#1029 - Malcolm Gladwell - How to Convince the World of Bulls**t & Evil

Summary

Modern Wisdom #1029 — Malcolm Gladwell — How to Convince the World of Bulls**t & Evil

Date: December 6, 2025
Host: Chris Williamson
Guest: Malcolm Gladwell

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Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging and provocative conversation, Chris Williamson and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell dive deep into the mechanisms by which ideas—both benevolent and malevolent—spread through societies. Gladwell, drawing from his latest projects and seminal works The Tipping Point and its sequel Revenge, explores historical and modern examples of contagion: from the American death penalty and the opioid crisis to internet virality, parental influence, genetic selection, and the persuasive power of storytelling. The duo also navigate hot-button cultural debates, always circling back to the root asymmetries that drive human behaviour and social change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Evolving History of Execution in America

• Summary:
  Gladwell explores the shifting landscape of the death penalty in the U.S., highlighting the American obsession with the “humane” execution rather than questioning the morality of state-sanctioned death itself.
• Key Insights:
  • The U.S. has evolved its execution methods (hanging → firing squad → electric chair → lethal injection → nitrogen gas) not for the sake of the condemned, but to make executions more acceptable for public consumption. ([01:36])
  • The use of lethal injection is far less humane in practice than publicly acknowledged: the sedatives cause immense pain, masked by paralytics that prevent the condemned from expressing agony ([04:17]).
  • Gladwell characterizes the state's indifference as “the cruelty is the point”: attempts to inform officials about the inhumane reality often make them more resolute. ([06:25])

Quote:
"The cruelty is the point. Telling them what they thought was humane actually isn’t...seems to increase their motivation and enthusiasm." — Malcolm Gladwell [06:25]

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2. America's Singular Place in the Developed World

• Summary:
  Gladwell reflects on why America is an outlier regarding the death penalty, noting that retributive justice, though psychologically universal, is now only widely enacted in the U.S.
• Key Insights:
  • American exceptionalism is less appreciated by both Americans and outsiders; the country’s approach to punishment, social policies, and state power is truly unique ([11:17]).
  • Even countries famous for execution devices (e.g., France with the guillotine) have long since abandoned them.

Quote:
"I do not believe that either Americans or non Americans fully appreciate just how weird America is." — Malcolm Gladwell [11:54]

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3. Viral Ideas, Super Spreaders, and Societal Change

• Summary:
  The conversation shifts to the mechanism of spreading ideas, using epidemiology as a metaphor—an idea central to Gladwell's Tipping Point.
• Key Insights:
  • Social influence is deeply asymmetrical: a tiny group does the majority of the spreading, whether with viruses, trends, drugs, or criminal behaviour ([18:06], [19:55]).
  • Technological advances have made it easier to identify super spreaders, dramatically intensifying their impact—this is true for COVID, opioid prescriptions, crime, and viral content ([22:20], [23:24]).
  • The story of OxyContin: Purdue targeted the few doctors who would prescribe liberally, creating a deadly opioid epidemic by leveraging newfound data on prescriber behaviour ([27:42]).

Quote:
"Now, we know things are asymmetrical, but now we know where the asymmetry lies, has affected nearly every field you can imagine." — Malcolm Gladwell [24:46]

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4. Epidemics: Ideas vs. Viruses vs. Drugs

• Summary:
  Gladwell compares the spread of drugs, ideas, and diseases, noting the extraordinary persistence of the opioid crisis compared to most outbreaks.
• Key Insights:
  • Normally, drug epidemics “burn out”—children avoid their parents’ drugs of choice (e.g., crack). The opioid crisis is anomalous for its decades-long persistence due to substitutions and continued super spreaders ([31:02], [32:52]).
  • Environmental factors, more than genetics, often influence susceptibility and resilience—seen in the intergenerational transmission (or lack thereof) of addiction and other behaviours.

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5. The Region Beta Paradox & Parental Influence

• Summary:
  Chris introduces the “region beta paradox”—some situations aren’t bad enough to spur change, so people remain stuck. The discussion then segues to how parental behaviours and genetics actually shape us.
• Key Insights:
  • Gladwell is skeptical about genetic screening for traits like intelligence or motivation, stressing the complexity and environmental influence ([37:40]).
  • Parental impact is hard to parse—Gladwell recommends looking at grandparent influence to filter out environmental "noise" ([41:39], [42:41]).
  • Chris presents the “parental attribution error”: people credit themselves for their virtues and their parents for their flaws, rarely the reverse ([45:02]).

Quote:
"People are more than happy to lay the blame for their shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but very rarely lay the credit for their victories there too." — Chris Williamson [46:29]

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6. Storytelling, Facts, and Changing Minds

• Summary:
  The emotional impact of stories trumps the persuasive power of facts, especially in the era of digital misinformation.
• Key Insights:
  • Humans seek stories that betray expectation; this willingness to have our minds changed is far greater in narrative than by data ([51:17]–[54:43]).
  • Facts are easily dismissed, while the mental shift caused by good stories is much harder to ignore—a key reason why myths, rumors, and fables persist in shaping beliefs even today.
  • The asymmetry in persuasion: “Facts don’t care about your feelings” is ironically disproven by how feelings (especially those stoked by stories) regularly override facts ([56:58]).

Quote:
"A story is one of the few places where we are willing to change our mind...the kind of subtle mind changing that comes with a story is much harder to dismiss." — Malcolm Gladwell [54:43]

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7. Culture Wars: Trans Athletes & Internet Outrage

• Summary:
  Gladwell and Williamson dissect the uproar over trans athletes in elite sports as an example of an “absurd” moral panic amplified by the internet, despite almost no real-world incidents.
• Key Insights:
  • These controversies are sustained by media magnification and serve more to fuel opposition than to address genuine issues.
  • Gladwell argues that the fixation on rare or hypothetical cases (e.g., Lia Thomas) distracts from real challenges facing marginalized groups ([61:49]).

