Malcolm Gladwell Returns Again

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondri in the Wondry 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 shepherd 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 best selling authority, the Tipping Point, Blank Outliers, what the Dog Saw, David and Goliath and a new book which is so tasty. Revenge of the Tipping Point. Overstories, Super Spreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. This is great.

It's so fun.

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 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 whole answer for many people. In the previous episodes he's been on, I talk a lot about his playful eyes.

Yeah. 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.

Watch him dance and flirt and captivate and ensnare. Please enjoy. Malcolm Gladwell. We are supported by Addie.

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He's an UP transfer.

He's an object expert.

He's an obstacle.

We probably need you to like draw something or maybe write us a note. We could use some of you here cause 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. Yeah, draw not well. Well, I do draw.

You do draw?

I mean, time to 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 about 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 6. 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 change a tiny bit. Did you ever see the documentary Crumb?

About R. 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.

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.

Not 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.

Well, maybe it'll find its way in.

Hopefully make its way.

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 do endless 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 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.

Yeah.

So he's like, that was the crazy thing.

They're already a fuckfest without them.

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 back knee like you can't believe.

Sure, sure. Telltale signs.

So she's part of. 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's 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 doing it. Yeah, 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 made this sort of elective decision that you're going to break the norm.

I find it to be a really 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. 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 clearly using steroids at the end of his career does not detract from the fact 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, Lazek's fine. You can augment your eyes with science, and you can take propanol if you want to audition for a symphony orchestra. There's numerous ways in which we think it's fine to augment.

Someone made this argument to me a long time ago, and I didn't find it persuasive, and now I totally find it persuasive. And that is. You're absolutely 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, my little.

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.

Yeah.

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's it working?

How much to penalize people?

That, too. I mean, the fact that she went to prison is insane. And I understand that she went to prison not for her steroid use, but for the line. But still, what are we talking about? Why are you even being questioned the first?

Don't even get me started on who does and doesn't go to prison.

I know.

Oh, 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 have.

Yes, I loved it. Cause 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 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. Yeah, 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 always 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 on my computer, watch 5,000 meters, 13 minutes.

Oh my.

Oh my God.

This is unethical.

Then go back to the Lux.

Wow.

I can't believe you're more willing to basically imply you have diarrhea.

Yes.

Than just say no, you can'.

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.

Well, of course not. You.

You led to that conclusion.

No one's thinking ulcer when you say.

Stomach issue that takes 13 minutes to resolve.

If you were filling out like the Hazelton 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 of 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 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, 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. I'm a fair weather fan this year. When the U of M won it all, I was like, okay, I'm watching 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 this 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?

Utcla, 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 have 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. Start unbuttoned my shirt. The kids are like, what is going on? The professors are like, what? Unbutton, unbutton, unbuttoned, break open my shirt. And I am wearing a University of Michigan T shirt.

Oh, that's cute.

Shameless. Pandering.

Shameless. Yeah. But it worked, right?

I'm sure it worked.

Of course it worked.

I've done a couple 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 defac. 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? Cause 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, it has to be a tiny bit concern.

And your eyes. Do you know he talks about your eyes every eighth episode?

Really?

Yeah.

I did not know that.

You know I do that.

I didn't know there was this subtle homoerotic element to our.

Oh, always.

Always. Yes.

I'm not in denial of that at all. I'm a fair weather friend. I have a 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 gotta tell a behind the scenes story I might've even told on a fact check. Cause 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, text me, hey, you're at Cafe 101, right? Order me a to go thing. I'm gonna 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. Ten years.

I know. Mass murderer or like Nobel Prize winner?

No, just like wattage.

She is 100 from day one.

But wow, 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're. You've turned around and you notice this.

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. 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 reverse side of the coin of Tipping Point, maybe.

When I was in my mid-30s, I wrote my first book, 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 my.

First reading was in LA at. What's the one on Sunset? That bookstore? Book Soup.

Okay, That's Book Soup.

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.

She sent her mom 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 it. 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 that. I was like, oh, okay.

I mean, the book is really optimistic, which we'll get into how it was so optimistic. 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 gonna 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 gotta sit through this to justify to now use the bathroom. He's like, hey, to check this race.

Out, I should try and find. I know who one of them was, the mother of my friend. The other two, I. I should try and find them.

That would be a fun episode of Revisionist History. 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 need 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 bestseller list. 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. 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 when they don't know what the fuck. They've never been popular.

Yeah. My initial reaction, you'll like this, stacks. Was that I bought a car.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I knew we'd get there.

Sob 95.

Don't laugh like that.

