Animal Spirits Podcast - Re-Kindled: Malcolm Gladwell (EP.107)

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

On this edition of Re-Kindled, Michael and Ben discuss Tipping Point, Blink, Talking to Strangers, pop psychology, and Malcolm Gladwell backlash. Find complete shownotes on our blogs... Ben Carlson��s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Like us on Facebook And feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's wealth management. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritt Holt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spears with Michael and Ben on this edition of Rekindled. We went back through and read Malcolm Gladwell's first two books.

I read The Tipping Point. Michael read Blink, and we decided to mash them up together since Gladwell has a new book out called Talking to Strangers that I just read. Michael has not read it yet. So we wanted to have a little discussion on Gladwell today and then go through those two books. I just finished it, and there's been a ton of Gladwell Press lately because he's in the news with the new book, and he obviously has a good PR agent. How many podcasts do you think he's been on besides his own? I've seen him on at least five or six. I mean, that's what you do these days, right? Who was the ambassador, Bill Simmons?

Podcast book tour. Well, he put one with him and Oprah. He was on with Ezra Klein. He, let's see, a bunch of them. I listened to a few of them. You said five or six, I count to three. Just saying. Yeah, I can't remember all of them at this point, but I know I listened to a few of them and saw the other ones in passing.

But thanks for fact-checking me there. So he was in a piece in the New York Times talking about the new book, and they go into the backlash that he's faced a little bit, and the fact that he's kind of gotten torn to shreds. And I think a lot of this came from outliers especially. I think after tipping point in blink, he reached some sort of celebrity author status. Escape velocity. Yes, if you will. And he didn't really get started getting ripped apart until after outliers.

And I think it seems like people just really get angry by the 10,000 hour rule that they think that he took that one out of context or misconstrued what it really means. And I don't really get that upset about it. But anyway, in this piece for the New York Times, he says, the reasoning and outliers, which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post hoc sophistry, and false dichotomies had me gnawing on my Kendall, a Harvard professor wrote in 2009. Oh, get over it. In 2013, a Times columnist ended his review bluntly. It's time for Malcolm Gladwell to find a new schick. It's, yeah, I understand it. And my theory is the pop psychology thing that he put out brought this stuff to the masses in a lot of this research in a way that hasn't been done before.

And I think the intellectuals sort of thumb their noses at all these other people that are reading this stuff now and thinking they haven't understood. Well, because it's fun stuff. It's fun studies for the layman, I guess. Yeah, and that's what he's trying to do, is make these studies more accessible and attached stories around them. He's a very good storyteller. Like, I like when he goes on the Simmons podcast. I enjoy those talks. He's great.

Well, so do you think that some of these studies that he shrinks down to clean, readable talking points? There's obviously maybe more nuance and some stuff that. But for goodness sakes, this is, he's an author. He's trying to entertain. These are not dissertations. Yes, he's going for these big themes. And I think that's where he missed on his latest book. I enjoyed it.

And there was probably, let's say, half of the chapters I liked. Half of the chapters were kind of boring and didn't really do it for me. The other half of the chapters, he had some interesting studies and anecdotes. I thought this was probably his worst book of all. But again, I'm not a Malcolm Gladwell hater like a lot of people are. I just think sometimes you can't take all these stories and fit them into a big theme. And I, and so sometimes... Do you have any examples?

There was just a lot of... He tried to sort of bring it around at the end, but I feel like there was just competing narratives within the overarching theme that he was trying to portray. And some of the stuff, I felt a little bit hot-takey. He was basically defending the people who were the head of Penn State for allowing Jerry Sundesky, Chandesky, to roam wild for 20 years as a child molester. And his point was, well, child molesters go out of their way to fool people, and you can't really blame people for being fooled in this instance.

And I thought he kind of glossed over the fact that the reason reason, one of the reasons maybe this happened is because more of career risk and people didn't want this stuff to get out and hurt their own career rather than they were just trusting someone who's a sociopath. Anyway, that's one example. I just thought it didn't, like the overarching theme didn't mesh with all of his interesting anecdotes and points like it did for the other ones. Well, let me ask you a follow-up question. Do you feel any differently about him having read this book? No, definitely not. I think, yeah, no, I think it's just probably harder to have, It's really hard to have these huge ideas, right?

