Malcolm Gladwell Returns Again
02:14:43 Share

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hello. My boyfriend's here today. Yeah, you love him and I love him too. Five-time New York Times bestselling author, the tipping point, Blank Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, and a new book with

which is so tasty. Revenge of the tipping point over stories, super spreaders and the rise of social engineering. This is great because it's the 25th anniversary of the tipping point. And this is kind of the other side of the coin of the tipping point. Yes.

Oh, what a fun conversation. We took lots of digressions, but we also did a good deep dive into the book. We went through the book. Yeah. And we also digressed a lot, which was the dream. And it was very fun. And this answers, this will answer for many people in the previous episodes he's been on. I talk a lot about his playful eyes.

Oh, exactly. People can see it now. You can see it now. The power of his playful eyes. Watch us on YouTube and you can see those eyes bounce. Watch him dance and flirt and captivate and snare. Please enjoy Malcolm Gladwell.

We are supported by Audible. We know you love audio content. Thanks for listening to the show. But if your ears are craving more audio, Audible is the place to go. I probably, in truth, spend more time on Audible than any other place. Any other app? Yeah, I'm listening every night for an hour before bed.

There's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you're searching for the latest bestsellers and new releases, or you want to catch up on a classic title, you can find it all in the Audible app. And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. What are you listening to now? Well, I'm just finishing The World's I See...

by Fei-Fei Li. It's so good and moving, and I love it so much. I'm sad it's ending. Now, listen, new members can try Audible for free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash DAX or text DAX to 500-500. That's audible.com slash DAX or text DAX to 500-500.

We are supported by Echo Dot Kids. Echo Dot Kids is a cute, smart speaker for Alexa made just for kids. Echo Dot Kids automatically filters explicit songs so kids are always ready for dance parties and singing. And parents can rest easy knowing everything is kid-friendly.

By using voice commands, children can interact with the devices without a parent's help, fostering a sense of responsibility and independence. Alexa can help kids develop by establishing healthy morning and bedtime routines, complete with reminders for tasks like brushing teeth, packing school bags, or going to bed on time. I need those now.

Kevin listens to his Echo Dot before bed every night. He does. He'll ask to play Fleet Foxes or Local Natives and just listen to music all night. We have one of these in our house and my family loves it. We've got the super cute little owl design. It's so sweet. Plus, purchase of the device comes with one year of Amazon Kids Plus, a digital subscription designed for kids and adults.

age 3 to 12, to safely learn and explore. Endless fun for kids, peace of mind for parents. Shop the device now at Amazon.com slash Echo Kids. ♪ He's an object expert ♪ ♪ He's an object expert ♪ ♪ He's an object expert ♪

We probably need you to like draw something or maybe write us a note. We could use some of you here because we have like something from Phil Stutz and something from Drew Barrymore. Yeah, it would be really nice to have a Malcolm artifact. Yeah, exactly. I'll do my best. Do you draw? Not well. Well. I do draw. You do draw? I mean, time and time. Then you probably draw well. Do you have a sketchbook?

No. I do not on that level. What I do is I obsessively doodle. If I'm in a meeting, I'm just doodling the whole time. You are. And do people think you're taking notes when you're doodling? I don't think there's any illusion that I'm taking notes. Do you draw people or faces ever? Faces only. Yeah, same. I draw cars in profile. Oh. Which I've done since I was about six, but mostly it's faces. And are they grotesque?

A little. I'm not good enough to make them look like real faces. I'm a poor artist, poor drawer. I disagree. Monica, thank you so much. But I do draw a lot. I have 12 faces I love to draw over and over and over again. You know, there's this guy with a certain nose I like to draw. And then there's an alien who's shaped like a light bulb a little bit, but he has a rectangular mouth. And then I just keep drawing them over the years.

And maybe they just changed a tiny bit. Did you ever see the documentary Crumb? About our Crumb? Yeah. I did not. I heard about it. Oh, I think you would love it. I want to say David Lynch maybe made it or produced it. Yeah, that makes sense. Someone like that. Yeah, it was very inspiring. Those two would be of a piece. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We have so much to talk to you about.

We have so much to talk about. Earlier today, we were recording and Monica said she was prepared to be bored for a good chunk of this. As you and I talked about cars. The car piece, the car piece, not the book piece. And I said, you'll be happy to know I actually don't think there's room for any car stuff. We're not doing the car stuff. There's, well...

Maybe it'll find its way in, hopefully. I'm sure it will make its way in. I thought we decided that we had reached a point in our careers where we could alienate our audiences. We did. We had breakfast recently and we decided that it was time for us to just completely betray the covenant. In my case, I would just end the shows about track and field. By the way...

Who loved your Marion Jones episode more than me? Nobody. Did you like it? I'm a track and field nut. I remember her story, the whole kind of descent. That era of track and field is nuts. What part of it's nuts? I mean, for me, it was that they were rock stars. That was the first time I ever saw track and field people be rock stars in my lifetime. They were rock stars, but drugs invade all.

sports, there's a 10-year stretch of basketball that does not resemble any other 10-year stretch of basketball. It's because there was just so much cocaine. Oh, really? And there's a 10-year stretch of track where everyone's using. I had a friend of mine who was on the Canadian Olympic track and field team in the early 90s, same era. And he would describe to me what it was like at the Olympic Village. I think he was there in 88 in Seoul.

He was just like, you have to understand how crazy everyone was. And like the throwers were all taking massive steroids and it dramatically increases your sexual appetite. Yes. So he's like, that was the crazy thing. They're already a fuck fest without that. They're already. Yes. They're young men and women in their 20s and they are physically in the 99.9th percentile. And they don't see anyone else. They're living in a training camp at all times. It's like they've been in prison. Out of control. You know, all the men have got bacne like you can't believe. Sure, sure.

Telltale signs. So she's part of that. She had the misfortune. The weird thing is if you replay her career 10 times, you just replay it 15 years later, it's totally different. Meaning how competitive she would be now? No, she'd still be the same brilliant athlete, but it's just a pathological era for that sport. Well, weirdly, there's an overstory, if you want to talk about your book.

There is an overstory. Whether it's explicit, you start sensing from above somehow. It's like trickling in. Everyone's doing something. I think it just ends up infiltrating you. I've always been sympathetic to Lance Armstrong because if you know anything about cycling, you know everyone was doing it. He was just the best at it.

doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the worst. When everyone is doing it and you do it because you realize if you don't, you'll never make it to Europe in cycling in that era. But it's different if you're the only one. You've made this sort of elective decision that you're going to break the norm. I find it to be a really fascinating

fun and complex issue. I kind of work backwards from the reality of it. There's some argument to be made, which is like just legalize it because it's proven to be impossible to truly find out who's doing it and who's not. So if we acknowledge they're not doing a great job of exposing the people that are and aren't, then I almost just think you got to kind of just allow it. I mean, I just don't know what else the solution is. And the Lance thing too, that I think changed my tune on him a little bit.

I want to add, I think, what he did in the wake of it, suing people and bringing people down. That part I despise. But to see the doc on him and realize he was winning adult triathlons at like 16 years old. And I go, oh, no, no, this guy has been a cardiovascular phenom his whole life. You couldn't give me what he was on and expect me to do anything. It's like Barry Bonds. The fact that he is literally using steroids at the end of his career does not detract from the fact that

that he's one of the greatest physical talents ever to play baseball. - Yes, and then also when we get into this debate, which we've had a bunch on here, it's like, it's really interesting where we draw the line. Well, Lasik's fine. You can augment your eyes with science and you can take propanenol if you wanna audition for a symphony orchestra. There's numerous ways in which we think it's fine to augment. - Some of this arguments to be a long time ago and I didn't find it persuasive and now I totally find it persuasive.

And that is, you're obviously right. It's all arbitrary. But you have an obligation if you play a sport to follow the sports rules, no matter how crazy they are. Can't break the rules. There's a great definition by someone. Elite sport is the willing acceptance of arbitrary constraints. Ooh. I like that. That's what it is. Yeah. You agree to...

compete within a particular group. The event has certain parameters that you can't decide that the marathon is 24 miles. Without the confinement, it's not a thing. It's actually the rules that make it what it is. So it's like if the rules say you can use this kind of PED, but not this kind of PED, you are obliged to follow that rule, even if it's crazy. Yeah. But then you just got to get somewhat practical about how's it going.

How is it working out? Well, how much to penalize? Yeah. Yes. For people. That too. I mean, the fact that she went to prison is insane. Oh my God. And I understand that she went to prison not for her steroid use, but for the lying. But still, what are we talking about? Why are you even being questioned? Don't even get me started on who does and doesn't go to prison. I know. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Now, okay, back to track and field. So A, did you watch Sprint on Netflix? Funnily enough, even though I am a massive track and field fan, I have not watched Sprint. I feel like I didn't need to watch it because I know all that. Maybe I'm wrong. Oh, so fun. I've done that.

too with things. I think I already know everything they're about to tell me. No, I like to watch things where I legit think at least 90% of the material would be something I haven't heard before. Yes. I loved it because I don't follow it that closely. And then we both watched it prior to the Olympics. And I went into the Olympics with like an enthusiasm for track and field I haven't ever had. They do such a good job at making you care so much about those personal stories. I

I, at least twice a day, spend time on running message boards. There's one called Let's Run. I monitor Let's Run like twice a day. I'm on that site, what's twice? 730 times a year. I have ducked out of crucial meetings. There's something called the Diamond League. There's like 10 of them every year. These elite track meets, they're all in Europe every week through the summer. 2.30 on a Thursday when the Diamond League's on.

I will just come up with an excuse in some crucial meeting, sneak off. I was having some crucial lunch with some guy, really important business lunch. And there was a Diamond League race coming up at like 2.30. And I was like, my stomach's not good. I gotta go to the bathroom. I go into the bathroom, take out my computer, watch 5,000 meters, 13 minutes. Oh my God.

This is unethical. Then go back to the lunch. Wow, I can't believe you're more willing to basically imply you have diarrhea than just say... No, you can't. It was a power lunch with someone way more important than I was. There's no way you can say, I'm blowing this off because there's a race in Lausanne, Switzerland, which I really need to watch right now. Yeah. You needed a really ailing family member or diarrhea. I never said diarrhea. I was. You...

You'd left to that conclusion. I did. No one's thinking ulcer when you say stomach issue. That takes 13 minutes to resolve. If you were filling out like the Hazleton admittance forms for addiction, that could qualify. Like, have you ever completely thrown your career goals in the trash to hide in a bathroom and do your drug choice? Well, no, because as I have learned since I'm now a parent, the number of pastimes that I thought I was addicted to that it turns out I just couldn't.

Give them up. I haven't watched a single football game for the last two seasons. And you were obsessed with it at one point? I used to watch five, six hours of NFL every Sunday and Thursday and Monday night. I haven't watched a single game since my first kid was born. Does that seem off brand for him? Football? Yeah. Yes, on face value. But then I bet there's like some psychological thing to it that you like. Yes. Yes.

I just like watching it. Very simple. I don't believe it. Dex, am I right? You're suspiciously not into sports. You're a Michigan guy. That's outrageous. It's offensive to the Red Wings, the Tigers, the Lions, and U of M. But I got into it. I'm a Fairweather fan. This year when the U of M won it all, I was like, okay, I'm going to watch that game. And then when the Lions were gone. He's owning it at least. But what I make up for it in is that I love sports documentaries.

And I will watch every sports documentary, even about things I don't give a shit about. The stakes are so baked in. Even the sport, I could care less who wins the Heisman or this or that. I get it. You tell me what is the highest mark for this thing. It's wonderful. Did you go to University of Michigan? UCLA. Oh, UCLA, obviously. Can I tell you, since you're a Michigander, I once gave a talk at Michigan, some big student thing. This is the most shameless act of pandering you'll ever heard. So I get up on stage. All the kids are there. A couple thousand.

I don't say anything. I'm wearing a jacket and a tie. I take off my tie. I take off my jacket. Fold it. Put it on the ground. I haven't said a word. I start unbuttoning my shirt. The kids are like, what is going on here? The professors are like, what? Unbutton, unbutton, unbutton. Break open my shirt and I am wearing a University of Michigan t-shirt. Oh.

That's cute. Shameless pandering. But it worked, right? I'm sure it worked. Of course it worked. I've done a couple of USO tours where I went to Afghanistan and they give you a kind of heads up. It's like, listen, here's what works great. Make fun of the food in the DFAC. Make fun of this sergeant's an asshole. They give you the playbook a little bit. People,

love knowing that you see them. Well, they love a culture and they want you to be in their culture. Well, they want a marker that you took the gig seriously enough to find out even a little bit about them. Yeah, it's like a tiny little act of goodwill.

Okay. I am delighted with your new book. I love it. You already know, and I don't even know how we're friends really, because it must be a tiny bit awkward that I'm a super fan of yours. And also we have a friendship. So the fact that I am like the number one proselytizer of your books has to be a tiny bit concerning. And your eyes. Do you know he talks about your eyes every eighth episode? Really? Yeah. You know I do that. I didn't know there was this subtle homoerotic element to

Oh, always, always. I'm not in denial of that at all. I'm a fair weather friend. I have homoerotic lust for you. Did I not say when I saw you today for the first time, Dax, I always forget how huge you are? It's mutual. I got to tell a behind the scenes story. I might have even told on a fact check because what a moment. So our youngest daughter is very Gladwell-esque. She has very playful eyes, troublemaker eyes.

And by luck, when we had breakfast, Kristen texted me, hey, you're at Cafe 101, right? Order me a to-go thing. I'm going to swing by and grab it with Delta. So then in walks Kristen and Delta. And then I said to Delta, look at this man's eyes. Like, take a look at the playfulness in the two of them.

Had a real eye off. It was explosive. I mean, I hope you remember it as well as I do. Your daughter, she's got like both sides charisma packed into one tiny little. Who knows what's going to happen to her. I know. Mass murderer or like Nobel Prize winner. She's so spunky. No, just like wattage. She is. 100%. From day one.

But what a moment. I wish I had a photo of the four eyes all connected. Oh, wow. Because I made her give you some looks too. And she rose to the occasion. She did. I was like, okay, now you've turned around and you notice this. Yeah.

Okay. So I love your books. I don't think I could put them in order. I find myself quoting shit from it still so often and spans the whole range. But it's very, very exciting that you're readdressing the tipping point because it's the 25th anniversary. And I also showed you a text I sent to Kristen. I said, oh my God, I'm reading Malcolm's new book. It's a takedown of his own book. And she said, what? What a king. Yeah.

