Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. This time we have a special episode
Speaker 1: for you, which we recorded live on stage here in
Speaker 1: Boston in front of an audience of more than a
Speaker 1: thousand people. My guest was none other than Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: He's a staff writer at The New Yorker, the author
Speaker 1: of best selling books including Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers.
Speaker 1: He's also the co founder of Pushkin Industries, the company
Speaker 1: that makes this podcast. Malcolm just published a new book
Speaker 1: called Talking to Strangers. We started there. Thank you all
Speaker 1: very much for coming. Thank you Malcolm for coming to Boston.
Speaker 1: I want to start by just asking you about the
Speaker 1: person to whom this book is dedicated, Yes, namely your father. Yes,
Speaker 1: the book starts with a very sweet anecdote about him,
Speaker 1: and then somewhere buried in the middle of the book,
Speaker 1: like at the beating heart of the book, isn't actually
Speaker 1: deeply moving and a little bit shocking story in which
Speaker 1: he figures what led you to think that he should
Speaker 1: be the Is he the inspiring figure for this book? Well,
Speaker 1: he was. I lost my father in twenty seventeen, so
Speaker 1: he was clearly on my mind. But he well, I
Speaker 1: you know, I opened the He does in some way
Speaker 1: inspire this book because I tell the story at the
Speaker 1: very very beginning of the book of when my parents
Speaker 1: would come to Manhattan, I would put them up at
Speaker 1: the Mercer Hotel, which is the most sort of celebrity
Speaker 1: written hotel in New York and is a joke because
Speaker 1: my parents. No two individuals know less about celebrity culture
Speaker 1: than my parents, and so it was always a kind
Speaker 1: of inside joke on my part to think of them
Speaker 1: mingling with rock stars Joe and you shared with no
Speaker 1: one but yourself until now, and then you're inside Joe.
Speaker 1: So one time, my dad's staying there and I asked
Speaker 1: him what he had done in the previous afternoon. He said, oh,
Speaker 1: I had a wonderful conversation with someone in the lobby
Speaker 1: about gardening. And so the only problem was that people
Speaker 1: kept coming up to this man and asking him to
Speaker 1: sign bits of paper and taking his picture, and so
Speaker 1: I suppolled, you know, who was it? So I have
Speaker 1: no idea, um, And it was clearly some just being
Speaker 1: the Mercer, some massive celebrity and I've scased the last
Speaker 1: this was ten years ago, the last ten years trying
Speaker 1: to figure out who it was. And you can be
Speaker 1: a pretty big celebrity in the Mercer Hotel and no
Speaker 1: one will come over to you because it's not cool
Speaker 1: to do that. First of all, there's several key facts here.
Speaker 1: What is that it's in the part of a part
Speaker 1: of the Mercer that's only opened guests, and this is
Speaker 1: where they were, so right away, the fact that own
Speaker 1: other celebrities were coming up to this celebrity is brucial.
Speaker 1: Second is my father. How all I can say is
Speaker 1: he had a clear preference for talking with other Englishmen,
Speaker 1: ay and be for people his own age. So I
Speaker 1: think it's someone born in the nineteen thirties in England
Speaker 1: who liked gardening, and he was a major celebrity. So
Speaker 1: so I've been asking people and someone recently said, I
Speaker 1: think a very good guess Michael Caine. Ah. Can you
Speaker 1: can imagine people approaching Michael Caine. You can imagine Michael
Speaker 1: Caine talking about apparently he's a big gardener that I was.
Speaker 1: That actually surprises me. And and also kind of lower
Speaker 1: middle class as my father was. And you know when
Speaker 1: Britt's congregate. Outside of England, they do the class thing
Speaker 1: instantly and then when they realized also do that inside
Speaker 1: of English. Yes, they just do that everywhere. They might
Speaker 1: do it more aggressively outside of him, but like once
Speaker 1: they discover they're from the same narrow slice. Like I
Speaker 1: once saw my father who was chatting with someone who
Speaker 1: was from the same town in Kent that he was from,
Speaker 1: and my father with that they hadn't done the class
Speaker 1: thing yet, and he told it was a woman. He
Speaker 1: told this woman that he used to break into some
Speaker 1: estate and play in the garden, and she paused and said, oh,
Speaker 1: that was my estate, And that was the end of
Speaker 1: the conversation. But what is my father did like to
Speaker 1: talk to strangers, and he um he embodied one of
Speaker 1: the principles of the book, which is he did not
Speaker 1: expect a conversation with a stranger to yield much about
Speaker 1: the stranger. In other words, he could talk for an
Speaker 1: hour with gardening about gardening with Michael Caine and never
Speaker 1: discovered that Michael Caine was a famous actor. And is
Speaker 1: that because talking about gardening is a form of small
Speaker 1: talk or is it the opposite? Is it that talking
Speaker 1: about gardening is so deeply interesting to the gardeners that
Speaker 1: that you can have a deep, substantive, meaningful conversation. It
Speaker 1: never comes up you know, what do you do for
Speaker 1: a living? Or no, it's you've lost your Harrison's outfear. Well,
Speaker 1: it's very English to have a subject that allows you
Speaker 1: to avoid all intimacy, like the weather, like the weather
Speaker 1: or gardening, but also it's something to do genuinely. A
Speaker 1: wonderful fact about my father, which is I think he
Speaker 1: understood that if you spend too much time gathering information
Speaker 1: on a person you're talking to, you're only going to
Speaker 1: find ways of alienating yourself from that person. So my father,
Speaker 1: the more you know, the less yeah, you don't want
Speaker 1: to will be yeah, you don't want to discover it,
Speaker 1: you don't have in common with them. So he was famous.
Speaker 1: So my father was a you know, he was a
Speaker 1: mathematics PhD. Whose head was somewhere up here, but he
Speaker 1: was always falling into conversation with people like his. He
Speaker 1: was great friends with our neighbor who probably had a
Speaker 1: seventh grade education, and it's because they never got past
Speaker 1: They would also talk about Guardian a person now but
Speaker 1: I sort of love that sort of you know that
Speaker 1: I love that, and that's sort of part of where
Speaker 1: I end up in the book, which is that we
Speaker 1: expect to weigh too much from these conversations, and they're
Speaker 1: dangerous when they get too aggressive. But in your book,
Speaker 1: you've got lots and lots of examples of conversations that
Speaker 1: go awry. Yeah. In fact, there's almost there are very
Speaker 1: few conversations in the whole book other than your father's
Speaker 1: conversation with the unnamed Englishmen, that go okay at all.
Speaker 1: So I'm sort of wondering, do you agree with your
Speaker 1: father's idea that, you know, maybe we should just talk
Speaker 1: less to everybody you know, or at least less to
Speaker 1: people whom we don't have immediate and total connection to.
Speaker 1: Or is the whole point that we should talk to
Speaker 1: them but not expect very much from the conversation. I
Speaker 1: think the whole point is that we should talk to
Speaker 1: them and not expect very much in the conversation. Noways
Speaker 1: I've become Then why talk at all? No, because you
Speaker 1: can have a meaningful conversation in the absence of drawing
Speaker 1: aggressive conclusions about the nature of the person you're talking to.
Speaker 1: So I think this is I mean, the real issue
Speaker 1: in the book, and the reason the book begins and
Speaker 1: ends with the story of Sandra Bland, is that the
Speaker 1: thing about that encounter, she's pulled over by the side
Speaker 1: the road in small town taxes by a police officer,
Speaker 1: and the thing that leads that encounter to end in
Speaker 1: tragedy is that the police officer takes it upon himself
Speaker 1: to reach enormously consequential conclusions about Sandra Bland in the
Speaker 1: absence both in the space of thirty seconds and in
Speaker 1: the absence of any real evidence at all. Right, that's
Speaker 1: what what is wrong with what he does, among other things,
Speaker 1: is it is in such a hurry, and his ambitions
Speaker 1: are so enormous he really thinks he pulls her over
Speaker 1: because he thinks there is a chance he pullsoever because
Speaker 1: she's out of state, black and driving a hunday. Right,
Speaker 1: And there are policies covering at least two of those things,
Speaker 1: officially in one of them on officially, yeah, that there are.
Speaker 1: And he has been trained to pull over people who
Speaker 1: are who are you know the phrase what the lovely
Speaker 1: in quotation marks phrase that law enforcement uses curiosity ticklers.
Speaker 1: So she has violated, she has she has activated several
Speaker 1: of his curiosity ticklers by virtue of she and he
Speaker 1: had noticed her while she was turning out of the
Speaker 1: campus of Prairie View University, and he noticed her notices
Speaker 1: that while she's on university territory, she rolls through a
Speaker 1: stop sign. So she has rolled to a stop sign.
Speaker 1: She's black, she's twenty eight, she's driving a Honday, she's
Speaker 1: got Chicago plates. And he says, that's for curiosity ticklers,
Speaker 1: and so he contrives a reason to pull her over.
