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

Chris Williamson 0:00 Talk to me about the history of the death penalty, fettered past that I didn't realize existed.

Malcolm Gladwell 0:06 Oh, my goodness. In what country? In, in America. Yes. Um, well, uh, this is a subject we dig into in this new, uh, series we've done on re- revisionist 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 w- 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, nitrogen gas, to asphyxiating you with nitrogen gas. So that-

Chris Williamson 1:32 I didn't know about the, I didn't know about the most recent, the iPhone 17 Pro Max that came out for-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:36 This is the latest wrinkle, right. So they've been-

Chris Williamson 1:39 Okay.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:39 ... and 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.

Chris Williamson 1:58 Less gruesome.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:58 So they're looking for the, for the way that, the form of executing somebody that, um, is 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, y- you, uh, you know, the, 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, somebody's whose brains were literally being fried in front of your eyes and their eyes were popping out and things. So that really was, that was up until the 1970s and the move to lethal injection was the idea was that we, um, can put people down the way we put down horses and that's really quite calm and it seem, 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.

Chris Williamson 3:05 Mm. And what is the, what's the current status of that in the US?

Malcolm Gladwell 3:13 Well, a guy, we get into this in the podcast, a very brilliant Canadian like me, um, a guy named Joel Zivet, 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's become the, the standard for if you wanted to kill somebody and you're 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, 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 paralytic just kept you still and then we stopped your heart with potassium chloride. Um, and what Joel Zivet 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.

Chris Williamson 5:18 Sounds humane comparatively.

Malcolm Gladwell 5:20 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 a 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, h- how do you pronounce that word? I never know. Macabre?

Chris Williamson 5:43 I think macabre.

Malcolm Gladwell 5:44 Do you say macabre?

Chris Williamson 5:45 Uh, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 5:47 Th- 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 miniseries 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 actually isn't, doesn't diminish their motivation and enthusiasm. It seems to increase it.

Chris Williamson 6:36 We're gonna have this come up with the young person that shot Charlie Kirk, it sounds like. I think the day that the, uh, head chief of police, uh, did a press conference, the f- one of the first things that he said was, "We will be seeking the death penalty."

Malcolm Gladwell 6:56 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.

Chris Williamson 7:05 Oh, wow. Okay. Real-

Malcolm Gladwell 7:07 We could pull that out. We could pull that out again. Now, I don't know-

Chris Williamson 7:10 Nostalgia. Brilliant.

Malcolm Gladwell 7:11 Yeah. A little, um-

Chris Williamson 7:12 Play the old stuff. Play the old songs again.

Malcolm Gladwell 7:14 (laughs) I- 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.

Chris Williamson 7:29 What would you choose?

Malcolm Gladwell 7:31 Uh, firing squad.

Chris Williamson 7:33 I'd w- I'd go firing squad too. It's a pretty heroic way to-

Malcolm Gladwell 7:37 Yeah. There's, there's, um... The ru- the one that I would really want is guillotine.

Chris Williamson 7:44 Oh, that's epic. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 7:47 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:47 And then have your head placed somewhere magnificent for the rest of time?

Malcolm Gladwell 7:51 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 g- who gave the guillotine his name, whatever his name was-

Chris Williamson 8:21 Monsieur Guillotine.

Malcolm Gladwell 8:22 ... you know, Jacques Guillotine.

Chris Williamson 8:23 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 8:23 That was his, his whole thing is that, you know, "We're, we're a civilized country. This is... We're Frenchmen of the 18th century. You know, we can't be playing these games."

Chris Williamson 8:34 (laughs)

Malcolm Gladwell 8:34 Um, so, like, I would... Uh, g- there is something to be said-

Chris Williamson 8:37 We must chop their head off with a, a big blade.

Malcolm Gladwell 8:41 Yeah. There's something to be said for, um... I mean, it's an abs- you know, the very fact that we're having this conversation is, is absurd, right? Like, w- wh- why, why are states killing people? Like, I, does it... Because it just seems like this 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. This, does this not strike you as just being bizarre?

Chris Williamson 9:08 Uh, not particularly. I think that the desire for retribution has existed throughout every sort of human's, uh, thought processes, whether they're modern or, or, or, uh, 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 9:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:28 ... 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've transcended that in the same way as we transcended shitting in the street and, and, uh, open warfare that you just do on your neighbor because you don't like him or something?

