Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello everyone, I'm backed with the Visionist Histories ombusman
Speaker 1: Mariya Kanikova. This is our third round and she's here
Speaker 1: to grill me on the six part series we just
Speaker 1: wrapped up on Guns in America. This is a mail
Speaker 1: bag in the truest sense of the word. We received
Speaker 1: an unprecedented amount of listener mail in this series, and
Speaker 1: Maria's come prepared with a whole slew of your feedback.
Speaker 1: Some nice, that's so nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I am surprised at how much nice we got,
Speaker 2: considering the subject of this particular season of Revisionist History.
Speaker 2: To be perfectly honest, so let's start with something really
Speaker 2: nice and positive.
Speaker 1: Get the good stuff up takes.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, you know the praise sound which, right, that's
Speaker 2: the feedback sandwich. But you had a relatively light episode
Speaker 2: in there about gun smoke, and someone wrote in being
Speaker 2: a little bit worried that you got the murder rate
Speaker 2: wrong when you calculated the murders, which I bring this, yes,
Speaker 2: all right, So basically you had this episode where you
Speaker 2: talked about the show that ran for how many years?
Speaker 2: Twenty years, right, almost twenty years, and your producer Tali
Speaker 2: Emlin actually went through several seasons of it and calculated
Speaker 2: what the murder rate would be, and you found that
Speaker 2: it would actually, even though it's insane, it is actually
Speaker 2: eighty times higher than what it would be in any
Speaker 2: city in the United States today. Yes, but it turns
Speaker 2: out that you might have actually undercounted. According to this listener.
Speaker 2: So here's the letter, the murder rate in Dodge City
Speaker 2: was even worse than you calculated. You compared a season
Speaker 2: of the show to an annual rate of modern day cities. However,
Speaker 2: each episode probably takes place in a single day or
Speaker 2: so the entire season probably only covered a couple months
Speaker 2: of time. That would make the annual rate five to
Speaker 2: six times worse than you already calculated. So what do
Speaker 2: we think about that?
Speaker 1: Okay, I get where this critique is coming from. I
Speaker 1: think some merit to it. I would point out, though,
Speaker 1: when I asked Ally about this, she says, if you
Speaker 1: look at the first two seasons, so we have an
Speaker 1: episode said in summer, we have one in winter, we
Speaker 1: have one on Christmas, We've got a blizzard. So they
Speaker 1: are kind of implying that what we're seeing unfolding in
Speaker 1: the mythical Dodge City is real passage of time and
Speaker 1: not a series of episodes. And also, by the way,
Speaker 1: the actors get older, right, so you know when they
Speaker 1: when this starts, Matt Dilan's a young man. When Gun
Speaker 1: Smoke ins, Matt Dylan is no longer a young man.
Speaker 1: So maybe the best way to say this is that,
Speaker 1: you know, I think we should probably split the difference
Speaker 1: and say that we were being excessively generous to the
Speaker 1: fictional Dodge City in suggesting that their murder rate was
Speaker 1: only eighty times higher than the next highest American city.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, maybe it should. The accurate number
Speaker 1: is one sixty.
Speaker 2: That is absolutely crazy. By the way, I have never
Speaker 2: seen gun Smoke, and I had to look it up.
Speaker 2: The first time I heard of it was on your show.
Speaker 1: And I act you get for growing up in Russia.
Speaker 2: This is true. But I also had this like brain
Speaker 2: fart moment where Matt Dylan. I was like, wait, but
Speaker 2: Matt Dylan isn't that old.
Speaker 1: Oh you would think of the other man.
Speaker 2: I was thinking of the actor Matt Dylan, and so
Speaker 2: for a second I was like, wait, how is Matt
Speaker 2: Dylan in this show gun Smoke? And it was just
Speaker 2: like this this total fictional universe that I created in
Speaker 2: my head before I looked up what it actually was.
Speaker 1: Years ago, maybe thirty thirty, maybe twenty five. I'm at
Speaker 1: a party in the West Village and I realized Matt
Speaker 1: Dillon is there when he was really at the height
Speaker 1: of his fame. He's still famous, but he was very
Speaker 1: I ingratiated myself with him and spent a delightful evening.
Speaker 1: It went well past evening, I said, I spent a
Speaker 1: delightful evening in his company, and I can testify that
Speaker 1: he is everybody's charming in real life as he would
Speaker 1: as the movies was jest he would be.
