Speaker 1: Pushkin. This is Solvable. I'm Ronald Young Jr. The rational
Speaker 1: response to being asked to fight in a war is
Speaker 1: to go crazy. That, of course, is the voice of
Speaker 1: Pushkin co founder Malcolm Bladwell. And I invited Malcolm back
Speaker 1: to Solvable because I've recently been thinking a lot about
Speaker 1: something I read that he published back in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: his book David and Goliath. The subtitle is Underdogs, Misfits
Speaker 1: and the Art of Battling Giants. It's a book that
Speaker 1: takes a closer look at events in which one outcome
Speaker 1: is greatly favored over another and discusses why sometimes those
Speaker 1: outcomes don't turn out as expected. This episode is a
Speaker 1: little different from our typical Solvable and that we don't
Speaker 1: exactly solve a problem here, but in the spirit of
Speaker 1: the show, we're very optimistic in our discussion of a
Speaker 1: big idea, and as you listen, you'll begin to get
Speaker 1: a sense of exactly why we chose now to have
Speaker 1: this particular discussion. Imagine you're living in Britain in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen thirties. Germany is preparing to attack your country.
Speaker 1: It's the start of the Second World War. The military
Speaker 1: is mobilizing. Preparations are being made for mass casualties. You're
Speaker 1: debating whether or not you should stay in the city
Speaker 1: or move to the countryside until the danger has passed.
Speaker 1: The British Military Command does a kind of projection of
Speaker 1: what they think is going to happen, and they think
Speaker 1: they're going to have six hundred thousand dead, one point
Speaker 1: two million wounded, and mass panic. They think that no
Speaker 1: one's going to go to work, which means that all
Speaker 1: of industrial production in England will cease. They think that
Speaker 1: the army will be useless because the army will be
Speaker 1: spend all of its time trying to keep the civilians
Speaker 1: like from going nuts. They really think it's over. The
Speaker 1: fear and uncertainty in the air are palpable. But what
Speaker 1: are you going to do? Can you still go to work?
Speaker 1: What about friends of family? Will they be safe? What
Speaker 1: is going to happen to all of you? And I
Speaker 1: know these questions may feel familiar. It's just funny about
Speaker 1: how a different circumstances in different times we have very
Speaker 1: different responses to people who have this kind of psychological
Speaker 1: reaction of invulnerability. They cannot be heroes or they can
Speaker 1: be chumps. While our responses to the fear of an
Speaker 1: impending battle and its immediate physical threats may be quite
Speaker 1: different from our responses to the fear of a global pandemic.
Speaker 1: There's a way in which they're actually kind of similar
Speaker 1: community approach. We've fallen so in love with the language
Speaker 1: of personal freedom and responsibility that we've forgotten the power
Speaker 1: of collective appeals to community. Here's my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: We're going to examine the parallels and intersections of fear, vulnerability,
Speaker 1: and responsibility when it comes to war and a global pandemic. Malcolm,
Speaker 1: welcome back to Solvable. It's great to have you here
Speaker 1: once again. Thank you. So I want to tell you
Speaker 1: about the my earliest introduction to you. It was in
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen and you were on the Ted Radio Hour
Speaker 1: and you were giving an interview with Guy Roz about
Speaker 1: your book David and Goliath, because you had just done
Speaker 1: a Ted talk on that. Do you remember that, I do, Yeah, great.
Speaker 1: I liked it because, you know, as a self proclaimed
Speaker 1: church guy, you gave a very different definition to David
Speaker 1: and Goliath, the battle what actually happened? And I love
Speaker 1: this book. I bought it it's one of my favorites.
