The Dark Truth About Lethal Injection - with Malcolm Gladwell

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Dark Truth About Lethal Injection

Podcast: Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know
Host: Hasan Minhaj (for 186k Films)
Guest: Malcolm Gladwell
Date: December 17, 2025

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Episode Overview

Hasan Minhaj welcomes Malcolm Gladwell, renowned journalist and author, to discuss the American death penalty system—specifically, the disturbing realities of lethal injection explored in Gladwell’s new season of Revisionist History. The episode covers the cultural permeation and critique of Gladwell’s work, changing perspectives on ideas and public apology, systemic issues in American justice, and a deeply personal account of empathy in storytelling.

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Key Discussion Points

Malcolm Gladwell’s Cultural Impact and Critique

• Gladwell’s style: Making "the world of ideas" accessible to the public.
• Public perception: How his books became cultural touchstones—but also received criticism for oversimplifying complex issues.
• Famous book titles and their staying power ("Tipping Point," "Outliers"), with Hasan joking about their omnipresence at airport bookstores (04:48).

Quote:

"Most people, as part of their daily lives, don't have a chance to engage in the world of ideas... What my books do is allow you to play with the world of ideas."
— Malcolm Gladwell [06:20]

Cultural Shoutouts:

• Blink’s cameo in White Lotus: Gladwell found it “hilarious” when his book was used as a prop, and interpreted critiques of his writing as somewhat complimentary for encouraging curiosity (05:08–06:56).
• Hasan asks Gladwell to coin a term for men over 40 getting deep into history—“dadstalgia”—discussing midlife fascinations with war documentaries and nostalgia (14:23–17:20).

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The Evolution of Evidence and Changing One’s Mind

• Gladwell’s openness to being wrong: He recaps his TED Talk and Revenge of the Tipping Point, where he admits his original support for broken windows policing was misguided [17:38–26:16].
• Public Apology: Gladwell contrasts the rarity of accountability in public figures with how the average person constantly revises their beliefs due to new evidence.

Quote:

"I get such delight in finding out that something I thought was one way is another... what the game we're playing here is, we're playing in the world of ideas. Ideas change."
— Malcolm Gladwell [17:44]

• Empirical evidence trumps certainty: When “Stop and Frisk” policies ended, crime continued to drop, disproving the theory he once promoted (24:27–27:01).

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Fact and Fiction in Storytelling

• Hasan and Gladwell discuss the boundaries between truth, storytelling, and performance, especially in comedy and literary nonfiction (33:11–35:38).
• Gladwell fiercely defends performers’ right to use creative distortion for effect:

  “To fact check a story like that is to essentially undermine the very basis of what we want in a comedian.” [34:43]

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Controversial Advice: College, Careers, and WFH

• Educational fit over prestige: Gladwell argues you shouldn’t attend the “best” school unless you’ll thrive there, citing mental costs of being at the bottom of a competitive environment (36:07–38:41).
• Remote work: Gladwell stands by his view that young professionals should be in the office to learn from others, while older, experienced workers benefit from WFH flexibility (39:27–44:24).

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Revisionist History – Season 11: The Alabama Murders

The Origin Story

• Gladwell traces the season’s roots to a series of conversations with trauma expert Kate Porterfield, who works with victims of torture and capital case defendants (44:50–47:26).
• Focus: The decades-long death row story of Kenny Smith and another man; both sentenced to die in Alabama under highly controversial circumstances.

Quote:

“We have this... tireless, relentless desire on the part of the state of Alabama to find a way to murder these two guys, to execute these two convicted murderers.”
— Malcolm Gladwell [49:32]

Death Penalty Mechanics and Judicial “Override”

• Alabama's unique legal system: Until recently, Alabama judges could override a jury's life sentence and impose death unilaterally—one of the only states to permit this.
• Historical context: The US Supreme Court paused executions in the 1970s due to arbitrary and racially biased practices, but executions returned under new “standards” that failed to resolve core issues (49:57–51:46).

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The Horrors of Lethal Injection

• “Medical” execution origins: The lethal injection protocol was devised by an Oklahoma doctor in the 1970s, never subject to medical testing or scientific scrutiny (52:58).
• Execution process: Three drugs—a sedative, a paralytic, and potassium chloride—are used, yet often result in severe suffering.
  Notably: Autopsies reveal that most executed individuals suffer excruciating lung damage, essentially burning from the inside, but are paralyzed and cannot signal pain (53:44–55:28).

Quote:

"The last thing that you may know is that you're on fire from the inside and the blood is filling up your lungs as you die."
— Hasan Minhaj [54:51]

"No one bothered in 50 years to ask the question of how exactly lethal injection was doing its work. That's the level of kind of moral callousness that we're talking about."
— Malcolm Gladwell [55:28]

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The American Obsession with Punishment

• Severity vs. certainty: Gladwell contrasts US fixation on severe punishment with Europe’s focus on the certainty of punishment as a deterrent (59:16–60:23).
• Philosophical split: Some Americans want more humane justice, while others actively desire perpetrators to suffer during execution—a “peculiarly medieval” view, Gladwell argues (57:49–60:39).

"You cannot fire your way to a better school... If you don't solve the underlying conditions that create [crime], you're just going to get another crop taking their place."
— Malcolm Gladwell [60:58]

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Empathy, Humanity, and the Power of Story

The Podcast’s Climactic Emotional Moment

• Gladwell describes being so emotionally affected in his interviews (especially with the therapist for the condemned men) that he was left speechless—an unusual choice for audio, but one that felt deeply honest (62:44–66:13).

Quote:

"Doing that show was the single most—there are a very small number of events that I've been a part of in my life, experiences that have shaken me emotionally... It seemed the most honest thing to do at the end of the show to communicate the fact that this tore me apart."
— Malcolm Gladwell [62:44]

• The finale is a plea for empathy: It’s “okay to open your heart to someone who society has given up on.”

Hope for Change

Gladwell hopes his work will “join the chorus insisting we be more human,” but acknowledges the challenge in shifting attitudes. [67:03–67:32]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|-------|---------| | 06:20 | “Most people... don't have a chance to engage in the world of ideas. What my books do is allow you to play with the world of ideas.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 17:44 | "I get such delight in finding out that something I thought was one way is another... what the game we're playing here is, we're playing in the world of ideas. Ideas change." | Malcolm Gladwell | | 34:43 | "To fact check a story like that is to essentially undermine the very basis of what we want in a comedian." | Malcolm Gladwell | | 54:51 | "The last thing that you may know is that you're on fire from the inside and the blood is filling up your lungs as you die." | Hasan Minhaj | | 55:28 | "No one bothered in 50 years to ask... That's the level of kind of moral callousness..." | Malcolm Gladwell | | 62:44 | "Doing that show was the single most... It seemed the most honest thing to do... to communicate the fact that this tore me apart." | Malcolm Gladwell |

