#1029 - Malcolm Gladwell - How to Convince the World of Bulls**t & Evil

30:56One should always be hesitant about making sweeping statements. Especially when the word epidemic is being used, yes. I think that the, I would say that the commonalities are greater than we imagine. Obviously, you don't die in the same numbers from a noxious idea that you do from a dangerously addictive opioid. So there's that. and ideas. There are some weird differences, which is when I was doing my book and I was talking to all these people who started the opioid crisis, the thing that they couldn't understand was why it lasted so long. It should have, normally when you look at an epidemic of disease or that's killing lots of people is they burn out really quickly.

31:44The crack epidemic in the 90s doesn't actually last that long. The HIV, HIV, well, we really get a really powerful medical intervention early on, but HIV doesn't, in the Western world, does not hang around for decades. It gets tamed pretty quickly. The flu comes every fall, and it's gone by the spring, right? You know what? People, large numbers of people are coming out. But opioids linger. That was what was so weird. It goes on for 25 years. It's still going on. It's finally starting to fall, but it's at a high level. because it moves from opioids to heroin and then heroin to prescription drugs to heroin and then heroin to fentanyl and then fentanyl to mixtures of all three and just keeps going.

32:31And all these people who study this for a living, they're observing this and are keep waiting for it to burn out, right? Like there's a well-known generational mechanism where if your dad or mom is addicted, this happened with crack, crack the kids of people whose parents were addicted to crack did not touch crack you saw what happened and you were like i want no part of it right um it's interesting with the the uh genetic predisposition that would be carried through as well so what you have to assume there is the environmental like inverse role model effect is so powerful that it's got escape velocity to get over you having the raw building block genetics of an addict.

33:20Yeah. Yeah, that's impressive. Really. I mean, you see a lesser version of this with, I mean, alcoholism clearly runs in families, but I think that might be because, to use the same kind of model that you're talking about, that people can be functioning alcoholics for their entire lives. And so the kind of lesson that the child is receiving is a little bit more mixed. With crack, you literally saw your parents disintegrate in front of your eyes. It's a really, really powerful, concentrated lesson that this is something you stay away from. If the natural path of alcoholism was that one of your parents starts drinking when you're 12 and they're dead by 16, then I would imagine that the alcoholism would not run in families in the same way.

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35:26And maybe they're cheating on you actually and you're not too sure. All of these people would be worse if their situations, all these people would be better off if their situations were worse. Worse, oh, that's fascinating. it would kick them out the bottom um and uh i i talked about this a few years ago and um as the internet does clipped it and did a thing and somebody asked me at this live show i did in australia last year set up and he says you know you have done live events and sometimes questions are a little more verbose uh they're a little bit rambling uh and this one was real sharp and short and he says i think i'm in region beta should i purposefully make my life worse so i get out of it and I was like kind of a radical solution it's a high risk strategy but I don't know it might work and we came up with a slightly different solution but I thought that was really funny well the version of that is the difference between the cold war and you know Russia and Ukraine we never the cold war never becomes a hot war because the consequences of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States are existential russia and ukraine just are just like slowly over time randomly destroying each other and you know they can both of them are carrying on right so it's like it's they're in they're in what's the phrase region beater region beta yeah beta you guys would call it region region region beta paradox um they're in that conflict is in region beta 100 yeah yeah yeah it really is um I suppose one solution here would be if you're an alcoholic, you could start trying crack.

37:04That might be a way, another radical one. Another thing I'm interested in, this parental contagion idea. I've been having a lot of conversations recently about embryo selection, IVF embryo selection, polygenic risk scores and stuff like that and the potential the potential sort of tiger mom implications pre-birth um that could roll back so i'm interested in uh this parental contagion idea that that you talked about

37:41well i'm a little bit of a skeptic on that kind of apologetic screening screening because the things that you're interested in are the ones that are impossible to screen for right so intelligence what is intelligence if if it's definable at all is probably the result of an unknowable interaction between so many thousands of genes that god knows how you select for it um and then the other thing is like we if you don't have a handle on the ways in which a genetic susceptibility interacts with environment, then you could select for something and it could all come to naught, right? Like when I think about what intelligence is or what the kind of determinants of success are, there's so much A, randomness, and B, so much of it is about motivation.

