Cautionary Tales Presents The Dream
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Hello. Today, I'd like to bring you a cautionary tale from one of the other podcasts in the Pushkin Industries family. It's called The Dream, and it's a co-production with Little Everywhere. The host of The Dream, Jane Marie, is with me now. Welcome to Cautionary Tales, Jane. Hi, Tim. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure. I've really been enjoying listening to some of the back catalogue of The Dream. We're into the third season. You're

Your previous seasons looked at the world of wellness and pyramid schemes. Very interesting from a point of view of portionary tales. So before we talk about the current season, what were you trying to do with those earlier episodes?

Some of my favorite stories in radio and podcasting are about things that are, you know, right in front of your face that you just don't actually know what's happening. Multi-level marketing has been part of my life since I was a

baby. My grandmothers sold Mary Kay and Tupperware and Avon and now we know their pyramid schemes. But when I was a kid, it was just, you know, ladies getting together and having fun. When you say multi-level marketing, you're not just selling whatever makeup, you're selling the idea of being a makeup selling agent. You're selling the American dream. You're selling financial freedom. You're selling a small business. Yeah.

You're selling the dream, hence the name of the podcast, The Dream. And the book. I wrote a book. It's coming out in March called Selling the Dream.

about all this stuff. You heard it here first, guys. I like looking into worlds where we think we know what's going on and we really don't. So you're exploring in these three seasons, you're exploring three different manifestations of the American dream. That's right. Yeah. And so is it partly that the system isn't delivering and so people reach for ever more implausible workarounds?

Absolutely. And what all of them have in common is kind of a quick fix, right? So

With multi-level marketing, it's all you need is a hundred bucks and you don't even need a high school diploma and you can run an empire if you want to. With wellness, you don't need to do chemo. Just take this pill, right? This is, it's, or rub this essential oil on your body. And with life coaching, you know, you don't really need a therapist. You don't need antidepressants. We don't need infrastructure for our healthcare or mental healthcare. You just need a life coach. You need someone who's calling themselves a life coach. And then

You could also be a life coach if you want. The multi-level marketing comes back in. You can't quite keep that idea down. So you just need a life coach. That brings us to season three, the current season of The Dream. Why did that strike you as a good topic? Because I think it's perhaps less well-known than the wellness industry, you know, goop, but it's less well-known than pyramid schemes. So why life coaching?

It is so embedded in both of those worlds that it felt like the most natural next thing to explore. With multi-level marketing, a lot of the companies offer coaching services that

as another enticement for staying in the scheme after you spent a few years and realized you're not going to make any money. You just need to pay for a coach. Exactly. And usually that person works for the multi-level marketing company. And we actually speak to someone who started out in multi-level marketing and it was a wellness brand. And she then got sucked into a coaching cult because I think what coaching does is it really...

drills down on the idea that all success and failure is upon the individual. The multi-level marketing company, it really doesn't matter what their products are like as long as you're working as hard as you possibly can to sell them. There's no fault within the company for your failure. It's all about your attitude and your work ethic. And with wellness products, it's not really about whether the product has any scientific efficacy or will actually cure your ailments, but

It's about what you believe, whether you are fully invested and have the right attitude. So a lot of what we looked at this season was this mindset junk. I think it's junk about, you know, success comes to those with the right way of looking at things and the right mindset. The hardest workers should reap the biggest rewards, all that stuff. That was just very curious to me. It's very interesting because, I mean, I guess what makes it so interesting

seductive is in part that it's adjacent to something perfectly reasonable. That's right. Yeah. So let's talk about the episode that you've picked is about hard work. So why did you want to share that with Cautionary Tales listeners? In reporting this season about life coaches, a lot of them are well-intentioned and the results you can get from them are great. But I just kept having this feeling as we were reporting that

that there's got to be someone that this doesn't work for. And in fact, I felt like the kind of toxic positivity within the coaching world, I don't know, there was something icky about it, like encouraging this bootstrap mentality that we're talking about and rugged individualism and, you know, just think and grow rich. Think your way out of your station in life. That can't work for everybody because there are systemic issues that keep certain populations alive.

in a struggle and no amount of like individual effort will change those systems. I was right, sadly. There happens to be many populations, mostly people of color, mostly people who are poor for whom this sort of striving is not only unhelpful, you know, it doesn't work, but it can be very detrimental to one's health and longevity.