Malcolm Gladwell 10:07 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:07 Um, 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. Uh, there is, I, I would imagine, an argument, a sort of a twofold argument. Uh, one being, uh, this person did something so heinous that they do not deserve to live anymore. Uh, and secondly, uh, this is a deterrent to other people who would consider doing this in future. Um, one... Uh, oddly enough, one is... The second one is very sort of utilitarian. Um, and the first one is actually kind of like karmic and astral. And, uh-

Malcolm Gladwell 10:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:50 ... I, I think... I don't know. What do you, what do you make of, of that postmortem on the sort of modern world of it?

Malcolm Gladwell 10:57 Well, I'm... (clears throat) I guess, I'm more, I'm more puzzled by... You, you're speaking in terms of this being an understandable human response to an act of brutality.

Chris Williamson 11:08 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 11:08 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? W- 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. The only... Canada, Bermuda, Jamaica, you know, like-

Chris Williamson 11:33 How long ago did Fr- France must have used the guillotine relatively recently.

Malcolm Gladwell 11:36 Until, I think, the '80s. So it's been a good, uh, it's been a good 40 years.

Chris Williamson 11:42 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 11:42 Right? They were one of the last holdouts. Uh, but, um-

Chris Williamson 11:45 Well, I mean, look, when, when you have come up with the entire genre yourself, uh, you've gotta, you've gotta keep playing the old songs, you know? You gotta keep using the guillotine-

Malcolm Gladwell 11:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:53 ... until the '80s.

Malcolm Gladwell 11:54 It is... It goes to this thing, uh, that I'm sort of 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 better.

Chris Williamson 12:19 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 12:20 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.

Chris Williamson 12:49 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 12:49 Like, so it's that, that, that's al- something that's always puzzled me.

Chris Williamson 12:55 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 12:55 That, um, that this country that I am, I am, you know, I'm an immigrant to, is just, I don't understand why it's so singular.

Chris Williamson 13:05 Yeah. Uh, it is 50 countries combined together under a single government, single currency-

Malcolm Gladwell 13:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:12 ... single language, so I, I think you get some weird externalities when you just combine that many people with-

Malcolm Gladwell 13:17 Yeah. What's the line from the Paul Simon song? "A loose, a loose accumulation of millionaires and billionaires." (laughs) It's like ... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 13:24 (laughs) I wasn't familiar with it.

Malcolm Gladwell 13:25 Something like ... That's from, uh, Days of Miracle and Wonder. Um, the, uh, 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.

Chris Williamson 13:36 No,

Chris Williamson 13:37 that's correct. Uh, 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 y- what happened that you couldn't have predicted in that way, which obviously led to The Revenge Of?

Malcolm Gladwell 14:02 Yeah. I mean, we're talking about two books written 25 years apart. My first book, The Tipping Point, my last book, Revenge or The Tipping Point. When I wrote the first book, the really, the internet is really, uh, 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 (clears throat) 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 unders- that I'm, uh, 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 a 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 essence, 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 talked about that. We, and when, whenever we use that, when we say something on the, 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. Um, so the task ... So when I was sat down to write this 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, there's 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 and try and understand what it means."

Chris Williamson 15:59 Do you feel like a Cassandra in that context, being able to ... Virality and contagion.

Malcolm Gladwell 16:06 Mm-hmm. Well, not re- ... I mean, I feel there's something kind of very self-regarding about calling oneself a Cassandra.

Chris Williamson 16:14 I, like, 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've said it before." I think it, it speaks, it speaks to you that you're like, "Ah, fuck, you know, like I just kind of said it then."

Malcolm Gladwell 16:30 No, 'cause I got the ... Listen, academics were talking about, I got this idea from ...

Chris Williamson 16:34 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 16:34 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."

Chris Williamson 16:41 It's all about who popularizes it, not who came up with it. Uh, so I'm, uh, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm interested in how your view of influencers evolved-

Malcolm Gladwell 16:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:50 ... since The Tipping Point. Obviously you're saying, uh, dynamics that you noticed back then are now very commonplace in terms of how people describe stuff now.

Malcolm Gladwell 16:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 16:59 So that's something that's the same.

Malcolm Gladwell 17:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:00 What's changed? What's, what's differed? What's evolved?

Malcolm Gladwell 17:05 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 y- 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 con- 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 100 or even 1,000-fold more likely to pass on their infection to someone else than the rest of us. That's an asymmetry.

Chris Williamson 17:45 I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't know that.

Malcolm Gladwell 17:46 Yeah. It's a massive asymmetry. That is very similar to the way ideas spread. If 100 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 gonna 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, uh, how socially connected they are. They can tell the world that soc- that this, this unknown artist named Ta- 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. That's not a consequential fact in the history of the trajectory of Taylor Swift, right?

Chris Williamson 18:35 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 18:35 With all due respect to my mom. She's not like (laughs) ... She does not have her 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, an asymmetry, which I was really fascinated with in the original Tipping Point, and that was t- dis- 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.

