Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwell's 12 Rules for Life

Episode Date: June 28, 2018

Crucial life lessons from the end of hockey games, Idris Elba, and some Wall Street guys with a lot of time on their hands. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin So one thing that chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle, you can give it essentially antidepressants and it will fight again. There's a Canadian, like me, my age almost exactly, who teaches my favorite subject, psychology, at my alma mater, the University of Toronto. His name is Jordan Peterson. If you want to understand a complex nervous system, it's a good idea to understand a simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards.

And it turns out that serotonin governs status, emotional regulation, and posture in lobsters just like it does in human beings. And so that just blew me away. He wrote a very provocative self-help book called Twelve Rules for Life. Rule number one, stand up straight with your shoulders back. Rule number two, treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Rule number 12, pat a cat when you encounter one on the street. Peterson's book was a sensation, and soon all kinds of other people were doing 12 Rules, like the economist Tyler

Cowan, whose blog Marginal Revolution is the first thing I read every morning. I particularly like Cowan's rule number seven. Learn how to learn from those who offend you. Every time you turn a corner, 12 rules. The columnist Megan McArdle. Rule number three. Always order one extra dish at a restaurant, an unfamiliar one. You might like it, which would be splendid. If you don't like it, all you lost was a couple of bucks. The exercise of curiosity requires a risk, a sacrifice, a commitment. I love that. Also, McArdle's rule number 12.

Always make more dinner rolls than you think you can eat. For some reason, dinner rolls loom much larger in our imaginations than in our stomachs. Whoa. Megan McArdle makes her own dinner rolls. Everybody's doing 12 rules. Wait. I'm jealous My name is Malcolm Gladwell

You're listening to Revisionist History My podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood This episode is about Malcolm Gladwell's 12 rules for living My guiding principles My wisdom distilled Except, I thought about this for like a month and I realized I don't have 12 rules. I just don't. I mean, I have rules. Like the fact that I only drink five liquids ever. Water, tea, red wine, espresso and milk in some combination.

But that's not a rule for living. It's just pointlessly provocative self-denial, the least attractive part of my personality. If you want a cocktail, you should have a cocktail. I only have one rule. Pull the goalie. What do you mean when you say you're obnoxious? Ah!

Be more specific. If I found something funny, which is still a disease I have, I will say it, even if it gets me in some trouble. I never thought I was particularly cruel, but I was a class cut-up. My one rule for living came to me from the work of two people, Cliff Asness and Aaron Brown, both philosophers of a sort and friends. This is Clifford Asness. He's in his mid-50s, bald, goatee, grew up middle class Jewish in Long Island. I was in the honors classes and I was the cut up in the honors class, which is always a strange thing to be.

You don't think of those classes as having one. But we had them. It wasn't always me, too. always a strange thing to be. You don't think of those classes as having one. But we had them. It wasn't always me, too. We were not perfectly well behaved. So obnoxious, I was tolerable. But I found myself extremely funny. Now, I should say that I didn't find Cliff Asness obnoxious. He's delightful company.

Instead, I suspect he is what psychologists call disagreeable. Short digression. Psychologists believe that human personality can be assessed along five dimensions. Extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and finally, agreeableness. My sense of cliffhaskness? He's at the low end of that last trait, number five. He's low agreeable, disagreeable, which is not the same as obnoxious. It's rather the quality of not being dependent on or particularly interested in the approval of others. When I went to interview Cliff Asness in Manhattan, I turned on my digital recorder and discovered that my memory flashcard was full.

And after much fluster and fumbling, I realized I had no idea how to delete any of the existing data from the flashcard to make room for my interview with Asness. Now, the rational thing would have been for me to hand Asness the digital recorder and ask him to figure it out. Because Cliff Asness has an IQ, I'm guessing, two to three standard deviations higher than mine. He could have solved the problem in about 30 seconds. But I didn't hand him the recorder because I was embarrassed, because I worried that he would think I was pathetic. And that concern was more important to me than actually fixing my tape recorder issues. I am agreeable.

I am interested in the approval of others. I am the opposite of Cliff Asness. So I ended up running down 42nd Street, two cross-down blocks, to Staples, to get another flash guard to replace the one I was too embarrassed to ask for help figuring out. Here, you may include this. This is not a secret. I don't work as hard as people think. I goof off a lot.