Quote:
"You are a highly informed participant in public controversies. And I've said: give me names. And you've come up with one...This is a definition of an absurdity. Why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical?" — Malcolm Gladwell [62:25]

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8. Merit, Ivy League Sports, and Social Class

• Summary:
  They examine preferential admissions for student athletes at elite universities, questioning the logic and fairness of granting the biggest admission benefits to sports like tennis or fencing—more so than to historically marginalized groups.
• Key Insights:
  • Athletic admissions breaks are greater for certain sports than for race or background, despite dubious relevance to academic mission ([66:47]).
  • Many “meritocratic” sports advantages closely track parental wealth rather than talent or opportunity—an overlooked axis of privilege ([68:53], [69:12]).

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9. Egalitarianism in Sport: Track and Field vs. Everything Else

• Summary:
  Gladwell praises track and field as the rare elite sport where class and wealth do not automatically confer advantage—contrasting it with sports like tennis or golf ([70:19]).
• Key Insights:
  • Success in most sports increasingly requires privilege and preparation that excludes lower-income strivers, but running remains more open.
  • Explanations for athletic dominance (genetic, cultural) tend to shift conveniently with who is winning.

Quote:
"I like a sport where there is no distinction, where income and class don't buy you a head start." — Malcolm Gladwell [71:01]

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10. Final Thoughts, Recommendations and Notable Projects

• Gladwell highlights his new Revisionist History mini-series, The Alabama Murders, and the paperback release of Revenge of the Tipping Point ([74:26]).

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Notable Quotes & Standout Moments

• On societal cruelty
  “The cruelty is the point...Doesn't diminish their motivation and enthusiasm. It seems to increase it.” — Malcolm Gladwell [06:25]

• On American exceptionalism
  “I do not believe that either Americans or non Americans fully appreciate just how weird America is.” — Malcolm Gladwell [11:54]

• On viral influence
  “Everything’s asymmetrical now... I think that, 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.” — Malcolm Gladwell [19:58]

• On storytelling vs. facts
  “A story is one of the few places where we are willing to change our mind...the subtle mind changing that comes with a story is much harder to dismiss.” — Malcolm Gladwell [54:43]

• On distraction via culture wars
  “This is a definition of an absurdity. Why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical?” — Malcolm Gladwell [62:25]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Death Penalty Evolution: [00:06]–[07:15]
• Asymmetry & Spreading Ideas: [17:49]–[24:46]
• OxyContin & the Opioid Crisis: [27:42]–[30:39]
• Parental Influence & Genetics: [37:40]–[44:03]
• Storytelling vs. Facts: [50:03]–[54:43]
• Trans Athletes Controversy: [58:29]–[64:56]
• Merit, Sports & Class in Education: [65:17]–[69:12]
• Egalitarian Sports: [70:19]–[74:11]

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Tone & Style

The conversation is sharp, humorous, and reflective—with many asides into personal experience, cultural quirks, and Gladwell’s signature inquisitiveness. While much of the discussion is rooted in recent research, historical context, and sociological insight, both host and guest keep the tone approachable and self-deprecating, unafraid to poke fun at themselves, their disciplines, or the absurdities of modern life.

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For Further Exploration

• Revisionist History: “The Alabama Murders” Mini-Series
• Malcolm Gladwell: “Revenge of the Tipping Point” (Paperback Release 2025)

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This episode is a masterclass in critical thinking about how the world changes—often for reasons that have little to do with logic, fairness, or virtue, and everything to do with who tells the story and how it’s told. Highly recommended for those interested in psychology, sociology, true crime, and the hidden drivers of modern society.

Transcript

[A]

Talk to me about the history of the death penalty fettered past that I didn't realize existed.

[B]

Oh, my goodness. In what country? In America. Yes.

Well, this is a subject we dig into in this new series we've done on 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. 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's this, you know, the. Used to be the case. You know, it was the. It was the way back when it was 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 they went to lethal injection. And then from lethal injection they have now gone on to.

Nitrogen gas to asphyxiating you with nitrogen gas.

[A]

I didn't know about the most recent iPhone 17 Pro Max that came out.

[B]

This is the latest wrinkle. Right. So they've been. And at each stage, the intention was. Formally the intention was to make the death more humane and certain for the person being executed. But in fact the intention was to make the process of execution more acceptable to the public. So they're looking for the. For the way that the form of executing somebody that is the easiest to watch. So you can imagine how hanging would be quite a spectacle, you know, a disturbing. You wouldn't take your child to a hanging. Um, the, you know, the.

Execution by firing squad might be a little less dramatic, but certainly the big jump was. The electric chair was gruesome. I mean, somebody whose brains were literally being fried in front of your eyes and their eyes are popping out and things. So it really was. That was up until the 1970s and the move to a lethal injection was the idea was that we can put people down the way we put down horses. And that's really quite calm and seem. Appears at least to be kind of calm and humane and stunned by medical people. And it's all very kind of. So that's. That's the kind of like it's a very curious peculiarly American approach to this subject.

[A]

And what is the, what's the current status of that in the.

[B]

Well, a guy, we get into this in the podcast, a very brilliant Canadian like me, guy named Joel Zivitt, who's an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist with a kind of side interest in the death penalty. People have been using lethal injection for 40 years. Since the late 70s, it's become the standard for. If you wanted to kill somebody in your a state government in the U.S. you, you inject them with three drugs. The first is a, a sedative. The second is. Calms you down. 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.

The paralytic just kept you still. And then we stopped your heart with potassium chloride. And what Joel Zivet discovers is that's not how you die during.

In lethal injection. You die because the first thing you get, which is typically some kind of barbiturate, the sedative so alters your. The, the 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.

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 be heard as you silently scream. That's lethal injection. And so ever since he showed the world that there's been this idea that, oh, maybe we should move to asphyxiating people with nitrogen.

[A]

Sounds humane comparatively.

[B]

It's. It is. Honestly, when I was doing this, our podcast is all about this, this murder that took place in Alabama. And all of these issues come up in the course of. As the state tries to figure out how to. What to do with the killers. And it is the most. Not only is. Are the details of these things just so bizarrely macabre? I don't know. How do you pronounce that word? I never know. Macabre.

[A]

Macabre.

[B]

Do you say macabre?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

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're talking about a case that happened in Alabama. The state government of Alabama is just Completely indifferent to all these. They don't even like. They don't even seem to care what happens to somebody that they're executing. They're just kind of. And that was the kind of. One of the many revelations in doing this little mini series we did called the Alabama Murders was the kind of. It's almost as if the. For the state of Alabama and other states.

