Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey Revisions History listeners, Malcolm here. Before we get started,
Speaker 1: I wanted to update you on a few things. First thing,
Speaker 1: this August twenty fourth, the Revisionist History season begins in earnest,
Speaker 1: eight old school episodes in a row, the little narrative
Speaker 1: jewel boxes you've come to love. We've been feeding you
Speaker 1: a little bits and pieces so far this season, but
Speaker 1: this is the main event. The heart of it is
Speaker 1: a six part series on guns and violence that I
Speaker 1: think is my favorite thing we've ever done. Weird, moving, funny, heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: So mark your calendar's August twenty fourth is when it
Speaker 1: all happens. And by the way, if you want to
Speaker 1: get that whole mini series early and binge it all
Speaker 1: at once without ads, you can just by becoming a
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus subscriber. In fact, just six ninety nine a
Speaker 1: month or thirty nine ninety nine a year gets you
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Speaker 1: or Pushkin dot fm, slash plus to sign up. And
Speaker 1: one laice thing. Speaking of things you should binge, the
Speaker 1: latest season of our true crime masterpiece Lost Hills has dropped.
Speaker 1: The new season explores a legacy of Malibu's dark prints
Speaker 1: Mickey Dora. Mickey was a surfer known for his style, grace,
Speaker 1: and aggression who ruled the Malibu Beaches from the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties to the nineteen seventies. Celebrated for his rebellious spirit,
Speaker 1: he was also a con man who led the FBI
Speaker 1: on a seven year man hunt around the world. Believe me,
Speaker 1: this is a show worth a listen, so sign up
Speaker 1: for Pushkin Plus and you can binge this one too. Hello,
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, Malcolm Babble here. I'm here in the studio
Speaker 1: with Marya Konikova, the revisionist history ombusman who's come by
Speaker 1: for the second time to do a little bit of
Speaker 1: correction and instruction and tell me what's gone right and
Speaker 1: wrong in her own mind with our season so far.
Speaker 1: Were you welcome?
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me, Malcolm. It is always
Speaker 2: a pleasure, although I have to say that in your
Speaker 2: last few episodes, I have felt a little bit personally
Speaker 2: under attack. I mean, we had the Monk Debates, which
Speaker 2: was an absolutely fascinating episode to me, and I'll say
Speaker 2: a little bit about it in a second, but I
Speaker 2: don't know if you know that. I used to be
Speaker 2: a debater, and I debated for multiple years at a
Speaker 2: pretty high level in high school.
Speaker 1: In high school, yes, and wait and were you successful?
Speaker 2: I was successful? But then I stopped debating, so I
Speaker 2: did not debate in college, and I stopped debating at
Speaker 2: the point where you would have gone to like nationals
Speaker 2: and like really had to focus a lot of time
Speaker 2: on it, because at first I got into it as
Speaker 2: a way of clarifying my thinking, and I just thought
Speaker 2: it was amazing when I watched people do this, like, Wow,
Speaker 2: they can synthesize so much information, they can argue all
Speaker 2: these points. And I'm someone who really loves to argue
Speaker 2: out both sides of something to figure out, you know
Speaker 2: what do I think you know what's important here? And
Speaker 2: so I thought debate would help me with that, and
Speaker 2: it did. But there came a point where it became formulaic,
Speaker 2: where I figured out how to do it, and then
Speaker 2: I lost interest in it because I realized that it
Speaker 2: wasn't actually about thinking deeply. It was much more about
Speaker 2: rhetorical defness technique technique exactly.
Speaker 1: It is heavy. That's that was the great takeaway for
Speaker 1: me in doing this because I never I debated very
Speaker 1: casually in high school once or twice, and we did
Speaker 1: parliamentary debating where hackling was allowed.
Speaker 2: And so that's amazing. We did not have heckling.
Speaker 1: We had hackling because you have hackling in parliament, real
Speaker 1: parmentary systems.
Speaker 2: Oh, Parliament's a shit show.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. So when we did debating, we just were
Speaker 1: focused on the hackling. That's what you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, of course that sounds so fun. So I missed,
Speaker 2: I'd probably still be debating, and that's that's what our
Speaker 2: debate was. But your debate, the Monk Debates, was not
Speaker 2: about heckling.
Speaker 1: No, no, it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a very different format. So for people
Speaker 2: who didn't listen to the episode or need a little
Speaker 2: bit of a refresher, you were arguing a resolution, and
Speaker 2: the resolution was don't trust mainstream media, and you were
Speaker 2: against this. You were on a team with Michelle Goldberg,
Speaker 2: and you were debating against Matt Taibi and Douglas Murray.
Speaker 2: And Douglas Murray, as I found out, and I saw
Speaker 2: as did other people who you spoke with after that,
Speaker 2: he's a debater and and so he's yeah, he's so
Speaker 2: we're going to spoil it spoiler alert, how did you do?
Speaker 1: Malcolm got destroyed? I mean it was humiliation on the
Speaker 1: level to my social media to this day is just
Speaker 1: filled people gloating about how I got my hat handed
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 2: You did, you did? But what I act act like?
Speaker 2: I loved that after that happened, you went to learn
Speaker 2: to figure out what you did wrong, and so I
Speaker 2: loved kind of the second part of the episode where
Speaker 2: we get to hear professionals talk about, you know, what
Speaker 2: you could have done, what you didn't do, and you
Speaker 2: went to learn how to debate.
Speaker 1: My complete ignorance of this debating technique, yeah, is what
Speaker 1: killed me. That and also the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: I was excessively self confident going into the and not
Speaker 1: self confident in my abilities to debate so much as
Speaker 1: self confident in my in the position I was arguing.