Cliff Asness likes puzzles, games, problems that engage the imagination. I have been caught several times playing internet chess in my office when I say caught. I'm the senior guy at the firm. I don't quit over this.

But people come in and I'm like, yeah, I've got to beat this guy. Hold on. Or lose. I'm not a great chess player. He doesn't play conventional chess. He plays one-minute chess, known as bullet chess. If you're curious, this is what a typical bullet match sounds like. It's like Einstein playing ping pong.

By the way, when Asness says, I'm the senior guy at the firm, he's referring to the fact that he heads a company called AQR Capital, Applied Quantitative Research, a hedge fund with $225 billion under management. Which brings me to philosopher number two, the second architect of the Poligoli principle, Cliff Asness's friend, Aaron Brown. If we were to create a disagreeableness scale where zero is like a golden retriever and 10 is Mr. Spock, cliffhance would be a solid seven. Aaron Brown is an eight, maybe even an 8.5. Brown is a member of the tribe of mathematically minded finance guys known as quants. The Wall Street quants used to gather after work at the Odeon restaurant in downtown Manhattan

to talk about Gaussian probability in the bond market. Yeah, so there's different definitions of quant. So remember, quant is an insult invented in the mid-90s that became adopted as a point of pride. Aaron Brown is a big guy, beard, impassive demeanor. When I met him, I was reminded of my favorite joke about engineers. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The engineer wonders why the glass is twice as large as it needs to be.

Brown grew up in Seattle. His mom had a master's in chemistry. His dad had a PhD in physics. Did a lot of unconventional work for the Air Force, like the time he inherited a strange contraption. The Air Force had given this guy like two million dollars over 10 years to build some machine. And they didn't know what it was supposed to do, but they knew he was really smart. And then he killed himself. And so the Air Force said, is there anybody who wants this machine who can figure out what it does and fix it?

And my dad said, sure, I'll take it. And he had it in our basement. A tortured genius builds a sinister contraption with millions of dollars of secret Pentagon money. The man mysteriously commits suicide. The Air Force says, who wants the machine? Aaron Brown's dad says, over here, over here. He puts it in his basement and says to his teenage son, Aaron, Who wants the machine? Aaron Brown's dad says, over here, over here.

He puts it in his basement and says to his teenage son, Aaron, hey, take a look if you want, like it's a box of Legos. This is how you raise a child to be an 8.5. What was the machine? It was just this huge machine. I stared at that thing for hours and hours. I couldn't, it had tubes and wires and this huge machine. I stared at that thing for hours and hours. I couldn't add tubes and wires and this and that. And you turned it on and it did kind of, you know, lights would light up and do interesting things, but we never figured out what it was intended to do. His notes were indecipherable

and he burned some of them. So either he was the guy who invented like the universal wonder machine and whatever, or he was just some crazy guy who liked to put wires together. Maybe it was the thing from that movie, from Back to the Future, the flux capacitor. Yeah, the flux capacitor. Maybe he teleported himself to some other civilization or something. When Aaron Brown was a teenager, Seattle was in the midst of a deep recession.

All around him, people are losing their jobs. He decides he needs a marketable skill. He teaches himself poker and finds a big money game in the basement of a local tavern. And I figured out two really important things. I was much better than these guys. I could easily win money consistently. And they'd let me win it and walk out with it. You know, kid comes in, plays, walks out. So that's like epiphany for me. I could easily win money consistently. And they'd let me win it and walk out with it.

You know, kid comes in, plays, walks out. So that's like epiphany for me. That says, okay. You're how old? 14. But I was a shy kid. This took every ounce of courage I possessed to walk in there. You know, there are people who could have done this and it wouldn't have been a big deal. But for me, it was like the most traumatic event in my life.

But when I walked out, I said, okay, I never have to worry about getting a meal, you know, having a place to stay because you can always find a poker game. Did you pay your way through Harvard with poker? Yes. Aaron Brown ends up on Wall Street, then goes to work for Cliff Asness at AQR Capital. Of course, a match made in heaven. Do you guys think the same way? Do you have differences in the way you approach problems? Well, the massive difference and the reason he has billions of dollars and I have a comfortable living, he cares far more. He gets literally physically angry when things don't work and they lose money. I'd rather work on an interesting problem than a profitable problem.

