How to Convince the World of Bulls**t & Evil - Malcolm Gladwell

Talk to me about the history of the death penalty. Fettered past that I didn't realize existed. Oh my goodness. In what country is in America? Yes. Um Well, uh this is a subject we dig into in this new uh series we've done on our revisions history, the Alabama murders. And you know, the the history of the death penalty in the United States is not a In other countries, there's a the battle is essentially about whether you should have it or not. And in America, the battle is really uh we'd like the states to have the right to do it, but they have to do it humanely. It's this absurd position where the At issue is not the morality of the state taking someone's life. The issue is that the state should take someone's life in a manner that seems consistent with the values of America. So, there is this, you know, the used to be the case, you know, it was the it was the way back when it was we we we hung you publicly. Then we moved on from that. And then was the firing squad, which was considered to be more humane. And then they moved on from the firing squad, and they went to the electric chair. And then from the electric chair, um they went to uh lethal injection. And then from lethal injection, they have now gone on uh to uh uh to um uh nitrogen gas to asphyxiating you with nitrogen gas. I didn't know about that. I didn't know about the most recent It's the iPhone 17 Pro Max that came out for >> the latest wrinkle. Right. So, they've been And at each stage, the intention was formally, the intention was to make the death more humane and um certain for the person being executed. But in fact, the intention was to make the process of execution more acceptable to the public. Let's go there. Looking for the for the way that the form of executing somebody that um is the easiest to watch. So, you can imagine how hanging would be uh quite a spectacle, you know, disturbing. But you wouldn't take your child to a hanging. Um the uh you know, the uh uh uh execution by firing squad might be a little less dramatic. But certainly, the big jump was the electric chair was gruesome. I mean, uh somebody whose brains were literally being fried in front of your eyes, and their eyes are popping out and things. So, it really was That was up until the 1970s. And the move to lethal injection was the idea was that um you can put people down the way we put down horses. And that's really quite calm and it seemed appears at least to be kind of calm and humane, and it's done by medical people, and it's all very kind of um So, that's that's the kind of like It's a very curious peculiarly American approach to this subject. Mm. And what is the What's the current status of that in the US? >> guy We get into this in the podcast. A very brilliant Canadian, like me, um guy named Joel Zivot, um who's a anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist with a kind of side interest in the death penalty. Uh people have been using lethal injection for 40 years, since the late '70s. It'd become the the standard for if you wanted to kill somebody in your a state government in the US, you you inject them with three drugs. Uh the first is a uh a sedative. Um the second is it calms you down. Uh the second is a paralytic, which just kind of like keeps you in one place. And the third is potassium chloride, which stops your heart. And that's the idea was that you got calmed down, you were buckled in, and and uh the the the paralytic just kept you still, and then we stopped your heart with potassium chloride. Um And what Joel Zivot discovers is that's not how you die during um uh in the in in um lethal injection. You die because the first thing you get, which is typically some kind of barbiturate, the sedative, so alters your the um the uh pH, the acidity of your blood, that essentially your lungs are on fire and burn up. And you can't cry out in pain because you've been given a paralytic. And so, you spend a few minutes in exquisite agony as your Imagine pouring um uh acid. Imagine forcing someone to drink a cup of acid. That's essentially what we're doing. And then I give you I give you another drug, which makes it impossible for you to to be heard as you silently scream. That's lethal injection. And so, ever since he he he showed the world that, there's some there's been this idea that oh, maybe we should um move to asphyxiating people with nitrogen. Sounds humane, comparatively. It's It is Honestly, when I was doing this Our podcast is all about this uh this murder that took place in Alabama. And all of these issues come up in the course of as the state tries to figure out how to what to do with killers. And it is the most Not only is are the details of these things just so bizarrely macabre. I don't know how How do you pronounce that word? I never know. Macabre? >> macabre. Do you say macabre? Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. The details are so absurdly that way. But then, what's additional is that there is simply no interest in any of these details on the part of We we're talking about a case that happened in Alabama. The state government of Alabama is just completely indifferent to all these. They don't even like they don't even seem to care what happens to somebody that they're executing. They're just kind of And that was the kind of one of the many revelations in doing this little mini-series we did called the Alabama murders. Was the kind of um It's almost as if the for the state of Alabama and other states, um the cruelty is the point. That telling them that what they thought was humane is actually isn't. Doesn't diminish their motivation and enthusiasm. It seems to increase it. We're going to have this come up with the young person that shot Charlie Kirk, it sounds like. I think the day that the uh the head chief of police uh did a press conference, this one of the first things that he said was, "We will be seeking the death penalty." Yes, Utah is a state. Now, Utah has used, where Charlie Kirk was killed, um has in some cases gone back to the firing squad. Oh, wow. Okay. We could really >> that out. We could pull that out again. Now, I don't know >> Brilliant. Yeah, little um Play the old stuff. Play the old songs again. It is it is very like, you know, the band from the '70s playing its hits. Um Now, I don't know. In some states, they it's considered This is again very American. You get to choose your method. I don't know whether that's the case in Utah. What would you choose? Uh firing squad. I I'd go firing squad, too. It's pretty heroic way to >> There's a um The the one that I would really want is guillotine. Oh, that's epic. Yeah. Yeah, and then have your head placed somewhere magnificent for the rest of time. Well, you know, the the thing about guillotine was, you know, guillotine at the time was considered this great progressive innovation. It wasn't it was intended to be a vast improvement over like tying people to the wheels of wagons and running them over. It was like, "Look, we're a civilized society. We should be able to kill people quickly and cleanly." And so, the guy the guy who who gave the guillotine his name, whatever his name was, Jacques Guillotin, that was his his whole thing is that, you know, we're we're civilized country. This is We're Frenchmen of the 18th century, you know, we can't be playing these games. Um So, like I would There's something to be said >> Chop his head off with a a big blade. Yeah, there's something to be said for um I mean, it's an you know, the very fact we're having this conversation is is absurd. Right? Like, why why are states killing people? Like, I it seems like this is just The idea that we're entertaining this conversation in 2025 is slightly incredible. It's a sign of just how strange America I mean, you're new to America. Does this Does this not strike you as just being bizarre? Uh not particularly. I think that the desire for retribution has existed throughout every sort of humans thought processes, whether they're modern or or or from five decades ago or forever ago. Um you know, Is it capital punishment? Is that the the sort of the title for this kind of a thing? Right, yeah. Um uh mutiny, you know, pirates on pirate ships, stuff like that. There is this sense of um there is a particular line that if you cross it, uh the threshold is you