It's just certainly, and he's had many of them, but it's weird, this like level of vitriol that. Yeah, I don't really get it. Can you just not care for something kind of move on with your life? Yeah, so I've told you before. I think after the first time the light bulb went off when I read like a behavioral book, one of these probably pop psychology books, whether it was this or Freakonomics. And again, these are the ones that the intellectual slimmer knows that. I think when someone who hasn't really put in the work reads one of these,

They think they're the smartest person in the world. And I think a lot of the intellectuals just don't like that. Like, you took a shortcut to get to this place and I've put in all the work and you don't really understand it as well as I do. I just think that's why there's a lot of backlash. Well, so I think it's jealousy. And this is not for the intellectuals. A lot of the times this is a gateway book into learning more. What's wrong with that?

Yes. Guess what? If there's a book at the airport and Gladwell's books are probably out of all the airports, it's not going to be for the intellectual crowd, right? It's going to be for someone in the cheap seats, probably. And even after reading more dense books on these subjects, I still enjoy it. And I still got, I don't know, five or six good little anecdotes and stories out of his new book, even though I didn't think it was as good as the other ones.

The Madoff part? Yeah, so chapter four of the book, it talks about, it says in 2003, Nat Simmons, a portfolio manager for the Lion-Based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. I'm guessing, or Simons, I'm guessing that's the son or a cousin or something. Jim Simons, right? And it says that they wrote an email worried to several of the colleagues that they had a piece of Bernie Madoffs

in. So I guess it doesn't really say what fund it was in or how they held it, but they held it like the entire time. And they were worried like listen, we tried to replicate this and we couldn't do it. But they also thought like, but what if he knows something we don't? And they

held it. And so it's pretty crazy. So he kind of contrasts that with that Markopoulos guy, who the one who really figured it out. So there was there was some interesting tibits like that that I I didn't know about. So yeah, decent book. I think I've said this before. You could probably get most of it off of the podcast book tour if you want to listen to four or five of them. But that's that's sort of the way that go. So anyway, so for this one, I read tipping point, you read blank. We wanted to add a little more structure around this since we both read two separate books and we're doing our own little

book reports here. So we added some segments. So we're going to look at like explaining the book in one sentence, our favorite chapter, some of the best quotes, some of the stuff that's aged well, some of the stuff that hasn't aged well, because these are actually old. What did you say? Tipping Point came on in 2000? 2001. And Blink was 2005. So we each read the other book, but a long time ago. By the way, this is a good idea. So previously in episodes of rekindled, we just would, since we read the same book, we would just pull out quotes and stories and just sort of riff. But Ben had an idea to add a little more structure to this because we were like, well, how are we going to do this? This would just be weird if we pull it out. So did you get

this idea from the rewatchables? Probably. I think it's just a lot of podcasts have segments. And I feel like that's a podcasting thing to do, right? Well, certainly in this format, it makes sense. So why don't we go ahead and get started? So this segment is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Okay, so explaining this book in one sentence. So Gladwell says, the tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire. So it's basically what causes these things to become massively popular. And the first example he gives in the book is hush puppies, which were these just swayed light shoes, I guess back in the 90s. I remember them. I don't know if I ever had a pair. So they said back in like 93, 94, sales were really hurting

30,000 pairs a year. And Wolverine, the company that makes them, was thinking of shutting them down. So then all of a sudden, in 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs. The next year, it sold four times that. And the year after that, it was more than that. So all of a sudden, they became popular again. he realized the tipping point was a handful of kids in the East Village in Soho decided to wear these ironically because no one else was. And a fashion designer saw this and thought, oh, I'm going to add this to my clutch. And then another fashion designer did it. I just, I just Googled these. They're horrible. Have you looked through this in the show notes. These are terrible looking sneakers. And it would make sense that people would only wear these ironically.