Chris Williamson 19:11 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 19:12 I, you know, I... I- I- 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.

Chris Williamson 19:39 Why?

Malcolm Gladwell 19:42 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-

Chris Williamson 20:09 Survived.

Malcolm Gladwell 20:09 ... was still infectious at the time-

Chris Williamson 20:10 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 20:10 ... they got off the ship, right?

Chris Williamson 20:12 Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 20:12 So things did move around the world, but they moved relatively slowly around the world. And-

Chris Williamson 20:16 That's where quarantine came from, right? Qua- quarantina.

Malcolm Gladwell 20:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 20:21 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 20:22 Exactly. That you could... You... 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 k- 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 t- I travel a lot. Like, I would be one of those... I probably travel more than 99% of the human population.

Chris Williamson 21:08 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 21:09 If I have... If I'm deep... If I'm very infectious with a cold and I get on a six-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.

Chris Williamson 21:21 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 21:22 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, the, the connective power of certain kinds of individuals is just so enhanced-

Chris Williamson 21:45 Right, the interc-

Malcolm Gladwell 21:45 ... by virtue of it.

Chris Williamson 21:46 ... the inter- the interconnectedness allows the, uh, the super spreaders to-

Malcolm Gladwell 21:50 To be, be just way more, you know, effective and powerful. And not only that, there's an a- there's an additional thing which I actually 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 in- that means that the super-spreader's power is enhanced even further, right?

Chris Williamson 22:40 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.

Malcolm Gladwell 23:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:05 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, then, "Oh, other people..." The- the... Here's a- 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, uh, uh, 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 square and-

Malcolm Gladwell 24:01 They build on each other.

Chris Williamson 24:01 ... and cube and... Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 24:03 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 s- s- 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 could effectively shut down that, um, criminal act. That is, cr- 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 tailor your, your policing, your law enforcement.

Chris Williamson 25:28 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 25:29 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.

Chris Williamson 25:51 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 25:51 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-

Chris Williamson 26:00 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 26:00 ... and you just spray the spot (laughs) , right? It's like, it's like hilarious. It's, you know, it's like the Ukraine war going on with pesticides and mosquitoes in a random part of Florida, but that's the same thing. S- Mosquitoes are sm- 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.

Chris Williamson 26:32 Yeah. That, I mean, that's a, a new way to talk about super spreader, right? Super efficient spreader, perhaps.

Malcolm Gladwell 26:37 Yes.

Chris Williamson 26:37 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 w- what is it that they all bring together in, in one example?

Malcolm Gladwell 26:58 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, of drugs that have been around for years and years and years. They made it a little more powerful and they made its slow release, but it's not, it wasn't like 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, uh, uh, Purdue, the maker of OxyContin realized in the 1990s and early aughts as this epidemic had 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're 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 shit. And what, what, uh, 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 shit. That's how we got the opioid crisis.

Chris Williamson 28:45 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 28:45 It's, it's, uh, it is exactly what we're talking about. It's the mos- 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 gonna 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 tho- those 2,000 people to prescribe as much OxyContin as is humanly possible. That is the entire... That's all you need to know about the o- about the opioid crisis, right?

Chris Williamson 29:24 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 29:25 It's just a ruthless application of this kind of asymmetry that we've been talking about.

Chris Williamson 29:29 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 29:29 Everyone else up to that point was under the illusion that, "If I wanna sell lots of a given drug, I gotta reach everybody." Right? "I need as many, uh, I need as many customers as possible, doctor customers as possible." And Purdue is like, "No, you don't. What? You're 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 220,000 deaths a year.

Chris Williamson 29:55 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?

Malcolm Gladwell 30:09 It's... Well, you know, I mean, I'm hesitant. One should always be hesitant about making sweeping statements about-

Chris Williamson 30:16 Especially when the word epidemic is being used.

Malcolm Gladwell 30:17 Yes. Yes. I think that the... I would say that the commonalities are greater than...... than we, than we imagine.

Chris Williamson 30:26 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 30:27 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, doesn't actually last that long. Um, the HIV, uh, well the... We get a, really get a, uh, a really powerful, uh, 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 years. It's still going on. It's finally starting to fall, but it's at a high level 'cause o- 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, right?

Chris Williamson 31:55 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 31:55 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, you saw what happened and you were like, "I want no part of it." Right?

Chris Williamson 32:13 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 32:13 Um, and people-

Chris Williamson 32:13 It's interesting with the, the, the, uh, 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 32:28 It overcomes.

Chris Williamson 32:28 ... that it's got escape velocity to get over you having the raw building block genetics of an addict.