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Important Timestamps

• Cultural Reach & Critique: 04:48–09:07
• Changing One’s Mind (Broken Windows & Stop and Frisk): 17:38–27:01
• Fact vs. Art in Comedy/Nonfiction: 33:11–35:38
• Parenting and Midlife Nostalgia: 14:23–17:20
• Work from Home Debate: 39:27–44:24
• Revisionist History S11 - Alabama Death Row: 44:24–47:26
• Death Penalty Law in Alabama: 49:57–51:46
• Mechanics and Horror of Lethal Injection: 52:58–55:28
• Severity vs. Certainty in Punishment: 59:16–60:23
• Empathy and Podcast Climax: 62:44–66:13

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Tone and Noteworthy Moments

• Conversational, frequently laced with dark humor from Hasan, academic but accessible explanations from Gladwell.
• Malcolm Gladwell’s emotional vulnerability is a rare and touching climax (62:44).
• Hasan follows comic relief with deep, probing questions, maintaining the show’s "dumb show for curious people" ethos.
• The episode closes with Gladwell offering a “blurb” for Hasan:

  “Hasan got me to cry. I wasn’t expecting it... I would listen to Hasan Doesn’t Know on a regular basis. From now on, if I were you.” [68:42]

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Conclusion

This episode offers more than a true crime tale—it’s a profound examination of American attitudes toward crime, punishment, empathy, and the fluidity of knowledge. Gladwell’s storytelling and vulnerability, paired with Hasan’s sharp wit and curiosity, make for a compelling, human exploration of difficult topics, putting a lens on both systematic injustice and the need for compassion.

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Transcript

[Hasan Minhaj]

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[Hasan Minhaj]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

Lemonade.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Last thing. And I don't know if you you got your pep in your step to do this, but you are very famous for giving people blurbs on the back of their book.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Now first things first. What is a blurb because it sounds like a slur that you would hear in Harry Potter, you bloody blurb.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

2 sentence, 3 sentence endorsement goes on the back of a book which says, I read it. I liked it. You should read it, too.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you mind giving a blurb for this interview here, right to your camera?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, my God.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You're the master of blurb. I've seen your blurbs on many different books. At a Hudson newsstand.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Hasan got me to cry. I wasn't expecting it. I was expecting that to happen. Anyone who can make their guests cry deserves a shout out. I would listen to Hasan doesn't know on a regular basis. From now on, if I were you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Prepare to be dazzled.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Prepare to be dazzled.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Maybe no other writer epitomizes popular nonfiction like Malcolm Gladwell. He literally made nonfiction popular. Millions and millions of people have read his books. And that has gotten him in trouble with two groups. One, snobs who hate popular things. And two, people impacted by some of the ideas that Malcolm Gladwell helped make popular. So I sat down with Malcolm to talk about the incredible new season of his podcast, Revisionist History and the profound impact that it had on him.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Shook me, Shook me.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Why his books have had such a wide appeal.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What my books do is allow you to play with the world of ideas.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And we get into his hot take on working for home.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I'll never live that one down.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I also asked him about that blink cameo in White Lotus. Was it a compliment or a snake diss? I mean, Mike White, what are you doing here? Are you coming for my boy Malcolm? And more importantly, are you casting me in season four or what? Because I am available. Do you prefer writing books or do you prefer podcasting?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I like them both because it's so different. It's like saying, do you prefer chicken to shrimp? I mean, I like them both, but they're. They're. It's hard to compare because there's things you want to do with podcasting that you can't do with writing and vice versa. The thing I got tired of in writing books, not tired of. It's too strong a word, but I wanted to get away from was I didn't like the insistence of my own voice. So the thing that's lovely about podcasting is, or the kind of narrative audio storytelling that I do is that I get to recede. And what I'm doing is collecting other people's voices.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I mean, your books have permeated culture in a way that is so. It's so Hudson Newsstand deep. Like, there is not a year that I have traveled where I have not seen a Malcolm Gladwell book at an airport in the United States of America. Did you see the cameo of Blink on season one of White Lotus?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How'd you feel about that?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That was hilarious.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Shane was reading it. This is a moment.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I did love that. I love that show.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How did you feel about the way Mike White described this moment? So this is what Mike White said about it. Blink just felt like such a normie book. It seems like he's stoking his curiosity, but it hasn't gone very deep. Gladwell is the kind of writer that makes you feel smart while you're reading it, whether you are or are. Aren't.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, I love that. That's a very sweet thing to say.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Don't you think some people think of this as a diss. I don't think I see this as a compliment. So he. He was writing that like, that's why Shane is reading the book in it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But I think I'm like, hey, you create egalitarian, accessible stories that people can read.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. And it's. But it's. I think, if I may be reading too deeply into that. But the way I would phrase it is most people, as part of their daily lives, don't have a chance to engage in the world of ideas. People's lives are full. They have kids, jobs, responsibilities. They're not reading the Journal of the American Sociological Society at night. Right. Or they're not getting exposed to the latest theory about this or that and the other. There's no place for it. They don't.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And so they don't get. They don't get a chance to quote, unquote. If. If feeling smart means being able to play in the world of ideas, they have limited opportunities for that. What my books do is allow you to play with the world of ideas. I'll. I say I'll go out and find cool ideas for you, arrange them and let you just indulge in them, see whether you like them, try them on for size, reject them if you want, like, and that's that. I think the books have been successful because people have a. They recognize the fact that once you leave college, you don't have easy access to anymore. Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah. It's just hours and hours of kind of free, open, guided time to explore big ideas.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

To explore big ideas. I have the luxury of doing that for others. And that, I think, is a. I think of that as a noble calling.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How do you feel when People put what you do on this huge pedestal that you go, these Malcolm Gladwell books are these seminal books for intellectualism. Do you feel like that's too big of a title? Because I had this with my Netflix show as well with Patriot act, people feel like these infotainment shows are the same thing as being deep experts. Like, if you watch Patriot act and you see our episode about fentanyl. You're not a fentanyl expert. I'm not a fentanyl expert. I'm literally reading off a prompter. And I learned about this a month and a half ago.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, I mean, I think. I do think that's too much. But I think to the extent that what people are doing when they say that is expressing their enthusiasm, I'm happy. Because what they're really saying is, wow, I got to play in this world of ideas. And it is way more fun than I thought.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That's cool.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's what they're saying. And they don't. And you're capturing that a moment in time. Because usually what happens then is they feel emboldened to go on, on their own and discover other stuff. And so the moment when they think that, you know, outliers was the be all, end all, it passes because they then start to discover on their own other ideas that complement their understanding of the world, and they fall in love with some other thing. I'm the gateway drug. I am not the. I'm not the addiction is your.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Is your dream that it gets them on a path to being like, I need to access scientific research.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But again, I want to be the first thing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Full PDF I want to be the.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

