Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: So one thing that chapter one is about is the
Speaker 2: fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle,
Speaker 2: you can give it essentially antidepressants, and it will fight again.
Speaker 1: There's a Canadian like me, my age, almost exactly, who
Speaker 1: teaches my favorite subject, psychology at my alma mater, the
Speaker 1: University of Toronto. His name is Jordan Peterson.
Speaker 2: If you want to understand a complex nervous system, it's
Speaker 2: a good idea to understand a simple one first and
Speaker 2: then sort of elaborate upwards. And it turns out that
Speaker 2: seratonin governs status, emotional regulation, and posture in lobsters just
Speaker 2: like it does in human beings, and so that would
Speaker 2: just blew me away.
Speaker 1: He wrote a very provocative self help book called Twelve
Speaker 1: Rules for Life. Rule number one stand up straight with
Speaker 1: your shoulders back. Rule number two treat yourself like someone
Speaker 1: you are responsible for helping. Rule number twelve, pat a
Speaker 1: cat when you encounter one on the street. Peterson's book
Speaker 1: was a sensation, and soon all kinds of other people
Speaker 1: were doing twelve rules, like the economist Tyler Cowen, whose
Speaker 1: blog Marginal Revolution is the first thing I read every morning.
Speaker 1: I particularly like Cowen's rule number seven, learn how to
Speaker 1: learn from those who offend you every time you turn
Speaker 1: a corner. Twelve rules the columnist Megan McCardell rule number three.
Speaker 1: Always order one extra dish at a restaurant, an unfamiliar one.
Speaker 1: You might like it, which would be splendid. If you
Speaker 1: don't like it, all you lost was a couple of bucks.
Speaker 1: The exercise of curiosity requires a risk, a sacrifice, a commitment.
Speaker 1: I love that. Also, mccardle's rule number twelve. Always make
Speaker 1: more dinner rolls than you think you can eat. For
Speaker 1: some reason, dinner rolls loom much larger in our imaginations
Speaker 1: than in our stomachs. Whoa Megan mccardal makes her own
Speaker 1: dinner rolls. Everybody's doing twelve rules. Wait, I'm jealous. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 1: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell's twelve Rules for a Living, my guiding principles.
Speaker 1: My wisdom distilled. EXCEPT thought about this for like a month,
Speaker 1: and I realized I don't have twelve rules. I just don't.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have rules like the fact that I
Speaker 1: only drink five liquids ever, water, tea, red wine, espresso,
Speaker 1: and milk in some combination. But that's not a rule
Speaker 1: for living. It's just pointlessly provocative. Self denial the least
Speaker 1: attractive part of my personality. If you want a cocktail,
Speaker 1: you should have a cocktail. I only have one rule,
Speaker 1: pull the goalie.
Speaker 3: What do you mean when you say you're obnoxious? Ah
Speaker 3: the most specific.
Speaker 4: If I found something funny which is still a disease
Speaker 4: I have, I will say it, even if it's gets
Speaker 4: me in some trouble. I never thought I was particularly cruel,
Speaker 4: but I was a class cut up.
Speaker 1: My one rule for living came to me from the
Speaker 1: work of two people, Cliff Assness and Aaron Brown, both
Speaker 1: philosophers of a sort and friends. This is Clifford Assnes.
Speaker 1: He's in his mid fifties, bald Goate grew up middle class,
Speaker 1: Jewish and Long Island.
Speaker 4: I was in the honors classes, and I was the
Speaker 4: cut up in the honors class. Whi's always a strange
Speaker 4: thing to be. You don't think of those classes as
Speaker 4: having one.
Speaker 3: But we had him.
Speaker 4: Wasn't always me too. We were not perfectly well behaved,
Speaker 4: so obnoxious. I was tolerable, but I found myself extremely funny.
Speaker 1: Now I should say that I didn't find Cliff Astness obnoxious,
Speaker 1: he's delightful company. Instead, I suspect he is what psychologists
Speaker 1: call disagreeable short digression. Psychologists believe that human personality can
Speaker 1: be assessed along five dimensions extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience,
Speaker 1: and finally agreeableness. My sense of Cliff Astness, he's at
Speaker 1: the low end of that last trait number five. He's
Speaker 1: low agreeable disagreeable, which is not the same as obnoxious.
Speaker 1: It's rather the quality of not being depended on or
Speaker 1: particularly interested in the approval of others. When I went
Speaker 1: to interview Cliff Astness in Manhattan, I turned on my
Speaker 1: digital recorder and discovered that my memory flash guard was full,
Speaker 1: And after much fluster and fumbling, I realized I had
Speaker 1: no idea how to delete any of the existing data
Speaker 1: from the flashguard to make room for my interview with Asnes. Now,
Speaker 1: the rational thing would have been for me to hand
Speaker 1: Asness the digital recorder and ask him to figure it out.
Speaker 1: Because Cliff Astness has an IQ I'm guessing two to
Speaker 1: three standard deviations higher than mine. He could have solved
Speaker 1: the problem in about thirty seconds, but I didn't hand
Speaker 1: on the recorder because I was embarrassed, because I worried
Speaker 1: that he would think I was pathetic and that concern
Speaker 1: was more important to me than actually fixing my tape
Speaker 1: recorder issues. I am agreeable, I am interested in the
Speaker 1: approval of others. I am the opposite of cliff Astness.