Malcolm Gladwell 32:37 Yeah, yeah, really interesting, really.

Chris Williamson 32:37 Yeah, that's impressive.

Malcolm Gladwell 32:39 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.

Chris Williamson 33:12 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 33:12 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.

Chris Williamson 33:26 Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's fascinating. There's this idea called the, the region beta paradox, uh, 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 and they're not 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... Uh, all these people would be better off if their situations were worse.

Malcolm Gladwell 33:55 Were worse. Oh, that's fascinating.

Chris Williamson 33:56 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 33:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:56 It would kick them out the bottom, um, and, uh-

Malcolm Gladwell 33:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:59 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 have done live events and sometimes questions are a little more of a boast. Uh, they're a little bit rambling.

Malcolm Gladwell 34:17 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:17 Uh, and this one was real sharp and short, and he says, "I think I'm in region beta. Should I purposefully make my life worse so I get out of it?" And I was like, "It's 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 34:36 Well, the version of that is the difference between the Cold War and, you know, Russia and Ukraine.

Chris Williamson 34:43 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 34:43 We never... The Cold War never becomes a hot war because the consequences of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States are existential.

Chris Williamson 34:52 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 34:53 Russia and Ukraine just, are just like slowly over time or randomly destroying each other. And, you know, they can ne- Both of them are carrying on, right? So it's like, they're in, they're in... What's the phrase? Re- region beater?

Chris Williamson 35:07 Region beta. Yeah, beta, you guys would call it.

Malcolm Gladwell 35:09 Beta.

Chris Williamson 35:09 Region, region, region beta paradox. Um, yeah-

Malcolm Gladwell 35:12 They're in, they're in... That conflict is in region beta.

Chris Williamson 35:14 Region beta, 100%. 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, (laughs) uh, that might be (laughs) a way-

Malcolm Gladwell 35:27 That's extreme. That's extreme.

Chris Williamson 35:27 ... a way of being... Yeah, another radical

Chris Williamson 35:29 one. Um, another thing I'm interested in, uh, 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, uh, this parental contagion idea that, that-

Malcolm Gladwell 35:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 35:58 ... you talked about.

Malcolm Gladwell 36:01 Well, I'm a little bit of a skeptic on that kind of polygenic screen- screening 'cause 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 few, you know, the, what's the big five? Conscientiousness, neuroticism, uh, openness to experience, uh-

Chris Williamson 37:18 Agreeableness and extroversion.

Malcolm Gladwell 37:19 ... agreeableness and extroversion. Um, conscientiousness is the least genetically determined of all those. Extroversion is the most.

Chris Williamson 37:26 Is that right?

Malcolm Gladwell 37:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:27 Wow.

Malcolm Gladwell 37:27 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'll 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, uh, of sour people is still an extrovert. They're still yucking it up. Like they're not... So you're relatively impervious to that. And I, I've come to the opinion that when it comes to explaining performance, c- conscientiousness and motivation are way, way, way, way, way, way more important than we realize. And if that's the thing that's the least genetically determined, then what are we doing here?

Chris Williamson 38:07 Mm-hmm. Yeah. I-

Malcolm Gladwell 38:08 Maybe-

Chris Williamson 38:09 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 38:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 38:27 ... people are... The same reason that I use a temperature controlled mattress duvet that tracks my HRV and I try to not eat three hours before I... You know what I mean? Like people are, are trying to-

Malcolm Gladwell 38:38 Are you on the H- Are you on the HRV train?

Chris Williamson 38:39 I am on the HRV train.

Malcolm Gladwell 38:40 Are you on the-

Chris Williamson 38:40 Look at me. Who do you think is on the HRV train?

Malcolm Gladwell 38:42 You've got it.

Chris Williamson 38:43 Yes, Whoop brothers. Whoop brothers indeed.

Malcolm Gladwell 38:45 Whoop, baby.

Chris Williamson 38:45 Yeah, um-

Malcolm Gladwell 38:46 Whoop, Whoop. We could do a whole side of thing on Whoop. I'm a Whoopssessive. Whoop, its chief function for me is, sorry, this is a digression.

Chris Williamson 38:54 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 38:55 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 four o'clock in the morning, "Daddy, Daddy, I wanna, uh..." And I can't get back to sleep and I wake up dreading my Whoop score. Whoop said I had a great night of sleep and I've been fine ever since. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 39:14 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 Whoop-

Malcolm Gladwell 39:21 Almost never happens.

Chris Williamson 39:22 Oh.

Malcolm Gladwell 39:22 It's only, for me, it only ever works if I think I had a great night, I had a great night.