First thing you read, not the last thing you read on that subject.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I think one of your greatest gifts is probably your gift and ability to passionately tell a story. I feel like you could tell a story literally about anything and get me engaged. Like, could you do a revisionist history about W2s and W9s? Like, how would you attack that? Give us a little bit of that Gladwell juice of how do you take these very mundane topics and make them super duper interesting?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You know, that's a tough one. I have to look into it a little bit. I've been doing this, a version of this right now because I've been working on this project about American gun violence, and I want to tell a story about American gun violence and not talk about guns. Not at all. You got to talk about guns. In some sense, I'm interested in exploring all. All the. All the peculiarities of the way Americans think about gun violence that have. That aren't the ones we normally think about. And so there's one. There's one where I do an entire chapter on the Second Amendment which is all about this. The grammar of the Second Amendment and understanding in the 18th century. If you wrote a sentence like that, which is. It's a sentence that begins with an absolute clause and then has the operative clause. And the absolute clause is what's called an initial being clause, particular kind of absolute clause. And initial being clauses loom really large in the grammar of the 18th century in a way they don't now. And so the whole thing is all about 18th century grammar. And I. It is like. I don't know if I pulled it off because no one else has read. It's just a draft. No one else has read it. But.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But this essentially, this is like a funk master Flex. Can we get. Can we get a bomb on this? Can we get a bomb drop, a hot 97 bomb drop on this. This could be the next. This could be the exclusive. This is your Jay Z Hot 97.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is me. This is.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This could be the next book.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, this is a chapter in the next book.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We'll just drop a bomb on a flex. Go ahead.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Did a bomb just drop?

[Hasan Minhaj]

We're going to do it in post.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Okay. But it's possible. I did. I. I did not succeed in this. But I got so deep into 18th century grammar. And what's interesting about it is, is that you realize the whole point of going on this incredibly nerdy grammatical path is to make you understand that when the Supreme Court passes opinions on the Second Amendment, they are making shit up. They have no clue what they're talking about. And anyone who knows what they're talking about is like, oh, my God, this is nuts. To pass a ruling about gun rights based on our understanding of the Second Amendment requires that you interpret the second Amendment because it's a sentence that actually makes no sense. It's a pre modern sentence. It's like not a sentence we'd ever write today. Right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And they presume to interpret the sentence without knowing anything about linguistics, in particular, without knowing anything about historical linguistics. That's ridiculous. You can't read a sentence from 1783 or whatever it was.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In. As someone living in 2025 and make sense of it. You've got to talk to people who knew what the way people phrase things in 1783 got it. Right. And they didn't do that. They just thought, oh, I can pull out Webster's the dictionary off the shelf and just tell you what the. What the words mean. This is. If you did this for a. For a paper in college, you would get a C minus.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You are very good at coining particular terms that catch, like wildfire. Tipping Point, for example. Yeah, obviously, your super popular book that came out in 2000, tipping point. I read it. Many people read it. What is it about certain terms that make them just catch on like wildfire, Like, I'll give you an example. You know the term bucket list? Okay. That term came from this movie. There was a movie called the Bucket List with Jack Nicholson and Morgan starts with that. It starts with this.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It was not used.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It does not predate this movie.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, really?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, like in social lexicon, isn't that crazy? But my question is, is how do you know that something is going to catch like that?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You don't. I mean, how could you know? I mean, you can, you can. It can sound good to you, but.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But picking a title is pretty big. Like, picking a title, you know this. You're sitting with this PDF, you're reviewing it, you're revising it. It's like naming an album. You go, okay, this is, this is the phrase.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I mean, I have a theory about what a title, what, what the perfect title is. Although none of my books have ever had the perfect title. The perfect title is a oxymoron. So there has to be some tension between the two kind of operative words in the title. So the famous environmentalist book for the 60s, Silent Spring, is, to my mind, a perfect title. Silent and spring are in opposition to each other. Right? It's an oxymoron. No, Spring is silent and she's giving us. She's. That with two words, we instantly know that there's stakes. Something has been right. We. She's taken two very, very, very sure, familiar, simple words and by pairing them, has just created this whole understanding of what's going on. Right. So I've always. That's what I've always strived for. The title of my podcast, Revisionist History, is not quite that, but it's a. It is. The tension is that that term is something that's usually used as a term of disparagement. And so I am suggesting that something that's usually disparaging is actually worth listening to.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Can you help me coin some terms, these things that I've been feeling as a comedian? I use comedy as a way to, in a healthy way, channel my add and internal feelings into something that is useful and possibly provides people Joy and comfort. Can you help me come up with a term that describes the urge that men above 40 have to want to engage in, devour history? You know how, like, dads who are, like, 44 years old and they're like, I'm super into Ken Burns now.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What. Is that so true, by the way? Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