Speaker 1: He sort of creates the reason, creates the reason by
Speaker 1: driving up fast behind her, which leads her to get
Speaker 1: out of his way, and then she doesn't use her
Speaker 1: turn signal. He has his pretexts, and then he creates
Speaker 1: a fantasy about this person he's pulled over. And the
Speaker 1: fantasy is that she's dangerous. And this comes up later
Speaker 1: in the you know, in the course of the investigation,
Speaker 1: he gives this deposition. And what's weird actually what the
Speaker 1: deposition is that even though the case itself when it happened,
Speaker 1: attracted attention, you know, around the world as far as
Speaker 1: I can find. That was like one minor story in
Speaker 1: the Austin Statesman about the deposition, and that was it.
Speaker 1: The deposition was completely ignored. Even when the deposition is
Speaker 1: like deeply revealing, deeply revealing, and you realize what a
Speaker 1: what a you know, like I said, like this bizarre
Speaker 1: fantasy that he creates in that moment that she is
Speaker 1: dangerous and harboring some deep criminal intent on the basis
Speaker 1: of the flimsiest and most misleading of cues. And it's
Speaker 1: that that I think is problematic and that we need
Speaker 1: to sort of zero in on. One of the fascinating
Speaker 1: things though about your treatment of that whole deposition is
Speaker 1: that you believe him when he says he thought she
Speaker 1: was dangerous. I do. You can imagine that other readers
Speaker 1: might be more skeptical and say, you know, and you
Speaker 1: consider this view in the in the book and passing
Speaker 1: at least, No, he was just a racist, and not
Speaker 1: only an individual way, but also in the production of
Speaker 1: the structural racism of the cops and the stop and
Speaker 1: frisk and so forth, rather the pulling over of supposed
Speaker 1: to traffic violations. And then later in a deposition under oath,
Speaker 1: he wanted to explain why he stopped her, and he
Speaker 1: made up these reasons after the fact yeah, but you
Speaker 1: don't think that you buy what he's saying. And that's
Speaker 1: partly because you're I don't want to say this, but
Speaker 1: maybe you're defaulting to truth and believing his account. I
Speaker 1: am devaulting to truth. I have two the magic thing
Speaker 1: in the book, defaulting to truth. And you're not supposed
Speaker 1: to do it. Yeah, I have. Well, you are supposed
Speaker 1: to do it, but let me explain will to do it.
Speaker 1: You're be able to do it. That makes me why
Speaker 1: I believe him when he says that two reasons. One
Speaker 1: is that if you look at his so we have
Speaker 1: from the Texas how he Patrol has on file, you
Speaker 1: can find it a complete record of every traffic stop
Speaker 1: he ever made as a member of the of the
Speaker 1: police force. And what you see when you look at
Speaker 1: that is that Kim stopping Sandra blend On the flimsiest
Speaker 1: of pretexts was not an anomaly. It was what he did. Yes,
Speaker 1: he was, I mean he is. The further you can say,
Speaker 1: you can say that he is by the standards of
Speaker 1: what we want, what the Texas Harry Patrol wants a
Speaker 1: cop to be. He's not a bad cop. He's an
Speaker 1: ideal cop. They are trained to stop people on the
Speaker 1: flimsiest of pretext and he did exactly as he was
Speaker 1: trained to do. His whole career was stopping people on
Speaker 1: flimsy pretexts. Right. So it's like if you look at
Speaker 1: the list of reasons of first of all, you look
Speaker 1: at the number of people he stopped, he's stopping. He's
Speaker 1: jumping out of his car four or five, six times
Speaker 1: an hour. And to put this in context, if you
Speaker 1: go back twenty five years and you do a similar
Speaker 1: search of what police officers did, you will discover they
Speaker 1: never got out of their car. If you were a
Speaker 1: police officer in smalltown, Texas in nineteen seventy five, you
Speaker 1: get out of your car to get donuts, like you
Speaker 1: did not the last thing you did was pull over
Speaker 1: people who are driving down a road for Note that
Speaker 1: the whole notion of policing was different. You sat in
Speaker 1: your car and you waited for a call after some
Speaker 1: and you reacted to something you could happen. This is
Speaker 1: a whole new way of policing, and he was the
Speaker 1: perfect embodiment of this new philosophy he's starting and you
Speaker 1: look at the list he's stopping people for. You know,
Speaker 1: the light above their license plate is out and he
Speaker 1: pulls you over. Why because he thinks that maybe there
Speaker 1: may be reason to believe that if you're the kind
Speaker 1: of person who didn't attend to the broken bulb above
Speaker 1: your license plate, then you're also the kind of person
Speaker 1: who is smuggling drugs. Right, that's the theory. He never
Speaker 1: found anything. Right, if you look at his long time
Speaker 1: on the force, the man stops, you know, dozens upon
Speaker 1: dozens of people, and the sum total of all of
Speaker 1: that frenzied activity is like, once he stops a kid
Speaker 1: who is I think has a token amount of marijuana
Speaker 1: in his car. He may have got a gun once,
Speaker 1: but basically he's coming up with nothing. So so reason
Speaker 1: number one for me to believe him is that he
Speaker 1: is so. What he does with sangel Blend is so
Speaker 1: a part of who he is. There's not an expression
Speaker 1: of some kind of of latent prejudice. It is an
Speaker 1: expression of his training as a police officer. Secondly, it's
Speaker 1: not inconsistent to say that he's scared of her because
Speaker 1: he's a racist. In fact, it's entirely consistent. That's why
Speaker 1: he's scared of her because she's actually bigger, than he is,
Speaker 1: and she's black, and that makes it And because he
Speaker 1: assumes that big black people are scary, it makes it
Speaker 1: really easy for him to construct a scenario where she's
Speaker 1: a threatening criminal and he is trying to uphold law
Speaker 1: and order. So the racist argument and the argument that
Speaker 1: she's scary are consistent, not inconsistent. And thirdly, there are
Speaker 1: actual things that he does. He approaches her for the
Speaker 1: first time on the passenger side, which is what you
Speaker 1: do when you're not scared, and then he goes back
Speaker 1: to his car, and then the second time he goes
Speaker 1: up after he sits in his car, and he constructs
Speaker 1: this fantasy. He approaches her on the driver's side. And
Speaker 1: that's the only reason you would do that on a
Speaker 1: highway traffic stop. So he exposed himself to the traffic
Speaker 1: by approaching on the driver's side. Is if you think
Speaker 1: the person has a gun, because you can defend yourself
Speaker 1: if you approach on the driver's side, and you are
Speaker 1: a target if you approach on the passenger's side. So
Speaker 1: that all those things make me think, yeah, the man's terrified.
Speaker 1: I mean. And by the way, the way we train
Speaker 1: police officers in the present day is to be terrified, right,
Speaker 1: like that the only way that the reason people who
Speaker 1: deny that, think that he's making up a cover story
Speaker 1: are wholly ignorant of the totally perverse way modern law
Speaker 1: enforcement works. Right, He's trained to be terrified. Of course
Speaker 1: he's terrified. So I'm feeling a little terrified. That was
Speaker 1: a very effective invocation of the experience. When you think
Speaker 1: about people who talk to strangers for a living, yeah,
Speaker 1: cops are an example, and it's particularly egregious because after all,
Speaker 1: he's talked to all those people that he stopped, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's tried to make some termination about how dangerous
Speaker 1: they are. But another kind of person, there are two
Speaker 1: other kinds of people who immediate leap to my mind
Speaker 1: when I think about people who talk to strangers. One
Speaker 1: is salespeople. Yeah, because you're often selling to strangers and
Speaker 1: they're it's sort of an interesting counterexample because there you're
Speaker 1: doing everything you can to comprehend them in order to
Speaker 1: produce an effective sale. And I just wonder whether I
Speaker 1: don't I have no idea, I wonder if salespeople do
Speaker 1: better at talking to strangers insofar as they're trying to
Speaker 1: make a sale and in fact, to the extent this
Speaker 1: comes up in your book, it's from the other side.
Speaker 1: It's from the buyer, as it were, you know, the
Speaker 1: person who believes what the salesman is this the pitch
Speaker 1: that the salesman is saying. Yeah. And then the other
Speaker 1: group of people who also come up in the book
Speaker 1: are anthropologists. Yeah, and you take us into the into
Speaker 1: Central America, a very intrepid part of anthropologists to actually Indonesia,
Speaker 1: to Indonesia. Sorry, who go to a village where people
Speaker 1: drink alcohol that turns out to be is it one
Speaker 1: hundred and oh that story? Yes, yeah, I'm mixing up
Speaker 1: my anthropology stories. Yes, there's several anthropologists anthropologies, Yes you are,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the drunk anthropologists. Yes, yeah, you know
Speaker 1: all of Malcolm's I mean as as you can guess
Speaker 1: and as you will know as soon as you read
Speaker 1: this book. It's a classic, the great read. And every
Speaker 1: you know anecdote could have a name, and this is
Speaker 1: the Adventure of the Drunken Apologists. Yes, every it's like
Speaker 1: every you can play a game where every Malcolm god
Speaker 1: Well anecdote could be turned into the name of a
Speaker 1: Sherlock Holms story. That's sorry. You know, so here these
Speaker 1: anthropologists they do really well and talking to strangers, it seems,
Speaker 1: at least in your I'm sure not all anthropologists do
Speaker 1: do well that that that's what they're trying to do.
Speaker 1: So I wonder is there something we could learn from
Speaker 1: either salesman or anthropologists, Yes, about how to go about
Speaker 1: talking strangers. The end of the salesman part is really
Speaker 1: interesting because what is it that a successful salesperson does.
