting punished the next day.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Now, it's funny, because if you map that onto what you're talking about, you were talking about the idea of getting medicine the same day. What you're saying is the swiftness variable is the neglected one here. And what if, if we improve swiftness, do you think we would change the psychological circumstances around which people use drugs?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
In other words, would the adherence problem be solved if we address the swiftness problem?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Well, this has been really fascinating. Best of luck with all the work you're doing. I hope next time I see you, I'll have at least three wearables.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence and Ben-Nadav Hafri. Our editor is Karen Shikurji, mastering by Jake Gorski. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Matt Romano, Eric Sandler, and Kira Posey. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is an iHeart Podcast.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Yeah. So let's start. So you make this. When did you start your job at Lilly? May 17th, 2021. Wow. So go through, just off the top of your head, the most surprising things you learned moving from Silicon Valley to a life sciences company.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
So there is certainty that this product will be approved, but just the... You can be 10 years away and be certain it'll be approved, but know that you still have 10 years worth of work to do?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
If you remember last season, we did a series of interviews with screenwriters on their favorite ideas that never made it to the screen. We're doing another round of interviews this year, half a dozen or so. And then we're also going to do a smaller batch of old school revisionist history episodes, some weird, some funny, some that will break your heart.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
But I want to go back to, so you come to Lilly, and I'm curious, so what did they want from you?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
But is there, within the portfolio of things that Lilly does, do you touch on everything, or just are you... Focused on the consumer side of the business?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
first in that chain of interest groups change the way you do business or change the way you think about what you're doing?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Over here at Pushkin, we've been hard at work, all with the goal of bringing you a little bit of audio happiness. Stay tuned, everyone. Welcome to Revisionist History. We have a special treat today.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
You have a whole table full of goodies over there. I want you to pick a goody and let's use this as a specific, walk me through the kind of thinking behind the product, the specific challenges, how it represents this process that you've been talking about. You pick.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Just so people know, about a couple of feet from Diego is there. There's about, it looks like, eight to ten mysterious boxes that are... So I have to...
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Well, the thing is, if you have small children as I do, you think exclusively in terms of shiny little gifts. I almost said, can you bring snacks?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
I had a chance to sit down with a guy named Diogo Rao, who worked for years at Apple, way up high, and then left to become the chief information and digital officer at Eli Lilly and Company, one of the biggest drug makers in the world. Diogo, as you will learn, is irreverent and fascinating and sees a good 10 years ahead of the rest of us.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
What would be, it's just fascinating, is there a particular kind of medicine for which the counterfeiters' motivation is greatest?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Yeah. How long did it take to develop that particular technology?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
So what you're saying is what you have is a technology that could be a platform for building an interaction between the consumer of the pill, the patient.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
At the end of our conversation, Diogo said to me, you know, we never got to AI, which is true. Can you imagine a conversation about technology so interesting that you never get to the subject of artificial intelligence? That's what you're about to hear. We're going to talk about a whole number of things, but I wanted you to start because you're a very unusual figure.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
Yeah. But you've put that RFID tag on the box. Correct. But now there's still a thing inside the box. There's still a thing inside the box.
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
What about protecting against an unauthorized use of the medicine? What if the wrong person taps their phone against?
Revisionist History
The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
So this is beta with the box. How many years before you think you'll be actually in the pill itself?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
That must have been amazing. That's right. Then I began to hear my mother when she would get angry. She would lapse, not into full-on Patois, but You could hear the Jamaican coming out of voice.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
That idea as well. No, it's funny, because I'm making the same, on some level, observations you are as a child, but I have no... What sidetracks me at that age is not how people are speaking, but how they're explaining things. I get obsessed in the same way that you, I think, it's funny, in the same way that you get obsessed with how your people are expressing themselves. Grammar, yeah.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So who do I go to see to explain how people from Buffalo end up sounding like English royalty? You guessed it, John McWhorter. My point is that there is a certain kind of question about language, about race, about why we speak the way we speak, for which the only answer is, let's call up John McWhorter. I love John McWhorter.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
To me, it was about, we're playing hearts and our cousin doesn't know how to play hearts and my brother starts explaining hearts to my cousin. He's doing it all wrong. That was my obsession. I'm six, I'm just like, why, why, start with the point of the game. Like, what are you doing? You know, like that. And I realized how deeply kind of... And it bothered you? Oh, to this day, it works.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
No, no, no. The surest way for me to completely lose my cool is to read instructions that someone has written for something. Just like, what is this? I mean, come on. I want to call up the company and volunteer my services. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with John McWhorter. I want to talk a little bit about your, and by the way,
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I always find this question, if it's asked of me, deeply annoying. So you don't have to answer it if you don't want to. But I wanted to talk about your kind of place in the culture right now, which is really interesting to me. And I have a grand unified John McWhorter theory.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Here's my theory. At any given moment in sort of popular culture or intellectual popular culture, there is someone who is allowed to get away with saying anything. You're that person. I think you get to say whatever you want. For a variety of reasons, which I'd like you to unpack.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Well, you wrote a beautiful, was it an op-ed? I can't remember where you wrote it. a thing about your own experience with affirmative action. Yes. Nobody else could write that. True. You write about... You, in your column, are constantly... in a very beautiful way, kind of setting down the rules for discourse, particularly around your code-switching column of yesterday.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Like, all right, you're not allowed to do that. You're going to do it this way.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Jasmine Crockett. You said very gently and nicely, you said to her, come on now. You get to do that. I do. You know what? Who else can do that?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And when he said he had a new book coming out called Pronoun Trouble, I asked him, could I interview you about it? And lucky for me, he said yes. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, we're going to run the conversation I had with John McWhorter this spring at the 92nd Street Y, which was delightful.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Part of it is, well, I think there's other layers. But one is that as a linguist, as someone who pays as much attention to language as you do, you're better at it. By which I mean that just the example you just gave, on parsing the difference between cowardly and hopeless. That someone who was not as attuned to the nuances of language might have said cowardly.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
There's quite a dramatic difference in the way that would be perceived and read. But you are professionally alert to those nuances. And that permits you a great deal more freedom. I think that most people dramatically underestimate how important word choices and how acutely sensitive we are to the words that are used, particularly if they're directed at us.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I want to talk about my favorite chapter in the book. What's the favorite? It's the chapter about you.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It is. So just to explain briefly to everyone the structure of the book.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