So I loved it right out of the gates. But I think we should remind people what the premise of Tipping Point is. I think we kind of remember, but you do a really interesting job in the foreword of explaining the era in which you wrote that book 25 years ago and what your point of view was at that time and then how you're 25 years older, you have children, you don't live in the city. And so it's kind of the

- Kind of the reverse side of the coin of Tipping Point, maybe. - When I was in my mid-30s, I wrote my first book called "The Tipping Point." And I was a relatively unknown journalist living in New York City. I wrote for the New Yorker Magazine, just started the New Yorker Magazine.

And I had this idea to write about how epidemics were a wonderful metaphor for understanding how ideas and behavior spread through society. That you could look at the flu or HIV or whatever and use what you know about epidemics of disease to understand why a fashion trend would take off or why crime would fall in New York City. So I wrote this book called The Tipping Point and it was an unexpected success. You said your first readings were like, nobody there. And you're like, okay, this seems good. My first reading was in LA at,

What's the one on Sunset, that bookstore? Book Soup. Okay, that's right. And three people came. How many were on accident? One of them was the mother of a friend of mine. My friend didn't even show up. Okay. She sent her mom. Sent a proxy. I was like, all right, that is what it is. You know, I enjoyed writing the book, but I guess that's the end of it. And that was not the end of it. It just kept on building and building. I'm really glad you had the moment where you thought you had a stinger. I'm all about the fact that

Most of my life is very low stakes. I know people who in their life face decisions or consequences that have real stakes. Raising kids is real stakes. Losing your job is real stakes. Having your house blown up because you're living in a war, that's real stakes. Publishing a book that doesn't do as well as you think is not real stakes. So I wasn't troubled by it. I was like, oh, okay. I mean, the book is really optimistic, which we'll get into how it was so optimistic, but

But in general, are you an optimistic person? Did you have delusions of grandeur before it came out? Do you have any expectations? No, I don't reflect much on the past and I almost never try and pick the future. I know it's going to happen tomorrow and I have forgotten what happened yesterday. That's my perspective on how to live a happy life. I'm so jealous of those three people. They get to say that they were really in on the ground floor.

And one guy just needed to use the bathroom and he's like, fuck, I got to sit through this to justify to now use the bathroom. He's like, hey. To check this race out in Switzerland. I should try and find. I know who one of them was, the mother of my friend. The other two, I just don't know. I should try and find them. That would be a fun episode of Revisionist History. Yeah. Because my hunch is they didn't know what the hell they were stumbling upon. I think they were just walking down the street. They needed to cool off, beat the heat.

So I do that book. The book ends up being quite successful. Yeah, like many, many years on the New York Times. Probably one of the most successful books. With no expectations, how are you processing that experience? I guess, are you able to internalize it and experience it? Or is it like a surreal thing that's happening that you're trying to keep up with and catch up to?

A, I don't really remember. And B, problem is this. If you go into banking, you get a job on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, you become a trader. One day you get a bonus for $5 million. That's why you went into banking. Exactly. To get the bonus. So it's like you've invested heavily in the idea, the expectation you're going to get a big bonus.

You've thought about it. It's validation for what you do. The way you measure success in that world is the size of your bonus. It's all wrapped up. Having a book that sold lots of copies was never on my radar. That's not what I thought writing was about. And that's exactly why I'm curious, because I think for an actor, when they end up in a situation where their movie did really great and everyone in town's talking about it, they had some moment of their life fantasizing about

that. They've done some mental modeling for that and they decided how they would feel on that. And then it either matches or it doesn't. And that's really interesting. But yeah, I would put you in a category of like some of these academics that are getting wildly famous from a podcast. They were nerds in school. There's no way they fantasized about this outcome. I don't know that you can model it all that well, but I think some modeling helps. I think a lot of these people get caught really in a world where they don't know what the fuck they've never been popular.

Yeah. My initial reaction, you'll like this, Dax, was that I bought a car. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew we'd get there. Sob nine five. Ha ha ha ha!

Don't laugh like that. The standard answer, like what's the game show where it's like you got to guess the five most popular answers. For sure, number one is 9-11. Anyone who makes some money who's semi-intellectual, 9-11 is the first car. Not a Swedish car. No, because my dad, until he was in his 60s, he'd only ever had one new car. It was a Saab that he bought in the late 60s. Right after he buys it, he gets his job offer in Canada. So he moved to Canada and he had to leave it behind and it

broke his heart. And then he had nothing but used cars for the next 40 years. Could that be right? The next thing I did was buy my dad a new car. And did you buy him a Saab? I bought him a Volvo. Okay. Swedish still. Of course. He's a professor. When you're a professor, you got to buy a drive-by. They're boxy, but they're good. But that was the only outward expression of it. I just didn't know what to do with this fact. I bought an apartment, but then I thought it was weird. And so I sold it and I went back to living in a

rental walk-up. Oh, really? This is kind of a two-pronged question. Had you ever imagined what it'd be like to be famous or be on 60 Minutes? I think no. No. Had you ever imagined having a lot of money? Yes, but my definition of what a lot of money was, was not actually a lot of money. So did I think I would make more money than my parents? Yes. That was a goal because I saw that they really worried a lot about money. I didn't want to go through that. Money is really interesting. I think money, we're going on many digressions.

As we should. People think we talk about it too much. I think we don't talk about it nearly enough. We don't talk about it in the right way. I think we fail to acknowledge how central it is

to so many crises, people's state of mind, the issues your parents have with money haunt you just as other issues your parents have. All these things, they really, really, really, really matter. And I always find myself in a position sometimes when I'm talking to Kate, for example, my partner, and we'll be talking about someone we know, and she'll give a complicated psychological reading of their position. And my position is...

I just think they're worried about money. Right, right. And it doesn't sound like that explanation measures up. And I totally think it does. My father, he wasn't someone who was anxious, neurotic, insecure. He was deeply religious and in the best possible sense, he thought that God walked with him. He was at the top of his field. He's a mathematician. He worried about money. Money haunted him. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Money is safety. It's my deepest fear, but I talk about it on here all the time. Yeah. It's so interesting in so many ways because yes, it is so powerful. It is on everyone's mind at all times, yet you're not supposed to talk about it. If you talk about it, you're going to build resentment in someone else or it's going to result in you envying somebody like it's so loaded. It's also mythical. It's fake.

and it's real. It's like this very powerful force that's moving through everyone and no one really knows how to talk about it. It's true that it helps. And then it's also true that it's not the fantasy. One of my first powerful childhood memories was

I became convinced that my family was going to go bankrupt when I was like seven or eight or nine, because I would listen to this conversation about money. What I wanted more than anything else in the world was a subscription to Road and Track magazine. So I saved up my allowance money for like months. I counted it all up. I think I had like $9.

And I thought I had enough. And then I went to actually subscribe and realized that I didn't. I remember standing in front of my parents in tears because I had to finally admit to them that I needed a couple of dollars so I could afford road and track. And I did not want to be a burden. Aw.

Already at that age. All I wanted was road and track. Yeah. You know, this is why we're bound. Because my first purchase at a similar age was Automobile Magazine, which had just come out. Oh, look at you going automobile over road and track. It was so glossy and there were so many more exotics and it was premium. Yeah.

The great one is the British one, Car Magazine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have every back issue going back to 1990-something. In my library, look, a huge long row of Car Magazines. That's cool. Oh, are you a hoarder at all? No. We just referenced your episode. Oh, on hoarding. Uh-huh. We talked about it the other day on a fact check. I love that episode. So fascinating. Yeah, that's one of Monty's favorite. I did it right before COVID. I remember I went down to Florida to see the guy who was the expert. I

I wish I had the tape of that conversation. It was fascinating. He devoted his life to finding the humanity in people who whored. And I just thought that was so beautiful in convincing you that something that appeared on the outset and had many of the manifestations of a pathology had at its core something that we ought to value. In a million years, did not think that there was someone who could have injected that much empathy and humanity into that topic. Yeah.

Yeah. We were just talking about this this morning. Have you ever heard the episode of Radio Lab titled Blame? No.

Okay. With the exception of all your work, it is by far, I think both of us, right? Favorite episode of a podcast of all time. It's unreal. And it does three stories within it, but one of them being a man who had adopted a girl and she was a social worker and one of her clients high on crack and a bunch of other mental things ends up killing her. And this man is

initially just kind of wants some answers. And he develops this incredible relationship with this guy who murdered his daughter and went come see him in prison and he became a father figure to him. And I hear that story and I think if anything was ever aspirational to be able to do that, that's the superpower of all superpowers. That is the superpower. That I admire and strive for and could never reach. And there's a few stories within it that are just like that. We're just mind-blowing compassion. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Wait, I'm failing spectacularly at the task of promoting my new book. No, no, well, I'm going to do that for you. I keep digressing. What is it about you two? You guys, you're just dangling digression invitations in front of me. Those are our favorites. Digressions are what we're in it for.

And here's another one. I love it. So you do something so meticulous and we do something that's so jazz improvisational. So I envy what you do. Is there any party that's like, fuck these guys. They sit down and create two hours of content real time. There's no other bullshit. Well, I'm not meticulous in real life because that's the form. Can I digress again? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My whole thing is that when it comes to any kind of creative act, the first thing I want to know are what the constraints are.

constraints are what make it interesting. I am going on Monday to go visit BMW corporate headquarters because I met the marketing guy from BMW and I said, I want to make audio ads for BMW. I want to show you how I think it should be done because I don't like the way cars are advertised on podcasts. So I made a bunch. I'm going to play them for him.

But the reason I tell the story is, what's lovely about that is, I figured they can't be longer than two minutes. I got to tell a two minute story. That's the constraint. In my podcast, the constraint is, we got a lot more time, but there's a formality that people are expecting. For this podcast, the constraint is, it's, can you play jazz in an improv? For me, it's, can you play jazz in an improv?

for whatever it is, an hour and a half, right? That's another kind of- Get ready for three hours. Maybe an hour is a day. Checking my watch. Who we ask guests to take their watches off when they walk to them. You can't do two great minutes and be done. What I love is you understand what the constraint here is. You're not running a sprint. If you gave me that set of constraints, I would find that thrilling. But just that I don't have that set in my life right now. Right. Okay. So

Again, back to tipping point in the forward, you say, look, I wrote this book in this time and it was very hopeful. And maybe also your age is a hopeful age. Yes. At that time. Mid thirties is hopeful. And so the kernel of the original tipping point is, hey, if you look at these things as epidemics and you look at

that very little things can nudge this tidal wave. And basically we can nudge things in a very positive direction. And it's hopeful in that way. And this book's very much like, and P.S., there are bad actors who are also aware of how all this works and they are actively also nudging it in a direction we don't like.

So this is kind of like the antidote to the first book in some way. Is that a fair summation? Yeah, that's why it's called Revenge of the Tipping Point. It's right in the title, actually. It's right in the title. No, no, no. I often do this when I'm writing books. You know, my book, David and Goliath, is a kind of antidote to outliers. My book, Talking to Strangers, is an antidote to Blink. Blink was all about, let's talk about the power of that first initial impression of someone or something. Talking to Strangers was...

Let's be aware that that first thing that we do is almost always wrong or misleading. O'Leary's was, let's talk about how successful people are the beneficiaries of a set of extraordinary advantages they may not always be honest about. And David and Goliath was,

Sometimes advantages don't look like advantages. I'm always going back and thinking about, and I realized with the original Tipping Point book, you write a book and then even without being aware of it, you end up arguing with yourself about what you wrote. In that case for years, I realized I'd been sort of like...

Did I mean that? And so much happens. Like right after I published the original Tipping Point, the internet happens. And then 20 years pass, we go through COVID and all of a sudden everyone's obsessed with epidemics again. That's sort of what led me to want to return to it. It just struck me that there was more to be said. Were you ever scared?

writing this because I started reading it last night. I don't normally read the books that the guest writes because I want to be able to know if things are getting too esoteric. But in your case, it was hard not to. So I started it last night and I was like, I hope no bank robbers are reading this and learning how to do it. Oh,

Like you're giving them sort of a handbook on what to do and how to do it properly. It's like, oh, no, you don't ever think about that. No. Okay. Now that you mention it. I mean, a lot of this book is about how bad actors have taken the principles of social engineering and use them to their own ends. Yes. It's not quite an owner's manual, but how to be an anarchist manifesto that would float around, teach you how to make a pipe bomb.

But I do think there's a couple of times in this book, like the story that frames the book is a different version of the story of how Purdue takes OxyContin from an unknown drug into the most damaging prescription drug in American history. And there, I think it's very useful for us to know how, if you're super evil and very smart, how you can hijack a system for your own purposes. They hijack the system. They realize that if you want to corrupt the medical system, you don't have to corrupt every doctor. You don't even have to corrupt anybody.

99% of doctors. They did that whole thing on the backs of a tiny, tiny fraction of doctors living in very specific parts of the country. That's a really important, chilling thing you need to learn about the world. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited premium wireless. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. Worried about letting someone else pick out the perfect avocado for your perfect impress them on the third date guacamole? Well, good thing Instacart shoppers are as picky as you are. They find ripe avocados like it's their guac on the line. They are milk expiration date detectives.

They bag eggs like the 12 precious pieces of cargo they are. So let Instacart shoppers overthink your groceries so that you can overthink what you'll wear on that third date. Download the Instacart app today to get free delivery on your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply.

With Credit Karma, finding the right credit card for you is easy. Our app analyzes user profiles to suggest personalized recommendations. Visit creditkarma.com today to explore cards tailored to your needs. Credit Karma, simplifying your financial choices.

That part of it is really mind blowing. And they had help. And it's really interesting because we talk about the guilt of them, which is warranted, but you have McKinsey, right? They're the ones that discover this and you're framing the whole thing through the lens of COVID a little bit, where you introduce this one event at a

meeting one person early on in COVID who's a super spreader. And we learned why people are super spreaders. You know, their vocal cords emit some of the saliva when they're dehydrated and all this stuff. And it turns out that one person ultimately was probably responsible for like a million cases or 300,000 originally, but a

Really, one human being resulted in 3 million infections, which is kind of mind-blowing. And then these doctors, they broke up at the time Purdue was spending a fortune having sales representatives all over the country talking to virtually 100,000 doctors. And this bright company, McKinsey, was like, well, let's really put this in a diagram and see what's happening. Well, no.

In decile 10, the doctors are only prescribing it once or not at all in a year. And there's 99,000 doctors in that decile. And if we go all the way up to the top, those doctors of which there's only 384 of them, they're prescribing 300 plus doctors.

So fuck all the money that's being spent on four through 10, and let's just put all the money in three, two, and one. And through that, they end up prescribing millions and millions and millions of tablets. This is this really important principle. I had talked about it in the first tipping point. I called it the law of the few. The idea that when you have an epidemic,

The work of the epidemic is done by a very small group of people. But I don't think I took it far enough. So I return to that idea in this book. And you're right, I start with the COVID example and I say, our assumption in the middle of COVID was that every person who was infected had a roughly equal risk of infecting someone else. Turns out that's just not even remotely true.