38:37And motivation is the least genetically determined of all the

38:46character traits. Conscientiousness is the, what's the big five? Conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience. Agreeableness and extroversion. Agreeableness and extroversion. Conscientiousness is the least genetically determined of all those extroversions the most. Yeah. And that's because conscientiousness is powerfully environmentally determined. If you like your job and you like your boss and you like your coworkers, you work hard. If you hate them all, you won't. Whereas, you know, an extrovert in a room full of sour people is still an extrovert. They're still yucking it up. Like they're not, you're relatively impervious to that.

39:32And I've come to the opinion that when it comes to explaining performance, conscientiousness and motivation are way, way, way, way, way, way more important than we realize. And if that's the thing that's the least genetically determined, then what are we doing here? Yeah, I mean, I suppose the argument would be trying to gain 1%, so 0.1 % wherever we can, the same as playing classic music to your unborn baby while it's in the womb because it's going to help the brain complexity of the brain development. Or, you know, people are, the same reason that I use a temperature controlled mattress duvet that tracks my HRV and I try to not eat three hours before I get, you know what I mean?

40:15Like people are trying to - Are you on the HRV train? I am on the HRV train. Look at me. You think I'm on the HRV train? Yes. Whoop brothers. Whoop brothers indeed. Whoop baby. Yeah. Whoop, whoop. We could do a whole sad thing on whoop. I'm a whoop obsessive. Whoop. its chief function for me is, sorry, this is a digression. The sleep score, really what it is, is I think I had a shitty night. And then Whoop tells me I didn't. This happened last night. My daughter wakes me up at four o 'clock in the morning. Daddy, daddy, I wanna... And I can't get back to sleep. And I wake up dreading my Whoop score.

40:50Whoop said I had a great night of sleep. And I've been fine ever since. But what about the gaslighting in the other direction? That's what you need. But what happens when you think you had a great night's sleep, you wake up and... Almost never happens. It's only, for me, it only ever works. If I think I had a great night, I had a great night. Maybe Will, I could get the CEO of Whoop. Did he skew my numbers? Maybe he gave me - I could ask him whether or not he could give me like optimistic Whoop. I just want to be, I'm happy to be gaslit. I only want to be gaslit in one direction now. I always want to assume that I've got more sleep.

41:22What's your HIV average? Probably in the 50s, high 50s. It's not that great. Good for you. No, that's high. I mean, I'm lower, but I'm a good deal older. It drops with age. Easier, such as myself.

41:37Parental contagion. Parental contagion. So there's, I mean, I guess the, I'm so impressed by this unknown interaction between environment and genes that I'm hesitant to kind of go too far on. there was a great book written that i wrote about at the time 30 years ago it was written by called do parents matter by judith harris and um she basically summed up all of the evidence about uh what impact parental child raising has on the kid and the answer is the evidence says not a lot basically if your kid you're feeding your kid and they have a roof over their heads and you're not terrifying them every night, it doesn't matter what you do.

42:29And the book, of course, is enormously controversial. Now that I'm a parent, I totally agree with it. But I just think the whole relationship between parents and the outcomes of their children is so muddy and murky that I don't even know what to make of it in any context now. In fact, I have a game that I play with people which is when I say, you know, people all love to play the game of, well, in this way, I'm just like my mom or in this way, I'm just like my dad. And I say, no, no, no, no. Skip a generation. The only way to do that usefully is to, is to think about your four grandparents because there's too much noise with your parents.

43:10Who knows? You grew up with your mom and your dad. Like who knows, like who knows if you're even accurate. Shed environment, N of two. Yeah. But who knows? And you have such a tangled psychological relationship. Who knows if you're even accurately representing the way they are, the way you are, right? I could go on for half an hour about my father and where my father alive and listening to it. I'm quite sure there's a possibility he would listen to that and say, I am nothing like that, right? And that's just the reality of your parental relationship. Your version of your parent and your parents' version of themselves are going to be different.