Speaker 1: I just didn't think that there were lots of people
Speaker 1: out there, particularly in Canada, who would believe that you
Speaker 1: shouldn't trust the mainstream media. I just couldn't get I
Speaker 1: just thought we're going to win.
Speaker 2: You know, I loved the excerpts that you chose for
Speaker 2: the podcast, because you know, you really showed some of
Speaker 2: the issues, which is I actually I don't think this
Speaker 2: was a bad thing because you felt strongly about your topic, right,
Speaker 2: you didn't even think that it was possible to argue
Speaker 2: the other side because I mean, as you just said yourself,
Speaker 2: like who you have to be insane to not trust
Speaker 2: mainstream media to think that the alternative is better. And
Speaker 2: so you brought a lot of emotion to it, which
Speaker 2: I think is good from a human point of view,
Speaker 2: but from a debating point of view is not necessarily
Speaker 2: ideal and can cloud your ability to hear the other
Speaker 2: side's arguments, what they're actually saying, whether they're twisting your words,
Speaker 2: whether they're twisting the actual premise of the debate. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that's I think where you got got so to speak.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny because I'm not normally I'm not normally
Speaker 1: someone who does rise to debate, and I'm not normally
Speaker 1: someone who's terribly emotion I don't really get angry much
Speaker 1: or but in that there was something about that context
Speaker 1: that just like I got pissed off about halfway through, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I just couldn't keep it in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you could tell that you were pissed.
Speaker 1: I really think that Douglas Murray loathsome all right.
Speaker 2: All right, well we'll just we'll have that on the record.
Speaker 2: But that gets to kind of the psychological heart of it, though,
Speaker 2: because what we know is as soon as he presses
Speaker 2: that button and you actually become enraged and you become emotional,
Speaker 2: your logic goes down a little bit, your ability to
Speaker 2: process information goes down a little bit, and your ability
Speaker 2: to listen goes down a little bit. That's why when
Speaker 2: we're in an argument, we want to be the one
Speaker 2: who does not get emotional, right. You want to be
Speaker 2: the one who steps back. You want to be the
Speaker 2: one who says, Okay, you know, let's take five minutes. Obviously,
Speaker 2: when you're on stage in front of an audience with
Speaker 2: someone you find loathsome, you can't say, okay, let's pause
Speaker 2: this for five minutes and take a step back. But
Speaker 2: it actually made me think some of the criticism that
Speaker 2: you got was not listening well. And it made me think,
Speaker 2: and this gets to the heart of why I quit
Speaker 2: debate of something that I learned from con artists. So
Speaker 2: a few books back, I wrote a book about con artists,
Speaker 2: and I spent multiple years with con artists and I
Speaker 2: learned all of these fascinating histories, and therefore and con
Speaker 2: artist totally fascinating character. Victor Lustig. I don't know if
Speaker 2: you've heard of him. He styled himself as Count Lustig,
Speaker 2: even though he was not a count. This was early
Speaker 2: twentieth century. So Victor Lustig is most famous for selling
Speaker 2: the Eiffel Tower not once, but twice to two different
Speaker 2: groups of investors. So he was very good at what
Speaker 2: he did. And he wrote something called the Ten Commandments
Speaker 2: of con Artists. And one of those commandments is something
Speaker 2: that just came to mind immediately, which is that a
Speaker 2: con artist isn't a good talker. A con artist is
Speaker 2: a good listener. And if you think, if you think
Speaker 2: about what that means, right, listening to the other person
Speaker 2: is how you get them, and it's how you trick them,
Speaker 2: is how you take advantage of them. And so it
Speaker 2: actually that's what came to mind when I was listening
Speaker 2: to this debate, and I thought, wait, a debate is
Speaker 2: a con in lot of ways.
Speaker 1: It's interesting.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a way to you know, if you're
Speaker 2: the better listener, you're actually going to be the better talker,
Speaker 2: and you're going to be able to take advantage because
Speaker 2: con artists are great talkers, right, they're silver tongued, but
Speaker 2: listening is at the heart of it.
Speaker 1: But here's the other thing I was thinking about, you know,
Speaker 1: with respect to debating, the second way in which debating
Speaker 1: is kind of a not a trick, but oh it's
Speaker 1: a trick, well a version of a trick, and that
Speaker 1: is that I realized that my my normal way of
Speaker 1: going about the world is I take in information and
Speaker 1: don't respond immediately. I tend to turn things over for
Speaker 1: a long time and decide how I feel a long
Speaker 1: time later, might be weeks later, might be months later.
Speaker 1: I'm someone who kind of I'm a slow processor, and
Speaker 1: so processing has been very useful for me. The debate
Speaker 1: form does not advantage the slow processor. I was in
Speaker 1: a situation orlves and I had to do in real
Speaker 1: time respond to people. I can't do that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: have a kind of and Douglas Murray a great debater.
Speaker 1: His great advantage is his fluidity. Right, It's just like
Speaker 1: it comes in one ear and boomy as a response,
Speaker 1: and I'm still thinking about it months later. I'm still
Speaker 1: thinking about what should I have said?