Speaker 1: So I ended up running down forty second Street, two
Speaker 1: cross down blocks to Staples to get another flashguard to
Speaker 1: replace the one. I was too embarrassed to ask for
Speaker 1: help figuring.
Speaker 4: Out here you may include this is this is. This
Speaker 4: is not a secret. I don't work as hard as
Speaker 4: people think. I goof off a lot.
Speaker 1: Cliff Astness likes puzzles, games, problems that engage the imagination.
Speaker 4: I have been caught several times playing internet chess in
Speaker 4: my office from people, and I say, caught. I'm the
Speaker 4: senior guy at the firm. I don't, I don't, I
Speaker 4: don't quit over this. But people come in and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I gotta beat this guy, hold on more or lose.
Speaker 4: I'm not a great chess player.
Speaker 1: He doesn't play conventional chess. He plays one minute chess,
Speaker 1: known as bullet chess. If you're curious, this is what
Speaker 1: a typical bullet match sounds like. It's like Einstein playing
Speaker 1: ping pong. By the way, when Astnes says I'm the
Speaker 1: senior guy at the firm, he's referring to the fact
Speaker 1: that he heads a company called aq R Capital Applied
Speaker 1: Quantitative Research, a hedge fund with two hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five billion dollars under management, which brings me to philosopher
Speaker 1: number two, the second architect of the Pologuli principle, Cliff Astnes'
Speaker 1: friend Aaron Brown. If we were to create a disagreeableness
Speaker 1: scale where zero is like a golden retriever and ten
Speaker 1: is mister Spock, Cliff Astness would be a solid seven.
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown is an eight, maybe even an eight point five.
Speaker 1: Brown is a member of the tribe of mathematically minded
Speaker 1: finance guys known as quants. The Wall Street Quants used
Speaker 1: to gather after work at the Odeon Restaurant in downtown
Speaker 1: Manhattan to talk about Gaussian probability in the bond market.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so there's different definitions of quant. So remember quant
Speaker 5: is an insult invented in the mid nineties that became
Speaker 5: adopted as a point of pride.
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown is a big guy beard, impassive demeanor. When
Speaker 1: I met him, I was reminded of my favorite joke
Speaker 1: about engineers. The optimist sees the glasses half full. The
Speaker 1: pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The engineer wonders
Speaker 1: why the glass is twice as large as it needs
Speaker 1: to be. Brown grew up in Seattle. His mom had
Speaker 1: a master's in chemistry. His dad had a PhD in physics.
Speaker 1: Did a lot of unconventional work for the Air Force,
Speaker 1: like the time he inherited a strange contraption.
Speaker 5: The Air Force had even this guy like two million
Speaker 5: dollars over ten years to build some machine, and they
Speaker 5: didn't know what it was supposed to do, but they
Speaker 5: know he was really smart. And then he killed himself,
Speaker 5: and so the Air Force said, is there anybody who
Speaker 5: wants this machine? You can figure out what it does
Speaker 5: and fix it him. My dad said, chure, I'll take it,
Speaker 5: and he had in our base learn.
Speaker 1: A tortured genius builds a sinister contraption with millions of
Speaker 1: dollars of secret Pentagon money. The man mysteriously commits suicide.
Speaker 1: The Air Force says, who wants the machine? Aaron Brown's
Speaker 1: dad says, over here, over here. He puts it in
Speaker 1: his basement and says to his teenage son, Aaron, Hey,
Speaker 1: take a look if you want, Like it's a box
Speaker 1: of legos. This is how you raise a child to
Speaker 1: be an eight point five?
Speaker 3: What was the machine?
Speaker 5: It was just this huge fish. I stared at that
Speaker 5: thing for hours and hours. I couldn't have tubes and
Speaker 5: wires and this and that. And he turned it on
Speaker 5: and it did kind of you know, lights would light
Speaker 5: up and do interesting things. But we never figured out
Speaker 5: what it was intended to do. His note his notes
Speaker 5: were indecipherable, and he burned some of them. So either
Speaker 5: he was the guy who invented like the Universal Wonder
Speaker 5: Machine and whatever, or he was just some crazy guy
Speaker 5: who liked quit wires together.
Speaker 1: It was the thing from that movie from Back to
Speaker 1: the Future, the flat the flux capacitor.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, maybe he didn't. Maybe he teleported himself to
Speaker 5: some other civilization or something.
Speaker 1: When Aaron Brown was a teenager, Seattle was in the
Speaker 1: midst of a deep recession. All around him, people are
Speaker 1: losing their jobs. He decides he needs a marketable skill.
Speaker 1: He teaches himself poker and finds a big money game
Speaker 1: in the basement of a local tavern.
Speaker 5: And I figured out two really important things. I was
Speaker 5: much better than these guys. I could easily win money consistently,
Speaker 5: and they let me win it and walk out with it.
Speaker 5: You know, a kid comes in plays, walks out. So
Speaker 5: that's like epiphany for me that says, okay.
Speaker 3: You're how old?