The cruelty is the point that telling them that what they thought was humane, it actually isn't. Doesn't diminish their motivation and enthusiasm. It seems to increase it.

[A]

We're going to have this. Come up with the.

Young person that shot Charlie Kirk, it sounds like. I think the day that.

The head chief of police did a press conference, one of the first things that he said was, we will be seeking the death penalty.

[B]

Yes. Utah is a state now. Utah has used. Where Charlie Kirk was killed has in some cases, gone back to the firing squad.

[A]

Oh, wow. Okay, pull that out.

[B]

We could pull that out again now. I. Nostalgia.

[A]

Brilliant.

[B]

Yeah, a little.

[A]

Play the old stuff. Play the old songs again.

[B]

It is very like, you know, the band from the 70s playing its hits 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.

[A]

What would you choose?

[B]

Oh, firing squad.

[A]

I'd go firing squad, too. It's a pretty heroic way to.

[B]

The one that I would really want is guillotine.

[A]

Oh, that's epic. Yeah, yeah. And then have your head placed somewhere magnificent for the rest of time.

[B]

Well, you know, the thing about guillotine was, you know, guillotine at the time was considered this great progressive innovation. It wasn't. It was intended to be a vast improvement over, like, tying people to the wheels of wagons and running them over. It was like, look, we're a civilized society. We should be able to kill people quickly and cleanly. And so the guy. The guy who. Who gave the guillotine his name, whatever his name was.

[A]

Mr. Guillotine.

[B]

Jacques Guillotine. 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.

So, like, I would. There's something to be said.

[A]

Chop the head off with a. A big blade.

[B]

Yeah, there's something to be said for. I mean, it's an. You know, the very fact we're having this conversation is. Is absurd. Right? Like, why. Why are states killing People like I. It just seems like. It's 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?

[A]

Not particularly. I think that the desire for retribution has existed throughout every sort of humans thought processes, whether they're modern or from five decades ago or forever ago.

You know, Capital punishment. Is that the sort of the title for this kind of a thing? Right, yeah.

Mutiny, you know, pirates on pirate ships, stuff like that. There is this sense of. There is a particular line that if you cross it, the threshold is you pay the ultimate price, which is that you no longer get to live. I understand. My point is I understand the psychological compulsion from humans. It doesn't surprise me. Do we think. Would I have thought that in the modern world we would have transcended that in the same way as we transcended shitting in the street and.

Open warfare that you just do on your neighbour because you don't like him or something? Yeah, in some ways. But I think the, the compulsion, the desire to do it makes, makes. Makes total sense to me. And you get this lock in from the past. There is, I would imagine, an argument, a sort of a twofold argument. One being this person did something so heinous that they do not deserve to live anymore. And secondly, this is a deterrent to other people who would consider doing this in future.

One, oddly enough one is. The second one is very sort of utilitarian and the first one is actually kind of like karmic and astral and I think. I don't know. What do you, what do you make of. Of that postmortem on the sort of modern world of it?

[B]

Well, I'm. I guess I'm more.

I'm more puzzled by. You're speaking in terms of this being an understandable human response to an act of brutality. But I'm more puzzled by the fact that if it is an understandable human response, why is it confined in the developed world to the United States?

Why is it 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.

[A]

How long ago did France. France must have used the guillotine relatively.

[B]

Recently, till I think the 80s. So it's been a good, it's been a good 40 years. Yeah, they were one of the last holdouts.

[A]

But I mean, look, when when you have come up with the entire genre yourself, you've got to. You got to keep playing the old songs, you know, you got to keep using the guillotine until the 80s.

[B]

It is. It goes to this thing that I'm so obsessed with, which is that I do not believe that either Americans or non Americans fully appreciate just how weird America is. I think that Americans think, oh, the rest of the world is kind of like us, only just a little less so. And non Americans, if they don't know America well, just assume, oh, it's like, you know, it's like. It's like England, but it's bigger. Actually, it's not like England. It's bigger. Like, Canadians are. I'm a Canadian, actually, I'm an Englishman, but I'm an adoptive Canadian. Canadians, we make this mistake all the time because we. We really, you know, we watch the same sports, we watch a lot of the same television. It looks you. If you drive from Detroit across the border or Buffalo across the border to Toronto, it all looks the same. If you didn't know there was a border there, you would think you would still. And yet the differences between Canada and the United States are just phenomenal. Like, so it's that, that. That's all. Something that's always puzzled me that.

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

[A]

Yeah. It's 50 countries combined together under a single government, single currency, single language. So I think you get some weird externalities when you just combine that many people with.

[B]

Yeah. What's the line from the Paul Simon song? A loose accumulation of millionaires and billionaires.

[A]

I wasn't familiar with that.

[B]

Something like. That's from Days of Miracle and Wonder.

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.

[A]

No, that's correct. Speaking of trajectories over time, do you think that the tipping point.

Aged with difficulty? Like, lots changed in the information landscape from then until now? I'm particularly interested in sort of what you didn't or couldn't foresee, what happened that you couldn't have predicted in that way, which obviously led to the Revenge of.

[B]

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 Internet is really just in its infancy.

And all of social media doesn't exist and.

The cold war has just ended and we're absurdly optimistic about the future of the world. And I'm 30 some odd years old and, you know, my world is my. My life is ahead of me. And then 25 years later, when I write the sequel.

I don't know whether the, the dynamics that I'm under, that I'm describing in the original tipping point are that, you know, the simple idea, the spread of ideas, can usefully be.

Understood as similar to the spread of disease, that the same contagious principles that govern epidemics of disease govern epidemics of ideas. That idea was a novel idea in the year 2000. Today, it's a commonplace idea. So in that sense, it's not that the ideas of the book became dated, it's that they became commonplace. Right now everything's viral. Now we talk about that. And whenever we use that, when we say something on what on, you know, Twitter has become viral, we are using the language of epidemics of disease. We have, we have adopted that metaphor as our own. So the task. So when I was sat down to write 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, 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.

[A]

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[B]

Well, not really. I mean, I feel there's something kind of very self regarding about calling oneself a Cassandra.