Speaker 1: They The first thing they do before they size up
Speaker 1: the person they're trying to sell to, is they sell themselves, right.
Speaker 1: They established their credibility, their friendliness, their interests there. You know,
Speaker 1: I once seen one of my earlier books, I like
Speaker 1: when you Go to Sell a book. Yes, I had
Speaker 1: a profile of the number one car salesman in America.
Speaker 1: Who was this guy in rural New Jersey. And he
Speaker 1: was really really fascinating and he was his record was
Speaker 1: I mean, he was like an order of magnitude better
Speaker 1: than anybody else. And he was the kind of most
Speaker 1: there was nothing. He wasn't a fast talking, slick guy.
Speaker 1: He was the opposite. He was this guy. When you
Speaker 1: met him, he just oozed authenticity and he impressed upon
Speaker 1: you before he even sized you up. He impressed upon
Speaker 1: you the fact that he was a straight shooting, normal
Speaker 1: guy who was not trying to hustle you. On the contrary,
Speaker 1: he just cared about, you know, serving your interests. And
Speaker 1: he was genuine. I think he actually genuine he believed
Speaker 1: that that's what he was doing. But kinds of genuine.
Speaker 1: There's he genuinely believed that's what he was doing, and
Speaker 1: there's that is genuinely what he was doing. I think
Speaker 1: that's genuinely what he was doing because he pointed out
Speaker 1: he was just doing people the favor of selling them.
Speaker 1: Because because he made this really interesting point, which is
Speaker 1: that if you're a car salesman, and I love the
Speaker 1: fact that we've now detoured into car salesman's but he
Speaker 1: says the thing about the mistake he was I asked
Speaker 1: him to talk about, what are the mistakes your peers make?
Speaker 1: So why what does everyone else do such a bad
Speaker 1: job of selling cars and you are so good? And
Speaker 1: he said, well, the mistake they make is that they
Speaker 1: think it's all about the person in front of them.
Speaker 1: But he said, no, no no, success in this business is
Speaker 1: about referrals. He's like a successful sale for me, is
Speaker 1: whether I don't sell the person in front of me
Speaker 1: a car, But they liked me so much that they
Speaker 1: go home and when their friends are buying a car,
Speaker 1: they say, oh, you should go talk to that guy.
Speaker 1: He was really nice. That's where was a volume business.
Speaker 1: Yes you want, you want, and that person might tell
Speaker 1: four people and you might sell three cars because of
Speaker 1: that one successful. So the other rule he had was
Speaker 1: you can never dismiss so anyone who comes into the
Speaker 1: dealership deserves your full attention. So he never judged anyone.
Speaker 1: If you were a seven year old kid, he would
Speaker 1: treat you as seriously as if you were, you know,
Speaker 1: a millionaire. Why because you don't know who the seven
Speaker 1: year old kid's father or uncle or grandfather is. So
Speaker 1: he would spend this whole afternoon who the seven year
Speaker 1: old kids? I thought it was kind of fascinating. But
Speaker 1: the point was he begins with establishing his own credibility.
Speaker 1: And this is of course exactly what Brian and Cinia
Speaker 1: in the cop in the Sandra Bland case does not do.
Speaker 1: He behaves without regard for his own credibility. In fact,
Speaker 1: he blows his credibility before she even meets him by
Speaker 1: pulling her over on a nonsensical traffic stop. And the
Speaker 1: idea that we have trained police officers to behave in
Speaker 1: such a way that their credibility is destroyed before they
Speaker 1: even meet the person they're pulling over is incredib Right.
Speaker 1: We should be taking the people training cops and sending
Speaker 1: them to meet with this car salesman and he could
Speaker 1: teach them something, right. So, I mean, it's funny because
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time in a book with
Speaker 1: these two brilliant criminologists who have rethought a lot of
Speaker 1: David Weisbergen and Larry Schreman, and they think endlessly about this.
Speaker 1: It's like the first task of a police officer in
Speaker 1: dealing with any member of the public is to establish
Speaker 1: their credibilion integrity. But you can't do anything before you
Speaker 1: do that, whereas presumably what a lot of people think
Speaker 1: is that they should establish our authority. Yes, exactly, and
Speaker 1: that is there's a huge difference between those two those
Speaker 1: two things. Now, when you talk though about the salesman
Speaker 1: who established his authority, that's also what your spies did
Speaker 1: in the book. Yeah, right, they were really good at
Speaker 1: establishing their authority. Yeah, there's a lot of spies in
Speaker 1: the book In case you loved it, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of spies and a lot of really cool spies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you establish authority and then the other person
Speaker 1: will believe whatever you say. Do you think people believe
Speaker 1: what the salesman said or they discounted what he was saying,
Speaker 1: but they needed to buy a car, and they figured
Speaker 1: he was a nice guy and they might as well
Speaker 1: buy the car from him. No, I think that I
Speaker 1: think they were. They are when they enter a dealership.
Speaker 1: They are desperate to find someone who seems to have
Speaker 1: their best interest at heart. There's I mean, I think.
Speaker 1: I mean his argument was that people enter a car
Speaker 1: dealership and their expectations are really, really low. They've had
Speaker 1: so many bad experiences over the years, and that just
Speaker 1: by being a normal human being he can sell well
Speaker 1: caused anyone else in America ms the stunning thought. But spies.
Speaker 1: So since writing a book, I've the more I think
Speaker 1: about this, the more of a radical position I take
Speaker 1: on spies. Okay, good, let's get let's to the let's
Speaker 1: get into some spy radicalism. So spies and there's I
Speaker 1: was reading this article in one of the you know,
Speaker 1: they are all these journals devoted to spies. We're academic
Speaker 1: and Bertward who writes in there like they're all x
Speaker 1: CIA officers or XMI six officers. And there was one
Speaker 1: really really brilliant essay I read recently by a guy
Speaker 1: who said, you know, if you take the long view
Speaker 1: and you see that, well, during the Cold War we
Speaker 1: had Aldri Shames and m Robert Hansen and a couple
Speaker 1: of other ones. But if you look at all of
Speaker 1: the damage they did, they basically give gave away all
Speaker 1: of our key secrets. It only took a few but
Speaker 1: they gave away all of the secrets because they had
Speaker 1: they were really high up boats in the CI and FBI.
Speaker 1: And on the flip side, we had a couple of
Speaker 1: people who come over from the Soviet side who basically
Speaker 1: gave away all their key secrets. He said, so it
Speaker 1: was a wash in the end, like the Cold War itself,
Speaker 1: the Cold like the Cold War itself. And he's like,
Speaker 1: so this guy was like, who is himself a spy guy?
Speaker 1: He's like, looking at the evidence of the Cold War,
Speaker 1: you should we should just give up, Like we should
Speaker 1: just have saved ourself billions of dollars by by shutting
Speaker 1: down all of the covert covert espionage operations of the CIA,
Speaker 1: like we ended up no further ahead than we then
Speaker 1: we would have been if we had had no spies
Speaker 1: at all. And I tell the story in the book.
Speaker 1: We need a treaty for that though, right, because it
Speaker 1: has to be bilateral doesn't work if we give up
Speaker 1: our spies and they don't give up their spies. It
Speaker 1: has to be you have to sign a treaty. We
Speaker 1: have to total disclosure of every total disclosure, which everyone
Speaker 1: would then lie about. But uh if but if we don't, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, you don't have to do it. You
Speaker 1: can be don't know, think about this laterally. It can
Speaker 1: be done utilaterally because we're shutting. If we shut down
Speaker 1: our spy service, then there is no spy service for
Speaker 1: them to infiltrate. Right, we have removed the post, but
Speaker 1: there's no spies, no no by on the non spots,
Speaker 1: there's no what are they gonna do? So the Soviets
Speaker 1: send a spy like go and spine the Department of
Speaker 1: Agriculture like, go ahead, it's all yours, go right in. No,
Speaker 1: there's no more, well there is the Defense Department. I
Speaker 1: mean I like this. I like that, I like where
Speaker 1: you're going here, and maybe the defense but there is
Speaker 1: like the defense department, I know. But mostly what the
Speaker 1: Soviets are doing is spying on our spies, and we're
Speaker 1: spying on the round. Although I guess the Chinese do
Speaker 1: it differently because they are mostly trying to steal technology,
Speaker 1: technology and secrets. Okay, so let's let's blog and secrets.
Speaker 1: But it's clear that an awful lot of this activity
Speaker 1: is just a merrygo round, yes, and we should sing around.
Speaker 1: And billions and billions and billions of dollars were spent
Speaker 1: on the merrygor around, right, So this is I found
Speaker 1: like for a spy to say this, and like I
Speaker 1: tell the story and of how I opened the book
Speaker 1: with a story of how the there's a defector comes
Speaker 1: over from Cuba and he calls together all the leading
Speaker 1: CIA people running our Cuban espionage operations. It says, um,
Speaker 1: not one, but not two and nuts free, but every
Speaker 1: single spy you have in Cuba right now is a
Speaker 1: double agent working for Castra. The whole thing. Like so
Speaker 1: like it was pointless, why bother shut you know? We
Speaker 1: had an operation in Havana inside the whatever it is,
Speaker 1: the Swiss embassy for years and years years the whole
Speaker 1: thing was a wash, like it worse than a wash.