Speaker 1: I think it's you know, a lot of people talk
Speaker 1: about blank and outliers in the other books you wrote,
Speaker 1: but David and Goliath is by far my favorite. And
Speaker 1: I bought the book thinking I'm just gonna get all
Speaker 1: these you know, insights about you know, underdogs and misfits
Speaker 1: and all that, which I did, and I thought it
Speaker 1: was gonna be purely based on David and Goliath. But
Speaker 1: then I got to one chapter and it was chapter
Speaker 1: five and a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote this book called
Speaker 1: The Structure of Morale named J. T. McCurdy talks about
Speaker 1: the bombings in Britain. Can you recount that? Yeah? Those,
Speaker 1: So this is, by the way, thank you for the
Speaker 1: kindroids about David and Glad. David and Glad happens to
Speaker 1: be my favorite of all my books as well. So
Speaker 1: this is something that has always not just fascinated me,
Speaker 1: but puzzled people for a long time. Which was at
Speaker 1: the start of the Second World War. The British knew
Speaker 1: that the Germans had a fleet of bombers, and they
Speaker 1: also knew the state of their defenses against bombers were
Speaker 1: that there was nothing they could do to stop the Germans.
Speaker 1: So the first thing they did, of course, was they
Speaker 1: a lot of children who lived in London were moved
Speaker 1: to the countryside. The second thing they did was they
Speaker 1: got the fire trucks ready for what would be you know,
Speaker 1: all kinds of all kinds of the normal things. More
Speaker 1: than that, they became convinced that the devastation would be
Speaker 1: such that the population of London would panic, and so
Speaker 1: they did things like they converted a whole series of
Speaker 1: buildings on the outskirts of London to psychiatric makeshift psychiatric hospitals,
Speaker 1: because they figured so many people will be traumatized, they
Speaker 1: assumed that some incredible percentage of the population of London
Speaker 1: would flee the city. They really worried that the war
Speaker 1: would be over, panic in London would be such and
Speaker 1: would spread the rest of the country and people would
Speaker 1: see that the Germans could just come and bomb at will,
Speaker 1: and they thought, you know, this could be this could
Speaker 1: be it for us. They were terrified from top to bottom.
Speaker 1: So the bombing comes in the fall of nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: the famous blitz, right, and it lasts about eight months,
Speaker 1: and the Germans come, you know, not every night, but
Speaker 1: there's one stretch where they come for fifty seven consecutive
Speaker 1: nights and they drop tens of thousands of tons of
Speaker 1: high explosive bombs on London. They damage a million buildings,
Speaker 1: they wipe out much of the East End, and the
Speaker 1: panic never comes, and nobody can believe it. They're like,
Speaker 1: what happened? Why is everyone? In fact, not only does
Speaker 1: a panic not come, but like after a little while,
Speaker 1: people get so over it that they start going back
Speaker 1: to their business and you know, they go to where
Speaker 1: or they go to the pubs at night, they party,
Speaker 1: they do all the things young people are on in
Speaker 1: the streets. And as you can imagine, every psychiatrist, social scientists,
Speaker 1: psychologists in England at the time is like driving around
Speaker 1: London saying, I am witnessing something that makes no sense. Right,
Speaker 1: we've terror the Germans have terrorized the population of London.
Speaker 1: And there's like kids playing you know, football in the streets,
Speaker 1: and there's couples like going dancing at night, and there's
Speaker 1: people dancing drinking in pubs and the bombs are falling.
Speaker 1: It's this completely bizarre event to kick off the war.
Speaker 1: And so this British psychiatrist comes along. J. T. McCarthy,
Speaker 1: the guy you mentioned the top, and he tries to
Speaker 1: explain what happened, and I think that's what that's the thing.
Speaker 1: It sounds like that drew your eye to that chapter. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: And that's what gets me because when I read this,
Speaker 1: I thought about it all the time. When I first
Speaker 1: read this, and this was back in twenty thirteen, I
Speaker 1: thought about it all the time. And I remember he
Speaker 1: divided them into three groups to direct hits, and those
Speaker 1: are the people that are dead, people that just didn't
Speaker 1: make it through the bombing. Then there were near misses.