So we found this professor, Dr. Sherman James, and another professor, Arlene Geronimus, who are in North Carolina and Michigan, respectively. And they do research into populations where striving, or as Arlene calls it, weathering, you know, really just working your butt off and trying to improve your life, can lead to all kinds of health complications if you're in a population where

The entire system is already built to like not let you succeed no matter how hard you're working.

Yes, I love the fact that I don't want to have too many spoilers for the episode, but I love the fact that the episode features its own cautionary tale, which is the story of John Henry, the steel worker. But one of the researchers that you talked to has developed a John Henry scale of whether people have tendencies to just be absolutely determined and to work and to work and to work. And we're told that, you know, that...

That kind of determination, that persistence, that grit. There was that book, wasn't there? Grit. That's the secret to success. And, well, it doesn't necessarily work out like that as we find out. Yeah, it's not necessarily good for you to try to beat the machine.

But why do people strive so hard when both the evidence and kind of common sense says, you know, you can push it too far, you can hurt yourself? Well, in America, we're trained up from birth to believe that that's how it works. It's a delusion. It's a mass delusion. But that we live somewhere where the hardest workers, the people with the most grit, as you say, the people who only get six hours of sleep at night, you know, the most industrious individual will somehow survive.

Not only reap unimaginable riches in this life, but probably also get into heaven. I mean, I'm talking from kindergarten you're told that story, right? Never mind the fact that all the people that they bring up as examples of folks who that's worked for are mostly dead white guys. But it's a way for these...

big systems and giant corporations to shirk the responsibility of taking care of each other by saying, you know, if you just had the right attitude and worked a little bit harder, you wouldn't have anything to complain about. Is there a way to break out of that vicious cycle? Yeah, revolution, man. No, I don't know. I think about all the time, like, what am I really saying? We're just humble podcasters. Yeah.

I don't know. I've gotten some pushback from people saying, well, you know, it's nice to criticize the system, but that doesn't help me right now. And that's what I wish changed is like, I don't really care about right now. Like I'm 45. I'm running out of time. Like nothing really that amazing is going to happen in my life. But...

I would hope that we change the system for like my grandkids. You know, I hope that by the time 100 years from now, like they have different opportunities. I get really sad every once in a while thinking about like sexism, right? Like I was told as a little girl in the 70s, 80s, that's going to get fixed. And then I'm now at my age and I go, oh, there's the pay gap is still real, man. You know, like this is all still a problem. And I get really sad thinking about my daughter because we didn't fix it in time for her. She's 10 years old now.

I'll give you personal absolution for not fixing capitalism in a single podcast. I think it's okay to point to the problem and to tell these vivid stories about this problem. Tim, I'm going to keep trying.

It's fun to be mad about it. And it's an amazing, amazing story, amazing listen. So thank you so much for joining us, Jaymarie. Thanks, Tim. And before we listen to the latest episode of The Dream, I should point out that people can hear The Dream wherever they get their podcasts. It is a production of Pushkin Industries and Little Everywhere. Thanks again for joining us. And loyal listeners, you've been waiting. Here it is. Striving is bad for your health.

Pushkin. Have you ever heard the legend of John Henry? Before I did the interview you're about to hear, the best recollection I had of the story came from a Disney short I saw like 20 years ago. In that cartoon version for kids, it's a story about the ultimate can-do man. A man with supernatural grit and determination.