43:46So how do we even start figuring out how your parent influences you? At least with your grandparents as a degree of remove. So I can say, my dad would tell a story about my mom's father who was this kind of quiet, thoughtful, bookish guy. But people would always ask him to give speeches at weddings. And my father once went to an event where my grandfather was speaking, saw him and said, oh no he went to an event where i was speaking saw me and said i saw you and i saw i thought it was daddy they all called him daddy i thought it was daddy now so there's an example of like it was clear the relationship between me and my grandfather is clear but like you would never have walked into my father and said oh i see that's malcolm you know like it's too much noise One of my friends, his answer to the question, if you could go for dinner with four people living or dead, who would it be?

44:49His answer to that is always his four great grandfathers. Says you would learn far more from sitting down with your own genetics than you would for sitting down with some genius. A hundred percent agree. How cool would that be? How cool would that be? And I didn't know my grandparents very well, so I would settle for my four grandparents. But yeah, the four. I didn't know mine either. Can I give you, I came up with this idea a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to give it to you. It's my show. I can do what I want. But it's called the parental attribution error. We love blaming our parents. It's practically a rite of passage in modern psychology, but there's a double standard buried in the trend.

45:22We attribute what's broken in us to our upbringing while claiming what's strong in us is ours alone. Call it the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error, where we blame others' actions on their character, but excuse our own by pointing to circumstance. This is a skewed way of assigning credit and blame. We externalize the bad, internalize the good. We're quick to blame and slow to credit. You say that you're anxiously attached because no one held you when you needed it, but isn't your ability to be alone with your emotions and to endure discomfort quietly also forged in the same crucible.

45:54You blame your parents for pushing you too hard in school, convinced that it made you perfectionistic and neurotic, but when was the last time you acknowledged that same pressure gave you ambition, discipline, and drive? Do you point to a childhood where mistakes weren't tolerated as a reason that you fear failure? But what about your meticulousness and your standards and your refusal to phone it in? Basically, as far as I can see, people are more than happy to lay the blame for their shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but very rarely lay the credit for their victories there too. And I just, I thought that was an interesting asymmetry.

46:32Yeah. It's funny that is a beautiful allegory to the fundamental attribution error. I have my own version of that, which is what I call the asymmetrical parental attribution error. I love asymmetries. And that is that we indulge in that, but typically when we indulge in that, we only ever make reference to one of our parents at a time. so you don't say i got this bad from my mom and this bad from your my father what you do is you're in a moment or a stage where you say well you're just blaming dad and then yours pass and you flip and you just blame mom for for a while and then you flip it's at only only one time you can only hold one disparaging right okay that's brilliant it's like um i remember scott alexander had this idea, he called it thinking in superpositions, right?

47:25That you could have two worlds exist in your mind at the same time. But when you're talking about the parents, it's like you have to collapse the superposition down. Like the uncertainty principle isn't able to exist. Only one parent can exist in your mind at one time. Yeah. It's never the interaction between the bookish father and the outgoing mother. And I am somewhere in between. It's like when you're not wanting to be outgoing, it's like, well, dad did tell you. And when you can't chill out, It's like, well, mom did say. It's binary. Yeah. And there are many interesting things about this, particularly now that I'm a parent.

47:57One is that from a very early age, and this is an obvious dumb observation, but it's nonetheless one that I've been thinking about. There is a, hypothetically, you might think, that the child, particularly the young child, thinks of their parents as a unit. My parents don't want me to do this. my parents, but in fact, they never do. From the very beginning, they're distinguishing between the father and the mother or whatever. And we continue to do this later. I think this becomes even more pronounced as we get older. And in the beginning, it's understandable because you're correctly, as a toddler, understanding that your parents relate to you independently and using different strategies.

48:45But you are, to your point, you're completely missing the extent to which it is the interaction between your parents that also fundamentally shapes you. You're just blind to it. Like the consensus position of Joyce and Graham Gladwell was X. And X also had an effect on me, not just Joyce and Graham individually. Well, how many people, when they get together, are different people to who they are when they're apart. With some of my friends, there's a version of both of us that comes out, and maybe it's even more us, right? It feels closer to our sense of self than I am when I'm on my own or with other people that I maybe even know better, but there's something, or the reverse.

