Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello, Revision's History listeners. I'm excited to announce
Speaker 1: that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from
Speaker 1: my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to Pushkin
Speaker 1: Plus for those who just can't get enough. We're giving
Speaker 1: every episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus We've
Speaker 1: created many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents.
Speaker 1: And of course you'll never hear any ads. Subscribe to
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on the Revisionist History Show page, in Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. So as a condition
Speaker 1: of our experiment, I'm giving you the ability to access
Speaker 1: every bit of data you want from everyone in the experiment.
Speaker 2: Yes, I would like that, and I know that sounds crazy,
Speaker 2: but I'm going pie in the sky like you said.
Speaker 1: Yes, no, you get that request granted. I'm the czar
Speaker 1: of the Magic wand I have granted that request. Experiments
Speaker 1: come in many forms. There are natural experiments, experiments based
Speaker 1: on observations from the real world, thought experiments where we
Speaker 1: gain out a problem and its potential solution in our heads,
Speaker 1: and formal experiments the ones that scientists design and perform
Speaker 1: in the laboratory. But there's another type of experiment. My
Speaker 1: favorite kind of experiment, the magic wand experiment, where I
Speaker 1: call up the smartest people I know and ask them
Speaker 1: to think big, to give me the experiment of their dreams.
Speaker 2: Because remember, we are changing this environment because you're giving
Speaker 2: me all this money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm giving you unlimited money. I'm limited money, elon
Speaker 1: musk money. I'm letting you go nuts. I'm letting you
Speaker 1: this the magic wand. The poet Homer invented the magic
Speaker 1: wand in his Greek epics The Iliad and the Odyssey.
Speaker 1: The god Hermes used the magic wand to make people sleep.
Speaker 1: Athena used it to make Odysseus old and then young again.
Speaker 1: Circe used a wand to turn the crew of Odysseus
Speaker 1: into pigs. Then, for a few thousand years, not much
Speaker 1: magic wand action until now, when all of us at
Speaker 1: Revisionist History have decided to revive the magic wand for
Speaker 1: the greatest of all forbidden pleasures, nerdy experiments. My name
Speaker 1: is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome back to Revisionist History, my podcast
Speaker 1: about things Overlooked and misunderstood. To kick off this season,
Speaker 1: we've asked scientists what if you could design an experiment
Speaker 1: without considering any financial, logistical, ethical, practical constraints. The experiment
Speaker 1: that allows you to answer the question that could never
Speaker 1: otherwise be answered. The experiment so far fetched, so fantastical,
Speaker 1: so offensive that you don't usually even admit that you
Speaker 1: want to do it, unless someone calls you up and says, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, how many do you want in each in
Speaker 1: this experiment?
Speaker 3: One hundred males and one hundred females.
Speaker 1: Meaning dream big, you can go more.
Speaker 3: Okay, sure, I'll give you.
Speaker 1: I'll give you thous Okay. The idea for this season
Speaker 1: of Revision's history was born in frustration. I've always believed
Speaker 1: that those of us alive in the twenty first century
Speaker 1: are all modern and smarty pants. But over and again
Speaker 1: I get into a serious discussion with some brilliant person,
Speaker 1: and after that person had dropped all of their expert bluster,
Speaker 1: they would say, oh, but we don't really know the
Speaker 1: answer to that, or I wish we knew, but we don't.
Speaker 1: It took me back, because I suddenly remembered that's what
Speaker 1: my dad used to always say whenever I pasted him
Speaker 1: with a question. Big sigh, hand to his forehead, slight
Speaker 1: shake of the head, and then no idea, no idea,
Speaker 1: which I thought was just Graham Glowell, but now I
Speaker 1: realize is everyone. The great sobering discovery of my middle
Speaker 1: age is that the list of things we don't know
Speaker 1: is a lot longer than the list of things we
Speaker 1: do know, which suggested to me that we really need
Speaker 1: to get cracking. Hence this season of revisionist history, a
Speaker 1: season devoted entirely to experiments, starting with the special category
Speaker 1: of magic wands. I got lots of suggestions about magic
Speaker 1: wand experiments on the physical world, suggestions like that of
Speaker 1: my friend David Epstein, author of the wonderful book Range
Speaker 1: Why Generalists Triumph in a specialized World. David wrote me
Speaker 1: the following email, which I asked him to read out loud.