Speaker 1: But so okay, let me let me try to up
Speaker 1: the radicalism here. So you can imagine someone saying, well,
Speaker 1: this is true of all arms races, right, each side
Speaker 1: goes like crazy. And there is a theory that at
Speaker 1: the point that the way the United States quote unquote
Speaker 1: won the Cold War was just by outspending the Soviets.
Speaker 1: So then there was a point we just waste more
Speaker 1: money than you do, and since we can afford to,
Speaker 1: we win. Yeah. Depressing, but maybe it's true. But if
Speaker 1: you ask the Defense depart in people, they would say,
Speaker 1: what do you mean intelligence services are expensive? They're really cheap,
Speaker 1: Like you can have an entire intelligence service of thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of spies for the price of like one
Speaker 1: fighter bomber. Yeah, that the equipment is really expensive, but
Speaker 1: humans are relatively relatively inexpensive, and they don't actually have
Speaker 1: you know, the James Bond, you know flying cars. I
Speaker 1: mean there is no queue strictly speaking, well, so you know,
Speaker 1: after yes, all right, although I will say that remember
Speaker 1: after snowdon and gives away the end at the store
Speaker 1: and at the NSA, there was all this handwringing about
Speaker 1: how much it was going to cost, and the numbers
Speaker 1: were I mean, they were not trivial. They were talking
Speaker 1: about many, many, many billions of dollars, which again raised
Speaker 1: the point like if this thing that you've constructed over
Speaker 1: many many years, costing tens of billions of dollars, can
Speaker 1: be essentially destroyed by one guy working for Dell, not
Speaker 1: even like some random dude way off in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere who is a subcontractor for Dell and who
Speaker 1: himself you know, Snowden gets kicked you gore to college education. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he gets He tries to work for the CIA,
Speaker 1: gets a job because it's like uncle gets him in,
Speaker 1: gets kicked out. Why because he hacks into the personnel
Speaker 1: database and changes his job evaluations so he looks good.
Speaker 1: They discover this, I'm like, oh, this guy is a
Speaker 1: a fraud, be a hacker, and the movies he would
Speaker 1: have promoted him and see and see only got a
Speaker 1: job because his uncle weighs in. So what does he do?
Speaker 1: They fire him? What does he do? He resurfaces at
Speaker 1: del and gets in again. Like if this is the system.
Speaker 1: Is there any point to having the system like there
Speaker 1: is this I you know, there is a point where
Speaker 1: you have to wonder. And it's funny when you think
Speaker 1: about it, how many American institutions are in the grip
Speaker 1: of arms races. I mean, basically, what twenty first century
Speaker 1: capitalism is is a series of I mean, is it
Speaker 1: is a you start with the marketplace, I mean you
Speaker 1: rapidly moved to a an arms race that has no
Speaker 1: productive function. Coke versus PEPSI. I was going to say
Speaker 1: Harvard versus Yale, but that would maybe maybe a better example,
Speaker 1: more expensive, more expensive example, or you know, Harvard Deaconess
Speaker 1: versus you know about SIONI or some I mean, they're
Speaker 1: all of these things. They're all they all have the
Speaker 1: same function, which is they're on the same kind of treadmill.
Speaker 1: And there's no as a point on which the spending
Speaker 1: no longer has any productive function. So the standard I
Speaker 1: mean sent there's a standard aswer to the question of
Speaker 1: why do we bother to compete, even though a lot
Speaker 1: of competition is idiotic and pointless. Usually it's the alternative
Speaker 1: is that we're colluding, and if we collude, we'll have
Speaker 1: no incentive to try to do our jobs. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: do you think that's just basically a ridiculous Well, you
Speaker 1: can compete on things that matter and what counts well,
Speaker 1: it would be nice, for example, if universities competed on
Speaker 1: how well they were educating children who needed to be
Speaker 1: educated for example. I mean, I mean, I would seem
Speaker 1: to be just we think we are competing on that,
Speaker 1: Like that's what we tell ourselves. That's a sad thing
Speaker 1: about it. Maybe sad institution that you work for. Yes,
Speaker 1: I did hear your I did hear the podcast about
Speaker 1: the LSA TU So yeah, yeah you yeah, I was
Speaker 1: going to tell you, by the way, I'm probably most
Speaker 1: people you ever heard the Malcolm's episode about the LSAT.
Speaker 1: I only give eight hour open open everything. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: never done the So good for you. Yeah, we're think
Speaker 1: it's because it as you say, it seems were you
Speaker 1: revealed to us what year else's score was. Well, I
Speaker 1: revealed to you what my score was. I got a
Speaker 1: lower score on the l set than I ever got
Speaker 1: on any other standardized test. Okay about that? Is that good? No?
Speaker 1: We were you was impressed by its idiocy, as I
Speaker 1: was deeply impressed by the idiocy. Yeah, I the logic games.
Speaker 1: I just thought were they and truth to be told,
Speaker 1: they bear no relationship to anything that one ever does
Speaker 1: in the wall ye leaving the speed out of it
Speaker 1: speed yea. For those you listen, the episode was all
Speaker 1: about I didn't understand why the while they had time limits. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And then when I went to the people who would
Speaker 1: make an administer the el set and asked that question,
Speaker 1: they h it's like, no, one didn't have a good answer. Well, no, no,
Speaker 1: it was worse than that. It was like they had
Speaker 1: never occurred to him that that was that would be
Speaker 1: an issue, Like so they Well, I think you got
Speaker 1: the right answer. I mean you buried the answer a
Speaker 1: little bit in the episode. But you pointed out that
Speaker 1: law school exams are typically timed and they measure whether
Speaker 1: they else that is any good by saying if it
Speaker 1: predicts predicts first year grades, so that they are. So
Speaker 1: it's really the law school's fault. It's not the fault
Speaker 1: of the exam. It's really involved with the law schools.
Speaker 1: But it was weird to find someone who was engaged
Speaker 1: in doing something and was radically incurious about the reasons
Speaker 1: for doing that thing. Right, that's that's only weird to you, Malcolm.
Speaker 1: Most of the world is people doing whatever they do
Speaker 1: every day and not keeping it. Who it about? What
Speaker 1: it is that they're Yeah, no, it's it's funny. And
Speaker 1: the other thing, um, no, I won't. I was going
Speaker 1: to say something disparaging, but I won't. You can say
Speaker 1: you can be disparaging. No. The other thing this is
Speaker 1: totally um tangential and parenthetical, is that so you have
Speaker 1: an institution which is making constructing these tests and administering
Speaker 1: them and has been doing so for seventy years, and
Speaker 1: by the way, it makes a lot of money doing it,
Speaker 1: and you know, no one's particularly challenging their right to
Speaker 1: do so. Um, and they don't serve any real productive function.
Speaker 1: So the only reason to persist is if they're having fun. Right,
Speaker 1: So that was I was looking. I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: so I can think of no behind the closed door,
Speaker 1: they would all be shortling to themselves, you know. So
Speaker 1: my thought was the only I can't. There's no reason
Speaker 1: for you guys to be doing what you're doing unless
Speaker 1: you wake up in the morning with joy in your
Speaker 1: heart and think I'm going to come up with some
Speaker 1: really like killer quests and I don't even but this
Speaker 1: example actually underscores what I was sort of the question
Speaker 1: I was raising a couple of minutes ago, namely, so
Speaker 1: the lsdas the law school. I don't even know when
Speaker 1: that all stands for. They have no competition, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: as you say, they're doing it for fun. I mean,
Speaker 1: in fact, in recent years, a couple of law schools,
Speaker 1: including mine, I've started experimenting by saying what you could
Speaker 1: take to gre Yeah, I love you. That's what they
Speaker 1: call an experiment. I mean, it's ridiculous thing. One ridiculous
Speaker 1: steridized test. You can take another steridized one which does
Speaker 1: not have logic games on unless we must be forgot.
Speaker 1: But I mean the justification, if there is one for that,
Speaker 1: it would only be if you have two different tests,
Speaker 1: then maybe that would create some competition, and it would
Speaker 1: lead the people who make up to tests in theory.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is all in theory to think about
Speaker 1: whether you know they could do something differently instead of
Speaker 1: just as you say, just being out there to have fun.
Speaker 1: Not that having fun. It's such a bad motive. No, No,
Speaker 1: I thought that's why I'll do my job. If I
Speaker 1: had thought they were having fun, I would have called
Speaker 1: the whole thing off and did not attack them, right
Speaker 1: but right, but they appeared not to be having fun.
Speaker 1: They committed this end of not having fun, unlike the
Speaker 1: drunken Anthropologists. Yes, yes, yes, who did have fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was fascinated by the chapter about alcohol here. There
Speaker 1: was tons. I mean, there's always stuff in every chapter
Speaker 1: that I don't know, but in that chapter, I feel
Speaker 1: like I didn't know anything, Like everything I thought about
Speaker 1: alcohol consumption was wrong. Can you tell the story of
Speaker 1: the drunken Anthropologists? I can't. I can. So that chapter
Speaker 1: began because I was looking for since I was interested
Speaker 1: in this question of conversations between strangers going awry. Naturally,
Speaker 1: I thought that campus sexual assault would be a reasonable
Speaker 1: place to start. Like that's that seems to be albeit
Speaker 1: a highly controversial, highly country but part, some part of
Speaker 1: that problem is about that that clearly conversations are going
Speaker 1: badly awry. Right. So I began to go and talk
Speaker 1: to people who studied this problem, and there are many
Speaker 1: of them, and all of them, five minutes into the
Speaker 1: conversation would say, well, you know, this is about alcohol.