Speaker 5: Fourteen? But I was a shy kid. This took every
Speaker 5: ounce of courage I possessed a walk in there. You know,
Speaker 5: there are people who could have done this and it
Speaker 5: wouldn't have been a big deal. But for me, it
Speaker 5: was like the most traumatic event in my life. But
Speaker 5: when I walked down, I said, Okay, I never have
Speaker 5: to worry about getting a meal, you know, having a
Speaker 5: place to stay because you always find a poker game.
Speaker 3: Did you pay you way through Harvard with poker?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown ends up on Wall Street, then goes to
Speaker 1: work for Cliff Astness at AQR Capital. Of course, a
Speaker 1: match made in Heaven.
Speaker 3: Do you guys think the same way? Do you have
Speaker 3: differences in the way you approach problems?
Speaker 5: Well, the massive difference and the reason he has billions
Speaker 5: of dollars and I have a comfortable living. He cares
Speaker 5: far more. He gets literally physically angry when things don't
Speaker 5: work and lose money. I'd rather work on an interesting
Speaker 5: problem than profitable problem.
Speaker 1: Now what do these two do aside from making money?
Speaker 1: Of course, they do thought experiments, write them up and
Speaker 1: post them online on something called SSRN, the Social Science
Speaker 1: Research Network, in my opinion, the greatest website on the Internet.
Speaker 1: It's a place where anyone, anyone can post any kind
Speaker 1: of paper or research or argument, and every article posted
Speaker 1: is then ranked according to its popularity. As I'm writing this,
Speaker 1: there are seven hundred and ninety eight seven hundred and
Speaker 1: forty five papers on SSRN. I don't know if you remember.
Speaker 1: Back at the beginning of this season an episode called
Speaker 1: Divide and Conquer, I talked about my love of law
Speaker 1: review articles. Well, where do you think I read law
Speaker 1: review articles? Not in law reviews? Are you kidding? Why
Speaker 1: would I wait two years for some dusty publication to
Speaker 1: put something out. I read them on SSRN because that's
Speaker 1: where everyone posts their articles the minute they finish. In Manhattan.
Speaker 1: For years, the most important source of gossip was page
Speaker 1: six of the New York Post. SSRN is page six
Speaker 1: for Dorks, so not long ago. I'm on SSRN poking
Speaker 1: around and lo and behold what is the number one
Speaker 1: ranked paper at the time. Pulling the goalie Hockey and
Speaker 1: Investment Implications by Clifford Astas and Aaron Brown. I thought
Speaker 1: I didn't have any rules for living. I was wrong.
Speaker 5: Pulling a goaltender down three so really giving a big
Speaker 5: advantage on the power of flay with possession firmly a standler.
Speaker 1: Here's the issue. You're playing hockey. Your team is down
Speaker 1: by one goal late in the game. The coach of
Speaker 1: the losing team typically removes his own goalie and substitutes
Speaker 1: in an extra attacker. So instead of having five offensive
Speaker 1: players and a goalie guarding the net, he now has
Speaker 1: six offensive players and no one guarding his net.
Speaker 4: That don't make him pay for it, I'm shorthanded goal.
Speaker 1: It's a tradeoff. Pulling a goalie makes it easier for
Speaker 1: the other team to score and put the game even
Speaker 1: further out of reach, But at the same time, your
Speaker 1: extra attacker increases your chances of scoring a goal and
Speaker 1: tying the game. Now, if you watch hockey, you know
Speaker 1: that coaches typically pull a goalie with a minute or
Speaker 1: a minute and a half left in the game. But
Speaker 1: that's just hockey tradition. It's not based on data. When
Speaker 1: exactly should you pull the goalie?
Speaker 3: Tell me the genesis of this paper I love so much.
Speaker 5: Okay, Well, Cliff and I talk a lot about sort
Speaker 5: of quant sports stuff, and I have always been talking
Speaker 5: to him about decisions that coaches make that are mathematically indefensible,
Speaker 5: but you know, makes sense from the coach's motivation. And
Speaker 5: specifically we were talking about Seattle Seahawks twenty fourteen Super
Speaker 5: Bowl New New England Patriots. I got the ball on
Speaker 5: the one yard line, second down, twenty six seconds.
Speaker 6: To go, second in goal, Russell Wilson, what are you doing?
Speaker 4: He gets picked up by the undrafted rookie free agent.
Speaker 6: From Western Alabama, Malcolm Butler.
Speaker 4: Who preserves the victory.
Speaker 6: And it will leave everybody asking why in the world.
Speaker 1: With marsha on in the back building, the Seahawks throw
Speaker 1: the football twenty one reasons. At this point, Brown goes
Speaker 1: on a tangent for maybe fifteen minutes about that particular play,
Speaker 1: which has gone down in Super Bowl lore as one
Speaker 1: of the worst coaching decisions in the history of football.
Speaker 1: But Brown convinces me that in fact, it was the
Speaker 1: right call, the rational call, and I would explain his
Speaker 1: logic to you, except that we have much bigger fish
Speaker 1: to fry. Anyway, talk turns to pulling the goalie in hockey,
Speaker 1: and Cliff says to Aaron, Oh, I've done some work
Speaker 1: on this already.
Speaker 4: It's probably six seven years ago, man, five six years ago.
Speaker 4: I wrote this model and xcept out of pure personal interest.