The overwhelming majority of people who were infected with COVID did not spread the virus very far at all. The spread comes from a small number of people who, for some reason that we don't entirely understand, but probably just genetic reason, produce a huge amount of COVID.

a huge amount more virus. When they talk, there's way more particles coming out of their mouth than anybody else. And even that, we thought it was coughing and sneezing, but then these aerosolists who study aerosol and particle disbursement, they look at it and they go, oh, no, no, no, no. It's from talking. Just talking. And what happened at this conference? This person got up and fucking lectured to everybody, hosed down the whole room with this. Oh my God, ew, this is,

for an hour and everyone was infected. So the logic of that says, if you want to understand how to stop COVID, we should really have been trying to figure out who these super spreaders are. There's not a lot of them. Make sure they're not out and about when they're infected. Give them a week-long trip somewhere.

It would be cheaper. They just quarantined all those people for like three weeks. It would have been done. We treated everyone the same because we didn't really understand how epidemics work. When you understand how epidemics work, you realize you need to be worried about the one person in a thousand. So that same logic is used by Purdue in creating the opioid crisis. They understand that, wait a minute, all along, we've been taking our sales budget

And we've been trying to reach every doctor in America who prescribes painkillers. Wrong. Why? We're wasting our time. Turns out there's a couple of hundred doctors throughout the country who are prescribing way more OxyContin than anybody else. And more than that, when we send a sales rep to go and see them,

and that sales rep takes into a ball game and buys them a fancy dinner. They just respond to that and write even more prescriptions. - It's so scientific, I gotta add. They have the data in these companies, McKinsey and other people. They're so scientific about it. They basically figure out, okay, you have these doctors. If you see them 25 times a year, they're gonna write less and less prescriptions.

Above 25, they're going to go up and up. Some of these doctors had 300 Insight rep contacts within a couple of years. Like they're nonstop. Every day, some drug company rep is showing up at your door bringing gifts. And they're attractive.

Probably. In the book, it says. It's reasonable to assume that they're attractive. And they're going to see, you know, some guy running a drug mill somewhere on rural Tennessee is getting visited hundreds of times a year by some sales rep and is just writing prescriptions by the boatload.

It's a little bit of an acquittal in a nice way of doctors in general, because even I, who I think I followed it more closely, I am an opiate addict. I was part of this whole thing. I get it. I was under the assumption that most doctors took the marching orders. You know, there was this huge campaign that they convinced people that everyone was under prescribing for pain.

And they had all these pretty complex campaigns. So I was kind of led to believe, oh, I think all the doctors loosened up there. No. And that's not true. 49% of all the opioids prescribed in that period were by 1% of doctors. Yeah. You're right. It does redeem your faith a little bit. I think this is another useful...

thing that comes out of thinking about these as epidemics and realizing that epidemics are propelled by a tiny fraction of the population, you realize that we're much too quick to condemn groups of people and professions. I was doing a podcast in parallel to the book. I was talking to a guy who studies homicides on the West side of Chicago, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. There are 50,000 people on the West side of Chicago. And this guy said, "If you want to understand homicide, who's at risk,

who's doing the dirty work. You're really talking about 400 people. Our assumption would be, if you walk around the West Side of Chicago, you think, oh, we're going to need a massive police presence on every corner and be stopping everyone we can. This guy's saying, you're misunderstanding. It's an epidemic. And epidemics are characterized by the fact that they are propelled by small numbers. And he makes these maps of where homicides fall in the social network of the West Side of Chicago. It's 400 people. Wow.

And they're super spreaders. And those are effectively the super spreaders of violence in that neighborhood. But that liberates you from the idea that, first of all, his point is the neighborhood's not dysfunctional. Don't go calling the West Side of Chicago a hellhole. It's not a hellhole. It is a place where a very small number of people have managed to kind of infect people.

the community with this terrible virus. Yeah, enact mass carnage. Yeah. So the first book, your kind of three laws you use were law of a few, the power of context, and the stickiness factor. But this book has three new concepts. It has the super spreader, and it has...

the overstory. And I want you to talk about the overstory because I was telling Monica this morning, it's like, I read the book. I love the book. I'm going to be quoting chapters from the book for the next decade. I know it. It has the same deliciousness of the first one. Every single story is so interesting. But, but,

But framing it is hard to do because, and I think it's what's unique about your writing and so fun is you're almost like addicted to starting threads. Digressions. I love the digression. You're just leaving these, like you create this little path and then you just stop and then you start a new story and then you stop and you start a new story. And then through the back end of the book, you're starting to just weave all these things together, which makes it a little hard to lay out the book in any kind of linear fashion.

But these concepts, the overstory, the super spreader, and what's the- Group proportions. Group proportions. I'm really interested in this question of how many people does it take to change the character of a group? Yes. And I think one of the examples I loved most, and you've had previous episodes about the power of the token. You're that incredible Sammy Davis. Oh God. Fucking what a beautiful episode. That's one of my favorites. Poor Sammy Davis. Heartbreaking. The

The audio of that roast is just like, oh. Tell people if they haven't heard what that was. Yeah, I did a Revisions History episode about Sammy Davis Jr. is roasted near the end of his life. You know, one of those classic Friars Club roasts. And it's so brutal and it's explicitly racial and he's required to laugh along. It's his role. And you listen to it. I did the whole episode about essentially trying to get people to imagine what he must have been feeling on the inside.

because his whole life was all about pretending to laugh in the face of things that aren't funny. I think almost even worse, as I remember, and I can't remember who the black leader was, but he had also hugged Nixon at one point or did something nice to Nixon. And then he got painted as an Uncle Tom and kind of,

skewered by his folks. I was like, oh my God, this guy lives in a world of white people that are willing to make these horrendous jokes about him. Yeah, what he had to give up. To be the first one in. And it's really predictable what the first one in is going to have to do. They don't really have an option. I've been thinking so much about this question. You have a group of people and an outsider wants to join the group. How the outsider is treated...

is first of all a function of what the majority is like, but more importantly, it's a function of how many outsiders are there joining the group. If you're the first, if you're Sammy Davis Jr. and you're entering a world that is entirely white, you're going to be treated very differently than if you are Dave Chappelle and you're joining a group that by the time you join it, there's lots and lots and lots and lots of fucking people. And legends.

Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, Bernie Mac. Those are very, very different scenarios. And so I wanted to kind of look at that in a variety of different ways.

about how many outsiders does it take before a group changes? Before you get treated like a human being and not just as a token or before you get listened to. I talk a lot about women on corporate boards. For years and years and years, there were no women on corporate boards in America. Under pressure, corporations would put, they'd have nine men on the board. They'd have an opening. They'd put a woman on. So you have one woman

Eight men. What happens when you only have one woman? Is she heard? Does she make a difference? Do they listen to her when she says stuff? Do they treat her like a person? The answer is they don't. It looks like they've changed the composition and created diversity. They haven't. There aren't enough. Really quick, the woman you're interviewing who's saying it is heartbreaking. She's in a room with nine men and someone will enter and the person shakes the hands of

eight of the men and literally walks by her as if she's not there. Well, they think that she's the secretary. Yeah. Or she'll have a point. No one will respond. 15 minutes later, a guy makes the exact same point. Everyone's high-fiving the guy. Yeah. I found all these women who had been on Corporate Boys and were the first one in. It's one of those great moments when you're reporting something, when everyone starts to say the same thing independently and you realize, oh, this is real. Yeah. So I call them up and I say, okay, so you were the first person on, name the Fortune 500 company. What was that like?

Terrible. Were you there when they appointed a second woman to the board? Yes. What was that like? Terrible. Nobody cared. No one listened to us. No one treated us properly. Were you there when they named a third woman to the board? Yes. What happens? Night and day. Really? It's like, really? When you get three out of nine,

Boom. Well, she said, when you're there by yourself, you're the token. When there's another person there, you have a friend. And when there's three of you, you're a block. You're now start acting the way you really want to act. And they can't ignore you. And they suddenly wake up to the fact that you're a human being and they have to take you seriously. And it turns out this phenomenon shows up in tons and tons and tons of different situations where when outsiders reach a certain crucial tipping point in a group, the

The group changes. That's fascinating. And so I just find this so weird and interesting and accords in a certain way with things that I've noticed over the course of my life that I've just never been able to put a finger on what was going on. But again, your specialty is counterintuitive. That's why I like it. I like going into a book and I think this would be logical and intuitive and then turns out no. So also you're telling another story at the same time, which is these experiments they run where there's pairs of people, there's going to be 15 rounds.

And the pairs of people are shown an image of a person and they have to say what name comes into their head. Show a picture of Benjamin Franklin and I go, Steve, you go Mark. By the 15th round, the whole group will be saying the same names. They're that good. It's weird, but it's true. These guys have done hundreds of versions of this. We have a large group of people. Eventually, we'll all agree on what we want to call this face. Within 15 rounds of doing this with a group of 30 people.

And then they do this fascinating thing where they put in antagonists. So the antagonist is there intentionally to not play by those rules, right? So he won't or she won't fall into line. And when we get to that 16th round, when we would both naturally say Ben, he'll throw out Glenn, right? Is it like two people in a room discussing or you're just saying? So what we have is like a computer game. Yeah. We've got pairs of people. I get matched with you. We see a face and I go...

Steve, and you say, Ben. And then we go to the next one, and it's me and Dax, and I say, Steve again. Dax says, George. Right. We keep going. And what eventually happens is we all say Steve. So that's a common phenomenon. We understand that. I'll keep saying Steve. Dax will say Steve because Steve's now in his head. You'll realize, oh, Steve's in the air. Okay, I'll just do Steve. Yeah.

Because you're trying to match. You're trying to figure out what to call this person. You know the goal is for you both to say the same name. This is kind of like a jury. Exactly. And as human beings, we're hardwired to find agreement on those kinds of things. We're social, social, social. So then the experiment, they do this clever thing, which is we take...

Somebody else. Rob comes in. Rob comes in and Rob has been coached. Don't play the game. You're going to call this person Abdul and you're going to say Abdul every single time. Yeah. Right? It's a white face. Yeah. It's not a prototypical Abdul. You're going to say Abdul. Yeah. So Rob just comes in, just says, Abdul, Abdul, Abdul. And the question is, how many people coming in saying Abdul do you need before the whole group starts saying Abdul? Yes. So only one person says Abdul, nothing happens. Right.

Two, nothing happens. Three, nothing happens. But when you get up to a quarter and a third saying Abdul, boom, everyone says Abdul. Every time. Every time. It's the same phenomenon. 25% can infect and completely change

this larger group. That makes no sense. I still don't know why that works. So it's this phenomenon of, it's all to the same thing about how groups are incredibly volatile. There's a point at which a group has to stand up and say, oh, you're real. I don't know, Abdull doesn't make any sense, but Abdull's happening now. They're not going anywhere. I'm on board for Abdull then. But it's the same thing with the women on the board. There's a certain point where a bunch of

Old dudes who play golf every day and who've been in a white male world their entire lives never occurred to them to take women seriously. There's a point where they wake up and they say, oh, there's women on the board. They're human beings. They're as smart as I am or smarter. I have to listen to them. You see this...

In every single field that's had a transformation. I mean, politics, come on. Politics, come on. Yeah. It's really hopeful because A, we actually have some sense of what diversity actually is going to affect any change. One's not.

Tuesday night, you're wasting your time. Have nobody. If you're going to fight one moment, just fucking have all the men stay. But if you really want to do something, you got to go three or you're a joke. That's encouraging. It is. I was thinking about this with black quarterbacks in football. There was a moment when Doug Williams, who's a black quarterback, wins the Super Bowl with the Washington Redskins. Was it the 80s? I can't remember. Or early 90s.

And everyone was like, wow, a black quarterback won the Super Bowl. There was this whole kind of wonderment. And the way in which he was described was weirdly kind of racist. The thought was white quarterbacks could mentally understand the offense and run the offense better.

intellectually. And any black quarterback that slipped through, they must also be a great runner. They got some other capacity. An arm that was just so much stronger. They couldn't be smart at running the offense. There had to be another explanation. But again, you have to understand, there was a whole stretch of time when I was growing up when whenever a black guy played quarterback, the whole conversation was about

The fact that, oh, it's a black guy playing quarterback. So crazy. They couldn't get out of hand. The numbers creep up and creep up and creep up. And then all of a sudden, it just goes away. It just breaks. Now, the best quarterback in the game, maybe one of the best quarterbacks of all time, Patrick Mahomes, no one ever mentions him.

His race. To the degree that I had to go in my head and go like, is he black or white? I mean, literally, I'm not playing along. It's actually a mixed race. No, I didn't know either until he's been hanging out with Taylor Swift. That's how I saw it. That's how he broke through you. Yeah, but no one's talking about it. Thank God. I love that that's your point of connection to Patrick Mahomes. That's my way in. That his teammate is dating. That's right. Do we think that relationship is real, by the way? We've had so many questions about this.

I think it's real. The current debate I have more interest in is, is this document that leaked that supposedly is a breakup contract, is that real or not? I find that a little bit more. What do you think? I think their relationship is real. They might be breaking up. I don't know. But I do think it's real. I think...

He is the only male that she's been around in quite a long time who is not threatened by her. He does not seem threatened. He is so confident. He does not care. He loves how famous she is. Yeah, he loves it. He's a cheerleader. He's coming out on stage in a little top hat.

That's who she needs. Isn't the greatest version of this story that the document is real, but then they fall in love anyway? Oh, that's the movie. This is the movie version. The day they sign. The PR people get together and say, for both of your careers, it's enormously huge if you guys go out for a year now. And they're totally not into each other, but they're like, yeah. Kelsey says, I'm at the end of my career. I don't know what I'm doing after football. This is fantastic. And she's like, I need a relationship. And then...

And the PR guy's like, okay, so it ends September 28th, 2024. This is Can't Buy Me Love, the great Patrick Dempsey movie where he rents the popular girl and then they fall in love. This was a real life version of it. It would be so fantastic. The reason I don't think it's fake is I don't buy the motivation of she needed to be more popular or something. I don't think she was wanting for more. There's no universe where he wouldn't fall in love with her.