Speaker 2: That's wonderful. Was he named after the show?
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's obvious he was, right, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: he kind of does. He looks not unlike the the
Speaker 1: fictional Matt Dill. Maybe his parents had a notion, but
Speaker 1: who knows either that or like just some agent gave
Speaker 1: it to him when he was nineteen years old.
Speaker 2: Well, I think I think that's amazing. And you know,
Speaker 2: to my credit, I also did not have a TV
Speaker 2: growing up, so notice, so you know, ah, we have
Speaker 2: that in common. So we did have this one lighthearted
Speaker 2: reader's email, but every other email, or at least the
Speaker 2: vast majority, were about one single episode. Do you want
Speaker 2: to care to guess which one it was?
Speaker 1: I'm going to guess it was the assault rifle.
Speaker 2: Episode, and you would have guessed correctly, it's that episode.
Speaker 1: Before you go, before you get into the let me
Speaker 1: just say that there are things you do as journalists,
Speaker 1: and you know this well, that are deliberate provocations. You
Speaker 1: do them precisely because you do think you are running
Speaker 1: counter to people's expectations and preconceptions. This would be one
Speaker 1: of those. I was poking the bear, and I guess
Speaker 1: the bear. The bear was postfair, was duly boked.
Speaker 2: Mission accomplished. So let's get into some of these letters,
Speaker 2: because when you listen to excerpts from them, you start
Speaker 2: realizing that it's as if people listened to two different episodes,
Speaker 2: depending on where they were coming from to begin with
Speaker 2: their own opinions about gun control colored what they heard
Speaker 2: you say and how they experienced your interviews to a
Speaker 2: shocking degree. I mean, actually not shocking. I'm not at
Speaker 2: all shocked, but it's crazy reading these and seeing just
Speaker 2: the opposite responses. So they will write things like, let's
Speaker 2: see the gun rights guy was more genial than the
Speaker 2: gun control guy, but he was just as misleading. All
Speaker 2: he did was smile while he made you look left
Speaker 2: when you should have looked to the right. And then
Speaker 2: they have all of these figures behind that saying that, oh, well,
Speaker 2: they're saying that, you know, he is saying that it
Speaker 2: only takes three seconds to do this, but mass shooters
Speaker 2: are there's going to be so much going on and
Speaker 2: his math is wrong and this is wrong, and that
Speaker 2: is wrong, and they say that you were led astray.
Speaker 2: But then you have someone saying, Malcolm, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: so proud of you for finally seeing the light now
Speaker 2: and now I'm quoting. Now, let's remember that the problem
Speaker 2: in America is a murder problem, not a weapon problem.
Speaker 2: So you have two very very different points of view, right,
Speaker 2: and let's talk about that. How can people walk away
Speaker 2: from the same episode, listening to the same data with
Speaker 2: just completely opposite perspectives.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it shouldn't come as a surprise that
Speaker 1: people's when people listen to something that they feel strongly about,
Speaker 1: they have a subjective reading, nor, you know, nor does
Speaker 1: it surprise me now after thirty years of writing books,
Speaker 1: that people don't read or listen to the end. You know,
Speaker 1: I wrote a book called my second book, Blink, was
Speaker 1: a book that looked critically at When I say critically,
Speaker 1: the examine wrote the pros and cons of snap judgments,
Speaker 1: But you had to keep reading. It started out on
Speaker 1: the pros and then as I dug deeper got interested
Speaker 1: in the cons. The number of people who either supported
Speaker 1: or loved that book or hated that book because they
Speaker 1: perceived it as being a book about celebrating snap judgments
Speaker 1: was limitless. You know, anytime you tell a story that
Speaker 1: has a twist, you're going to leave some portion of
Speaker 1: people along the way. And I think this episode is
Speaker 1: a proof of that. Like basically where I end up
Speaker 1: remember is you know, is a gun is a gun
Speaker 1: as a gun. Parsing these these distinctions between gun is
Speaker 1: a pointless exercise that leads you away from the central issue,
Speaker 1: which is that having lots of lethal weapons floating around
Speaker 1: in a society is not the best idea.
Speaker 2: Right. Obviously, when you were doing these interviews, you you
Speaker 2: know you want to do the interview, and you never
Speaker 2: want to You don't want to antagonize a person you're interviewing.