[A]

Look, I love, I love the question. I love the question because everyone's desire, this compulsion, the temptation to see yourself as the prescient clairvoyant that could have. I would have said it before. I think it speaks, it speaks to you that you're like, ah, fuck. You know, like I just kind of said it.

[B]

Yeah. Because I got the listen academics were talking about. I got this idea from 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 love this idea. I think it's cool.

[A]

I don't know who popularizes it, not who came up with it. Okay, I'm interested in how your view of influencers evolved since the Tipping point. Obviously you're saying dynamics that you noticed back then are now very commonplace in terms of how people describe stuff now. So that's something that's the same. What's changed, what's, what's different, what's evolved.

[B]

So one of the ideas that I spent a lot of time with in the original Tipping point and end in the sequel is this is just the observation that social influence is asymmetrical. That and this is true of epidemics of disease, many kinds of epidemics of disease, which is that.

If you look at Covid.

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 a hundred or even a thousand fold more likely to pass on their infection to someone else than the rest of us. That's an asymmetry.

[A]

Yeah, I didn't know that.

[B]

Yeah, it's a massive asymmetry that is very similar to the way ideas spread. If a hundred of us think that Taylor Swift is a great singer, we are not equally responsible for spreading that news to the rest of the listening, music loving public. There's going to be four or five of us who do all the work, right. Who have by virtue of their social position or their.

Or the kind of trust that people have in them or how socially connected they are, they can tell the world that this unknown artist named Taylor Swift is great. But if somebody is. If my mom listens to Taylor Swift in her nursing home, she's not that and loves her. This is not a consequential fact in the history of the trajectory of Taylor Swift. Right. With all due respect to my mom, she's not like, she's not 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 listen to them. And if that person likes Taylor Swift, it really matters. That process asymmetry, which I was really fascinated with in the original Tipping Point, and I was. It's the great commonality between diseases and spreads of ideas, I think that's gotten more marked in the. I think everything's asymmetrical.

[A]

Now.

[B]

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 population. I think everything's asymmetrical. Now. I think that, 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.

[A]

Why?

[B]

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 would spread to another country only if somebody got.

On a passenger ship, crossed the ocean and was still infectious at the time they got off the ship. Right, right. So things did move around the world, but they moved relatively slowly around the world.

[A]

That's where quarantine came from, right? Quarantia.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That you could. And it was possible to kind of nip these things in the bud.

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 small group of people who travel a lot become hugely important in spreading disease. Right. Because they have access now to way more, you know, if you. So, you know, I'm, I travel a lot. Like I would be one of those. I probably travel More than 99% of the human population. 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 a hundred people 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.

Kind of.

The social power, the connective power of certain kinds of individuals is just so enhanced.

[A]

Right. The interconnectedness allows the super spreaders to.

[B]

Be just way more.

Effective and powerful. And not only that, 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. That's crucial. Right. As opposed to being, you know, 25 years ago, you say, I think that most ideas are spread by a very small group of influential people. I have a vague idea who they are, but I don't know for sure. Now I feel like we sort of, we don't know for sure, but our certainty about who the super spreader is is much greater and that that means that the super spreader's power is enhanced even further. Right.

[A]

That's an interesting.

The transparency or obviousness and awareness of everybody, of the influence of the person and of the, you know, the, the common knowledge idea. It's kind of like the, the 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. 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 you know, the newsletter list or whatever. Oh, other people. Here's an objective statement of how many other people think this person is a person of note. And yeah, it's this odd. People accumulate reach 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, some sort of trust, prestige, dominance type thing. 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 cube and.

[B]

Yeah, 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.

Outbreaks of criminal behavior, we now know you go to a criminologist and they look at a map of Austin, Texas or London, England or New York City. They can tell you exactly the 15 or 20 city blocks where 50% of the crime in those cities takes place on a regular basis. They can tell you down to the, you know, down to the stretch of sidewalk where a criminal act is most likely to occur. And we can put police there and we can effectively shut down that criminal act. That is, crime is a highly contagious asymmetrical activity where a small group of people commit a huge majority of the crimes and they commit it. They commit those crimes in predictable places at predictable times according to predictable patterns. And if you know all those things, you can completely tell your, your policing, your law enforcement. I was talking to a guy yesterday who.

Is working in, he runs the anti mosquito spraying program in a county in Florida and they used to spray huge amounts of pesticide over the entire county with planes. Now they use drones and lidar. And now what you do is you figure out exactly where the swarms of mosquitoes are and you only.

You send the drone to that exact spot and you just spray the spot. Right. It's like, it's like hilarious. It's, you know, it's like the Ukraine war going on with pesticides and mosquitoes in a random part of Florida. But that's the same thing. Mosquitoes are massively asymmetrical. It's like all of the damage is being done by a group in a very specific spot. And now that we know where the spot is, you can fight the epidemic at its source. You have to spray everything. That's a great metaphor for how the world has changed in the last 25 years.

[A]

Yeah, that, I mean, that's a new way to talk about super spreader, right? Super efficient spreader, perhaps. Yes, you mentioned OxyContin there, opioids. Why is the OxyContin Sackler family such a good throughline case study? Literally, morally, pharmaceutically. Like, what is it that they all bring together in one example?

[B]

Well, you have to understand that OxyContin, the most infamous drug of the last hundred 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 it slow release, but it's not, it wasn't it was some dramatic breakthrough. So in other words, OxyContin is not the product of some kind of innovative genius. What it is, is the product of, of, of a marketing innovation. That what they realized in what Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, realized in the 1990s and early aughts as this epidemic gets started, is that if you look at how an addictive painkiller is prescribed by doctors across the United States, there is a massive asymmetry. Most doctors don't prescribe it at all because they are doctors. They are aware of how dangerous opioids are and they dramatically limit their patients access to them. A very, very, very small group of doctors in a very, very specific parts of the country don't give a shit. And what, what, what Purdue was able to do using the kinds of databases and that we have now that we didn't have 20 years ago, that track the prescribing habits of every doctor in America is precisely identify and target the tiny fraction of doctors who didn't give a shit. That's how we got the opioid crisis. It is exactly what we're talking about. It's finding the swarm of mosquitoes. It's looking at the block in New York City where all the crime is. They found those doctors and they said, we're going to ignore every. We're talking about 2,000 doctors out of the hundreds of thousands of doctors who could potentially have prescribed OxyContin. They find that, that group of 2,000, and they put all of their resources in trying to convince those 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, about the opioid crisis. Right? It's just a ruthless application of this kind of asymmetry that we've been talking about. Everyone else up to that point was under the illusion that if I want to sell lots of a given drug, I gotta reach everybody, right? I need as many.