Speaker 2: You knowing that, yeah, and it's it's a skill. It's
Speaker 2: a skill, and that's you know, at the end of
Speaker 2: the day, that's what I came away with That debate
Speaker 2: teaches you very useful skills of fluency and of conning.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I want to an additional point about this, least
Speaker 1: yar when I went and hung out with the Brooklyn
Speaker 1: Debate League the other there were my tutors and had
Speaker 1: to be a better debater. The one transcendent value in
Speaker 1: running to debate. Remember that the kids that they at
Speaker 1: the Brooklyn Debate League, they they're most concerned with, many
Speaker 1: of them are from less privileged backgrounds. Right, you're talking
Speaker 1: about kids from poor areas of Brooklyn. You know what
Speaker 1: debating allows is for these kids to be heard on
Speaker 1: subjects where they would were normally no one would ever
Speaker 1: pay them the suddest attention. So you tell a fifteen
Speaker 1: year old kid from Bushwick, we're going to debate immigration policy,
Speaker 1: and not only do they get to talk about immigration
Speaker 1: policy and people have to listen, but it allows them
Speaker 1: to almost have another identity. And these are kids who
Speaker 1: never have a chance to have another identity. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and that's what is an incredible gift. That's being given
Speaker 1: to them by allowing them to stand up and inhabit
Speaker 1: a way of thinking or a set of opinions that
Speaker 1: would otherwise be denied to them.
Speaker 2: Now that's amazing, and I think that that is something
Speaker 2: that it's actually incredibly special about debates. So let's just
Speaker 2: caveat and put that as an asterisk that it can
Speaker 2: give you tremendous skills, It can give you confidence, and
Speaker 2: especially you know, someone like me. You know, I didn't
Speaker 2: speak English when I came here as an immigrant, didn't
Speaker 2: fit in very well, and that was also a way
Speaker 2: for me to fit in at first.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there was actually one listener email that came
Speaker 2: in which actually raises some of the things we've been
Speaker 2: talking about. So here's what Jonathan writes, So, what if
Speaker 2: we learn to listen to each other in debates. I've
Speaker 2: always struggled with the benefits of any debate. Does winning
Speaker 2: a debate matter anymore to the well being of society
Speaker 2: as your favorite NBA team winning a game matters? Does
Speaker 2: a society full of expert debaters achieve something our current
Speaker 2: society cannot? And I think this was actually, you know,
Speaker 2: a really important question and something that we've been touching
Speaker 2: on because while I think that you know, debate has
Speaker 2: given me a lot of positives, and as you say,
Speaker 2: kind of this group in Brooklyn, it's definitely giving them
Speaker 2: a lot those skills of you know, fluidity and being
Speaker 2: silver tongued are not necessarily I think beneficial.
Speaker 1: Well, the questions are there sort of spillover effects, Like listening.
Speaker 1: Being someone who learns to pay attention carefully to what
Speaker 1: people are saying is a really important skill that you
Speaker 1: can only gain through practice. And so to the extent
Speaker 1: that debating is really listening practice, then I think it's
Speaker 1: really useful. A lot of what's difficult about listening, and
Speaker 1: why I think we think of it as an imperiled skill,
Speaker 1: is that listening is about the negation of the self. Right,
Speaker 1: I is not important. It's you who are important, And
Speaker 1: there's so much privileging of I these days. I've always
Speaker 1: wanted to, you know, I have a little alternate fantasy
Speaker 1: where I teach an English class for a year, and
Speaker 1: I would like in my English class. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you'd want to, but one of the rules I
Speaker 1: would have is we're going to write a series of
Speaker 1: things over the course of the next year. And my
Speaker 1: rule is you can never ever use the word I
Speaker 1: in anything you write for me, right, No eyes. If
Speaker 1: you if I see an eye referring to yourself in
Speaker 1: anything you write, you fail. Right, And just that I
Speaker 1: feel like the kind of the discipline of forcing someone
Speaker 1: to always be talking about the other and to distance
Speaker 1: themselves from their own perspective, it would just be incredibly useful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the New Yorker would be very happy that
Speaker 2: they have a whole generation of writers who don't use eye.
Speaker 1: I tried so hard for so long when I was
Speaker 1: a New York writer not to fall into the eye trap,
Speaker 1: and then you know, eventually you're like, yive in he's.
Speaker 2: Like speaking to this journalist. I know. It's so disingenuous.
Speaker 1: I love and the English gout around this by saying one, yes,
Speaker 1: one listens to one's perspective.
Speaker 2: On my and what does one think about this?
Speaker 1: The problem is that you get you get into the
Speaker 1: multiple one then and you once you commit to using
Speaker 1: one once you have to keep and you're like, oh, please,
Speaker 1: just stop it. It's really annoying.
Speaker 2: And it's not just annoying, it makes it difficult to
Speaker 2: understand because it's actually unclear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2: The second thing I wanted to talk to you about
Speaker 2: today is the importance of precise language, even if that
Speaker 2: language might make you uncomfortable, even if that language might
Speaker 2: not be nice so to speak, but the importance of
Speaker 2: saying precisely what you mean. And I actually started laughing
Speaker 2: out loud at this listener email that we got. So
Speaker 2: I'm taking the liberty of writing as an admirer of
Speaker 2: Malcolm Gladwell's work to share my humble opinion on the
Speaker 2: use of swear words and vulgar language in your content.
Speaker 2: There is no doubt their use in proliferation has become
Speaker 2: part of the zeitgeist. It seems people feel that, even
Speaker 2: informal context, they lend an air of cool and nonchalance,
Speaker 2: helping them avoid coming across as stuffy and staid in
Speaker 2: a culture where everyone eques really wants to be hip.
Speaker 2: What they don't realize is at the same time they
Speaker 2: cheapen the language and give it an air of tawdriness.
Speaker 2: It's the opposite of classy and also reflects laziness on
Speaker 2: the part of the writer. I hardly doubt Pushkin would
Speaker 2: have used such curse words in his writing. And this
Speaker 2: is where I just lost my shit, because this is
Speaker 2: someone who has never read a word of Pushkin. Pushkin
Speaker 2: is the most foul mouthed poet just I think, in
Speaker 2: Russian history, and this is among other foul mouthed poets.