The standard answer, like, what's the game show where it's like, you Gotta guess the five most popular answers for sure. Number one is 9 11. Anyone who makes some money who's semi intellectual. 911 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 gotta buy a drive.

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 income.

Oh, 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. 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 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.

Yeah.

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. And 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 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, Track.

It was so glossy and there were so many more exotics, and it was premium.

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, Unhoarding.

Uh huh. We talked about it the other day on a fact check. I loved that episode. So fascinating.

It's one of Monty's favorite.

I did that right before COVID I remember I went down to Florida to see the guy who was the expert. I wish I had the tape of that conversation. It was fascinating. He devoted his life to finding the humanity in people who hoard. 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, we were just talking about this this morning. Have you ever heard the episode of Radiolab 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. Shocking. 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 initially just kind of wants some answers, and he develops this incredible relationship with this guy who murdered his daughter and would 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 reach. And there's a few stories within it that are just like that, where just mind blowing. Compassion. Yeah.

Wait. I'm failing spectacularly at the task of promoting my new book.

No, no. Well, I'm gonna 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.

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.

Ah.

I'm going to play them for them. 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 whatever it is? An hour and a half. Right. That's another kind of much longer.

Maybe checking my watch.

What if we ask guests to take their watches off when they walked in?

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.

Yeah, yeah.

But just that I don't have that set in my life right now.

Right. Okay, so. So again, back to Tipping Point. In the foreword, you say, look, I wrote this book in this time and it was very hopeful. And maybe also your age is a hopeful age at that time.

Mid 30s 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 in PS 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. To actually say all that.

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. Outliers 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 wanna 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. Like you're giving them sort of a handbook on what to do and how to do it properly. I was like, oh, no. You don't ever think about that?

That.

No.

Okay.

Other than this, 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. So it's not quite an owner's manual.

But how to Be a Anarchist Manifesto. They 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 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.

World.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

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Okay, so I just ordered these king size pillows from JCPenney, which were so hard to find. I was looking at a lot of places and JCPenney had them and when they arrived I was like, wait, these feelings. Really luxe and expensive. Way more than what I paid.

Well, that's the thing about JCPenney right now. They're a one stop shop for incredible gifts. You can grab something last minute, like even on December 22nd and it still looks like you've been planning for months. You know, I just bought a bunch of stockings for Nashville from JCPenney and an adorable Christmassy placemat with a fire engine on it and some nutcrackery. Guys, creatures. There's like false kinds of fun Christmas stuff.

Oh, I love that.

Whether it's beauty, home decor, jewelry, or fashion for the whole family, everything has that elevated I definitely splurged vibe.

Even when you didn't, it's what they thought that counts.

And honestly, nobody needs to know you grabbed it at the 11th hour shop. JCP.com yes, JCPenney. We are supported by Audible. You know, I spend a lot of time listening. It's literally my job. But when I'm not recording the show, I'm constantly consuming audio content. And honestly, I can get pretty overwhelmed by all the choices out there. That's why I love when Audible drops their Best of the Year collection. Audible's most anticipated collection, the best of 2025, is here. And let me tell you, these editors know what they're doing. They've spent countless hours listening, having heated debates, probably way more heated than Monica and I get, although that's hard to imagine. And they have handpicked this year's must listens. What I really appreciate is that they don't just go for the obvious picks. They found hidden gems alongside the buzziest new releases. Whether you're into true crime like Monica, hist historical biographies like me, or something completely different, this collection has your back. I've already started diving into their selection and honestly, it's like having a really smart friend curate your entire listening experience. Want to finish the year with a sure thing? Check out Audible's Best of 2025 and discover why there's more to imagine when you listen. Listen now. Go to audible.com best of the year.

That part of it is really mind blowing and they had help and it's really interesting. So 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 learn 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 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, well, 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. So fuck all the money that's being spent on 4 through 10. And let's just put all the money in 3, 2, and 1. And through that, they end up 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 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 diagnosis 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 wound up and lured to everybody, hosed down the whole room with this. This is so 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 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 alone. Wrong. 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 them to 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 going to 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 in 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. Cause 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 led to believe, oh, I think all the doctors loosened up their.

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 be. 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 super spreaders of violence in that neighborhood. But that liberates you from the idea that, first of all, his point is, 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 the community with this terrible virus.

Yeah. Enact mass carnage.

Yeah.

So the first book, your kind of three laws you used were law of a few, the power of context and the stickiness factor. But this book has three new concepts. It has the super spread, 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 gonna 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. So interesting. 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. 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? Grouper 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 audio of that roast is just.

Like, tell people if they haven't heard what that was.