Speaker 1: Those were people who were experiencing the devastation of the
Speaker 1: bomb but did not experience death, or even people who
Speaker 1: were close to someone who experienced the devastation of the bomb,
Speaker 1: family member, whatever. Then there were the majority of London
Speaker 1: experience what he called remote misses, which is mean you
Speaker 1: heard about the bomb a few feet over, you felt
Speaker 1: the rumbling, you felt the building shake, but you didn't
Speaker 1: experience any devastation. And one are the quotes that you
Speaker 1: wrote the book was that the morale of the community
Speaker 1: depends on the reaction of the survivors because the majority
Speaker 1: of the community is experiencing remote misses. They have this
Speaker 1: experience of feeling invulnerable as opposed to the people who
Speaker 1: experienced near misses, who they actually have a higher sense
Speaker 1: of fear or a higher sense of actual danger when
Speaker 1: the bombs fall. Yeah. So yeah, he does this thing
Speaker 1: which is in retrospect. I think it's incredibly brilliant. He
Speaker 1: says that your reaction to a traumatic event is a
Speaker 1: function of your proximity to it. So you're right, there's
Speaker 1: the people who are most proximate to a traumatic event,
Speaker 1: other ones who are killed by it. They're presumably the
Speaker 1: ones who are the most terrified at the moment before
Speaker 1: they died. But they're dead, right, Yeah, they can't spread
Speaker 1: we don't know how they felt. They can't spread their feelings.
Speaker 1: They have no impact. They're gone. Right. Second group near
Speaker 1: miss is they're the ones who the bomb drops in
Speaker 1: the other room and they crawl out of the wreckage.
Speaker 1: Those people have traumatized, Like there's no doubt about that. Like,
Speaker 1: that's that's like, that's like you're in a car accident
Speaker 1: and your car is totaled and they take you out
Speaker 1: with the jaws of life. M right, that's that's your
Speaker 1: that's your near miss, right, that'll stay with you. Has
Speaker 1: that ever happened to you, by the way, run You're
Speaker 1: ever in a car accident like that? No, I have
Speaker 1: not either. I know some people who have a man
Speaker 1: that like dead stays with you. That's like some serious
Speaker 1: I actually have a personal near miss story, which is
Speaker 1: I when I was a kid, And funny enough, this
Speaker 1: is not traumatic for me, but traumatic for my father.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, I was going hiking with
Speaker 1: my father in the winter on this gorge went in Canada,
Speaker 1: and I'm about seven, and there's a sheer sheet of
Speaker 1: ice down the side of the gorge that runs all
Speaker 1: the way to a frozen not a frozen over, but
Speaker 1: a freezing cold, fast moving river. I slip slide down
Speaker 1: the side of the gorge and come to a halt
Speaker 1: six inches from this fast moving rapids river. Where had
Speaker 1: I gone six more inches, I would be dead. Of course. Wow.
Speaker 1: My dad never got over that. He like, you know,
Speaker 1: he had to repel down the ice and like I'm
Speaker 1: just sitting there six inches from the water on the ice,
Speaker 1: right that was for him, that's a near miss, like
Speaker 1: and he would talk about that, you know, forty years later,
Speaker 1: like it had just happened, right, He's not the remote
Speaker 1: miss though, is the category that really interested in McCurdy
Speaker 1: And he said, if the bombs across a street and
Speaker 1: you survive, your response is not trauma but exhilaration. It's
Speaker 1: like you get a new lease on life. Can I
Speaker 1: read you from McCurdy? Absolutely, when we had been afraid
Speaker 1: that we may panic in an air aid, and when
Speaker 1: it has happened, and when we have exhibited to others
Speaker 1: nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe.
Speaker 1: The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief
Speaker 1: and feeling of security promotes a self confidence that is
Speaker 1: the very father and mother of courage. By the way,
Speaker 1: how much do you low the way these guys right, Oh, brilliant,
Speaker 1: there's no what what like practicing site today. They would
Speaker 1: write that in some gobble. It's like some academic and gobbledegook.
Speaker 1: And he's talking about the father and mother of courage.
Speaker 1: I love that. You know the rest of that passage,
Speaker 1: I think it starts you started in the middle, but
Speaker 1: it starts with we are all not merely liable to fear,
Speaker 1: but we also are prone to being afraid of being afraid,
Speaker 1: which I always love, because I've realized that most of
Speaker 1: their ways in which that I've I've ever been afraid
Speaker 1: of always been the anticipation that was really killing me.