Chris Williamson 39:26 Maybe Will, I, I could get the CEO of Whoop to-

Malcolm Gladwell 39:29 Did he s- did he skew my numbers? Maybe he gave me-

Chris Williamson 39:31 Well, 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 39:36 Is that something?

Chris Williamson 39:36 I'm happy to be gaslit. I only want to be gaslit in one direction though, I always want to assume that I've got mostly-

Malcolm Gladwell 39:42 Wait, what's your H- what's your, what's your, what's your HRV average?

Chris Williamson 39:45 Uh, probably in the 50s, high 50s. It's not that great.

Malcolm Gladwell 39:48 Good for you. No, that's high. I mean, I'm lower, but I'm, I s- I'm a good deal older. It drops with age.

Chris Williamson 39:53 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 39:53 Geezers such as myself.

Chris Williamson 39:55 (laughs)

Malcolm Gladwell 39:55 (laughs) What? What?

Chris Williamson 39:58 Uh, parental contagion.

Malcolm Gladwell 40:00 Parental contagion. W- 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, there was a, a f- 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.

Chris Williamson 40:38 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 40:38 And the answer is the evidence says not a lot. Basically if your kid, 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 their children is so muddy and murky, and that I don't even know what to make... I, I, I've, 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 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, no. Skip a generation." The only way to do that usefully is to, is to think about your four grandparents 'cause there's too much noise with your parents.

Chris Williamson 41:31 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 41:31 Who knows... You grew up with your mom and your dad, like who knows like, who knows if you're even accurate-

Chris Williamson 41:36 So shared environment, N of two.

Malcolm Gladwell 41:39 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 or the way you are?

Chris Williamson 41:47 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 41:47 Right? I can s- 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."

Chris Williamson 41:58 (laughs)

Malcolm Gladwell 41:59 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 gonna be different.

Chris Williamson 42:07 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 42:07 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, 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-

Chris Williamson 42:40 Hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 42:41 ... 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." You know, so there's an example of, like, it was clear, the relationship between me and my grandfather was clear, but, like, you would never have walked into my father and said, "Oh, I see. That's Malcolm."

Chris Williamson 42:57 Hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 42:57 It's, you know, like, it's too much noise.

Chris Williamson 42:59 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."

Malcolm Gladwell 43:19 100% agree.

Chris Williamson 43:19 How cool would that be?

Malcolm Gladwell 43:20 100%.

Chris Williamson 43:21 How cool would that be?

Malcolm Gladwell 43:22 100... Although I, and I didn't know my grandparents very well, so I would settle for my four grandparents.

Chris Williamson 43:26 Hmm. Hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 43:26 But, uh, yeah, the four

Chris Williamson 43:27 I didn't know mine,

Chris Williamson 43:28 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... Uh, well, I'm going to give it to you.

Malcolm Gladwell 43:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:33 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 perfe- 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 f- 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 thereto. And I just... I thought that was a, a, an interesting asymmetry.

Malcolm Gladwell 44:49 Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's like a, that is a... It- it- it's funny that you... That is a, a, a beautiful allegory to the fundamental attribution error.

Chris Williamson 44:59 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 44:59 That there are... We make... I, I have my own version of that, which is what I call the, um, asymmetrical parental attribution error.

Chris Williamson 45:08 Okay.

Malcolm Gladwell 45:08 I love asymmetries.

Chris Williamson 45:09 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 45:09 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 my- my father." What you do is you're in a moment or a stage where you say, "Well, you're just blaming Dad." And then years pass, and you flip, and you just blame Mom for-

Chris Williamson 45:31 Hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 45:31 ... for a while.

Chris Williamson 45:31 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 45:31 And then you flip. It's at only e- only one time. You can only hold one disparaging parent in your-

Chris Williamson 45:38 Oh, right. Okay. That's brilliant. It's like, um...

Malcolm Gladwell 45:41 ... in your mind at a time.

Chris Williamson 45:42 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.

Malcolm Gladwell 45:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 45:50 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. You know, it's never the interaction between the bookish father and the outgoing mother, and I am somewhere in between.

Malcolm Gladwell 46:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:05 It's like when you're not wanting to be outgoing, it's like, "Well, Dad did tell you..." And when you can't chill out, it's like, "Well, Mom did say..."

Malcolm Gladwell 46:11 It's binary.

Chris Williamson 46:12 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 46:12 And what's, what's... There are many interesting things about this if you... Particularly now that I'm a, a, a parent. The, um, the... One is that from a very early age, and this is an obvious dumb observation, but it's f- nonetheless one that I've s- 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 i- t- you know, I think this becomes e- e- 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 that 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... Their... 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.