Yeah. I did a revisionist 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. 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 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?

Ooh.

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, you know, 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 very 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. Fifteen minutes later, a guy makes the exact same point, and 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 up and I say, okay, so you were the first person on Name the Fortune of having a 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? I was like, really? When you get three out of night, boom.

Well, she said, when you're there by yourself, you're the Tokenolis Institute. 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 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 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 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 at 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, 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. 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, right. Because you're trying to match.

Figure out what to call this person.

You know, the goal is for you both to say the same thing.

This is kind of like a jury.

Exactly. And as human beings, we're hardwired to find agreement on those kinds of things.

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. It's not a prototypical Abdul. You're going to say Abdul. 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. Two, nothing happens. Three, nothing happens. But when you get up to between 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 vulnerable, volatile. There's a point at which a group has to stand up and say, oh, you're real. I don't know. Abdul doesn't make any sense. But Abdul's happening now.

They're not going anywhere.

I'm on board for Abdul 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 which 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, 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, two's not. You're wasting your time. Have nobody. If you're going to fight one woman, just fucking have all the men's day. 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 and 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 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.

Monica, you have to understand. There was a whole stretch of time when I was growing up, whenever a black guy played quarterback, the whole conversation was about the fact that, oh, it's a black guy playing quarterback. 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 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 mixed race.

No, I didn't know either until he's been hanging out with Taylor Swift. That's how. That's how I saw.

That's how he broke through.

Yeah, but no one's talking about. Thank God.

I love that. That's your point of connection to Patrick Mahomes.

That's my way in.

But his teammate is dating.

That's right.

Do you 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 am more interested 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.

He loves how famous she is.

Yeah, yeah.

He's come out on stage and little top hat. That's who she needs.

Is it 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 your n 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 28, 2024.

This is can't Buy Me in 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. What are his better options than Taylor Swift?

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, 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 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. You know. 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. The West Indian performer.

Yeah, that she was supposed to be singing Dayo.

Dayo.

When she writes her memoir, she's like, what is going on? And 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 know.

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 yes.

The way that every single in my life. If I talk to 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, 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 that.

They were at the University of West Indies together, and my dad was a professor, and Kamala's dad was a student.

Oh, really?

And my mom went to school in a town where. And if I'm remembering this correctly, went to church in Kamala's dad's father's church.

Whoa.

So many people.

Of course he's excited.

My point is, my mom, your dad, when you see one of your own, like, of that generation, when my mom's generation, there were no Jamaicans in positions of authority, this is huge.

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 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 Kamal is half Indian. See, that not even occurred to her. That's so.

I think maybe the chapter I was most interested in, which is, 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.

Wait till I make a reference to Gwinnett County. Next.

Gwinnett.

But Gwin.

I go in really, really good.

I'll take it.

But 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.

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. There 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 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 what 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 1/3 white, 1/3 black, 1/3 Asian. If you're a white person, you want to move out, you got to sell to a white person. If you're a black person.

If you're a black person, 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, no longer existence or. 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. But 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, and 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, it's 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 Colombia, you paint this picture of Colombia, 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, 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, Doug Zer Fear. 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 Olivia College.

It's your cottage.

It is my cottage. 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 what'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, 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 is like, eff 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 girls school.

Wow.

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.

Those are going to go to the principal.

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.

So I was chatting to a guy doing this podcast. His daughter was looking at colleges. I said, oh, where's she looking? He goes, well, she went to Chilean. She really wanted to go to Chilean. She did 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 school. She goes, there are no boys on campus. She's going to the university. 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 girls 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, it won't feel like a. And if you're a boy at Tulane, 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 get worse.

I would say this will be a very useful lesson for. 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.

Dismiss your opinion. You could probably come out a better, stronger person or completely destroyed, crawls into.

A whiskey jug for the rest of their life. I don't like this plan. You do. A very, very artful way of breaking down how these elite institutions actually end up. End up creating the exact student body they want without necessarily triggering any kind of affirmative action lawsuits, which is 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 time 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 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, as 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 for as well.

Great.

So great.

Joyce, your mom's gonna be in.

Joyce Gladwell.

What?

She sees a Nigerian going. Well, she's also extremely happy. Right. So that's what happens if you're just gonna be meritocratic. You're gonna rise and fall with whatever group is studying hardest.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

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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 made sure that the only group that's above the tipping point as 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. Mommy, Daddy, there's some asshole rich mommies to do it.

Mommy and Daddy are rich. That's one way. And there's actually. This is hilarious. I don't go and do 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. 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 will ultimately donate to the school.