They look like bowling shoes. Matter of fact, they basically are bowling shoes, one of the pairs. Yeah, they're just little white small shoes, aren't they? With heels, they're bizarre looking. Yeah. And so, oh, yeah, I forgot about these. Okay. You see that advertisement's so good, they're bad? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a... So anyway, it was, you know, all of a sudden, this one little thing, these kids wearing it, and then it grew and grew and grew, and that's what the whole book is about. And so my immediate thought after rereading this book and thinking about it was, this is, the Darry-Mori tweet was a huge tipping point. And because you had all these elements of the NBA, becoming more popular than ever. It's a global sport. We had this stuff going on with the U.S.

and China and the stuff going on in Hong Kong and all of a sudden, Daryl Morey sends his tweet. And a lot of times, it's just hard to understand what that is going to be. And he tried to figure out and dissect why these things happen. So it sounds like I was thinking like almost maybe that tipping points are an inevitable outcome, but probably not, right? Not always. And he's trying to figure out, he's trying to reverse engineer why they happen. And also sometimes why they don't happen. Well, let's put out another example of a tipping point. Let's say that Robin Hood, which does free trading commissions, I don't know when they

launched, call it four or five years ago. 2013. Okay. So six years ago. And let's say you saw Robin Hood getting traction and in 2016, you decided that you wanted to bet against the brokerage firms. You were going to short Schwab, TD, and others. And you're like, what's going on?

Like, why isn't this putting a dent in their business? And then all of the sudden, Schwab announces that they're taking commissions to zero, TD follow suit, e-trade, interactive, and finally fidelity, and all of the stocks, I think Schwab held reasonably well. All of those stocks are fondly cratered. That was the tipping point. Easy to envision, but hard to time. Yes, exactly. And sometimes it's inexplicable. And so my favorite chapter of the book, he talks about the stickiness factor of why do something stick and other things don't. And this is kind of like that Derek Thompson. and book that he talked about, like, why things become popular, kind of around to me of that. So this one rang true to me because it's about Sesame Street. And so thinking about this stuff, like, why do kids like watching certain things? And Sesame Street has been on the air since the late 1960s. And they said virtually every time the show's educational value has been tested,

and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers. And my kids still watch Sesame Street. I watched him. I was a kid. And so he wanted to figure out. why this is. And so they looked at, you know, what are the reasons that kids stick around and watch something? And they found that basically if you can hold kids attention, you can educate

them, which, duh, but how do you do that? And so they had one thing where they had two groups of five-year-olds, and they had them watch the same episode of Sesame Street. In one group, they had kids with all these toys all over the place, and then the other group they had no toys. So one of them had distractions, the other one didn't. And they found that the scores when they asked how how much the kids remembered and understood about the show were exactly the same. And so they're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. And they said, no, kids watch when they're stimulated and look away when they're bored. And then the reason they watch is when they understand something and they look away when they're confused. So these people from Sesame Street decided to go to Nickelodeon

and start something new and take a little bit what Sesame Street does, but make it even better. because Sesame Street is an hour, and it has 40 different segments per show, they said. So kids can lose their attention eventually. So do you remember the show Blues Clues? I guess it was on Nickelodeon. And it debuted in the mid-90s, and they said within months of the debut, it just began trouncing Sesame Street in ratings. And they basically took what Sesame Street did and made it even better.

So they took it down from an hour to a half hour. And every show was constructed the exact same way. It was this guy named Steve, the host. and he was trying to solve a puzzle with Blue, the dog. And instead of having different episodes every day, they played the same exact episode five days in a row. And this really rang true to me, and they found out the kids were like off the charts

in terms of paying attention to the show. So they have like an appetite for repetition? Yeah, and I've figured that out through my kids too. Like when they hear a song they like or find a movie they like a Pixar movie, they just beat it into the ground. And it's so annoying as a parent because I'm so sick of this song or this movie. And it's because they're familiar with it. And the idea was that like four and five

year olds, they want to, they experience it in a different way, but they want something they're familiar with because everything is so unfamiliar to them. I think there was actually a point apart in Blink where they spoke about like why a lot of new products fail and it's because people enjoy familiarity. Yes. Yeah. And that's kind of what Thompson said too in his book about things to come. So it was interesting to see that through the lens of little kids. And I'm always like, why do my daughter listen to the same song every time on Alexa? And it's because she gets it. And now she starts singing the words.