Speaker 2: In the middle of the interview, especially when they're holding
Speaker 2: a gun. But I'm actually just curious from a personal perspective,
Speaker 2: if if you care to comment, were you kind of
Speaker 2: were you persuaded by by these arguments so that it
Speaker 2: actually doesn't make that much of a difference, and that
Speaker 2: you you know that that we should that were barking
Speaker 2: up the wrong tree when we're looking at this guy legislation.
Speaker 1: I was there two persuasive things in the reporting a persuision.
Speaker 1: One was with my gun expert, the guy I've shot
Speaker 1: within North Carolina, Gregg Wallace. And what's persuasive about his
Speaker 1: discussion is not how fast you can shoot a semi
Speaker 1: automatic weapon versus an automatic weapon, although that is the
Speaker 1: thing is relevant. The real core issue he was getting
Speaker 1: at is said assault rifle bands don't ban assault rifles.
Speaker 1: They ban a subcategory of assault rifles which qualify for
Speaker 1: the ban not because they are more lethal, but because
Speaker 1: they have certain cosmetic features that make them unattractive or
Speaker 1: mean looking. Right, Really, what you're getting so's his function
Speaker 1: in the story is to remind us that, look, this
Speaker 1: is a bullshit exercise. You may think that an assault
Speaker 1: rifle ban bands assault rifles it does not. Right, the
Speaker 1: fundamental platform of the AR fifteen remains untouched by these bands, right.
Speaker 1: You can still use the basic weapon, you just can't
Speaker 1: use some of these accessories. That's pointing with the number
Speaker 1: two is it is not a distinction without a difference
Speaker 1: to point out that a semi automatic weapon is not
Speaker 1: the same as an automatic weapon. They are fundamentally different.
Speaker 1: And if people are under the illusion that an assault
Speaker 1: weapon is basically like a machine gun, they're wrong, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's not a trivial mistake.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So a lot of these as I'm reading through on
Speaker 1: this one in this one letter, a lot of them,
Speaker 1: you know, are fussing around in the kind of minor
Speaker 1: details of these distinctions, and it's just like, it's not
Speaker 1: the point. The point is like, what we're setting out
Speaker 1: to do here is not actually what we're doing A
Speaker 1: and B. This brings us to the second persuasive character
Speaker 1: in that the most persuasive character in that episode was
Speaker 1: the er doctor. Yeah, the guy in DC who had
Speaker 1: studied mass shootings and points out that the truly lethal
Speaker 1: weapon in the hands of a mass shooter is a
Speaker 1: handgun and not an assault rifle. And that's because what
Speaker 1: makes a gun lethal is not just a matter of
Speaker 1: its ballistic properties. It's a question of how it's used.
Speaker 1: And there are so many quote unquote advantages to a
Speaker 1: handgun in the way it's used that it makes it,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, a more dangerous weapon
Speaker 1: in a mass shooting. There is a whole kind of
Speaker 1: really weird academic subculture devoted to the analysis of mass shootings,
Speaker 1: and you would be surprised how divergent those findings are
Speaker 1: from a lot of our preconceptions about what happens in
Speaker 1: a mass shooting.
Speaker 2: That's really interesting, and I actually saw that as a
Speaker 2: thread throughout this entire season of Revisionist History, just how
Speaker 2: strong identity politics and our sense of who we are
Speaker 2: and how we define ourselves is when it comes to
Speaker 2: parsing the world and those definitional issues.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the other moment, you know, in the assault Rifle episode,
Speaker 1: you know, it ends with me confronting this this anti
Speaker 1: gun lobbyist, big time opponent of the Second Amendment in Washington,
Speaker 1: and I think the reason he gets very upset, and
Speaker 1: actually we didn't even use the parts of the of
Speaker 1: the conversation where he was most upset, And I think
Speaker 1: One of the reasons he was so upset is that
Speaker 1: I was out flanking him on the left, and I
Speaker 1: was taking a more anti gun position than he was.
Speaker 1: And not only that, in order to outflank him on
Speaker 1: the left, I was using right wing arguments or right
Speaker 1: wing facts. You know that that episode is if you
Speaker 1: think about it structurally, that's what it is. It's taking
Speaker 1: arguments most commonly used on the right to draw a
Speaker 1: highly liberal conclusion. It's just confused. It's just confusing to
Speaker 1: do that.
Speaker 2: Malcolm, you have come a long way from your debating fiasco.
Speaker 1: Don't even get me started. We will be right back
Speaker 1: back more from the mailbag.