You give your 20 million, your kid gets in.

Wow.

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. Money. That's a 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 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 catch 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 fakocta rich people sports, country club sports. It's the back door for the rich white people. I talk about tennis. There is no way to be even remotely good enough to play D1 varsity tennis 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 gonna say it. And I'm just saying it.

They are the equ exception that proves the rule.

Yes.

If you're the greatest tennis player to ever be on the planet, you might.

Break through this and your father's a.

Genius that dedicates his entire life.

But anybody else.

Yes, I'm glad you said that though that's normally what I would have said.

Well, I just know we're gonna 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 gonna 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 and rugby and whatever other, they're doing it out in the open. They're constantly adding new fakacta white people.

Sports to their and they're winning because you're also paralleling that with ut being sued by a white girl cuz 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 sunk in 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 SL.

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's like the next step beyond what we already don't like, which is you would hope that these young kids are playing for 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 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. Maybe that girl is my daughter. Maybe not. 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, this is an incredible concept I really enjoyed learning about. And it starts with a doctor. And in Vermont.

Yeah. In his 60s, he's given this job by the government to go into Vermont and measure how much healthcare each community is getting because they're worried 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 remember those? Yes.

What he discovers is it's not that the rich areas have more healthcare than the poor areas or that 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. 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. 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 is 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 seeking advice. They're nurturing you, and you fall into line with whatever source of nourishment.

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 the whole, 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.

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. 1/3 of their population changed.

So I try and locate the moment when Miami becomes Miami. Miami. Miami used to be just another struggling, sleepy southern city. It was Jacksonville. It was nothing remarkably 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 the West Indies. And then overnight it becomes cocaine from Colombia. And that's a whole different ball game. 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.

They were. 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.

Crazy.

It was just an explosion of wealth while the rest of the country was going the complete opposite direction.

You and 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 slow, sleepy, crime ridden, forgotten 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 money. 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 scare of wellcraft. He's got a $500,000 boat in 80s.

This is talking about when a police officer is driving a Ferrari. 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 Mommy 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, yeah, the Scarab. And they're playing Tangerine Dream in the background.

Michael Mann's. That's 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 this show?

I'm obsessed with this. I 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 in 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 top 10 of all time. Miami Vice belongs on the top 10 of all time. That show is 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. It's like a third of the country's 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 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 right.

I didn't exist before Sex in 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 in 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 it's a weird valence.

Somebody needs to tackle the Bill Cosby thing seriously as a subject and reckon with the fact that his story is one of the strangest, creepiest, hard to understand. He is simultaneously one of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century, country in America, 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. You, you're doing that.

You're gonna call me and tell me.

Not to say shaming Lisa Bonet for doing nudity and 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 an unconscious level. He had to.

He's gotta 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.

Right.

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.

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 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.

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, who'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, 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 is to close off any doors, be a hard.

Hitting cop like Cagney, Lacy.

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 to and you realize, oh no, no, no, that's not what the show's 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 Laughlin 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 sun comes out to his family and the family comes to accept the son. And 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 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. And the reason Will and Grace 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. Let's shift. Because in every other previous I quote, at one point, some guy who 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 finds some untimely death as a result of their gayness.

You don't realize it until you. You go back, you're like, oh, that's right. And then Will and Grace comes along.

And nothing, no one has age.

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. 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 absolutely without warning or 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'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.

Yes. Sit back and see what. What happens.

Yeah.

Well, Malcolm, I just love you. I have two compartments for you. I am 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 books. It's you and Krakauer. For me. If either of you write a book, I don't have anything to relate. 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 crackhower has a new book. Who's yours?

Oh, I have many. You're like, oh, for years. My favorite writer was Janet, Malcolm. She died a couple years ago. Every time she came up with something, I just devoured it instantly and tried to emulate it and thought, she's a genius. If you're honest about yourself, you have something you're a fanboy about, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

You're 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. Took her on the subway for the first time yesterday. Just, like, looking at. 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.

No, no.

And a while it still all made sense. Like, dark and kind of crazy characters.

The New York City subway. And then we took on a bus the first time, and I convinced her that the conductor was going to start singing Wheels on the Bus at any moment. She's like, really? I was like, oh, just hold on. It could happen. Like, 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 take 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. 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 in real life. 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, 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.

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. Oh, yeah. Let's hear it. You should read it. You come over the top big time. The writer comes out. Ooh.

Dax opens it up brilliantly. Hold on. This is a lot of car stuff. I gotta get back to the. 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.

Oh, that's.

That's good.

That, 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 as 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 interview expert if you dare.