The bad term I have is dad stalgia. But that. Like that. It's not. It's not singing. It's not singing, baby, help me make it sing. You know what I'm talking about, though, right?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I know exactly what you're talking about. It never occurred to me till now. It makes me happy that you have identified this thing. And what's right about this is that it is absolutely the case that, like, there's a moment when they're all. When this species of dad is like, they're all. There's suddenly it's all about General Patton.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's a species of dude. Yes, it is a species of heterosexual man.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Second World. Second World War is.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I'm going to. I'm going to keep giving you the exposition. Hopefully this sparks something. I'm talking about a type of guy. See, here's what happens is, in your childhood, your teens, your 20s, your 30s, you're like, how does the world work? Okay. Shit. That will hurt me. All right. What is a bank account? Wells Fargo. Got it. This is a checkbook. Checks are stupid. This is a credit card. Holy. Interest rates are high. Finally got a job. This is how you talk to people. I think I'm awkward. I should probably go to therapy. You do all these things, then you come of a certain age and you're like, whoa, I kind of get the world. And then you're like, how the fuck did we get here?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And then you dive into Civil War by Ken Burns, 1990.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's right. It's. It's like. But also, it's about it. The nostalgic.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What's that word?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Because it is. You're also hearkening back to at the moment that you're beginning to lose your grip on your own masculinity and to kind of physical force. You're harking back to a time when those were the things that mattered the most. Right? It's like that. It's like. You know, it's. It's. It's testosterone. It's like, oh, no. It's something. I mean, I don't know how to. I don't know what to do. It is. But that's part of it. It is longing for not Just longing for a lost era. But it's a longing for a lost version of yourself at the time when you could no longer be a soldier. You are starting to indulge the stories and lives of soldiers. Right. You don't do it when you're 25 because you realize, oh, that's me, like, being slaughtered in the trenches or whatever. But when you're 45 or 50, it's safe. It's like, oh, no, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be called up if we went to war. So now I can kind of. I can stay home and watch Saving Private Ryan for the third time.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sorry, I'm just like. I'm just still dwelling on testosterone. Okay, let's move on to the next concept, because I don't want to dwell on this. What I love about you is that you are willing to be proven wrong. And you talk about this in Revenge of the Tipping Point. Dude, your TED Talk was nuts. How did you feel about that TED Talk where you basically were like, my bad.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't. Thing is, it's a flip side. I was saying earlier, because I don't have it, because I get such delight in personal delight in finding out that something I thought was one way is another. It never occurs to me that there's any public cost to speaking about that out loud. Right. It's like, it's fine. Like. And if you're someone who likes my writing, you're used to that and you understand that what the game we're playing here is, we're playing in the world of ideas. Ideas change. So we're gonna. Every now and again, we're gonna pull up stakes and move forward.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You know, I gotta give you credit, man. It was really. It's very cool of you to say, hey, I was wrong about this.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And then also add that into the blockchain. Because we also live in a society where it's deny, deny, defend, deny, deny, deny.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't understand this because my understanding this is this. There's a whole series of cases where the. The perception of people at the kind of. Who have public roles and the perception of the rest of society are completely at odds. I honestly don't think the average American is at all distressed to learn that an author whose books they've read would stand up and say, you know what? That 25 years ago when I wrote about that, I've changed my mind. I think I was wrong. I think most people are like, oh, that's great. You know why? Because the common experience of most people in the world is that you have to change your mind all the time. Anyone who's had kids, all you do is change your positions. Used to be you're going to bed at 7, then all of a sudden it's 7:30 and you're forced to confront the fact that the body of work, the. That was devoted of parental work, that was devoted to 7pm as a bedtime has gone out the window. And like, there's no going back.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah, totally.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's it. Right. So we're you. But like, but this. There continues to be this perception among people in the public eye that if I do that I'm somehow jeopardizing my credibility, which is so nonsensical to me. Why wouldn't it jeopardize your credibility if you refuse to change your mind in the face of a rapidly changing world? Like that's credit that someone who's like saying the same thing today as they said 25 years ago, that is a threat to their credibility.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I think that is a byproduct of people saying in. In certain particular circles, you cannot say you're sorry, it will fuck up with your credibility. That's because I think people have noticed some of the most powerful people on planet earth are psychopaths that do not apologize. And we live in their ecosystem. The shrapnel of their ideas affect us.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Elon Musk, Donald Trump, et cetera. Right. It's their ideas that they then push notification to the entire world and we have to deal with it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. I interviewed these two people, two of the most impressive people I've ever met, the other week. Former secretary of the Air Force and former chief of staff of the Air Force. So secretary is a political appointee. Chief of staff runs the place. They knew each other, they were friends. And when they were both running the Air Force, there's a mass shooter. I forget where. Oklahoma. Something like that goes in and kills 25 people in like a church.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They get a call early in the morning that guy is a ex Air Force person. And then they get another call. And by the way, he was drummed out of the Air Force dishonorably for committing some kind of act of violence involving a gun. And it was your responsibility to notify the FBI so that he would be on a list that wouldn't allow him to buy a gun. And you didn't do it. Right. Like my institution screwed up and as a result, this guy went out and killed 25 people. So they have a meeting and everyone in the meeting, all the top Brass in Washington there tells them, go slow, let's work this out. There's maybe a way, some loopholes. And they're like, no, we screwed up. We're going to just hold a press conference and say we screwed up. And so they go, they, they say we screwed up. They go towards Congress and they say we blew it, we made a mistake. Like, we've got to have better. We're going to find out all the people who are accountable. We're going to fix this thing. And then there's a funeral for some of the people killed by that shooter. And the guy who's the chief of staff of the Air Force puts on his uniform, flies down. Was it Texas? Flies down to Texas and attends the funeral of the people who were killed because of an institute of an error by his institution. And I said to him, Jesus, like, did you. What did you think was going to happen? I didn't know what was going to happen, but it was my responsibility to go. And I was so. It was so antithetical to everything about the way public servants behave, popular expectations in popular culture. And it was two, these two incredibly decent people who, by the way, they weren't personally responsible. It wasn't like they personally didn't report it. It was like something, they run an organization with like a hundred thousand people, but they took responsibility, they took the heat before Congress. And then the guy puts on his uniform and flies to Texas and goes to the funeral and goes up to the guy who just was one guy there who lost six children, goes up and gives the guy a hug, right? Just like.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And so you were blown away by the empathy, the humanity, and by the.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Fact that he didn't, he was not afraid to say I fucked up, right? And he said at the end of the day they were way better, they were way better off for doing that. He said when they went toward, for Congress, everyone was expecting them to deflect, deny and delay. And when he said, no, no, we screwed up as the first thing out of his mouth, he's like, they were completely shocked, right? And it's like sometimes the hardest thing is not just the best.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And maybe it's so refreshing because people and especially adults in corporate America and in their day to day life hear it, never hear that from those who are in power, from their manager all the way up to the sitting politician or bureaucratic.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Why is it I listen to that story? And I was like, how can you listen to this story and still believe it's a good idea to.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, I mean, this is Such an inspiring thing that you're describing. Just so our listeners are aware, can you describe what you talked about in Revenge of the Tipping Point and in your TED Talk in regards to the broken windows theory that you had in the 2000 book?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

In my 2000 book, 25 years ago, I made. I was trying to describe why crime fell in New York City so dramatically in the 1990s. And I spent a lot of time arguing that it was the result of what was called broken windows policing, which was this idea that relatively trivial signs of disorder are send a signal to would be criminals that behavior misbehavior is possible. Right. More than that. Almost welcomed. Right. No one's in charge. That idea was then taken by the nypd and that was the basis for the Stop and Frisk program where the NYPD went out and over the course of many years stopped hundreds of thousands of young black men on the street looking for weapons. Because that was broken windows policing. It's like, all right, if we crack down on gun carrying, we'll send a message that people will. I at the time, like many people in New York, thought that Stop and frisk was a really good idea. It's like, yeah, that's a good extension of this idea. That's the way we keep the crime rate down. A court stepped in and throughout as unconstitutional stop and frisk policing, NYPD went from stopping hundreds of, if not millions of young black men every year to almost none. And what happened? Crime continued to fall. So if you wrote, if you endorse stop and frisk, and then you were suddenly faced with the empirical reality that once Stop and frisk went away, things did not get worse, but rather better. You have to re examine your position. Right. Gotta wait. It didn't work the way I thought it was gonna work. In my heart when I read that court case that threw out Stop and Frisk, I'm forgetting when it was 2000 and something, like many New Yorkers, I was like, this is the end. It's all coming back.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Oh, you thought New York would turn into Gotham City?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh my God. I thought the crime was coming back. And so did. I mean, if you read editorials in all the papers in New York in the early aughts when that court decision went down, everybody was like, gloomy and dooming. We're bringing back the bad old days. Didn't happen. The reverse happened. Crime accelerate. The crime drop accelerated. So I just gave a TED Talk when my book came out, my last book, Revenge the Tipping Point, where I talk about this, where I just said I was wrong, you know, And I. I have to. I have to take ownership of this. And here's the thing that I have come to understand about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York. I was wrong.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Black Friday was a dark day indeed in the Minhaj household. Enticed by promises of never before seen savings, I accidentally spent all of ours. Did I only buy stuff for me?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I got some gifts on lock. Will my son grow out of his new custom Jordans in six months? Yeah, he will. But if you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch, rated Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 20. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. And right now, just for our listeners, Monarch is offering 50% off your first year. Monarch made me realize how easy it is to get sucked in by the holiday spirit. It was a wake up call. Tracking my spending in real time helped me pivot well before the bills arrived. Plus, with Monarch, I get access to a financial advisor with no extra cost.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Your boy is learning. Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use code [e-mail] in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year. @monarch.com with code Hasan. I can be a bit of a perfectionist. I am always trying to top my personal best. Usually that side of me comes out through my writing or standup. But this time of year, it's usually through holiday gifts. Because let's be real, you cannot give a gift that is worse than last year's. And I'll admit I was struggling to think of something perfect. It's gotta be thoughtful, personal, ideally not something I have to to physically build. I mean, you see these callous free hands. I don't build stuff. Then I learned about today's sponsor, Aura Frames. Aura Frames are digital picture frames. You can send unlimited photos and videos straight from your phone to display in your home. Useful and sentimental, it also comes in a very nice gift box. Included for free. It is low effort perfection. Win the holidays now with Aura Frames for a limited time. Save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best selling Carver mat frames. Name number one by Wirecutter by using promo code HUSAN at checkout. That is a U R A frames.com promo code HASSAN. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out Fast. So order yours right now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. I recently turned 40 and have been labeled as UNK on TikTok. I gotta say, I keep finding myself thinking I should get that checked out by a doctor. Like how one of my leg muscles randomly spasms or my lifelong IBS symptoms I've grown to accept without question. Or blood tests to tell me that I inevitably will succumb come to type 2 diabetes. But going to the doctor is so time consuming and not fun. It takes a lot of time, trial and error to find a doctor I actually feel comfortable with. Your boy is shy and doesn't play with HIPAA. That's when I found ZocDoc. They made it easy and fast to find the right doctor and immediately book an appointment directly on their website. The best part, zocdoc is completely free. You can search and compare high quality in network doctors and sometimes even book same day appointments. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com husband find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's Z O c d o c.com Huss this message is sponsored by Zocdoc.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I wrote a book that was read by a ton of people, millions of people in 2000, arguing that the way to explain New York City's crime drop was essentially some version of aggressive policing.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How did you feel when you found out that, oh, the NYPD used your book as literary or intellectual justification to stop and frisk?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I mean, there were many. I wasn't the sole source of there.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But I'm sure it's right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. But no, no, my book became part of this kind of zeitgeisty discussion, discussion about how aggressive policing was the way to cure crime. I mean, I think, if I think back to that time, I think I was flattered. How could you not be? Because we were in the middle of this extraordinary urban experiment where New York goes from being one of the most dangerous big cities in the world to one of the safest. And the idea that I was part of a movement that kind of helped justify this crackdown on crime was like, made me feel good. And then I find out, oops.