But you, so tell us the problem with you. You is a problem.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I did this interview with John right after finishing up the Joe Rogan episode of Revisionist History. If you listen to it, you'll know that I spent a lot of time talking about how to properly interview someone, how hard it is and how Joe Rogan could learn a lot from someone like Oprah.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Thou is the one we miss.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So let's convince us about why we need to have thou back.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So what's your preference here? There's two parallel strands of argument here, and I want to figure out which side you're on. So you originally is the plural. Thou is the singular. Singular. What has happened is that you has come to encompass both. But we've developed these colloquial forms, y'all, et cetera, to take up the plural position, and we've moved you to the singular.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Do you think you should remain the singular, or should you be moved back into the plural position?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I was a fan of John McWhorter long before I met him for the first time. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University and a music lover and a New York Times columnist, basically a Renaissance man. It was maybe 2019 when we first spoke. At the time, I was working on something about Tom Bradley, who was mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Why did, I was thinking of, you know, so if someone wrote the hymn How Great Thou Art Today, it would be how great you are. How great you are. Then sings my soul. It's not as good. My savior God to thee. How great you are. How great you are. It doesn't work.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And that episode was very much on my mind as I was interviewing the quarter because I was thinking, oh, am I going to measure up? Where do I land on the Oprah-Joe Rogan continuum? I'll let you be the judge of that. Although I will say this is not exactly a fair test. The degree of difficulty with interviewing someone as charming as John McWhorter is very, very low. Hello, everyone.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
You have to use you. But no, you've said there's problems with both positions. But come on, you're not answering my question. Trying. If I make you language czar, and you get to push... you to the singular plural position and either reinstate thou or establish yous and y'all. Which move are you making?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
One of the things that had not occurred to me until I read that chapter was that in the South, y'all is only, is the plural. That is to say, and if it's addressed to a person, you're invoking unseen others. I hadn't realized it. So if I go to the South and I say, well, that's what y'all think, and I mean just you, I've committed a violation.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I want to go back to something. You said, well, we need to distinguish between the... Plural and singular you. But what problem does it create for us when we can't?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
What I would like to see is the country divided on this question. There would be thou districts, and then they would be y'all districts.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Because I don't like y'all, to be honest. I do like thou. I would like thou to come back.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
But is that... This is another sort of interesting language question, though. Is that because, is that going to be as true for our children? Will our children have the same associations with thou? I mean, once, why do I think, I sang that hymn for a reason. I grew up singing that hymn. All of my associations with thou are biblical.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
If we move into a world in which people's association with religious practice is vanishing, then doesn't that free us up to go back and pick up a lot of that stuff?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Thanks for coming. John, thank you for... agreeing to join us tonight. Malcolm, thank you for having me. I was thinking back when I first met you, and I think it was I called you up or went to see you because I was doing something on the first... black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And what about the, you mentioned this in, I believe, in passing, the English use of one. You do, yes. One, do the English upper crust resolve this problem by, if I say one in the way that English, one doesn't think that, does one? Right. What am I, am I explicitly freeing up you to be in the plural form? Is that what I'm doing?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Is that why they're doing that? Why does the English upper class use one instead of you?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
John, sorry to be a dog with a bone here, but why don't we all use the English one?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
As a kid, we would make fun of this because... My father would, I think he would use this locution and then he abandoned it. Because you're trapped once you start with the one. One doesn't think that one should do that, does one? And then you realize this is an endless stream of ones in your future.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And I was listening to tapes of him speaking, and he sounded like the whitest guy I could imagine.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It is. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with John McWhorter.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Some of these questions are really good. The questions are always fun. How does English compare with other languages in terms of words on the move, the shifting of words' meaning over time?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And you gave... Wait, tell me a little... Before we even get into this, it was so much fun, your answer. Explain to me why that would be so...
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Someone once told me, I don't know if this is true as a Canadian, that in Quebec, the French that is spoken is archaic French. So why is Quebecois French not moving at the same pace as French French? So that does suggest that different languages move at different rates.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
What are your thoughts on black American English being adopted by younger generations in the slang they use? I'm assuming this question is about by younger and in some cases non-black generations.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Yeah. We have to end, sadly. But I want to ask you one last question, and that is one of my... It's my favorite question for someone like you. Let's imagine you were made language czar of America with absolute powers. I want you to tell me the three... Language fixes you would impose on all of us. You want y'all. We've given that to you. I want three new ones, and then we're done.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
No one uses more exclamation marks points in email than me. You know this. Are you really doing this? Oh, my God. It's so excessive. It's to the point now where I think that with people I'm regularly corresponding with, if I only use two, they'll think that I'm mad at them. And so why is Malcolm so cold today? He's cut back to two exclamation. So I gotta do like three and four.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Well, you might be angry. But you might well be angry, John.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Is the correct response to it is what it is, it isn't what it is? Is that what, yeah, but, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it isn't what it is. In this case.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
John, this has been great fun. This is a wonderful book. You should all go and get it and give it to your friends as well. And thank you for joining us tonight. And thank you, John. Thank you, Malcolm. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Coming up on Revisionist History, an episode about faces, an episode on raccoons, and another on English muffins.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben-Nadav Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakerji. Mixed and mastered by Sarah Bruguier. Engineered by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original score and music by Luis Guerra. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and Greta Kohn. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Yeah. Didn't I say that? I think you said something along that lines. And we were, the thing, the fascinating question is when that, did that stop? It stopped. Yeah. He doesn't sound like that if he's the mayor of Los Angeles today.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
The minute... I mentioned Tom Brady to you, you were like, oh! I remember I played you a tape. You were like, oh! And I realized, oh, this is old hat for John. This is what it means to be a linguist. You're constantly entertaining, asking yourself those kinds of questions. You can't let a... More or less.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
And while I listened to old tapes of Bradley, I was struck by something I heard. Listen.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
When you say you have... This sounds like a fantastic obsession, by the way. How does that, like... Is this something you do sort of for fun? In other words, do you have places you go to find these historical... Or are you just watching a movie from the 30s and you stop it and you go back five minutes and you play up a... Both of those things.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
There is nothing there to hide. I want everybody to know that Tom Bradley's life has been an open book, and this is another demonstration of that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
When did you, at what point in your career, life, whatever, did you realize that this was something of particular interest to you?