Chris Williamson 47:29 Well, how many people when they get together are different people to who they are when they're apart? You... Uh, with- 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. I- I'm 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,

Chris Williamson 48:00 gi- 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, uh, infectious ideas, noxious or- or benevolent, I guess, um, talk to me about the landscape of how storytelling infects, uh, differently than facts and sort of how, how, how that plays together 'cause I think in the modern world people assume that people... You- you should be convinced by the facts. Follow the facts.

Malcolm Gladwell 48:39 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 48:39 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 48:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:50 ... uh, even fuel hate as well.

Malcolm Gladwell 48:52 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 and 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 b- a narrative that betrays the audience's expectations. That's what a story is. I- the reason I will, why do I, why did I watch, mm, HBO's Task? Finished it on Sunday. I watched it every week for seven weeks. Why did I keep watching? Well, it was interesting, I needed to find a TV show to watch, blah, blah, blah. But fundamentally, I didn't know how it was gonna end, right? So I knew if you had asked me before the final episode how do I think it's gonna end, I would've 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 gonna 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?

Chris Williamson 50:38 Mm.

Malcolm Gladwell 50:38 That's why we, there's so many things we do. Why would... think about it, why would somebody pay an enormous sum 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? And 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 Bargatzi, um, and, uh, is that, am I pronouncing his name right? Bargatzi? Bargatzi?

Chris Williamson 51:10 I've only ever seen it written down. (laughs)

Malcolm Gladwell 51:12 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 'cause he's working with this incredibly narrow template of he's telling these super, kind of, uh, 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 gonna 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 gonna rag on anybody. He's not gonna make fun of anybody. So you're like, so we've narrowed it and that's why he's so inviting and we're like, "Okay, this dude is, uh, trying to thread the needle here. He's gonna do something, he's gonna betray me after taking 90% of possible-

Chris Williamson 52:09 (laughs)

Malcolm Gladwell 52:09 ... objects of betrayal off the s- 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, to the, to the quality of the joke.

Chris Williamson 52:19 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 52:20 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-

Chris Williamson 52:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 52:30 ... you did not see that coming and you, you decided you were gonna paint in one color, right?

Chris Williamson 52:34 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 52:34 That's like, and that's, that is the... So all of which 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 we're, 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-changing that comes with a story is much harder to dismiss.

Chris Williamson 53:04 Dude, that's so great. That's such a, uh, 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've 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, a, a theologist, uh, or a believer desperately hoping to believe on the other side. Um, he just-

Malcolm Gladwell 53:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 53:33 ... has a very high bar for it and is educated in the counterarguments. And, um, he said, he said this real 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, matil- m- materialistic.

Malcolm Gladwell 54:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:09 And he goes, "Is it any surprise (laughs) 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 you... uh, and, and then shame them for not believing, right?"

Malcolm Gladwell 54:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:28 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 now sp- o- supposed to put all of your faith in. And again, asymmetries. There's asymmetry between the power of story and the power of statistics.

Malcolm Gladwell 54:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:44 You know, d- uh, Shapiro's got that famous, um, "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.

Malcolm Gladwell 54:57 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Although, he's using it in a slightly ... That actually ... That's super interesting, on top of that, 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-

Chris Williamson 55:15 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 55:16 ... is not, does not mean that the, the underlying thing is somehow, um, uh, has been kind of, uh, existentially disabled.

Chris Williamson 55:25 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 55:25 It's still-

Chris Williamson 55:26 Your dis- your displeasure does not mean, does not disqualify.

Malcolm Gladwell 55:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 55:28 Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 55:28 It's not like ... You, you know, you haven't changed 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, uh, I wish they were ... I wish m- most commentators were as rigorous in their thinking as he was.

Chris Williamson 55:50 Mm.

Malcolm Gladwell 55:51 I'm saying that-

Chris Williamson 55:52 I saw that you, uh, I saw you made headlines last month-

Malcolm Gladwell 55:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:54 ... about trans athletes. I imagine that was thrilling for you.

Malcolm Gladwell 55:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:58 Do you see a tipping point dynamic going on there?

Malcolm Gladwell 56:03 I 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 one of the strangest public controversies I've ever been a part of. I was describing... I was the moderator on a panel (laughs) on a ch- on ... I was just describing my experience as a moderator, a moderated panel between a pro-trans participation and an anti-trans pertition, partition person, and I'm trying to elicit a fair argument. Four years pass and I'm on a podcast out of Johannesburg 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. Ever, ever moderated in your life?

Chris Williamson 56:47 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 56:47 Particularly on that topic? So, yeah, 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. (laughs) I was like, "What are they talking about?" This-

Chris Williamson 57:02 You wouldn't, you wouldn't have predicted this in advance?