Yeah, I know. What's the universe where he wouldn't? Yeah. Yeah, what are his better options than Taylor Swift? Yeah, I agree. Turning his nose up at her. The whole thing is preposterous. Yeah. I think it's just fueled by people who don't like her. The whole suspicion that it's fake. Well, people love to speculate on her. But back to the quarterbacks, there's also this terrible history of

really promising, great college black quarterbacks who when they enter the NFL, they are talked into becoming running backs or whatever their other skill set was. They're like, well, you can't be a quarterback here. You're great, but you need to be a running back or you need to be a receiver. Crazy. I tell the story, the woman who is the first

first American Indian CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Pepsi? Yeah, Pepsi. When she gets appointed CEO, if you go back and you read the news coverage, so this is

20 years ago. It's unbelievable. It's basically, she likes to wear a sari and walk barefoot through the... Meanwhile, she said, I've never worn a sari barefoot. Are you kidding me? Maybe in my office at the end of the day when I take off my heels. And she was singing Wayo by the West Indian performer. Yeah, that she was supposed to be singing Dayo. When she writes her memoir, she's like, what is going on? It's because they couldn't see her as a person. They could only see her as this exotic...

Indian has come to take over an American landmark institution. And then compared to today, when first of all, there's a million Fortune 500 Indian CEOs now, it doesn't even come up. You're left to infer from the name whether or not, oh, maybe they're Indian. I don't have no idea. Unless you're my dad. He likes to make sure everyone knows what's going on with the CEOs. As well he should. As he should, yeah. The way that every single Jamaican in my life, if I talk...

my mother. First of all, it is impossible for me to talk to my mother without her bringing up Kamala Harris. Yes. By the way, same. There's never been a Jamaican who, for a Jamaican to see a Jamaican on the cusp. My mother is like the biggest defender of Kamala. It is so hilarious. You know, my dad knew her dad.

Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know anything about them now. They were at the University of West Indies together, and my dad was a professor, and Kamala's dad was a student. Oh, wow. And my mom went to school in the town where he grew up, and if I'm remembering this correctly, went to church in Kamala's dad's father's church. Whoa. Whoa.

So many connections. So of course she's excited. My point is, my mom and your dad, when you see one of your own, of that generation, when my mom's generation, there were no Jamaicans in positions of authority. This is huge for her. It's huge. I know my parents, same thing, but they have the Indian side of it, right? So they're like, to go from a village in India to your daughter, that is pretty insane.

one generation to being already vice president and then potentially the president of the United States. Well, they're the pot calling the kettle black. What's hilarious is that to your- Well, I'm not quite the president. To your parents, she's Indian. That's what I'm saying. To my mom, she's Jamaican. Exactly. And they're saying the same story. And to my mom, she's a woman. That's right. I love it all. We'll take it all. My mother has never for a moment admitted that Kamala is half Indian. See, that- It did not even occur to her. That's so funny.

I think maybe the chapter I was most interested in, which again is about the law of the few or what concentration tips, is white flight. I thought this chapter was so illuminating. Both of you come from cities.

that were utterly transformed in the 1950s and 60s by white flight. Half of Atlanta moves to the suburbs in the 60s. And Detroit, same thing, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. The hollowing out of Wayne County. You just did the U of M thing to me. Wait till I make a reference to Gwinnett County next. Gwinnett? But really good. Really, really good. I'll take it. And Atlanta's in Fulton County. It is, right. Yeah, Gwinnett is

A little outside. They're moving to Gwinnett. That's where all the whites went. Yeah, exactly. That's where all they went. So this happens across America. As black people move north and also becoming middle class, want to move into neighborhoods where they previously had never had a chance to move into. And there is this mass exodus of white people from hundreds of American cities in the 60s. And the interesting thing is you don't leave when one black family moves onto your block.

It's the same dynamic we were talking about earlier. It has to be a certain threshold reached. Somewhere around, I call this the magic third. It's the same phenomenon, only the dark side that I talked about with the women on boards. There's a point at which there's enough black people in your neighborhood that you feel you can't live there anymore. And that's when you leave. I talk about this experiment that happened in Palo Alto.

in the 50s, where a group of liberals got together and said, "We would like to create a neighborhood that is immune to white flight, where blacks and whites and Asian people can live in harmony." And the only way we can make this happen is that we will make sure that no one group ever gets above that tipping point, that threshold. It's going to be one third white, one third black, one third Asian. If you're a white person and you want to move out, you've got to sell to a white person.

If you're a black person- It's in the bylaws of the community. In the bylaw. If you're a black person and you want to move out, you got to sell to a black person. We're never going to breach those barriers. You can go there today. It no longer exists in its earlier form, but it's in this corner of Palo Alto. It's called Lawrence Lane and it works. It still has that same- No, no, no. It's long since. People have died and moved on. Okay, yeah, yeah.

In the 50s and 60s, where every single other experiment in racial integration in America is a failure, they're the one place where whites and blacks are living in harmony because they limit their numbers. It's weird. And it's deeply kind of troubling, too, because there's a moment I talk about in the book where a black family wants to move in. It's really hard for black people to find housing in those years because nobody will let them. And

A white family wants to sell their lot to a black family and the whole neighborhood says, no, this is going to break our numbers. And we're worried if we break our proportions and we have one black family too many, the white people will move out. So we're not doing it. I don't know how you handle the morality of that. Yeah, exactly. I think too of Columbia. You paint this picture of Columbia, which at a time, I think also in the 50s, they see an increasing number of Jewish students and it's growing and it's growing and it's growing. And what they know, because they've just observed it,

If you see this pattern where the Jewish concentration gets too high, first of all, the Jewish students want to go where the Gentiles go to school. But if it reaches a certain point of critical mass, the Gentiles will leave.

but the Jewish students will then leave. So you'll have nothing at the end of it. This guy that's being interviewed is like, okay, maybe he's lying, but seeing other colleges go this route where it's like, well, then at the end you have nothing, whether that's true or not. But I guess what I'm trying to get at is

You want to play within the reality of the world and you do want to find some magic ratio where it's like you are including people and you're not collapsing something because you know that it'll collapse. Well, I would draw a distinction between those two. So in the case of the neighborhood, when we're talking about races living together at a time when the entire country is undergoing a kind of epidemic of racial prejudice, that's an incredibly noble, difficult cause.

I don't have much sympathy for elite colleges who are trying to limit the number of outsiders. I think if you're an Ivy League school, you should just let in students who you think will benefit the most from a fantastic education and stop worrying about where they're from or what color their skin is. My chapter on Harvard, no one loves kicking up.

at Harvard more than me. It's my favorite house. Yeah, you hate all these colleges. I can't, I just, it's your cottage industry. It is my cottage industry. I love it. I have a lot of fun at their expense in that chapter, but it's getting at the same thing. You know, it's a good example. I don't go into the book, but I've become really fascinated by this. Women and men coming out of high school, girls and boys coming out of high school, their performance is now way out of whack. Girls do way, way, way, way better than boys. So if you're an elite school,

The only way you can have 50-50 distribution of males and females is if you have affirmative action for boys. So boys get in with way lower test scores than girls. It's like 64-36 right now or something nationwide. So if you look at a school like Brown, Brown is 50-50. They're at 50-50 because they have affirmative action for boys. If you go to Tulane, someone was telling you about Tulane.

Tulane's a school that's like, F it. We're just going to let in the best students we can. Tulane's now, I could be wrong, but I think they're approaching 70-30. Whoa. It's a girl's school. Whoa.

And there's a point at which the fear, well, I say fear in quotation marks, there's a certain point where boys won't go to Tulane because they think it's a girls' school. Oh my God. Those are dumb boys. I want to go to this school. It's 90-10. My options triple. 100%. Yeah, I'm going to go into musical theater at that school. 100%. Okay, but that's interesting because then does it have an impact on the girls? Are they like, I don't want to go to a girls' school. So I was chatting to a guy doing this podcast. His daughter was looking at colleges and

I was like, oh, where is she looking? He goes, well, she went to Tulane. She really wanted to go to Tulane. She had a campus tour and she comes back and she says, daddy, I'm not going there. And he said to her, why? It's fantastic. Cool. She goes, there are no boys on campus. She's going to the University of Texas. Yeah, there you go. Where there are boys. It's weird, but it's the same thing we're talking about here, which is the reality of this is at a certain point when the number of

a group drops above a certain point or goes above a certain point, the character of the place changes. So the quote unquote fear at Tulane is that if the boys go below 30%, the magic third, if they go below the tipping point, we're going to be a girl's school. Now that could be a great thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's just a reality. This is a school that for whatever a hundred years has been a co-ed institution. Even if there are boys there, it won't feel like a, and if you're a boy at Tulane and

where males are only 20% of the student population, you're going to be treated differently than you would have if you were in a place where it was 50-50. Which could be a nice dose of poetic justice, but you're not raising your hand. Wait, let's just pause on that. It is a hilarious case of poetic justice. By the way, if I had a boy, I don't have girls, but if I had a boy...

Yeah, you guys are fine. I would say this will be a very useful lesson for you to experience what women experience for a couple thousand years. Go to Tulane. Be treated like a token. Have people not listen to you. Have people walk by you as if you weren't there. Dismiss your opinion. Exactly. Dismiss your opinion. You'll probably come out a better, stronger person. Yeah.

Or completely destroyed in an attic. Who crawls into a whiskey jug for the rest of their life. I don't like this planet. You do a very, very artful way of breaking down how these elite institutions actually end up creating the exact student body they want without necessarily triggering any kind of affirmative action lawsuits, which is amazing.

really mind-blowing. I don't think I had the whole scope of what's going on. But let's talk about the legacy and the sports phenomena at, let's use Harvard. I want to frame it like this first. If you look at...

Caltech's Asian student body population from the 90s until current times, you're starting in the teens and you're ending up in the 48%. And that's a completely meritocratic system. Exactly. Who tests the most, who had the best grades. Yeah.

At the exact same time frame at Harvard, you start with 18% Asian, and lo and behold, in 2020, it's 18% Asian. So how the fuck does that happen? Yeah. You have two meritocratic institutions. One, their percentages of various groups fluctuate from year to year, depending on which ethnic group is on top at that point. And I joke in the book that...

There's going to be a point when Caltech's all Nigerians. Yeah. Nigerians are clearly coming. They're one generation away. And by the way, nothing would make me happier as someone who is 25% Igbo. Your mom would now have an interest in Caltech. Well, no, Jamaicans is, you know, I said this many times, Jamaicans are Nigerians.

We are transplanted Nigerians. That's what we are. So when Nigerians do well, we cheer as well. Great. Okay, great. Your mom's going to be in. Joyce Gladwell, when she sees a Nigerian going well, she's also extremely happy, right? So that's what happens. If you're just going to be meritocratic, you're going to rise and fall with whatever group is studying hardest. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Are you struggling to close deals? Cold outreach is wasting the time of both the buyer and seller at every stage, especially when sellers are using shallow and outdated data. Your organization can overcome these challenges with technology that translates comprehensive, high-quality buyer data into real-time insights.

These deeper insights empower sales reps and teams to adopt the habits of top performers, which leads to better outcomes, like more pipeline, higher win rates, and larger deals. We call this deep sales.

This is a mini meditation guided by Bombas.

Repeat after me. I'm comfy. I'm cozy. I have zero blisters on my toes. And that's because I wear Bombas. The softest socks, underwear, and t-shirts that give back. One purchased equals one donated. Now go to bombas.com slash wondery and use code wondery for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash wondery and use code wondery at checkout.

This episode is brought to you by Huggies Little Movers. Huggies knows that babies come in all shapes and sizes, and their tushies do too. Huggies has more curves and outstanding active fit. Parents know that there's nothing worse than an ill-fitting diaper, especially for active wiggly babies. Huggies Little Movers are curved to fit all curves, so babies feel comfy no matter how much they're moving around. And we all know they're moving around a lot.

They also offer 12-hour protection against leaks, which is a game changer. Get your baby's butt into the best-fitting diaper. Huggies Little Movers. We got you, baby.

Harvard, there's no fluctuation. The group proportions of all various ethnic groups are exactly the same today as they were 30 years ago. How do they do that? Why is it that white people have been in the majority at Harvard for as long as Harvard's been around? So I have a chapter which gives the answer, which is they understand this same thing we've been talking about, which is the group portion game. They have many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many,

made sure that the only group that's above the tipping point is white people. How do they do that? Well, they do that by using sports. There are three ways to get into Harvard if you're not very smart. One is if daddy's really rich. That's the easiest way. And there's a number. Let's be fair. Maybe mommy's rich. Or mommy's rich. Yeah.

There's some asshole rich mommies too. Mommy and daddy are rich. That's one way. And there's actually, this is hilarious. I don't go into it in the book, but I started calling around to figure out, because there's a whole community of people used to work in admissions at Ivy League schools. There's a number. How much do you have to give for your kid to be a lock? Because they have places set aside. It looks like it's around 20 million. Whoa. Holy shit. That you ultimately donate to the school? You give your 20 million and your kid gets in.

So that's one way to get in. Okay, really quick. Just one second there. This is the part I thought you were fair at, but I'm guessing you're not, which is at least you're fair in saying like, okay, so they have this one group. They're an institution that wants money and likes money. So here's a group that can give them lots of money. That's an understandable incentive. In a way, it's legit. You can ask the question about why an institution that has $50 billion in the bank needs more money. Let's

Put that aside. And it's an educational institution ultimately. So second group that gets in easily is if your parents, if mommy and daddy went to Harvard. Legacy. Legacy. You get a big break. Okay, I understand that. They want to keep it in the family. They tend to give more money. They have given more money. They're more involved with the school. It's a way to keep the cash coming. Group three though, who get in even if you're not that smart,

are athletes. Now, this is the thing that's hilarious to me. I'll refer to the premier state institutions in both of your home states, University of Georgia and University of Michigan. When people think of those schools, they think, oh, there's tons of athletes. Those are like sports factories, right? You've heard that. Oh, yeah. The greatest sports factory in America is Harvard University.

Harvard has more varsity sports than any other institution in the country and has a greater share of its students who are recruited athletes than any other institution in the country. In fact, it may have more varsity athletes, period, just raw numbers, than any other institution in the country. That's crazy. The chapter starts with Yale and Harvard playing a female rugby match in the rain that

nobody's at. Then there's a boating club. Like it's a bunch of bullshit sports to just cast the nest wider and wider. Why do they have so many sports? And also the sports they have, they got basketball and football like everybody else, but then they have all of these focaccia, rich people sports, country club sports. It's a backdoor for the rich white people. I talk about tennis. There is no way to be even remotely good enough to play D1 varsity tennis outside

Unless you're rich. To play junior tennis, it's at least 50 to 100 grand a year to play junior tennis. Unless you're Serena and Venus. They are such outliers. I know, but I just have to say it because someone's going to say it and I'm just saying it. They are the exception that proves the rule. Yes. If you're the greatest tennis player to ever be on the team.