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Tom Bradley is black, born in Texas, grew up in South Central Los Angeles. So I went to see McWhorter, went to his rabbit warren of an office, played him that bit of tape and said, explain this to me. Why does a black guy whose parents were sharecroppers from Texas sound like Cary Grant? And for an hour of the most wonderful conversation, he explained to me exactly why he did.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
John, you've got to do better than that. You can't say, for some reason, it interests me. You've got to tell me. You've got to tell us more than that.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Wait, my wife, who's black, she uses that, that's where it comes from. What? She sticks head in the craziest places.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Yeah. Today she said, I had went. Now understand, this is a highly educated, went to Princeton corporate lawyer. She just takes head and just kind of like... shovels it in randomly into her sentences.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
So her father... Wait, I want to... Her father grew up in both Harlem and Jacksonville, Florida. Mm-hmm. And he would be growing up in the 50s.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Now, you said something earlier that you didn't speak black English growing up. Why not? That's deep, Malcolm, actually.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
Fast forward a few years, I was doing our series on the 1936 Olympics, and I got obsessed with Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the most important journalists in the world in the 1930s. And I heard some old tapes of her, and she sounded like she was the Duchess of York, only, do you know where she grew up? Buffalo.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
I remember the first time I saw that kind of, the switching, as a kid in Jamaica, seeing my uncle, you know, a brown-skinned Jamaican, who talked to us in the Queen's English, and he was getting gas, had a gas pump. That must have been amazing. I'm maybe nine. He gets out of the car, and he starts talking to the guy pumping the gas. And there's some, it wasn't just that he switched into patois.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
It was that he also, his manner completely changed.
Revisionist History
The Origin of “You” – A Conversation with John McWhorter
They were doing that Jamaican thing where they're shouting at each other even though they're not angry. Yes. Which I had never seen before. I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my entire life. That he could go from literally, Malcolm blah, blah, blah, and then boom.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Yeah, I don't think country music does good love songs. I think it does good breakup songs, heartbreak songs. It does the reverse.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
So country music, which is consistent with its role in American popular culture, it is the downer to rock music's upper. Right. Rock music. And I did a whole revisions history episode on on this. It was, you know, the the striking thing about rock music is the inability of rock musicians to write effective sad songs. Their sad songs are terrible. They're just not sad. Right.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
They're not believably sad. They're rock and roll songs that are kind of, you know, trying to pretend to like I gave the example of of Wild Horses, which is supposed to be a sad song. It's not sad. What's sad about it? It's faux sad and faux country. It's also banal and like wild, wild horses. Like what is going on? I mean, it's just like it doesn't work.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Country, though, is totally comfortable in that kind of emotional morass. That's the whole—it's depressive music. That's the whole point. It's the South. It's like white guys who lost the Civil War, never got over it. That's what it is. You know, I was talking to some guy yesterday about the Church of Christ, which is a almost overwhelmingly Southern denomination of Christian denomination.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
And Nashville is the heart of— of Church of Christ. The music in Church of Christ churches is insane. The Church of Christ famously has no orchestral music. It's all a cappella, which is way more demanding. The Church of Christ, it is not a happy denomination. It's not Pentecostals jumping up and down and welcoming the risen Lord. No.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
It's like white Southerners bemoaning the loss of their status and be bowing their head in the face of a vengeful God.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
And no piano to lift their spirits. No organ, no piano, no nothing. Use your own voice, damn it. Which is why, by the way, so many country singers come from the Church of Christ. Amy Grant is Church of Christ. Merle Haggard is Church of Christ. I could go on and on. The list, if you look it up, is insane.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
So, like, is it any surprise that country music, which comes from Nashville, the epicenter of the Church of Christ, is, like, the least happy music known to man? No, it's, like, depressive.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
One of my favorite country songs about heartbreak is, I think it's George Strait. Does Fort Worth ever cross your mind? Which is a classic. I mean, you can't, if we're going to talk about country music and sad songs, we're starting with George Strait. Now, okay, so I'm going to read to you some lyrics to Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind? This is the opening stanza.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Cold Fort Worth beer, this is how it begins. Just ain't no good for jealous. I've tried it night after night. You're in someone else's arms in Dallas. Does Fort Worth ever cross your mind? Darling, while you're busy burning bridges, burn one for me if you get time.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
What's hilarious about this is this song is all about parsing the cultural distinction between Fort Worth and Dallas, which looms large in the minds of people from Texas. And the rest of us are like, what? This song makes no sense to anyone who's not from Texas. I want to give you a, you left me here to be with him in Dallas. And I know it hurts you at the time.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Well, I wonder now if it makes a difference. Does Fort Worth ever cross your mind? It's 20 miles away. It's a whole song. It's a whole song about a stretch of interstate. It's just so fantastic. This is what's so hilarious about it.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
It's so petty and so, but like, this is why rock and roll can't do a breakup song, because a breakup song requires a certain level of emotional and narrative specificity, and rock and roll is too obsessed with being universal.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
No, no detail. Did Prince ever write a song about, did St. Paul ever cross your mind? No. No. No, because that's not the business he's in. He's not in the business of evoking this kind of strong emotion. He was aware of the distinction between Minneapolis and St. Paul, but chose to overlook it in his songwriting. That's why he's a rock musician or a R&B musician and not a country musician.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
No, no, no. You have to understand the song here. The reason why it's not, does Dallas ever cross your mind? That's a wholly different song. that Fort Worth is the ugly stepsister. Fort Worth is one step down the rung. So she left him to upgrade in Dallas. To move up. Yeah. That's why it hurts. If she left him for a dude in Fort Worth, he's fine. He's moved on. He's fine. Another girl in Dallas.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
No, no, no, no, no. He's in Fort Worth. What did she do? Got up one morning, drove down the interstate and upgraded her situation, leaving him in a pile of tears in Fort Worth.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Where I want to live. No, no. What you're just identifying is that she's made stronger stuff. That's what that's about. And some of this is like, is bathos. Am I pronouncing that right? Is it bathos or bathos? Yeah. Pathos. Pathos or pathos? No, I think bathos is the word I want. Bathos? B-A-T-H. Bathos. Definition. Definition.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Anti-climax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous. Like that's what – does Fort Worth ever cross your mind is Bethos, right? That's what that is, right? That's the appeal of the song.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
But that's a song. But think about that song. The way he sings it, he sings it like it's a sad song. I'm going to love you forever and ever.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Forever and ever. It sounds like he's committing to a prison sentence.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
I once had a friend named Mike, and he didn't know me very well, and we decided to go to a ball game together. This is in the 80s. And we drove from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore to see the Orioles. And I played some mixtapes in the car. And at the end, he turned to me and he said, I had no idea how depressed you are.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
Because every single song in the mixtape was a song about some kind of broken heart, suffering, sadness, death. I don't know. That's what I want in a song.