His story was first shared as a folktale among African Americans in the late 1800s, and then it became a song performed by black folks, and then white folk singers, about the magnificence of the steel-driving man that's the human precursor to a jackhammer or pneumatic drill. For over a century, it's been upheld as a story emblematic of the American dream. Work hard enough and you shall overcome. Have the right mindset and the rest will fall into place. Except

That's not what happens in the end of The Legend of John Henry, not even close. John Henry's life doesn't get better, no. The ending of The Legend of John Henry is totally perplexing, so much so that scholars have argued about its meaning for almost 100 years. One of those scholars, a retired Southern Black professor, Dr. Sherman James, used the story to come up with a hypothesis about why putting your mind to something and trying your very, very hardest isn't necessarily a good thing for any of us.

Any of us, not just the person driving this deal. Here's how Dr. Sherman James tells the story of John Henry. According to this legend, sometime in the early 1870s, John Henry, an uneducated African-American, was working as part of a work gang, probably a group of convict laborers. And so he

One day, John Henry, who was reputed to be the best steel driver that the world had ever known, was challenged by his work boss to compete against a newly invented machine, mechanical steam drill.

And he rose to the challenge, arguing that a man was nothing but a man, but a man was certainly better than a machine. And so this epic battle, man against machine, ensued. And after a long, long confrontation with the machine, John Henry won. But he dropped dead after his victory from complete mental and physical exhaustion.

And what was that legend meant to teach us at the, or when it was created? Yeah, that's a great question. It's probably debatable as to what the legend actually signifies. The earliest work on the meaning of the legend was by an anthropologist by the name of Guy Johnson, who actually went to the area where this legendary contest was supposed to have taken place near Talcott, West Virginia.

And so he interviewed a number of Black folks, and he came away with the idea that John Henry may not have actually been a real person, but that really didn't matter. Here's what he wrote in his book, John Henry, Tracking Down a Negro Legend, first published in 1929. The question of whether the John Henry legend

rests on a factual basis is, after all, not of much significance. No matter which way it is answered, there remains the fact that the legend itself is a reality, a living, functioning thing in the folk life of the Negro. So the legend had this large meaning in the lives of working-class African Americans who felt that it

It sort of signified the triumph of the spirit of Black people. So it was, you know, standing up to power and refusing to back down and winning, even at a very high cost. Now, in 2006, historian Scott Nelson wrote this really interesting book, Steel Driving Man, The Untold Story of

of John Henry. And it's a wonderful piece of historical research. Scott Nelson concluded after extensive archival research that John Henry was probably a real person and not necessarily a freed slave. Maybe he was born in New Jersey and he worked his way south shortly after the Civil War looking for job opportunities and

He got caught up in the Black Codes. He actually was accused of petty larceny and was tried and convicted and thrown into jail, a very long prison term, and wound up working as part of a work gang on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

and then was exposed to, you know, all of the toxic dust that men who carved out tunnels and mountains were exposed to. And he probably died of, you know, what we might call coal miners disease. So that in a sense then he was a, you know, the legendary John Henry was a victim of sort of the first wave of mass incarceration of black people. So Scott Nelson concluded that

the meaning of the story for everyday Black folks. It was like a cautionary tale. Don't let this happen to you. Run away as fast as you can. Don't get caught up in this system. So we have these, I'm going to say competing versions of what the legend means. For me, I sort of lean more toward the former version

Because I think it really taps more deeply, more authentically into the

into the spirit of Black Americans to confront adversity, to not give up on their dreams, to succeed against the odds. So it's more of a fight, if you will, kind of response than a flight kind of response. And then, of course, I think that there are both rewards and costs associated with

engaging in that kind of fight response. So with the story in the back of his mind, Dr. James headed off to college and became a professor of epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill.

He studied diseases and their causes. And he decided to look at the problem of high blood pressure in Black men in eastern North Carolina. He said he chose this population because they were unlikely to regularly go to the doctor and very likely to die of heart attack and stroke, the end result of a life with high blood pressure or hypertension. And so a physician colleague of mine gave me the names of six of his Black male patients whom I could interview.

So I drove about 55 miles north of Chapel Hill to a farm in Alamance County to speak to a man by the name of Mr. John Martin. And he was retired. He was 71 years of age at the time. He was waiting for me in his backyard. It was mid-July, very hot.