And so anyway, so, okay, that's my favorite chapter. Next, next category, what's aged the best? I think the fact that this is almost a mistimed book because it would have been so much better if he could have used some examples from social media. But it aged well because he basically called the social media era without it even being around yet. Like social media in many ways has its own tipping points. and no one never knows what they're going to be a lot of times, right?

What was in the Middle East in 2010, the Arab Spring? Yes, same thing, yeah. So he kind of called that with this book, not that he was the first one to say this, but okay, here's what didn't age well. He talked about how many times you need a salesperson to walk you through things and to sell an idea, and he talked about how Paul Revere was such a good salesman, and that's how he was able to ride his horse and get everyone up in arms and warn everyone when the British were coming.

And there was another guy who tried to do the same thing who didn't fare as well because he wasn't good of his salesman. Anyway, he interviews this financial advisor in this sales one. And this is, again, early 2000. And here's a quote from this guy. He talks about his successful business. Maybe he is a successful business. But the way he laid this out. I get here at six or seven in the morning. I get out at night. I manage a lot of money. I'm one of the top producers in the nation. Doesn't that that producer? A producer has a dirty word. just yes a dirty word and he also talked about how he has a script book for sales for every one of his advisors quote unquote I'm sure it was more of a brokerage thing that just stood out to me in terms of that those practices like having a script book to sell someone so anytime someone says no you have a reason to make them say yes well perfectly acceptable in 2000 things have changed a little bit exactly that just stood out to me from a financial perspective okay best anecdotes okay he talked about the six degrees of Kevin Bacon and I don't remember why he

talked about this. Did that start in that book or did that predate it? Well, have you heard of Kevin Bacon had a few podcast interviews recently because he had a new show out? Oh, he was on Bill Simmons. That was very good. So he talked in a few of these interviews about the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. And he said initially it made him angry. And I guess it was two college students who came up with it. And initially he thought people were making fun of him because he's a character actor and he didn't like it. And then eventually he kind of latched onto it. And I guess he met the guys who came up with it in their dorm room or something. But they said any actor who was, this is a research piece, any actor who has ever acted in a television show or movie can be linked to Kevin Bacon in 2.83 steps. So six degrees is

even too many. So anyway, good anecdote. Let's see. Here's another one for you. Now, I had a question for you. When you take the subway or the train, do people ever try to beat the fair and jump over the thing anymore? Does that ever happen? I don't think so. So he talked about New York City's crime and how it came down. And from a high in 1990, the crime rate in New York City, murders dropped by two-thirds. Felonies were cut in half, but the biggest drop came in New York City. And there were 75% fewer felonies on the subways. And one of the reasons were because they started arresting people that didn't pay their fares before they would just let them go. And then they started every night they would wash off or paint the cars when there was graffiti on them to

clean them. And they said those two little things may have changed the crime and the subway. Again, this is one of those things that requires more nuanced and context, but it was like the broken window theory, he called it, where these criminologists thought that if a window was broken in a house in a neighborhood left unrepaired, people just assume no one cares, so eventually more broken windows show up. So it's kind of, this is one of those examples of a small, a small thing, kind of leading to a bigger thing. Okay, best study. In one experiment, they had people leaving a student alone in a room on stage where someone had an epileptic fit, which is kind of a really mean thing to do to someone, right, in a study?

Yeah. Have someone pretend. So when there was one person there, a student, they rushed to their eight, 85% of the time. But when there was four others there, they only rushed to their age 31% of the time. And so this was kind of the idea that being in a group of people can change the way that people act in certain ways. And do you remember the story about the woman who was brutally murdered and raped and all the people who were watching for their windows. No one called the cops.