Revisionist History
Malcolm Breaks Down the Perfect Break Up Song
No, but I don't like upbeat songs. It's my problem with rock and roll. It's just like, just calm down already. Can we wallow in our emotions for a moment here and not just beating our head against the wall in ecstasy? It strikes me as unseemly.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Yeah, well, it's funny. You did an in-depth analysis of the case, which I just listened to last night. I did the same thing on my podcast, two episodes on the case. You're right, reaching different conclusions. Although I think there are lots of interesting... issues that you raise, it's a complicated case. I think we could start there. More complicated, I think, than people realize.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And complicated by the fact that, as you go into this in some detail in one of your episodes, that Floyd, at the time of his arrest, is not a well man. He's on fentanyl. His heart's lungs are full of fluidness. He's got, what is it, 75% blockage of his arteries to his heart. So it's complicated. And in difficult cases, you know that legal axiom, difficult cases make bad law.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
We're in a difficult case here. My big issue with your analysis is... I think when you look at the autopsy results and you see that George Floyd was a very sick man before his arrest, he's vulnerable, that supports the argument against Chauvin. It doesn't undermine it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
The second thing I would say, and this bears in this as well, is that I'm much more focused on Thomas Lane, who is the first of the police officers on the scene, And Thomas Lane throughout the entire incident is constantly telling Derek Chauvin to get off Floyd, that Floyd is really not well, that he's having difficulty breathing.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And Lane is the one who brings up excited delirium, which you bring up as you see that as that. I think that's, there's where you and I agree. I think that's why he dies. He dies because of some combination of his drug use, his preexisting conditions, and the fact that he's in a position where he's in respiratory distress because he's prone, right? He's got weight on his...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Sometime on his neck and largely on his back and chest. And have you ever been, Ben, have you ever been in the exact position that Floyd was in? I had someone do that to me. It's really hard to breathe.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
They're yelling. The people who are around are yelling for Chauvin to get off Floyd.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Yeah. Yeah, I did the second of, I did two-part series on the case, and the second part was essentially a defense of Thomas Lane. And I don't think that Thomas Lane deserved to go to prison. Thomas Lane, to my mind, is the only voice of reason at the scene. He's the one who says this man is not well. Thomas Lane's the one who calls 911.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And he calls 911 not just because Floyd has cut his mouth, but because he believes that he is suffering from excited delirium and that he's in a very vulnerable state. And then Lane says to... Chauvin repeatedly, this guy's not doing well. You got to get off him and you got to put him in the recovery position.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
I would also point out that when you was making a distinction between these two, is he someone who was going to die because he had these preexisting issues or does he die because of uh, positional asphyxia, you know, the, what the cops did to him.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
My suggestion is that it's, it's a combination of both that the reason why, and I wanted to, I brought up this morning, I was looking at the, um, the Minneapolis use of force guidelines and is, uh, one of the things they say is the maximal restraint technique, which is what
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Chauvin's doing, shall only be used in situations where handcuffed subjects are combative and still pose a threat to themselves, officers, or others, or could cause significant damage to property if not properly restrained.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And I think the issue here is that, and the reason everyone got so upset with Chauvin's behavior, is that having restrained Floyd, having gotten him under control, he doesn't get off. And you're not supposed to do that have someone in that position for nine minutes. And the reason it's so dangerous to put someone in that position for nine minutes is not that she'll kill.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
If someone put me in that position for nine minutes, I'm not going to die, right? I'll be very uncomfortable. I'll be short of breath, but I won't die. But the reason you don't do it for 90 minutes to someone who you've just arrested is you don't know what their underlying conditions is, right? You don't know whether they have a heart condition. You don't know whether they have...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
COVID and lungs filled with fluid. And so you have to be careful. There's a point that the Minneapolis head of detectives makes in the trial when he says, he repeats that police adage, when someone is in your custody, he's in your care. And Lane has that position. He's like, this man is now in our care and he's suffering. And Chauvin seems indifferent, and that's the issue now.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Let me ask you this. So one of the things I think that the difference in the approach that you took in your series and the approach that we took in ours was that we were focused on the question of whether Derek Chauvin was a good police officer. And you were focused on the question of whether the legal system treated him fairly. And they're different questions, as you point out.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
But I would love for you to respond to our question. Do you think that the way he conducted himself on the night of the George Floyd arrest, was good police work.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Thomas Lane does not believe that Derek Chauvin was doing good police work on the night of the George Floyd arrest. So there are other- officers, peer officers, who look, who were there on the scene, who were aghast at what Chauvin was doing. Genevieve Hansen, who is one of the first to arrive on the scene, who was a firefighter, a Minneapolis firefighter who was out for a walk that night.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
She's the one, one of the most vocal voices in the crowd who's screaming to Chauvin, get off him. He's dying, get off him. He's dying. She's someone who's very familiar with first responding work. And she was aghast at his behavior.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
The chief of... The 9-11 dispatcher on the night of... Who was watching the whole thing on... In Minneapolis Police Department had a camera on the corner of 38th and Chicago. So she was able to watch it. She's the first person to watch the video. She watched it in real time from the 9-11 dispatch office. She's so unbelievably...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
shocked at what she's seeing that she asks whether the camera's frozen. She can't believe he's still on, he's still doing that technique for nine minutes on Floyd. And she calls for the first time in her seven years as a, as a 911 dispatcher calls the Sergeant in the local precinct and says, you've got to get down there. Something bad is going on. So there's lots of people who,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
credible people that night who are observing his technique and are saying, this is not the way police officers are supposed to handle a case. And if the guy has been saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, as you point out correctly, this is a crucial point that I'm so happy you made. Floyd saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, before they put him on the ground, right?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
It's the first thing he says. He's clearly in distress even before they put handcuffs on him. But if a man's saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, over and over again, the last thing you want to do is put him in a prone position with your knee on his neck and his back.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And that is worse than that. It's worse than that. We can talk about revealed preference. What police officers did following that case was to leave the police forces around the country in droves.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Yeah. No, I and believe me, I have been writing about this for much of my career. I think it's a deeply important and fascinating question that this is the hardest. This is one of the hardest professions we have. And the consequences of screwing up or making a bad judgment call as a police officer are very often that you go to prison.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Um, and so that's not true of, you know, if I make a bad judgment call, I don't go to prison, right? Nobody shoots me. Nobody, you know, so I totally understand that it's hard. Um, one of the things I did when I was doing my series on revisionist history about this was called up a bunch of police chiefs.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And I asked them on this question about, you know, about had them walk to the George Floyd case with me to get their perspective. And what they talk about is it is absolutely the case that a lot of police work is inherently complicated.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And one, I talked to this really wonderful police chief named Daniel Oates, who was talking about, you can't even use use of force complaints as a proxy for how good a police officer is. It's just, there's too much noise in the system. You don't know. It depends on where they're working. And you make this point, where they're working, how many hours they're working.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
But he did say, look, at any given time, there are on a police force, 5% of your force is not up to the task. And one of the real public health, his take-home lesson from George Floyd was, it is too hard for police officers to get rid of the 5% who aren't any good. And that's union rules.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And if you told me that the number one reform that came out of George Floyd was that we cracked down on the excessive protections for bad police officers that union contracts have created, I would say I'm happy. That's not what happened. And that's one of the reasons I'm not happy with it.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
But I do think there are really thoughtful ways in which we could have responded to this that would have made policing better. And giving, you know, and this guy Daniel Oster and many other police officers, many other police chiefs would say, look, we could prevent these cases in the future if you just gave us a little more discretion about who we can hire and fire on our police departments.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
It's impossible to fire at that police officer.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Yeah, it's funny. I was doing my research for my series on vicious history, and I read this really, really thoughtful analysis of the case, talking about this question of union regulations and how collective bargaining agreements with police unions have made it really hard to fire bad cops, and that's a public policy reform we really need to push forward.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And I realized when I finished reading it, it was written by someone who was high up at Black Lives Matter. So the point is, they did say this, but it didn't, you're right, it's not, I thought this was a really important part of the message that got ignored or, and they themselves weren't making this argument by the end. And I think that was a mistake.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
I think that if I was redoing, rethinking the Black Lives Matter response in retrospect, I'd do it differently. I think they should have talked much more about those kinds of very pragmatic structural changes we could make to the system that would make it easier for police officers to do their job. I'm totally with you, by the way, on hiring more police. That's, you know...