Speaker 1: They all said this, and I realized, Okay, so maybe
Speaker 1: I should rethink and start talking thinking about more about alcohol.
Speaker 1: And that's interesting on another on a number of levels,
Speaker 1: in part because if you read books about campus assault,
Speaker 1: there are books written about it that don't mention alcohol,
Speaker 1: which is quite incredible. But really, do you see this
Speaker 1: gap between the way an issue is discussed in public
Speaker 1: and luay an issue is discussed by the research community.
Speaker 1: Um anyway, so it led to this long question about Okay,
Speaker 1: so what happens when you're drunk? Um? That would that
Speaker 1: might impair the um the conversation that's being had between
Speaker 1: two strangers at a party or what have you. And
Speaker 1: the common position is that what happens when you drink
Speaker 1: is you become disinhibited, which is what I thought, Yes,
Speaker 1: that you simply then the normal, the kind of surface
Speaker 1: constraints on your um personality melt away, and some kind
Speaker 1: of purer version of yourself emerges in vino veritas right
Speaker 1: for better or words for better fans uh. In fact,
Speaker 1: the contemporary position on alcohol now is on drunkenness is
Speaker 1: very different from that, and that is that drunkenness causes myopia,
Speaker 1: and what that means is that when you're drunk, what
Speaker 1: happens is your higher cognitive functions start to shut down
Speaker 1: and you're capable only of making sense of things in
Speaker 1: the immediate term that are right in front of you.
Speaker 1: And that's a significant That sounds like a subtle difference,
Speaker 1: but it's significant because your personality is your normal personality
Speaker 1: is a function of you, of a careful weighing of
Speaker 1: short term versus long term consequences. Right that, Noah, you
Speaker 1: are who you are because you're not just thinking about
Speaker 1: what's happening now. You're thinking about tomorrow and next week.
Speaker 1: And if you say something rude or stupid or offensive
Speaker 1: to me right now, you know it'll matter tomorrow and right.
Speaker 1: But if you're drunk, that falls away, and what's left
Speaker 1: is not Noah anymore. Because Noah is someone who thinks
Speaker 1: about tomorrow. What's left is the version of Noah that
Speaker 1: doesn't think about tomorrow, which is not Noah. Right, And
Speaker 1: to the extent that we it's a version of Noah
Speaker 1: that doesn't think about tomorrow. Yes, but that's not a
Speaker 1: version you approve of. True, But it's a separate question.
Speaker 1: I think we can discuss it without without a view
Speaker 1: of like, which is the essential Noah? Oh? No no,
Speaker 1: I would say, it's the non essential no yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: isn't your non essential self the portion of yourself that
Speaker 1: you would not willingly choose to be? Well, that would
Speaker 1: be super nice if that were true. But it might
Speaker 1: be the other way around, right, I mean, it could
Speaker 1: be that the portion of myself that I don't want
Speaker 1: to be is actually the essential me, and that to me,
Speaker 1: who goes all the work, goes into producing the public me,
Speaker 1: is the inessential me. Do you want to lie on
Speaker 1: the couch and should? I mean, I'm I'm getting to that,
Speaker 1: Believe me, I'm getting to I'm going to get to
Speaker 1: psychoanalysis and talking to strangers, I promise you, Okay. Regardless
Speaker 1: of whether drunken Noah is the anti Noah or simply
Speaker 1: altered Noah, it's not typical Noah, and it's not ideal Noah. Yes. Right,
Speaker 1: So if this version, if drunken, the drunken version of ourselves,
Speaker 1: is this radically altered, less than altimal verse, then that's
Speaker 1: hugely problematic, right, And it makes it hard to understand,
Speaker 1: for example, how consent can ever be appropriate when people
Speaker 1: are very drunk, because the notion of consent assumes that
Speaker 1: you're it is your self. It is your essential self
Speaker 1: that's consenting, not your altered self. But also it means
Speaker 1: that I think that we have Also it raises the
Speaker 1: question of whether the transformed drunken self is someone who
Speaker 1: is much more likely to engage in criminal behavior, which
Speaker 1: turns out to be true. Right, That's what a lot
Speaker 1: of this sexual assult is about, is that people get very,
Speaker 1: very drunk thinking that it is a harmless, fun state,
Speaker 1: and in fact it's a state that radically increases their
Speaker 1: chances of being criminal sexual predators, right on the one
Speaker 1: side of the equation. So anyway, what does this have
Speaker 1: to do with the drunken anthropologists. Well, a lot of
Speaker 1: this rethinking of drinking begins in the fifties, with all
Speaker 1: the sense of pological work that starts going around the
Speaker 1: world and observing that in other parts of the world
Speaker 1: drunkenness doesn't look like drunkenness in the United States. Right,
Speaker 1: So if if drunken, henkenness is culturally the drunkenness. So
Speaker 1: if drunken that's just how often you get drunk, But
Speaker 1: what you do when what you do when you get
Speaker 1: drunk differs dramatically from culture. So these the the anthropologists.
Speaker 1: So these two lovely this couple um who taught a
Speaker 1: brown for many years. They went to Bolivia in the
Speaker 1: fifties and they observed that this tribe they were living
Speaker 1: with would get would drink essentially grain alcohol, but the
Speaker 1: most potent liquor imaginable. Every Friday night they would get
Speaker 1: together as a group and they would get so wasted that,
Speaker 1: like I mean, they would just drink too. But there
Speaker 1: was no no observable pathology. It didn't lead to fights,
Speaker 1: it didn't lead to you know, absenteeism from work, it
Speaker 1: didn't lead to broken marriages, that didn't lead to and
Speaker 1: they were like so stunned by this, like how could
Speaker 1: this be? And the answer is it goes to this
Speaker 1: question of biopia, that when you are drunk, you were
Speaker 1: at the mercy of your immediate environment. And they had
Speaker 1: constructed an immediate environment that was entirely benign, more than benign,
Speaker 1: that was socially positive. So when they got so, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were surrounded by like happy things. They sang songs
Speaker 1: and they held hands and it was all love. Was
Speaker 1: like a rave, but with grain alcohol. It was like
Speaker 1: a rave with green yes exactly, if that's what frat
Speaker 1: parties were we would not have sexual assaults, right, But
Speaker 1: frat parties are the opposite. They are places where the
Speaker 1: thing that is immediately in front of this of these
Speaker 1: you know, wasted eighteen year olds is not something that
Speaker 1: brings out their best self. It is rather something that
Speaker 1: brings out, in many cases, their worst self. The fact
Speaker 1: that we allow this to happen on campuses and we
Speaker 1: are seemingly oblivious to its consequences enrages me because the
Speaker 1: answer is the answer to engage in some rat cultural
Speaker 1: experiment to change the cultural norms. Because I mean, that's
Speaker 1: the thing about anthropologists, right, they go all over the world.
Speaker 1: They see incredible things, and they report back that what
Speaker 1: we think is intuitive isn't intuitive. But their explanation tends
Speaker 1: to be a teeny bit different from the explanations that
Speaker 1: often come up in the other work of other social scientists.
Speaker 1: They tend to say, it's a different culture. So those
Speaker 1: folks had put a lot of time and effort into
Speaker 1: figuring out a culture. Maybe it was luck, maybe it
Speaker 1: wasn't where getting drunk actually gave them some kind of
Speaker 1: communal solidarity, and so maybe we should be trying to
Speaker 1: produce a culture like that. Yeah, I agree, I think
Speaker 1: we should be. I think the idea of so some
Speaker 1: people have been trying to produce a culture around drinking.
Speaker 1: It's just that the culture that has been produced around
Speaker 1: drinking on campuses in the last twenty five years is
Speaker 1: the most monstrously maladaptive culture imaginable. So we know you
Speaker 1: can produce powerful cultures around it, but we have surrendered
Speaker 1: that task to people who do not have the best
Speaker 1: interests of nineteen year role college students at heart. And
Speaker 1: it's time we went back and took back that particular culture.
Speaker 1: It is quite possible to have fun at a party
Speaker 1: without getting blackout drunk, right at the very least, it
Speaker 1: makes sense. You know, in telling in retelling the story
Speaker 1: of the Stanford rape case, there are many things that
Speaker 1: strike you. One is that here is a party at
Speaker 1: Stanford where there is a lot of very young people
Speaker 1: are getting very very drunk, and there appeared to be
Speaker 1: no adults anywhere, no sober people present. How is that good? Idea? Like,
Speaker 1: here's a college that has not like there are a
Speaker 1: lack of resources at Stanford for this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: When I was at you know, getting drunk in college
Speaker 1: at the University of Toronto in the nineteen eighties. They
Speaker 1: were always sober adults at our parties. It just it
Speaker 1: was the way it was constructed, and so whenever something
Speaker 1: got out of hand, the sober adult came in and
Speaker 1: made sure it didn't go too far. I suspect that's
Speaker 1: why the number of these incredibly problematic incidents in my
Speaker 1: college years was small. I never knew of a single
Speaker 1: person who went to the hospital suffering from alcohol poisoning.