I think that was debunked. That was, yeah. And I think he debunked it in here, actually. But I've read that one in a number of different books. You know, it's interesting. I've thought about that idea that people act differently. Like, for instance, I go to the temple, I guess, twice a year. And there's, I don't know, 500 people in the room, whatever it is.

And the rabbi will make a joke that is objectively not very funny. And it's something that if it was one-on-one, I don't know if you would think it was weird, but you certainly wouldn't. You give a fake laugh. Yeah, I mean, you certainly laugh. Yeah, so in a group setting, people are like slapping their knees. Oh, okay. I got you. And it's just really, I think that always stood out to me.

Like, why are people laughing? It's not funny. But people behave differently in large groups of people. Yeah. Okay. So best quotes. He honestly is not very much of a quote machine. I feel like he has more like best paragraphs.

So I honestly couldn't find very many. So the best one I thought was just he says emotion is contagious. And that was one of the things he was. trying to prove throughout the book. I think that they were probably there, but due to your nature of your skimming habits, you probably didn't find them. I read this book, cover to cover or Kindle to Kindle to Kiddle, however you want to say it. So he also said epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. Wait, what was the first word? Epidemics. Okay. So that's kind of the idea that,

like you were saying, you don't know when and why these are going to happen. And a lot of it is circumstantial and context dependent. And sometimes you don't know what that context is going to mean. So I enjoyed tipping point. I thought it was good. And he had a lot of studies in here. And I think, again, that's why people like this because it made this sort of pop psychology more accessible to them. So all in all, it aged well? I thought it aged well.

There was a few chapters where I was kind of like, eh, this may have impressed me before. But it's one of those things where a lot of the stuff you've now read about, like, if you follow the behavioral finance stuff like we do and read a lot about it, you've had this stuff drilled into your head so many times that you're kind of not impressed. anymore. But reading it the first time, you're kind of like, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize so. But all and all, yes. I don't know. Seven out of ten. Oh, that's it? That sounds light. Oh, you think so? I think seven's pretty good. That's like a B plus material. Okay. I don't know. Seven is a C minus. Yeah, that's true. I'm grading on a curve here. All right. Fair enough. Okay. So that's pretty much all I have for tipping point. Let's move on to blink, your book report. Book report. Okay. So explain this book in one.

sentence. Conclusions are made subconsciously for better and worse in the blink of an eye. Okay. That makes sense. Favorite chapter. There was a chapter called... Wait, well, give me, like, the, what is, like, the simple example of blink? Like, this is just split-second decisions, right?

Okay. Speed dating. Okay. All right. And I don't really remember, does he come away with this being good or bad? Does he use, like, the System 1, System 2 thing, basically? Yes, he does. Okay.

This is basically the prequel to thinking fast and slow. Okay. I'm not quite sure why. This took me a while to read. Okay. And his books aren't very long either, what, 200, 250 pages maybe? So, I mean, this is the type of book that you could plow through it fairly quickly. 270 pages. It took me, I don't know, it took me like two or three weeks. Again, I'm not quite sure why or if that says anything about the book or maybe just I read it. I've read it before. I don't know. Don't you think it's bizarre? I don't reread to any books. I will go back and look at passages I've read before. It's kind of a bizarre thing. Do you ever reread books? No. Just for this show, right? We were just doing it for the people. Yes. My favorite chapter was called Kenna's Dilemma, and in it they spoke about the story of the Pepsi challenge, and 57% of respondents preferred Pepsi. Let me just read a piece.

The predicted success of New Coke never materialized, but there was an even bigger surprise. The seemingly inexorable rise of Pepsi, which had also been so clearly signaled by market research, never materialized either. For the last 20 years, Coke has gone head-to-head with Pepsi with a product that taste tests say is inferior, and Coke is still the number one soft drink in the world. The story of New Coke, in other words, is a really good illustration of how complicated it is to find out what people really think. Don't you think taste tests are kind of like surveys in a way? Well, here's why. There's a reason why.

The reason is because sometimes, quote, this is a quote, sometimes a sip tastes good and a whole bottle doesn't. So when they were doing that taste test, yeah. It's just a sip, right. People prefer one sip of Pepsi. to Coke, but a bottle is very different. Yeah, I can see that. Like, one sip of a beer is different than drinking a whole beer. Totally.