You might break through the system. And your father's a genius. Yes, agreed. Dedicates his entire life. But anybody else. I'm glad you said that, though. That's normally what I would have said. Well, I just know we're going to get a comment if I don't. If you're number three playing tennis at Georgetown, you played junior tennis and daddy and mommy spent 50 to 100 grand on your game throughout high school. So what you say when you say I'm going to give a massive admissions break to someone who's a good tennis player is I'm giving a massive admissions break to someone who has the money.

to be a really good tennis player. So you're just ensuring you have a healthy supply of rich. And when it comes to tennis, let's be honest, tennis and rowing, it's rich white people. Yeah. And rugby and whatever other. They're doing it out in the open. They are constantly adding new focaccia white people sports to their list. And they're winning.

Because you're also paralleling that with UT being sued by a white girl because a black girl got in with lower grades than her and they're losing that. Race-based affirmative action is super controversial. Sports-based white people affirmative action, not controversial. I don't think this song came with people. The whole varsity blues scandal is all about this.

The reason you pay $500,000 to the soccer coach at Harvard to get you into Harvard is that the Harvard soccer coach gets to let in kids and no one's looking over his shoulder. He gets to let in whoever he wants. He just has like 40 slots. How many slots are there on the soccer team? You don't have to be a smart soccer player to be on the Harvard. You have to be a good soccer player. And also you don't have to be great because those schools don't

win very much. Yeah, perfect storm. And there's so many roster positions that what those coaches were doing was just selling off the marginal spots on the roster. I think it's out of control. I have plugged this book so many times. It's a book called Taking Back the Game by Linda Flanagan. Oh, I adore Linda Flanagan. She wrote this book about what was wrong with youth sports. She has all these suggestions for fixing it. One of her first one is, it's time to get rid of all athletic scholarships. If you want to let an athlete in, fine. If you want to give them financial aid because they don't have a lot of money,

Fine, but stop setting up this separate thing where we somehow pretend. Because her argument is when you set that up as a goal, it infects the minds of parents and it starts distorting sports all the way down the line. There are 11-year-old kids who are playing sports in a way that's not fun.

that's just feeding into some fantasy their parents have about getting a free college education down the line. She's like, why are we ruining sports? Because we offer this kind of lottery ticket at the end of the game. She said, you just make everyone's life much easier. Just get rid of it. It's like the next step beyond what we already don't like, which is you would hope that these young kids are playing for the love of the game.

And not even love of winning. Like winning's great. And then you add, oh, actually, it's not even about winning. And it's not about love of the game. It's about ultimately getting into this elite school. So you'll be on this trajectory. It's like, how on earth do you even like it at that point when the goal of it's so far down the road? When I think about school sports experience I want for my daughters is, well,

because I'm a runner, I'm naturally thinking about running. I want them to be on a huge high school cross country team where they can go for 10 mile runs with 20 other people and chatter the whole time and then go to meets and have a blast on the bus and come in 45th and help a team place third and go home happy. Learn how to be on a team. There'll be a girl on the team who wins the whole race by 20 seconds and be proud for her. And maybe that girl is my daughter. Yeah.

And it's not the end of the world if it's not. Okay. The other really, really fun story in the book that I want to talk about is a big component of when you're looking at this contagion effect, which is small area variation. Now, this is an incredible concept I really enjoyed learning about. And it starts with a doctor in Vermont. Yeah. In the 60s. He's given this job.

by the government to go into Vermont and measure how much healthcare each community is getting. 'Cause they had a worry that like poor communities aren't getting enough healthcare. So he goes to every town in Vermont and he kind of measures

how much of a given medical procedure is being done. How many tonsillectomies are being done in Waterbury and how many are being done in Stowe? Good job, by the way. You remembered those. What he discovers is it's not that the rich areas have more healthcare than the poor areas or the places with a big hospital. It's a totally random variation, A. And B, the differences are enormous. Yeah, can I read a couple of them? Yeah. Like hemorrhoid surgery, five times higher in some districts.

And hysterectomy, prostate surgery, appendix removal, three times more likely in some districts. Some districts, though, 70% of their kids have had their tonsils out by the time they were 15, and 20% have only had them out in Waterbury. Which is like a neighboring town. Right. So understand, this is all within Vermont.

It's a tiny little state. You can wander through Vermont and you don't feel like you're going from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to the South Bronx. It doesn't have that feel at all. It looks all the same from the outside, but he finds these wild differences in how medical care is practiced. And this starts what has been this

enormous area of interest for medical researchers over the last 50 years, which is what they have come to call small area variation, which is for some weird difference, where you practice as a doctor. And when we say where, we mean the hospital or the town,

Makes a massive difference in how you practice. That just by virtue of if Dax and I are ophthalmologists, we're working out of Pasadena, we're going to practice and treat our patients a particular way. And then if Dax and I were to both decide we're going to move to Ann Arbor tomorrow, we would...

become Ann Arbor ophthalmologists. We would change. You give this example of like people who went to Buffalo and completely changed. It wouldn't be like a conscious thing. We would just go there and the vibe of what it means to be a doctor in Ann Arbor is so different that we would just become different kinds of doctors. And this has been documented exhaustively.

It's super weird and super interesting. Well, we just had this week a professor from Columbia who wrote a book called Tribal, which is really, really good. And it talks about the three components of tribalism. And one of them is, and there's an operative word in this, which I really love.

You model and comply with the people that are nurturing you. Nurturing to me is the huge word there. So yeah, if you go to this hospital, they're the ones paying your paycheck. They're the ones that you're seeking advice. Like they're nurturing you and you fall into line with whatever your source of nourishment is. But why is it different one town over? Because the nurturers, for whatever reason, have a different perspective on what it means to be a good doctor.

And it's contagious. They've spread their lesson, their model, their paradigm to everyone in their orbit. And when you move there, you catch the vibe of that place. But as a model, I think of this as being useful well outside of medicine. My chapter ultimately on all this is all about Miami because I became obsessed with why Miami is so weird. There's not a more fascinating city in America than Miami. Yeah. I love the great joke that why do Latin Americans like Miami so much? Because it's so close to the United States. Yeah.

But back to your tipping point thing too, that was a town of 300,000 that in the 80s when Fidel Castro opened up the border overnight, they got 100,000. Crazy. One third of their population changed. So I try and locate the moment when Miami becomes Miami. Miami used to be just another struggling, sleepy Southern city. It was Jacksonville. It was nothing remarkable or special.

And then a bunch of things happen to change it all in the same narrow window. One is that Cuba opens up. There's a huge influx of Cuban migrants in the 1980s. And in the same incredibly short period of time, there's a race riot that sends all kinds of white people fleeing for the suburbs. And there's the rise of the cocaine trade, which used to be that the drug trade in Miami was small-time operators bringing in marijuana from the West Indies.

and then overnight it becomes cocaine from Colombia, and that's a whole different ballgame. Those three shocks to the system all happen within months of each other.

If you think about it, the population just gets turned upside down. There was a moment in the 80s that the Federal Reserve that held the cash for Miami had more cash in it than all remaining 11 Federal Reserves combined. That's insane. There was such an insane amount of cash in Miami. There was a recession in car sales. You couldn't get a Mercedes.

In Miami, you couldn't get a Ferrari. It was crazy. It was just an explosion of wealth while the rest of the country was going the complete opposite direction. You know what I don't get into in telling the story of Miami? I wish I had, in retrospect. There's all of this really fascinating work been done by social scientists about Miami Vice. The way we think about Miami now is a totally new phenomenon. Miami was this sleepy, crime-ridden, forgotten place.

Southern town that nobody cared about. You did not go to Miami Beach if you were a tourist. You went to Lauderdale or Boca or you went to the West Indies. In the 60s, Miami gets shut down. The whole idea that that was a tourist destination is dead through the 70s. The question is, why does Miami become sexy and cool after it gets turbocharged by drug money and has a race riot and the cops are really crooked? The answer is Miami Vice. There's a

fascinating paper I read about someone who makes this argument so convincingly that Miami Vice is the pivotal moment in Miami's history. And you can look at the numbers. The first episode of Miami Vice, it's like Crockett and Tubbs, they come across some insane instance of

corruption in the miami police force and it's like it's just all cool a normal show would have then launched into some internal affairs investigation it's just like then they jump in the boat and they're both dressed in pastels he drives a ferrari he's a 42 foot scarab well crab he's got a 500 000 boat in 80s this is talking about when a police officer is driving a ferrari yeah he's on the take

And the whole point is like, these are the two coolest police officers you've ever seen. They are clearly taking drug money and it's fine. If you look at the tourism numbers after Miami Vice comes on the air, all of a sudden people are like, whoa.

We want to go to Miami because it's exciting and dangerous and cool and sexy. They're going across the Bay of Biscayne in that go fast boat. It's like, you know, and they're playing Tangerine Dream in the background. Michael Mann's at the height of his powers. Michael Mann saved Miami. He should get a little kickback. If we did make a list of, I'm digressing again. I'm actually not digressing because I talk about in my book,

two television shows that I think belong on the list of the 10 most important television shows in the history of television. So if we make a list, have I done this before in a show? No, I just want to hear the list. I'm obsessed with this. What are the 10 most important television shows of all time? American television shows of all time. I have a chapter on why I think Will and Grace belongs on that list. I think that's without question. I have a whole chapter on a miniseries from the late 70s on NBC called Holocaust.

which was watched by half of all Americans, which forever changed the way we think about the Holocaust. There wasn't a single Holocaust museum before this show. People didn't even use the word Holocaust, capital H. It didn't exist. That whole chapter on the Holocaust and that show just blew my mind. Everything I learned, I did not realize. So I think those two shows belong in the top 10 of all time. Miami Vice belongs on the top 10 of all time. That show is huge.

hugely important, changes the way we think about an entire city. And also heartbreaking in a sense that that, as you so skillfully lay out in the Will and Grace episode, it can't happen because we had three networks. So there's tens and tens of millions of people watching Miami Vice.

It's not a show streaming on Netflix where maybe there's 800,000 people. It's like a third of the country is watching Miami Vice. It's reaching everybody. Will and Grace is reaching a third of the people. That's gone. And that was a very powerful tool. The political divide implications of us not sharing these shows. That kind of scared me. The decline of television. Television got way better in terms of quality, but it lost its power. Yeah, the monoculture power is gone.

Would you put Sex and the City on that list for- - For Monica? - For me. No, for New York and New York women. - Someone pointed this out to me that I hadn't realized it's so true though. Once you see it, the phenomenon of groups of young women walking- - In a line. - In a line. - Yes.

That's real. It didn't exist before Sex and the City? I live in the village. You walk around the village, you'll see three women walking abreast down the sidewalk blocking all traffic. It is totally from Sex and the City. Yeah. And kind of a sexually... Liberated? Yeah. Group of women. Empowered. I'm putting that on the list. I don't know if it goes on your list. I think it belongs. Cosby Show clearly belongs. Oh, yeah.

Not a popular one to put on the list currently, but still. That's a weird valence. But it's true.

and a monster. Monster. Yeah. With self-righteous shaming of other people all along the way. Calling Eddie Murphy and saying, you shouldn't swear in your set. Fuck you. You're doing that? The hypocrisy. You're gonna call me and tell me not to say fuck?

shaming Lisa Bonet for doing nudity in Angel Heart and getting her potentially kicked off the show. He was so offended by nudity. But we know why he's doing that in retrospect, right? On a conscious level, he had to. He's got to appear. I don't think it's that. I think he's on some level so ashamed of what he's doing. I agree. It's the mirrors. Yeah, that's the way you express your deep shame. Internally, to him, the world is this depraved, corrupt place, and he's a part of it. Some part of him just wants it to be

clean. Who needs the world to be clean and moral and upstanding more than Bill Cosby? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. He's just sitting in his house in Philadelphia. Currently. Yeah. He's just sitting there like waiting for someone to come and- Get him. Talk to him. Yeah.

That's a good example you bringing up, Cosby, because it's actually tied to also you talk about a very ineffective approach. There was an attempt to help America start accepting gay people, and it was done with this made-for-TV movie swerving off the road in the pines. Yeah.

And actually did the worst case scenario, which is it only painted this very limited stereotype of the gay person. Whereas the Cosby show, right, is the virtual opposite of that. Yeah. I have a chapter where I get in deep on TV. When does TV change our perception? When is it a transformative revolutionary force? And when does it prop up the status quo? And I ran across this woman named Bonnie Dow, who's just a genius. She's written all this fantastic stuff about TV. And she has this great riff about

That wave of feminist shows in the 70s, Mary Tyler Moore show, Rhoda, all the way up to Murphy Brown. Cagney and Lacey. Cagney and Lacey. A lot of people looked at those shows and said, this was a sign of the rise of feminism. And she's like, actually, no. Because if you look at those shows very carefully, you'll see that they are all portraits of women whose only path to success was to emulate men. Yep. So they were single, single.

childless, whose measure of success was to achieve in the workforce exactly as men had. There was no model of a woman who could be a feminist and simultaneously have a family, for example, which is the dominant question facing many working women in this country today.

So she's like, those shows didn't break the glass ceiling. If anything, if you were a woman and you looked at those shows, you would say, the only way for me to be a success in the world is to be a man, to close off any doors. Be a hard-hitting cop like Cagney and Icy. So then she does the same thing when she looks at the way Hollywood dealt with gay people in 70s and 80s.

And you could see these shows, which on the surface would be about a family coming to accept their gay son. And you look closely and you realize, oh, no, no, no, that's not what the show has meant. And I talk about one called Doing Time on Maple Drive, a classic made-for-TV movie from the 80s, which has a young Lori Loughlin in it.

Oh. Oh, really? Ding, ding, ding. And also it's one of Jim Carrey's first roles. Oh, really? It's from the 90s. Is it early 90s, I think? It's very young, Jim Carrey. You're like, oh my God, playing it straight, by the way. Playing a kind of troubled alcoholic son in a rich family.

It's a classic made for TV. We would watch it on a Tuesday afternoon. It's ostensibly about a son comes out to his family and the family comes to accept the son. You think that's super positive. That's setting the stage for us all accepting. But it's not that at all. She points out that what happens is...

The son is not seen as normal. By virtue of being gay, he's seen as carrying a terrible burden that brings grief on his family. He's also shown as someone who's incapable of maintaining a relationship. And thirdly, he's not what the show's about. The show is all about the suffering that

that he caused to his straight family and friends. It's their story. As long as Hollywood's telling stories in which those three conditions are in play, we're not making any progress. And isolation was a key too. Oh yeah, he's all by himself. The prevailing gay story, just like feminists couldn't have a family, is that the gay person was going to live a life of isolation. Is incapable of sustaining any relationships. Wow.

And the reason "Willy Ways" is so important, it seems like it's just another sitcom about beautiful young people in New York. It's not. It breaks those three rules. Will's gayness is not a burden to anyone. He has a real relationship with Grace and Grace doesn't go around.

bemoaning what he's done to her life. Yeah, what she has to deal with. She loves him. And he has lots of friends. He has friends. So it's brilliant because it is a deeply subversive show that you don't realize it's subversive. You think it's just another sitcom. Meantime, you have absorbed all these lessons. Will's just normal. Yeah, the subtext is this is a normal human being. He's a normal guy. One little aspect of his life differs from yours. It's not watching someone accept. It's you yourself are accepting.