Malcolm Gladwell 57:04 No. (laughs) It's like, "What are they talking about? As a moderator," no one ever mentioned the word moderator. Like I ... It sort of changes when you know that I was the moderator, right?

Chris Williamson 57:12 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 57:13 Anyway, uh, has it ... It's already tipped. Uh, this is ... But wait, 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've ... The idea that we would be discriminating against a class of people over this particular characteristic is absurd and offensive, right? But I think the ... 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?"

Chris Williamson 58:06 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 58:07 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 tr- ... It only involves like a dozen people in the (laughs) entire, the United States, like it's so hypothetical. It's like most people 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 b- 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 are we even talking about this? It doesn't ... Can you name, can you name a signal trans athlete, trans w- a trans woman competitive elite athlete who is currently being disadvantaged by this policy? Can you give me the name?

Chris Williamson 59:10 A trans woman athlete who's being disadvantaged?

Malcolm Gladwell 59:14 Yeah, who's been locked out of competition with biological women as a result of the policies in elite sports.

Chris Williamson 59:20 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 59:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:31 ... I have to imagine if sh- they are going to continue to swim.

Malcolm Gladwell 59:36 They, right now they can't swim.

Chris Williamson 59:38 So would that be a yes?

Malcolm Gladwell 59:40 So you have-

Chris Williamson 59:41 I've got one.

Malcolm Gladwell 59:42 Okay, go ahead. You got one.

Chris Williamson 59:42 I got one. Yes.

Malcolm Gladwell 59:44 Can you g- can you get me another?

Chris Williamson 59:45 No.

Malcolm Gladwell 59:45 (laughs) Okay. So that's number one.

Chris Williamson 59:47 I, I, I, I did, did, did my one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 59:48 Why ... So why, why are we having-

Chris Williamson 59:50 That's 1-12.

Malcolm Gladwell 59:50 Why are we having ... So you, you are a, a 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, "Gimme names," and you've come up with one who's not even relevant, who isn't even swimming anymore. Right? This is a definition of an absurdity.

Chris Williamson 1:00:15 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:00:15 Why, why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical, right?

Chris Williamson 1:00:18 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:00:18 Why don't we discuss the actual issues that are of existential meaning and threat to the trans community?

Chris Williamson 1:00:25 Mm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:00:25 That's my point.

Chris Williamson 1:00:26 Mm. Interesting. I think on the, you know, on the other side, um, 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, th- the college sport thing is like y- 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've- 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 room's there, that, that has to be happening in sport too." I, I wasn't aware of how few, uh, incidents, uh, this is, this is causing, but, um, certainly a lot of headlines, uh, are-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:01:26 But it's like-

Chris Williamson 1:01:27 ... are happening after that.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:01:27 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 and Jim Crow. Do we let them into our... You know, in, in Birmingham in the 1960s, Black people were 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 the panel of which I was a moderator-

Chris Williamson 1:02:26 (laughs) Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:02:27 ... but it's like... So, anyway, this is just... It's an example of the internet can occasionally is very dumb.

Chris Williamson 1:02:34 Mm. What was the story about the Harvard women's rugby team?

Malcolm Gladwell 1:02:39 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, uh, 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.

Chris Williamson 1:03:13 Huh.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:03:13 Which pe- people think, "Oh, it must be some sports factory in the South or something." No, no, no, no. Ivy League schools have the most athletes, have the greatest 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... Uh, the 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. That strikes me as weird. Does that not strike you as weird? It's very strange. And why is one controversial and the o- the other one is not?

Chris Williamson 1:04:12 I would guess that in a meritocratic system people believe that something which is done based on merit, uh, is maybe more deserving somehow or justified in some sort of a way.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:04:29 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 app-... If you, if you were 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-

Chris Williamson 1:04:46 Well, 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, right?

Malcolm Gladwell 1:05:00 Yeah, but these sports are absurd. Like, it's fencing. No one's... It is... The rule-

Chris Williamson 1:05:04 I'd say that to a, say that to a fencer with this big long pokey, pokey thing on their face.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:05:07 What is it? You'll come after me.

Chris Williamson 1:05:09 Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:05:09 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 a 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?

Chris Williamson 1:05:49 I was gonna say, is there something more special about somebody who's Black than somebody who can play tennis well?

Malcolm Gladwell 1:05:55 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.

Chris Williamson 1:06:15 What if they also play tennis? Black tennis players are the rarest of them all, you know?

Malcolm Gladwell 1:06:20 Yeah. There's not a lot of them. That's, 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.