pay the ultimate price, which is that you no longer get to live. I I understand My point is I understand the psychological compulsion from humans. It doesn't surprise me. Do we think would I have thought that in the modern world, we would have transcended that in the same way as we transcended [ __ ] in the street and and open warfare that you just do on your neighbor because you don't like him or something. Yeah, in in some ways, but I think the the compulsion, the desire to do it makes makes makes total sense to me and you get this lock-in from the past. There is I would imagine an argument is sort of a twofold argument. One being uh this person did something so heinous that they do not deserve to live anymore and secondly this is a deterrent to other people who would consider doing this in future. Um One oddly enough one is the second one is very sort of utilitarian and the first one is actually kind of like karmic and astral. And I think I don't know. What do you what do you make of of that postmodern the modern the sort of modern world of it? Well, I'm I guess I'm more I'm more puzzled by you speaking in terms of this being an understandable human response to an act of brutality. Mhm. But I'm more puzzled by the fact that if it is an understandable human response, why is it confined in the developed world to the United States? Why is it why is it not understandable in England, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands Spain, Portugal you know, on and on and on. Greece, Italy, they don't have an understandable human response. They only Canada Bermuda, Jamaica >> How long did France must have used the guillotine relatively recently? >> Until I think the '80s. So it's been a good uh it's been a good 40 years. Yeah. >> They were one of the last holdouts. Uh Well, I mean look, when you when you have come up with the entire genre yourself uh you've got to you got to keep playing the old songs, you know, you got to keep using the guillotine until the '80s. It is it goes to this thing that I'm so obsessed with which is that I do not believe that either Americans or non-Americans fully appreciate just how weird America is. I think that Americans think oh the rest of the world is kind of like us only just a little less so and non-Americans if they don't know America well just assume oh it's like you know, it's like it's like England, but it's bigger. It's actually it's not like England it's bigger. Like Canadians are I'm a Canadian. Actually I'm an Englishman, but I'm an adoptive Canadian. Um Canadians make we make this mistake all the time because we we really you know, we watch the same sports we watch a lot of the same television it looks you if you drive from Detroit across the border or Buffalo across the border to Toronto it all looks the same. If you didn't know there was a border there you would think you would still and yet the differences between Canada and the United States are just phenomenal. Like So it's that that that's all the something that's always puzzled me. That um that this country that I'm I'm you know, I'm a immigrant to is just I don't understand why it's so singular. Yeah. I is 50 countries combined together under a single government, single currency, single language. So I think you get some weird externalities when you just combine that many people with Yeah. What's the line from the Paul Simon song a loose a loose accumulation of millionaires and billionaires. It's like I wouldn't >> Something like that's from Days of Miracle and Wonder. Um the yeah yes it's not I mean where you are living in Texas is not the same country as where I live in New York State. No, that's correct. Speaking of trajectories over time do you think that the tipping point um aged with difficulty like lots changed in the information landscape from then until now. I'm I'm I'm particularly interested in sort of what you didn't or couldn't foresee what what happened that you couldn't have predicted in that way which obviously led to the revenge of. Yeah. I mean we're talking about two books written 25 years apart. My first book The Tipping Point, my last book Revenge of the Tipping Point. When I wrote the first book the really the internet is really at just in its infancy. Uh and all of social media doesn't exist and the Cold War has just ended and we're absurdly optimistic about the future of the world. And I'm 30 some odd years old and you know, my world is my my life is ahead of me. And then 25 years later when I write the sequel um I don't know whether the the dynamics that I'm that I'm describing in the original tipping point are that you know, the simple idea the spread of ideas can usefully be uh uh understood as similar to the spread of disease. That the same contagious principles that govern epidemics of disease govern epidemics of ideas. That idea was a novel idea in the year 2000. Today it's a commonplace idea. So in that sense it's not that the ideas of the book became dated. It's that they became commonplace. Right? Now we we everything's viral now. We talk about that we whenever we use it when we say something on on you know, Twitter has become viral we are using the language of epidemics of disease. We have we have adopted that metaphor as our own. So the task So when I was sat down to write the kind of sequel to my first book it wasn't that I was saying okay, I got it wrong and this is what I missed. I mean I I did a little bit of that in the book. It was more like okay, the task is different now. We've all accepted this metaphor. Let's dig a little deeper try to understand what it means. Do you feel like a Cassandra in that context being able to virality and contagion Mhm. Well, not really. I mean I feel there's something kind of very self-regarding about calling oneself a Cassandra. >> I look, I love I love the question. I love the question because everyone's um desire this compulsion, the temptation to see yourself as the prescient clairvoyant that could have I would have said it before. I think it it speaks it speaks to you that you're like [ __ ] you know, like I just kind of said it. Cuz I got the listen, academics we're talking about. I got this idea from Yeah. sociologists were using this metaphor in this way. It wasn't like I somehow saw it. I just kind of stumbled on this idea and said I like I love this idea. I think it's cool. >> who popularizes it not who came up with it. So I'm okay, I'm I'm I'm interested in how your view of influencers evolved Mhm. since the tipping point. Obviously you're saying dynamics that you noticed back then are now very common place in terms of how people describe stuff now. Mhm. So that's something that's the same. What's changed? What's what's differed? What's evolved? So we one of the ideas that I spent a lot of time with in the original tipping point and in the and in the sequel is this is just the observation that social influence is asymmetrical. That and this is true of epidemics of disease, many kinds of epidemics of disease which is that if you look at COVID um every every person infected with COVID does not carry an equal risk of infecting someone else. The job of infecting is done by about 5% of the population. That 5% might be a hundred even a thousandfold more likely to pass on their infection to someone else than the rest of us. That's an asymmetry. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's a massive asymmetry. That is very similar to the way ideas spread. If a hundred of us think that Taylor Swift is a great singer um we are not equally responsible for spreading that news to the rest of the listening music loving public. There's going to be four or five of us who do all the work, right? Who have by virtue of their social position or their uh or the kind of trust that people have in them or how socially connected they are, they can tell the world that social that this this unknown artist named Taylor Swift is great. But if somebody is if my mom listens to Taylor Swift in her nursing home it she's not that and loves her. It's not a consequential fact in the history of the trajectory of Taylor Swift, right? With all due respect to my mom. She's not like she's not even a finger on the pulse of popular culture. But you can all you can imagine that there are people who are you know, massively social connected and have bonafides. There are people who when we want to know what to listen to we we listen to them. And if that person likes Taylor Swift it really matters. That process and asymmetry which I was really fascinated with in the original tipping point and I was this it's the great commonality between diseases and spreads of ideas. I think it's that's gotten more marked in the I think everything's asymmetrical now. Mhm. >> I you know, I in if you'd asked me 25 years ago I would say that select kinds of contagious ideas have this pattern that but many other many other things are kind of like spread randomly or spread equally through the through population. I don't I think everything's asymmetrical now. I think that I I don't think you can find a phenomenon that isn't marked by the fact that 5% of the infected population is doing 90% of the work. Why? Because I think I mean here's an analogy which is before there's air travel international air travel. So, we're in the 19th century. And if you had a contagious disease, it could it would spread to another country only if somebody got on a on a passenger ship, crossed the ocean, and were still infectious at the time they got off the ship, right? So, things did move around the world, but they moved relatively slowly around the world. That's where quarantine came from, right? Quarantia. Yeah. >> Exactly. That you could you could and it was possible to kind of nip these things in the bud. Um Now, then there's the age of jet travel, and all of a sudden I could be in I could catch a cold in New York and be in and spread it to my dinner partner in London that night, right? Like So, what's happened is that a tech a technological intervention has sped up and enhanced the asymmetrical process. So, the the the small group of people who travel a lot become hugely important in spreading disease, right? Because they have access now to way more um you know, if you uh so, you know, I'm I travel a lot. Like I would be one of those. I probably travel more than 99% of the whole population. If I have if I'm deep if I'm very infectious with a cold and I get on a 6-hour flight to Los Angeles, I am like I'm patient zero. I mean, I'm you know, I'm doing the work of of 100 people. Um so, that when you think about the digital age, it's doing that for ideas. There's just so many more contacts between people now and access to ideas and the and the um the kind of uh uh the social power that the connective power of certain kinds of individuals is just so enhanced Right. The The interconnectedness allows the the super spreaders to >> be just way more, you know, effective and powerful. And not only that, there's an there's an additional thing which I should get into in my book when I talk about the opioid crisis, but technology also allows people who want to spread things to better identify who the super spreader is. And that's crucial. Right? As opposed to being, you know, 25 years ago you say, "I think that most ideas are spread by a very small group of influential people. I have a vague idea who they are, but I don't know for sure." Now, I feel like we sort of we don't know for sure, but our certainty about who the super spreader is is much greater. And that that means that the super spreader's power is enhanced even further. Right? That's an interesting the transparency or obviousness and awareness of everybody of the influence of the person and of the uh you know, the the um common knowledge idea is kind of like the the uh emperor's new clothes. It's not enough to know the emperor has no clothes on, you need to know that everybody else knows as well. Um and if that person is the most influential, but does everybody else know that they're the most influential? Well, if you have this big number next to their Instagram account or their YouTube subscribers or or, you know, their newsletter list or whatever, the Oh, other people here's an objective statement of how many other people think this person is a person of note. And um yeah, it's this odd people accumulate reach uh the opportunity to be connected to more people. That reach gives them a degree of authority independent of their authority, right? They may have some authority already. It's some sort of trust, prestige, dominance type thing. Uh and then everybody's awareness of the fact that other people are aware of their authority like supercharges this even more. So, yeah, I can see how these things sort of They build on each other. and cube and yeah. The The original observation though is this idea of the transparency of asymmetry. So, not only so, we know things are asymmetrical, but now we know where the asymmetry lies has affected nearly every field that you can imagine. Let me give you two random examples. The big one is in fighting crime. Because of our ability now to precisely track and model uh outbreaks of criminal behavior, we now know if you go to a criminologist and they look at a map of Austin, Texas or London, England or New York City, they can tell you exactly the 15 or 20 city blocks where 50% of the crime in those cities takes place on a regular basis. They can tell you down to the you know, down to the stretch of sidewalk where uh a criminal act is most likely to occur. And we can put police there and we can effectively shut down that um criminal act. That is crime is a highly contagious asymmetrical activity where a small group of people commit a huge um majority of the crimes and they commit it they commit those crimes in predictable places at predictable times according to predictable patterns. And if you know all those things, you can completely tell your your policing, your law enforcement. Um I was talking to a guy yesterday who uh uh is working in um he runs the anti-mosquito spraying program in a county in Florida. And he they used to spray huge amounts of pesticide over the entire county with planes. Now they use drones and lidar. And now what you do is you figure out exactly where the swarms of mosquitoes are and you only you send the drone to that exact spot. And you just spray the spot. Right? It's like it's like hilarious. It's you know, it's like the Ukraine war going on with pesticides in a mosquitoes in a random part of Florida. But that's the same thing. Mosquitoes are massively asymmetrical. It's like all of the damage is being done by a group in a very specific spot. And now that we know where the spot is, you can fight the epidemic at its source. You don't have to spray everything. That's a great metaphor for how the world has changed in the last 25 years. Yeah, that's I mean, that's a new way to talk about super spreader, right? Super efficient spreader. Perhaps. >> Yes. Uh you you mentioned uh OxyContin there um opioids. Why is the OxyContin Sackler family such a good through-line case study literally, morally, pharmaceutically? Like what is it that they all bring together in in one example? Well, the you have to understand that this that OxyContin, the most infamous drug of the last 100 years, the drug that stopped kicked off this opioid crisis in the United States that at its peak was claiming whatever 120,000 lives a year. I mean, unbelievable carnage. There's nothing particularly special about OxyContin. It's just a it's a reworking of a drug drugs that have been around for years and years and years. They made it a little more powerful and they made it slow release, but it's not it wasn't that it was some dramatic breakthrough. So, in other words, OxyContin is not the product of some kind of innovative genius. What it is is the product of of of a marketing innovation. That what they realized in what Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, realized in the 1990s and early aughts as this epidemic got started, is that if you look at how a pain an addictive painkiller is prescribed by doctors across the United States, there is a massive asymmetry. Most doctors don't prescribe it at all because they are doctors, they are aware of how dangerous opioids are, and they dramatically limit their patients' access to them. A very very very small group of doctors in a very very specific parts of the country don't give a [ __ ] And what what what Purdue was able to do using the kinds of databases and that we have now that we didn't have 20 years ago that track the prescribing habits of every doctor in America is precisely identify and target the tiny fraction of doctors who didn't give