You start loving the people as opposed to watching it from afar. And to the extent you have an issue with Will or Jack, your issue is not with their gayness. He's annoying because he's neurotic. He's not annoying because he likes men. That shift, because in every other previous, I quote at one point, some guy wrote a book about the history of how gay people were treated in Hollywood movies from the 60s through the 90s.

And he makes a tally, like, of the, what I'm making this up, of the 75 gay characters in Hollywood films in that period, 51 were murdered, 21 commit suicide. That's what happened to gay people. Virtually the whole lot. The whole lot. Died some untimely death as a result of their gayness. You don't realize it until you go back. You're like, oh, that's right. And then Will and Grace comes along and...

Nothing. No one has a- They go to work in the morning. They're funny. You would like them in your life. Yeah. It's kind of brilliant. I watched that show casually enough to realize it was very funny. But what was weird is I do this for a living, consider myself a sort of skilled analyst.

None of the subversiveness of that show occurred to me at the time. I missed it all. I am sure I was affected by it in the best way. I am sure it changed my perspective on whether gay people should be allowed to get married. And this is a big component of the book. You talk about a lot of these huge title shifts happen so much faster than were expected and at

Absolutely without warning. Anyone in the space who would have been good at predicting when we think marriage equality will happen, like you have George Bush in 2006 saying to America, let me put this to bed. A union in this country is going to be a man and woman. Every religion respects that. We as a culture respect that. That's it. He comes out to say like that.

Like, that's enough of that. It seems like we're decades and decades and decades away at that moment in the fall of USSR. No one sees that coming. The people within the USSR don't see it coming. We on the outside don't see it coming. And then in seconds, all of a sudden, this thing is upon us. Yeah. It's a very sobering and kind of fascinating phenomenon. It's actually lessened a little bit of my current pessimism about the world because I just think, look, my pessimism is based on a prediction.

And they're always wrong. It's pointless. Yeah, sit back and see what happens. Yeah. Well, Malcolm, I just love you. I have two compartments for you. I'm a super fan of yours, but I stow that in the house. And then I'm with you. I ignore all that. And I just proceed as if you're a normal guy. But I just adore you.

Not just the playful eyes, but the fucking books. It's you and Krakauer. For me, if either of you write a book, I don't have anything to relate to. There's not even a sequel of a movie I would look forward to that much. There's nothing that would delight me as much as when you have a new book or Krakauer has a new book. Who's yours? Oh, I have many. Then you're like, oh, fuck.

For years, my favorite writer was Janet Malcolm. She died a couple of years ago. Every time she came up with something, I just devoured it instantly and tried to emulate it and thought she was a genius. If you're honest about yourself, you have something you're a fanboy about, right? Yeah, definitely. Just like it's the purest state. My eldest daughter is very exuberant and enthusiastic about the world. And I just realized that's the natural state. It's all great. I took her on the subway for the first time yesterday. Just like looking at her, she just thought...

This is so rad. And it is. She's like, it's dark and there's crazy people. Some guy was singing, what's that Jason Mraz song? The famous hit. Oh, yes. Some homeless guy comes up and does a really good version of that song. And she just thought, wait, there's...

entertainment on the subway. Like, this is fantastic. At first, I thought you said you took her to Subway, the sandwich shop. No, no. And for a while, it still all made sense. Like, dark and kind of crazy characters. The New York City subway. I see. And then we took her on a bus first time. And I convinced her that the conductor was going to start singing Wheels on the Bus at any moment. Ha ha ha.

She's like, really? I was like, just hold on. It could happen. That's what they do on buses. They sing Wheels on the Bus. Where do you think the song came from? Oh, how cute. Can I tell you my funnest moment like that? This would have never occurred to me until it happened. Delta had spent the first six years of her life with us ordering everything we would get. Then COVID, so we didn't go anywhere. And we came out of COVID and I don't know why I needed to go, but I took her to Target and

She couldn't believe what she was seeing. She was like, everything that you would want is in one location. And it's just on display. And you walk down the aisles and you can see all the things we would want that we would normally order. It's in 3D and real. And I was like, oh my God, I've never taken her to a department store. My life was going to Kmart with my grandpa on the weekends. We got home that night and she said, how do you work at Target? I go, well, you just apply.

And I go, and in fact, if you applied to be on the night shift, you could be there by yourself. And she was like, oh my God, that's what I want to do when I grow up. She wants to be able to be in Target by herself at night and just take it in. I get it.

A shopping addict you created. Yeah, yeah. Well, all that to say, Malcolm, I really, really, really love Revenge of the Tipping Point. I'm sure everyone will read it, but I encourage everyone to. It's so tasty and delicious, and you've done it again. And I adore you. And not to make you uncomfortable, but I am so flattered by your friendship. Oh.

Feeling is entirely mutual. And we didn't even discuss. When we get to texting about Norway, like I'm in Norway and I hit you with an opinion. You're like, yes, I've said this a thousand times. Did I tell you our take on Norway? No. I have the text. Oh, yeah. Here's a transcript. You should read it. You come over the top big time. The writer comes out. Dax opens it up brilliantly. Although this is a lot of car stuff. I got to get back to you. This is Dax.

This is my final conclusion after days of driving and thinking about it. It's a waste of time to go back 100 or 200 years to try and understand these people. I think the answer lies in the original migration out of Africa.

These people walked through Greece and Italy, where food was growing off of trees. They went through all the fertile farmland of Germany, got to this icy place that's dark 10 months of the year with nothing to eat, and they thought, this is absolutely perfect. And then I said, they hung out with the super friendly and exuberant Nigerians. They dated gorgeous Ethiopian women. They ate mangoes off the tree and fresh oranges from their backyard, and they decided, nah, I prefer dried herring. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Oh, that's good. I like made my whole vacation. I was there like really synthesizing the whole thing. And the fact that you had the exact same take was so comforting. That is so good. All right. Well, until next time, you're getting up there with Sedaris is our most frequent guest. So let's keep the battle going. We will. Keep coming back. All right, guys. Thank you so much. And also everyone listening to Revisionist History is my favorite podcast currently. Bye. Stay tuned for more Armchair Experts.

If you dare. We are supported by Welch's Zero Sugar. I get the warmest, coziest feeling with just saying Welch's. Yeah. What a treat it was when I was a kid. I know. Well, Welch's Zero Sugar is a new drink filled with incredible flavor. We're talking mouth-watering, fruity goodness with flavors like tangy passion fruit and bold concord grape. And when something tastes this good, you might not expect that it'd be a healthy choice, but...

But it is. This delicious beverage has zero grams of sugar. This was made for me. It might not immediately make sense how a zero sugar drink could taste so good. You just have to sip it to get it. I got to say, it's delicious. And you know, I'm not a big sugar consumer. So this is the ideal product for me. It worked out perfectly. Welch's Zero Sugar is refreshing and a great addition to your breakfast routine. Start your day with something sweet without the sugar.

Try new Welch's Zero Sugar today. Available in stores now. Find it in the refrigerated aisle. Stay tuned to hear Miss Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. It's okay though, we all make mistakes.

I'm representing you today. I know. It's such a cute shirt on you. Thank you. It is such a cute shirt. Yeah. We should hire you to do some modeling for the line. I'm happy to. Also, I kind of wanted to show people how you could style merch. Oh, you wanted to be an example. You can mix it with...

Beautiful pants and also cute sweaters. That's kind of my move. You know, when I wear a cardigan, I also wear something with some flare underneath. Yes. It's like, oh, that's a very nice cardigan, but there's some kind of edgy shirt. Mixed messes. Yeah, yeah. It's a nice mix. Mm-hmm. What time did you rise this morning? So I had such a bad headache this morning. Oh, no. From your flies. Yeah, my flies are here. They've arrived. Big time. And-

Have you ever thought about putting one? So I have these fly zappers that sit in the kitchen. Have you seen? It's like two, it looks like black light colored lights, tubes, and they zap the fruit flies and the presumably period flies. Or should I put it in my body? I think when you're in bed at night, just get it between your legs and on. That way it'll attract them all and zap them. It might minimize the time of the duration. That would be great. Yeah. Yeah.

I'll try it. I'll try anything because it's not a fun time. It's not. And this one hit you hard. Yeah. And it was affecting my tummy, as we've talked about, but I mainly cut out. Oh, you did? Well, some of it. And now I had a really bad headache. Sometimes I get these really, really intense headaches when I'm on my period. So I took in Aleve D. Oh.

Okay. One of our favorite products. I don't think sponsored. Not a sponsor. We do really like it. We need them as a sponsor. Yeah. And it's helping. Well, let's tell people about our longstanding feud about our favorite medication for a headache. Okay. Let's do it. You like an ibuprofen. I do. You like a Motrin or an Advil. I don't go Motrin. I've never bought Motrin. You don't know what it is, right? Yeah. It's the same as Advil. It's ibuprofen. Just a different brand. Okay.

And I like a set of metafine. I like a Tylenol. I know. We fight about this all the time. We always are fighting about it. Would you say what happens when you take Tylenol? Just nothing. I just don't know. Yeah. Is it that you don't know it or you've had an adverse? I've never had an adverse, but I've not felt the relief that I feel from an IV medication.

Uh-huh. Because we used to really, not actually fight, but we would try to put our own views on the other person. You would try to convince each other that the other was better. And then over time, I've noticed that for both of us, if anyone has like,

a headache or something and we say, did you take anything? And I'll say, yeah, I took Advil. Or you say, yeah, I took Tylenol. We just keep quiet. We leave it at that. But I notice there's always like three seconds of like... Okay. And we're both going to stay out of it. And then we choose to move on. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of these fights that we just...

eventually got tired of having. Yeah. Yeah. Fatigue is a good... It's a good tool. It is. Fatigue is an adaptation, not a bug. Well, I watched a good Frontline. I sleep on Frontline all the time. I like forget Frontline's my favorite show. Yeah. And then I'll be...

perusing my DVR and I'll, oh, Frontline. And then I see. And what's nice is by the time I check in, there's usually four or five documentaries that I've missed so I can select. So last night I started watching The Enemy Within, which is about Germany's- Could also be about periods. Absolutely. Yeah. That might be called The Enemy Downstairs.

Yeah, you're right. Maybe that's a part two. Maybe they'll have that. Maybe they already have that. Yeah, probably. But this was about Germany's growing far right. Oh. Neo-Nazi-ish. Current? Current. Oh, wow. Yeah, there's a party there called the AFD, I think, like Alternative Something Deutschland. Yeah.

Scary. Yeah. And we just had a guest on that was saying that like extremism's been on the ride and polarization's been on the rise. And I was like, yeah, I'm so stuck in America. I just assumed it was just us. But no, it's so frightening. It's so frightening. You just think, yeah, these horrors of the past, we know better now. And then you go like, I don't know. I don't know if we'll ever know better.

Well, factions will always come up, but we just have to hope the majority knows better. Yeah. But and also democracy is tricky in that you can elect a non-democratic entity. You can elect a group that aims to diminish democracy, which is so interesting. If you're expressing goal. I don't think very many people. This isn't a diss. This is just like.

I think reality. I don't think many people know the deets of democracy, really. Right. They don't know what they're protecting and not protecting. Yeah. So and I and I have an adjacent huge pet peeve. Yeah. When you say we're in a democracy and some genius writes, no, we're not.

We're not in a democracy. We're in a representative republic. Oh, I see. Sure. But those people don't realize that is a democracy. There are different versions of democracy. There's direct democracy, which would be impossible, where every issue we all vote on, all 300 million of us. Yeah. And then there's representative democracy, which is what we have, a republic. Yeah. People think those...

That one, I don't know why that one. Do you ever wonder, like, I guess you're not, you're not as triggered as me in comments, right? And I don't even mean ours, but like, if you look at other, you just don't look at comments, period. No. If you see a post you like, you won't look at any of the comments. I'm trying to think.

No. There's just a handful that irk me to no end. Yeah. I don't know why that one. I think it's because it has the air of intelligence. Like, I'm correcting you. We don't live in a democracy. And the wrong is so. I guess when someone is policing someone. It's a self-righteous thing a little bit again. You really, really.

I really don't like that. I don't like that. You do not like that. And then I craft a response to try to explain to them that there are multiple versions of democracy. Yeah. And then I go, what am I doing? They don't care. And then why would I do that? And then I...

But I really hate reading that. Well, that's funny because I think that because self-righteousness is your big, I don't want to say hang up, but yeah, trigger. Yeah. Which is only, I think, like a millimeter away from hypocrisy. They're very similar. I think they're on the same spectrum for sure. And hypocrisy is my trigger. Yeah.

That's huge for me. Yeah, I cannot stand it. When we talk about Cosby, which weirdly enough we did in the Gladwell episode, this episode. Yeah, we did. It shouldn't be the thing that angers me the most. Obviously, what should anger me the most is these poor victims. What he did, yeah. And that does anger me. Yeah. But it's the him shaming all these other people in public with his self-righteous morality. Yeah. That one to me just...

It burns extra hot for me. I know. Which is funny because I think Malcolm had a generous and cool explanation for that that I think is correct. I do think when people are behaving in such depraved ways, they do...

or rationalize, but also I do deeply think maybe want for something better. Like they know subconsciously. It's weird. I'm out on a limb here, but I'm guessing he...

He that is clearly a big, dark, cancerous secret running in the background of his life. Exactly. Even if he thought somehow he was right, which I bet he didn't. Even if he thought he was right, he knew everyone else didn't think that was right. And it's like a compulsion, I think, to keep going forward. Speaking of, I told you a crazy story yesterday about my friend. Oh, my God. Yes.

Which is a similar thing. My friend, she said I could talk about it. She did? Uh-huh. Okay, great. My friend who is lovely. Yeah, I want to give unbiased feedback. Yeah. She's your friend. Yeah. I adore her. Yeah, you've met her before. She's got a great big personality. She's a very hard worker. She's incredible.

ambitious and smart and competent. She's very, very loyal. She's a good girl. She is. She really, really is. She's very special. But she is single and has been dating for a long time and has never found the person. But she's out there. Like, she really puts herself... She's pounding the pavement. She is. And I really respect it because she's like, I know what I want. I want a partner. Yeah. And I'm going to find one. Yeah. And she's been on so many horrible dates. And she...