[Hasan Minhaj]

At the end of the TED talk, a woman comes on stage and thanks you for your mea culpa. And then you guys get into an interesting discussion about the way your work was interpreted for it. Did you ever think about what if they got it wrong? What if it was wrong and Innocent people were gonna have to experience this. What were your thoughts about that back then?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I wasn't thinking about that after that experience.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How do you now see your work in the way it's received by others? Do you want to put addendums that, hey, this could change or has it fundamentally, how has it changed the way you approach your work?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, over the course of my career, I think one of the changes that I've made is I have slowly come to the understanding that if you are going to play this game with ideas, you have to not temper your enthusiasm, but temper your certainty. You have to make it clear that this is what we're talking about right now. And that ideas by their very nature are based on evidence. And evidence changes. We, we learn more things. Criminology is a great example. Criminology last 25 years. The field of criminology has. I mean, so much has happened. We know so much more. I mean we were in retrospect primitives in 2000. We know like that a hundred years of advances in understanding have happened in the last 25 years. So we need to be remind people this is a. Knowledge is a moving target. And I think I need to do. I've realized I need to do a better job of communicating that. Just because I'm saying this now doesn't mean it's going to be. I'm going to be saying the same thing a generation now or five or even next year.

[Hasan Minhaj]

By the way. By the way, hey, I've been caught in comedy crime before as well.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

As a grifting charlatan. And I think the adjustment that I've made is you have to lead with. I don't know. That's what I. I make it very clear in on our little microphones here just in case if anyone is using micro content as a way or vessel to truth. I just want to make it very clear that the title of the show is Hassan Menhash Doesn't Know.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Don't get me started on what happened to you, which I'm still angry about.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No, don't, don't.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Nothing is more tiresome than people who fact check stories. These are not. Like you weren't writing a history of your life that was gonna be published by Harvard University Press.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I was condensing many stories into 70 minutes. That's.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You're a performer, for goodness sake. Do we forget what a performer is like? Part of what's funny about comedians, like the universe of good comedians, is that when we are listening to you, the thing that's that draws us to you is, is the idea that you guys have a distorted lens. Like it's. That's what we don't have. We don't have a distorted lens. We don't see the comic possibilities in looking at the world from a slightly different angle. And the delight we get from listening is, oh, that person's not looking at something straight on. They have this completely, you know, this surprising wacko, never would have thought about it in a million years perspective. That's the punchline. It's what a punchline is.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Right. So like, to sit to, to fact check a story like that is to essentially undermine the very basis of what we want in a comedian. And if you're getting your history from a comics routine, then you're so intellectually impoverished, I have no time for you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Malcolm, don't do this. I already put out. I put out a 23 minute YouTube video about this. You can see it in the link below. But it's fine.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It drives me crazy.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Malcolm. It's okay. I'm a race baiting, grifting charlatan. It's okay. Meanwhile, and then you can make funny. You can make funny jokes about it, and then you can sell out venue.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The people for whom this stuff does matter get a pass. Okay, Right. The politicians who are telling bullshit stories, they're not comedians, right? I didn't vote for you to look at the world from a 45 degree angle.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's okay, Malcolm. You can put me in comedy jail. It's fine. I set my sentencing.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I'm up about this. I do not want my comics to be like dryly relating to facts of the day.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Okay, understood. You want your comics spicy. You want your comics lying to you, and that's okay. You know, I gotta give it to you though, again, you and I, we love a hot take. Literally, in your. You know, you have revenge of the Tipping point, and then CBS Sunday Morning does a story on you and you've got even more spicy takes. Let's take a look.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You should never go to the best institution you get into. If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard.

[Hasan Minhaj]