Speaker 4: It might be really fun to talk to a string theorist.
Speaker 4: I haven't kept up with this in years, but I
Speaker 4: remember at one point hearing that if you wanted to
Speaker 4: directly test string theory, you'd need a particle collider the
Speaker 4: size of the Solar System. And then I seem to
Speaker 4: recall that there was some writing about the feasibility of
Speaker 4: a collider wrapping around the entire Solar System. Come to
Speaker 4: think of it, if you had a particle collider that big,
Speaker 4: maybe we could basically recreate the Big Bang, maybe finally
Speaker 4: figure out why gravity is such a weird weak force
Speaker 4: and what dark matter is. So yeah, okay, I vote
Speaker 4: for Solar System sized particle collider.
Speaker 1: David, I love you. You know that. Don't take this personally.
Speaker 1: We need to have a few ground rules, like we're
Speaker 1: not doing physics experiments or for that matter, anything on
Speaker 1: space travel, crypto, the bond market, or the ramifications of
Speaker 1: Supreme Court decisions, etc. I am limiting this set of
Speaker 1: magic wands to the basics human things, exercise, diet, and babies.
Speaker 1: I'll let you guess why my show my wands. Second
Speaker 1: ground rule, The reason to do magic wands is to
Speaker 1: help us think about the things we want to know
Speaker 1: but aren't allowed to find out. Magic wands are supposed
Speaker 1: to make you feel a little uncomfortable. My guess is
Speaker 1: that you will feel uncomfortable at least once over the
Speaker 1: next forty minutes, and that's totally fine. So here are
Speaker 1: my top five experiments that can never be done. Drum
Speaker 1: roll please. We begin with the penis test. This was
Speaker 1: the idea of Harvard University child psychologist Joyce Benenson. She's
Speaker 1: the author of a deeply fascinating book called Warriors and Warriors.
Speaker 1: Here's what she would do with.
Speaker 5: Her magic wand Okay, so I'll say it, and that is,
Speaker 5: if we could randomly cut off a bunch of infant
Speaker 5: babies at birth boys penises and attach them to randomly
Speaker 5: selected girls.
Speaker 3: And have them raised by their parents as the opposite
Speaker 3: sex from what they are biologically destined to be because
Speaker 3: the parents are misinformed, and then look at their activities
Speaker 3: and interest.
Speaker 1: We remove the penises of one group of boy babies,
Speaker 1: babies born with X Y chromosomes, we attach those body
Speaker 1: parts to a group of newborn girls, the double X
Speaker 1: chromosome babies, so the parents of the boys assume they're
Speaker 1: raising girls and vice versa. Remember this is all with
Speaker 1: the magic wand no one's suffering. Were we socializing them
Speaker 1: with our controls? If boys of penises and girls without.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, just to be as clean as possible, I
Speaker 3: would keep them just with one another. I would isolate
Speaker 3: them so there's no other influences. That to me would
Speaker 3: be just the strongest one. I think it would be
Speaker 3: a beautiful experiment.
Speaker 1: What Beninson wants to test is the impact of parenting
Speaker 1: on gender identity. It's really hard to untangle nature and nurture.
Speaker 1: People have been arguing about this for millennia, So Beninson says,
Speaker 1: let's just wave our magic wand put together a massive,
Speaker 1: perfectly designed experiment and settle this issue once and for all.
Speaker 1: If your mom and dad are confused about what gender
Speaker 1: you belong to, does that make any difference to you.
Speaker 1: Beninson has been researching the behavior of children for more
Speaker 1: than four decades, and she's pretty sure what the answer is.
Speaker 1: She thinks that if you take boys and raise them
Speaker 1: as girls, nothing's going to change. Remove the penises, dress
Speaker 1: them in pink, none of that will alter their bea.
Speaker 3: Those would be the ones engaging in rough and tumble play.
Speaker 3: Those would be the ones who would be punching each
Speaker 3: other and competing to show they're the best. They would
Speaker 3: be the ones who love transportation, vehicles and weapons.