We are supported by skims. You know what, Monica, I have to talk to you about these skims pajamas they sent us.

Yes, I was literally just thinking about how much I love mine. I think I've worn them every night since we got them.

Oh, yeah. I barely was able to get out of mine to come in today, so I've always been that guy who just sleeps in whatever random T shirt, you know, old shorts, these skims jammies. First of all, they're in the pattern I love. They're in the checkered red and black.

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And honestly, I feel more put together wearing matching pajamas instead of my usual mismatch situation.

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Sleeping shop the best pajamas@skims.com after you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you select podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the dropdown menu that follows. And if you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the skims holiday shop is now open@skims.com stay tuned to hear Ms. 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 you. 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, is that a. That's a very nice cardigan. But there's some kind of edgy shirt. Yeah, yeah. It's a nice mix. What time did you rise this morning?

So I had such a bad headache this morning.

Oh no. My mom like flies.

Yeah, my flies are here. They've arrived big time.

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. That way it'll attract them all and zap them. It might.

Minimize the time of the period, the duration.

That would be great. 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've mainly cut out.

Oh, you did?

Well, some of it.

Okay.

And now I had a really bad headache. Sometimes I get these really, really intense, intense headaches when I'm on my period. So I took in Aleve D. Okay. One of our favorite products, I don't think.

Sponsored, but 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 long standing feud about our favorite medication for a headache.

Okay, let's do it.

You like an ibuprofen? I do. 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 Metaphine. 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, I, I don't know it or you've had a adverse.

I've never had an adverse, but I've, I've not felt the relief that I feel from. And ibuprofen.

Uh huh.

Cause 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? Let me see. 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 noticed 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 a, is an adaptation, not a, not a bug. Well, I watched a good Frontline. I sleep on Frontline all the time. I like, forget Frontline's my favorite show. And. 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 to downstairs.

Yeah, you're right. Maybe that's a part two.

Yeah. Maybe they'll have that. Maybe they already have that.

Yeah, probably.

But this was about Germany's growing far right. Oh, neo Nazi is current. Current.

Oh wow.

Yeah. There's a party there called the AFD I think like alternative something Deutschland.

Scary.

Yeah. We just had a guest on that was saying that like extremism's been on the ride and polarizations but on the rise. And I was like I. Yeah, I. We're so. I'm so stuck in America. I just assumed it was just us. But no, it's so frightening. Yeah, I know 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 full. Oh 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.

Exactly.

Entity. You can. You can elect a group that aims to diminish democracy, which is so interesting. If you express a goal.

I don't think very many people. 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.

Well they don't know what they're protecting and not protecting.

Yes. 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, 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.

Well, I don't even mean ours but like if you look at 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.

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, the. 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 a little bit. Again, you really, really don't like that.

I don't like it.

You do not like that.

And then I craft a response to try to explain to them that there are versions of democracy. 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 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 in this. They're on the same spectrum for sure. Yeah.

And hypocrisy is. Is my trigger.

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. And that does anger me.

Yeah.

But it's the him shaming all these other people in public with his self righteous morality. That one to me just. It burns extra hot for me.

I know. Which is funny because I think male Malcolm had a. He had a generous and cool explanation for that. That I think is correct. I do think when. When people are behaving in. In such depraved ways, you. They do compartmentalize 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. Exactly.

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. Okay.

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.

She's got a great big personality. She's a very hard worker. She's Ambitious and very smart and competent.

She's a very, very loyal friend. 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.

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 gonna 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. She's the perfect person for a of lot of horrible dates.

In a way she handles it all with like, greatness and. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

She's indomitable.

She is. She's never like taken out by any of it. Like she.

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 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.

Ooh, that's a bummer.

I know. I. 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 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, like 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.

Y. 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. Universally reviled, universally practiced.

We know people who have that.

We have friends.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you know, I was in an open relationship. 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, any, anyone's at home with kids is like well no, how about the wife? And yes, I know I'm saying this is, 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 lies. In most affairs at least one memories number knows what's going on and they're complacent or they're like well what's interesting.

Is I wonder what the percentage is like my assumptions always people are having an affairs are going like I'm. They meet and they go I'm married and then they fall, you know, whatever happens. But 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 too because I agree.

So I, 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 or husband, children like awful. But there is something about letting a single person believe.

That they're taking a pat.

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, thank God it ended now. But. But yeah, like it, 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 in incredible. First thing she said was like how could you do this to your family?

Uhhuh.

Like that's her reaction.

Yes, yes, yes.

But she also, and like you know, she said she was like I, 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 that's a terrible thing. Yeah. She's like, that's not that. She was like, this is so different.