Speaker 1: I think I've very much embraced this ideology because the
Speaker 1: idea of getting through the fear is kind of what J. T.
Speaker 1: McCurdy gets at when he talks about what happens with
Speaker 1: the British. He's basically saying, like, they got through the fear,
Speaker 1: and because the majority of them went through remote misses,
Speaker 1: it's all of a sudden like I don't even need
Speaker 1: to be scared anymore. Yeah, yeah, though I walk through
Speaker 1: the value of death. Oh there goevil, for thou art
Speaker 1: with me. That Tiblical line is about this very phenomenon
Speaker 1: that what it says is that the function of religious
Speaker 1: faith is to turn a near miss to a remote
Speaker 1: a remote miss. Right. It's not that the danger is removed,
Speaker 1: there's you're still walking to the valley of death. But
Speaker 1: the idea is that God's with you, so you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not as it is no longer an occasion
Speaker 1: for panic and fear. It's something that you can see
Speaker 1: to the other side of. Oh. Absolutely, that's my church moment. Too. Hey, hey,
Speaker 1: we in here man, it's Tuesday. So so let me
Speaker 1: ask you this. So we're at we're at the end
Speaker 1: of the bombing. Um, how does the courage of the
Speaker 1: English factor into the German plan? Because their goal was
Speaker 1: to break the English and when it didn't happen, how
Speaker 1: did courage factor into that plan? Well? So this actually
Speaker 1: I talk a little about this in UM the bombom mafia.
Speaker 1: Oh nice, like the plug. Yes, that it's super interesting.
Speaker 1: The Germans also assume that the British will crumble. That's
Speaker 1: why they're doing this thing. No one had ever done
Speaker 1: this in the history of warfare, before large scale aerial
Speaker 1: bombing of civilian populations. It was considered to be first
Speaker 1: of all, no one had bombers before. But in you know,
Speaker 1: in the in the wars of the nineteenth century, you
Speaker 1: fought armies. You didn't you didn't slaughter civilians. But the
Speaker 1: Germans were like, oh, we think that if we bomb
Speaker 1: the civilians, we'll bring the entire country to its needs.
Speaker 1: We won't even have to fight their army. Doesn't happen, right,
Speaker 1: Brits come through, Fine, then what do the Brits do?
Speaker 1: The Brits don't learn their own lesson. They have just
Speaker 1: been through an experience where they where people have proven
Speaker 1: to be a lot tougher and more resilient than they
Speaker 1: would have imagined, and then they turn around forget that
Speaker 1: and try the same failed experiment on the Germans. And
Speaker 1: when confronted on this question the head of the British
Speaker 1: Bomber Command, his answer was basically, well, I don't think
Speaker 1: Germans are as tough as English people, which is like
Speaker 1: such an obnoxious British thing to say. He couldn't wrap
Speaker 1: his mind around the fact that we were dealing here
Speaker 1: with something fundamental about human beings, which is that our
Speaker 1: powers of courage and resilience, even foolhearty powers of courage
Speaker 1: and resilience, are just way more considerable than we would
Speaker 1: have imagined. We're not rational actors. Rationally, if you are
Speaker 1: living in London during the Blitz of nineteen forty, you
Speaker 1: should leave London? Are you kidding me? They're like, there's
Speaker 1: just no reason for sticking around, and you have people
Speaker 1: stick around. They're not rational. Yeah, it makes me think
Speaker 1: of the earliest days of the pandemic. Yeah, if we
Speaker 1: talk about the fear that I had early on and
Speaker 1: the way that I feel now we know that those
Speaker 1: feelings are markedly different, because, like, if you go back
Speaker 1: to the British and everything you said about what the
Speaker 1: British thought was going to happen to them and the
Speaker 1: ways in which they prepared at the beginning, very similarly,
Speaker 1: a lot of us were doing that same things at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the pandemic. But it feels like in
Speaker 1: this case, especially if we start looking at the COVID statistics.