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
We have misallocated in America. We spend way too much money on prisons and way too little money on cops. And every criminologist who's ever studied crime will tell you that it is such a better investment to invest upfront in the prevention of crime than it is to invest at the end of the process. But there's something else I want to bring up with you.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
on show then we're doing too much agreeing here Ben we're supposed to be at each other's throats so I wanted to here's my biggest problem with your series I think I read I think I listened to it all now correct me if I'm wrong I don't believe you talked about the John Pope case No, I didn't. So the John Pope case is the one where I really... It's from three years earlier.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And it's a mom calls 911 and says, my son has assaulted me. And we have all of the body cam footage, the whole thing.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Because to my mind... That case, which is Chauvin goes into a room and there's a 14-year-old boy playing on his phone and Chauvin says, get up. And the boy says, I didn't do anything. My mom's drunk. She always calls 9-11. Chauvin says, get up. The boy slowly gets up and Chauvin says,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
after like five seconds, goes to the boy, smacks him over the head repeatedly with his flashlight, draws blood, puts him in a choke hold, throws him on the ground, and then puts his knee on his neck and his other knee on his back and holds him there for 13 minutes. Now, when you see that, you're like, this was a kid, a 14-year-old. Every time I watch that video, I start crying.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And after watching that video, I was like, Chauvin is not a police officer. You can't do that to a 14-year-old kid whose mom's drunk. I just saw that he's in the wrong profession. He's got to do something else. And to my mind, this whole thing, the other cops, we see it in what's called the John Pope video. There are like six other cops in the room.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And when Chauvin gets on the boy's neck, and the boy's whimpering like a 14-year-old would. You have kids, right? Yeah. The way that a kid would, who doesn't understand what's going on. Why is this man like beating me up with a flashlight and sitting on my neck because my mom's drunk? Well, it's, listen, again, this is heartbreaking. And the other thing was the other cops all file out of the room.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
They can't take it. Like they know that Chauvin is a bad egg. Okay.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
But in retrospect, it's a clue to the kind of police officer Derek Chauvin is.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
The only significance of the John Pope video is that, and this points to a structural problem within the Minneapolis Police Department. No one seems to have watched that video until after the Chauvin case. But had someone watched it at the time, I think that there would have been serious questions raised about Chauvin's future on the Minneapolis Police Department.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
And we would never have had George Floyd case because he wouldn't have been around to do it. I mean, so it does say, I do think that there is a management failure here where the reason we have these body cam cameras is that they do collect, you know, meaningful evidence about an officer's behavior and the situation in which they're operating. And that video is,
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
You know, the Floyd video is complicated. The John Poe video is not complicated. He's beating up a kid. Did you watch it, Ben?
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Yeah, I know you like facts over feelings, but sometimes feelings tell us something important about a situation.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2170 - The Atlantic’s GIANT Fake News Screw-Up
Yeah, Ben, it was a pleasure.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism
Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here. On this season of Revisionist History, we're going where no podcast has ever gone before. In combination with my three-year-old, we defend the show that everyone else hates. I'm talking, of course, about Paw Patrol.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism
My son watches Paw Patrol. I hate it. Everyone hates it, except for me. Plus, we investigate everything from why American sirens are so unbearably loud, to the impact of face blindness on social connection, to the secret behind Thomas's English muffins, perfect nooks and crannies. And also, we go after Joe Rogan. Are you ready, Joe? I'm coming for you. You won't want to miss it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism
Listen to Revisionist History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Up First from NPR
Harvard President says critics' "fire is misdirected"
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
Up First from NPR
Trump's Defense Pick, United Healthcare CEO Killed, Mass Deportations And Jobs
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
WWDTM: Brian Tyree Henry
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Shabby, you don't know this yet. You will someday. Oh. You know, the market share capture, the brain share capture of toddlers by Sesame Street is like 95%. It's the same.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And her argument would be that this would be the single greatest way to solve, like, the single greatest short-term solution to mankind's problems. By the way, I think she's 100% right here. This is such a genius idea. But my point is, if you want to participate in the world in a kind of ethical way, you have to do a version of this in your life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
So I have a simple thing I do, which is I try and change the people I... I follow a very small number of people on Twitter, and I constantly change them. And so I cycle through... like I'm always like once a week or something, I drop two or three people and add two or three people just trying to, cause you get exposed to new.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I did my 23andMe and I'm 23% Igbo. Oh, my God. Which is so fantastic. And I put it on Twitter. And this is like every Nigerian on Twitter is like, oh, my God, fantastic. But every single one was positive. Like it was the most, you know, inclusive experience I've ever had in my life. I was very happy. But it was obvious because Jamaicans are all Igbo, right? Jamaica is just Nigeria.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And I try to get the, I also want, so I, I follow, um, The Ukrainian war, I don't know why, really closely, but entirely through these ex-military guys who are obsessed with logistics. I love these guys. And it's stuff I would never in a million years have heard of before. None of what they say is in the news. It's all so weird. It's super interesting. My favorite guy is this guy, Trent Chilenko.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I love Trent Chilenko. I want to meet him one day. Who's like, by the way, he's been saying that Russians are going to lose. He's been saying this since the beginning of the war. And he had this great tweet early in the war where he found a photograph of a Russian transport carrier, like a truck, that was stuck in the mud. Yeah. And he zeroes in on the tires.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Do you remember this? Yes, I remember this. Made in the USSR. And he was like, they've lost. They can't win. Their tires are from before the wall fell. And he goes this whole rant about tires, about how you got to be rotating the tires. If the truck's in storage, the tire's going to break apart. It's like, and if there's tires of that, that says that your this doesn't work and you don't have this.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And I was like, so that's like, you have to keep exposing yourself. That's how you learn about what you need to update, right? So now when I read something, about the war, I have a slightly different perspective because I have trends in my head. And I'm asking a different set of questions than I would have otherwise. It's not that I'm a skeptic.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It's just that I have a different, you know, I'm looking at it from a different perspective. Like,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Yeah. There, I thought about this recently because I was, I go to this little coffee shop in my nearby hometown upstate and there's always these two old guys who, who are in the corner, they're there every time I go there, and they're always having an argument about, not an argument, a long discussion about movies. They're movie junkies.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
They have encyclopedic knowledge, and I eavesdrop on them all the time. And I realize that there's something really lovely there, which is that they have clearly a huge part of their identity is about the enjoyment and appreciation of that particular art form. And