Yeah, well, I was want. Have you started that, Lacy Peterson?

Oh, yeah.

Three parter.

Yeah.

I'm 2/3 of the way through, maybe.

Yeah.

But in that. So he killed her for another woman. And even the people the. The episode's 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. That's what makes me think. I wonder if it's more common than.

Yeah, it might be. It probably is. But also, a lot of people really don't think he did it, FYI.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's claims his innocence still and he's been in jail for a really long time.

Oh, really?

Yes. And Anna and I have 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. Watch a doc, 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.

Yes. 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, no.

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, you know, intentionally killed it, even though people wanted it. And it would have been a bestseller in blah, blah, blah and petrochemical, you know, all this big conspiracy. And then the smoking gun. And again, a. 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 EV ones 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. 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 then you die.

Yeah.

So they're in a situation where they. They can either try to create some liability free sale of this car or they chalk 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.

They should be able. You should be able to sign away that liability if someone wants a free car.

Yes. We did give one, by the way. There was. I remember we were on a car show in Wisconsin. 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.

Okay.

But it was one of these really famous cases. And it was decided after at that show. Let's give her one of these passenger vans. And somehow they did give that family. Someone from Jones 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.

Yeah.

But I'm like, oh, right. If you know that.

Yeah.

Side note.

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 gonna get crushed. So it didn't matter what I did to them. So Aaron and I would take turns driving these cars, 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. We would drive them down dirt roads and swerve into things. I mean we, we went nuts because it didn't matter.

Well, your lives matter.

Well, but we, we made it.

When you're 16, if someone gives you a brand new Corvette and says you go. 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.

Did you shoot, did you go to get a prostitute? And like I killed a guy.

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. No, I'm against.

I'm in favor of sex work.

Yeah.

Dud.

They can do whatever.

I don't know. 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 back this.

Exposed 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, that's like documentaries. Well, we were talking about Cosby and deception.

Yes. And hypocrisy.

And hypocrisy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's. It's wild out there.

And then I'm a hypocrite, you know?

Well, we all do things then.

It's the side of myself I hate the most, you know?

Yeah. But are you a hypocrite? Because I also 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. 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 mis. 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, this is actually hard. This is a hard moral to keep or like to. It's harder than. Than I thought.

Yeah.

I don't think you parade around like.

Maybe hypocrisy is not the word. Contradictions.

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 that. Like, I can. Let's just say this. I can list many things that I am a moral on. Like my involvement in the environmental crisis is not great. You know, it's not good. I eat a ton of cows. Ethically, I don't feel great about. You know, like, I'm participating in things I know intellectually are not the best.

Yeah. For sure.

Or morally are not the best thing.

Yeah.

And I just plow through it.

Yeah.

You know, and I have. I have to have some priority list of the things I'm. I'm most interested in servicing.

Yeah.

And then other things I. I just ignore.

Yeah. Yeah. We can't do it all.

No. Unfortunately. Good place.

Speaking of the good place, Kristen's new show comes out tomorrow. By the time this comes out, it will have already been out.

Yeah.

Hopefully you guys watched it because it's great.

I'm hoping for them that it does. Well, 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.

Okay.

Do you get under the covers in your clothes at 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 lay 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 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. You don't like that?

Little weird. How about you?

I guess this is hypocrisy. Ding, ding, ding.

Okay.

I think it's probably gross.

Uhhuh.

But I do it.

Yeah.

Yeah, Yeah. I like getting.

I Think people are a little. I think people are overwhelmed with girls. Yeah. Like people. Anytime we have a guest that has their feet on the couch, people are apple apoplectic about it. And again, there's another thing I resist writing. Like I want to write that it's still a democracy.

Sure. If. If someone was going to eat their lunch off 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. In the attic. So I don't really know what everyone's worried about. Second, secondly, the germs you're afraid of are not the right germs.

Yeah.

I've seen a million two thousand and twenties on this and evening news. You can walk around a subway with your feet. You're not gonna. 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 on your toilet too. But not nearly as bad as your kitchen. All the salmonellas and all the actual harmful. Yeah. Or most foodborne illnesses. They're not. You're not getting e cold, you know, cholera from your shoes from the subway. This is not what's happening.

Yeah.

So it's just also a misplaced. Now if you saw a picture of someone's kitchen freak, go ahead and freak out because that's, that's a minefield of bacteria.

We have this new coffee table that's very nice and it's longer than our other one. So in 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. A nice p. 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 in the plant. It. Now that's, that's, that's rubbing off on the bottom of your duvet cover. So then the next night you're gonna go bear. You're gonna raw dog it and your legs are gonna be exposed to. With the g. You know, it's not like, it's your mouth and your nose. I don't even know what the biggest.