49:29Around some person, and around them, all I can do is be bitter or resentful or I think small-minded things or I see the world in scarcity mindset or whatever. Given the fact you you talk a lot in uh stories which i i think is why um it's very easy to read your writing when it comes to the medium of communicating

49:58infectious ideas noxious or benevolent i guess um talk to me about the landscape of how storytelling infects differently than facts and sort of how that plays together. Because I think in the modern world, people assume that you should be convinced by the facts, follow the facts, follow the science. But I'm not convinced that that's the way that the human brain works, especially when you're trying to change opinions, fuel empathy, even fuel hate as well. Yeah. Well, the story does a lot better job of eliciting emotion. And that's enormously important, obviously, in anchoring an idea and making and giving an idea leverage over somebody's thinking or feeling.

50:55The story embedded, this is a kind of more subtle point, but I, you know, A story to my mind is a narrative that defies or a narrative that betrays the audience's expectations. That's what a story is. The reason I will, why did I watch HBO's Task? I finished it on Sunday. I watched it every week for seven weeks. Why did I keep watching? Well, it was interesting. I needed to want a TV show to watch. But fundamentally, I didn't know how it was going to end. So I knew if you had asked me before the final episode, how do I think it's going to end, I would have given you six possibilities. It turns out almost all of them were wrong.

51:43So the story, what made it satisfying to watch that through to the end, was that it did not conform to my expectation. And I knew that. And that's why I was drawn to it. I knew that it was pointless to try and figure out how it was going to end. And all stories, good stories, good songs, all have that quality of betraying our expectation. And we know that going in and that's why we want it. There's something fundamentally human about wanting our expectations to be betrayed. That's why we laugh at jokes, right? There's so many things we do. Think about it. Why would somebody pay an enormous sum of money to sit in an arena and have just somebody, one person up on stage, just tell these abbreviated anecdotes about their life or the world?

52:31The answer is because it's just a constant rush of betrayed expectations, right? I always watch these little Instagram snippets of Nate Bragassi.

52:47Am I pronouncing his name right? Bragass? I've only ever seen it written down. Yeah. So who I think is very, very, very, very funny in a kind of, but his portrayals are so beautifully done and so subtle. And so, cause he's working with this incredibly narrow template of he's telling these super kind of prosaic and benign stories about family life. Right. So you, and so you, your expectation is nothing can be funny or happen here. Right. He's, he's taken so many things off the table there's going to be no you know dangerous edgy commentary there's no politics there's no sex there's no violence there's no swearing there's no nothing he's not going to rag on anybody he's not going to make fun of anybody so you're like so we've narrowed and that's why he's so inviting you're like okay this dude is trying to thread the needle here.

53:42He's going to do something. He's going to betray me after taking 90 % of the possible objects of betrayal off the table. Then he pulls it off and you're like, oh my God. You laugh way out of proportion to the quality of the joke. The joke itself is pretty mild, but the degree of difficulty is so great. That's what you're rewarding. You're like, you did it man like yeah yeah did not see that coming and you you decided you want to paint in one color right that's like and that's that is the so all of which is a long way of saying that a story is one of the few places where we are willing to change our mind right it's when we're talking about a betrayed expectation we're talking about you change your mind And fact, facts don't, people have no difficulty whatsoever dismissing facts.

54:37But the kind of subtle mind changing that comes with a story is much harder to dismiss. In other news, Shopify powers 10 % of all e-commerce companies in the United States. They are the driving force behind Gymshark, Skims, Aloe, and Nutonic, which is why I partnered with them. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36 % better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with ShopPay, you can boost conversions by up to 50%. They've got award-winning support there to help you every step of the way. Look, you are not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do backend inventory management.

55:16Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with Newtonic on Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. Dude, that's so great. That's such an interesting insight. I had this conversation with Alex O 'Connor, who is an upcoming agnostic commentator, I guess.