I need as many customers as possible. Dr. Customers as possible. And Purdue's like, no, you don't. Well, 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 to 120,000 deaths a year.

[A]

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?

[B]

Well, you know, I mean, I'm hesitant. One should always be hesitant about making.

[A]

Sweeping statements, especially when the word epidemic is being used.

[B]

Yes, I think that the. I would say that the commonalities are greater than.

Than we, than we imagine. Obviously, you don't, you don't die in the same numbers from a noxious idea that you do from a dangerously addictive opioid. So there's that 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 couldn't understand was why it lasted so long. It should have. Normally when you look at an epidemic of disease or that's killing lots of people is they burn out really quickly. The crack epidemic in the 90s doesn't actually last that long. The HIV, well, we really get a really powerful medical intervention early on, but HIV doesn't in the Western world does not hang around for decades. It gets tamed pretty quickly. The flu comes every fall and it's gone by the spring. Right. You know what 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 because 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 I keep waiting for it to burn out. Right. Like there's a. There's a well known generational mechanism where if your dad or mom is addicted, this happened with crack. The kids of people whose parents were addicted to crack did not touch crack.

You saw what happened and you were like, I want no. No part of it. Right.

[A]

It's interesting with the genetic predisposition that would be carried through as well. So what you have to assume there is the environmental like inverse role model effect is so powerful that it's got escape velocity to get over you having the raw building block genetics of an addiction.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

That's impressive.

[B]

Really. I mean, you see a lesser version of this with. I mean, alcoholism clearly runs in families. But I think that might be because.

To use the same kind of model that you're talking about, that there people can be functioning alcoholics for their entire lives. And so the kind of lesson that the child is receiving is a little bit More mixed with crack. You literally saw your parents disintegrate in front of your eyes. It's a really, really powerful, concentrated lesson that this is something you stay away from.

If the 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.

[A]

Yeah, that's fascinating. Are you still using that old face shaver from three Christmases ago to shave your nether region? If so, that isn't self care, it's a hate crime. Good news. Manscaped just put their best gear into one kit. The Performance Package 5.0 Ultra. Inside you find the Lawnmower 5.0 Ultra. And for those tough to reach areas, there's the Weed Whacker 2.0 for your nose and ear hair. And once you're done trimming, Manscaped has the aftercare handle too. You get their crop soother, after lotion, crop preserving, anti chafing, deodorant. They even throw a magic matte shaving mat in to make clear clean up effortless. And two free bonus gifts. So if you're giving someone in your life a gift this Black Friday, this Christmas, whatever this is, what to get them. It's a hint that they might be a bit too hairy and it's a lovely gift. Plus you can get 15% off and free shipping by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.com ModernWisdom and ModernWisdom15 at checkout. That's manscaped.com ModernWiry and ModernWisdom15 at checkout. There's this idea called the region beta paradox. Things that are not bad enough to be bad, but not good enough to be good. Living in a house that's in an alright location and the rent's not too expensive, but there's mold in 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. All these people would be better off if their situations were worse.

[B]

Worse. Oh, that's fascinating.

[A]

It would kick them out the bottom. And I talked about this a few years ago and as the Internet does, clipped it and did a thing and somebody asked me at this live show I did in Australia last year, set up and he says, you know, you have done live Events. And sometimes questions are a little more verbose. They're a little bit rambling. 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. I was like, this is kind of a radical solution. It's a high risk strategy, but I don't know, it might work. And we came up with a slightly different solution, but I thought that was really funny.

[B]

It's like, well, the version of that is the difference between the Cold War and Russia and Ukraine.

The Cold War never becomes a hot war because the consequences of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States are existential. Russia and Ukraine just are just like slowly, over time, randomly destroying each other. And you know, they can. Both of them are carrying on, right? So it's like they're in. They're in. What's the phrase? Region beater.

[A]

Region beta. Yeah, Beta. You guys would call it Region, region, Region beta paradox.

[B]

They're in. They're in. That conflict is in region beta 100.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It really is.

I suppose one solution here would be if you're an alcoholic, you could start trying crack.

That might be a way. Another radical one. Another thing I'm interested in, this parental contagion idea. I've been having a lot of.

Conversations recently about embryo selection, IVF embryo selection, polygenic risk scores and stuff like that. And the potential.

The potential sort of tiger mom implications pre birth that could roll back. So I'm interested in this parental contagion idea that you talked about.

[B]

Well, I'm a little bit of a skeptic on that kind of apologetic screening, because 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.

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. What the kind of determinants of success are, they are. There's so much, A, randomness and B, so much of the. So much of it is about motivation.

And motivation is the least genetically determined of all the.

Character traits. Conscientiousness is the few, you know, the. What's the big five. Conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience.

[A]

Agreeableness and extroversion.

[B]

Agreeableness and extroversion. Conscientiousness is the least genetically determined of all those extraversions. The most. Yeah. And that's because conscientiousness is powerfully environmentally determined. If you like your job and you like your boss and you like your co workers, you'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 of sour people is still an extrovert, they're still yucking it up like they're not. You're relatively impervious to that. And I, I've come to the opinion that when it comes to exploring, 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?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I suppose the argument would be trying to gain 1% or 0.1% wherever we can, the same as playing classic music to your unborn baby while it's in the womb. Because it's going to help the brain complexity of the brain development or you know, people are the same reason that I use a temperature controlled mattress duvet that tracks my HRV and I tried to not eat three hours before I. You know what I mean? Like people are trying to.

[B]

Are you on the HIV train?

[A]

I am on the HRV train. Look at me. You think I'm on the HRV train? Yes. Whoop brothers. Whoop brothers indeed.

[B]

Whoop baby.