Speaker 2: There is profanity in Russian language, and it's not just profanity,
Speaker 2: it is like it is profane profanity and your namesake company,
Speaker 2: you know, Pushkin, Yeah, is named for someone who was
Speaker 2: so enamored with precision in words, with using the right word,
Speaker 2: and he would actually he has an entire poem that
Speaker 2: laughs at censorship and at people being snooty about language.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to actually read that poem, but I
Speaker 2: was going to read a few a few Pushkin lines.
Speaker 2: So let me just give this gentleman a taste of
Speaker 2: what Pushkin's writing is. Actually. Like, there's one from a
Speaker 2: poem which is called the Wagon of Life Tide. So
Speaker 2: I'm actually going to just read this lovely for just
Speaker 2: four lines in Russian, and then we'll do a translation.
Speaker 2: Soutra Sadamites, pashol youbon mites. Russian is such a beautiful
Speaker 2: melodic language. Yes, So here's this is this is just
Speaker 2: my rough translation, in the morning, we get into this car,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, this wagon of life. We are
Speaker 2: happy to challenge our brains. Literally it says break our heads,
Speaker 2: but that's not idiomatic. So and detesting laziness and leisure.
Speaker 2: We yell get moving. Fucking mother, but it's not fucking
Speaker 2: mother is the literal translation, but that does not even
Speaker 2: begin to describe it. So in Russian, the word to
Speaker 2: fuck and all of its permutations is such an incredibly
Speaker 2: powerful thing that So I was talking to my mom
Speaker 2: in preparation for this episode and asked her, you know,
Speaker 2: how would she describe it? She said, well, you could
Speaker 2: say that saying fucking English would be like, you know,
Speaker 2: a politician just giving a talk in front of an audience,
Speaker 2: compared to what something like you be on the mind
Speaker 2: sounds like in Russian.
Speaker 1: I mean people can.
Speaker 2: Get killed for saying that to someone else. It's a
Speaker 2: very yeah, I mean you can. There's there's actually a
Speaker 2: history of you know, people bringing fists to faces when
Speaker 2: you when you use phrasing like that, because you know,
Speaker 2: it's incredibly incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1: But your voice changes when you speak Russian, and this
Speaker 1: really interesting way. I'm falling in love with you speaking
Speaker 1: Russian way.
Speaker 2: That's very funny.
Speaker 1: Can we do an episode where you just speaking Russian?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, let's do it. Let's do it. It's not just me,
Speaker 2: who's who thinks that? This is so incredibly important. If
Speaker 2: you look at you know, Russian history, the use of
Speaker 2: swearing is an incredibly important part of the language, part
Speaker 2: of expression, part of kind of communicating clearly, and in fact,
Speaker 2: Dostoyevsky wrote back in eighteen seventy three about how the
Speaker 2: single word khui, which means prick, dick, but it's once
Speaker 2: again it's you know, both prick and dick and cock like,
Speaker 2: all of those words are not not quite right. But
Speaker 2: the male sexual organ, how you could basically describe everything
Speaker 2: and every single emotion in the Russian language with that
Speaker 2: one word, and his permutations, and how he thought that
Speaker 2: it was just awful that because of censorship he couldn't
Speaker 2: actually use it, and so he has just this whole
Speaker 2: big thing on it. And this is Dustoyevsky. Ye, so
Speaker 2: if you had named your company Dustoyevsky instead of Pushkin,
Speaker 2: he also would have been eyeboard.
Speaker 1: Can I just venture a mild defense of our letter writer?
Speaker 2: Yes, please go?
Speaker 1: Which is I think that what the letter writer is
Speaker 1: arguing against is sloppiness that sometimes people use profanity when
Speaker 1: they can't be bothered to express themselves more articulately, more clearly,
Speaker 1: more specifically, more and it was it becomes a kind
Speaker 1: of crutch. But the careful and the choice use of profanity,
Speaker 1: it can be very powerful and sometimes even beautiful. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And there are times I remember I had this conversation
Speaker 1: with spending enough. A friend of my brothers is a
Speaker 1: men and night pastor who is writing a book about
Speaker 1: the use of profanity in the religious context, and he
Speaker 1: told me the story about a woman whose sort of
Speaker 1: life had called a series of incredible, terrible things had
Speaker 1: happened to her, and she relates this to her friend,
Speaker 1: and her friend, who was someone who would never in
Speaker 1: a million years use a profanity, use of profanity, And
Speaker 1: it was this incredibly emotionally important moment, because what the
Speaker 1: woman who was suffering needed at that moment was someone
Speaker 1: who understood the magnitude of what had happened to her.
Speaker 1: And the only way for a very strict religious person
Speaker 1: to express that was to swear, was to go into
Speaker 1: forbidden territory, right, Like, that's really beautiful and I don't
Speaker 1: think our letter writer would disagree with that kind of
Speaker 1: use of profanity.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know our letter writers seemed.
Speaker 1: I'm just much more generous to her.
Speaker 2: I'm not. I get so. One of the reasons I
Speaker 2: get so riled up about this is the letter writer
Speaker 2: has a lot in common with Latimer Putin, because back
Speaker 2: in twenty fourteen putin an act a ban on using
Speaker 2: the four base swear words in Russian in any sort
Speaker 2: of cultural or artistic expression. So hui, which we already
Speaker 2: talked about you butte, which was in the Pushkin poem,
Speaker 2: so that poem would have been censored and would not
Speaker 2: have been allowed to be published, and Pushkin could have
Speaker 2: actually been put in jail. Pizdel, which is kind of
Speaker 2: your female another regions.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, you are resorting to euphemism he
Speaker 1: has stopped you in the previous ten.