55:56We would have called him an atheist a few years ago, but I don't think that's kind of the interim anymore. And he's very pro-religion. He's fascinating. He goes into every conversation with a theologist or a believer desperately hoping to believe on the other side. He just has a very high bar for it and is educated in the counter-arguments. And he said this real interesting thing that what we are asking people to do in the modern world is to ignore the types of information and persuasion which is most easily understood and believed in story myth archetype narrative personification uh to dispense with that in place of stats figures numbers charts data sterile scientific rational materialistic materialistic and he goes is it any surprise that you can't sort of rip people across you can't bludgeon them over the head with just more bar charts um in the hopes that and and then shame them for not believing right the thing which is most believable to you is the thing which you're not supposed to believe and the thing which is least understandable and least salient to you is the thing that you're now supposed to put all of your faith in and again asymmetries it's asymmetry between the power of story and the power of statistics Shapiro's got that famous um facts don't care about your feelings like it could not be more backward it's like feelings really do not care about your facts at all especially if that feeling has come from a fable right or a story yeah yeah yeah but he's using it in a slightly that actually that's super interesting i thought that but he is using that in a slightly uh different context which is that what he's saying is that you are really upset right now over something is not does not mean that the the underlying thing is somehow um uh has been kind of uh existentially disabled yeah it's still your displeasure does not mean does not disqualify You haven't changed anything.

58:08It's still, you know. So, yeah, but I happen to think he's one of the better. He's not in my particular corner ideologically, but I wish most commentators were as rigorous in their thinking as he was. I saw you made headlines last month about trans athletes. I imagine that was thrilling for you. Do you see a tipping point dynamic going on there? I think it's already tipped. I mean, this is one of the most puzzling. Let me just say parenthetically that that was one of the strangest public controversies I've ever been a part of. I was describing, I was the moderator on a panel. I was describing my experience as a moderator.

58:59a moderated battle between a pro-trans participation and an anti-trans partition person. And I'm trying to elicit a fair argument. Four years passed, and I'm on a podcast out of Johannesburg with one of the participants. And I just think, I said, there was a moment in that discussion where I failed as a moderator. I didn't do a good job. There was a moment where I should have moderated. Moderating is difficult. Ever moderated in your life? Yeah. Particularly on that topic. So that's all I said. And then the whole thing went. And I was like, I didn't recognize any of... Usually when you're involved in a controversy, you recognize the controversy.

59:37I did not recognize the controversy. I was like, what are they talking about? You wouldn't have predicted this in advance? No. I was like, what are they talking about? Was a moderator... No one ever mentioned the word moderator. It sort of changes when you know that I was the moderator. Anyway. It's already tipped. this is one of the most ridiculous subjects in the following sense that most people myself included would give their 100 % approval support for the trans agenda the idea that we would be discriminating against a class of people over this particular characteristic is absurd and offensive, right?

1:00:25But I think that this last random thing that's thrown into the agenda that says, oh, and by the way, someone who is biologically male should be able to compete against biological females is deeply puzzling to a lot of people, right? They're like, what does that have to do with, it's weird. Like, what's it doing there? I don't think, and I think most people are in wholeheartedly in support of the agenda and just say that last item, which by the way, it only involves like a dozen people in the entire United States. It's so hypothetical. It's like, what would you say? Why are you adding that? You're just antagonizing.

1:01:04You're giving fuel to the right. By the way, during the election, what is the part of the trans agenda that the Republicans hammered again and again and again? Participation in sports. That's what it came down to. So you're giving your enemy a weapon to use against you. Over what? A dozen? A hypothetical case involving a small number of people? So that's why I find the whole thing puzzling. I don't understand why are we even talking about this? Can you name a signal trans athlete, trans woman competitive elite athlete who is currently being disadvantaged by this policy? Can you give me the name?

1:01:48A trans woman athlete who's being disadvantaged. Yeah, we're locked out of competition with biological women as a result of the policies in elite sports. I would imagine that Leah Thomas would be at some point. I feel like the Swimming Association was one of the first bodies to have implemented this. I have to imagine if they are going to continue to swim. Right now, they can't swim. So would that be a yes? So you have... I've got one. You've got one. I've got one. Yes. Can you give me another? No. Okay. I did my mom. So why are we having... Why are we having... So you are a highly informed participant in public controversies.