Speaker 1: As for the girls, Beninson says, calling them Johnny and
Speaker 1: giving them baseball caps isn't going to change anything.
Speaker 3: The one with the penises, right, who are actually xx females,
Speaker 3: they would be much more concerned about their survival they're
Speaker 3: taking care of either the dolls or the actual babies.
Speaker 3: They're cleaning and making sure hygiene is better. They're cooking,
Speaker 3: either real or pretend. They're doing the kinds of things
Speaker 3: that anybody who goes into a preschool seas are not
Speaker 3: socialized by anyone, but naturally occurring. And you would see
Speaker 3: the division, so that in this case, the ones with
Speaker 3: the penises would be crowding around the sink and crowding
Speaker 3: around the stove and the baby dolls and dressing up,
Speaker 3: and the ones without the penises would be jumping on
Speaker 3: top of each other's heads and competing to throw the
Speaker 3: best arrow or paper airplane or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: Parenting does not override biology. That's what Benison already believes.
Speaker 1: So why do the magic wand if she already knows
Speaker 1: the answer, Because we don't just do experiments to learn
Speaker 1: the truth. We also do experiments to persuade others of
Speaker 1: the truth, in this case, to persuade the legions of
Speaker 1: neurotic North American parents who believe that it is their
Speaker 1: own practice and attitudes that shape their children's fundamental nature.
Speaker 3: Okay, so most people will say to me nowadays, at
Speaker 3: least here in the West, that parents are raising their
Speaker 3: daughters arbitrarily to be a certain way, and parents are
Speaker 3: raising their sons, and all we have to do is
Speaker 3: stop that, and then there will be no basic instincts,
Speaker 3: there will be no divide between males and female, there
Speaker 3: will be nothing that we are motivated or emotionally attracted
Speaker 3: to naturally biologically.
Speaker 1: Now, maybe you're one of those parents in the Nurture
Speaker 1: over Nature camp. Maybe you think that what Joyce Benison
Speaker 1: thinks is crazy and offensive. Maybe you're write maybe there
Speaker 1: are children out there who are shaped by their parents
Speaker 1: careful administrations, like a lump of clay from a potter's wheel.
Speaker 1: That's why we're doing an experiment. Wait, so how long
Speaker 1: do you let this experiment run? At what point do
Speaker 1: you unblind the parents?
Speaker 3: Okay, so now we're talking about ethics, right, because if
Speaker 3: I were really.
Speaker 1: We've waved ethical constraints. But from your purposes, it needs
Speaker 1: to run for how many years to get a persuasive result?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, obviously hormones come online and you'd have
Speaker 3: to do too much to meet it. Run this through puberty,
Speaker 3: but I would absolutely run it through age five.
Speaker 1: Just think if Benison's right, nature triumphs over nurture. So
Speaker 1: you're lying in your shrink's couch and the shrink is
Speaker 1: making you think it's all your mother's fault, which is
Speaker 1: what they do, of course, only now you get to say, actually,
Speaker 1: there was this cool experiment where they chopped off the
Speaker 1: penises of little boys and found out mom doesn't matter
Speaker 1: that much. You have I shocked your delicate sensibilities. Just wait,
Speaker 1: We've got four more experiments to go after the break. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back on to our next impossible, possibly unethical, but
Speaker 1: super interesting and useful experiment, the magic of New York
Speaker 1: University psychologist Adam Alter. I had a lot of internal
Speaker 1: debate about whether to include this one, because Adam happens
Speaker 1: to be a very good friend of mine, so I
Speaker 1: worried it would look like favoritism. But then I thought
Speaker 1: back to the first six seasons of revisionist history and
Speaker 1: decided it's a little late in the day to be
Speaker 1: raising journalistic standards.
Speaker 6: Kidding, Okay, So what I want to do is I
Speaker 6: want to go to every hospital in the country, every
Speaker 6: maternity ward, and when every baby is born, some person
Speaker 6: randomly walks around and puts a little sticker on the
Speaker 6: baby's forehead, and the sticker determines which condition the child
Speaker 6: will be in for the first let's say, fifty years
Speaker 6: of life.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, no, you have a magical I'll be modest
Speaker 1: about it. You have a magic wand you're allowed to
Speaker 1: fifty okay, five, zero, fifty.