Speaker 2: All right, well, let's go back to guns, because I
Speaker 2: do want to talk about some of the other episodes.
Speaker 2: I think that one theme that we haven't touched on,
Speaker 2: but that is, you know, deeply connected to all of everything.
Speaker 2: We have been discussing, the racial and the socioeconomic underpinnings
Speaker 2: of all of this, and the fact that it's kind
Speaker 2: of woven into the fabric of the country. And you know,
Speaker 2: you you talk about in these are different episodes. There's Chicago,
Speaker 2: you know, there's there's DC, There's and you have you
Speaker 2: have Alabama. You have these very different geographically arts of
Speaker 2: the country, urban rural, and yet you have some of
Speaker 2: the exact same reasons why we have still despite all
Speaker 2: of the incredible medical stuff that's happened, and despite how
Speaker 2: many lives are saved now that wouldn't have been saved
Speaker 2: in the past, we still have these huge disparities, and
Speaker 2: we still have people dying who shouldn't be dying because
Speaker 2: either they're the wrong color, or they're in a place
Speaker 2: where they seem like they're the wrong color, or they're
Speaker 2: in a place that's so economically marginalized that you know,
Speaker 2: they can't get to a trauma center, probably because that
Speaker 2: area was the wrong color at some point, and it's
Speaker 2: just it's heartbreaking, but it's still the reality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this reminds me of I think I'm getting this right.
Speaker 1: Something I read years ago about what is the effact
Speaker 1: What is the effect of reading enrichment programs on test
Speaker 1: score gaps between black and white kids? And reading the
Speaker 1: ritual programs increase the testcore gap. They don't decrease it,
Speaker 1: even though they're intended to decrease it. But what they
Speaker 1: do is if you give reading enrichment to someone who
Speaker 1: reads a lot, they're going to reap the most of
Speaker 1: that boost. If you give a reading enrichment to someone
Speaker 1: doesn't read much, they're not going to get much out
Speaker 1: of it because they're not reading to begin with. So
Speaker 1: something that we introduced as a way to narrow the
Speaker 1: gap ends up widening the gap, which is a reminder
Speaker 1: that not all innovations do what we have an assumption.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I think that the purpose of an innovation is
Speaker 1: to shrink the gap between the haves and have nots.
Speaker 1: This is so often violated that it's time we shelve
Speaker 1: that notion and understand that innovations are just energy. You know,
Speaker 1: they can be put to whatever use we want, and
Speaker 1: sometimes what they do is just turbocharge existing inequities. And
Speaker 1: I think Caare is an example of this exact thing.
Speaker 1: That you can't put trauma centers everywhere too expensive. You
Speaker 1: can only put them in places where you can justify
Speaker 1: them economically. And what are those places, Well, those are
Speaker 1: wealthy places. Yeah, So you put them in wealthy places,
Speaker 1: and they have the effect of making the quality of
Speaker 1: healthcare provided in wealthy places, which was already better than
Speaker 1: everyone else everywhere else, even better. Right, So when everyone
Speaker 1: who goes to a hospital gets you to for a
Speaker 1: gun shot dies. We don't notice the difference between good
Speaker 1: hospitals and bad hospitals. But when you put a trauma
Speaker 1: center in one of those places and you don't have
Speaker 1: another one, then you begin to notice it's a huge difference.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I was just at something when we were talking about AI,
Speaker 1: and everyone's you know, we're obviously very excited about the
Speaker 1: possibility that AI will transform all manner of things. It's
Speaker 1: really unclear whether AI lifts all boats equally, closes the
Speaker 1: gap between haves and have nots, or widens the gap.
Speaker 1: Pato halves no idea. Anyone who tells you that they
Speaker 1: know which way it'll go, doesn't you know it was
Speaker 1: fooling you.
Speaker 2: That's that's a very good point. And I mean, if
Speaker 2: I had to bet on one outcome or the other,
Speaker 2: I would say probably it's not going to lift all
Speaker 2: boats equally, just because also who's going to have access
Speaker 2: to AI, right, and who's going to have access to
Speaker 2: the technologies, and who's going to have the time to
Speaker 2: learn how to use them? Yeah, so who knows? Who knows?
Speaker 1: On that one? I'm actually an optimist, good I'm glad. Well,
Speaker 1: at least I'll say this that over time, I would
Speaker 1: expect it to close the gap. Not even so quite explicitly.