Speaker 1: So at the time of this taping, out of a
Speaker 1: population of about three hundred twenty million Americans, yeah, over
Speaker 1: forty million Americans have been affected by COVID nineteen and
Speaker 1: of that over forty million, about seven hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand have died. So it's about a two percent mortality rate,
Speaker 1: which means the majority of us have been experiencing remote
Speaker 1: misses here. Two hundred and eighty million people are fine,
Speaker 1: I'm one of the two hundred and eighty million. I
Speaker 1: don't think I got it, or if I got it,
Speaker 1: I didn't even know I had it. So like you're you,
Speaker 1: You're right, the overwhelming number of Americans are people who
Speaker 1: had remote misses here. Yeah, I think that. Unfortunately, because
Speaker 1: there were so many remote misses that there was a
Speaker 1: higher amount of preventable deaths that probably could have been
Speaker 1: missed if the people that had remote misses had continued
Speaker 1: the same practices. Now, I don't want this to become
Speaker 1: a conversation of everybody getting basket to get immunizations. You know,
Speaker 1: I understand that those are personal decisions, and I've done
Speaker 1: both because I feel like responsible for my community. But
Speaker 1: a lot of people haven't. And I think it's because
Speaker 1: of this phenomenon of invulnerability. I e. COVID has come.
Speaker 1: It did not get me, it didn't get the majority
Speaker 1: of us. So we're good. Yeah, you don't have to
Speaker 1: be Yes. It's funny. I think it's a perfect illustration
Speaker 1: of what McCarty is talking about. Let's compare two actors here.
Speaker 1: There is the person in East London in nineteen forty
Speaker 1: joining the Blitz who has observed five people on their
Speaker 1: street had their houses destroyed by German bombs, and you know,
Speaker 1: five of them died, but their house is still standing
Speaker 1: and their whole family is still alive. McCurdy would say,
Speaker 1: is that person is a remote miss and they're like, whatever,
Speaker 1: I'm fine, I survived, And they're the ones who are
Speaker 1: going to the pub, and they're the ones who are
Speaker 1: going dancing on a Saturday night, And those are the
Speaker 1: ones who just went about business as usual. Now, that
Speaker 1: person's response to the Blitz is probably best termed as
Speaker 1: irrational in that they're not out of the woods. The
Speaker 1: Germans are still coming night after night, but their psychological
Speaker 1: interpretation of their experience is one of invulnerability. How is
Speaker 1: that person any different from the person who declines to
Speaker 1: get vaccinated today? I think it's exactly the same. Yeah,
Speaker 1: only only one difference. The person joined the Blitz who
Speaker 1: act at all, and we know whose response was I'm invulnerable,
Speaker 1: I'm fine, I'm gonna go back to work is considered
Speaker 1: to be heroic and a hero. The unvaccinated person today
Speaker 1: is considered to be a social shame now for good reasons.
Speaker 1: But it's just funny about how a different circumstances, in
Speaker 1: different times, we have very different responses to people who
Speaker 1: have this kind of psychological reaction of invulnerability. They cannot
Speaker 1: be heroes or they can be chumps. So the reason
Speaker 1: why I think that is, and you can help me
Speaker 1: with this, but the reason why I think that is
Speaker 1: is because bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID. Avoiding
Speaker 1: bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID because with COVID,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people that can do a lot
Speaker 1: of things, right, Like, there's studies that show that wearing
Speaker 1: a mask helps prevent the spread of COVID. There's studies
Speaker 1: that show that getting immunized helps prevent the spread of COVID.
Speaker 1: There's studies that show that social distance helps prevent the
Speaker 1: spread of COVID. All of these things that help prevent
Speaker 1: the spread. And there's people that at every juncture have
Speaker 1: avoided those three things and still not gotten sick. And
Speaker 1: I think those people that are in the remote miss
Speaker 1: category are somehow bolstering the numbers of people that feel
Speaker 1: invulnerable in a way that's actually spreading harm in a
Speaker 1: way that the bombing does it. Yeah, necessarily, because it's
Speaker 1: still you could go to the pub and you could
Speaker 1: still get bombed, even though you're not afraid, but you
Speaker 1: could still get bombed. Yeah. The other aspect of this
Speaker 1: is what is your social responsibility here? You could argue
Speaker 1: that in nineteen forty during the blitz, you are actually
Speaker 1: not reacting with panic. Is a fulfilling your social responsibility,
Speaker 1: that it's a good thing that you behave in that
Speaker 1: mildly irrational way because you're in the middle of a war.