Speaker 1: I never knew of a single person although I got drunk.
Speaker 1: Although I have read this is maybe about the early nineties,
Speaker 1: I can't be so different from the late eighties studies
Speaker 1: suggesting that the rate of sexual assault on campuses was
Speaker 1: actually not so different then than it is now, that
Speaker 1: is to say, outrageously, shockingly terribly high. Yeah. Yeah, All
Speaker 1: I know is that the Yeah, the gathering of statistics
Speaker 1: in this area is an incredibly difficult Yes, so safely
Speaker 1: because so much goes unreported. Yeah. All I can say
Speaker 1: for certain is that our best efforts at the moment
Speaker 1: suggests the sexual self problem is way, way, way worse
Speaker 1: than people imagine. I wanted to I promised one question
Speaker 1: about broadly speaking psychoanalysis. So here's the question. You talk
Speaker 1: a lot in the book about default to truth as
Speaker 1: some thing that we do and maybe something that we're
Speaker 1: hard wired to do. Yeah, so you know your spies
Speaker 1: are being spies and they say, oh, I'm not a spy,
Speaker 1: and then people say, oh, I guess you're not a
Speaker 1: spy because we're you know, it's pro social to believe
Speaker 1: people unless you have really strong evidence not too How
Speaker 1: do you distinguish that from the situation where we kind
Speaker 1: of know that you're lying, but we really don't want
Speaker 1: to think that, where we're actually eager on some level,
Speaker 1: and you know, it could be on different levels, but
Speaker 1: it could actually be on a you know, a subconscious level.
Speaker 1: We're eager to believe you because it would be just
Speaker 1: too terrible to believe the truth that my co worker
Speaker 1: in the next cubicle, who's an award winning you know,
Speaker 1: Cuba analyst, is actually you know, piling around personally with
Speaker 1: Fidel Castro, you know, on odd weekends. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: devastating to think that. I mean, in all of your
Speaker 1: cases about the spies, you always have the person saying,
Speaker 1: oh my god, we were just devastated to discover this. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: how do you distinguish a kind of idea that we're
Speaker 1: just built to believe people, so we believe people from
Speaker 1: the idea that no, it's not that, it's that we
Speaker 1: kind of know they're lying on some level, but we
Speaker 1: but we know and we don't know at the same
Speaker 1: time because we just really, really really don't want to
Speaker 1: be disillusioned. Well, I there's many way stiensers that I
Speaker 1: would say that. So a lot of my ideas in
Speaker 1: this book about why we do such a bad job
Speaker 1: of knowing when others are lying come from the work
Speaker 1: of this psychologist, Tim Levine and levine zanswer would be
Speaker 1: that real liars. So there's a in a psychological literature,
Speaker 1: there is a distinction between there's a big argument about
Speaker 1: what is a lie, and they don't count as lies.
Speaker 1: Untruths that are told with the intent of preserving social
Speaker 1: relationships are not considered lies what we would call white lies,
Speaker 1: but they're the category why life is quite large. Yes, um, so,
Speaker 1: a true lie is a lie that's told deliberately and
Speaker 1: malicious maliciously with the intent of severing or rupturing social relationships.
Speaker 1: The number of the percentage of the population who tal
Speaker 1: large numbers of true lies is really really small. So
Speaker 1: the con style of that with the statistics on the
Speaker 1: number of people who cheat on their spouses, I mean
Speaker 1: that by depending on the numbers you look at, that's
Speaker 1: you know, between a third and sixty percent of you
Speaker 1: know of Americans, depending on which studies you believe. That's
Speaker 1: a lot of people and they're all telling unless you
Speaker 1: think that's a white lie. Now, so is cheating on
Speaker 1: your I mean I'm talking about a cheating on this
Speaker 1: on your spouse. Is an active an active deception, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it may not involve an actual lie. In other words,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the moment when the two people confront
Speaker 1: each other and one of the fun party says that
Speaker 1: you're having an affair and the other party says, I'm
Speaker 1: not okay. So that's no. I don't know what percentage
Speaker 1: includes that moment. Yeah, I'm more interested in that act
Speaker 1: where they confront each other. I'm not you know, you're
Speaker 1: talking about the commission of a social acts or maybe
Speaker 1: highly social acts, but social acts outside of overly social,
Speaker 1: overly social acts, but um but no deeply malicious acts
Speaker 1: meant to destroy. So made off made off level kinds
Speaker 1: of lies are really really rare. Um. So to add
Speaker 1: to you you, I agree with you. How do we know
Speaker 1: that a lot of so there is a there is
Speaker 1: a healthy literature in psychology and trying to figure this
Speaker 1: question out. Yeah. Um, you know it's hard to tell.
Speaker 1: But you know, we do know that because you know
Speaker 1: what percentage of investment advisors are running massive Ponzi schemes.
Speaker 1: It's actually quite small, right, I mean there's a lot
Speaker 1: of Look, where's your money in like in a sock?
Speaker 1: I you this, No, No, it's in an index fund. Yea.
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal is not lying. I mean the index.
Speaker 1: The index is the index. So you know how you're
Speaker 1: you know, well, the person running the index fund, you're
Speaker 1: saying it's not lying. You know, there's don't you don't
Speaker 1: even need a person. It's just an index, I know.
Speaker 1: But so therefore it's not you, whereas a human being
Speaker 1: with a with a you know, with an investment strategy
Speaker 1: could could be the nature of a Ponzi scheme? Is
Speaker 1: that advision it? Actually? Yeah? So we do know that
Speaker 1: there aren't ten madeups out there? Yeah, there are, you know,
Speaker 1: there is a small number. And similarly, when we look
Speaker 1: in you know, what is the incident incidents of Since
Speaker 1: I talk about pedophilia in this book, how many you know,
Speaker 1: what is the real incidence of pedophilia in the population,
Speaker 1: So someone who is systematically deceiving those around him in
Speaker 1: in the in the in the name of pursuing a
Speaker 1: devan sexual agenda. It's actually it's quite small. It's like
Speaker 1: two three percent. That who that's small? Well, two three percent.
Speaker 1: Now we're not saying that these are people who actively
Speaker 1: pursue their pedophilia, but who have those kinds of inclinations,
Speaker 1: But that that's quite small. Sure, yeah, okay, two or
Speaker 1: three people out of one hundred. It's nothing like sounds
Speaker 1: like a lot of people to me. I don't know.
Speaker 1: But it's because I have kids. I don't know. But
Speaker 1: if you but if you have as a baseline position
Speaker 1: that most people you deal with are not pedophiles, that's
Speaker 1: not an irrational position. It's not irrational, not by any string.
Speaker 1: So you can send your kids to boy scout the world,
Speaker 1: and you shouldn't lie awake at night worrying about whether
Speaker 1: the boy scouts. But verify, yes, that's right anyway, So
Speaker 1: I don't think that your position is wrong. But I
Speaker 1: would say that it's it is probably rational to want
Speaker 1: to believe that the person you're dealing with is telling
Speaker 1: the truth, because most people actually are telling the truth.
Speaker 1: That's Slivian's argument. I think that's there's something and it's
Speaker 1: a it's a rationalist argument, presumably built into some evolutionary theory. Right,
Speaker 1: it's rational, and so we've evolved this tendency. You know,
Speaker 1: what are the reasons why so many? And I guess
Speaker 1: my worry is, I'm not sure that covers the cases
Speaker 1: money of which you write about, where there's like stuff
Speaker 1: staring the person in the face, you know, the person
Speaker 1: who suspects the spy and says, gee, I suspect this
Speaker 1: spy and goes and ask the questions and the spy
Speaker 1: gives a lame answer, and the person's like, okay, I
Speaker 1: believe you. And your your answer is you know, this
Speaker 1: kind of evolutionary default the truth. But my instinct, at
Speaker 1: least on reading those anecdotes was that's not enough to
Speaker 1: explain that because the person's doubts were already raised. It's
Speaker 1: really that they just didn't want to face it. They
Speaker 1: didn't want to take on board the painful reality you
Speaker 1: know spies thinking about spies as someone who has consumed
Speaker 1: huge numbers of real and imaginary spy stories. But if
Speaker 1: you just look at the real ones, spies never get caught.
Speaker 1: Like show me a case where the first day that
Speaker 1: Joe Hill decided to turn coat and spy for the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, even though he was a high ranking CIA officer,
Speaker 1: he was caught by counterintelligence. Never ever happens. If you do,
Speaker 1: like I woudn't want to write a book about it
Speaker 1: because it short no if you talk to these counterintelligence
Speaker 1: officers about their record and uncovering spies. First of all,
Speaker 1: most counterintelligence officers never catch any spies, and to the
Speaker 1: extent they do, they catch them like after ten years.