So he welcomed me warmly, invited me to sit next to him and chair in the big tree. And we just started talking and he began to tell me his life story. It was a phenomenal story. Born into a sharecropper family in 1907. His father was, of course, uneducated and

and could never get out of debt because the sharecropper system was designed to keep particularly black sharecroppers perpetually in debt. And so when John Martin, Mr. John Martin was probably an early adolescent, and he saw how his father just fretted and hard he worked and he could just never get ahead, he vowed that that would not be his fate. Under no circumstances would he

he'd be caught up in that kind of exploitative system. So some years later, when he became a young man, got married, and he was a sharecropper himself because he had the job out of school in the second grade in order to help out on the farm. His wife's brother was a landowner, an independent landowner, and

His wife also came from a family that owned their own land. And so both of them, his wife and his brother-in-law prevailed upon him to take the risk and go to the bank and get a loan and buy his own property.

So with some considerable reluctance, he did. And he got a mortgage, a 40-year mortgage, to purchase 75 acres of fertile North Carolina farmland. And

He always had this sort of deep sense of vulnerability to, you know, powerful forces because he saw what had happened to his father. And by working literally night and day for, you know, six days a week, he, with a lot of help from his wife, managed to pay it off in five years. A huge accomplishment. And so then he...

He turned to me and he said, "I think that's the reason why my legs are all out of whack. I pushed myself too hard in the fields." Now, I knew that he had high blood pressure and he had two canes that were leaning against the chair in which he was sitting. So he was suffering from a very severe case of osteoarthritis. And in the course of telling me about his life story, he also told me that

In his mid-50s or so, he had to go to the hospital and have 40% of his stomach removed because he had a very serious case of peptic ulcers. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So he had these three major diseases that had a huge stress component. Stress component meaning these diseases that can be caused or triggered by stress. Yeah. The stress plays a role. So he'd been talking for maybe a couple of hours and-

his wife came to the door and she said, "John Henry, it's time for lunch and bring your guests with you." So I looked at him and I said, "Your name is John Henry?" And he said, "Yeah, John Henry Martin." And I thought, just like the legendary John Henry went up against the machine. And in the case of John Henry Martin, the machine was the sharecropper system, which he beat

He won his struggle against the machine, the economic machine that was the sharecropper system, but he paid a price. I began to think, well, maybe there's something here, you know, maybe there's something here, because his story reminded me, John Henry Martin's story reminded me a lot of

of the story of my parents, the story of my grandparents. My grandfathers on both my mother's side and my father's side were sharecroppers. So I could identify with what John Henry Martin was telling me. And I thought, his story is not just his story. This is really the story of Black people.

Black people in America having to go up against these very powerful political and economic forces, these systems, these institutions that are in place to keep Black people subjugated.

and forcing them to have to work extremely hard in order to make ends meet and in order to try to move ahead. So that really led then to the John Dienderism hypothesis that maybe that's the explanation for why we see so much

high blood pressure and strokes and heart attacks that affect African Americans, particularly working class African Americans, fairly early in adult life. And then of course the challenge became, how do I test this? AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up.

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And so I came up with 12 questions that constitute the John Henryism scale for active coping or high effort coping. And I can give you, if you wish, a couple of sample questions. So here's the first question.

When things don't go the way I want them to, that just makes me work even harder. Now, the response options are strongly agree, somewhat agree, don't know, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree. So here's the second question. Once I make up my mind to do something, I stay with it until the job is completely done.

So, you know, the remaining questions continue to work this theme of tenacity, persistence, not giving up. So that's the John Henryism scale. And guess what? His hunch was right. He found a very strong correlation between scoring high on the John Henryism scale and having hypertension and all of its attendant problems like stroke and heart attack.