Speaker 4: I thought I had a neat way to think about
Speaker 4: the problem, and essentially it was it's really hard to
Speaker 4: think about what five minutes left, but with ten seconds left,
Speaker 4: it's really easy to think about.
Speaker 1: Cliff shared his calculations with Aaron Brown. Aaron made them
Speaker 1: better and built a beautiful computer model, and their conclusion
Speaker 1: was a team down by one goal should pull its
Speaker 1: goalie with five minutes and forty seconds left in the game,
Speaker 1: and a team down by two goals should pull its
Speaker 1: goalie with eleven minutes and forty seconds left. Eleven minutes
Speaker 1: and forty seconds with an undefended goal. No one in
Speaker 1: all of hockey pulls their goalie with that much time left.
Speaker 1: If a coach did that in a playoff game with
Speaker 1: real stakes involved, the entire arena would probably go up
Speaker 1: in smoke. In basketball and baseball, there's been a statistical
Speaker 1: revolution over the past generation known as moneyball, where advanced
Speaker 1: metrics have been applied to maximize every aspect of the game.
Speaker 1: Hockey is a step behind, with the exception of my
Speaker 1: beloved Toronto maple Leafs, who if a genuine quant is
Speaker 1: their leader. This is a sport where players pick fights
Speaker 1: with each other in full knowledge of the fact that
Speaker 1: the penalty for their transgressions will materially diminish their team's
Speaker 1: chances of winning. Baseball is quantum theory. Hockey is the
Speaker 1: grown up, professional version of Red Rover, Red Rover, let
Speaker 1: Waying Gretzky come over. Hockey coaches are not looking for
Speaker 1: strategic tips on SSRN, So what do they do? They
Speaker 1: keep their goalie in place until the very last minute,
Speaker 1: defending the goal. And why do they keep doing that?
Speaker 1: Because anything else would be impossibly disagreeable. Imagine you're a
Speaker 1: coach of a hockey team down three to one with
Speaker 1: eleven minutes and forty seconds left in the game. You
Speaker 1: pull your goalie. The other team scores, so now it's
Speaker 1: for to one with half of the final period left,
Speaker 1: and now your fans think that you've robbed them of
Speaker 1: what might have been a reasonably interesting game. They'll hate
Speaker 1: you and so your players, because it's an awful lot
Speaker 1: more humiliating to lose a lopsided game than a close one.
Speaker 4: The Cliff and Aaron strategy maybe, again inn our geeky sense, optimal,
Speaker 4: but it doesn't provide the optimal or the maximum amount
Speaker 4: of entertainment.
Speaker 3: It is very high.
Speaker 4: Probability you create a laugher where you get down by three,
Speaker 4: down by four, And of course, if you follow Cliff
Speaker 4: and Aaron's cold vulcan model you never put the goalie
Speaker 4: back in. You're still an infinitesimal chance you will tie it,
Speaker 4: and you lose fourteen to nothing. And it's embarrassing and
Speaker 4: maybe entertainment in a side show kind of way, but
Speaker 4: it's not what they want.
Speaker 1: Who would try this or anything like it, Not anyone
Speaker 1: who has any normal human expectation of being liked and applauded.
Speaker 1: But do Cliff and Aaron need to be liked and applauded. No,
Speaker 1: they don't. Astas founded his firm with a couple of
Speaker 1: other PhD graduates from the finance department of the University
Speaker 1: of Chicago, which is like the geek capital of the world,
Speaker 1: and his basic hiring philosophy ever since has been to
Speaker 1: hire more PhDs disagreeable quants just like him. He's now
Speaker 1: up to seventy three PhDs. For comparison purposes, the economics
Speaker 1: faculty at MIT has forty one PhDs at one point
Speaker 1: seven eight x MIT and counting. Now does he need
Speaker 1: that many PhDs? I have no idea, But how much
Speaker 1: more fun is office life for insanely smart, disagreeable people
Speaker 1: if at all times they are surrounded by dozens and
Speaker 1: dozens of other insanely smart and disagreeable people circling each
Speaker 1: other's arguments like vultures.
Speaker 5: Which is going to be one of the watershed days
Speaker 5: in financial market's history.
Speaker 1: It was a manic Monday in the financial markets.
Speaker 7: The Dow tumbled more than five hundred points after two
Speaker 7: pillars of the Street tumbled over the weekend.
Speaker 1: Remember the start of the financial crisis in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, when no one knew what to do as
Speaker 1: stocks were falling in banks teetering on the brink, and
Speaker 1: everyone was running around screaming for the Secretary of the
Speaker 1: Treasury to do something. Aaron Brown told me that if
Speaker 1: he had been Treasury Secretary, he would have done nothing.
Speaker 1: In fact, he would have gone on vacation for a
Speaker 1: few months, because the truth was no no one knew
Speaker 1: what to do. And when no one knows what to do,
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown says, the rational thing is to wait until
Speaker 1: you have the data you need before you start throwing
Speaker 1: around trillions of dollars in bailout money. This is exactly
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that someone with a disagreeable score
Speaker 1: of eight point five would say. In times of panic,
Speaker 1: the agreeable Treasury Secretary would want to be a calming presence,
Speaker 1: to project stability and wisdom, to have others look at
Speaker 1: him and nod approvingly and murmur something about the importance
Speaker 1: of a firm hand at the tiller. But not Aaron Brown.