All right, so what aged the best? I don't know if this necessarily age the best. I just thought this is kind of funny, for lack of a better word. So this guy, his license is to Ekman, I'm not sure. I forget who he is. Ekman recalled the first time he saw Bill Clinton during the 1992 Democratic primaries. Quote, I was watching his facial expressions, and I said to my wife, this is Peck's bad boy.

This is a guy who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar and have us love it, love him for it anyway. Perfect description, right? I can't remember. Did he go through the studies where you look at like a picture of a politician for two seconds and then that determines who's going to win the vote based on people's initial reaction? Yeah, I'll get into that in a minute. All right. So what didn't age well? This was fairly cringy.

And it's funny because as you were telling me the categories that we're going to do and one of them was didn't age well. I was like, oh, man, I have the perfect one for this. so he spoke about police violence and how an innocent man was shot 37 times police emptied their clips and so he deconstructs a scene and why it happened to what failures were in place and he opens the chapter talking about autism and they did a study on a guy where they put lasers on his eyes and made him watch a scene from a movie and he wasn't paying attention to the right things on the screen and I thought about, thinking about it. I think about Joker. There was a scene where, and this is not a big

spoiler, where Joaquin Phoenix is going to see a stand-of-comedian, and he is laughing at all the wrong points of the bit. He's laughing like before the punchlight, and it's just incredibly uncomfortable and awkward to watch. What did autism have to do with police shooting? I'm going to get to that. So this is the part that did not age the best. So he basically said what autism is and how it manifests itself with reading social cues and things like that. So here's a quote. police training does, at its best, is teach officers how to keep themselves out of this kind of trouble to avoid the risk of momentary autism.

Oh, okay. The funny thing is that talking to strangers is all, like the whole jumping off point of the book is police violence. That's the main theme of the book. So he basically says that when police, or in this case, when they shot this man, they were autistic. They were momentarily autistic. And I read that and I was like, e.

I don't think he would have done that today. Right. Okay. Yeah. That doesn't come off well. All right. Best anecdotes. I've got a few in here. There's this guy, Vic Braden, who was able to spot when a tennis player was going to fault on their serve. And he said, I was calling double faults on girls from Russia. I'd never seen before in my life. But here's the catch. It's a weird party trick. Yeah. Much to Braden's frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows. So this was an interesting part of the book And by the way A lot of this book I read in Malcolm Gladwell's voice Okay

Now that you have the podcast in your head Yeah And so in that same chapter They were talking about an art historian Who knows how to spot fake paintings But also he can't explain it And it's funny because I wrote down in the margins I wrote down Soros

Ah yeah And like Druck and Miller kind of yeah And then later in the page The Soros example came up You know it's kind of like me I can always find the best parking spot, and I have no idea how. I have a gene. Every time, ask my wife, perfect parking spot. Is that true? Yeah, I'm a great parker. I always get the spot right in front. Okay. Next time I'm in a parking lot, I'll FaceTime you for help. So Soros's son said,

my father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that, but I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking at least half of this is bull. That's right. The back pain and the knee pain or whatever. That's why he sold his positions. Again, getting back to the speed dating. Did you talk about Soros selling puts? Markets is definitely rolling on. or sorrows to selling puts or buying puts. Somebody said they lost me at hello. What do you mean? That was a quote.

That's why speed dating works because you draw, and that's sort of the whole ethos of blink is you make these snap judgments in two seconds. So his speed dating thing, if it was written today, would be about Tinder. Yeah. Another part that I thought was interesting, this was sort of similar to the Soros thing, where I wrote something in the margin and then it came up a paragraph later. They were talking about generals and what. war games and decisions under uncertainty.

And I wrote down like trading or something like that. And then later in the chapter, they said that they actually went to the New York Mercantile Exchange and they brought some traders to Governor's Island to play war games with the generals and they were like soulmates. Oh, really? So it actually did work. Because hedge fund letters love to talk about war for their analogies. The art of war.