This is nutso.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, no, that's. That's part of a complicated argument from my book David and Goliath, which just says you should never. If you're interested in succeeding in an educational institution, you never want to be in the bottom half of your class. It's too hard. So you should go to Harvard if you think you can be in the top quarter of your class at Harvard, that's fine. But don't go there. If you're going to be at the bottom of your class, no doing stem, you're just going to drop out of your.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I get it. Now you're triggering me because I was pre med and I was in the bottom third of my class. They did the whole thing. Look to your right, look to your left. Two of you won't make it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You were one of those.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I was one of the two. Yeah. And we don't have to get into this because now you're triggering me. But let me just say, Malcolm, if you do get into Harvard, you got to go to Harvard. You have to.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, you don't. If my daughters, knock on wood, get into Harvard, and I don't think they're going to be in the top third of their class, I'm going to say don't go. It's too hard. It's crazy hard. Do you know how smart those kids are? I know people who went to, like, elite public high schools. Like, you know, Stuyvesant in New York.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And everyone in Stuyvesant basically has an IQ of 180. So the dumbest person in a math class in Stuyvesant can have an IQ of 100, whatever, 70. So they think they're dumb because you measure your. That's how you measure your intelligence, by looking around the room. They're not dumb. They're in the top 99.999% of humanity, but they are misled by the fact that they happen to be in the most extraordinarily selective group of individuals in the city of New York. Don't do that to yourself. Right.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Or you should. Cuz I'll tell you why. Both Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz went to Harvard and then Donald Trump went to Penn. So my point is, is that there are idiots that go to these institutions and if they can spin it into a win, so can you. If you get into Harvard, go, yeah, take your shot at going to the league if you get drafted, if David Stern gives you the call. I went to UC Davis, unfortunately. And the crazy part is I got him to ucla, but I didn't go. I went to Davis. Said, this is a longer story for another time. I got scared.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Your family's from Sacramento, were they?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sacramento, Davis? I grew up in Davis and I went to UC Davis.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You got, you do want to go to uc.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I met my wife there. And so it was the biggest blessing of all and it was wonderful.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But you see summer camp, it's like.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Malcolm I get it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What were you doing?

[Hasan Minhaj]

I know, I know. I got shook. I got shook. That is madness that I didn't go to ucla. Yeah, I know. I know. It is a regret.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Were you, like, an AG major? Like, what were you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I was a pre med major, and I ran into somebody when I did my campus visit that said, hey, STEM at UCLA is really hard. You shouldn't go here.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, I see. That's what you're thinking.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And that's what got me to not go. Now look again. I met the love of my life, the mother of my children at UC Davis. Let's take that reality to the side. Everything else, ucla, the Wooden center, the history, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and you're in.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The middle of LA in Westwood. You're in the middle of la.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I should have gone. And so, Malcolm, what if you get a call from Adam Silver that says we're calling you up to be one of the 400 players to play in the league? You got to go to the league. And if you can't cut it, fine, but you gotta go to the L. Let's look at another one of your crazy spicy takes that. I don't know how you thought this was cool. All right, let's take a look.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's not in your best interest to work at home. I know it's a hassle to come to the office, but, like, you know, if you work, if you're just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live?

[Hasan Minhaj]

Is that the work life I want? Answer. Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I got so much trouble for that. I'll never live that one down. Can't believe you dredged that one up.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's one of the top videos of you, Malcolm.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What am I wearing? I'm wearing, like, some.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You're wearing a gray T shirt. So the irony here is that you're telling people to not be bums, be in their pajamas and work at home, and you're wearing a goddamn Hanes T. Here.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Here's what I should have said. I should have said two things. No, one thing. It depends who you are. If you're 25 and you're trying to. Entering a new field and trying to master it, you shouldn't be at home. You got to go to the office because you got to learn from other people. And it's way, way, way, way easier to learn from other people when you can see them face to face. If you're 50 and you got three kids at home and you got an hour and A half commute and you're really good at your job and experienced. Why are you coming in? Doesn't make any sense. You can be way more productive at home. Depends who you are. What I was reacting to, I think in that was this widespread belief that everybody is better off just working from home. I don't think that's true. I do think if I had worked from home in my 20s, I would not be here. You would never have heard of Malcolm Global.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Here's my subway take. I'm Kareem now. I 100% disagree. I'm not here to tell anybody how they should live their life. I used to work at Office Max for many years. I'm not trying to brag, but I wasn't a great employee and I truly did not care because my first name isn't Office and my last name isn't Max. Whatever you can to do, you protect your own. Get the bag and take care of your family. Do your thing.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, no, yours is a much more evolved position than mine, but I do. I was simply trying to explain. If you've never. If you're young and you're trying to, like I said, master something complicated, it can be hard to understand how much richer the learning experience is when it's in a social setting. Right. That's all. If you're trying to be a journalist. So when I started out in journalism, I got a job at the age of 23 at the Washington Post. And I was within 10ft of four or five of the greatest journalists of my generation. And I didn't know anything about journalism. And I.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Who are you around? I mean, man.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I mean, among others, Bob Woodward was greatest investigative reporter of the 20th century. Was as far away from me as you are. There's a. There was just a series, a guy named Steve Call, who's like a legend. There was a guy next to me called Mike Isikoff who was another legend. And I spent like six months, my first six months almost doing nothing but sitting there and just eavesdropping and like, it was a masterclass. All these things. I had no idea how to ask a question, how to get. How to interview someone who didn't want to be interviewed, how to frame idea, how to extreme. I mean, I could go on and on and on how to process things on the fly, how to write. I just watched them.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You picked up a ton of game from these people in person.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And no, by the way, no athlete would ever say, you can master a sport by yourself, ever. They would. They would never say Oh, I, I, I got drafted by the Knicks, and here's. I'm going to work for work from home over the off season. No, they would never say that. Like now. If LeBron wants to spend the off season by himself, do. Absolutely. He's the top of this game. But if you're a Rookie, if you're 19 and you just got drafted out of wherever, Kansas State. No, you show up with your peers and learn from them. That's all I was saying. I don't think that's a, I do not think that is a controversial take. And I was speaking from my own personal experience because I had become aware, acutely aware in later life just how much I learned in those early years in journalism.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You know, Malcolm, you were able to pick up game from some legends at some great institutions, but a lot of people who have jobs, their co workers are a bunch of bums. And so they just want to say, peace out, Carl. Yeah, I'm going home.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't know. You're more of a cynic than me on this. I, I actually think that if you're, if you're motivated, you can always find in any setting somebody from whom you can learn. And that's part of, that's another thing that is useful about going in your early years in going to the office and immersing yourself, is making those kinds of social calls. Right? There's 10 people around here who, the, who's the one that matters and that I should be attaching myself and learning from. That's a really, really important skill that you can't learn by yourself.

[Hasan Minhaj]

We've had an amazing conversation, but we haven't even gotten to, I think, one of your best pieces of work. I'm talking about the podcast Revisionist History. Season 11, ladies and gentlemen, season 11 of Revisionist History is about the Alabama murders. Now, that's the title of it, but give me the details of what launched this story about this particular situation in Alabama.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Friend of mine named Steven, I was talking to him about a year and a half ago, and he goes, I have a friend named Kate who has the most interesting job in America. You should talk to her. I was like, okay. And I did this thing, which I've started to do more and more and more, where I find someone interesting, and I just sit down with them for as many hours as they can tolerate and just talk to them with no agenda. So Kate was someone, Kate Porterfield was this really extraordinary woman whose job it was. She's a trauma expert, and she started out by treating People who've been started working at the torture clinic at Bellevue, treating people who've been tortured around the world. I'm just world renowned torture clinic there. Then she went on and she spent a lot of time in Guantanamo Bay working with people who've been tortured by the CIA. And then she got involved in criminal cases, capital cases where she was brought in by, usually by the defense in a, in a death penalty case to try and understand the, the life and the trauma of the convicted killer. Right. And so incredibly interesting. So I sat down with her, we met five times, each time for about three hours. And in the fourth time, fourth visit, fourth session, she started talking about a case she had just finished working on about a guy named Kenny Smith. And I was just floored. I was like, oh my God, that's what I want. So in, in, in our like 20, I was like, oh, that's what I want to talk about. Yes. Kenny Smith was a, a guy from Florence, Alabama, in the north western corner of the state who had been convicted in 1988 of murdering the wife of a preacher. And it was a murder for hire and had been sentenced to the, to death by, in the state of Alabama and had been living on death row for 40 odd years. And she got involved in that case as. Just as Kenny was about to be executed. And so I just said, oh, I want to write, tell that story. And it is the most, I think it's the best thing I've ever done. It was the most emotionally powerful thing I've ever done. We ended up doing seven episodes. We ended up expanding it. So Kate, who plays a central role in the story, doesn't even appear until episode five or six, isn't it?