Speaker 2: Minutes, and which is slut, but normally you just use
Speaker 2: it as you know, as a as a daily exclamation
Speaker 2: in different permutations. So those four words are banned in
Speaker 2: the Russian language. And this was around the same time
Speaker 2: that he was, you know, enacting all the anti gay stuff,
Speaker 2: and you know, it's a way of censoring expression ideas.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like taking a hammer to it, right,
Speaker 2: because those words. Something that my mom also always says
Speaker 2: is there are really no bad words. It's just bad people.
Speaker 2: And so by banning these words, you know, he's showing
Speaker 2: that he's one of the bad people, because you can
Speaker 2: hurt someone much more. Just like you said that using
Speaker 2: swears judiciously can be beautiful and can just be very powerful.
Speaker 2: You can hurt someone without swearing. You can you can
Speaker 2: really just skewer them and just be absolutely vicious without
Speaker 2: using a single bad word. Yeah, And it's all in
Speaker 2: the intention, it's all in the person. It's all so
Speaker 2: I the moment I see any kind of censorship, it's
Speaker 2: kind of like you and the Monk debates, My emotions
Speaker 2: start getting riled up and I start wanting to say no.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm basically always against anyone who says you
Speaker 2: should not use any some kind of language.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, Malcolm, now that we've established the parameters of precise
Speaker 2: language use, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back now, Maria. As you know, we
Speaker 1: gave Columbia University the first ever Pushkin Prize for the
Speaker 1: way they screwed around with your data to get a
Speaker 1: higher place on the US News rankings. We awarded them
Speaker 1: the George Sandalis Memorial Pushkin Prize for egregiously deceptive self promotion,
Speaker 1: and they were. It was all because a Columbia professor
Speaker 1: named Michael Thaddeus found them out, and after he exposed
Speaker 1: their shenanigans, they fell from number two to number eighteen.
Speaker 2: It was a huge scandal, which is quite the fall
Speaker 2: from grace.
Speaker 1: It is quite the fall from grace. No one is
Speaker 1: more obsessed with the US News rankings than me. No
Speaker 1: one was more delighted to see Columbia tumble so far
Speaker 1: and so fast. But I can see that for a
Speaker 1: Columbia lum such as yourself, this could be a little
Speaker 1: bit disconcerting. You didn't feel like your degree was in
Speaker 1: some way devalued by learning that the school was eighteenth
Speaker 1: as opposed to second.
Speaker 2: No. No, because when I applied to Columbia, first of all,
Speaker 2: it was grad school, so it's a little bit different.
Speaker 2: But secondly, it was not number two because this was
Speaker 2: pre manipulation. So I mean, I'm sure there was still manipulation,
Speaker 2: but this was I started grad school in Columbia back
Speaker 2: in two thousand and eight, so this.
Speaker 1: Was the Oh, I think the manipulation may have started
Speaker 1: by then. Okay, it's one thing we don't know right now.
Speaker 1: Columbia has not come clean. Well, they've given us no
Speaker 1: knowledge at all about the extent, and this is strength
Speaker 1: of this conspiracy. But I think it's reasonable to assume
Speaker 1: that it may well have started maybe in the nineties.
Speaker 2: That's actually probably accurate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the show we just did about it, I
Speaker 1: asked Revisionist History's resident data scientist Lauren Lavelle to reconstruct
Speaker 1: what Columbia did. But I also wanted to know, and
Speaker 1: this is crucial, is there a way they could have
Speaker 1: cheated so they wouldn't have gotten caught? In other words,
Speaker 1: is there a way they could have climbed into the
Speaker 1: top ten without having run any risk of exposure? And
Speaker 1: so Lauren sat down and went through the data and
Speaker 1: figured out a strategy to make this happen.
Speaker 3: So we're trying to do like a more sneaky route
Speaker 3: of getting them into the top ten. So in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three, Duke and Northwestern tied for number ten, So
Speaker 3: we're looking to get the same score as a Duke
Speaker 3: or Northwestern, which is about a ninety two out of
Speaker 3: one hundred.
Speaker 1: Lauren says that for Columbia just to beat those schools
Speaker 1: or tie them, they don't need to try goosing numbers
Speaker 1: like their graduation rate or the student faculty ratio, or
Speaker 1: even how much they spend on instruction. There's all kinds
Speaker 1: of reasons they can just leave those particular metrics alone.
Speaker 3: I want to specifically keep the expenditures per student figure
Speaker 3: as close to reality as possible because those are publicly
Speaker 3: available figures, they're in the consolidated financial statements. And also
Speaker 3: since their spending is already so high, like blowing up
Speaker 3: that number further doesn't actually do much as far as
Speaker 3: ranking goes, because it's already in the top like ninety
Speaker 3: eight percent of schools, Like they're already a top ranking there.
Speaker 1: Instead, Lauren says, what Columbia could do if they want
Speaker 1: to cheat without getting caught is just to play with
Speaker 1: three variables. The percentage of class sizes under twenty students,
Speaker 1: the percentage of class size is over fifty students, and
Speaker 1: the percentage of faculty that are full time employees. So
Speaker 1: three like totally off the radar statistics now, for each
Speaker 1: of these categories, Columbia gave numbers to US News that
Speaker 1: didn't line up with what Michael Thadyus found. The differences
Speaker 1: were enormous, so Lauren says, secondly, Columbia should just pick
Speaker 1: numbers that are about half as wrong, so somewhere in
Speaker 1: the middle between what they sent US News and the truth.