Speaker 6: It's a fifty year experiment. And what we're going to
Speaker 6: do is based on the color of the sticker, We're
Speaker 6: going to assign kids to different conditions of exposure to
Speaker 6: screens and social media, and we're going to track their
Speaker 6: progress across the lifespan, across those fifty years or even longer.
Speaker 1: Alter wants to do this because he points out that
Speaker 1: we basically have no idea what the long term effects
Speaker 1: of screen time and social media are. Hence the Alter
Speaker 1: screen test.
Speaker 6: There are two camps right now. There's a camp that
Speaker 6: thinks that social media screens all the concerns about those
Speaker 6: are moral panic, there's nothing to be concerned about. And
Speaker 6: then there's another camp that thinks this is really a
Speaker 6: serious concern.
Speaker 1: What are all the things we're looking for?
Speaker 6: The thing that I want to know, number one is
Speaker 6: is it bad for your well being? Are you less happy?
Speaker 6: Do you have a less meaningful life. Are you less
Speaker 6: connected to other people if you have access to screens
Speaker 6: throughout your life? And how much is a problem? Is
Speaker 6: one hour a day? Okay? Is three hours? Okay? Is five?
Speaker 6: I'm sure there's a point at which it becomes problematic.
Speaker 6: There's some evidence that your ability to distinguish subtle facial
Speaker 6: cues that show, say, the difference between fear and sadness
Speaker 6: comes from spending a lot of time as a kid,
Speaker 6: as a very young kid, looking at people face to face.
Speaker 6: So I would like to know do kids who spend
Speaker 6: a huge amount of time in front of screens never
Speaker 6: develop those capacities? Is there a critical period where if
Speaker 6: you don't develop them young, it becomes very hard to
Speaker 6: develop them later on. And I think there's some evidence
Speaker 6: to suggest that the ability to tell, for example, to
Speaker 6: get a sense of the effects of your actions on
Speaker 6: other people seems really important. So as a little kid
Speaker 6: you take another kid's toy, that kid bops you on
Speaker 6: the head and says, don't do that. That's really important
Speaker 6: to learn. And I think to the extent you're spending
Speaker 6: a huge amount of time on screens, the feedback you
Speaker 6: get when you do social things is low fidelity, it's
Speaker 6: slow to arrive, it's not physical, and so I think
Speaker 6: these kids are going to learn social things less quickly,
Speaker 6: and I think that might be problematic as well. So
Speaker 6: that's the early part of life as we get older.
Speaker 6: I mean, you just have to talk to parents of
Speaker 6: teens and even to the teens themselves, and they'll tell
Speaker 6: you I am less happy because I have access to
Speaker 6: social media. A lot of teens will tell you this,
Speaker 6: and their parents will say the same, And so I'd
Speaker 6: like a sort of harder edged way to measure that.
Speaker 6: What does that exactly mean? And is it because you're
Speaker 6: exposed to the best one percent of everyone else life
Speaker 6: that you become less happy or is there something else
Speaker 6: going on? So those are the kinds of questions that
Speaker 6: I'd want to know about teens in particular.
Speaker 1: What's interesting about Adam Alter's magic wand is that it
Speaker 1: runs counter to the penis test. The penis test has
Speaker 1: the potential to absolve parents of all blame. Alter's experiment
Speaker 1: has the potential to make you feel really, really bad
Speaker 1: about a decision you made for your children. There's no
Speaker 1: middle ground with magic wands. There was only euphoria on
Speaker 1: the one hand and a mountain of guilt on the other.
Speaker 1: This reminds me oddly love of my own childhood because
Speaker 1: I was the only child in my primary school without
Speaker 1: was that the only one, one of the only ones
Speaker 1: without television? Right, So I was the child who was
Speaker 1: listening to these conversations about things that I had never
Speaker 1: heard of, these television shows which meant nothing to me.