[Hasan Minhaj]

It was two men that were two men. Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Another guy as well.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So the whole premise of this thing is so interesting. It almost sounds like a prestige show for fx, which is there's a wife, there's a husband, there's a murder for hire. The men assault and beat said wife, but then the husband kills the wife.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We think, we think, yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And then it's specifically about the two men that were part of this murder for hire that are then given the death sentence. And what's really fascinating about it is you think this is almost like true crime, but it's actually an analysis about how crazy Alabama judges are. Why are they so crazy?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, why is Alabama crazy? I mean, Alabama is the weirdest state in the union. I think that's beyond dispute. Also one of the most fascinating. I love, I mean, I say that I Actually love Alabama. I go there. I've done so many stories there. I go there all the time. I find it absolutely riveting place. The great curse of the United States is, of course, the legacy of slavery, which has persisted. That curse has lingered longer in some parts of the country than others. And Alabama is a place that is still kind of struggling under the weight of that legacy. Now, this case involves everyone's white in this case. So it's not explicitly about the relationship between black and white people, but what we're describing is a. A brutal and unfeeling system of punishment that arises in response to the kind of racial realities of the state. So we have this. What we're documenting in this series is the unrelenting, tireless, relentless desire on the part of the state of Alabama to find a way to murder these two guys, to execute these two convicted murderers.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What's so interesting about it is this is an analysis on capital punishment.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So the jury is actually against the death sentence. The judge is for it. But just for our audience, before they dive into the season, can you give me the history of capital punishment in America? What's the history of capital punishment in the United States?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, so it's. Compared to our Western European peers, America was very slow to kind of dial back capital punishment. It's a pretty big deal in this country up through the 70s. And then the Supreme Court says, we've looked at the way capital punishment is being used in the states, and we think it clearly shows signs of racial bias and arbitrariness. You know, you got two people convicted of the same crime. One's one's getting executed, one's not. You can't do that. You got to have some kind of rigor. They put a pause on it on death penalty. Public support for the death penalty plummets, and people think it's going away. And then it comes roaring back. Not everywhere, but particularly in the South. And one of the states in which it comes roaring back is Alabama. And Alabama does this thing to ensure that they will to retain their right to execute whoever they choose. They give the judges what are called. What is called override. So there's only one other state in the union that does anything remotely like this. But in the state of Alabama, if you are convicted of a crime and the jury votes for life without parole and not the death penalty, if the judge wants. It's not been changed, but for many years, if the judge wanted to, the judge could override the jury and just say, I know you wanted life without Parole. But I think this person should be killed. And. Which is like a really, really weird thing where they basically throw out a.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Judge, basically gets to have a super veto on a jury, which is nuts.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Nuts.

[Hasan Minhaj]

But there's. I have two questions, follow up questions. The first is, is that up until the 70s, they were like, no, we cannot kill people. We are against the death penalty. What was it about the Supreme Court that lifted that ban?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So everyone's doing it. The Supreme Court says, stop. And then the Supreme Court comes back a couple years later and says, you can proceed so long as you ensure they're speaking to the states, that there's some rigor to the process. You got to have standards. You have to say, you know, and.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What are their standards here? They're like, look, you can't. The guillotine's got to go. We can't have a firing squad. Some states, by the way, have the firing squad, Right?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, there's a big. We. I didn't get into it, but I interviewed all these people about, you know, one of the standards is the method of punishment must be neither cruel nor unusual. And so you get into these big definitional things. Is. Is lethal injection, for example, cruel? And there's a big argument that it is because you suffer. Actually, you think you're not suffering lethal injection. You are. Then the electric chair was clearly cruel. You did suffer. So there's a big argument. One of the reasons that Utah brings back the firing squad is that as an argument that it's more humane than lethal injection. Actually, if I had to be executed, I would choose the firing squad over lethal injection.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It's that bad. Lethal injection.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, we talk about that in one of the episodes.

[Hasan Minhaj]

So take me through the mechanics of lethal injection. How does it work?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's three drugs. It was dreamt up by this doctor in Oklahoma in the 70s on the back of an envelope. It's never been subjected to any kind of scientific protocol or medical analysis. It's a random dude. In response to a request from the Oklahoma state legislature, which wanted to start putting prisoners down the same way they put down horses. And so the guy says, okay, here's what you should do. Give him a. A sedative, like a barbiturate, then hit him with a paralytic that basically kind of freezes you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And then hit him with potassium chloride, which will stop their heart. I think basically his position is that should work. And everyone's like, okay, let's do that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And Reagan, funny enough, was a big proponent of Reagan's big Proponent of it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And so lethal injection, which spreads throughout America and then throughout the world. So in, you know, in many countries now that have Euthanasia. Legalized. Euthanasia, yeah. They're using the lethal injection protocol. Well, we have a whole episode of the podcast where this really brilliant anesthesiologist from Atlanta named Joel Zivet very does all these autopsies of people who have been executed. He finds that their lungs are filled with blood, frothy blood, and realizes what's happening is that the barbiturate that they get at the very beginning is given in such a high dose that it's turned their blood acidic and it's burning up their lungs. So what happens is your lungs are on fire, which is, as you can imagine, quite painful. Because you've been giving a paralytic, you can't cry out in pain.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I mean, the way you describe it in the podcast is horrifying. This is the pull quote. The last thing that you may know is that you're on fire from the inside and the blood is filling up your lungs as you die.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's nasty. The whole point of this is no one who's involved in the death penalty game is even remotely interested in trying to prove that this is a quote unquote humane method of they don't you? When Joel Zivett did the analysis of autopsies to figure out what was going on with lethal injection. Lethal injection had been used in American prisons for close to 50 years. So for half a century we've been doing this and no one bothered in 50 years to ask the question of how exactly lethal injection was doing its work. That's the level of kind of moral callousness that we're talking about.