Now, what do these two do, aside from making money, of course? They do thought experiments. Write them up and post them online on something called SSRN, the Social Science Research Network. In my opinion, the greatest website on the internet. It's a place where anyone, anyone,

can post any kind of paper or research or argument, and every article posted is then ranked according to its popularity. As I'm writing this, there are 798,745 papers on SSRN. I don't know if you remember, back at the beginning of this season, an episode called Divide and Conquer. I talked about my love of law review articles. Well, where do you think I read law review articles? Not in law reviews. Are you kidding?

Why would I wait two years for some dusty publication to put something out? I read them on SSRN, because that's where everyone posts their articles the minute they finish. In Manhattan, for years, the most important source of gossip was page six of the New York Post. SSRN is page six for dorks. So, not long ago, I'm on SSRN, poking around, and lo and behold, what is the number one ranked paper at the time? Pulling the Goalie, hockey and investment implications by Clifford Asness and Aaron Brown. I thought I didn't have any rules for living. I was wrong.

Pulling the goaltender, down three. So really giving a big advantage on the power play with possession firmly established. Here's the issue. You're playing hockey, your team is down by one goal late in the game. The coach of the losing team typically removes his own goalie and substitutes in an extra attacker. So instead of having five offensive players and a goalie guarding the net, he now has six offensive players and no one guarding his net. It's a trade-off. Pulling your goalie makes it easier for the other team to score and put the game even

further out of reach. But at the same time, your extra attacker increases your chances of scoring a goal and tying the game. Now, if you watch hockey, you know that coaches typically pull the goalie with a minute or a minute and a half left in the game. But that's just hockey tradition. It's not based on data. When exactly should you pull the goalie? Tell me the genesis of this paper that I love so much. Okay, well, Cliff and I talk a lot about sort of quant sports stuff. And I have always been talking to him about decisions that coaches make that are mathematically indefensible, but are, you know,

makes sense from the coach's motivation. And specifically, we were talking about Seattle Seahawks' 2014 Super Bowl, New England Patriots. They got the ball on the one-yard line, second down, 26 seconds to go. Now second and goal, Russell Wilson. What are you doing? He gets picked off by the undrafted rookie free agent from Western Alabama, Malcolm Butler, who preserves the victory.

And it will leave everybody asking, why in the world with Marshawn in the backfield did the Seahawks throw the football? At this point, Brown goes on a tangent for maybe 15 minutes about that particular play, which has gone down in Super Bowl lore as one of the worst coaching decisions in the history of football. But Brown convinces me that, in fact, it was the right call, the rational call, and I would explain his logic to you, except that we have much bigger fish to fry. Anyway, talk turns to pulling the goalie in hockey, and Cliff says to Aaron, oh, I've done some work on this already. It's probably six, seven years ago, five, six years ago. I wrote this model in Excel

out of pure personal interest. I thought I had a neat way to think about the problem. And essentially, it's really hard to think about with five minutes left. But with 10 seconds left, it's really easy to think about. Cliff shared his calculations with Aaron Brown. Aaron made them better and built a beautiful computer model. And their conclusion was, a team down by one goal should pull its goalie with five minutes and 40 seconds left in the game. And a team down by two goals should pull its goalie with 11 minutes and 40 seconds left. 11 minutes and 40 seconds with an undefended goal. No one in all of hockey pulls their goalie with that much time left.

If a coach did that in a playoff game with real stakes involved, the entire arena would probably go up in smoke. In basketball and baseball, there's been a statistical revolution over the past generation, known as moneyball, where advanced metrics have been applied to maximize every aspect of the game. Hockey is a

step behind, with the exception of my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs, who have a genuine quant as their leader. This is a sport where players pick fights with each other in full knowledge of the fact that the penalty for their transgressions will materially diminish their team's chances of winning. Baseball is quantum theory.