Speaker 1: It's obvious to me it lifts all boats. It's obviously
Speaker 1: in the short term, people with access to the technology
Speaker 1: will benefit the most. So I'm interested in making a
Speaker 1: medium to long term I think in medium to long
Speaker 1: term it does not merely lift all boats. If I
Speaker 1: had to put my money on something, I would say
Speaker 1: it would close the gap that the farmer in Bangladesh
Speaker 1: benefits more from AI than the than the factory farmer
Speaker 1: with fifty million dollars in equipment in Iowa.
Speaker 2: I hope you're right.
Speaker 1: These days, I'm only really optimistic about one thing, and
Speaker 1: that's it. Everything else is bad.
Speaker 2: All right, All right, well, well let's cling to that.
Speaker 2: So now back to the optimistic news of the trauma centers.
Speaker 2: But I was one of the things that I am
Speaker 2: curious about is how strongly do you actually agree with
Speaker 2: this idea of moral hazard that you raise in relation
Speaker 2: to the improvements and care, because I don't know if
Speaker 2: I actually buy that.
Speaker 1: You don't buy that. No, So the argument was that
Speaker 1: doctors have become so good at saving lives that it's
Speaker 1: relieve the pressure on the rest of society to do
Speaker 1: something real about the gunman. Exactly that if doctors had
Speaker 1: done nothing over the last fifty years, this is the counterfactual,
Speaker 1: the murder rate would be. We probably have four or
Speaker 1: five times of spending homicides in a given year. Let's
Speaker 1: say we we'd have one hundred thousand homicides as opposed
Speaker 1: to twenty thousand homicides, and at one hundred thousand, the
Speaker 1: current American policy set up, policy positions would be untenable.
Speaker 1: We would jump up and down and say enough stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: do I think that there is some truth in that? Yes. However,
Speaker 1: then I thought, after I'd finished the episode and I
Speaker 1: was writing this next book, I'm working on doing something
Speaker 1: on the opioid crisis, and I realized, Oh, we're at
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty thousand opioid whatever it is, one
Speaker 1: hundred and ten thousand opioid deaths a year and hasn't
Speaker 1: really moved the needle. We don't even talk about it.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: So, and also, opioid deaths are not dissimilar to homicide
Speaker 1: deaths in a sense that it's clustered in various parts
Speaker 1: of the country, various slightly younger age groups. You know,
Speaker 1: the fact that we spend an enormous amount of time
Speaker 1: arguing about mass shootings when mass shootings are what, less
Speaker 1: than one percent of total homicide deaths in a given year,
Speaker 1: and very little time on the remaining ninety nine percent,
Speaker 1: suggests to me that maybe it wouldn't make a difference.
Speaker 1: Maybe the moral hazard thing is just a kind of
Speaker 1: intellectual nicety. The opioid thing would suggest that if it's
Speaker 1: the wrong people dying, really hard to get people upset.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's to be perfectly honest, that's exactly
Speaker 2: what I was thinking when I was listening to this.
Speaker 2: I was saying, I actually think the moral hazard argument
Speaker 2: is bullshit, and that we wouldn't care, and that it's
Speaker 2: just these days, we also are so immune to a
Speaker 2: lot of this stuff where you're just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, I guess more people are dying, and.
Speaker 1: Here's the so here's the let me make a let
Speaker 1: me return, let me do another backflip and say, okay,
Speaker 1: here's here's here's a here's a moral hazard argument, and
Speaker 1: maybe that it's a it's a mechanism argument. So moral
Speaker 1: hazard is as a term is used most frequently in.
Speaker 2: The insurance industry.
Speaker 1: If I ensure you against a risk, I make your
Speaker 1: motivation to avoid that risk, I diminish your class. Example
Speaker 1: would be you live in a flood zone and I
Speaker 1: give you flood insurance, or the federal government you know,
Speaker 1: provides flood insurance. Nobody moves from South Beach. Yep, logically
Speaker 1: you shouldn't live in South Peach. In fact, they're building.
Speaker 1: They built billions of dollars in luxury house against South
Speaker 1: Beach in the last ten years, precisely because the builders
Speaker 1: are and the not not just builders, the purchasers of
Speaker 1: those apartments are reasonably sure that in the event of
Speaker 1: an environmental catastrophe, they will be bailed out by the government.