a [ __ ] That's how we got the opioid crisis. It's it's a it is exactly what we're talking about. It's the it's finding the the swarm of mosquitoes. It's looking at the block in New York City where all the crime is. They they found those doctors and they said, "We're going to ignore every We're talking about 2,000 doctors out of the hundreds of thousands of doctors who could potentially have prescribed OxyContin." They find that that group of 2,000 and they put all of their resources in trying to convince those those 2,000 people to prescribe it as much OxyContin as is humanly possible. That is the I That's all you need to know about the about the opioid crisis, right? It's just a ruthless application of this kind of asymmetry that we've been talking about. Everyone else up to that point was under the illusion that if I want to sell lots of a given drug, I got to reach everybody, right? I need as many uh I need as many customers as possible, doctor customers as possible. And Purdue's like, "No, you don't. What are you, nuts? You need to focus on 2% of the population in order to make this thing take off. And that's that's that's like that's how we get to 120,000 deaths a year. Is there a way that an epidemic of drugs differs from an epidemic of ideas or even I guess an epidemic of viruses? Do do ideas spread in the same way or is there something else going on? Well, you know, I mean I'm hesitant. One should always be hesitant about making sweeping statements Especially when the word epidemic is being used, yes. I think that the I would say that the commonalities are greater than than we than we imagine. Um obviously you don't you don't die in the same numbers from a noxious idea that you do from a from a dangerously addictive um opioid. But um so there's that. Uh and ideas there are some weird differences, which is when I was doing my book and I was talking to all these people who studied the opioid crisis, the thing that they did couldn't understand was why it lasted so long. It should have Normally when you look at an epidemic of disease or that's killing lots of people is they burn out really quickly. The crack epidemic in the '90s doesn't actually last that long. Um the HIV uh well, did we get a really get a a really powerful medical intervention early on, but HIV doesn't in the Western world does not hang around for decades. It gets tamed pretty quickly. The flu comes every fall and it's gone by the spring. Right? You're not people large numbers of people aren't coming down with but opioids linger. That was what was so weird. It goes on for 25 It's still going on and it's finally starting to fall, but it's at a high level cuz it moves from opioids to heroin and then heroin to prescription drugs to heroin and then heroin to fentanyl and then fentanyl to mixtures of all three. And just keeps going. And all these people who study this for a living, they're observing this and they keep waiting for it to burn out. Mhm. Right. Like there's a there's a well-known generational mechanism where if your dad or mom is addicted, this happened with crack. The kids of people whose parents were addicted to crack did not touch crack. You saw what happened and you were like, I want no part of it. Mhm. Right. Um it's interesting with the the the genetic predisposition that would be carried through as well. So, what you have to assume there is the environmental like inverse role model effect is so powerful that it's got escape velocity to get over you having the raw building block genetics of an addict. Yeah. Yeah, that's impressive. Really? I mean you see a lesser version of this with I mean alcoholism clearly runs in families, but I think that might be because to use the same kind of model that you're talking about that there uh people can be functioning alcoholics for their entire lives. And so the kind of lesson that the child is receiving is a little bit more mixed. With crack, you literally saw your parents disintegrate in front of your eyes. It's a really, really powerful concentrated lesson that this is something you stay away from. If the if the if the natural path of alcoholism was that one of your parents starts drinking when you're 12 and they're dead by 16 then I would imagine that the alcoholism would not run in families in the same way. Mhm. Yeah, that's fascinating. There's this idea called the the region beta paradox things that are not bad enough to be bad, but not good enough to be good. Living in a house that's in an all right location and the rent's not too expensive, but there's mold and your landlord's a dick or being in a relationship with somebody in the mode of abusive, but you're really not that in love and maybe they're cheating on you actually and you're not too sure. All of these people would be worse if their situations all these people would be better off if their situations were worse. >> Were worse. Oh, that's fascinating. It would kick them out the bottom and I I I talked about this a few years ago and um as the internet does clipped it and did a thing and somebody asked me at this live show I did in Australia last year stood up and he says, you know, you've done live events and sometimes questions are a little more verbose. Uh they're a little bit rambling. Uh and this one was real short and short. And he says, I think I'm in region beta. Should I purposely make my life worse so I get out of it? And I was like I was kind of a radical solution. It's a high-risk strategy, but it might I I don't know, it might work. And we came up with a slightly different solution. But I thought that was really funny. Um it's like >> Well, the version of that is the difference between the Cold War and you know, Russia and Ukraine. Mhm. We never The Cold War never comes a hot war because the consequences of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States are existential. Russia and Ukraine just are just like slowly over time but randomly destroying each other. And you know, they can both of them are carrying on, right? So, it's like they're in they're in what's the phrase? Region beta? Region beta. Yeah, beta you guys would call it. Region region region beta paradox. They're in they're in that conflict is in Region beta paradox. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it really is. Um I suppose one solution here would be if you're an alcoholic, you could start trying crack. Um uh that might be That's extreme. Well, yeah, there you have another radical one. Um another thing I'm interested in this parental contagion idea. I've been having a lot of um conversations recently about embryo selection, IVF embryo selection, um polygenic risk scores and stuff like that and the potential the potential sort of tiger mom implications pre-birth um that could roll back. Uh so, I'm interested in this parental contagion idea that that you talked about. >> Well, I'm a little bit of a skeptic on that kind of polygenic screening cuz the things that you're interested in are the ones that are impossible to screen for. Right? So, intelligent What is intelligence if if it's definable at all is probably the result of an unknowable interaction between so many thousands of genes that God knows how you select for it. Um and then the other thing is like we if you don't have a handle on the ways in which a genetic susceptibility interacts with environment then you could select for something and it could all come to naught. Right? Like when I think about what intelligence is or what what it what the kind of determinants of success are they are there's so much A randomness and B so much of the uh so much of it is about motivation. And motivation is the least genetically determined of all the um character traits. Conscientiousness is the you know, the what's the big five? Conscientiousness, neuroticism uh openness to experience uh agreeableness and extroversion. Agreeableness and extroversion. Um conscientiousness is the least genetically determined of all those. Extroversion is the most. Yeah. And that's because conscientiousness is powerfully environmentally determined. If you like your job and you like your boss and you like your co-workers, you work hard. If you hate them all, you won't. Whereas you know if an extrovert in a in a room full of of of of sour people is still an extrovert. They're still yucking it up. Like they're not It's you're