Speaker 1: He doesn't care about Wall Street's feelings. He cares about
Speaker 1: the trillion dollars people would be calling for his head.
Speaker 1: He would be pullside in Boca, browsing SSRN on his BlackBerry.
Speaker 1: Oh man, how great if we could all be as
Speaker 1: disagreeable as Cliff and Aaron.
Speaker 3: I suppose you were. Let me give you a hypothical scenario.
Speaker 3: You have a plucky young team and inexplicably you have
Speaker 3: ended up in the Stanley Cup Finals and you're up
Speaker 3: against one of the great Pittsburgh Penguin teams in the
Speaker 3: last couple of years. Would you consider pulling the goalie
Speaker 3: to start the game?
Speaker 5: I absolutely would love to do it, and I'd have
Speaker 5: to do the math.
Speaker 1: Do the math always, We'll be right back. A few
Speaker 1: years ago a movie came out called No Good Deed,
Speaker 1: starring Taraji p Henson as a woman named Terry and
Speaker 1: the ridiculously handsome Idris Elba as Colin. No Good Deed
Speaker 1: is a home invasion movie, and home invasion movies are
Speaker 1: of a piece with pulling the goalie. They are meditations
Speaker 1: on disagreeableness. Not to get pretentious, but both goalie pulling
Speaker 1: and the home invasion genre are versions of the canonical
Speaker 1: story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac.
Speaker 1: Sorren Kirkgard wrote about it in Fear and Trembling. God
Speaker 1: commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to demonstrate his loyalty,
Speaker 1: and the rational thing is for Abraham to obey God
Speaker 1: because If God is all powerful, then Abraham's future and
Speaker 1: the future of his family depend on being in God's
Speaker 1: good graces. But how can he look his son in
Speaker 1: the eye and then kill him. It's a disagreeableness test.
Speaker 1: How much will you let the thought of what others
Speaker 1: think of you and what you think of yourself get
Speaker 1: in the way of doing what is right in the
Speaker 1: eyes of God? On the one side is fear, on
Speaker 1: the other trembling. This is exactly what goes on in
Speaker 1: home invasion movies.
Speaker 8: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: That's Ami Lagos who wrote No Good Deed.
Speaker 8: To me, that's at the core of why these movies
Speaker 8: are interesting to people. Why the home invasion genre? You know,
Speaker 8: it's an actual genre at this point, you know why
Speaker 8: it persists.
Speaker 1: I called Logos up after the Revisionist History research team
Speaker 1: determined that No Good Deed was the most perfectly Kureka
Speaker 1: guardian of all home invasion movies.
Speaker 8: It puts you in these incredibly morally ambiguous situations where
Speaker 8: the audience can see the direct path to success.
Speaker 1: So here's the premise of No Good Deed. It's late
Speaker 1: on a Friday night, raining hard. Terry is at home
Speaker 1: with her two small children.
Speaker 5: Okay, finished.
Speaker 1: The doorbell rings. It's interests Elba.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry. I don't mean to bother you.
Speaker 5: I just lost Jola macaw as directed.
Speaker 1: He says he's been in an accident and he forgot
Speaker 1: his cell phone. Can he come in and use her phone?
Speaker 1: She lets him in, Of course she does. He kind
Speaker 1: of has to be insanely handsome. Yes, for that to work.
Speaker 1: She's not gonna let me in if I show up
Speaker 1: wet and bedraggled at one hundred and thirty pounds. She's
Speaker 1: not like, I don't know.
Speaker 8: I mean, I think maybe she would. I think ultimately, yes,
Speaker 8: I think his insane good looks are a huge part
Speaker 8: of that, and another, you know, another big part of
Speaker 8: her character. You know, she's sort of been primed for
Speaker 8: this moment in her life. Leading up to this moment, right,
Speaker 8: she's feeling unseen, she's feeling unsatisfied in her marriage, she's
Speaker 8: feeling neglected. This handsome stranger shows up and compromises her
Speaker 8: her instincts, you know, on some level, because he so handsome.
Speaker 1: It's awkward at first, but he's super charming. They flirt
Speaker 1: a little waiting for the tow truck to come. There's
Speaker 1: a whole lot of something in the air, and then
Speaker 1: halfway into the movie she sees him for who he
Speaker 1: really is, a deeply evil guy. She runs to the
Speaker 1: kitchen to call the cops and sees that he's cut
Speaker 1: the phone line. She looks around, terrified to see where
Speaker 1: he's gone, can't find him. Then oh my god, runs
Speaker 1: upstairs to find him playing with her daughter again.
Speaker 4: Again. All right, let's do it.
Speaker 6: Let's go and up.
Speaker 4: Such a scare.
Speaker 5: No, Ryan, Ryan, Baby, you gotta go to bed. Okay, Ryan,
Speaker 5: and I just hav him some fun.
Speaker 2: That's a lot we were No.
Speaker 5: Come on, fuck a ball, it's past your ball time.
Speaker 7: See.
Speaker 1: Amy Lagos says she went to see No Good Deed
Speaker 1: on opening night at a theater and ball Hills in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles.