Hockey is the grown-up professional version of Red Rover, Red Rover, let Wayne Gretzky come over. Hockey coaches are not looking for strategic tips on SSRN. So what do they do? They keep their goalie in place until the very last minute, defending the goal. And why do they keep doing that? Because anything else would be impossibly disagreeable.

Imagine you're a coach of a hockey team down 3-1 with 11 minutes and 40 seconds left in the game. You pull your goalie. The other team scores, so now it's 4-1, with half of the final period left. And now your fans think that you've robbed them of what might have been a reasonably interesting game. They'll hate you.

And so will your players, because it's an awful lot more humiliating to lose a lopsided game than a close one. The Cliff and Aaron strategy may be, again, in our geeky sense, optimal. But it doesn't provide the optimal or the maximum amount of entertainment. It is very high probability you create a laugher, where you get down by three, down by four. And of course, if you follow Cliff and Aaron's cold Vulcan model, you never put the goalie back in. You still an infinitesimal chance you will tie it and you lose 14 to nothing. And it's embarrassing

and maybe entertainment in a sideshow kind of way, but it's not what they want. Who would try this or anything like it? Not anyone who has any normal human expectation of being liked and applauded. But do Cliff and Aaron need to be liked and applauded? No, they don't. Asness founded his firm with a couple of other PhD graduates from the finance department of the University of Chicago, which is like the geek capital of the world. And his basic hiring philosophy ever since has been to hire more PhDs, disagreeable quants just like him. He's now up to 73 PhDs. For comparison purposes, the economics faculty at MIT has 41 PhDs. He's at 1.780x MIT and counting. Now, does he need that many PhDs? I have no idea. But how much more fun is office life for insanely smart, disagreeable people if, at all times, they are surrounded by

dozens and dozens of other insanely smart and disagreeable people circling each other's arguments like vultures? This is going to be one of the watershed days in financial markets history. It was a manic Monday in the financial markets. The Dow tumbled more than 500 points after two pillars of the street tumbled over the weekend. Remember the start of the financial crisis in 2008, when no one knew what to do as stocks were falling and banks teetering on the brink? And everyone was running around screaming for the Secretary of the Treasury to do something, Aaron Brown told me that if he had been Treasury Secretary, he would have done nothing.

In fact, he would have gone on vacation for a few months, because the truth was no one knew what to do, and when no one knows what to do, Aaron Brown says, the rational thing is to wait until you have the data you need before you start throwing around trillions of dollars in bailout money. This is exactly the kind of thing that someone with a disagreeable score of 8.5 would say. In times of panic, the agreeable Treasury Secretary would want to be a calming presence to project stability and wisdom,

to have others look at him and nod approvingly and murmur something about the importance of a firm hand at the tiller. But not Aaron Brown. He doesn't care about Wall Street's feelings. He cares about the trillion dollars. People would be calling for his head. He would be poolside in Boca browsing SSRN on his BlackBerry. Oh man, how great if we could all be as disagreeable as Cliff and Aaron. Suppose you were, let me give you a hypothetical scenario. You have a plucky young team and inexplicably you have ended up in the Stanley Cup finals and you're up against, you know, one of the great Pittsburgh Penguin teams of the last couple of years. Would you consider pulling the goalie to start the game?

Absolutely. I would love to do it. Now I'd have to do the math. Do the math. Always. We'll be right back. A few years ago, a movie came out called No Good Deed, starring Taraji P. Henson as a woman named Terry and the ridiculously handsome Idris Elba as Colin. No Good Deed is a home invasion movie, and home invasion movies are of a piece with pulling the goalie.

They are meditations on disagreeableness. Not to get pretentious, but both goalie pulling and the home invasion genre are versions of the canonical story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Soren Kierkegaard wrote about it in Fear and Trembling. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to demonstrate his loyalty. And the rational thing is for Abraham to obey God,

because if God is all-powerful, then Abraham's future and the future of his family depend on being in God's good graces. But how can he look his son in the eye and then kill him? It's a disagreeableness test. How much will you let the thought of what others think of you and what you think of yourself get in the way of doing what is right in the eyes of God? On the one side is fear, on the other, trembling. This is exactly what goes on in home invasion movies.