Speaker 1: You have to fight, I mean, you have to sacrifice.
Speaker 1: Social responsibility in terms of a contagious disease is the
Speaker 1: opposite that behaving with caution and being appropriately fearful is
Speaker 1: part of the way that we end diseases. So you
Speaker 1: end a war by being irrational, you end up pandemic
Speaker 1: by being rational. I love that. Right. You can even
Speaker 1: go further and just say that no soldier in wartime
Speaker 1: can do their job without being irrational. It's nuts, right,
Speaker 1: say more, Well, you can't. You're asking someone to go
Speaker 1: out and like risk their life for some I mean
Speaker 1: meaningful cause, but like it's still abstract to them. Like
Speaker 1: the rational response to being asked to fight in a
Speaker 1: war is to go crazy and get like sent to
Speaker 1: a psychiatric hospel for the That's actually the rational response.
Speaker 1: But people don't see that, you know, I'm glad they don't.
Speaker 1: They go through some experience in wartime believe that they
Speaker 1: are a in the remote miss category and that's where
Speaker 1: courage comes from. But so then it's courage irrational. Of course,
Speaker 1: it is Yeah, the rational thing, under any circumstances to
Speaker 1: run knowing that I guess the question that I'm really
Speaker 1: kind of that we're kind of like kind of circling.
Speaker 1: Is understanding when courage is helpful, Yeah, and courage needs
Speaker 1: to be restrict yeah, Or making it clear to people
Speaker 1: who don't behave appropriately during a pandemic that the behavior
Speaker 1: that they're exhibiting is not courageous. It may feelgeous or
Speaker 1: come from the same psychological place as wartime courage, but
Speaker 1: it's not. It's and I This has been one of
Speaker 1: my frustrations with the messaging around things like vaccination in
Speaker 1: this country is that it's been too much about the
Speaker 1: self and not enough about society. The argument should be
Speaker 1: very simple. When we say to someone you should get vaccinated.
Speaker 1: The wrong argument is you should get vaccinated because it
Speaker 1: could save your life. Well, most people are. They have
Speaker 1: a remote misattitude about that. It's like saying you should
Speaker 1: leave London because it will say their life. Now, I'm
Speaker 1: not leaving London as my home. The right answer is
Speaker 1: you have an obligation to other people who are more
Speaker 1: vulnerable than you to get vaccinated. I thought, you know
Speaker 1: things the other day that the single most powerful thing
Speaker 1: that I read about the reason to get vaccinated were
Speaker 1: these personal testimonies from nurses who are describing what they've
Speaker 1: been through working in intensive care units during COVID, that
Speaker 1: seeing people die day and day out, working in these
Speaker 1: insane shifts, being completely burnt out. We are asking of
Speaker 1: people who you know, at the not the bottom of
Speaker 1: the healthcare food chain, but pretty close to it. We're
Speaker 1: asking them to perform these unbelievably heroic acts. And if
Speaker 1: you don't get vaccinated, you're making the life of this
Speaker 1: group of unbelievably heroic people a whole lot harder. Why
Speaker 1: would you do that? Right? That's the argument, Right, So
Speaker 1: let's take it off the plane of let's acknowledge these
Speaker 1: people feel invulnerable. Yes, you feel invulnerable. Fine, it's not
Speaker 1: about that, though. It's about you're making someone else's life miserable,
Speaker 1: and that's not what we do when we're in a
Speaker 1: civilized society. Can you think of some examples of times
Speaker 1: where community successfully went from eye to we in ways
Speaker 1: that we can learn from in trying to do that
Speaker 1: in this moment? Now? Yeah, well there's a bunch of examples,
Speaker 1: but one simple one would be One of the things
Speaker 1: that turns the corner on smoking is the introduction of
Speaker 1: the idea of the dangers of secondhand smoke. We've been
Speaker 1: telling the smoker for a generation that they are endangering
Speaker 1: their own life, and we had very limited success in
Speaker 1: getting people to stop smoking under those circumstances. And then
Speaker 1: the conversation shift and we literally stopped talking about not
Speaker 1: talking exclusively about the smoker, and we started talking about
Speaker 1: the people around the smoker, and it became a matter
Speaker 1: of collective responsibility. Right. I'm old enough to remember when
Speaker 1: you could smoke into of an airplane. They had a
Speaker 1: smoking section the back of an airplane. That stopped not
Speaker 1: because we were trying to prolong the lives of the
Speaker 1: people smoking in the back of airplanes, but because everyone said, oh,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, what about all the non smokers. It's
Speaker 1: about creating a safe environment and congenial environment for them.