Speaker 1: And if all they'd done was those subtle tweaks, they
Speaker 1: could have cracked the top ten.
Speaker 3: And what I arrived at was the combination of those
Speaker 3: values gives us a rounded score of ninety two, which
Speaker 3: ties Columbia with Duke and Northwestern for tenth place, which
Speaker 3: is kind of what we were aiming for.
Speaker 1: But of course that's not what Columbia wanted. They wanted
Speaker 1: to rule the rankings, and that's why they blew themselves
Speaker 1: up because climbing higher in the top ten is really
Speaker 1: really difficult.
Speaker 3: So you know, we have to start making bigger and
Speaker 3: bigger fabrications in order to keep climbing places, which lends
Speaker 3: to that idea of the synergy between the ranking metrics, right, like,
Speaker 3: we have to tweak many variables and in some cases
Speaker 3: buy a lot to start seeing any appreciable change in score.
Speaker 3: Like inflating one or two values just doesn't really do
Speaker 3: much for us.
Speaker 1: What Laura Novelle is saying is that if Colombia just
Speaker 1: fiddled with three incredibly obscure metrics and just casually ease
Speaker 1: their way into the top ten, no one's going after them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's absolutely true. If they're cheated just by a
Speaker 2: little bit less like who knows. And this goes back
Speaker 2: to when did they start cheating, right, because I'm guessing
Speaker 2: they did not start being so egregious right away, right.
Speaker 2: They started small, and then they started climbing, and they
Speaker 2: got more ambitious, and no one caught them. No one
Speaker 2: took them by the hand and said, you know, bad boy,
Speaker 2: you can't do this. And so they kept going and
Speaker 2: they kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And that
Speaker 2: to me is, you know, the hallmark of the cheaters
Speaker 2: who get caught.
Speaker 1: Columbia only gets caught as this guy, Michael Thaddeus, a
Speaker 1: math professor, takes an interest and devotes an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of time to figuring out how much to the extent
Speaker 1: to which his institution cheats. Right, no one else is checking,
Speaker 1: So right away we have a suspicion that maybe more
Speaker 1: cheating goes on, because how many of these obsessive, devoted
Speaker 1: math professors out there are there the motivation to look, right,
Speaker 1: not that the goblin's looking or US News is certainly
Speaker 1: not looking, because if US News the minute that they
Speaker 1: claim to verify the validity of the data they collect,
Speaker 1: then they're libel in the case of in the event
Speaker 1: of a fraud. So they very clearly say, we don't
Speaker 1: check anything. It's on you. So anyway, the reason I
Speaker 1: bring us up is I'm walking down the street in
Speaker 1: Manhattan about two weeks ago, down twenty second street. Guy
Speaker 1: stops me, he goes, mister clapwell he goes, He goes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: big fan of Revision's history. I read that thing you
Speaker 1: wrote about Columbia, and I got to think because it
Speaker 1: brought me all kinds of clients uhh. And I was
Speaker 1: like wait what. I was like, what do you do?
Speaker 1: He goes, I'm a lawyer, he goes, what clients? He goes, Well,
Speaker 1: you can imagine when other schools learned about what was
Speaker 1: happening at Columbia, they realized they some legal exposure and
Speaker 1: they called me. So all these clients. Now it was
Speaker 1: like wait, wait, and then I said tell me more
Speaker 1: and he's like, oh, I I can't any and he
Speaker 1: walked away and I said, well, I gave him my email.
Speaker 1: I was like, he didn't email me.
Speaker 2: Of course he didn't.
Speaker 1: So but that exchange makes you think, wait, so what
Speaker 1: is he saying. Is he saying that lots of schools
Speaker 1: are cheating They see that Columbia got busted and now
Speaker 1: they're panicking and they're calling him to figure out whether
Speaker 1: they have legal exposure. Is that what he's saying.
Speaker 2: I think that's what he's saying, because the moment you
Speaker 2: started telling the story and it didn't even occur to
Speaker 2: me until this conversation. But of course everyone cheats on
Speaker 2: the US News rankings, and in that case, right, if
Speaker 2: everyone's cheating by a little bit, then the rankings are
Speaker 2: actually probably still pretty accurate, because if every single school
Speaker 2: is trying to bump themselves up a bit, then it
Speaker 2: probably kind of all evens out. But they're no guessing,
Speaker 2: not with Columbia, right, the people who are doing it egregiously,
Speaker 2: Obviously it doesn't even out.
Speaker 1: No, it's not. What a better more PLUSB explanation is
Speaker 1: a is a cheating arms race that somebody fiddles a little,
Speaker 1: someone else realizes that here is fiddling a little, and
Speaker 1: they hiddle a little bit more, and then what you went,
Speaker 1: Columbia is the culmination of a whole series of got it?
Speaker 2: So Columbia is a nuclear explosion.
Speaker 1: Got it?
Speaker 2: But but yeah, it made me realize, you know, how
Speaker 2: many people are cheating, how many schools are cheating on
Speaker 2: the rankings, how many are actually being smarter and just
Speaker 2: cheating smarter and not yet as cocky as Columbia became.
Speaker 2: Because that's the other thing, right, The more you get
Speaker 2: away with it, the longer you get away with it,
Speaker 2: the more confidence you become that you will keep getting
Speaker 2: away with it. And that's completely rational.
Speaker 1: So, as someone who studies this, I'm curious in this question.