Met this guy. Can I add to? She's got a great sense of humor. Yes. She's the perfect person for a lot of horrible dates in a way. She handles it all with like grace. Keeps it moving. Yeah, exactly. She's indomitable. She is. She's never like...

taken out by any of it. Like, she's... Right. She's not sitting around self-pitying. Yeah. It's pretty admirable. But she fell in love with this guy. They had a long distance, like, long relationship. A year, you said? Yeah. And, like...

It started off a little casual and then became more serious, more serious, and visited each other many times. This person met her family, was planning on coming for Thanksgiving to her families. He came here, he met a bunch of friends. I was out of town.

Oh, that's a bummer. I know. I know. Cause I wonder if I would have probably not probably like the sociopath. We wouldn't know. I also, when she was first telling us about him or not first, but when it was like really getting serious, she said, I love, you know, she told him she loved him. And he said, you know, he reciprocated. She has a group of friends that said that were very skeptical. Yeah. And because she is a very trusting person. And so when she told us,

our group of friends this, I was like, no, it's good. Like I chose to believe. Yeah, you chose to believe. Yeah. You chose hope. I did. And she was just so happy. And I really wanted that for her.

Anyway, fast forward lots of things. He has a wife and three children. And how did how was this discovered? Oh, it's such a story. But anyway, her one of her, you know, so her friends started doing some sleuthing and they were really on top of it and they found the wife's Facebook page. Oh, man. Yep.

So anyway, it's so... I want to own how arbitrary my set of disgust is. Same. Same, by the way. It's so arbitrary. Like, if I hear someone's having an affair, two people are having an affair, I'm like, yeah, 50% of relationships have affairs. I know. Universally reviled, universally practiced. We know people who've had them. Esther Peral, we have friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I was in an open relationship. Mm-hmm. Yet...

The deception of the unwitting single person who doesn't know. I don't know why that feels so extra to me. Same. It doesn't make sense. Like anyone else, anyone's at home with kids is like, well, no. How about the wife and the kids? Which of course. Yes. I know. I'm saying this is a paradox. I don't know why this is so angering to me. For me, it's more the disgust isn't different. It's the shock is different. It's

How can this person be lying this deeply to two sets? Uh-huh. That's where I'm like, that like lends itself to more of a pathology because you're really having to keep track of so many things.

many lies in most affairs at least one member knows what's going on and they're complacent or they're like what's interesting is I wonder what the percentage is like my assumptions always people are having an affairs are going like I'm married they meet and they go I'm married and then you know whatever happens but yeah

Yeah, maybe maybe it's a high percentage of people who are cheating. Don't tell the other person they're married or they have a girlfriend. I don't know. I'm I'm curious. Yeah, I'm curious because I agree. So there's like this weird I'm having this oversized reaction to that aspect of it, which is interesting. Obviously, it is so cruel to keep something from your wife and your children like awful.

But there is something about letting a single person believe that they're taking a journey leading somewhere. Leading to a marriage. Yeah, which who knows if there's no discovery where this would have ended up. Certainly we see docs all the time where a guy does have multiple wives and multiple sets of children. Yes, yes.

Thank God it ended now. But yeah, like, it feels like what a waste of her time. It's so unfair. Yes. But anyway, she is handling it so well. And of course, because she's incredible for...

First thing she said was like, how could you do this to your family? Like that's her reaction. Yes, yes, yes. But she also and like, you know, she said she was like, she was like, people have affairs. There are people in her life who've had them who she loves. She's like, that's not. She doesn't think they're terrible people. Yeah. She's like, that's not that. She's like, this is so different. Yeah. Well, I was. Have you started that Lacey Peterson? Oh, yeah. Three parter. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm two thirds of the way through maybe. Yeah. But in that, so he killed her for another woman. And even the people, the app, the episodes entitled, I'm not a mistress. So the woman that he was doing that for, she didn't know he was married. She didn't know she was a mistress. Yeah.

That's what makes me think. I wonder if it's more common. Yeah, it might be. It probably is. But also a lot of people really don't think he did it. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's claims his innocence still. He's been in jail for a really long time. Oh, really? Yes. And Anna and I've had some fights about this because she's like, he didn't do it. Oh, wow. And she watched there's so there's a Netflix one and there's also a Hulu.

one competing and I guess the Hulu one takes a different is a much is much different this scares me I don't like this because when I watch a doc I

I know. I like to believe that I was watching the news, but I need to remember I'm watching a film. Exactly. That's been edited and written. Yeah, someone's point of view. Have you ever had an experience? I maybe have said this once before on this, but have you ever had an experience watching a doc where you actually, you knew a lot about it and you knew it was completely misrepresentative? Oh.

Because I had a single one that kind of shattered my whole confidence in documentaries in general. Which one? In the way that doing press myself and reading things wrong kind of was like, oh, stuff's wrong all the time in the newspaper. Who Killed the Electric Car? Oh. Which was this documentary suggesting...

That there was a kind of conspiracy that GM had this electric car, the EV1, and that they intentionally killed it even though people wanted it and it would have been a bestseller and blah, blah, blah, and petrochemical, you know, this big conspiracy. And then the smoking gun. And again, if I was...

In the audience, I'd be like, yeah, duh. The smoking gun is they get this spy footage of a parking lot of EB-1s that they're taking into a crusher.

and destroying them. Okay. So that very much seems like, oh, clearly there's a conspiracy. They're trying to destroy the cars. Right. Well, I worked for GM for 14 years and I drove cars to the crusher. Yeah. They crush cars. Right. They crush all their cars. They have a set of cars that they loan out to people.

To journalists to do testing for quarter mile times and track times. And at the end of that period that they've had the car out for testing, they can't really sell it because they would take on all this liability. So what if something went wrong in one of the tests? They sell a car to you and the brakes go out and you die. Yeah. So they're in a situation where they can either try to create some.

liability-free sale of this car, or they chuck it up to a marketing expense. They destroy it and they get a full tax credit for the value of the car.

It's a very easy decision if you're a corporation. I know, but I wish they could give it to people who need cars. I know. I wish our society wasn't so fucking litigious that it's such a liability to give people free cars. You should be able to sign away the liability if someone wants a free car. Yes. We did give one, by the way. I remember we were on a car show in Wisconsin yesterday.

And whenever we would have car shows, we would send tons of these 15 passenger vans so we could transport all the journalists around. And it was when a woman in Ohio or somewhere in the Midwest had like six kids and it was all over the news, maybe eight. It wasn't Octomom. It was one of these really famous cases. Thanks for clarifying.

And it was decided at that show, let's give her one of these passenger vans. And somehow they did give that family, someone from Children's Youth drove that van over and delivered it to their house. Yeah, that's- Anyways, all that to say, if I was watching it, I'd be like, what could be more incriminating than they're making these cars disappear? They're grinding them up so no one can find them. But I'm like, oh, right. If you know that- Yeah. Side note. Yeah. Yeah.

The funnest thing in the world when I was 16, period, was when I had to take a car to the crusher. Yeah. Because I'd have to take it from our shop in Troy down to where they crushed them. And they were going to get crushed, so it didn't matter what I did to them. So Aaron and I would take turns driving these cars to the crusher. And we would be on the highway in a Corvette going like 70. And we would force it into first gear with the clutch in and then drop the clutch and then the back wheels would.

We would drive them down dirt roads and swerve into things. Oh, my God. We went nuts because it didn't matter. Your lives matter. But we made it. Shockingly. When you're 16 and someone gives you a brand new Corvette and says, you go drive it its last six miles of its life. Do whatever you want. Holy smokes. It's like Grand Theft Auto before Grand Theft Auto. Oh, my God.

Did you shoot? Did you go to get a prostitute and like shoot people? I killed a couple people. Yeah. By the way, I think I know what that reference means. Grand Theft Auto, but I haven't played it. But I think you trash, you steal cars and trash them. You steal cars and you meet prostitutes and I do think you kill people. Okay. That's all I know. Sex workers, not against sex workers. No, I'm in favor of sex workers. Yeah, dude, they can do whatever. I don't know if I'm in favor of sex workers.

I said I'm in favor of sex work. But I think we're in favor of sex workers. Exactly. Yeah. Yes. Like, whatever. People. I can't judge. No. Anyway. No, I haven't seen a doc. I don't think that I was exposed. This ding, ding, ding ties in. Like, that's what's interesting about this gentleman. Yeah. Because go see a sex worker. I know. But that's not. It wasn't. That wasn't why. He wanted to build another life with somebody. He got off on this somehow. Like, you. Yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy. Anywho, so that was crazy, but that's like... Documentaries? Well, we were talking about Cosby and Deception. Yes, and hypocrisy. And hypocrisy. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild out there. And then I'm a hypocrite, you know? Well, we all do things... And it's the side of myself I hate the most, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Are you a hypocrite? Because I also think you have a lot of compassion towards people and mistakes. So I don't think you're a hypocrite. Well, I don't think I'm super self-righteous. Right. I don't think so. No. But like I have, I would say a hypocrite is someone who's got like,

an expressed set of morals that they violate. And that I do, you know, like I think all of us do. But we all make mistakes. But that's to me making mistakes as opposed to, it's one thing if you make a, to me hypocrisy is if you

Have an express set of morals. You do something against that. Yeah. But then you're out still parading that moral. Yeah. I often think if you realize like, oh, fuck, this is actually hard. This is a hard moral to keep or like to it's harder than I thought. Yeah. I don't think you parade around like. Maybe hypocrisy is not the word. Contradictions. Sure.

Sure, we all do that. Yeah, yeah. I have some belief, yet I do some action that doesn't really support that. Yeah. Or isn't in concert with it. Like I can, let's just say this, I can list many things that I am amoral on. Yeah. Like my...

in the environmental crisis is not great. It's not good. I eat a ton of cows. Ethically, I don't feel great about... I'm participating in things I know intellectually are not the best thing or morally are not the best thing. And I just plow through it. And I have to have...

Some priority list of the things I'm most interested in servicing. Yeah. And then other things I just ignore. Yeah. Yeah. We can't do it all. No. Unfortunately. The good place. Speaking of the good place, Kristen's new show comes out tomorrow. By the time this comes out, we'll have already been out.

Yeah. Hopefully you guys watched it because I'm hoping for them that it does. I feel like it's going to be a real enormous show. I do, too. Yeah, I do, too. Very exciting. I did have a question I wanted to ask that I do think is important. Do you get under the covers in your clothes that nighttime?

Or anytime. Like, if you go into your bed right now to, like, do work or something, are you comfortable getting under the covers in your day clothes? Not really. Okay. This only happened where, like, I laid down.

Well, I lay down in my clothes all the time on my bed to do research. Yeah. Occasionally I'll lay down to take a nap and I don't, I just have my clothes on, I'm on top, but then I'll get a little chilly in the nap and I'll pull it over like just my upper torso. Okay. So you're not very comfortable. Yeah, you don't like that. A little weird. How about you? I guess this is hypocrisy. Ding, ding, ding. Okay. I think it's,

Probably gross. Uh-huh. But I do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What is gross? Because I like getting cozy. I think people are a little, I think people are overwhelmed with gross. Yeah. Like people, anytime we have a guest that has their feet on the couch, people are apoplectic about it. And again, there's another thing I resist writing. Like I want to write that it's still a democracy. Pfft.

Sure. If someone was going to eat their lunch off of the couch at some point, potentially problematic.

Someone's going to lay their bare face down on that cushion. Maybe a problem. Never going to happen in the attic. So I don't really know what everyone's worried about. Secondly, the germs you're afraid of are not the right germs. Yeah. I've seen a million 2020s on this in evening news is you can walk around a subway with your feet.

You're not going to, the dangers in your life are in your kitchen sink. Definitely. They're all in your kitchen sink and they're on your countertops where you had chicken and you had E. coli and listeria. Probably your toilet too. But not nearly as bad as your kitchen. All the salmonellas and all the actual. Harmful.

Yeah, or mostly foodborne illnesses. You're not getting cholera from your shoes from the subway. This is not what's happening. So it's just also a misplaced. Now, if you saw a picture of someone's kitchen, go ahead and freak out because that's a minefield of bacteria. We have this new coffee table that's very...

And it's longer than our other one. So it actually was in this episode with Malcolm was the first time I realized like, oh, I can put my feet up because I couldn't when we had the shorter one. Yes. So I did that in the episode. And I thought I did think, oh, I wonder if people are going to be freaked out by this. They're going to be mad. Yeah. Yeah. But I I'm going to keep doing it. Yeah. And you're not going to eat a bear sandwich off of there.

I'm not. Even if we have lunch here, you'll have a plate or a nice bit of wax paper. So, okay, so you got in with your pants on, right? And so your pants had collected God knows what out on the planet. Now that's rubbing off on the bottom of your duvet cover. So then the next...

Night, you're going to go bare. You're going to raw dog it. Yeah. And your legs are going to be exposed to what the gene... You know, it's not like it's your mouth and your nose. I don't even know what the big deal is. It's true because I don't sleep nude. Right. Maybe if I slept nude, I would be a little more germ...

Also, the odds of the germs penetrating your skin and getting into your actual system. I mean, the only real way in the body is your mouth and your nose. Well, it could get in my vagina. That's an orifice. I know. That's a good point. If I slept nude. If you slept nude. That's an option. That's true. But I don't. In your anus, let's be honest. Yeah. Although, it would be hard to get in the anus.

Because my butt cheeks. But you could itch your butt while you were asleep on accident with the sheet. You could use the sheet to scratch your butthole. And then your jeans, you had sat somewhere. But again, what are the pathogens on a seat? It's just, it's your food, guys. You watch those, right? Where they have. Yes. Blacklight. Unfortunately, it's always a woman. I've never seen a man do this, but they tell the mom like cook, cook chicken in that kitchen. And we're going to then we're going to blacklight.

I know. So she's on her best behavior. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's on the pulls of the cabinets. I know. It's on the handle of the fridge. It's on the sink. Even when you're trying not to. When she was trying her hardest. I don't know what to do about that. So if you're worried about germs, don't go into your kitchen. But wear your pants in bed. Put your shoes on the couch. It's your butt with your shoes. It's scratchy, scratchy, scratch. Yeah.

I have way too personal of a thing, but it's, I know I would tell you and I don't know if I would tell America. Oh my God. It must be so. Wow. Okay. I'm going to back up with a story before this. Okay. Is this a brand new thing you're saying? Oh yeah. My last colonoscopy, you know, you do the cleanse off to a good start. Yeah.

My last colonoscopy, you can have either like clear broth. You can't really eat any food. Yeah. So my hack for that was, you may recall this, is olive oil. Yeah, I want calories still. And olive oil is so good for you. Oh. So what I was doing when I was hungry all day is I was drinking little glasses of olive oil. Oh, my God. During my cleanse, my cleanup before the colonoscopy. Yeah. And when I was going...