Speaker 1: Like think about how long Aldrich aims possibly the worst
Speaker 1: by this country ever had. The man is a buffoon,
Speaker 1: he's a drunken His performance reviews are like terrible. He
Speaker 1: starts getting huge amounts of money from the Soviets for
Speaker 1: his spying or what does he do? He spends it
Speaker 1: wildly and shows up at Langley and like a jaguar
Speaker 1: with his teeth capped and wearing a fancy you know
Speaker 1: BRIONI suit and like nobody nobody looks askance so like,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry at a certain boot, President, I'm sorry. At
Speaker 1: a certain point, you have to believe that this is
Speaker 1: something that is I just read this, this book about
Speaker 1: Klaus Fuchs. You know, the so Klaus Fuchs, he's the
Speaker 1: one who betrays the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: I hadn't realized that a Klaus Fuchs. I thought he
Speaker 1: was a kind of minor figure in Los Alamos. He's not.
Speaker 1: He's like a he's one of the greatest nuclear physics
Speaker 1: of his generation. And also his ties to the Communists
Speaker 1: go way back. He's a he's a Communist from the
Speaker 1: get go, which actually a good number of the nuclear
Speaker 1: scientists were deeply sympathetics. So it's like and you know,
Speaker 1: all kinds of people were like raising her hand and say,
Speaker 1: I don't know about Klaus, like Klaus goes. And then
Speaker 1: Klaus was at Los Alamos. They had you on lockdown
Speaker 1: in the trend and you know, where to get out
Speaker 1: of Los Alimos to meet with his Soviet handler. He
Speaker 1: had to construct these elaborate reasons. Shore enough, like Klaus
Speaker 1: is always getting in a car, like driving off to
Speaker 1: the desert, and they're like, oh, where's Claus. I don't
Speaker 1: know he's he's going to, like, you know, where would
Speaker 1: you you're at Lost Alimos? Were you going for? I
Speaker 1: think the supports my theory. I think not you're a theory.
Speaker 1: I think the supports that people say wanted to they
Speaker 1: really didn't want to believe this about classrooms. Of course
Speaker 1: they didn't want to believe it, but they were. But
Speaker 1: they didn't want to believe it because in part because
Speaker 1: most people at Los Alimos were not spies, right Klaus,
Speaker 1: It's Klaus, and like basically Klaus. I mean there's like
Speaker 1: one other guy who's a spy, but maybe someone we
Speaker 1: don't know about, but most of them not spies, right. Um.
Speaker 1: So I want to make sure we ask some of
Speaker 1: the audience questions. And this is the first question from
Speaker 1: Tyler from Westfield in New Jersey, and this question I'll
Speaker 1: you why I'm interesting this question. The question says, you're
Speaker 1: known to be an avid runner. How does running factor
Speaker 1: into your process as a writer and as a thinker?
Speaker 1: And the reason I was especially attracted this question is
Speaker 1: that I didn't exactly meet you, but the first time
Speaker 1: I ever saw you was in the Equinox in the
Speaker 1: West Village when I lived in New York, and there
Speaker 1: were several rows of treadmills, and in the front row
Speaker 1: of treadmills in the center was always Malcolm running at
Speaker 1: like an unimaginable speed, and for a long time he
Speaker 1: was by far the fastest person in that gym. And
Speaker 1: then a early two thousand supermodel. I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out which one it was, one of the blond ones?
Speaker 1: Was it? Which one was? She was right next to you,
Speaker 1: and she would run right next to you really at
Speaker 1: that now, you'd tell me, at super high speed. This
Speaker 1: happened on more than one occasion. This is like a
Speaker 1: story about you and your father, Like you didn't even notice,
Speaker 1: and she was like pretty much as fast as as
Speaker 1: you are, and comparably skinny. And so I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: first I thought I didn't know who you were. I
Speaker 1: was just like, wow, that guy is incredibly fast. And
Speaker 1: I was like, that guy's incredibly fast and doesn't notice
Speaker 1: the girl next to him, And then later I found
Speaker 1: out that it was you. So here's the question, how
Speaker 1: does that running factor into your process as a writer
Speaker 1: and as a thinker, other than making you oblivious to supermodels?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I suppose, well, you know the you
Speaker 1: know this how iterative writing is, that you never finding
Speaker 1: a way to express what you really mean takes forever
Speaker 1: and that early and an awful lot of kind of
Speaker 1: what you discover when you write something down is how
Speaker 1: difficult it is to put your thoughts into words, or
Speaker 1: how difficult it is to know what you think. And
Speaker 1: so I always think that you running is really, among
Speaker 1: other things, a way in which I can simply take
Speaker 1: time out to ruminate. All writers, I think, have to
Speaker 1: have some space in your life for rumination. Darthy from
Speaker 1: Boston And this is I don't think it means to
Speaker 1: be a mean question, but it's a teeny bit mean.
Speaker 1: When I was on my way over here, I asked
Speaker 1: my daughter what happens if I have to ask Malcolm
Speaker 1: a mean question? She said, you have to do it
Speaker 1: as a compliment sandwich, and I didn't. I didn't know
Speaker 1: what that was, but she explained to me. So I
Speaker 1: wanted to say, Malcolm, that's this is an amazing book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: after the aha moment that birth's a new theory? How
Speaker 1: do you avoid confirmation bias while evidence gathering? And also great,
Speaker 1: great shirt? Did I do it right. Um, well, one
Speaker 1: answer is to say that all journalism is an expression
Speaker 1: of confirmation bias, but then so it confirmed the bio.
Speaker 1: Charthy holds, Yeah, I mean you're I think I guess.
Speaker 1: The defense I would say is that, unlike other forms
Speaker 1: of writing, the kind of journalism that I'm up part
Speaker 1: of is meant to provoke, not convince. That is to say,
Speaker 1: I'm not and what I what I'd like to do
Speaker 1: is to present an argument, maybe an argument that readers
Speaker 1: haven't seen before. Not necessarily because I think I can
Speaker 1: persuade you to adopt it, or necessarily because I believe
Speaker 1: the argument is one hundred percent correct, but because I
Speaker 1: think it's incredibly useful to consider the problem from that angle.
Speaker 1: So an example would be, you know, I don't talk
Speaker 1: a lot, like we went over this, I don't talk
Speaker 1: a lot about race in the case of Sandra Bland.
Speaker 1: Why Because it's really useful to think through the problem
Speaker 1: of what to do about police shootings and put race
Speaker 1: to the side for a moment. Right, that's a good
Speaker 1: do I think that race doesn't belong, No race totally belongs,
Speaker 1: but it's useful to take a couple hours and set
Speaker 1: it aside and say, what if I thought about this
Speaker 1: outside of that of that particular prism, And that's what
Speaker 1: that's what I think useful nonfiction does. And so part
Speaker 1: of the part of the production of that kind of
Speaker 1: argument is confirmation bias, happily confirmation bison. Yeah, let's gather
Speaker 1: all the events we can for a particular point of
Speaker 1: view and want it buy you. Let's see what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you default to truth and believe it, that's
Speaker 1: your own fault you have. You got to read a skeptically, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you've got to read skeptically. Yeah. Nicole from Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: This is a very Massachusetts question, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: a deep one. Is Trump derangement syndrome a similar phenomenon
Speaker 1: to the Belgian coke crisis? This question requires a great
Speaker 1: deal of unpacking the Belgian. Nicole is from Massachusetts. Yes,
Speaker 1: coke crisis was something I did a podcast episode about.
Speaker 1: Was an episode in the nineties or eighties in Belgium
Speaker 1: where Belgians became convinced by the way every time I
Speaker 1: say the word Belgian, I'm reminded of that great Monty
Speaker 1: Python episode about they wanted to come up with a
Speaker 1: nickname for Belgian's, remember, and one of them was sprouts,
Speaker 1: one of them was Flems, and then the winner was
Speaker 1: dirty and Belgian best so so fantastic Um. But Belgians
Speaker 1: became convinced that coke was poisoning them and all these
Speaker 1: kids got sick. And then it turns out there was
Speaker 1: not conversions, and yeah it was it was just all
Speaker 1: um hysteria, a moral panic. Anyway, this person wants to
Speaker 1: suggest that people that Trump is somewhat trumped arrangement syndrome.
Speaker 1: You know which is you know that you know that
Speaker 1: phenomenon when um one observes people who and the ques
Speaker 1: the name implies maybe that they're they shouldn't, but that
Speaker 1: people just can't stop thinking about Trump and how angry
Speaker 1: they are about Trump and how they are about Trump,
Speaker 1: and it just distorts their whole like frame of engagement
Speaker 1: with the world. Slash gives them great clarity and accuracy,
Speaker 1: depending on whether you're inside the syndrome or absence syndrome. UM,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe Nicole wins, she gets a freak
Speaker 1: of the well, she already bought a copy of the book.
Speaker 1: This is a serious question, and it connects up to
Speaker 1: the fact that this book really is about very serious things.
Speaker 1: It has it has all of the fun of him
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gottwell book, but it's framed as an inquiry into
Speaker 1: one of the deepest, hardest and most serious questions that
Speaker 1: we're facing as a society. And the question is, do
Speaker 1: you think that we as Americans This is Christina from Boston,
Speaker 1: have improved in civil dialogue in the years, say, since
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, the last almost two decades, or have
Speaker 1: we regressed when it comes to talking to strangers. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a deep question. Well, in some ways we
Speaker 1: have regressed in a sense of um that you know,
Speaker 1: we're in a peculiar moment where we're we're obsessed with
Speaker 1: each other's differences and not what we have in common.