Speaker 1: Is it so the longer you cheat and get away
Speaker 1: with it, the more confident you become that you won't
Speaker 1: get caught. But is it also the case that the
Speaker 1: less aware you are that you're actually cheating.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think that's right. No think I think
Speaker 2: that these people are not pathological. They are very well
Speaker 2: aware of what they're doing, but they probably give themselves
Speaker 2: excuses because they also don't think they're doing anything bad,
Speaker 2: and people who cheat all the time, who lie all
Speaker 2: the time, they want to justify that, no, I'm not
Speaker 2: a bad person and I'm not really doing anything wrong.
Speaker 2: So Columbia actually probably tells itself we're not doing anything bad.
Speaker 2: We're just staying competitive, because if we're the only truly
Speaker 2: honest school and everyone else is cheating, then we get
Speaker 2: screwed and they all benefit. So you know, let's all
Speaker 2: do it a little bit.
Speaker 1: Lance armst argument for which at various times in my life,
Speaker 1: I've had a lot of sympathy. So here's what Lance
Speaker 1: would say. Lance would say in the era that I
Speaker 1: was taking EPO and winning the Twitter fans every year,
Speaker 1: not just EPO, lots of things. The only way you
Speaker 1: competed at highest levels of cycling was if you were
Speaker 1: using performance enhancing drugs. My problem is that I was
Speaker 1: better at it than everybody else, and I think that
Speaker 1: that's actually true, because you know, you can't just take
Speaker 1: performance enhancing drugs and expect to be better overnight. They're
Speaker 1: simply a tool that allow you to train in different
Speaker 1: ways and to exploit your potential more efficiently. And he
Speaker 1: was the most efficient exploiter of his own potential. Right, true,
Speaker 1: he brought a considerable his considerable intelligence, and the man
Speaker 1: and his group or these guys were like to bear
Speaker 1: on the question of Okay, if we're going to take EPO,
Speaker 1: how do we maximize its usefulness? So like he's sort
Speaker 1: of right, like if Landsay is a less expert cheater,
Speaker 1: he doesn't get caught. Most of those guys never got caught.
Speaker 2: But it's also because he's so incredibly talented that people
Speaker 2: are going to scrutinize him more. Yes, And so.
Speaker 1: He's like Colombia in this respect. You know that the
Speaker 1: reason we care that Columbia is cheating us, it's Colombia. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: we're not East Tennessee State. If they cheat on their
Speaker 1: US news, we're not getting quite as upset. Right, we
Speaker 1: don't feel the mistakes.
Speaker 2: East Tennessee State, no offense place. But yes, point taken.
Speaker 1: Yeah, any way, could I make a personal confession about
Speaker 1: cheating on the weekend?
Speaker 2: Welcome, What do you cheat on?
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what I cheat it. On the weekend
Speaker 1: I ran in the sharing Connecticut Classic five Mile Road Rays,
Speaker 1: an annual road race.
Speaker 2: How'd you do?
Speaker 1: And I came in I think seventeenth I'm an old man.
Speaker 1: It was a good but I cheated, and I cheated
Speaker 1: because there were maybe other cheaters as well. I was
Speaker 1: wearing what they call super shoes. Ah, you know, you
Speaker 1: know about this. There's now running shoes you can buy
Speaker 1: with carbon fiberplates, and there's a particular kind of running
Speaker 1: shoe made by New Balance, which combines a carbon fiber
Speaker 1: plate with what they call a high stack height, an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of cushion and you kind of bounce down
Speaker 1: the road. And I heard that and in certain races,
Speaker 1: these particular New Balances, you know, they're banned from formal competition.
Speaker 1: I could not wear these if I was running an
Speaker 1: Olympic marathon. But I'm like, it's the Sharing Classic five months, Like,
Speaker 1: do you know there's like fifty people in the race.
Speaker 1: You know, it's Saturday morning. Like, I'm an old dude.
Speaker 1: Nobody cares. But technically it was cheating. Well was it?
Speaker 2: Was it actually banned?
Speaker 1: Well? Is it formless band?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: But he's cheating in the sense that is a violation
Speaker 1: of the ethic of the sport, and it is an
Speaker 1: unfair advantage over everyone who was in that race who
Speaker 1: was not wearing carbon fiber carbon plate shoes with high
Speaker 1: stock hites.
Speaker 2: Well, if this was, if this were actually an important competition,
Speaker 2: I don't think you would do that.
Speaker 1: We are you saying that my race wasn't important to me?
Speaker 2: Yes, I am saying that, Malcolm, that is exactly what
Speaker 2: I'm saying.
Speaker 1: No, I felt mildly guilty. Was that the start It
Speaker 1: was the starting line, and I was looking at everyone's
Speaker 1: shoes to see if anyone else had these shoes, and
Speaker 1: I feel guilty. There was a conscious decision in the morning,
Speaker 1: was like, because I have lots of legal shoes, but
Speaker 1: everyone's virtually everyone who's serious is wearing some kind of
Speaker 1: carbon yeah show, but this is the one that combines
Speaker 1: it with the ice tackite. And so I was looking around,
Speaker 1: was like, is anyone else wearing these new balances? And
Speaker 1: I felt a little bit exposed, I have to say,
Speaker 1: because but no one noticed and my if you look
Speaker 1: on the website of the Sharing Classic five mile race,
Speaker 1: there's no asterisk next to him next to my performance.
Speaker 2: Right now now everyone knows, I mean, I did not
Speaker 2: know that I was sitting across from a bona fide.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can put that story in your.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe now you're going to make my cheating, but
Speaker 2: it's going to be it's going to be an entire chapter.
Speaker 2: Malcolm Glad, I just you.