Because I don't sleep nude.

Right.

Maybe if I slept nude, I would be a little more germ. A phobic.

Also, the odds of the germs penetrating your skin and getting into your actual system. I mean, the only real way into the body is your mouth and your nose.

Well, it could get in my vagina. That's an orifice.

I know.

If I. If I slept nude.

If you slept nude.

That's an option.

That's true. In your.

But I don't.

Your anus. Let's be honest.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Although it would be hard to get in the anus because my 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. Yeah, it's. It's your food, guys. You watch those right? Where they have.

Yes. Ew, black light.

Unfortunately, it's always a woman. I've never seen a man do this, but they tell the. The mom, like, cook. Cook chicken in the kitchen. And we're gonna. Then we're gonna blacklight it.

I know.

So she's on her best, best behavior.

It's everywhere.

It's everywhere. It's on the poles of the cabinets. It's on the handle of the fridge. It's on the sink.

Even when you're trying.

Not when she was trying her hardest.

I don't know what to do about that.

So if you're worried about germ, don't go to your end of your kitchen, but wear your pants in bed. Put your shoes on the couch.

It's your butt with your shoes.

Scratchy, scratchy scratch. I have way too personal of a thing, but it's. I know I would tell you. 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.

Okay.

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. I'm like, yeah, I want calories still and olive oil. 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 duty.

It was. Olive oil was coming out of the way. Yeah, yeah. Like straight olive oil. Like, I would. Would. I would wipe. I would wipe. And there was crystal clear olive oil on the toilet paper.

Okay.

Like the Blockbuster guy. What? It's like the Blockbuster guy.

An armchair anonymous that was leaking from the Wendy's chili. Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God. Yeah, the Wendy's chili.

Oh.

So I tried a new brand of bars yesterday.

Oh, yeah.

And they're magic. Ooh, they're magic. They're 28 grams of protein and only 150 calories. Oh, that's almost impossible.

Yeah.

A gram of protein's four calories. So you're at 120, 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.

Oh.

In this morning during my time alone.

You're 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. They have an inordinate amount in my coffee. No. The only thing new in my life were these two bars. So I think it has some kind of an oil. I don't know if you remember when they invented. I think it was called Olio Olio. 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 blowing out toilets all over America. They needed 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 and water.

Yeah.

Like balls up into pretty little globs.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm losing everyone, aren't I?

No. It was all.

There was some oil. There was some oil.

Wow.

Now. And so now I'm really trying to decide if that's an acceptable part of these bars.

Maybe they're delicious 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 whipped more caloric.

Oh.

It's got to be an oil that somehow that 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 and do some?

I'm not anymore.

You're not anymore?

I. I don't.

You don't like oil?

I love olive oil, but I. 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. 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.

Well, you're eating a lot of.

That's where I tip my hat to these bodybuilders because they are eating. They're eating like nine chicken breasts a day and all. I. 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 great. 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 whey.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. I just. There's something about it.

I get it. I agree with that. 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 I. 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.

Oiled a pan with the toilet. Wow, that would be intense.

Yeah.

That's where your mind went.

Yeah.

You're a. 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.

Yeah.

I kind of am 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. About Malcolm. I feel that way about Jedediah Jenkins. Like, when I sit down with him, I know he's gonna say things to me in a way that's pretty unique and gonna be really interesting and refreshing.

Yeah.

And so the novelty and the dopamine of, like, anticipation of what thing they're gonna say to me. Mirrors. Falling in love. It's like that novelty.

Totally.

Dopamine feeling.

Yeah. Interesting.

Polar.

Oh, yeah.

There we go.

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.

There's stakes to it.

Okay. We found one.

We're like. I'm sure anytime she'd call you on the phone, you'd get a. 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. 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.

Yeah.

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. I'm working on flexibility.

Yeah.

I have two children to help me.

Not so flexible.

That's something we could talk about.

Sure. We are. At an hour, but go ahead.

Oh, jeez.

Time flies.

I know.

Well, I can table it.

You want to table it for next time?

Sure.

Okay. So did David lynch producer direct the R. Crumble documentary? No. So it was. It was by Terry Zwig Off. Zwig off.

Zwig off.

Zwig off. Okay.

Terry Zwig, 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 Zwigoff, he then went on to do Ghost World, I think. And then a ton of narratives, I think, remember, might have started with that.

Okay. He.

By the way, 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 the number 42 teams? 42 teams.