Absolutely. That's Amy Lagos, who wrote No Good Deed. To me, that's at the core of why these movies are interesting to people, why the home invasion genre, you know, it's an actual genre at this point, you know, why it persists. I called Lagos up after the revisionist history research team determined that No Good Deed was the most perfectly Kierkegaardian of all home invasion movies. It puts you in these incredibly morally ambiguous situations where the audience can see the direct path to success. So here's the premise of No Good Deed.

It's late on a Friday night, raining hard. Terry is at home with her two small children. The doorbell rings. It's Idris Elba. He says he's been in an accident. He forgot his cell phone. Can he come in and use her phone? She lets him in. Of course she does. He kind of has to be insanely handsome. Yes.

For that to work. She's not going to let me in. If I show up wet and bedraggled at 130 pounds, she's not like... I don't know. I mean, I think maybe she would. I think ultimately, yes, I think his insane good looks are a huge part of that. And another, you know, another big part of her character, you know, she's sort of been primed for this moment in her life leading up to this moment, right? She's feeling unseen. She's feeling unsatisfied in her marriage.

She's feeling neglected. This handsome stranger shows up and compromises her instincts, you know, on some level because he's so handsome. It's awkward at first, but he's super charming. They flirt a little, waiting for the tow truck to come. There's a whole lot of something in the air. And then, halfway into the movie, she sees him for who he really is. A deeply evil guy.

She runs to the kitchen to call the cops and sees that he's cut the phone line. She looks around, terrified, to see where he's gone, can't find him, then, oh, my God, runs upstairs to find him playing with her daughter. Up again. Yeah. Do it again. Again? All right, let's do it. Let's go. And up, touch the sky. Whoa. No, Ryan.

Ryan, baby, you got to go to bed, okay? Please. Ryan and I just having some fun. That's all I No, Ryan. Ryan, baby, you gotta go to bed, OK? Please. Ryan and I just having some fun, that's all, aren't we, Ryan? No. Ryan, come on, bugaboo. It's past your bedtime, sweetie. Amy Lagos says she went to see No Good Deed on opening night at a theater in Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles.

You know, it was a really rousing, I mean, there were lines out the door to get in and the place was packed and people were screaming and shouting at the screen. And it was- Wait, what point? Do you remember what point they're screaming? After they get back to the house where Colin's ex is murdered,

I don't think I could hear a word for the rest of the film from then on. It was just people screaming at her what she should do wait and did they have well I mean what were the range of things they were suggesting did they say were they saying to her run yeah kill him you know it was like it was it was everything from like run get out of there to kill him to you know to like just every everybody had their answer of what she should do next. And they were a hundred percent sure that's what she should do.

Exactly. What should Terry do? She's a baby and a four-year-old. A psychopath is threatening her children. At one point, she grabs a fire extinguisher and hits him over the head and he tumbles down the stairs. But he's Idris Elba.

He gets back up. Later, Idris herds them all into her car and they drive to another house. On the way, they get pulled over by a cop. He's suspicious, but Idris reaches into the back seat and takes her baby into his arms. So Terry can't tell the officers he's in trouble, can she? What should she do? I felt like I needed high-level assistance, someone who could put the home invasion dilemma into broader context. So I called up Sam Harris, author, podcaster, neuroscientist, the kind of person who would publish his own 12 rules, or if pressed, maybe even 24. So yeah, if someone breaks into your house, I mean, there are a few things that are relevant to flag there. One is the time of day is relevant. If someone breaks in in the middle of the night

and you are there, well, now you're talking about somebody who hasn't taken any care to show up when you're not there. And the kind of person who does this is the kind of person who either doesn't care to find a person in the house that he's breaking into or finding a person there is part of the fun. Right. So this selects for the scariest kind of criminal. That would be Idris Elba in No Good Deed. You can't assume that this person has any ethics that you can interact with profitably by bargaining, by pleading your case. That's not who's coming through the window, you know, in all likelihood. Halfway through my interview with Sam Harris, I began mentally calculating his score on the

disagreeableness index. I'm thinking 9.5. And I must admit this is highly counterintuitive and perhaps impossible to act on. But I mean, just think this through. Sam Harris says you have only one option. When Idris Elba is upstairs playing with your kids, that's your opportunity. Run! Everything in us recoils at the idea of doing that, except it does change the situation in a surprising way.