[A]

Yeah, Whoop whoop.

[B]

We could do a whole side thing on whoop. I'm a whoop obsessive. Whoops whoop. Its chief function for me is. Sorry, this is a digression. The sleep score. Really what it is is I think I had a shitty night and then whoop tells me I didn't. This happened last night. My daughter wakes me up at 4 o' clock in the morning. Daddy, Daddy. I wanna. 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.

[A]

But what about the gaslighting in the other direction? That's what you need. What happens when you think you had a great night's sleep? You wake up and almost never happens.

[B]

For me, it only ever works if I think I had a great night. I had a great night.

[A]

Maybe Will I could get the CEO of Whoops.

[B]

Did he skew my numbers? Maybe he gave me.

[A]

I could ask him whether or not he could give me like optimistic whoop. I just want to be gaslit. I'm happy to be gaslit. I only want to be gaslit in one direction now. I always want to assume that I've got more.

[B]

So what's your, what's your, what's your HIV average?

[A]

Probably in the 50s. High 50s. It's not that great.

[B]

Good for you. No, that's high. I mean I'm lower, but I'm a good deal older. It drops with age. Easier, such as myself.

[A]

Parental contagion.

[B]

Parental contagion. So there's, I mean, I guess the, the I'm so impressed by this unknown interaction between environment and genes that I'm hesitant to kind of go too far on.

There was a great book written that I wrote about it at the time, 30 years ago, was written by called Do Parents Matter? By Judith Harris. And she basically summed up all of the evidence about what impact parental child raising has on the kid. And he answers, 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 but like, I just think it's such a, the whole relationship between.

Parents and the outcomes of the children is so muddy and murky and that I don't even know what to make I, I, I 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 because there's too much noise with your parents. Who knows you grew up with your mom and your dad? Like who knows?

[A]

Like who knows if you're shared environment n of 2.

[B]

Yeah, but who knows? And you have such a tangled psychological relationship. Who knows if you're even accurately representing the way they are the way you are? Right.

I could go on for half an hour about my father and were my father alive and listening to it, I'm quite sure there's A possibility. He would listen to that and say, I am nothing like that.

Right. My. And that's just the reality of your parental relationship. Your version of your parent and your parents version of themselves are going to be different. So like, I don't. How do we even start figuring out how your parent influences you, at least with your grandparents, as a degree of remove. So I can say my dad was telling a story about my mom's father who was this kind of.

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, saw me and said, I saw you. And I saw. I thought it was Daddy. They all called him Daddy. I thought it was Daddy. Now. So there's an example of like, it was clear. The relationship between me and my grandfather is clear. But like, you would never have walked into my father and said, oh, I see. That's Malcolm. You know, like it's too much noise.

[A]

One of my friends, his answer to the question, 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.

[B]

A hundred percent agree.

[A]

How cool would that be? How cool would that be?

[B]

And I didn't know my grandparents very well, so I would settle for my four grandparents. But yeah, the four.

[A]

I didn't know mine either. Can I give you. I came up with this idea a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to give it to you. It's my show. I can do what I want. But 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 professional, perfectionistic, and neurotic. But when was the last time you acknowledged that same pressure gave you ambition, discipline, and drive? You point to a childhood where mistakes weren't tolerated as the reason that you fear failure. But what about your meticulousness and your standards and your refusal to phone it in? Basically, as far as I can see, people are more than happy to lay the blame for their shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but very rarely lay the credit for. For their victories there too. And I just. I thought that was an interesting asymmetry.

[B]

Yeah, that's like. That is. It's funny that you. That is a beautiful allegory to the fundamental attribution error that there are. We make. I have my own version of that, which is what I call the asymmetrical parental attribution error.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I love asymmetries, 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 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 a while, and then you flip. It's only one time. You can only hold one. Disparaging.

[A]

Okay, that's brilliant. It's like. I remember Scott Alexander had this idea. He called it thinking in superpositions. Right. That you could have two worlds exist in your mind at the same time. But when you're talking about the parents, it's like you have to collapse the superposition down. Like the. The uncertainty principle isn't able to exist. Only one parent can exist in your mind at one time. Yeah. It's never the interaction between the bookish father and the outgoing mother. And I am somewhere in between. It's like when you're not wanting to be outgoing, it's like, well, dad did tell you. And when you can't chill out, it's like, well, mum did say it's binary. Yeah.

[B]

And what's. What's. There are many interesting things about this. If. Particularly now that I'm a. A parent. The. The one is that from a very early age, and this is an obvious dumb observation, but it's nonetheless one that I've been thinking about. There is a.

Hypothetically, you might think that the child, particularly the young child, thinks of their parents as a unit.

My parents don't want me to do this, my parents. But in fact they never do. From the very beginning, they're distinguishing between.

The father and the mother or whatever they're, they're. And we continue to do this later. You know, I think this becomes even more kind of pronounced as we get older. And it's a. It is in the beginning. It's understandable because you're correctly as a toddler understanding 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. 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.

[A]

Well, how many people when they get together are different people to who they are when they're apart?

With some of my friends, 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 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 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. Given the fact.

You talk a lot in stories, which I think is why it's very easy to read your writing.

When it comes to the medium of communicating.

Infectious ideas, obnoxious or benevolent, I guess.

Talk to me about the landscape of how storytelling infects differently than facts and sort of how that plays together because I think in the modern world people assume that people you should be convinced by the facts, follow the facts, follow the science. But, but I'm not convinced that that's the way that the human brain works. Especially when you're trying to change opinions, fuel empathy, even fuel hate as well.

[B]

Yeah, well, the story does a lot better job of eliciting emotion.

And that's enormously important obviously in.

Anchoring an idea and making and giving an idea leverage over somebody's thinking or feeling.

They, 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 defies or a narrative that betrays the audience's expectations. That's what a story is. The reason I will.

Why did I watch HBO's task finished it on Sunday. I watched it every week for seven weeks. Why did I keep watching? Well, it's interesting. I needed one TV show to watch, but fundamentally, I didn't know how it was going to end, right? So I knew if you had asked me before the final episode, how do I think it's going to end, I would have given you.