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I would imagine that if one of those guys was a Trump or MAGA type and the other was a diehard liberal, it wouldn't matter because they had found this area that was more important to their identity and where they could find common ground and where they could find joy in each other's company. And it's those kinds of spaces that I feel have been eroded.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I use the movie example for a reason, which was for the longest time in many cultures around the world, The movies occupied this huge position in the way people related to the world.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
They saw... You know, people talk to people who grew up in New York in the 30s and 40s. They would see a movie every day. And that's what they would talk about on the playground. And that's what they would, you know, and, you know, sports function in that way. And I sometimes think that what we need actually weirdly is more sports, not less sports.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Because sports are one of the few things that can occupy a big space and bring people together. And you can have a long conversation with someone about sports and politics will never come up. You know, even my parents would be a good example. My white father, black mother, a lot of people looked at them and said, you know, you guys are so different. And that's not how they organized their life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It's my advanced theory of Jamaica.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Oh, yes. That's amazing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
They thought they were exactly the same. Two committed Christians who, you know, their fathers read the same books. I think that's the issue. It's just not good to spend all your time wallowing in political arguments.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Wait, what is it? So 23% Ebo? That's a significant amount.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Yeah. I'm so, I realize now when I'm outside of live, like many people, I'm lost. Yeah. I mean, I watched Perfect Couple. Yeah. Why did I watch Perfect Couple on Netflix? That's like, I'm never getting, I've got like six, I've got five episodes in. I'm like, I cannot believe that I have just devoted myself.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
On the Jamaican front, I was at the World Championships, track championships, and I see Shelley Ann Fraser-Price, one of my heroes. So she's like this big. I go up and say, hello, my name is Malcolm. I don't know if you know this. I'm half Jamaican, she says. There's no such thing as half Jamaican. There's only Jamaican. Yeah. That's the right attitude. That is the right attitude.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
The Harvard chapter? The admissions?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Let's talk through that. It's all about this strange fact that there is no university in the United States that has more division one varsity sports than Harvard. So everyone thinks that the sports obsessed schools are like in the South. No, no, no, no. The most sports obsessed school is Harvard. Not only that, they're so obsessed with the day.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
If you're an athlete, they have the front doors for smart kids who compete and it's really hard to get in the front door. They have a back door for athletes and rich people. Of course. And the back door is way easier to get in. The simplest way to get into Harvard is to be a good athlete, not to be a good student. So the question is, why would they care so much about sports that they would...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Like create a special backdoor for them and also play so many. And I think the answer is in the kind of sports they're playing. So what sports are, if they have all these rowing. Rowing, got it. Heavyweight and lightweight rowing. And each team is like... What is it, 25? I've forgotten. Some incredible number. Fencing. Okay. Fencing. Sailing. Oh, got it. How do you feel about sailing? Sailing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Interesting, tennis. Now, rugby. Now, rugby, so you guys are Africans, particularly you, you come, you guys are serious rugby playing people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Understand that in the American context. Oh, no.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Rugby's a very different animal. Yes. Not playing rugby and, you know, field hockey, squash. You can see where I'm going with this. So they reserve. You add up all those numbers, men and women, right? Coaches, kids sitting on the bench. You add all those numbers up and you see that they have reserved an entire team.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Huge pool of admission slots for white people with enough money to be good at white people sports. Yeah. It's the whole thing is like so hilariously obvious. And like they're pretending for years they've been pretending. Oh, no, no. We we believe the athlete brings something special to the camp. No bullshit. Like I do. I do this thing with tennis.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
There's no such thing as 23% Nigerian. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
In order to play Division I tennis in this country, you must have played junior tennis. Okay. In order to play junior tennis, your parents have to – I did the math – have to spend at a minimum $50,000 a year on your game and probably north of $100,000.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
When you add up all the things you – so basically what Harvard is saying is we've got whatever it is, 12 spots on our tennis team, which we are reserving for people who have parents capable of spending $100,000 a year on their games. Like, it's like – I mean –
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
If you don't do this, if you have an elite school that just takes the smartest kids, what that means is your school's culture is going to turn over with each new wave of smart immigrants that come. So you're going to be all Jewish in the 50s, then you're going to be all Korean now, and you're going to be all Nigerian in like 10 years.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I think it's an amazing thing.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
But you can see if your conception of what your school is is a place where you have lots of preppy kids in blazers, you can't play that game.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Because you're going to wake up one day and you're going to have a lot of Ebo shouting at loud voices running around your campus. And that's unthinkable.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
So the Willem Groves, that was very interesting. So- there's a really brilliant woman whose work I read and I love by the name of Bonnie Dow, who does this kind of meta-analysis of television shows and their importance. And she looked at the way, including in Ellen, the way that television had described and discussed gay relationships.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And she said that up until Will & Grace, every time gay people were talked about, even if they were talked about on television in a positive way, a series of rules were in place. The emphasis on the show was always about how straight people reacted to the gay person, not on the gay person themselves. The second thing was that the gay person's gayness was always a problem that had to be solved.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And the third thing was that the gay person was always in isolation. So she looks at Ellen and she says, Ellen, yes, had a gay character, first openly gay character on network television. But those three rules were still in effect. When Ellen comes out in that pivotal sitcom show from whenever it was, all the rules are in effect. Her gayness is a problem her friends have to solve.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
The whole show is about her straight friends dealing with the fact that Ellen is like complicated their lives. And she has no gay community on those shows. It's just her. Will and Grace comes along and breaks all three rules for the first time on television. Will's got a community. He's got Jack, right? And that whole, like, his gayness is not a problem to be solved. It's never even a problem.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It's just a fact, right? And the show is not about... straight people reacting to Will. It's about Will and Grace together reacting normally to, and that makes that show revolutionary. And that argument to me is so, and if all you do is watch Will and Grace without the benefit of that kind of analysis, you miss it. And there's an incredible book that was written about
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
The way Hollywood treated homosexuality, pointing out that... Look at all the movies in which gay people appear from the 60s through the end of the 90s. And this guy just counts up what happens to the character, the gay character. And, like, in 60% of the cases, the gay character dies. In 10%, they commit suicide. In 10%, they die of a drug overdose. Like... Hollywood just killed them off. Right.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Like that's what they did. And you were allowed to feel sympathy for, because, but they were always, it was always this dreadful burden. Right. And Will and Grace, it's not a burden. It's just like, he's just. It just happens to be part of their lives. It's just part of their lives. And that is so like, I feel like it is no coincidence.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