relatively impervious to that. And I I've come to the opinion that when it comes to explaining performance conscientiousness and motivation are way, way, way, way, way, way more important than we realize. And if that's the thing that's at least genetically determined, then what are we doing here? Mhm. Yeah, I I mean I I suppose the argument would be trying to gain 1% or 0.1% wherever we can, the same as playing classic music to your unborn baby while it's in the womb because it's going to help the brain complexity of the brain development or you know, people are the same reason that I use a temperature-controlled mattress duvet that tracks my HRV and I try to not eat 3 hours before I get You know what I mean? Like people are Are you on the Are you on the HIV train? I am on the HIV train. Look at me. You think I'm on the HIV train? Yes, Whoop brothers. Whoop brothers Whoop baby. Yeah. Um Whoop whoop. We could do a whole side thing on Whoop. I'm a Whoop possessive. Whoop. It's chief function for me is Sorry, this is a digression. Yep. The sleep score really what it is is I think I had a shitty night. And then Whoop tells me I didn't. This happened last night. My daughter wakes me up at 4:00 in the morning. Daddy, Daddy, I want to and I can't get back to sleep and I wake up dreading my Whoop score. Whoop said I had a great night's sleep and I've been fine ever since. But what about the gaslighting in the other direction? That's what you need. Like what happens when you think you had a great night's sleep, you wake up and Almost never happens. It's only for me, it only ever works. If I think I had a great night, I had a great night. Maybe we'll I I could get the CEO >> Did he Did he skew my numbers? Maybe he gave me I could ask him I could ask him whether or not he could give me like optimistic Whoop. I I I just want to be I'm happy to be gaslit. I only want to be gaslit in one direction. I always want to assume that I've got more sleep. >> What's your What's your What's your HIV average? Uh probably in the 50s, high 50s. It's not that great. >> Good for you. No, that's high. I mean, I'm lower, but I'm I a good deal older. It drops with age. >> Mhm. Easier such as myself. [Laughter] Uh parental contagion. Parental contagion. Um so there's I mean, I guess the the I'm so impressed by this unknown interaction between environment and genes that I'm hesitant to kind of go too far on There was a great book written that I wrote about at the time 30 years ago it was written by called Do Parents Matter by Judith Harris. And um she basically summed up all of the evidence about uh what impact parental child raising has on the kid. Mhm. And the answer is the evidence says not a lot. Basically, your kids you're feeding your kid and they have a roof over their heads and you're not terrifying them every night, it doesn't matter what you do. And book of course is enormously controversial. Now that I'm a parent, I totally agree with it. Um but like I just think it's such a the whole relationship between parents and the outcomes of the children is so muddy and murky and that I don't even know what to make I I I I don't know what to make of it in any context now. I don't like In fact, I have a game that I play with people which is when I say, you know, people all love to just play the game of well, in this way I'm just like my mom or in this way I'm just like my dad. And I say, "No, no, no. Skip a generation. The only way to do that usefully is to is to think about your four grandparents. Cuz there's too much noise with your parents. Who knows you grow up with your mom and your dad. Like who knows like who knows if you're Oh, shared environment n of two. Yeah, but who knows it and you have such a tangled psychological relationship. Who knows if you're even accurately representing the way they are, the way you are, right? I can I could give you I could go on for half an hour about my father and were my father alive and listening to it, I'm quite sure there's a possibility he would listen to that and say, "I am nothing like that." Right? My and that's just the reality of your parental relationship. Your version of your parent and your parents version of themselves are are going to be different. So like I don't how do we even start figuring out how your parent influences you? At least with your grandparents there's a degree of remove. So I can say my dad would tell a story about my mom's father who was this kind of um he's quiet, thoughtful, bookish guy and but he was he was people would always ask him to give speeches at weddings. And my father once went to an event where my grandfather was speaking, saw him and said, Oh, no, he went to an event where I was speaking. Mhm. Saw me and said, "I saw you and I saw I thought it was Daddy." They all called him Daddy. "I thought it was Daddy." Now, so there's an example of like it was clear the relationship between me and my grandfather is clear. But like you would never have walked into my father and said, "Oh, I see that's Malcolm." Mhm. See, you know, like there's too much noise. One of my friends uh his answer to the question uh if you could go for dinner with four people living or dead, who would it be? His answer to that is always his four great grandfathers. Says you would learn far more from sitting down with your own genetics than you would for sitting down with some genius. 100% agree. >> How cool would that be? How cool would that be? 100 Although I and I didn't know my grandparents very well, so I would settle for my four grandparents. Mhm. But uh yeah, the four >> know mine I didn't know mine either. Can I give you I I came up with this idea a couple of weeks ago. I want to I'm going to give it to you. It's my show, I can do what I want. Um but uh it's called the parental attribution error. We love blaming our parents. It's practically a rite of passage in modern psychology, but there's a double standard buried in the trend. We attribute what's broken in us to our upbringing while claiming what's strong in us is ours alone. Call it the parental attribution error like the fundamental attribution error where we blame others' actions on their character, but excuse our own by pointing to circumstance. This is a skewed way of assigning credit and blame. We externalize the bad, internalize the good. We're quick to blame and slow to credit. You say that you're anxiously attached because no one held you when you needed it, but isn't your ability to be alone with your emotions and to endure discomfort quietly also forged in the same crucible? You blame your parents for pushing you too hard in school convinced that it made you perfect perfectionistic and neurotic, but when was the last time you acknowledged that same pressure gave you ambition, discipline, and drive? You point to a childhood where mistakes weren't tolerated as the reason that you fear failure, but what about your meticulousness and your standards and your refusal to phone it in? Basically, as far as I can see, people are more than happy to lay the blame for their shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but very rarely lay the credit for their victories there, too. And I just I thought that was a an interesting asymmetry. Mhm. Yeah. That's like a that is a it it's funny that you that is a a beautiful allegory to the fundamental attribution error. That there are we make I I have my own version of that which is what I call the um asymmetrical parental attribution error. Okay. >> of asymmetries. Mhm. And that is that we indulge in that, but typically when we indulge in that, we only ever make reference to one of our parents at a time. So you don't say, "I got this bad from my mom and this bad from your my father." What you do is you're in a moment in a stage where you say, "Well, you're just blaming Dad." And then years pass and you flip and you just blame Mom for for a while. And then you flip it's and only at only one time you can only hold one disparaging >> Oh, right. Okay. That's brilliant. It's like I remember Scott Alexander had this idea. He called it thinking in superpositions, right? That you could have two worlds exist in your mind at the same time, but when you're talking about the parents, it's like you have to collapse the superposition down. Like the the uncertainty principle isn't able to exist. Only one parent can exist in your mind at