Speaker 1: That was a huge shift and really successful, because you know,
Speaker 1: it was a way of reaching smokers and to say
Speaker 1: you couldn't smoke, but you can't smoke in the back
Speaker 1: of the airplane. They may have felt invulnerable when it
Speaker 1: came to the individualized risks because most smokers do not
Speaker 1: die of lung cancer a lot too, but not most
Speaker 1: of them. Right, So it's for most people it's a
Speaker 1: pretty remote miss category. Do you think that that messaging
Speaker 1: is the only way to truly win the war during
Speaker 1: this pandemic? Because again, knowing the majority of us have
Speaker 1: experienced remote missus. But now we're all making personal decisions
Speaker 1: as to how we're going to engage with the community
Speaker 1: and how we're going to be protective of those around us.
Speaker 1: So I guess the big greater question I'm asking is
Speaker 1: how do we take this information and use it to
Speaker 1: end the war on COVID? Yeah? We stop. And to
Speaker 1: my mind, the great frustrating thing in public discourse in
Speaker 1: this country around a whole series of issues is we've
Speaker 1: fallen so in love with the language of personal freedom
Speaker 1: and responsibility that we've forgotten the power of collective appeals
Speaker 1: to community. We don't use that language anymore. No one
Speaker 1: ever says, it's not about you, it's about it's about
Speaker 1: your service to others. Right, It's like the I mean,
Speaker 1: since we're being churchy today, the whole the whole message
Speaker 1: of the New Testament is about, like, you're do one
Speaker 1: too others as you would have to do it. I mean,
Speaker 1: not even a New Testament, the Old Testament too. The
Speaker 1: whole message is about some awareness of your place in
Speaker 1: a community, right, It's not about you. That is the
Speaker 1: single most powerful, you know, message in human history. And
Speaker 1: we've like, well, suddenly get into these arguments where it's well,
Speaker 1: one side saying well, it's my personal choice and freedom
Speaker 1: and the other person the other side. I was saying, well,
Speaker 1: you need to be a rational actor and stop with
Speaker 1: the eyes already, Like enough with I I love it.
Speaker 1: I love it, Ronald. When we get churchy, Let's get
Speaker 1: churchy every time we do these. Yeah, don't pass with me, man,
Speaker 1: I'll come with you with scripture every time. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: the one who quit scripture, not you. I was waiting
Speaker 1: for you to come back at me. I'm like I'm
Speaker 1: doing I walked in the Valley or Shadow of Death.
Speaker 1: I got crickets on your end. Malcolm, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for being with us again. It's always a pleasure
Speaker 1: of ue on the show. Thank you, Ronald, Always a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell is the author of David and Goliath and
Speaker 1: the co founder of Pushkin Industry. He also hosts one
Speaker 1: of our sister podcasts here at Pushkin Revisionist History available
Speaker 1: everywhere you get podcasts, and you should check out his
Speaker 1: new audio book, The Bomber Mafia. Solvable is produced by
Speaker 1: Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah, booking by Lisa Dunn.
Speaker 1: Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer
Speaker 1: is Mia LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.