Speaker 1: Who the pattern of my days was complete different for
Speaker 1: everybody else's. So I sort of get how that works,
Speaker 1: and just see how I turned out needlessly provocative, irrationally
Speaker 1: obsessed with running a delightful podcast host. You see what
Speaker 1: I'm saying? Was it because I didn't watch television until
Speaker 1: I went to college? We just don't know. You know,
Speaker 1: what we need to give them are old school blackberries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's a phone, it's email, and that's it, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we're basically talking about creating a BlackBerry generation alongside
Speaker 1: an iPhone generation, and we're controlling, we're controlling for the
Speaker 1: nature of their phone and observing the outcome. Yes, no
Speaker 1: one is happier, by the way, with an experiment that
Speaker 1: brings back the BlackBerry. BlackBerry, as I'm constantly reminding people,
Speaker 1: was made of my hometown. My tagline on my old
Speaker 1: BlackBerry emails was there's no school like old school. Oh man,
Speaker 1: I missed the simple pleasures driving down the highway rocking
Speaker 1: out to the litist Nirvana album on my CD player
Speaker 1: while strolling through my emails on my BlackBerry with my
Speaker 1: free hand.
Speaker 6: My son started kindergarten. He's five, and for the first
Speaker 6: time he got an iPad to take home. All of
Speaker 6: his little friends have got these screens, and so they
Speaker 6: talk about the things they do on the screens at
Speaker 6: the end of the day. And I think that's a
Speaker 6: completely different thing. How it's changed the way he's interacting
Speaker 6: with all these little kids versus what it's like to
Speaker 6: get him off the screen at the end of the day.
Speaker 6: I think both are interesting questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, wait, I can't believe that in the middle
Speaker 1: of you imagining this magic wand experiment involving limited access
Speaker 1: to screens of social.
Speaker 6: Media, your own son is being given and I, yeah, well,
Speaker 6: we had no say. This is what schools do today,
Speaker 6: They give kids iPads. Unfortunately.
Speaker 1: Okay, we have the penis test, we have the altar
Speaker 1: screen test. Next up. Nancy Siegel, who teaches a cal
Speaker 1: State Fullerton and studies what she calls scientific treasures. Twins.
Speaker 1: Twins are catnip for psychologists, and no one loves a
Speaker 1: twin more than Nancy Siegel, who is also herself a twin. Now,
Speaker 1: you might say, aren't identical twins in effect nature's magic
Speaker 1: wand a little bit of genetic wizardry that lets us
Speaker 1: see things we would never know about otherwise. Absolutely in fact,
Speaker 1: and this will require a little digression. Sigull once uncovered
Speaker 1: a totally bananas real life twins case study. Two sets
Speaker 1: of twins born a day apart in Columbia.
Speaker 7: One pair born in the lively capital city of Bogata,
Speaker 7: the other born one hundred and ten miles to the north,
Speaker 7: in the most rural area with no running water, no
Speaker 7: flush toilets, no nothing. One little boys up north was
Speaker 7: very sick, so at day one or two, his grandmother
Speaker 7: brought him to the better hospital in Bogata where he
Speaker 7: was switched with one of the twins and the other pair.
Speaker 7: So this is an extraordinary double switch case. So you
Speaker 7: had two sets of boys who were identical twins to
Speaker 7: somebody else, with growing up together thinking they were fraternal twins.
Speaker 7: So you can look at the unrelated pair. This is
Speaker 7: somebody that that person A was raised with, so twin
Speaker 7: B was unrelated to him. But then remember, twin B
Speaker 7: has an identical brother somewhere else that person A was
Speaker 7: never raised with. So how similar are you to somebody
Speaker 7: you're unrelated to but raised with, but unrelated to and
Speaker 7: not raised with. So that was that was something I
Speaker 7: addressed in my book because I had that, and that
Speaker 7: was completely unique, completely.
Speaker 1: The Bogata Twins. How did they discover the error? Oh?
Speaker 7: Good question. The boys up in the north moved down
Speaker 7: to Bogata to make a living. They became butchers in
Speaker 7: a local supermarket. Actually, Bogata is a big city. It
Speaker 7: wasn't so local. But a friend of one of the
Speaker 7: other guys who was raised there went into the butcher's
Speaker 7: shop and she thought, hoor hey, what are you doing here?