The more these men strived for excellence, the sicker they became and the shorter they lived. And contrary to what Dr. James and his colleagues speculated, the link was there even for those who had already moved up the socioeconomic ladder, who had achieved success and stability and were aiming to achieve even more, as we all do. This was very surprising to us. I can't emphasize that enough. So this is the late 1980s.

when at the time there had been very little epidemiological research on the health of middle-class Black people. And we sort of expected to see that, oh, they will be doing so much better than their working-class counterparts, right? We're talking about the post-civil rights movement, folks who came of age in the 1960s, who benefited from the 1964 pandemic.

Civil Rights Act 1965, the Civil Rights legislation. And now they were moving into these white spaces from which Black folks had, for the most part, been excluded. There may be a lot of physiological wear and tear that attends going up against, taking on these intrinsic shape-shifting

institutional constraints against upward social mobility. That's wild. I mean, I understand it. I understand it, but yeah. I mean, obviously very disturbing, right? A very disturbing finding. So what the data are telling us, what these data are telling us, and again, I want to emphasize that this is not just one study, but there are multiple studies that

that have shown this effect. What this is telling us is that successful upward mobility in America for people of color, not just Black Americans, but for people of color, comes with a price. Just like we saw in the story of John Henry Martin. He achieved, there was upward social mobility, he became a landowner, he became an independent farmer, he had some wealth, but he paid a price.

I kept wondering how Dr. James' findings extended to women. At the end of one popular version of the John Henry song, the story goes on to talk about his widow, Polly Ann, who just picked up John Henry's hammer and went right on driving steel in his place. So I spoke to a professor at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, Dr. Arlene Geronimus. My area of study is health inequity.

Okay, tell me more about that. I think that's something we all want to know a lot about right now. Yes, which is interesting to me because 30 years ago, people weren't that interested. Dr. Geronimus began her research into health inequity back in the 70s in a school for pregnant teen moms. She had a hunch about teen pregnancy and the way we thought about it.

that it wasn't the very worst thing to ever happen to someone. And it wasn't nearly as negatively impactful on people's lives as other, larger forces in society. It wasn't the root of all evil. But in observing the poorer moms or the moms of color, she did notice that they often had health problems that usually don't appear until much later in life, problems that had nothing to do with being pregnant. What was going on?

Well, I came to this theory I've now pursued for all these decades, which I called weathering, which was the idea that if you're part of a denigrated group, you're both exposed to more assaults that wear down your health at earlier ages. And so that's weathering as in a rock being, you know, weathered by water.

Wind and rain over centuries. But you're also in this, you know, this is what I had seen initially in the school for pregnant moms. You're also weathering in the sense that you're having to, and this actually relates a lot

to some of the concepts in Sherman James's work. Having to expend so much effort and coping with all the things you're exposed to because you're still trying to withstand the storm, you're trying to survive it, you're trying to even overcome it or help overcome it through the next generation if we're talking about racism and poverty.

That keeps you chronically stressed, even while you're sleeping. It's not something you can just say, let me meditate or let me try to reframe the situation. Let me smile and put on my high heels and pretty dress, feel positive. These are things that are happening day in and day out.

And they're happening to you and they're happening as you, as I said, work very positively and assertively and proactively to survive and withstand them. And I've come to believe, you know, some of that is just objective things in your environment. You know, meditating isn't going to help you deal with environmental toxicity. Right. Meditating isn't going to help you deal with the fact in order to feed your children, you

Given that, you know, the value of real wages, which was never very high in the lower rungs, has gotten even less, means you have to do two or three jobs or take night shift jobs instead.

that impinge on your sleep or that you don't have a car. So you're relying on really bad public transportation to try and get to your various jobs. You're also juggling how do you get your kids to school? How do you have them taken care of when they're home? At the same time, you don't have any control over the hours you work.