one time. Yeah, it's never the interaction between the bookish father and the outgoing mother and I am somewhere in between. It's like when you're not wanting to be outgoing, it's like, "Well, Dad did tell me." And when you can't chill out, it's like, "Well, Mom did say." Spinery. Yeah. And what's what's There are many interesting things about this if particularly now that I'm a a parent, the um the one is that from a very early age, and this isn't obvious dumb observation, but it's nonetheless one that I've been thinking about. There is a um hypothetically you might think that the child, particularly the young child, thinks of their parents as a unit. "My parents don't want me to do this. My parents" But in fact, they never do. From the very beginning they're distinguishing between the father and the mother or whatever. They're they're and we continue to do this later you know, I think this becomes even more kind of pronounced as we get older. And it's a it is In the beginning it's understandable because you're correctly as a toddler understanding your parents relate to you independently and using different strategies. But you are, to your point, you're completely missing the extent to which it is the interaction between your parents that also fundamentally shapes you. You're just blind to it. Like they they're the consensus position of Joyce and Graham Gladwell was X and X also had an effect on me, right? Not just Joyce and Graham individually. Well, how many people when they get together are different people to who they are when they're apart? You with with some of my friends there's there's a version of both of us that comes out and maybe it's even more us, right? It feels closer to our sense of self than uh I am when I'm on my own or with other people that I maybe even know better, but there's something or the reverse. Yeah, I I around some person and around them all I can do is be bitter or resentful or I think small-minded things or I see the world in scarcity mindset or whatever. Um given the fact you you talk a lot in uh stories which I I think is why um it's very easy to read your writing. When it comes to the medium of communicating [Music] uh infectious ideas, noxious or or benevolent, I guess. Um talk to me about the landscape of how storytelling infects differently than facts and sort of how how how that plays together cuz I think in the modern world people assume that people you should be convinced by the facts. Follow the facts. Follow the science. Um but I'm not convinced that that's the way that the human brain works, especially when you're trying to uh change opinions, fuel empathy, even fuel hate as well. Yeah. Well, the story does a lot better job of eliciting emotion. Uh and that's enormously important obviously in in um anchoring an idea and making giving an idea leverage over somebody's um thinking or feeling. Um they uh the the story embedded This is a kind of more subtle point, but I you know, a story to my mind is a narrative that uh defies or a narrative that betrays the audience's expectations. That's what a story is. The reason I will Why do I Why did I watch um HBO's task? Finished it on Sunday. I watched it every week for 7 weeks. Why did I keep watching? Well, it's interesting. I needed what I was TV show to watch But fundamentally I didn't know how it was going to end, right? So I knew if you would ask me before the final episode, how do I think it's going to end? I would have given you six possibilities. Turns out almost all of them were wrong. So the story, what made it satisfying to watch that through to the end, was that it did not conform to my expectation. And I knew that, and that's why I was drawn to it, right? I knew that it was pointless to figure out try and figure out how it was going to end. And all stories good stories good songs, good all have that quality of betraying our expectation, and we know that going in, and that's why we want it. We There's something fundamentally human about wanting our expectations to be betrayed. That's why we laugh at jokes, right? That's why we There's so many things we do. Why would Think about it. Why would somebody pay an enormous amount of money to sit in an arena and have just somebody one person up on stage just tell these abbreviated anecdotes about their life or the world. The answer is because it's just a constant rush of betrayed expectations, right? Like there's a I always watch these little Instagram snippets of um Nate Bargatze. Um and uh is that I might be pronouncing his name right? Bargatze Bargatze >> ever seen it written down. Yeah. So who I think is very very very very funny in a kind of But his betrayals are so beautifully done and so subtle and so cuz he's working with this incredibly narrow template of He's telling these super kind of um prosaic and benign stories about family life. Right? So you And so you your expectation is nothing can be funny or happen here, right? He's He's taken so many things off the table. There's going to be no you know dangerous edgy commentary. There's no politics. There's no sex. There's no violence. There's no swearing. There's no nothing. He's not going to rag on anybody. He's not going to make fun of anybody. So you're like So we've narrowed it And that's why he's so inviting. You're like, "Okay. This dude is uh trying to thread the needle here. He's going to do something. He's going to betray me after taking 90% of the possible objects of betrayal off the off the table, right? And then he pulls it off, and you're like, "Oh my god, that's And so you laugh way out of proportion to the to the to the quality of the joke. I mean, the joke is it's The joke itself is pretty mild, but the degree of difficulty is so great. That's what you're rewarding. You're like, "You did it, man. Like >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. did not see that coming, and you you decided you were going to paint in one color. Right? That's like And that's That is the So all of this is a long way of saying that a story is one of the few places where we are willing to change our mind, right? It's when when we're talking about a betrayed expectation, we're talking about you change your mind. And fact facts don't People have no difficulty whatsoever dismissing facts. But the kind of subtle mind change that comes with a story is much harder to dismiss. Dude, that's so great. That's such a such an interesting insight. Um I had this conversation with Alex O'Connor, who is a upcoming agnostic commentator, I guess. Used to We would have called him an atheist a few years ago, but I don't think that's that's kind of the in term anymore. Uh and he's very pro-religion. He's He's fascinated. He goes into every conversation with a uh a theologian uh or a believer desperately hoping to believe on the other side. Um he just has a very high bar for it and is educated in the counterarguments. And um he said he said this really interesting thing that what we are asking people to do in the modern world is to ignore the types of information and persuasion which is most easily understood and believed in. Story, myth, archetype, narrative, personification. Uh to dispense with that in place of stats, figures, numbers, charts, data, sterile, scientific, rational, materialistic. And he goes, "Is it any surprise that you can't sort of rip people across? You can't bludgeon them over the head with just more bar charts um in the hopes that and and then shame them for not believing. Right? The thing which is most believable to you is the thing which you're not supposed to believe, and the thing which is least understandable and least salient to you is the thing that you're not supposed to put all of your faith in. And again, asymmetries. This asymmetry between the power of story and the power of statistics. Shapiro's got that famous "Facts don't care about your feelings." Like it could not be more backward. It's like feelings really do not care about your facts at all, especially if that feeling has come from a fable, right? Or a story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although he's using it in a slightly That actually That's super interesting and that would have But he is using that in a slightly uh different context, which is that what he's saying is that you are really upset right now over something is not does not mean that the the underlying thing is somehow um uh has been kind of uh existentially disabled. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your displeasure does not mean does not disqualify. It's not like you know you didn't change anything. Like it's still, you know, uh So yeah, but I I um uh I I happen to think he's one of the better He's He's um I don't He's not in my particular corner ideologically, but I I wish they were I wish most commentators were as rigorous in their thinking as he was. Um I saw that you uh I saw you made headlines last month about trans athletes. I imagine that was thrilling for you. Mhm. Do you see a tipping point dynamic going on there? I don't think it's already tipped. I mean, I don't This is one of the most puzzling Let me just say parenthetically that that was the one of the strangest public controversies I've ever been a part of. I was describing I was the moderator on a panel. On a on I was describing my experience as a moderator. A moderator panel between a pro-trans participation and an anti-trans participation person. And I'm trying to elicit a fair argument. Four years pass, and I'm on a podcast out of to Harrisburg with one of the participants, and I just think I said there was a moment in that discussion where I failed as a moderator. I didn't do a good job. There was a moment where I should have moderated. Moderating is difficult. Have you ever Have you moderated in your life? Yeah. Particularly on that topic? So that's all I said, and then like the whole thing went And I was like, "I did not I didn't I didn't recognize any of Usually when you're involved in a controversy, you recognize the controversy. I did not recognize the controversy. I was like, "What are they talking about?" >> have predicted this in advance? No. I was like, "What are they talking about? As a moderator No one ever mentioned the word moderator." Like sort of changes when you know that I was the moderator, right? >> Mhm. Mhm. Anyway. Uh has It's already tipped. Uh This is By the way, this is the most one of the most ridiculous uh subjects in the following sense. Um that most people, myself included would give their 100% approval, support for the trans agenda. We The idea that we would be discriminating against a class of people over this particular characteristic is absurd and offensive, right? But I think that this last random thing that's thrown into the agenda that says, "Oh, and by the way a someone who is biologically male should be able to compete against biological females." Is deeply puzzling to a lot of people, right? They're like, "What does that have to do with It's weird. Like what's it doing there?" I don't think And I think most people are in wholeheartedly in support of the agenda and just say that last item, which by the way it It only involves like a dozen people in the entire the United States. Like it's so hypothetical. It's like Most people would just say, "Why are you adding that? You're just You're just antagonizing. You're giving fuel to the to the right." By the way, during the election, what is the part of the trans agenda that the Republicans hammered again and again and again? Participation in sports. That's what it came down to. So you're giving your enemy a weapon, a you know, to use against you. Over what? A dozen a hypothetical case involving a small number of people. Like So that's why I find the whole thing puzzling. I don't just don't I don't understand why we even talking about this. It doesn't Can you name Can you name a signal trans athlete trans uh trans woman competitive elite athlete who is currently being disadvantaged by this policy. Can you give me the name? A trans woman athlete who's been disadvantaged. >> Yeah, who is locked out of competition with biological women as a result of the policies in elite sports. I would imagine that Lia Thomas would be at some point. I feel like the uh the swimming association was one of the first bodies to have implemented this. So I have to imagine if they are going to continue to swim, They right now they can't swim. So, would that be a yes? So, you have I've got one. You got one. I got one. Yes. Can you give me another? No. Okay. I I did I did my one. >> What? So, WHY WHY ARE WE HAVING Why are we having So, you you are a uh highly informed participant in public controversies and I have touched on this issue which everyone assumes is this hot button. This is tearing our country apart. So, I have I have gone to a highly educated source and I've said, "Give me names." And you've come up with one who's not even irrelevant. Who isn't even swimming anymore. Right? This is a definition of an absurdity. Why why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical? Right? Why don't we discuss the actual issues that are of existential meaning and threat to the trans community? That's my point. Mhm. Interesting. I think on the you know, on the other side um the the the the right would say something like uh this is the tip of the spear. This is sort of endemic of the the encroachment into uh locker rooms and bathrooms. This is you know, the college sports thing is like you it's only half a wall away from it being about school as well. And it it you know, it all kind of especially with the the interesting one about the locker rooms thing. I do I I've thought this for ages. I think that the locker rooms thing and the sports thing are so tightly bound because in order to get onto the sports field, you have to go through the locker room. Uh and there is this sort of um just geographic map psychologically inside of people's heads where they they play that role through. And you think, "Well, if the locker rooms that that that has to be happening in sport, too." I wasn't aware of how few uh incidents uh this is this is causing, but um certainly a lot of headlines uh But it's like But even the locker room thing is a separate issue. So, there is a separate social issue of how do you accommodate somebody who belongs to a relatively new social category? And we have a long history in America of struggling with that issue, right? It was the issue we struggled with with African-Americans in the '50s and '60s in Jim Crow. Do we let them into our you know, in in Birmingham in the 1960s, black people are not allowed to use the same changing rooms as white people in department stores, right? Same issue. Right? Eventually, we figured out how to do that. And I think we can figure out how to do that with the trans community. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a completely separate thing, which is in elite sports, should the the incredibly small number of people who are trans women who uh can uh uh meaningfully compete at the elite level be allowed to compete in the female category. That's That's That's the narrow thing that was being discussed on a panel of which I was a moderator. But it's like So, anyway, this is this is this is it's an example of the internet occasionally is very dumb. Mhm. What was the story about the Harvard women's rugby team? Oh, there I was interested in uh uh Well, I was interested in this There's a There's a certain amount of Ivy League bashing that I've done over the course of my career that um now that Ivy League bashing has a become a an agenda item in Washington, I'm a little more circumspect about my Ivy League bashing, but I was just intrigued in my book about the fact that uh this university in the United States that plays more varsity sports than any other is Harvard. Mhm. Which people think, "Oh, must be some sports factory in the South or something." No, no, no. Ivy League schools have the most athletes have a greater share of athletes on recruited athletes on campus of any institution. My question is, "Well, why?" That seems weird to me. Why would an elite academic institution go out of its way to have lots of athletes on campus and also give those athletes a tremendous break at admissions? So, huge controversy in America about oh, don't you dare give an admissions break to black people. That's wrong. That's a violation of a Supreme Court says outlaws it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, the exact same institutions are giving an equal and in some cases larger break to people who are really good at rowing or fencing. This strikes me as weird. Does that not strike you as weird? It's very strange. And why is one