Speaker 7: And he said, my name is William and she could
Speaker 7: hardly believe it. So she took a picture of Williams
Speaker 7: showed it to her friend, hora hey, and Hojorgey, of
Speaker 7: course it's a twin, right, he thinks he's a twin
Speaker 7: to the sky Carlos. And anyway, they sat on it
Speaker 7: for a while But then Porgey went online and he
Speaker 7: saw himself in clothes he knew he didn't own, and
Speaker 7: he saw someone next to this guy who looked just
Speaker 7: like his twin brother, only wasn't his twin brother. And
Speaker 7: they met, they got together, and of course they were
Speaker 7: all in shock, particularly because the one guy who was
Speaker 7: raised in the city knew that if things had gone right,
Speaker 7: he who had been raised in a very rural area
Speaker 7: and he's someone who enjoyed the city. And the guy
Speaker 7: up in the north, who should have been raised in
Speaker 7: Bogata was desperate for education, wanted to learn, and had
Speaker 7: no opportunities, never went past the fifth grade. So there
Speaker 7: were some tensions in the beginning. But actually I will
Speaker 7: say that these four boys are the most gracious and
Speaker 7: loving of any of the switch to birth families I've encountered.
Speaker 7: They call themselves a group of four. They make decisions together,
Speaker 7: and any differences they had, I mean, it was not
Speaker 7: their fault. These things just happen. Sometimes they get along beautifully. Now,
Speaker 7: all for all combinations of twinsally incredible story.
Speaker 1: Now could you imagine a magic wand replication of that
Speaker 1: real life experiment? Sure, but Siegel has a a bigger idea.
Speaker 7: This is a new buzzword in the twin world. Biracial twins.
Speaker 7: What are they? They come about naturally when an interracial
Speaker 7: couple marries and has children. So let's say you have
Speaker 7: a Caucasian mother and an African American father, so the
Speaker 7: children are really both biracial, but given the way that
Speaker 7: the genes segregate, one child looks very Caucasian and one
Speaker 7: child looks very African American. Now these are fraternal twins,
Speaker 7: so you're not controlling for the genes. What I would
Speaker 7: like to do, if I could, would be to have
Speaker 7: a set of identical twins and have them look exactly
Speaker 7: the same, except that one would look Caucasian and one
Speaker 7: would look African American, or one would look Asian and
Speaker 7: one would look Hispanic. But still raise them together and
Speaker 7: just see what their different life experiences are like and
Speaker 7: how that would impact in their development. And I got
Speaker 7: this idea because I've had fraternal twins in my classes
Speaker 7: at the university. Who are these biracial fraternal twins, And
Speaker 7: they've told me they have very different life experiences. But again,
Speaker 7: you're not controlling for the genes. So if you had
Speaker 7: monopsychotic or identical twins like this. I think it would
Speaker 7: really show us in a new way. And this is
Speaker 7: what information we don't have so well.
Speaker 1: The magic wand we have to waive here is to
Speaker 1: take identical twins and make them not identical in their
Speaker 1: skin color exactly. We have the twins dressed the same,
Speaker 1: eat the same go to the same schools, same summer camps,
Speaker 1: play on the same soccer teams, and do that for
Speaker 1: hundreds of pairs of twins from thousands of different families, rich, poor,
Speaker 1: the Southern United States, the Midwest country city, And after
Speaker 1: thirty or forty years, we gather them together in a
Speaker 1: big convention center and have them go up on stage
Speaker 1: one period of time and talk about all the experiences
Speaker 1: they shared as almost identical twins, What was same, what
Speaker 1: exactly was different? Who wouldn't want to be in the
Speaker 1: audience for that, because suddenly we would have a very
Speaker 1: different conversation about things like discrimination. I have to say, though,
Speaker 1: that of all these magic wands so far, this one
Speaker 1: is the hardest, the cruelest. Yes, it would teach us
Speaker 1: a lot, but I couldn't help thinking of my own mother,
Speaker 1: who was an identical twin. She and her sister went
Speaker 1: to college in England from Jamaica in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: What if my aunt had been white? What would it
Speaker 1: have meant for their relationship? If suddenly the person whom
Speaker 1: my mother had shared everything with for the first twenty
Speaker 1: years of her life was suddenly on the other side
Speaker 1: of the racial fence at a time and a place
Speaker 1: when the racial fences were really high. It's too much
Speaker 1: to think about. But that's why a magic wand is
Speaker 1: sometimes a powerful thing. Siegel had so many ideas. She
Speaker 1: described a magical wand where identical twins'll be born twenty
Speaker 1: five years apart, same genes, different generations. Think of all
Speaker 1: the things you could do once you suspend this little
Speaker 1: law of nature. We could go back to Adam Alter's
Speaker 1: screen test, because the perfect way to do his BlackBerry
Speaker 1: versus iPhone experiment, now that I think about it, is
Speaker 1: with massive numbers of identical twins, same genes, different cell phones.