Speaker 1: And you know, at other times, other countries don't have
Speaker 1: these kinds of conversations. Canadians don't get together and enumeered
Speaker 1: all the ways in which they disagree. They do the opposite, right,
Speaker 1: They talk about things they all share. Um, that's the age,
Speaker 1: and they do it nicely. They do it nicely. The
Speaker 1: great Canadian project is this endless search for common ground
Speaker 1: gets a little tedious at times, but um, this country
Speaker 1: has decided, but less shooting each other. This country's society
Speaker 1: doesn't want to do that. I guess that would be
Speaker 1: point number one. But two slash we've never done it.
Speaker 1: Maybe we've never done it. Be to be there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I you know, to going to back to the
Speaker 1: theme of this This book is a lot about misunderstandings
Speaker 1: that arise from hasty generalizations about strangers. I'm always struck
Speaker 1: on Twitter about how you know seventy five of what
Speaker 1: are classified as disagreements on Twitter or not disagreements, but
Speaker 1: they are misunderstandings. Yeah that they just people have been
Speaker 1: bothered to figure out what the other person is arguing,
Speaker 1: or they delicated by the medium, which is designed to
Speaker 1: make it impossible for you to explain your argument in
Speaker 1: any depth. It is astonished to me what a bad
Speaker 1: idea of Twitter is, Like if you it's one of
Speaker 1: those things like in retrospect, like who if they were
Speaker 1: so like who thought this was going to end up
Speaker 1: being Remember there was that golden period of a like
Speaker 1: a year and a half when they were serious people
Speaker 1: in this country who thought that Twitter was going to
Speaker 1: save the world from tyranny. And I will say I
Speaker 1: was a skeptic in that moment, and I people were
Speaker 1: so angry with me for not believing in the condemptive
Speaker 1: power of Twitter, and I was like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like I don't see how you know. And sure enough,
Speaker 1: what happens. It turns out Twitter is good for like
Speaker 1: cat videos. That's useful. But other than that, we had
Speaker 1: Facebook for that. We already had Facebook for that. But
Speaker 1: it is astonishing to me how like pointless it is.
Speaker 1: But it is fascinating then that it has the reach
Speaker 1: that it has. I mean specifically among people who talk
Speaker 1: at length for a living, people who should do the
Speaker 1: best at going deeper conversational at least in principle, seemed
Speaker 1: to have this deep desire to communicate on Twitter, the
Speaker 1: framework in which all of the things that in theory
Speaker 1: make them worth listening to are taken away are stripped away.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like, you know, your your example of
Speaker 1: in the LSAD podcast, your example of speed chess compared
Speaker 1: to a real chess. All these people who are actually
Speaker 1: supposedly writers, you know, scholars, people who think in larger
Speaker 1: longer than a sentence or two, and that's who spends
Speaker 1: a lot of time yelling at each other. And this
Speaker 1: understand each other on Twitter. I have no answer for
Speaker 1: why we have the impulse to do that, but apparently
Speaker 1: we do, and distinctively that group of people, because it's
Speaker 1: not like Twitter has as many users as one of
Speaker 1: the formats that allows for a longer form communication. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't get it. It's like the it's
Speaker 1: like the id of It's like the id of people
Speaker 1: who like to express themselves at length. It's like, really
Speaker 1: that they can sum it up in one sentence, which
Speaker 1: actually they can't. Yeah. Yeah, it joins along this I
Speaker 1: always even it should be this everything. Every institution, uh,
Speaker 1: in a kind of functioning society should have a sunset
Speaker 1: clause and then at that moment of sunset, everyone sits
Speaker 1: around and should say, well up or down? Good idea?
Speaker 1: Do we should we start over? Like? Be very imagine
Speaker 1: if we hit like so, if we had a sunset
Speaker 1: clause on I mentioned higher education before, Yeah, super useful
Speaker 1: for us to say. In say, in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: we all get together and we say, okay, let's start
Speaker 1: over and see what we come up with. Right, we
Speaker 1: would come up with something very very different. Similarly with Twitter,
Speaker 1: if we decided in twenty twenty Five's go, We're gonna
Speaker 1: shut it down for six months and then have a
Speaker 1: meeting and figure out what we want, whether we want
Speaker 1: to replace it or what we would replace it with.
Speaker 1: We would come up with something very different. There's no
Speaker 1: reason these things persist long past their their useful stage.
Speaker 1: Last question and it connects Canada to the time, when
Speaker 1: and why was the last time you applied your pull
Speaker 1: the goalie rule in real life? Another recond ask that
Speaker 1: because you know we're almost done here, I'm pulling the goalie.
Speaker 1: But this is another friends to one of my podcasts
Speaker 1: where I described the work of this hilarious hedge fund
Speaker 1: guy who published a paper on SSRN rolls quast website
Speaker 1: about when you should what is the optimal time to
Speaker 1: pull a goalie in a hockey game if if you
Speaker 1: are down a goal And his answer is like I forgot,
Speaker 1: it's like with six minutes to go far, far, longer
Speaker 1: than anyone would begin to imagine, and he does all
Speaker 1: the math and then if no one ever does that,
Speaker 1: no one ever does that way. But the idea is
Speaker 1: that you should take big risks, take big way your
Speaker 1: way behind when you're way behind, when all is hopeless. Um,
Speaker 1: when was the last time I took a massive, unparalleled
Speaker 1: risk because I was otherwise almost certain to lose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a really good question. It is a good question.
Speaker 1: Jim from Bridgewater. Well, no, I should add that you're
Speaker 1: willing to share. What about you? Have you ever pulled?
Speaker 1: Do you ever? Um, that's a good question, I think, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I've I think I've done it in my
Speaker 1: personal life on multiple occasions. Um, you know, gone for
Speaker 1: like the big the big risk. Yeah, um, you know,
Speaker 1: hoping that it would make things work out. But as
Speaker 1: we know from the statistics of pulling the goalie, usually
Speaker 1: what happens is they just score a goal on you
Speaker 1: and it doesn't work out. Yeah, you usually fail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that would be me. Elizabeth Thorns politically didn't she.
Speaker 1: I don think Elizabeth Tharos. I don't think Elizabeth what's
Speaker 1: her last name of Paris? Elizabeth Holmes Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes
Speaker 1: of Tharnis was playing without a goalie from the very
Speaker 1: This is not true. So think about her position if
Speaker 1: you think about this rationally. So, she had this idea
Speaker 1: that you could completely take over a huge corner of
Speaker 1: the healthcare market if you could do. Liabel diagnoses from
Speaker 1: a drop of blood. She was, let's say, generously, twenty
Speaker 1: five percent of the way there, right, but we don't
Speaker 1: we don't really know how far she was, and her
Speaker 1: her gamble was I can get to one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: Undergraduate advisor appeared in the at least in the documentary
Speaker 1: and said she was zero percent of the because, okay,
Speaker 1: because I explained to her that it was impossible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. And then the other guy got it. The
Speaker 1: other advisor from Stanford got on and said, but she
Speaker 1: was a genius, so it was possible. Yeah. So let's say, okay,
Speaker 1: let's say that she was fifteen percent of the way.
Speaker 1: They okay, So she was, in a sense, pulling the goalie.
Speaker 1: So she was faced with an all but impossible task.
Speaker 1: But there was this little glimmer of hope if she
Speaker 1: gambled everything that she could pull it off. And if
Speaker 1: she pulled it off, she would be a mega billionaire.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I mean. So she chose to play
Speaker 1: very very very long odds. So did Bernie Madoff. According
Speaker 1: to that theory, Well no, no no, remember could have had
Speaker 1: the first pay scheme that worked by Bonnie Monoff never
Speaker 1: made an honest attempt to actually invest people's money. But
Speaker 1: he was a fraud from the start. Hers was not
Speaker 1: a fraud from the start. I mean, no one claims
Speaker 1: that she was. Did it was all fictional that when
Speaker 1: all the activity going on in her firm was just
Speaker 1: for show. No people were trying to solve the problem.
Speaker 1: It's just the problem was pertually impossible to solve. But
Speaker 1: there was some little glimmer of not I don't mean
Speaker 1: to defend her, but I do want to point out
Speaker 1: you just there is a kind of little sliver of
Speaker 1: logic to what she was doing. She was classically pulling
Speaker 1: the goalie, like she was down by three goals with
Speaker 1: you know, deep in the third quarter, and she decided,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go for broke. I'm gonna convince a
Speaker 1: bunch of rich people to give me lots of money,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to try and do this thing that
Speaker 1: i'm And had she succeeded, she would be right in
Speaker 1: the pantheon. Well, none of you has pulled the goalie
Speaker 1: by coming here tonight, and you've had a short thing
Speaker 1: from the beginning because you bought the book, and I'm
Speaker 1: thrilled that you did come and thrilled, and Malcolm came
Speaker 1: and joined us, and I'm really grateful to you, Malcolm
Speaker 1: for the conversation and thank you all for coming. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Lydia Gancott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and
Speaker 1: Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music
Speaker 1: is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass,
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobell. This week, we
Speaker 1: would also like to give a shout out to the
Speaker 1: Harvard Bookstore my home bookstore, for helping organize the conversation
Speaker 1: between me and Malcolm. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.