Speaker 1: So why not why not live in paradise until you
Speaker 1: get there? The answer to that is that just because
Speaker 1: one institution or body insures against risk and provides a
Speaker 1: mechanism for moral hazard doesn't mean everybody does. So what's
Speaker 1: happening in Miami is that, sure, if the hurricane wipes
Speaker 1: out your house, the Feds may bail you out, or
Speaker 1: the statement bail you out, But in the meantime, no
Speaker 1: private insurer is writing you up policy, right, So you're
Speaker 1: other self assuring or you're naked. The cycling that's happening
Speaker 1: that I suspect may soon happen, and there are people
Speaker 1: talking about this now, is maybe when you buy a
Speaker 1: house in South Beach, the mortgage rate is three points higher,
Speaker 1: maybe it's ten percent. Maybe the bank just says, you
Speaker 1: know what, why am I writing a mortgage for an
Speaker 1: apartment in South Beach that's the same as an apartment
Speaker 1: on a mountaintop in Maine when the odds that one
Speaker 1: will be swept away in a hurricane are a thousand
Speaker 1: times higher than the other. But really, by a quirk
Speaker 1: of history, we have national mortgage rates. Why are mortgage
Speaker 1: rates national if risks are not equal across what happens
Speaker 1: when we start localizing mortgage rates. That is a way
Speaker 1: in which moral hazard problems can be corrected by the market, right.
Speaker 2: But it's a very different kind of moral hazard. Right.
Speaker 2: It's actually you can't draw this then equivalence there because
Speaker 2: one is a personal choice you're making, right, You're you're
Speaker 2: choosing to buy a house knowing that it'll be fine
Speaker 2: or not. The other one is the way that you're
Speaker 2: looking at policy legislation where you don't think it applies
Speaker 2: to you where oh, well, you know, I'm not the
Speaker 2: one dying, or you know, I think I think it's
Speaker 2: a it's a slightly different decision making calculus. And in
Speaker 2: one case, you're talking about kind of discretionary spending. I
Speaker 2: mean obviously having housing as at discretionary, but you know
Speaker 2: what I mean buying, But buying a condown in South
Speaker 2: Beach certainly is versus you know, life and death and
Speaker 2: policies that are on a more.
Speaker 1: Fundamental global basic Yes, but here my point was I
Speaker 1: should restate my point. My point is that moral hazard
Speaker 1: is a term that applies to any kind of policy
Speaker 1: that removes the kind of necessary pressure for behavioral change. Sure,
Speaker 1: my point is, using the mortgage example, was that just
Speaker 1: because one mechanism removes pressure doesn't mean there are other
Speaker 1: mechanisms that can't exert it. So and you can see
Speaker 1: that with housing. What I'm wondering is, in the case
Speaker 1: of if we had one hundred thousand homicide deaths every year,
Speaker 1: or if we continue to have these one hundred and
Speaker 1: whatever plus, is there another mechanism by which on a
Speaker 1: non effected populations might be affected. So you can imagine
Speaker 1: if you live in downtown San Francisco and you see
Speaker 1: the results on a day to day basis of what
Speaker 1: the opioid crisis is doing to vulnerable communities, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of pressure. Sure, So what if what if I
Speaker 1: imagine that you're the way you think about the opioid
Speaker 1: crisis if you live in downtown San Francisco, it's very
Speaker 1: different than if you lived in Marine County. So what
Speaker 1: happens if Marine County starts to look like downtown San Francisco.
Speaker 1: In other words, there is not it's not absolutely clear
Speaker 1: to me that the kinds of pressures that would change
Speaker 1: people's thinking in a place are always going to be
Speaker 1: confined to downtown San Francisco and downtown LA And right,
Speaker 1: there's a there could be there's a scenario where people
Speaker 1: living in suburban enclaves begin to be confronted with the
Speaker 1: consequences of social policies in a way that they're not
Speaker 1: now right.
Speaker 2: Sure, Sure, I mean I get that argument, and I
Speaker 2: think and I think that that's actually that that's a
Speaker 2: valid argument. But I just don't see, you know, how
Speaker 2: we're going to get without massive horrible things happening to
Speaker 2: the world. How we're going to get Marin County looking
Speaker 2: like downtown San Francisco. It's just a you know, it's
Speaker 2: a it's a nice what if exercise, but but it
Speaker 2: doesn't seem like an actual solution.
Speaker 1: We are going to take a little break and be
Speaker 1: back with some final thoughts.