Speaker 1: Now imagine we place those twins in different technological eras.
Speaker 1: The first set born in nineteen eighty who grew up
Speaker 1: without Instagram or Twitter, and another identical set born the
Speaker 1: year the iPhone came out. Two thousand and seven, and
Speaker 1: who grew up under the long dark shadow of Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1: What do we learn from that? We learn everything. I
Speaker 1: just realized I gave you two or was it three
Speaker 1: Magic one twin studies for the price of one. That's
Speaker 1: how we roll here at Revision's history. We've done the
Speaker 1: penis test, iPhone versus BlackBerry, multi racial twin studies, and
Speaker 1: now the magic wand has been passed. Stella Volpi a
Speaker 1: nutritionist and exercise physiologist at Virginia Tech University.
Speaker 8: How did you get to me? Because can I just
Speaker 8: tell you?
Speaker 2: I see this email from Malcolm Gladwell in my inbox,
Speaker 2: and I was at a conference and I said to
Speaker 2: my friend, Okay, this is real.
Speaker 8: I think this is the real Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is the real Malcolm Gladwell. And Stellivolpi's experiment
Speaker 1: was my very favorite. Her premise is this, Americans are
Speaker 1: getting less and less healthy. We need to try new
Speaker 1: strategies to change that. So for her Magic Wand, she
Speaker 1: divides the United States in half. One half is the
Speaker 1: control group, which continues life as ever, eating Dorito's and
Speaker 1: watching Netflix. Over the other half of the country, those
Speaker 1: in the treatment condition. Volpi waves her magic wand and
Speaker 1: gets to work making all kinds of subtle and nuts
Speaker 1: of subtle changes right now. So much of our focus
Speaker 1: when it comes to getting people to improve their health
Speaker 1: behaviors is to tell them what to do and instruct
Speaker 1: them and cajole them and such. But you're talking about
Speaker 1: a series of interventions in their built environment. Should we
Speaker 1: just do it and not say anything?
Speaker 6: Yes?
Speaker 8: I did that actually in a dining hall at a university.
Speaker 8: Oh really, we changed the portion sizes. We decrease the
Speaker 8: portion sizes. The students didn't know.
Speaker 1: Turns out it worked the students instead of Olpi's stealth
Speaker 1: small portion cafeteria didn't gain the freshman fifteen, The students
Speaker 1: in the control group did. And you didn't tell them
Speaker 1: that you were decreasing the portion size.
Speaker 8: We didn't.
Speaker 1: Now did the students any of them suspect what was
Speaker 1: going on? You know?
Speaker 2: They didn't because that and I really give credit to
Speaker 2: the food service employees. Students didn't quite know that the
Speaker 2: pizza was cut a little bit smaller, or that the
Speaker 2: cake was cut in like, instead of eighty four slices,
Speaker 2: there were ninety six. So this is what we had
Speaker 2: to work with the food service folks to do and
Speaker 2: they were amazing.
Speaker 1: So Volpi's magic wand experiment is also a stealth operation.
Speaker 1: If you're in the experimental half of the country, you
Speaker 1: wake up one morning and you find a lot of
Speaker 1: the elevators are gone. What's your elevators threshold? So I
Speaker 1: can if I live in Manhattan in a twenty store building,
Speaker 1: You're not going to make me walk up. But what's
Speaker 1: the point at which I get to use in elevator
Speaker 1: if I'm otherwise unencumbered? Right? Three stories?
Speaker 8: Poor, I'm going to say six stories.