1:02:35And I have touched on this issue, which everyone assumes is this hot button. This is tearing our country apart. So I have gone to a highly educated source and I've said, give me names. And you come up with one who's not even irrelevant, who isn't even swimming anymore. Right? This is a definition of an absurdity. Why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical? Why don't we discuss the actual issues that are of existential meaning and threat to the trans community? That's my point. interesting i think on the you know on the other side um the the right would say something like uh this is the tip of the spear this is sort of endemic of the the encroachment into uh locker rooms and bathrooms this is you know the college sport thing is like you it's only half a wall away from it being about school as well and it you know it all kind of especially with the interesting one about the locker rooms thing i do i've thought this for ages i think that the locker rooms thing and the sports thing are so tightly bound because in order to get onto the sports field, you have to go through the locker room.

1:03:40And there is this sort of just geographic map psychologically inside of people's heads where they play that role through. And you think, well, if the locker rooms, that has to be happening in sport too. I wasn't aware of how few incidents this is causing. But certainly a lot of headlines are happening. But even the locker room thing is a separate issue. So there is a separate social issue of how do you accommodate somebody who belongs to a relatively new social category? And we have a long history in America of struggling with that issue, right? It was the issue we struggled with with African-Americans in the 50s and 60s and Jim Crow?

1:04:25Do we let them into our, you know, in Birmingham in the 1960s, black people are not allowed to use the same changing rooms as white people in department stores, right? Same issue, right? Eventually, we figured out how to do that. And I think we can figure out how to do that with the trans community. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a completely separate thing, which is in elite sports, should the incredibly small number of people who are trans women who can meaningfully compete at the elite level be allowed to compete in the female category? That's the narrow thing that was being discussed on the panel of which I was a moderator.

1:05:06But it's like, so anyway, it's an example of the internet occasionally is very dumb. What was the story about the Harvard women's rugby team? out there. I was interested in... Well, I was interested in this... There's a certain amount of Ivy League bashing that I've done over the course of my career that now that Ivy League bashing has become an agenda item in Washington, I'm a little more circumspect about my Ivy League bashing, but I was just intrigued in my book about the fact that this university in the United States that plays more varsity sports than any other is Harvard. Which people think, oh, it must be some sports factory in the South or something.

1:05:55No, no, no, no. Ivy League schools have the most athletes, have a greatest share of athletes on, recruited athletes on campus of any institution. My question is, well, why? That seems weird to me. Why would an elite academic institution go out of its way to have lots of athletes on campus and also give those athletes a tremendous break at admissions. So huge controversy in America about, oh, don't you dare give an admissions break to black people. That's wrong. That's a violation of it. The Supreme Court says outlaws it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, the exact same institutions are giving an equal and in some cases larger break to people who are really good at rowing or fencing.

1:06:41That strikes me as weird. Does that not strike you as weird? It's very strange. And why is one controversial and the other one is not? I would guess that in a meritocratic system, people believe that something which is done based on merit is maybe more deserving somehow, more justified in some sort of a way. but what relationship is there between the merit here and the role of an academic institution? It's like saying, if you were a high school kid applying to Harvard, is it useful to put on your application that you're a really good cook? The answer is... Well, if cooking was something which was part of the competitive landscape for a varsity league college, perhaps that would be the case.

1:07:34I think when people look at sports, but I mean, college sports is an entire category. Yeah, but these sports are absurd. It's fencing. Say that to a fencer with this big, long - What is that? You'll come after me. I mean, I make the point about, I talk a lot about tennis, which I think is the most ludicrous example. Massive admissions breaks at elite schools for people who are tennis players. What is the definition of someone who's good enough to play division one tennis in America that they spend their entire lives on a tennis court? Why do you want at your school someone who's not even participating in the undergraduate experience, they're just practicing their backhand.

1:08:08What is so special about that solitary, utterly boring activity that merits them getting an admissions break that is equal or greater to the break that you give to somebody who is part of a historically disadvantaged minority? I was going to say, is there something more special about somebody who's black than somebody who can play tennis well? Someone who is a product of several centuries of racism in the United States absolutely has a moral claim on an admissions break that is an order of magnitude greater than someone who has spent their entire adolescence at a tennis academy in Florida hitting forehands.

1:08:53What if they also play tennis? Black tennis players are the rarest of them all, you know? Yeah, there's not a lot of them. that's you know well tennis being good at tennis is a linear function of how much money your parents have so you would expect that the wealthiest uh uh ethnicities in the united states would have the most tennis players interesting question on that um seth stevens davidowitz wrote a great book about uh was it who owns the nba who wins the nba something like that and uh he did data scientist used ai to help him write this book in 30 days it's brilliant and uh the most common name of NBA players, the top five.