Speaker 2: So so we had you know, we've talked about a
Speaker 2: lot of problems, and so we had one letter that
Speaker 2: finally turns to the question of okay, so what do
Speaker 2: we do? But here's here's what this letter from South
Speaker 2: Carolina asks. My request is this, I need help with
Speaker 2: the So now, what if Malcolm were in charge of
Speaker 2: this topic, what would he do? Copy Canada's rules, build
Speaker 2: a new hospital in Chicago in a certain gun violence
Speaker 2: prone area. Force all cities to report bullet contact injuries
Speaker 2: and not just fatalities. So Malcolm, you're now in charge
Speaker 2: of this.
Speaker 1: Well all of those things. I mean, I think we
Speaker 1: have to accept rist fall that there's no one there
Speaker 1: is no one thing we can do here. Probably have
Speaker 1: to do twenty things. The big my big of takeaway
Speaker 1: from doing that series was I came away fundamentally disillusioned
Speaker 1: in the power of conventional government approaches to solve the problem.
Speaker 1: I don't. Actually, I was struck in talking to people
Speaker 1: who are on the front lines of this epidemic how
Speaker 1: infrequently people talked about gun control. I mean, I talked
Speaker 1: about in passing, but it is just not The majority
Speaker 1: of gun violence in this country is people to people
Speaker 1: with the legal guns. You can change, you can pass
Speaker 1: all the laws you want. They're not being touched by that.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are little things Washington could do around
Speaker 1: the margin, but just changing the conversation so that we're
Speaker 1: not arguing in the abstract about which law does this
Speaker 1: and which law does that. A couple of seasons ago,
Speaker 1: I did this episode on homelessness and they spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time in Jacksonville, Florida, which has an exemplary
Speaker 1: homelessness program by the way, and someone involved that program said,
Speaker 1: we had this conversation which I didn't use in the episode.
Speaker 1: I've thought about all the time, long time since. She said,
Speaker 1: you know, they do account of their homeless populationship, so
Speaker 1: they have a really really accurate picture going back for years,
Speaker 1: how their population has fluctuated over time. And she said,
Speaker 1: you know, there aren't more homeless in Jacksonville today than
Speaker 1: there were five years ago, in fact is less, but
Speaker 1: they're more visible. And then she went into the long
Speaker 1: discussion of why all the reasons why they might be
Speaker 1: more visible, and it was really interesting to me because
Speaker 1: we do make this mistake where we confuse the severity
Speaker 1: of a problem with the visibility of a problem. And
Speaker 1: the thing that causes pressure is not severity, it's visibility.
Speaker 1: And so when the homeless are visible in Jacksonville, you
Speaker 1: get movement behind it. So now when the problem is
Speaker 1: it's actually small than it used to be in the past,
Speaker 1: but there's urgency now because they're visible, and when it
Speaker 1: was this huge problem that was hidden, there wasn't the
Speaker 1: same kind of So like that distinction so often I
Speaker 1: think allied that distinction between urgency and visibility. So I
Speaker 1: think that what I hope to get from the series
Speaker 1: is not that it pass a law or ban ar
Speaker 1: fifteens or whatever. I think I just wanted to make
Speaker 1: the problem more visible. The last episode is called sin
Speaker 1: is the Failure to Bother to Kill. I'm not so
Speaker 1: interested in what people decide to do to solve the problem,
Speaker 1: because there's a million ways to get it. The problem.
Speaker 1: It's not even just one problem. I'm mainly interested in
Speaker 1: trying to get people to care and to think clearly
Speaker 1: about what they're caring about.
Speaker 2: On that really really happy note, thank you for an
Speaker 2: inspiring and optimistic conversation. By the way, we're probably you know,
Speaker 2: we don't have time. But I loved the Shockley episode.
Speaker 2: I thought it was so much fun and I would
Speaker 2: I hope people listen to the end that last sentence.
Speaker 2: That just what an amazing, amazing reveal. I mean, Freud
Speaker 2: would have just like been been there. Oh Freud's back
Speaker 2: in a big way. Yea, but it was. It was
Speaker 2: such a great episode. I love it. Thank you Ray,
Speaker 2: all right, Thanks Melcom.
Speaker 1: This episode of Revisionist History was produced by Ben A. DAPFH. Haffrey,
Speaker 1: Tali Amlin, and Jacob Smith, editing by seraen Nix, original
Speaker 1: scoring by Luis Kira, mastering by Jake Gorsky, and engineering
Speaker 1: by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Claudma