Yes. Best study. This hit home. So this guy analyzes a husband and wife talking and he can predict with 95% of the accuracy, whether that couple will still be married 15 years later. And it's funny, because as I'm reading this, like, I was really thinking about Robin and myself, like, what's his, what is this guy's job? Like, do we have these sort of signs? I forget what his job is, but if he watches for 15 minutes, his success rate is around 90%, which is pretty remarkable, because

if you were to just ask somebody, like, how would you go about determining whether a couple will still be married in 15 years? You know what I would do? I'd put him in a canoe together. Have you were seeing a married couple in a canoe. Like, I got to be honest, I don't do all those situations. Robert, if I were to canoe in Alaska. Actually, maybe that's the wrong one because everyone fights in those situations. Yeah, right? Like, you're not doing it right.

Yeah. But I would think that you would start with like, well, I would like to spend time with him individually and separately and maybe go through their emails. Does he give the accusers of the kind of thing where he just doesn't know the same thing. He doesn't know why? No, no. Oh, he definitely knows. So it's, this is pretty scientific.

Only four things matter when you're watching. your couple speak defensiveness stonewalling criticism and contempt which is the most important thing yeah that makes sense it makes sense if you if you see somebody talking to their spouse and have you had any friends yet that have gotten divorced i've had a couple and some suspicions yeah like they're the ones you kind of go okay that makes sense have you been through it yet i'm sure you have some friend yeah because i'm so much older than you yeah a couple all right so some quotes. We live in a world that assumes the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. Good one. That makes sense. People are

ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. Do you think that he comes down on this book as it can it be like a learned skill? Does he go into that at all? Or does he kind of just say? He segments it. So there's some things that our, you know, system one, you can't really override it. But in other cases, you absolutely. can. How many books do you think System 1 and System 2 has showed up in? Got to be like thousands at this point, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like in terms of any psychology book that if you don't have condomin in there, like what are you doing, right? Yeah. And you know, it's funny. And one of the margins I wrote, like, is there anything new? Right. Because I feel like it's just

But that's what I meant about the pop psychology stuff. Like when you discover this stuff for the first time, it's like the light goes on and you're just going, oh my gosh, I have like human beings figured out finally. Yeah. And then the people who've already been there before, it's kind of like, well, of course, you idiot. This is human nature. But when you first read this stuff, you feel like you're the smartest person in the world. All right. Some other stuff.

He wrote with a logic problem, asking people to explain themselves doesn't impair their ability to come up with answers. In some cases, in fact, it may help. But problems that require a flash of insight operate by different rules. So basically, sometimes it's hard to, this is why like the morning routine stuff you and I harp on so much. because sometimes you just can't explain why people are successful what they do. I'll give investing as an example. Technical analysis. You could look at a chart and know immediately, okay, the stock's going up, it's going down.

How much more do you really need to know? How many more bells and whistles and indicators do you really need to predict or, you know, to the extent that you can? The stock is in an up trend. The stock is in a downtrend. Well, first of all, you start with the Fibonacci numbers. Fundamental analysis, obviously entirely different. You're not going to look at some key metrics, price of sales, price earnings, and be like, voila, I got it. But don't you think even with technical analysis, there are massively different opinions on the same chart?

True. Like where people can look at one chart quite differently from another technical analysis. Absolutely true. I'm talking at the micro level, you don't necessarily need to spend, you know, three hours dissecting a chart. Yeah. Like your flash judgment is probably. Okay, so it's easier to make a flash judgment from a chart than it is from fundamental data. Without a doubt.

That makes sense. Yep. So he spoke about, so the dark side of rapid cognition, like Warren Harding, for example. He looked presidential. That was it. And that was part of the reason he got elected. That was part of the reason. And then they gave some data about the average height of CEOs in the country.

I mean, I don't know when William Harding was a president, but don't you think back then, the most people ever got out of them was a picture of them in the newspaper or like a picture of their face on a sign or something? It was Warren Harding, first of all. What did I say? William. Okay. And I think, I mean, he was in the early 1920s, so I think it was like not that, that ancient. Okay.