controversial and one the other one is not? I would guess that in a meritocratic system, people believe that something which is done based on merit uh is maybe more deserving somehow, more justified in some sort of a way. But the But the What relationship is there between the merit here and the role of an academic institution? It's like saying if you if Did you put on your up If you if you were a a high school kid applying to Harvard, is it useful to put on your application that you're a really good cook? The answer is Well, if if cooking was something which was part of the competitive landscape for a varsity league college, perhaps that would be the case. I think when people look at sports, but I mean college sports is an entire category. Yeah, but these sports are absurd. Like it's fencing. No one's I would say that to a Say that to a fencer with his big long >> What is that? You'll come after me. When I make the point about I I talk a lot about tennis, which I think is the most ludicrous example. Massive admissions breaks at elite schools for people who are tennis players. What is the definition of someone who's good enough to play Division 1 tennis in America? That they spend their entire lives on the tennis court. Why do you want at your school someone who's not even participating in the undergraduate experience? They're just practicing their backhand. What is What is so special about that solitary utterly uh uh uh boring activity that merits them getting a admissions break that is equal or greater to the break that you give to somebody who is part of a historically disadvantaged minority? I was going to say, is there something more special about somebody who's black than somebody who can play tennis well? Uh someone who is someone who is a product of uh several centuries of racism in the United States absolutely has a moral claim on an admissions break that is an order of magnitude greater than someone who has spent their entire adolescence at a tennis academy in Florida hitting forehands. What if they also play tennis? Black tennis players are the rarest of them all. You know? Yeah, there's not a lot of them. As you know, well, tennis Being good at tennis is a linear function of how much money your parents have. So, you would expect that the wealthiest uh uh ethnicities in the United States would have the most tennis players. Interesting question on that. Um Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wrote a great book about uh was it Who owns the NBA? Who wins the NBA? Something like that. And uh he did data scientist used AI to help him write this book in 30 days. It's brilliant. And uh the most common name of and uh of NBA players, the top five, Mhm. it's like Michael, John. Mhm. They're very uh middle-class names. The reason is that even in the sport of basketball, one that people assume is going to sweep up these Oh, no. poor kids from the streets and deposit them into the NBA. Uh now, LeBron uh born to a 16-year-old single mother, um it is a remarkable for how much >> that proves the rule. >> Yeah, how much of an outlier he is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, if you are LeBron, you can beat the system, but not anyone else. >> Well, I I wonder how many LeBrons have been born after LeBron now. That's my question, whether or not we're going to see a ton of LeBrons in the NBA in a couple of uh decades' time. Um yeah, that makes perfect sense because the degree of preparation uh necessary now to make the NBA is just way higher than the minute you you radically increase the amount of preparation necessary to excel in a given area, you skew it um by income. By By class and income. Yeah, by By classic example. Which is one of the reasons why I'm a big track and field fan. One of the beautiful things about track and field is it is one of the last sports for which this is not true. You do not need to have wealthy parents to be a great runner. Oh, you like watching poor people do sports. That's what you're telling me. I like to watch the I like to watch the poors. They They run faster. >> No, I like a sport where there is no distinction, where income and class don't buy you a head start. That's what I like. I like a sport where Name me another sport where the Kenyan who grew up, you know, way off in the Rift Valley somewhere, Mhm. it can meaningfully compete against someone who has the full power of Nike behind them and grew up in an upper middle-class suburb of Dallas. Mhm. That's There's no other Give me another sport where that happens. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not even Not even cycling. >> Football. Like football in Europe, if you don't come out of one of those football systems, Yeah. you you're not you're not playing. I think it's any it's any problem that you have with team sports. As soon as you get into team sports, right? It's got to be an individual sport for this. I can't think of a team sport that would allow you Rowing is not going to be But even even a massive number of individual sports have become class weighted. Like tennis. Mhm. A perfect example. Golf. Massively class weighted. >> Well, I Yeah, golf is a golf is a particularly interesting one. Uh tennis kind of kind of makes sense at least to some degree in that you need to be playing against people. Like it it is interesting with track and field that apart from like wrestling which I don't think happens on the track or the field. It's just in the Olympics. That there's no track and field that is against an opponent in quite that like there isn't an opposition in the same way. There's just competitors, right? Also doing the same thing to you independently of it. Like the two javelin guys are like throwing the javelin at each other as it's coming and that means that if you grow up in an area that has more better javelin players that can spend more time throwing the javelin at you that you become more successful. Um yeah, that's fascinating. I I I I hadn't considered that. Uh the egalitarian nature of of the Olympics. >> the weird Running's really interesting. Distance running in particular is fascinating because you know, it starts out since you're English. The English dominate middle distance running Good. Good. for the longest time. And if And the if it wasn't English, it was it was in the English by proxy, the Australians and New Zealanders. Then the Africans in the kind of '80s take over. And all of a sudden everyone starts saying, "Well, that's cuz they have a genetic advantage. That's because of this holistic all these reasons." And then what happens in the last 10 years? All the Europeans are Now it's the English again, right? It's like So it's like we realized we made this we we it's this thing that we do which it which always it strikes me as as kind of fascinating which is that we toggle back and forth between our causal explanations for a phenomenon just depending on where we're situated. If we're winning, oh, it's like the we have the culture of the When we start losing, it's oh, it's got to be genes. Cultural attribution error. Yeah. And then we start winning again and like now if you talk to the English, it's like you went to you talk to some English track and field coach, they'll tell you, "Oh, it's the long English long distance running tradition." It's like, "Dude, you didn't say that 15 years ago when the Moroccans and the Kenyans were winning all all every race." Like you just started saying it cuz cuz Josh Kerr started won the and you know, and and you know, won the world championships. And now all of a sudden you changed your mind. Mhm. Malcolm Gladwell, ladies and gentlemen. Malcolm, I find you fascinating. I think you we could continue to do this for a long time, but I need to get on a flight to go on tour to your state. So um >> I need to leave. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of this stuff that you've got that's going on? >> Listen, I I think the latest podcast I did on my podcast Revisionist History, we have a series called The Alabama Murders. It is the best thing I've ever done and I would wholeheartedly recommend that to people. And I have a new book out in paperback, Revenge of the of the Tipping Point. Sick. Malcolm, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much. This is really fun. Congratulations, you made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Go on.