Speaker 8: You know it was it was a really rousing I mean,
Speaker 8: there were lines out the door to get in, and
Speaker 8: the place was packed, and people were screaming and shouting
Speaker 8: at the screen, and.
Speaker 1: It was wait, what point do you remember what point
Speaker 1: they're screaming?
Speaker 8: I'm the entire after they get to back to the
Speaker 8: house where Collins ex is murdered. I don't think I
Speaker 8: could hear a word for that. The rest of the film.
Speaker 8: From then on, it was just people screaming at her
Speaker 8: what she should do.
Speaker 1: And did they have well, I mean, what were the
Speaker 1: range of things they were suggesting did they say? Were
Speaker 1: they saying to her run.
Speaker 8: Yeah, kill him?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 8: It was like it was it was everything from like
Speaker 8: run get out of there, to kill him, to you know,
Speaker 8: to like just every everybody had their answer of what
Speaker 8: she should do next, and they were one hundred percent
Speaker 8: sure that's what she should do.
Speaker 1: Exactly what should Terry do? She's a baby and a
Speaker 1: four year old. A psychopath is threatening her children. At
Speaker 1: one point, she grabs are extinguisher and hits him over
Speaker 1: the head and he tumbles down the stairs, but he's
Speaker 1: Idris Elba. He gets back up. Later, Idris herds them
Speaker 1: all into her car and they drive to another house.
Speaker 1: On the way, they get pulled over by a cop.
Speaker 1: He's suspicious, but Idris reaches into the back seat and
Speaker 1: takes her baby into his arms, so Terry can't tell
Speaker 1: the officers she's in trouble? Can she? What should she do?
Speaker 1: I felt like I needed high level assistance, someone who
Speaker 1: could put the home invasion dilemma into broader context. So
Speaker 1: I called up Sam Harris, author, podcaster, neuroscientist, the kind
Speaker 1: of person who would publish his own twelve rules, or
Speaker 1: if pressed, maybe even twenty four.
Speaker 6: So yeah, if someone breaks into your house, I mean
Speaker 6: there are a few things that are relevant to flag there.
Speaker 6: One is the time of day is relevant if someone
Speaker 6: breaks in in the middle of the night and you
Speaker 6: are there. Now you're talking about somebody who hasn't taken
Speaker 6: any care to show up when you're not there. And
Speaker 6: the kind of person who does this is the kind
Speaker 6: of person who either doesn't care to find a person
Speaker 6: in the house that he's breaking into, or finding a
Speaker 6: person there is part of the fun, right, And so
Speaker 6: this selects for the scariest kind of criminal.
Speaker 1: That would be Idris Elba in no good deed.
Speaker 6: You can't assume that this person has any ethics that
Speaker 6: you can interact with profitably by bargaining, by pleading your case.
Speaker 6: I mean, this is just that's not who's coming through
Speaker 6: the window in all likelihood.
Speaker 1: Halfway through my interview with Sam Harris, I began mentally
Speaker 1: calculating his score on the Disagreeableness Index. I'm thinking nine
Speaker 1: point five.
Speaker 6: And I must admit this is highly counterintuitive and perhaps
Speaker 6: impossible to act on. But I mean, just think this through.
Speaker 1: Sam Harris says, you have only one option. When Idris
Speaker 1: elba is upstairs playing with your kids, that's your opportunity run.
Speaker 6: Everything in us recoils at the idea of doing that,
Speaker 6: except it does change the situation in a surprising way.
Speaker 6: One It introduces significant uncertainty in the mind of your attacker,
Speaker 6: because now he knows the clock is ticket. You'll be
Speaker 6: summoning help in a matter of moments or minutes at
Speaker 6: the longest. And then you know, we'll discover just what
Speaker 6: sort of attacker this person is.
Speaker 1: We'll discover just what sort of attacker this person is.
Speaker 6: Now, if your concern is that he's going to kill
Speaker 6: your child because you didn't follow instructions, well, then very
Speaker 6: likely this is the sort of person who is going
Speaker 6: to kill your child anyway, right, and kill you as well.
Speaker 1: It's late in the third period, you're Taraji Henson. You're
Speaker 1: losing down by a goal to a psychopath. Now running
Speaker 1: away carries a huge social cost and a real risk
Speaker 1: of an even more disastrous outcome, But at the same time,
Speaker 1: it increases your chances of winning from zero to something
Speaker 1: slightly greater than zero pull the goalie.
Speaker 6: That is a totally rational option, and may in fact
Speaker 6: be the only rational option.
Speaker 1: But it's impossible, isn't it. You've got to be disagreeable
Speaker 1: level eight or nine to pull that off.
Speaker 6: I imagine how you will look to your child, or
Speaker 6: to your wife, or to anyone else who's terrified and
Speaker 6: looking in your direction for help if you just bolt
Speaker 6: from the house at that moment. Uh, it's you know,
Speaker 6: it's only when you come with the cavalry and rescue
Speaker 6: everyone that you know, you seem like you were, you know,
Speaker 6: wise and responsible. But in those moments, it just seems
Speaker 6: like a total failure, and you know, may in fact
Speaker 6: feel like a failure.