Beauty. Hello. It was olive oil was coming on my butt. Yeah, yeah. Like straight olive oil. Like I would wipe and there was crystal clear olive oil on the toilet paper. Okay. It's like the Blockbuster guy. What? It's like the Blockbuster guy on Armchair Anonymous that was leaking from the Wendy's chili. Oh, yeah.

Oh my God. I forgot about that. Yes, the Wendy's chili. So I tried a new brand of bars yesterday. Oh yeah. And they're magic. Fuck, they're magic. They're 28 grams of protein and only 150 calories. That's almost impossible. A gram of protein is four calories. So you're at 120 calories.

Huh. Virtually 120. Somehow the remaining 30 makes it taste delicious. Really? They're delicious. Wow. So I had two of them back to back. Uh-oh. And this morning during my time alone. You're an evac. My evac. Yeah. I did a little wipey and it was the same. Oh.

I was like, my first thought from muscle memory was like, did I drink a few ounces of olive oil yesterday? Wow. I have an inordinate amount in my coffee.

No. The only thing new in my life were these two bars. Interesting. So I think it has some kind of an oil. I don't know if you remember. Do you remember when they invented, I think it was called Oleo? Yes. Oleo. And it was all over the news and you were going to be able to eat potato chips with virtually no calories because the oil molecule was too big to be absorbed by your stomach and it would pass through. That was during the non-fat craze. Yes. And people were blown.

Blowing out toilets all over America. They need like a bag of Lays or Doritos or whatever, and then just blast oil everywhere. Yes, I remember this. I think maybe these have that. Some kind of oil that can't be absorbed and passed through. I don't know that that's good.

I know. And then I looked in the toilet. Oh, God. And there were some, you know, when you see oil in water. Yeah. It like falls up into pretty little globs. Yeah. Oh, I'm losing everyone, aren't I? No. It was all like that. There was some oil. There was some oil. And so now I'm really trying to decide if that's an acceptable part of these bars. Maybe. They're delicious. Well, if it's olive oil.

It might be fine. It's depending. It's going to be the specific oil. It wouldn't be olive oil because they'd be way more caloric. It's got to be an oil that somehow is not...

I'm going to call. I know the person who created these and I'm going to have a talk with them today. Oh, God. Are you curious to try these bars? Well, I was. I'm not anymore. You're not anymore. I don't. You don't like oil. I love olive oil, but I am. I'm really not into things that aren't natural. Right. Like I really I don't like protein shakes. Right.

I don't like any of that. I want it to be a real food. Yeah, sure. That's fair. Yeah. But that's a bummer because I am trying to get more protein because I'm getting so strong. I mean, it would be my preference too, but for me to

hit that goal, I'd have to eat so many chicken breasts in a day. I just can't. I can't eat that much meat. Well, you're eating a lot of protein. That's why I tip my hat to these bodybuilders because they are eating, they're eating like nine chicken breasts a day and all that. I can't do it. I need it. I need it. But right here, I have a shake right here. Yeah. This is 60 grams. I mean, there's nothing wrong with them. People love them and they're,

They're fine. And you know, I know you already know this. It's not like some synthetic molecule they've been created. Yeah. It's from way. Yeah, I know. Yeah. I know. I just, there's something about it. I get it. I agree with that for the most part. Yeah. The more.

Food you're eating in its original form, I think the better you're going to be off. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. I didn't think that was as gross as, okay, honestly, I thought. I have more details I'm going to tell you off air. Okay, great. That are, we'll tip it there. Okay. Because I thought the way you prefaced it, I thought you were going to say after the colonoscopy and you were like wiping and it was just pure oil that you like reused it.

Like oil the pan with the toilet. Wow. That would be intense. Yeah. That's where your mind went. Yeah. You're a gloat. You're a gremlin. Well, you said it was so bad. Yeah. Well, I left out some details, but I'll tell you. Okay. Yeah.

I look forward to that. Okay. Some facts for Malcolm. What a- First of all- My God. I just enjoy him so much. I just love him. I know. I love him. We're so- He makes me giddy.

I kind of met him in love with him. Yeah. I guess like, but you get butterflies. Yeah. Yeah. He like, he, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What females do you have that for? Oh, that's a good question. I can think of a few people for me. I'm sure I do. I. Like, I feel that way about Huey. Oh, wow. Yeah. I feel that way about Malcolm. I feel that way about Jedediah Jenkins. Hmm.

Like when I sit down with him, I know he's going to say things to me in a way that's pretty unique and going to be really interesting and refreshing. Yeah. And so the novelty and the dopamine of like anticipation of what thing they're going to say. To me, mirror is falling in love. It's like that novelty. Totally. Dopamine feeling. Yeah. Interesting. Polar?

Oh, yeah. There we go. Probably, yes. But it's hard to know if it's crushy or if it's like, because I'm also intimidated by her, but I guess that's all sort of part of it. Yeah, when you like somebody, you're half deciding whether they like you or not. You're evaluating that. That's part of the zhuzh of it. Totally, yeah. There's stakes to it. Okay, we found one. Where like, I'm sure anytime she'd call you on the phone, you'd get a race of like,

Excitement. Endorphins. Yeah, definitely. She's never called me. Okay. Well, yeah. Call me. Call me. I kind of have it with Anna. Yeah. Like I really, I just enjoy her so much. Yep. Like I would never have said it was like crushy or butterfly. I don't think it's butterfly, but I am always excited to be around her.

I feel that way about her too. Yeah. She's very infectious. She's very infectious. She has this incredible dichotomy of being very innocent and childlike and also very tough and streetwise. Yes.

And she's making both things work at the same time. And it's really fun. She's strong. Yeah. She's very strong and also very flexible. Yeah. It's hard to be both. Teach me. Pretty hard to be both. I know how to be strong. I'm working on flexibility. Yeah. I have two children to help me. I'm not so flexible. That's something we could talk about. Sure. We are at an hour, but go ahead. Oh, geez. Yeah.

Time flies. I know. Well, I'm going to table it. You want to table it for next time? Sure. Okay. So did David Lynch producer direct the R. Crumb documentary? No. So it was by Terry Zweigoff. Zweigoff. Zweigoff. Okay. Terry Zweigoff. He directed it, right? Yes. It said the film is presented by David Lynch, though he had no actual involvement in making the film. There we go. I knew there was some connection to him. Yes.

Well, but Terry Zweigoff, he then went on to do Ghost World, I think, and then a ton of narratives. Oh, cool. I think he might have started with that. Okay, he... By the way. Mm-hmm.

One of my highest recommend docs of all time. You recommended it to me. It's incredible. It's an incredible documentary. I put it up there with American Movie. Also, that's my all-time favorite documentary in case anyone's interested. Harvard does have the most varsity sports teams of any college in the United States. Does it say that number? 42 teams. 42 teams. 21 men's sports, 21 women's sports, and one co-ed.

Yeah, that was fascinating. Yeah, what a reveal, huh? Okay, Seoul was the home of the 1988 Summer Olympics. He was right about that. Okay. I tend to trust him a lot. Too much. I only checked the ones that he was like, maybe. Like he himself said, I think or maybe. Right. Other than that, I just trusted him. Yeah, we trust him. He's a trusted brand. Big time. Big time. Book Soup is the...

the bookshop on sunset. He got that right too. Went into a Barnes and Nobles on the weekend. You did? Yeah. It had been a decade or more. I know. And you know, what's fun is it used to be reviled because it was like taking out mom and pop bookshops. It's so funny. Yeah. And now it's like, you should go to Barnes and Noble and buy real books. Yeah.

I know. You're right. Borders was ruining mom and pops. But I love Barnes & Noble. You know that's my fantasy date. You know I like Borders. I know. That's you being a contrarian. It's not. Yes, it is. I think you like coffee bean and tea leaf. No, Barnes & Noble is like coffee bean and tea leaf. No, Starbucks. No.

Yes. Borders is Starbucks. No, you're wrong. And in fact, they had Starbucks in them. You're wrong. Starbucks is in Barnes & Noble. Trust me, I know this. I used, Anthony and I used to go all the time. They might have been in both Borders and Barnes & Noble. Let's agree on that. Maybe they took over. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know enough about borders, so I can't speak on that. But I do know about Barnes & Noble and I know about Starbucks are in there because this is what I do. I go, I get a hot chocolate from the Starbucks and then I walk around and I look at books and I buy...

a couple books and I really probably don't read them. Yep. Right. And that's my thing. Yeah. Anthony and I used to, when we lived over by the Grove, we'd walk over all the time on like Friday night and do that. And it was so fun. Yeah. And you know, my dream fantasy date. Oh. Is to. Would be suitors. Take note. Take note. Probably go to a movie because there's normally a movie theater nearby, Barnes and Noble. Yeah. Go to a movie and then

dinner. And then after that, we go to Barnes and Noble and we get hot chocolate. Close the date at Barnes and Noble. Yeah. It's a nighttime thing. You get hot chocolates and then you, you know, walk around, but you pick out a book for the other person. Oh, yes. Did you get that from someone? I'm sure I did. Okay. You get such a specific fantasy that it feels like

Yeah. Because then there's presence involved, but there's picking out and receiving thoughtfulness. And you get to know about a person because it's the book that they like probably. You would get me the history of Hermes and I would get you the history of the internal combustion engine. Probably. History of a small black Chevy V8. No, what would you give? What book, one book.

that you would buy for a person you were also like courting? Good question. Now, am I trying to buy a book that I have surmised they would like and haven't read? Or am I trying to show them something that's important to me in a worldview way that I think they would like? I think it's both. Yeah.

I think that's all kind of the same thing. I almost think you're better off doing the latter because who are you to say what they would like? Yeah. I would probably Under the Banner of Heaven. Great pick. Or Catcher in the Rye if they haven't read it. Also a great pick. What would be yours?

Bukowski would be too extreme. I think they would be worried about me. Okay. Then maybe that's third date. So I wouldn't buy them my favorite book. That would be, they'd be like, oh, this guy likes pooping and Bukowski.

being drunk all the time and violence. Right. Okay. Even though I do like all those things. You do. I'm going to hide that. I mean, I assume everyone's read To Kill a Mockingbird, so I probably would skip that, but that's like my catcher in the rye. It is. I mean, truly the best book I've read in the last 10 years is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. The one I read over Christmas that I like could not stop. You like that more than all four?

I love all fours, but. And more than Copperhead, Demonhead. Yes. This book had such an impact. Yeah. So I would probably do that. Oh, that's good. It's a good book. Really good book. Or maybe Visit from the Goon Squad. What is that? I've never even heard of that. Oh, it's so good. It's by Jennifer Egan. And she has another book called Candy House that is more recent. But Visit from the Goon Squad's.

probably 15 years old. And it's all these little stories, but they intertwine, the people intertwine, and it's kind of dark, and it's good. It's great. It's a great book. Did you read What is the What?

No. That's a great book. Is it a fiction? David, no. Eggers? David Eggers. Oh, he also wrote. Yep. What's the other really popular book he wrote, Rob? A Heartbreaking Work of Cedric and Genius. I didn't read that. I can't remember if I read that one or not. But what is the what's really a wild book? It's about the Lost Boys of Sudan. Oh.

It's wild. Yeah. What is the what means? God said to them, I can either give you the cow, and from the cow you'll have milk, you'll have clothes, you'll have meat, or I can give you the answer to what. Ooh. Whoa. And their people chose the cow. God.

And so what is the what? Ooh. Ooh, I want to read that. It's really good. I'm going to buy it. It's a beautiful book. Not the topic I would normally get into. I love buying books. Yeah, you love buying them. Yeah. Yeah, they're colorful. They're unique. To me, the promise of a book is so exciting to me. Yeah. And the adventure that's in there is so exciting. Yeah.

I love it, but then I just don't make the time anymore. There's another thing going on, I think, which is this thing you can carry around is a world and you can enter the world, but you carry it places. It's really interesting. It's like a safe way in.

explore other points of view to explore places I guess that's like you know your wanderlust yes yours is there's something in here for me with that yeah for

For sure. Books are cool. Not a sponsor. Maybe I would give a Malcolm book. You know what? I probably would give a Sedaris book. Oh, another great pick and a good filter. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, you said tens and tens of millions of people watched Miami Vice. The series finale had 22 million viewers. Yeah.

Tens and tens. Just barely. That's tens and tens. Tulane's gender ratio for the class of 2028, 63. Oh, my God. 63% of students identified as female, 37% as male. Okay, so Tulane, I know it's so loud. Oh.

Oh, Jesus. Last episode was my truck. We let people know how close my truck was. I know. And now we're letting everyone know how close we are to tree trimming. Unfortunately, again, this sounds much closer than your car did. So your car thing is becoming less and less impressive. Yeah. Okay. Speaking of Tulane, I was looking up the super spreaders.

like what constitutes one in Tulane, Harvard, MIT and mass gen. It's learned that obesity, age and COVID infection correlate with the propensity to breathe out more respiratory droplets. It's pretty gross when he gets into the description of what makes it happen, because it's really when if you, cause he watched a camera go in and look at the vocal cords as you speak and they come together and separate like so fast and

And if you have sticky saliva, it creates that thing, which then breaks and then creates the droplets. If you're super well hydrated and it's not sticky, you're not a super spreader. So the person at this conference who infected 3 million people, they had just flown like 18 hours from China or 20 hours. So they were dehydrated. And they probably already had some

genetic predisposition for that kind of saliva, but it's grosser than you want it to be. Wow. It's like sticky. I wish we, can you check, like, can you check your own? I don't know if there's a test. They should add that to 23andMe. They should, it's a super spreader. Yeah. Okay. Higher body mass index is,

Is part of it. Being a super spreader? Mm-hmm. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. This says researchers found that 18% of the human subjects accounted for 80% of the exhaled particles of the group. Whoa. 18% were responsible for 80%. That's so crazy. Okay. The Jason Mraz really, really, really popular song is I'm Yours. How's that go? Oh.

I don't want to sing it. Come on. No. Hum it. We can play it. Actually, we can't. Well, I don't think we can. I don't think we can do any of it. So look it up. Rob, can you sing it? Do you know how it goes? No. Yes, you do. No, I really don't. Other than the part you just sang. I know I know it because I know his really popular song. So I'm frustrated that I can't get it. Fine, I'll play it. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. Anyway, that's it. That was everything? Yeah. Malcolm. You're Malcolm.

Doesn't sound like you're welcome. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. You're Malcolm for welcome. Sure, sure it is. I just love that he revisits his previous. He's not afraid to revisit some previous theories. Right. That's very admirable. Oh, ding, ding, ding. Hypocrisy, contradiction. Yes. People are so afraid of changing their mind because that would make them a hypocrite. Exactly. As opposed to someone who's just. Evolving. Evolving. Yeah. And then he could go back too.

Maybe it'll be more hopeful time and he'll focus again. All right. I love you. Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders.

This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.