Six possibilities. Turns out almost all of them were wrong. So the story, what made it satisfying to watch that through to the end was that it did not conform to my expectation. And I knew that, and that's why I was drawn to it. Right. I knew that it was pointless to figure out, try and figure out how it was going to end. And all stories, good stories, good songs, good. All have that quality of betraying our expectation. And we know that going in, and that's why we want it. We. There's something fundamentally human about wanting our expectations to be betrayed. That's why we laugh at jokes, right? That's why we. There's so many things we do. Why would. Think about it. Why would somebody pay an enormous amount of money to sit in an arena and have just somebody, one person up on stage just tell these abbreviated anecdotes about their life or the world? The answer is because it's just a constant rush of betrayed expectations, right? Like, there's a. I always watch these little Instagram snippets of Nate Bragaczi.

And is that. Am I pronouncing his name right? Brigatz.

[A]

I've only ever seen it written down.

[B]

Yeah. So who I think is very, very, very, very funny in a kind of. But his portrayals are so.

Beautifully done and so subtle. And so, because he's working with this incredibly narrow template of. He's telling these super kind of 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 taken so many things off the table. There's going to be no, you know, dangerous, edgy commentary. There's no politics, there's no sex. There's no violence. There's no swearing. There's no nothing. He's not going to rag on anybody. He's not going to make fun of anybody. So you're like, so we've narrowed. And that's why he's so inviting. You're like, okay, this dude is trying to thread the needle here. He's going to do something. He's going to betray me after taking 90% of the possible objects of betrayal off the table, right? And then he pulls it off and you're like oh my God, that's. And so you laugh way out of proportion to the, to the, to the quality of the joke. I mean the joke is, it's, the joke itself is pretty mild, but the degree of difficulty is so great. That's what you're rewarding. You're like, you did it man. Like did not see that coming. And you, you decided you want to paint in one color, right? That's like, and that's, that is the so all 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? 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.

[A]

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Had this conversation with Alex o' Connor who is a upcoming.

Agnostic commentator. I guess used to we would have called him an atheist a few years ago, but I don't think that's, that's kind of the in term anymore. And he's very pro religion. He's, he's fascinating. He goes into every conversation with a, a theologist or a believer desperately hoping to believe on the other side. He just has a very high bar for it and is educated in the counter Arguments. And.

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, to dispense with that in place of stats, figures, numbers, charts, data. Sterile, scientific, rational, materialistic. And he goes, is it any surprise that you can't sort of rip people across? You can't bludgeon them over the head with just more bar charts.

In the hopes that, and then shame them for not.

Believing. Right. The thing which is most believable to you is the thing which you're not supposed to believe. And the thing which is least understandable and least salient to you is the thing that you're now supposed to put all of your faith in. And again, asymmetries, this asymmetry between the power of story and the power of statistics. Shapiro's got that famous facts, don't care about your feelings. Like it could not be more backward. It's like feelings really do not care about your facts at all. Especially if that feeling has come from a fable. Right. Or a story.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although he's using it in a slightly, that actually, that's super interesting. I thought of that. But he is using that in a slightly.

Different context, which is that what he's saying is that you are really upset right now over something. Is not, does not mean that the, the underlying thing is somehow.

Has been kind of existentially disabled.

[A]

Your displeasure does not mean, does not disqualify.

[B]

Like you haven't changed anything. Like it's still, you know, so, yeah, but I, I.

I, I happen to think he's one of the better. He's, he's, I don't, he's not in my particular corner ideologically, but I, I wish they were. I wish most commentators were as rigorous in their thinking as he was.

[A]

I saw that you were, I saw you made headlines last month about trans athletes. I imagine that was thrilling for you. Do you see a tipping point dynamic going on there?

[B]

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 on a, on, I was describing my experience as a moderator, a moderator panel, between a pro trans participation and an anti trans participation person. And I'm trying to elicit a fair argument. Four years pass and I'm on a podcast out of 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 when I should have moderated. Moderating is difficult. Ever moderated in your life?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Particularly on that topic. So that's all I said. And then like, the whole thing went. And I was like, I didn't recognize any of. Usually when you're involved in a controversy, you recognize the controversy. I did not recognize the controversy. I was like, what are they talking about?

[A]

You wouldn't have predicted this in advance.

[B]

No, it's like, what are they talking about? It's a moderator. No one ever mentioned the word moderator. Like, I sort of changes when you know that I was the moderator.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Anyway, has. It's already tipped. This is. By the way, this is the most. One of the most ridiculous.

Subjects in the following sense.

That most people, myself included, would give their 100% approval support for the trans agenda.

The idea that we would be discriminating against a class of people over this particular characteristic is absurd and offensive. Right. But I think that this last random thing that's thrown into the agenda that says, oh, and by the way.

Someone who is biologically male should be able to compete against biological females is deeply puzzling to a lot of people. Right. They're like, what does that have to do with. It's weird. Like, what's it doing there? I don't think. And I think most people are wholeheartedly in support of the agenda and just say that last item, which, by the way.

It only involves like a dozen people in the entire. The United States. Like, it's so hypothetical. It's like, would you 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, 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. Trans woman. Competitive elite athlete who is currently being disadvantaged by this policy? Can you give me the name a.

[A]

Trans Woman athlete who's being disadvantaged.

[B]

Yeah. Who've been locked out of competition with biological women as a result of the policies in elite sports.

[A]

I would imagine that Lia Thomas would be at some point. I feel like the. The Swimming association was one of the first bodies to have implemented this. I have to imagine if sh. They are going to continue to swim.

[B]

Right now they can't swim.

[A]

So would that be a yes?

[B]

So you have.

[A]

I've got one.

[B]

You got one? I got one.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Can you give me another?

[A]

No.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I did my one.

[B]

Why. So why. Why are we having. Why are we having. So you. You are 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, give me names. And you've come up with one who's not even irrelevant, who isn't even swimming anymore. Right. This is a definition of an absurdity. Why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical? Right. Why don't we discuss the actual issues that are of existential meaning and threat to the trans community? That's my point.

[A]

Interesting. I think on the, you know, on the other side.