Um, so there's just this endless coping that is kind of psycho, I might call it psychosocial. And what I've come to understand and what I think goes beyond a lot of how people think about stress, besides that it's not just this individual thing you can manage or control, um, is that a very big part of what sets off all those stress reactions in your body, the cortisol and all of that is, is

is that we all as human beings need to have a sense of how safe we are in any particular situation. And safe can mean literally life or death safe, or it can mean, are we somewhere where we can be authentic, where we will be treated fairly? So it can mean things short of that life or death, or it could mean

you know, the intersection of them, such as if you're a black person stopped by a police officer, that's both something that you worry is unsafe and it could be life threatening also. So we set off these stress reactions that people kind of vernacularly know as fight or flight. But if you think about what happens when you set them off, you start to see how your health wears down early

early along the very things that cause the health inequities by race and class in the United States. I think when you were talking about the like, you know, having so many jobs and not sleeping and taking public transportation and all of that, I feel like for a large part of our society in America anyway, those are the actually the answers. Those are the solves, right? Like get

Work harder. If you don't have a car, take the bus. It's like just change your attitude. Be more positive. Be optimistic and have a better –

a better mindset? What I've seen is in the very same populations who weather, I've never seen more resilient people who keep going on in the face of adversity and who can be very optimistic and, and who have all these sayings and support from, you know, the people they're in networks with or their loved ones about, you know, take one foot forward or, you know, keep on keeping on. Um,

But given that I've seen how optimistic and what a good attitude by, you know, by some measures people in these communities have,

and they still get so sick, it certainly doesn't seem to me that that's much good evidence that being optimistic or having grit or being resilient or making the best of bad situations is what's going to make you healthy. It certainly hasn't worked in these circumstances. People would have to accept how inequitably structured our world is

And that they didn't really earn their right to have vacations and time off for yoga and me time. Where do you get your me time when you're raising kids and

working night shifts and then working another shift in the day and then trying to figure out do you pay your electricity bill or not? Do you fight with your landlord that he hasn't fixed the heater in your building? And you have to make these decisions all the time. Yeah. And then you're also being told you don't work hard, you don't have future orientation, you're not a good person, you had your children too young, which just proves you aren't a good person.

If you just really, you know, pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, you'd get all the same things we got. Those are stressful things to work against, too. I wish I could say that these findings shocked me, but instead they affirmed a feeling I've been having about the self-improvement woo-woo coachy world.

There's just something really privileged and tone-deaf about the idea of picking yourself up by your bootstraps. An idea we've heaped upon people of color in this country, I think, to absolve white people of having to do any hard work to help their fellow man. An idea that we've gifted white people, convincing us we've earned everything we have. An idea designed to keep those in power in power, while blaming people we oppress for their powerlessness.

The mindset stuff from Napoleon Hill, the individual responsibility of the unemployed folks in Texas, Ray Higdon's insistence that you just need to defy your negative feelings to overcome adversity. These are all just distractions from the larger forces that make it harder for so many people to rise in this country. Things like racism and sexism and all the isms I'm constantly banging on about.

Despite what these pitchmen might say, you cannot thank yourself out of being the only woman in a business meeting. Believe me, I've tried. There are people, groups of people, for whom this think and grow rich stuff is just plainly detrimental and that it's bad for society on the whole. When entire enormous communities suffer in an effort to not suffer, we all suffer.

I want to put you in a room with Tony Robbins while he's like screaming about how, you know, this like rugged individualism and, you know, your mindset just needs to overcome stuff. No, it's more complicated. It's more complicated. These motivational speakers have figured something out, right? You know, how to speak to the aspirations of people and how to connect people

their shtick with the American dream. And, you know, we Americans, you know, how our mind is conditioned, right, to think about our country as a place where hard work pays off. I mean, all of us have internalized, to some degree, that notion, that aspiration. They have been sold the American dream

lot of us have been sold the American dream. This is where I want to give them some grace, if let me put it that way. What they don't know is the kind of thing that you and I have been talking about. They really don't know the physiological costs associated with this. Now the question, for me, the question becomes, what would they say if they knew? How would it change their

their message. How would it change what they say to people if they knew, but they don't know? And of course, it's a very powerful dream, isn't it? I mean, what a wonderful idea the American dream is. I mean, it's a powerful idea. It has attracted people from all over the world, you know, in search of opportunities, you

to be freer than uh you know they're able to be free in their in their home countries to to realize their potential to to be safe from harm uh to be successful economically to gain wealth to pass something on to the next generation to make it easier uh for the next generation uh to live their lives and uh have been the case for them there's nothing wrong with the dream

but it's a dream. The problem is, and you mentioned this earlier, the record individualism that is such a core attribute of American culture, the notion that

That America, that the United States is a meritocracy. I was just going to say, yeah, the meritocracy thing. Yeah. Yeah. That you deserve what you get and you get what you deserve. Right. And, and that now in the end is really up to you.