One, it introduces significant uncertainty in the mind of your attacker, because now he knows the clock is ticking. You'll be summoning help in a matter of moments or minutes at the longest, and then, you know, we'll discover just what sort of attacker this person is. We'll discover just what sort of attacker this person is. Now, if your concern is that he's going to kill your child because you didn't follow instructions, well, then very likely this is the sort of person

who is going to kill your child anyway, right, and kill you as well. It's late in the third period. You're Taraji Henson. You're losing. Down by a goal to a psychopath. Now, running away carries a huge social cost and a real risk of an even more disastrous outcome. But at the same time, it increases your chances of winning

from zero to something slightly greater than zero. Pull the goalie. That is a totally rational option and may in fact be the only rational option. But it's impossible, isn't it? You've got to be disagreeable level eight or nine to pull that off. I mean, imagine how you will look to your child or to your wife or to anyone else who's, you know, terrified and looking in your direction for help if you just bolt from the house at that moment. It's only when you come

with the cavalry and rescue everyone that you seem like you were wise and responsible. But in those moments, it just seems like a total failure and may in fact feel like a failure. I know that sounds crazy. I thought, he can't be right. But he is right. The job of a parent being held hostage by Idris Elba is not to win a parental popularity contest. It is to maximize their child's chances of survival. I try to convince Amy Lagos of this. Amy Lagos, herself the mother of two small children. Wish me luck.

She should run. Without her children? Like, she should just... Well, this is what I want to get... This is totally what I want to talk about. Let's think about this rationally. She... What's he going to do to the kids when she's not there?

Right? Right. Isn't it? Right? I mean, the only reason to mess with her kids is to get leverage over her. Well, not necessarily. But if she's not there.

She doesn't know what his motivation is. Right? Yeah. I mean, he just could be a standard issue psychopath. Yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, if I'm in my house and I realize that there is somebody, there is a psychopath in my house, I am not leaving my kids. Like you could, you could burn the house down and I would stay with the kids. No, no, no. The fact that he's a psychopath is exactly why you should leave your children

behind. It's your only chance to save them, Amy. Run for the love of God. Rule number one for living, pull the goalie. In common law, there's a principle called duty to retreat, which holds that a person being threatened has a duty to retreat to a place of safety, to exhaust all avenue of escape, before they can justifiably use force in self-defense. In the past several years, though, about half of American states have passed stand-your-ground laws. Now, what's a stand-your-ground law? It's a law that effectively repeals duty to retreat.

It says you don't need to exhaust all avenues of escape to claim self-defense in a court of law. You can stand your ground, defend yourself, and the law will support that choice. Duty to retreat is a legal principle that gives people license to act disagreeably. I am not a coward if I cut and run at the first opportunity. I am, in fact, acting morally and responsibly. Stand Your Ground laws sanction the Socially Agreeable Act. They say, what matters is that you preserve your honor in front of family and community. I did not run. I stood my ground. So what's happening in those states that now have stand-your-ground laws? Well, I refer you to Stand Your Ground Laws, Homicides and Injuries, Journal of Human Resources,

summer 2017. I think overall we found about a 7.5, 7.7 percent increase in the overall homicide rate. That's Chandler McClellan, adjunct professor at American University, first author of the study in question. States that passed stand-your-ground laws saw their murder rates rise 7.7% compared to states that didn't pass those laws. Well, the fact that the homicide rate increases in these cases suggests that that's not the case, that people are using these laws and standing their ground in cases where they're actually not being lethally threatened. They could de-escalate the situation, they could

get away, but instead they're choosing to engage in self-defense and use lethal force against this threat. And as a result, you're seeing this kind of net increase in homicide rates. And who are all these extra people getting killed in stand-your-ground states? White men. I think our estimates kind of show about 20%, 25% increase in homicides among white males. And actually, that seems a little high, a little surprising. A little high. It's a huge number. Yeah, exactly. It is. But nevertheless, that's kind of what fell out of the model. Yeah, yeah. We speculate that because the white male population is the population that's most interested in the gun culture, more likely to be members of organizations like the NRA, because white males are so entrenched