Chris Williamson 1:06:34 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 a data scientist, used AI to help him write this book in 30 days. It's brilliant, and, uh, the most common name of N, uh, of NBA players, the top five-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:06:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:56 ... it's like Michael, John.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:07:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:07:00 They're very, uh, middle class names, and the reason is that even in the sport of basketball, one that people assume is going to sweep up these-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:07:09 Oh, no. Not

Narrator 1:07:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:09 ... poor kids from the streets and keep... Deposit them into the NBA. Uh, now LeBron, uh, born to a 16-year-old single mother, um-... it is, uh, remarkable for, uh, how much-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:07:23 It's the exception that proves the rule.

Chris Williamson 1:07:24 Yes. Yeah, how much of an outlier he is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:07:26 Because I mean, if you are LeBron, you can beat the system, but not anyone else. No, it's-

Chris Williamson 1:07:32 Well, I, I wonder how many LeBrons have been born after LeBron now. That's my question, whether or not we're gonna see a ton of LeBrons in the NBA in a couple of, uh, decades time.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:07:40 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 radically increase the amount of preparation necessary to excel in a given area, you skew it, um, by income, right?

Chris Williamson 1:08:00 Formula 1.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:00 By class and income. Yeah, form- pretty 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, right?

Chris Williamson 1:08:15 Oh, you like watching poor people do sports. That's what you're telling me.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:19 No, I like-

Chris Williamson 1:08:19 I like to watch the, I like to watch the poors.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:21 No.

Chris Williamson 1:08:21 They, they run faster.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:23 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-

Chris Williamson 1:08:36 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:37 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 1:08:44 Hm. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:45 That's... There's no other sp- Give me another sport where that happens.

Chris Williamson 1:08:48 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:49 Not even-

Chris Williamson 1:08:49 Yeah, even cycling. Cycling.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:51 Football. Like, football in Europe. If you don't come out of one of those football systems-

Chris Williamson 1:08:56 Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:08:57 ... you, you're not, you're not playing in the Premier League.

Chris Williamson 1:08:58 Well, 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 gotta be an individual sport for this. I can't think of a team sport that would allow you... Rowing is not gonna be-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:09:09 Even, but even, even a massive number of individual sports have become class-weighted, like tennis-

Chris Williamson 1:09:15 Hm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:09:15 ... would be the perfect example. Golf, massively class-weighted.

Chris Williamson 1:09:18 Well, I, uh, yeah. Golf's an in- golf's a, 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. Th- there's no track or field that is against an opponent in quite the, like, there isn't an opposition in the same way. There's just competitors, right? Also doing-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:09:47 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:09:47 ... 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.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:10:01 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:10:01 Um, yeah, that's fascinating. I, I, I hadn't considered that, uh, the egalitarian nature of, of the Olympics.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:10:08 And also, the weird... Running's really interesting, distance running in particular is fascinating because, you know, it starts out, since you're English-

Chris Williamson 1:10:16 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:10:16 ... the English dominate middle distance running for-

Chris Williamson 1:10:18 Good, good.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:10:19 ... for the longest time. And if, and th- if it wasn't the English, it was, it was E- the English by proxy, the Australians, the New Zealanders. Then the Africans in the kind of '80s take over, and all of a sudden everyone starts saying, "Well, that's 'cause they have a genetic advantage. That's because..." and they started listing all these reasons. And then what happens in the last 10 years? All the Europeans are... And it's now it's the English again, right? It's like... So it's like, we realized w- we made this... We, we... It's this thing that we do, which it, which always, it strikes me as, is 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.

Chris Williamson 1:10:59 Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:10:59 If we're winning, "Oh, was like the, we have the culture of da-da-da." When we start losing it's, "Oh, it's gotta be genes." And then we-

Chris Williamson 1:11:05 Cultural attribution era.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:11:07 Yeah. And then we start winning again, and like, now if you talk to the English it's like, you went... If you talk to some English track and field coach, they'll tell you, "Oh, it's the long English ******* running tradition." (laughs) 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 'cause, 'cause Josh Kerr start, won the, and, and, and, and, uh, you know, won the World Championships, and now all of a sudden you've changed your mind.

Chris Williamson 1:11:31 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:11:33 Malcolm Gladwell, ladies and gentlemen. Malcolm, I find you fascinating. Uh, I think you, that 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-

Malcolm Gladwell 1:11:43 That's right.

Chris Williamson 1:11:44 ... I need to leave. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you've got that's going on?

Malcolm Gladwell 1:11:47 They should 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.

Chris Williamson 1:12:02 Sick. Malcolm, I appreciate you. Thank you.

Malcolm Gladwell 1:12:05 Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Chris Williamson 1:12:07 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.