So don't ask me to pay higher taxes so that the opportunity structure can be expanded and we can have some social safety nets that will make your striving to be successful less costly. And other countries have in place much stronger social safety nets such that the kind of

Upper mobility striving, the kind of desire, you know, for self-realization, to realize your potential, you know, to live a life that is meaningful and satisfying does not come with it. The pursuit of it, of that kind of life does not come with an unnecessary cost to your health. And that is one of the things that distinguishes our country from other countries.

rich countries in the world. Right. One could argue that that is the most distinguishing factor that distinguishes the United States of America from our peer countries elsewhere in the world. It's very sobering, but it's important to know that this phenomenon exists. And now that we know it,

And we have to keep talking about it. We have to engage in educating the public. Of course, there'll be the skeptics, but we have to do our best certainly to educate policymakers and advocate for social and economic policies that make urban mobility striving less costly.

We're going to leave you today with a version of John Henry sung by the civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who died this year. Enjoy. John Henry, he could hammer, he could whistle, he could sing. Went to the mountain early in the morning just to hear his hammering. Lord, Lord, just to hear his hammering. Just to hear his hammering. Lord, Lord, just to hear his hammering. When John Henry was a little baby...

Well, John Henry's family needed money.

Said he didn't have but a dime. If you wait till the rising sun goes down, I'll get it from the men in the mine, Lord, Lord, I'll get it from the men in the mine. I'll get it from the men in the mine, Lord, I'll get it from the men in the mine. Well, the captain said to John Henry, John Henry, what can you do?

I can hoist a jack, I can lay a track, I can pick and shovel too, Lord God, I can pick and shovel too. I can pick and shovel too, Lord, Lordy, I can pick and shovel too. Well, John Henry said to the captain, but let your steam drill beat me down, well, I'll die with a hammer in my hand, Lord God.

¶¶

Well, John Henry said to his shaker...

Shake a wad, don't you sing. Throwing 15 pounds from my hips on down. Listen to the cold steel ring, Lord, Lord. Yes, listen to the cold steel ring. Oh, listen to the cold steel ring, Lordy, Lordy. Won't you listen to the cold steel ring? Well, the man who invented the steam drill thought he was mighty fine. John Henry drove his 15 feet and the steam drill only made nine, Lord.

Steam Drill Only Made Nine Yes, the Steam Drill Only Made Nine Lord, Lord, the Steam Drill Only Made Nine Well, the captain said to John Henry Are you mountains sinking in? John Henry said to the captain Oh, my, ain't nothing but my hammer sucking wind Lord, Lord, nothing but my hammer sucking wind Ain't nothing but my hammer sucking wind Lord, ain't nothing but my hammer sucking wind Well, John Henry said to the captain

The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Jane Marie.

Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from Nancy Golombiski and Joy Sanford. Our editor is Peter Clowney. The Dream is a co-production of Little Everywhere and Pushkin Industries. Well, John Henry had a little woman, and she walked down the track, never looked back. Polly Andros teed like a man, Lord, Lord, Polly Andros teed like a man. Polly Andros teed like a man, Lord, Lord, Polly Andros teed like a man.

Well, the people took John Henry to the White House and they buried him in the sand. Every locomotive come roaring by says, There lies a steel-driving man, Lord God, yes, there lies a steel-driving man. Yes, there lies a steel-driving man. There lies a steel-driving man. Yes, there lies a steel-driving man, Lord, yes, there lies a steel-driving man.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.

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