That's right around the time when the country wakes up one day. after flipping out about gay marriage, wakes up one day and just doesn't even say, I love gay marriage, just shrugs and says, are we really going to fight about this? And it just goes away.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
They have got to strangle. They have your kid in hand.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And the show is interesting because it puts a finger on, the issue fundamentally was not that by the early 21st century, most Americans thought that there was something pathological about being gay or that they had some revulsion at, No, it was quite specific. It was, they did not believe that gay people were capable of the same kind of relationships as straight people. It was that specific.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It was about relationships. And that's why marriage was being denied. And that show is just about a, is about a successful relationship involving a, and in the previous sort of, to get your point, Trevor, the preachiness assumed the problem was specific to something about marriage. The gay person and the way they practice their life. No, no, no, no.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It was a separate thing about could they participate in something that straight people have been participating in for thousands and thousands of years? And just getting people to say, oh, yeah, they can participate. That's all we needed. Yeah. You didn't need to win the bigger battle. Right.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It's also the soccer thing is great because the key to getting people to making that magic happen is to have everyone give everyone a job to do. You're all busy. That's why it works. Right? That's the kind of, like, I always, the busyness thing, if you're all focused on the game, you're exhausted, you're running up and down. Who has time for all the nonsense? Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
No, I've worked it out that I have 45 minutes to myself a day. Okay. Between 10 and 10.45. That's my time. Okay. And you write your book. That's all I got. That's all I got. And you write your book. No, no, no, no. No, I don't know. I also thought it would be fun. I've been enjoying myself tremendously over the last... Ever since I started podcasting stuff, it's loosened me up about...
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I'm a lot less precious about the stuff I do and I'm doing different kinds of stories. My position now is why not? And why not do something? It sounds like it'll be interesting. Who knows what'll happen? The turning point for me was... Well, when I started the podcast and I started doing weird show, like shows on cranky kind of, you know, going after golfers or whatever.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And I was like, that was really fun. Like, I didn't realize that. And then I did that audio book with Paul Simon, with my friend Bruce, which, you know, I don't really know that much about music. I know I like Paul Simon and we just sat down with him and it was just so, we did hours and hours of interviews with him and it was, literally changed my life.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I just realized, wow, I thought I was in this for the writing. I'm not. I'm in this because I like talking to people. I like interviewing them. That's what I like. And when I realized that, I was like, oh, this clarifies everything. I shouldn't be obsessing about how I'm going to make a story out of this. I should be obsessing about the The interview. Yeah. The conversation.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
You're thinking it's an exercise in self-hatred? Is that what you're saying?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And so I did it again this summer with this incredible woman. And I met with her like eight times. And she's someone who deals with trauma. I'm going to get emotional. She was involved with a guy on death row and she fails to save him and he gets killed by the state. Yeah. And I wanted to know what was going through her head when he died. That's what I wanted to know.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And I decided I was going to take the long path. We took 16 hours, whatever it was, to get there. Wow. And then we kind of got there and I was completely overwhelmed. I couldn't stop crying. I just was, it was so, and then I interviewed, I went back and I interviewed the, it was so unprofessional. I interviewed the lawyer, the guy's lawyer.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
and I had him tell the same story and I, I couldn't stop crying. I just, I had to end the interview. I was like, sorry, I'm sorry, sir. I can't, I can't. It's just, but it was because I just made that invest, that investment. And I had just sat and listened, right? That's, I realized at the grand old age of 61, I realized that's what I want to do. Like that's,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And there's a lot of that in this book. It's a lot of just sitting and listening to people and kind of trying to make sense of them.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Can I tell you my South Africa story on this very front? Yeah, for sure. The president of South Africa, his name is Ram... Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa. Cyril Ramaphosa. So I'm at this conference in South Africa. Actually, that's when I texted you because I was walking around, came down and I was like, white people know their real estate. And then... And Trevor's like, yes, they do.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Oh, Peppa Pig is fire, though.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
So I go to this conference and Ramaphosa is speaking. He gets up in front of the stage. He's like, and the lights go out, right? Because the power is always going off in Cape Town. And there's silence. And then you hear Ramaphosa saying, it's all my fault. And the whole room just starts laughing. And it's like,
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
How many leaders of major countries in the world would make a self-deprecating joke at that moment? Because it's been a huge political issue for him. It's been a huge issue. And so what does he do? And it's like, it was hilarious. It's just hilarious. I was like, this is off topic, but I was chatting with all these people at this conference.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And I'm talking about, I was like, you know, haven't a lot of people been leaving South Africa? Aren't you worried? This guy says now it's the best thing. He's like, the only people left in South Africa now are the people who want to be here. Yeah. I thought that was fantastic. It like totally changed my perception of, it's like, that's right.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
They're the ones who are tough enough and interested and committed. And like, at his point was like, let them go. You know, we're here. It's beautiful. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Well, no one likes changing his mind more than me, first of all. I just enjoy it. My dad really enjoyed it. And as a kid, some of my greatest memories of my father, who was a marvelous character, was him just shamelessly changing his mind on a subject, like without any explanation or apology. He just would agree. He'd talk to somebody. And he would always make this calculation.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
No, you're absolutely right. Do you do this? I've started to do this now and it's so terrible. I now, with no standing whatsoever other than three years as a parent, I'm just openly critiquing people's parenting.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
You got to stop it. I'm for a go. It makes it worse. Oh, yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
There's zero connection between any intellectual idea I've ever held and my parenting. This is another thing that's totally surprising. No, no, no.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Well, I always think that they're free content. I find them just endlessly hilarious and it makes it very difficult for me to take other things as serious. Oh, there you go. So it is part of like, they just become the center of your universe and everything else sort of fades away in importance. Any disappointment I have is irrelevant to them. It's just so liberating. Yeah.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
You know, they just, you know, my funeral this morning just wanted to like draw. She's making a picture for, she has a crush on the girlfriend of the nanny. It's the most hilarious thing I've ever seen. And she was making a picture for them. And she, that's like, that's what she's, you know, and like everything else kind of, but it has, but I do understand, you do understand how powerless.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
He's got high spirits and you should have high spirits.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Yeah, 100%. If I see you across the room at some restaurant.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Great. That was lovely.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Oh, I'll show you pictures. I'll get my phone.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