Speaker 1: She wants to swap out hard chairs and offices for
Speaker 1: bouncy balls, give kids standing desks in the classroom, put
Speaker 1: a quarter mile between a parking lot and the building
Speaker 1: it serves, give grocery stores a makeover. Yeah wait, Stelle,
Speaker 1: I just had a good idea. This is going to
Speaker 1: My idea is going to uh is going to link
Speaker 1: two of your things. Okay, your your grocery store and
Speaker 1: your stairs. Idea? What about this? In the in the
Speaker 1: treatment condition, grocery stores can still carry whatever they want
Speaker 1: to carry, but everything that Stella deems to be unhealthy
Speaker 1: is now on the on a third floor of the
Speaker 1: grocery store. If you want a chocolate bar, if you
Speaker 1: want cheerios, you're going to walk up two flights to
Speaker 1: get them.
Speaker 8: Okay, that is so brilliant, Thank you. I love that.
Speaker 1: So we can do that, right, we can do that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we could wave our magic one. Now, think
Speaker 1: about how much we could learn from Stella Volpi's idea.
Speaker 1: Maybe the people without the elevators and with the parking
Speaker 1: lots down the street rise up in protest. Maybe they
Speaker 1: would all move to the other half of the country
Speaker 1: in a huff. That would tell us something, tell us
Speaker 1: to give up. But maybe they just shrug and get
Speaker 1: used to it. Or maybe Stella Volpi's treatment half of
Speaker 1: the country gets so fit and happy and tough minded
Speaker 1: that the slacker half gets envious and competitive and starts
Speaker 1: making the same changes in their world. Or maybe nobody
Speaker 1: wants to hire the slacker half, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden there's a wave of workforce discrimination suits against the
Speaker 1: slacker half for being slackers, and the Supreme Court has
Speaker 1: to weigh in in Slacker vi Vulpi. The point is,
Speaker 1: right now, we're getting nowhere, insisting on trying to educate
Speaker 1: and persuade and create awareness. Maybe it's time for us
Speaker 1: to admit that all this talking does nothing. We just
Speaker 1: need to do stuff. I realized my school in Canada
Speaker 1: did a version of this. It's a slightly cruel version
Speaker 1: of this, but this is Canada in the seventies. So
Speaker 1: the bus would dropped me off at my school and
Speaker 1: all the other kids from my bus route at eight
Speaker 1: thirty five in the morning. Okay, school starts nine in
Speaker 1: my little town. From eight thirty five to nine, the
Speaker 1: doors to the school were locked, so you had twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes of enforced playtime. Now, I will point it
Speaker 1: to you. It's Canada. It's like twenty below to this day.
Speaker 1: I remember, you know I'm skinny. I'm a little skinny,
Speaker 1: Like the only way to stay wanted is to run
Speaker 1: around like a madman for twenty five minutes. It was like,
Speaker 1: it's basically put a gun to our head and said
Speaker 1: you you know, if you want to you can. You
Speaker 1: can just stand there, but you'll you'll get prostpited. Yep.
Speaker 1: See this belongs in the in the treatment condition. Do
Speaker 1: you know how long winter last in Ontario? Like four months?
Speaker 1: For four months, I froze to death. Every single morning,
Speaker 1: and look.
Speaker 8: And look look at the character it built in you? Right,
Speaker 8: good character?
Speaker 1: Absolutely? I have am I complaining now? The penis swamp
Speaker 1: iPhone versus BlackBerry by Racial Twins Slacker v Volpi. How
Speaker 1: is the world not a better place if we could
Speaker 1: learn from those four experiments? But wait, I know what
Speaker 1: you're thinking, Malcolm. You promised us five magic ones. Where's
Speaker 1: the fifth? The fifth, my friends, is so massive and
Speaker 1: wonky and random that I felt it deserved an episode
Speaker 1: all to itself.
Speaker 2: We did have to really put on a lot of
Speaker 2: gear to get in there for food safety reasons.
Speaker 1: I think that's in our next episode. Our experiment of
Speaker 1: a season is just getting started. You wearing like hard.
Speaker 8: Hats, gloves, hard jackets, out caps for our hair that
Speaker 8: didn't really work for either of us.
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Leeman Gestu, and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, with Tolly Emlin and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is mil LaBelle.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Karra, mastering by Flon Williams, and
Speaker 1: engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact checking by Keishaw Williams. I'm
Speaker 1: Malcolm Blawa,