Speaker 1: I know that sounds crazy. I thought he can't be right,
Speaker 1: but he is right. The job of a parent being
Speaker 1: held hostage by Idris Elba is not to win a
Speaker 1: parental popularity contest. It is to maximize their child's chances
Speaker 1: of survival. I try to convince Amy Lagos of this.
Speaker 1: Amy Lagos, herself, the mother of two small children, wish
Speaker 1: me luck. She should run without her children, like she
Speaker 1: should just well, this is what I want to get.
Speaker 1: This is totally what I want to talk about let's
Speaker 1: think about this rationally, she what's he going to do
Speaker 1: to the kids when she's not there? Right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Is it any right? I mean, the only reason to
Speaker 1: mess with her kids is to get leverage over her.
Speaker 8: Well, not necessarily know what his motivation is, right, I mean?
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean he just could be just a psycho
Speaker 1: standard issue.
Speaker 8: Yes, I mean, I'm telling you. If I'm in my
Speaker 8: house and I realize that there is somebody there is
Speaker 8: a psychopath in my house, I am not leaving my
Speaker 8: kids like you could. You could burn the house down
Speaker 8: and I would stay with the kids.
Speaker 1: No, no, No. The fact that he's a psychopath is
Speaker 1: exactly why you should leave your children behind. It's your
Speaker 1: only chance to save them. Amy, Run for the love
Speaker 1: of God, Rule number one for living pull the goalie.
Speaker 1: In common law, there's a principle called duty to retreat,
Speaker 1: which holds that a person being threatened as a duty
Speaker 1: to retreat to a place of safety to exhaust all
Speaker 1: avenue of escape before they can justifiably use force in
Speaker 1: self defense. In the past several years, though about half
Speaker 1: of American states have passed stand your ground laws. Now,
Speaker 1: what's to stand your ground? Law. It's a law that
Speaker 1: effectively repeals duty to retreat. It says you don't need
Speaker 1: to exhaust all avenues of escape to claim self defense
Speaker 1: in a court of law. You can stand your ground,
Speaker 1: defend yourself, and the law will support that choice. Duty
Speaker 1: to retreat is a legal principle that gives people license
Speaker 1: to act disagreeably. I am not a coward if I
Speaker 1: cut and run the first opportunity. I am, in fact,
Speaker 1: acting morally and responsibly. Stand your ground laws sanction the
Speaker 1: Socially Agreeable Act. They say, what matters is that you
Speaker 1: preserve your honor in front of family and community. I
Speaker 1: did not run. I stood ground. So what's happening in
Speaker 1: those states that now have stand your ground laws? Well,
Speaker 1: I refer you to stand your ground laws. Homicides and Injuries,
Speaker 1: Journal of Human Resources, Summer twenty seventeen.
Speaker 7: I think overall, we found about a seven and a
Speaker 7: half seven point seven percent increase in the overall homicide rate.
Speaker 1: That's Chandler McClellan, adjunct professor at American University, first author
Speaker 1: of the study in question. States that pass stand your
Speaker 1: ground laws saw their murder rates rise seven point seven
Speaker 1: percent compared to states that didn't pass those laws.
Speaker 7: Well, the fact that the homicide rate increases in these
Speaker 7: cases suggests that that's not the case. That people were
Speaker 7: using these laws and standing their ground in cases where
Speaker 7: they're actually not being lethally threatened. They could de escalate
Speaker 7: the situation, they could get away, but instead the using
Speaker 7: to engage in self defense and use lethal force against
Speaker 7: this threat. And as a result, you're seeing this kind
Speaker 7: of net increase in homicide rates.
Speaker 1: And who are all these extra people getting killed in
Speaker 1: standard ground states? White men?
Speaker 7: I think our estimates kind of show about twenty percent,
Speaker 7: twenty five percent increase in homicides among white males. And
Speaker 7: actually that seems a little.
Speaker 1: High, middle high. It's a huge dunburn.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly, it is. But nevertheless that's kind of what
Speaker 7: that's what fell out the modeling. Yeah, Yeah, we speculate
Speaker 7: that because the white male population is the population this
Speaker 7: most interested in the gun culture, more likely to be
Speaker 7: members of organizations like the NRA, Because white males are
Speaker 7: so entrenched in this sort of culture, we think that
Speaker 7: these laws are most salient for them, and as a result,
Speaker 7: they're most aware of them and they're most likely to
Speaker 7: act on them.
Speaker 1: So a certain kind of white guy who is really
Speaker 1: into guns and the NRA gets super excited about stand
Speaker 1: your ground laws and instead of looking to avoid violence
Speaker 1: or run away, grabs his gun and stands his ground.
Speaker 1: That is, right before the other guy shoots him dead.
Speaker 1: Tragic astic is the is the most appropriate word, but
Speaker 1: the other word disappropriate here is ironic that the NRA
Speaker 1: is has been pursuing a policy agenda with stand your
Speaker 1: ground that has the effect of getting its own members killed.
Speaker 7: It is a little ironic and.
Speaker 1: Figuring out when to pull the goalie or what to
Speaker 1: do when Idris Elbas shows up late at night seem
Speaker 1: like abstract intellectual exercises. They are not. They are rehearsals
Speaker 1: for real life, because being disagreeable, well when you need
Speaker 1: to be disagreeable, is hard, especially because the world around us,
Speaker 1: the crowd in the stands, the short sighted lawmakers. They
Speaker 1: encourage us to do the easy and agreeable thing, which
Speaker 1: gets us killed, pull the goalie.