He would talk to someone, and if he thought they knew even 1% more on a subject than he did, he'd just like, all right, you're right. And that was it. And he was done. I thought it was fantastic as a child. And secretly, that's what I wanted. I wanted to be the guy who wakes up and decides.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Cocomelon is dangerous. I don't know what's happening.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And Kate, my partner, is always making fun of me on this because I will not like someone, and they'll just wake up and be like, they're great. Right. Like, why don't we have them over? She's like, wait, I thought you didn't like them. It's like, yeah, that was the past. Now I'm all over them. So I didn't read The Tipping Point after I wrote it. And then it was its anniversary.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And I thought, oh, I should read it again because we were thinking of doing a new revised edition. So I read it again. I'm like, wait a second. I wrote that? Like, I just fell. I was like arguing with the book the whole time. So that's why I want to do a new one. That was basically what happened. Are you the opposite of the same?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
All of us here. Okay. Super deep Christians. Here we are. Three of us are gathered in his name. Let's go. No. But no, not change the mind about that.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
If I have to listen to any more Cocomelon, I'm bringing back Stop and Frisk. That's how much it will radicalize me.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
First of all, just to go back on parents for a second. So my father, my father's, can I talk about my dad? Yeah, of course. Talk about your dad. He passed six or seven years ago and I wrote his obituary and I said, he had strong opinions about The Bible, gardening, and mathematics. And on everything else, he was open to suggestion. And I sort of think that's the right model.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
You've got to have your core set of things that you hold dearly. And I think you should – I always use the phrase that ideas should be held loosely. And they're not values, but ideas. Values you hold tightly, but ideas you hold loosely because stuff changes. And you grow up or you're –
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
You know, in the original Tipping Point, there's a chapter on crime, which is just why New York City crime fell in the 90s. It's an appalling chapter. I mean, it's just appalling.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Yes. Jesus. Like, what was I thinking? I mean, I didn't know any better, I guess. But it's not difficult. To me, it's very freeing to say I was wrong.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Well, I mean, the world, yes, of course the world has changed, although probably changed less than we think. I think sometimes we fetishize... you know, certain kinds of technological innovation and think we've reinvented ourselves as human beings. And it's just, to my mind, a little bit more of the same. But mostly it's that I've moved... Like, the crime example is a good one.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
That I wrote that... Broken Windows was a fetish in New York City in the 90s. The mayor, Giuliani at the time, was like running around and saying... you know, the only way to stop murder was to stop people from peeing on the sidewalk. Now, I think he was right to say that people shouldn't be peeing on the sidewalk and we should clean up. That was totally right.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
But he made two subsequent connections. His first thing was that the way to stop people from engaging in that kind of behavior was to arrest them by the thousands. And then secondly, he said, and that's also, by the way, how you stop violent crime. Both of those second claims were, in retrospect, preposterous, right?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
In the moment in the late 90s when we had just witnessed New York go from being one of the least safe big cities in North America to one of the safest, we were sort of willing to accept, to pay any price for that improvement in safety and accept any explanation. And that was the fever that I was caught up in.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I was like, okay, we're arresting hundreds of thousands of young black men in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but... Better that than being killed. That's what we were all thinking. And then, you know, I subsequently learned this. It's actually an incredibly interesting history. You know, what happens is a judge Stop Stop and Frisk in New York.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
We go from stopping 700,000 people in one year to stopping 20,000. And everyone says, including the judge who stopped it, crime's going to go back up. And what happens? Crime falls another 50%. And everyone's like, oh, my God. Not only was Stop and Frisk irrelevant to the crime drop, maybe it was preventing us from using police resources in a way that actually... helped solve.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
So we learned this happened in 2012. And my point is, if you lived through that learning moment in 2012, when we took away stop and frisk and crime fell another 50%, if you lived through those next five years and you didn't change your mind, then you are morally bankrupt, right? You have to have changed your mind at that point. So you have to acknowledge it's not wrong to be wrong in 1996.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It's wrong to not change your mind after 2012. We learn something crucial in those post-stop and frisk years. It's like you have to respond. The price of playing the game of ideas in the world is you have to stay on your toes and respond to new evidence as it arises. You want to play this game, that's the rule.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
So, I mean, yeah, I find it's weird. And also it was so long ago, like this is the, this was the late nineties. I'm older than you guys, but it's like, have you looked at your high school yearbook or like, it's just everything about it is cringeworthy. I mean, it should be fine to look back on your 25 years in the past self and have an issue. I would, I would hope he would have an issue.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I'm stealth. I would have, back in the day, would have been very, I was born in the wrong century. 19th century. Fantastic for me.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
because because you're making them do work yeah so you gotta revise you have to revise your opinion of them and that seems like oh that that seems like an imposition i think that's what um as opposed to kind of um you know it's the same way when a musician makes a kind of change in their style yeah there's always a set of fans who are appalled by this like
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
Like they don't – like they want the musician to be kind of frozen in amber. Yeah. To be the same person they encountered for the first time at 16. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How dare you use an electric guitar or whatever the argument is. It is a funny – I don't – I mean I think you – the question is who is your obligation to as a writer? Is it to your audience or is it to yourself?
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
They're like, wait a minute. Like historians would have uncovered 100 years later. Wait a second.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I think it has to be first and foremost it has to be to yourself. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
It's not that you shouldn't trust what I said in the other book. Right. It's that I've moved on. It's just not where I am at this moment.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
I haven't repudiated them. They're not who I am now, right? You know, in the same way, it wasn't... To go back to my dad, for example, when my dad changed his mind, sometimes it would be he would go from, you know, A to Z. But sometimes it was just... He just... There was an earlier version of himself that believed this... And then that self was gone.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
And he was now someone who believed this new thing. It was just a kind of, it's just about accepting the evolution. The thinking involves evolution.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
This is interesting. I have a friend of mine. I was playing the game of, I love playing the magic wand game where you could change, wave a magic wand and change one thing. What would it be in the world? And her answer was to make everyone in the world for one year trade places with someone else in the world.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
So just imagine a big random, everyone in the world puts a random hat and then you take, you put your address, you put your address in a hat and then you pull out a different address and you got to live there for a year.
What Now? with Trevor Noah
Tight Values, Loose Ideas with Malcolm Gladwell [VIDEO]
If you're unhoused.