Speaker 1: Know, I just wouldn't very briefly go back. We're nearing
Speaker 1: the end of our time. I have one last little
Speaker 1: bit of business, which is, you know, I've been handing
Speaker 1: out these prizes, Pushkin prizes, and we talked a little
Speaker 1: bit about the first one, that George Santos Memorial Pushkin
Speaker 1: Prize for egregiously deceptive self promotion and not that you.
Speaker 2: Put memorial in there. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1: Well, his career is essentially over, so I feel like, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But there was another one I did in a I
Speaker 1: read the story by this student at Harvard, Harvard, your
Speaker 1: school that you attended, the see that you.
Speaker 2: Put a little barb in there without any swear words.
Speaker 1: So my best friends went hard.
Speaker 2: And and they're perfectly nice people.
Speaker 1: So I found this this student named Brooks Anderson, who
Speaker 1: wrote an article for the Harvard Crimson in which he
Speaker 1: pointed out just how many administrators there were at Harvard,
Speaker 1: and so I called him up and I said, Brooks,
Speaker 1: can you do a little of work for me? I
Speaker 1: want to know which school in America has the highest
Speaker 1: ratio of administrators to students. You know, the perfect number
Speaker 1: would be one, right, And I called that the ICU
Speaker 1: staffing ratio and ice you in a hospital is characterized
Speaker 1: by the fact that there was a one to one
Speaker 1: ratio of staff to patients, right, That's yeah, it's the baseline.
Speaker 1: Often there's more, but that's the baseline. So I said,
Speaker 1: to what extent can we figure out if any college
Speaker 1: is coming close to an ICU ratio? So this is
Speaker 1: the second Pushkin Prize, the ICU Staffing Ratio Award. And
Speaker 1: I deputized Brooks to go out in the world and
Speaker 1: to do some research and figure out who is the
Speaker 1: closest to the magic number of one, and so I
Speaker 1: just wanted to run through his findings. I limited him
Speaker 1: to the Ivy League plus MIT in Stanford, which seemed reasonable,
Speaker 1: and so he has at the bottom was Brown point
Speaker 1: one four, then Columbia point one five, Columbia.
Speaker 2: There it is again.
Speaker 1: Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, Harvard. And the highest, at a
Speaker 1: staggering zero point three six administrative staff to student ratio.
Speaker 3: Is he l.
Speaker 1: The Bulldogs. They take on the prize which means, like
Speaker 1: you walk around the Yale campus, chances are your one
Speaker 1: third is likely to run into an administrator as you
Speaker 1: are a student, which is I'm sorry, completely not only bananas,
Speaker 1: it is bananas.
Speaker 2: But but I will I will actually push back a
Speaker 2: tiny bit on this because as someone who went to Harvard,
Speaker 2: we always were a little bit jealous of the fact
Speaker 2: that Yale's students had more support, more resources.
Speaker 1: And wait, you were You're serious, You're serious. Actually you
Speaker 1: went to Harvard and one of your complaints was a
Speaker 1: lack of resources relative to other schools, not.
Speaker 2: Relative to other schools, just relative to Yale. That Yale
Speaker 2: was a much more personalized environment where students actually had
Speaker 2: places to go, people to talk to, where there was
Speaker 2: a very big support structure that was actually pretty absent
Speaker 2: at Harvard. Like at Harvard's a big school where you
Speaker 2: sink or swim. And I was fine with that. I
Speaker 2: actually I loved it. Like I'm independent, I don't need it.
Speaker 2: I understand. I see your face, I see your face.
Speaker 2: But but all of these people, there.
Speaker 1: Are no one's ever no one's ever sunk in the
Speaker 1: history of Harvard University.
Speaker 2: Oh, some people have sunk.
Speaker 1: I mean, like yeah, nineteen thirty six, somebody dropped that.
Speaker 2: But all I mean is that administrators do serve a
Speaker 2: purpose for student support, student resources. I think that's important.
Speaker 2: And all of these people have jobs, So these are
Speaker 2: people who are getting paid money and making a living,
Speaker 2: and they'd be fired if you had lower ratios. And
Speaker 2: people are going hungry babies, starving babies, Malcolm starting.
Speaker 1: No one is saying that anyone needs to be fired.
Speaker 1: With the Pushkin Prize, we simply like to shine a
Speaker 1: spotlight on, shall we say, anomalist behavior by elite institutions
Speaker 1: in the United States. Come on, well, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: get a strator for every three students it's getting We're
Speaker 1: not talking about academic staff.
Speaker 2: Okay, So academic staff obviously is more.
Speaker 1: Important, and for the parents who pay the tuition that
Speaker 1: covers this enormous amount of administrative belowd fair enough. Yes, yes, Maria,
Speaker 1: this has always been enormously fun. I will go home
Speaker 1: just thinking about your transformation when you speak Russian and
Speaker 1: how anyone with the privilege of hearing you speak Russian
Speaker 1: gets a different Maria.
Speaker 2: I love it, And Malcolm, I will go home thinking
Speaker 2: about your seventeenth place finish in your race. That was
Speaker 2: life changing.
Speaker 1: For you, right, yes, it was, Gus, it was Thank you, Maria.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Malcolm.
Speaker 1: Revisionist History Today was produced by Kiara Powell with Jacob Smith, Lemingistu,
Speaker 1: ben at Af Haffrey and tali Emlin. Engineering by Flon Williams,
Speaker 1: Sarah Bruguer and Kay Wang. Our music by Luis Garra,
Speaker 1: fact checking by Kishew Williams and tali Emlin. Our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Peter Clowney. I'm Malcolm Glawell.