Speaker 4: I have an aunt, She's Australian who once a year
Speaker 4: calls me to ask when she should convert her Assi
Speaker 4: dollars to wherever she's going that year on vacation. For
Speaker 4: about ten years, I explained ant Cynthia. You know, we
Speaker 4: do have views on currencies, but their micro views, they're
Speaker 4: fifty one percent chance of being right, let alone on
Speaker 4: a given day. So I'm loath to give this to you.
Speaker 4: And she'd always act like I knew the answer. I
Speaker 4: just refuse to tell her.
Speaker 1: Year after year, his Australian aunt called and Cliff refused
Speaker 1: to help her. Then one day Cliff asked us, realized
Speaker 1: he didn't have to always be disagreeable.
Speaker 4: She'd say, when should I convert my my ass to
Speaker 4: Japanese yen? And I'd go, not this, but next Thursday,
Speaker 4: and everyone was happy. She I was lauded for giving
Speaker 4: her the truth. She was happy because she really feels
Speaker 4: she knows what she's doing. She never checks before or after.
Speaker 4: And I did not harm her one drop because nobody
Speaker 4: knows what day to do it, and she was always
Speaker 4: going to do it on some arbitrary day.
Speaker 3: I just picked the arbitrary day.
Speaker 4: So there's a case of maybe it's so optimal, but
Speaker 4: I picked a high EQ if not IQ solution.
Speaker 3: You were protecting your reputation as opposed to just.
Speaker 4: Making my aunt not mad at me.
Speaker 1: He could be cliff astness polar of goalies. He could
Speaker 1: also be Cliff Astna's dutiful nephew. Malcolm glad Bell's first
Speaker 1: rule for living poll a goalie, but be wise enough
Speaker 1: to know that disagreeableness is not a matter of temperament,
Speaker 1: It is a choice. I'd love that you take calls
Speaker 1: from your aunt about currency and what did he say next?
Speaker 4: Anyone who's successful that won't take calls from their crazy
Speaker 4: aunt is no friend of mine.
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell's second rule for living. Two Down, ten to go.
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer is
Speaker 1: mil Obel with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking
Speaker 1: by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Garra. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwein.
Speaker 3: What makes you a good poke player?
Speaker 5: Two things. There's just the basic math and theory, which
Speaker 5: I mean why once anybody can learn, but if you're
Speaker 5: quiet you can learn it. But the real thing that
Speaker 5: sets ship part is something I think you have to
Speaker 5: do by traditional wisdom. You have to learn this in
Speaker 5: your teens. While your brain is still forming and you
Speaker 5: have to do it under in can sleep deprivation. So
Speaker 5: we do these seventy two hour sessions with maybe a
Speaker 5: few powered amps in between, and you pushing every sense
Speaker 5: you have in the world, sometimes more than every sense
Speaker 5: you have in the world in the middle of the pod.
Speaker 5: And that developed certain mental abilities that the way I
Speaker 5: think about it is, I think you managed to harness
Speaker 5: the processing power of your unconscious brain so that you
Speaker 5: are not staring at people in the table and sort
Speaker 5: of you know, enumerating tells to you that person, you know, moods, chit.
Speaker 5: Your unconscious brain is so much better at noticing what
Speaker 5: people do, kind of like blink, you know, you just
Speaker 5: look at somebody and you don't know he holds the
Speaker 5: ace and jack you know, it's not doesn't tell you that,
Speaker 5: but it says this guy is afraid to lose, or
Speaker 5: this guy is afraid of being bluffed. And it tells
Speaker 5: you what they're going to do if you do something.
Speaker 5: So it tells you when you can push and they're
Speaker 5: going to fold, or when you can draw them in
Speaker 5: and they're going to go high.
Speaker 1: This outtake goes on for a long time. If that
Speaker 1: bothers you. I don't care anymore.
Speaker 5: It is a curse. I would never recommend to somebody
Speaker 5: do it. Yes, you can make money from it, but
Speaker 5: it strips away a lot of illusions. Right, It's a
Speaker 5: lot more pleasant in life to believe that there are
Speaker 5: things like love and friendship and honor once you're ruthlessly
Speaker 5: strip all that away and just look very objectively how
Speaker 5: people act. There's probably something that psychopaths do. The world's
Speaker 5: a bleak place, so it's kind of a dangerous road
Speaker 5: to go down.
Speaker 3: Do you feel like you went down that road? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 3: how did it affect your life?
Speaker 5: What it meant is that you're bleak, You're just kind
Speaker 5: of you know, you don't really trust anybody in a
Speaker 5: sense you trust them, you know what they're going to do,
Speaker 5: and because you know what they're going to do, it
Speaker 5: just h I guess it almost makes you treat them
Speaker 5: like robots that you can predict what they're going to do,
Speaker 5: you know their program, and therefore you can't really trust that.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of in friendship and honor or anything
Speaker 5: like that. So that's one of the reasons to move
Speaker 5: to finance. I actually moved from poker to sports betting,
Speaker 5: and then to finance