[Hasan Minhaj]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, and we, we go into this in some detail, and it's the most horrifying part of what is a very long and horrifying story. It's just like nobody gives a shit.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Well, there's an interesting philosophical discussion to be had here with, I call them the revenge heads, the petty police. There's two camps. There's one camp that's like, there has to be a more humane way to have justice and to understand that you cannot just kill human beings. Then there are people that are like, good, yeah, good.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's a lot of that.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No, but for real.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, good. Yeah, there is that strong. Which I don't understand.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How do you react to that sentiment?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It seems peculiarly American. It seems peculiarly medieval. It's part of this weird thing about this country, which is that we are simultaneously the most sophisticated country in the world and also the least. The larger point about this is that if you compare the US to, say, Western Europe or parts of South Asia, East Asia, that we're very interested in the severity of punishment and they're interested in the certainty of punishment. So if you think about deterrence, about the attempt to dissuade someone from committing a crime, the certainty of punishment, how likely are you to get Caught, the severity of punishment, how. How much you'll suffer if once we catch you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Sure.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And the celerity of punishment, how quickly it happens. In Europe, they're super focused on certainty. If you. If you murder someone in Europe, it's almost 100 certain you'll get arrested or someone will get arrested for that homicide. Certainly super high. But they go really easy on severity. Prison sentences are a fraction as long. Most people don't go to prison in. We do the opposite. We're. We have very low certainty. The chances of getting arrested for a homicide in this country are less than 50% in parts. In certain neighborhoods in this country, they're below. On the south side of Chicago, it's like 15. But if you get caught, you will throw away the key. Right. So this is part of that same dynamic. We've decided we're going to put all of our eggs in the severity basket and make. We want to make punishment as horrifying as it sounds, to try and dissuade you from committing a crime. The Europeans say that's. Don't put your emphasis there. Put your emphasis on certainty. I happen to believe the European approach is far superior.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Why do you think in America there's this obsession, particularly with the severity and the feeling of, hey, look, if you kill these bad people, we're talking about criminals, we're talking about murderers. If you kill them now, you just have good people left.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

That was kind of the conversation I had. I had with different friends and people at the office before you came in. Hey, how do you feel about this? And there was, again, a camp of people that were like, this is barbaric. All of this is barbaric. The Green Mile electric chair is barbaric. Firing squad is barbaric. Lethal injection. This is nuts. It's all crazy. I'm not with this. And then there's people that are like, yeah, it'd be, like, reminded.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is a total digression. But my brother was a principal in elementary school, and he realized his great struggle was ensuring the quality of his teachers. Right. Because it's a big difference. And he would always say, you cannot fire your way to a better school. Meaning that, like, you think your first thought is, oh, I'll just get rid of my bad teachers and hire good ones. And he's like, it doesn't work that way. You can't. You. You. If you. If you're just getting rid of the bad ones and. And quote, unquote, hiring good ones, you're not solving the problem that made the Bad teacher, bad. Right? You have to look at yourself and say, am I developing people properly? Am I supporting them properly? Am I putting them in the right place? Those are the questions you got to start with. You can't just, like, go in there and willy nilly get rid of people. And I think there's a version of that with. That's what's not happening in people who are obsessed with killing off murderers. They're not asking the harder question, which is, well, it doesn't help. You're just gonna. If you don't solve the underlying conditions that create this, you're just gonna get another crop taking their place.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You have, obviously, a high level of empathy and curiosity. And one of the ways that you showed that is the way you end season 11. There's this really powerful moment where you speak to the therapist of the man who was sentenced to death, and you do something that is extremely rare in podcasting. You literally are quiet and choked up and silent for a minute. Now, remember, this is a medium where you have to keep yapping, but you are so emotionally moved that you cannot even speak. Why did you choose to end the podcast in this moment?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Because we had been on this. Going to get emotional about it all over again. That doing that show was the single most. There are a very small number of events that I've been a part of in my life, experiences that have shaken me emotionally. Death of my father, number one by far. I'll never get over that. Birth of my children in a positive sense.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Doing that show is like, up there in the. Shook me, Shook me and still does. Was incredibly hard to write to, to report to, like, the number of times I found myself after conducting an interview where I couldn't function for the next like. And it seemed the most honest thing to do at the end of the show to communicate the fact that this tore me apart. Right? Like, because what I wanted to do was, the whole idea was it was a show about people who looked at these two kids from this little town in northern Alabama who do something insanely stupid when they're 19 years old and were written off by the state of Alabama and by the rest of society. And the series of people come and see in them some element of humanity go to the trouble of investing in these kids who society has thought were worthless and finding something of value in them and learning how to love them. Right? And I mean, in one case, this guy we talked about in, I think, episode three, this lawyer visited this guy in prison, drove two hours each way, once a month for 20 years to visit this kid in prison, one of, like, one of the murderers in prison, just to spend time with him. And that, like, just tore me apart. Right. I just, it just. And I needed at the end of that, of the, of the show to kind of just to tell people that, like, it's okay to, like, It's okay to. It's okay to feel. It is okay to open your heart to someone who society. To someone whose society has given up on.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Thank you for sharing that. Appreciate it, man. It's a very powerful moment and something to think about. And it's a very. What I thought was so amazing about it is a very real thing that there are people. These two men obviously did something wrong. But for you to explore the complexity of. Despite the fact that people make mistakes and do things that are horrible, we're still human beings. And we're so much more than what the state was thinking where they would literally kill people from the inside as if they were animals. And so I just thought that was a really powerful moment. And thank you for sharing how those interviews moved you.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you hope that it makes us as a society more empathetic or it makes perhaps America reflect on our own internal empathy?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's always. That's always the hope with these things. You know, it's very difficult to measure the impact, but I think all you can do is like, is just join the chorus. Right. Of people who are. Are insisting that we be more human.

[Hasan Minhaj]

I gotta somehow end on a positive note. We gotta button this thing. How do we do this?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't know.

[Hasan Minhaj]

How do we do this?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I did bring us down a notch. My ability to kind of like inject a. A downer. No. To any room. I.

[Hasan Minhaj]

No, I appreciate it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I will appreciate it.

[Hasan Minhaj]

It was a rare podcast moment and I think an amazing counterweight to the never ending blabbering that we have through laugh mics. It was just a really human, beautiful moment.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. Thank you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

And so like I said, everyone please listen to season 11, a revisionist history last thing. And I don't know if you. You got your pep in your step to do this, but you are very famous for giving people blurbs on the back of their book.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, yeah.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Now, first things first. What is a blurb? Because it sounds like a slur that you hear in Harry Potter. You bloody blurb.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

2.

[Hasan Minhaj]

What is it?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

2 sentence 3 sentence endorsement goes on the back of a book which says, I read it. I liked it. You should read it too.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Do you mind giving a blurb for this interview here right to your camera.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh my God.

[Hasan Minhaj]

You're the master of blurb. I've seen your blurbs on many different books.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Hassan got me to cry. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't expecting that to happen. Anyone who can make their guests cry deserves a shout out. I would. I would listen to Hassan doesn't know on a regular basis. From now on, if I were you.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Prepare to be dazzled.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Prepare to be dazzled.

[Hasan Minhaj]

Can you also add a parentheses that I didn't bully you into crying? If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time. Because guess what? You can listen completely ad free. Plus you'll unlock exclusive bonus content like Halle Berry on how to be a good partner during menopause or Mehdi Hassan on the dumbing down of media clips you won't hear anywhere else. Just tap that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe on any other app that's lemonadapremium.com don't miss out.