But even then, the travel of information was quite limited. True. And here was another one. In terms of how instantaneous judgment can bite you in the ass. So he interviewed one of the most successful car salesmen, and he said pre-judging as a kiss of death. In other words, he didn't look at somebody that appeared as if they had little money. He just treated everybody the exact same way. Okay, which is really hard to do, obviously.

Yeah, I mean, I don't, I think that that probably is something that can be learned, but it's definitely not something that beginners would think. Like, so we judge a cover, and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad, and I think that was sort of the essence of this book. Like, in some cases, we make snap judgments that are accurate and we can't explain them, and that usually comes from, you know, things like the 10,000 hour rule. It is interesting to see some overlap in its books because there is a lot of that snap judgment stuff and is talking to strangers book, like how a lot of what we do in

interactions with human, other humans is we immediately default to trust. But there are certain situations with people from different cultural backgrounds or whatever that we don't necessarily make that same default. And that could kind of cause us to make mistakes when making these judgments of people. So that was, that was all I had for blink. I think that this, this was a good book. I guess I'd give it a true B, more like an 82. Okay. out of 8.2 out of 10. Okay. All right. How about this? Since we were on the topic of Gladwell, favorite Gladwell book. I know you haven't read the newest one, but... I honestly don't remember. I think that I think that I really enjoyed outliers. I just, you know what stuck out

to me, and this was one of those... I did. I feel like he got too much heat for that. Excuse me. I was talking... Oh, sorry. We don't interrupt each other on this podcast. That's not what we do here. I forgot. I know that the... So it's to your earlier point about like you read one of these books and you feel like a genius, I felt that way. when I read about like Wozniak and Jobs and Bill Gates all being born around the same time with the same advantages, to me that's so commonplace. Like that knowledge is well understood, but to me it was brand new. So I think that I really enjoyed outliers despite the 10,000 hour rule being debunked.

Whatever, I liked it. I actually think what the dog saw is my favorite one of his, which is just his collections of essays from magazine articles at The New Yorker. Oh, I don't remember that. Because there wasn't one, it was all of his old essays. And so there wasn't just one overriding theme. Each chapter was its own thing. And that actually I think was my favorite one of his, surprisingly.

Do you mind if we give ourselves a little plug here? What's that? So Malcolm Gladwell with this new book, what's it called? Talking to Strangers. Yes. He told Bill Simmons that the audio outsold the physical book big time. And you and I have... Like 70% I think.

It was a ridiculous number. You and I have been talking about an idea that's been fermenting. And we've mentioned this. We've mentioned this many times, so we actually have to do it, I think, because we keep talking about it. Yeah, so our idea is we're going to write a book, but not in the traditional sense where we're going to, like, write chapters and read them. We're going to do research as if we were writing a book. It'll just be delivered in a podcast format. I think that's a much more digestible way to consume content these days. My thought is we can do one of these a year. One Animal Spirit's podcast slash book a year. Take it easy. Take it easy. It doesn't have to be as long as a book. And the idea would be each individual podcast would be like its own chance.

chapter. And we would put them out 10 chapters, 10 individual podcasts and, right? And we do plan on charging for this. I don't know, a dollar a chapter. Something like that. Now that you said it, we basically, yes. I'm sorry, $8 a chapter. All right. So, yes, I think we're both in agreement. Like, I can see why some people like to put Gladwell down a little bit, but I still. Get over. Get over yourself. I think it's a little nitpicky. And I think, I think, I think, all the hate is a little strong. I get it, but I don't get it. Well, you know what? I think if you asked him 20 years ago, hey, would you like to get to the place where you're so successful that everything you do is under a microscope? I think he would say yes. Right. Yep. Okay. We're still

up in the air for the next week. Kindled. I've thrown out against the gods by Peter Bernstein. We'll see that we make that happen. I threw out another two for the two. Richard Feynman. I was about to say Richard Dawkins. I drew a blank. Yeah, the two Richard Feynman books. I know you're not too keen on that we'll uh we'll discuss all right thanks for listening and uh we'll talk to you later