21 men's sports, 20 women's sports and one co ed.

Wow.

Yeah. That was fascinating.

Yeah. What a reveal, huh?

Okay. Soul 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.

Store. 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. At this point.

And now it's like, you should go to Barnes and Noble and buy real books.

I know. You're right. Borders was ruining. Yeah, mom and Pops.

But I love Barnes and Noble, you know, that's my fantasy date.

You know I like Borders.

I know. I. That's. You being a contrarian.

It's not.

Yes, it is.

I think you like Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. No, Barnes and Noble is like Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.

No. Starbucks.

No.

Yes.

Borders is Starbucks.

No, you're wrong.

In fact, they had Starbucks in them.

You're wrong. Starbucks is in Barnes and Noble. Trust me, I know this. Anthony and I used to go all the time.

They might have been in both Borders and Barnes. And Noble, let's agree.

Maybe they took over. I don't know enough about Borders, so I can't speak on that. But I do know about Barnes and 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 really read them.

Yep. Right.

And that's my thing Anthony and I used when we lived over by the Grove. We'd walk over all the time on, like, Friday night and do that. It was so fun.

Yeah.

And you know, my dream fantasy date.

Is to would be suitors. Take note.

Take note. Probably go to a movie because there's normally a movie theater nearby at Barnes and Noble. Go to a movie and then dinner, and then after. After that we go to Barnes and Noble and we get hot chocolates.

Close the date at Barnes and Noble.

Yeah, It's a nighttime thing. You get hot chocolates and then you walk around, but you pick out a book for the other person.

Oh, is that fun? 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 animals.

Thoughtfulness.

Thoughtfulness. You get to know about a person. Person. Because it's the book that they like.

Probably what you would get me the history of Hermes, and I would get you the history of the internal combustion engine.

Probably History of the small black Chevy V. Give. What. What book? One book that you would buy for a. Per. 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. I think it's. That's all kind of the same.

I almost think you're better off doing the latter, because who are you to say what they would. They would like.

Yeah.

I would probably do under the Banner of Heaven.

Great pick.

Or Catcher in the Rye if they haven't read it.

Also 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 day.

So I wouldn't buy them my favorite book. That would be. They'd be like, oh, this guy likes pooping and being drunk all the time and violence.

Right.

Okay. Even Though I do like all those things.

You do?

Maybe I 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 Ryland.

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 Demon Head.

Yes.

Okay. 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 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. And it's a. 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.

He also wrote.

Yep.

What's the other really popular book he wrote, Rob?

A Heartbreaking Work of Genius.

Yeah, I didn't read that.

I can't remember I read that one or not. But what Is the. What's Really a Wild Book? It's about the lost boys of Sudan.

Wow.

It's wild.

Wow.

Yeah. What does 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.

Got it.

And so what is the. What is.

Oh, I want to read that.

It's really, really good.

I'm gonna 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. And the, like, the adventure that's in there is so exciting. And I. 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 to 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. That.

Yeah, for sure.

Books are cool.

Not a sponsor.

Malcolm, 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 people. Tens and tens of millions of people watched Miami Vice.

The series finale had 22 million viewers.

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.

Jesus.

Last episode was my truck. We would 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, this sounds. Now, 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. In MassGen, 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 makes it happen, because it's really when. If you. Because 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 if you have sticky saliva, it creates that thing which then breaks and then creates the droplets. If you're super well hydrated.

Oh, fuck.

And it's not sticky. You're not a super spreader. So it's. So the person at this conference who infected 3 million people, they had just. Just flown, like 18 hours from China or 20 hours. So they were dehydrated. They were this. 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.

You should add that to 23andMe.

They should. Super spreader.

Yeah. Okay. Higher body mass index. Index. And is part of it being a super spreader.

That's interesting.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, this is. Researchers found that 18 of the human subjects accounted for 80% of the exhaled particles. Of the group.

Whoa. 18 were responsible for 80% so crazy.

Okay, the Jason Mraz really, really, really popular song is I'm Yours.

How's that go?

I don't want to sing it.

Come on.

No comment. We can play it.

Actually, no, 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. Cuz I know. I know his really popular song. So I'm frustrated that I can't get it.

Finally 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.

It sure. Sure does. I just love that he revisits his preview. He's not afraid to revisit some previous theories. That's very admirable.

Oh, ding, ding, ding. Hypocrisy. Contradiction. Some people are so afraid of changing their mind because that would make them a hypocrite as opposed to someone who's just evolving. Evolving.

Yeah.

And then he could go back too, May. It'll be more hopeful time and he'll focus again.

All right.

I love you.

Love you.

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