The right would say something like, this is the tip of the spear. This is sort of endemic of the. The encroachment into locker rooms and bathrooms. This is, you know, the college sport thing is like you. It's only half a wall away from it being about school as well. And it, you know, it all kind of. Especially with the interesting one about the locker rooms thing. I do. 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. And there is this sort of 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 wasn't aware of how few incidents this is. This is causing, but certainly a lot of headlines.

[B]

But it's like. But even the locker room thing is a separate issue. So there is a separate social issue of how do you accommodate somebody who belongs to a relatively new social category? And we have a long history in America of struggling with that issue. Right. It was the issue we struggled with, with African Americans in the 50s and 60s and Jim Crow. Do we let them into our, you know, in. In Birmingham, 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 can.

Meaningfully compete at the elite level be allowed to compete in the female category? That's. That's the narrow thing that was being discussed on the panel of which I was a moderator.

So anyway, it's an example of. The Internet, occasionally is very dumb.

[A]

What was the story about the Harvard women's rugby team?

[B]

Oh, there I was interested in.

Well, I was interested in this. There's a certain amount of Ivy League bashing that I've done over the course of my career that now that Ivy League bashing has become 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.

This university in the United States that plays more varsity sports than any other is Harvard, which people think, oh, it must be some sports factory in the south or something. No, no, no. Ivy League schools have the most athletes, have a greater share of athletes on. Recruited athletes on campus of any institution. My question is, well, why. That seems weird to me. Why would an elite academic institution go out of its way to have lots of athletes on campus and also give those athletes a tremendous break at admissions? So huge controversy in America about, oh, don't you dare give an admissions break to black people. That's wrong. That's a violation of 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 other one is not?

[A]

I would guess that in a meritocratic system, people believe that something which is done based on merit.

Is maybe more deserving, somehow more justified in some sort of a way.

[B]

But 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?

[A]

The answer is, well, if. If cooking Was something which was part of the competitive landscape for a varsity league college. Perhaps that would be the case, I think when people look at sports. But I mean, college sports is an entire category.

[B]

Yeah, but these sports are absurd. Like it's fencing. No one's say that.

[A]

To say that to a fencer with his big long.

[B]

What is that? You'll come after me when I make the point about. I talk a lot about tennis, which I think is the most ludicrous example. Massive admissions breaks at elite schools for people who are tennis players. What is the definition of someone who's good enough to play Division 1 tennis in America? That they spend their entire lives on the tennis court? Why do you want at your school someone who's not even participating in the undergraduate experience? They're just practicing their backhand. What is so special about that solitary, utterly.

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?

[A]

I was going to say, is there something more special about somebody who's black than somebody who can play tennis? Well.

[B]

Someone who is a product of 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.

[A]

What if they also play tennis? Black tennis players are the rarest of them all, you know.

[B]

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 ethnicities in the United States would have the most tennis players.

[A]

Interesting question on that. Seth Stevens Davidowitz wrote a great book about was it who owns the NBA? Who wins the NBA? Something like that. And he did. A data scientist used AI to help him write this book in 30 days. It's brilliant. And the most common name of.

NBA players. The top five. It's like Michael John. They're very middle class names. The reason is that even in the sport of basketball, one that people assume is going to sweep up these poor kids from the streets and deposit them into the NBA. Now LeBron, born to a 16 year old single mother.

Is remarkable for the.

[B]

Exception that proves the rule.

[A]

Yeah. How much of an outlier he is.

[B]

Because I mean, if you are LeBron, you can beat the system, but not anyone else.

[A]

I Wonder how many LeBrons have been born after LeBron. Now that's my question. Whether or not we're going to see a ton of LeBrons in the NBA in a couple of decades time.

[B]

Yeah, that makes perfect sense because the degree of preparation necessary now to make the MBA is just way higher than the minute. You radically increase the amount of preparation necessary to excel in a given area. You skew it by income formula, by class and income. Yeah, 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.

[A]

Oh, you like watching poor people do sports, that's what you're telling me.

I like to watch the poors, they run faster.

[B]

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, 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.

[A]

That's.

[B]

There's no other. Give me another sport where that happens.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not even cycling.

[B]

Cycling, Football, like football in Europe. If you don't come out of one of those football systems, you're not, you're not playing well.

[A]

I think 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.

[B]

But even a massive number of individual sports have become class weighted. Like tennis. Be a perfect example. Golf massively class weighted.

[A]

Well, I. Yeah, golf's a particularly interesting one. Tennis kind of, kind of makes sense at least to some degree in that you need to be playing against people. Like 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 there's no track and field that is against an opponent in quite like there isn't an opposition in the same way. There's just competitors. Right. Also doing the same thing to you independently of it. Like the two javelin guys are like throwing the javelin at each other as it's coming. And that means that if you grow up in an area that has more better javelin players that can spend more time throwing the javelin at you, that you become more successful. Yeah, that's fascinating. I hadn't considered that the egalitarian nature.

[B]

Of the Olympics, the weird running is really interesting. Distance running in particular is fascinating because, you know, it starts out since you're English, the English dominate middle distance running for good. Good for the longest time. And if, and if it wasn't English, it was, it was the English by proxy. The Australians and New Zealanders. Then the Africans in the kind of 80s take over and all of a sudden everyone starts saying, well, that's because they have a genetic advantage. That's because they soliciting all these reasons. And then what happens? In the last 10 years, all the Europeans are. Now it's the English again, right? It's like, so it's like we realized we made this. We, we. It's this thing that we do, which, which always it strikes me as, as kind of fascinating, which is that we toggle back and forth between our causal explanations for a phenomenon just depending on where we're situated. If we're winning, oh, it's like we have the culture of when we start losing, it's, oh, it's gotta be genes.

[A]

Cultural attribution error.

[B]

Yeah. And then we start winning again. And like now if you talk to the ignorance, 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 long distance running tradition. It's like, dude, you didn't say that 15 years ago when the Moroccans and the Kenyans were winning all, every race. Like you just started saying it because Josh Kirstad won the, and you know, won the world championships. And now all of a sudden you've changed your mind.

[A]

Malcolm Gladwell, ladies and gentlemen. Malcolm, I found you fascinating. I think 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 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?

[B]

Listen, 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 Tipping Point.

[A]

Sick. Malcolm, I appreciate you. Thank you.

[B]

Thank you so much. This is really fun.