1:09:34It's like Michael, John. They're very middle-class names. The reason is that even in the sport of basketball, one that people assume is going to sweep up these poor kids from the streets and deposit them into the NBA. Now, LeBron, born to a 16-year-old single mother,

1:09:59is remarkable for how much of an outlier he is. Because, I mean, if you are LeBron, you can beat the system, but not anyone else. I wonder how many LeBrons have been born after LeBron now. That's my question. Whether or not we're going to see a ton of LeBrons in the NBA in a couple of decades' time. Yeah, that makes perfect sense because the degree of preparation necessary now to make the NBA is just way higher than the minute you radically increase the amount of preparation necessary to excel in a given area, you skew it by income. Formula One. Like classic income. Yeah. Very classic example, which is one of the reasons why I'm a big track and field fan.

1:10:43One of the beautiful things about track and field is it is one of the last sports for which this is not true. You do not need to have wealthy parents to be a great runner. or you like watching poor people do sports that's what you're telling me i like to watch the i like to watch the poor's they they run faster no i like a sport where there is no distinction where income and class don't buy you a head start that's what i like i like a sport where name me another sport where the kenyan who grew up you know way off in the rift valley somewhere it can meaningfully compete against someone who has the full power of nike behind them and grew up in an upper middle class suburb of dallas that's there's no other give me another sport where that happens yeah yeah yeah not even cycling cycling football like football in europe if you don't come out of one of those football systems you you're not you're not playing i think it's any it's any problem that you have with team sports as soon as you get into team sports right it's got to be an individual sport for this i can't think of a team sport that would allow you rowing is not going to be but even even a massive number of individual sports have become class weighted like tennis is a perfect example golf massively class well yeah golf's in it golf's a particularly interesting one uh tennis kind of kind of makes sense at least to some degree in that you need to be playing against people like it is interesting with track and field that apart from like wrestling, which I don't think happens on the track or the field, it's just in the Olympics, there's no track or field that is against an opponent in quite, like there isn't an opposition in the same way.

1:12:24There's just competitors, right? Also doing the same thing to you independently of it. Like the two javelin guys are like throwing the javelin at each other as it's coming. And that means that if you grow up in an area that has more better javelin players that can spend more time throwing the javelin at you, that you become more successful. Yeah, that's fascinating. I hadn't considered that, the egalitarian nature of the Olympics. And also, the weird, running is really interesting. Distance running in particular is fascinating because, you know, it starts out, since you're English, the English dominate middle distance running for the longest time.

1:12:58And if it wasn't English, it was the English by proxy, the Australians and New Zealanders. Then the Africans in the kind of 80s take over. And all of a sudden, everyone starts saying, well, that's because they have a genetic advantage. That's because they're listing all these reasons. And then what happens in the last 10 years? All the Europeans are, now it's the English again, right? So it's like we realized we made this – it's this thing that we do, which always strikes me as kind of fascinating, which is that we toggle back and forth between our causal explanations for a phenomenon just depending on where we're situated.

1:13:37If we're winning, oh, it's like we have the culture. When we start losing, oh, it's got to be genes. Cultural attribution error. Yeah. And then we start winning again. And now if you talk to the English, it's like, you talk to some English track and field coach, they'll tell you, oh, it's the long English longest since running tradition. It's like, dude, you didn't say that 15 years ago when the Moroccans and the Kenyans were winning every race. You just started saying it because Josh Kirsten won the world championships. And now all of a sudden you've changed your mind. Malcolm Gladwell, ladies and gentlemen.

1:14:12Malcolm, I find you fascinating. I think we could continue to do this for a long time, but I need to get on a flight to go on tour to your state. That's right. I need to leave. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you've got that's going on? Listen, I think the latest podcast I did on my podcast Revisionist History, we have a series called The Alabama Murders. It is the best thing I've ever done. And I would wholeheartedly recommend that to people. And I have a new book out in paperback, Revenge of the Tipping Point. Sick. Malcolm, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

1:14:44This was really fun.