in this sort of culture, we think that these laws are most salient for them. And as a result, they're most aware of them and they're most likely to act on them. So, a certain kind of white guy who is really into guns and the NRA gets super excited about stand your ground laws and instead of looking to avoid violence or run away, grabs his gun and stands his ground. That is, right before the other guy shoots him dead. Tragic is the most appropriate word, but the other word that's appropriate here is ironic, that the NRA has been pursuing a policy agenda with Stand Your Ground

that has the effect of getting its own members killed. It is a little ironic. Figuring out when to pull the goalie or what to do when Idris Elba shows up late at night seem like abstract intellectual exercises. They are not. They are rehearsals for real life. Because being disagreeable when you need to be disagreeable is hard, especially because the world around us,

the crowd in the stands, the short-sighted lawmakers, they encourage us to do the easy and agreeable thing, which gets us killed. Pull the goalie. I have an aunt, she's Australian, who once a year calls me to ask when she should convert her Aussie dollars to wherever she's Australian, who once a year calls me to ask when she should convert

her Aussie dollars to wherever she's going that year on vacation. For about 10 years, I explained, Aunt Cynthia, you know, we do have views on currencies, but they're micro views. They're 51% chance of being right, let alone on a given day. So I'm loathe to give this to you. And she'd always act like I knew the answer. I just refused to tell her. Year after year, his Australian aunt called,

and Cliff refused to help her. Then, one day, Cliff Asness realized he didn't have to always be disagreeable. She'd say, when should I convert my Aussie dollars to Japanese yen? And I'd go, not this, but next Thursday. And everyone was happy she I was lauded for giving her the truth yeah she was happy because she really feels she knows what she's doing she never checks before or after and I did not harm her one drop because nobody knows what

day to do it and she was always going to do it on some arbitrary day. I just picked the arbitrary day. So there's a case of maybe it's suboptimal, but I picked a high EQ, if not IQ solution. Well, you were protecting your reputation as opposed to your witness. Which is making my aunt not mad at me. He could be Cliff Asness, polar of goalies. He could also be Cliff Asness, dutiful nephew. Malcolm Gladwell's first rule for living. Pull the goalie, but be wise enough to know that disagreeableness is not a matter of temperament. It is a choice. I love that you take calls from your aunt about currency.

And what did he say next? Anyone who's successful who won't take calls from their crazy aunt is no friend of mine. Malcolm Gladwell's second rule for living. Two down, ten to go. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer is Mia Lobel with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer.

Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Glabra. What makes you a good poker player? Two things. There's just the basic math and theory, which I won't say anybody can learn but if you're a quant you can learn it

but the real thing that sets you apart is something I think you have to do by traditional wisdom you have to learn this in your teens while your brain is still forming and you have to do it under intense sleep deprivation so we do these 72 hour sessions with maybe a few power naps in between, and you're pushing every cent you have in the world, sometimes more than every cent you have

in the world, in the middle of the pot. And that develops certain mental abilities that the way I think about it is, I think you manage to harness the processing power of your unconscious brain so that you're not staring at people on the table and sort of, you know, enumerating tells, gee, that person, you know, moved his chips. Your unconscious brain is so much better at noticing what people do, kind of like blink, you know. You just look at somebody and you don't know he holds the ace and jack, you know.

It doesn't tell you that, but it says this guy is afraid to lose or this guy is afraid of being bluffed. And it tells you what they're going to do if you do something. So it tells you when you can push and they're going to fold or when you can draw them in and they're going to go high. This outtake goes on for a long time. If that bothers you, I don't care anymore. It is a curse. I would never recommend to somebody to do it. Yes, you can make money from it, but

it strips away a lot of illusions, right? It's a lot more pleasant in life to believe that there are things like love and friendship and honor. Once you ruthlessly strip all that away and just look very objectively at how people act, it's probably something that psychopaths do, the world's a bleak place. So it's kind of a dangerous road to go down. Do you feel like you went down that road? Yeah.

How did it affect your life? What it meant is that you're bleak. You're just kind of, you know, you don't really trust anybody. In a sense, you trust them. You know what they're going to do. And because you know what they're going to do, it just, I guess it almost makes you treat them like robots. That you can predict what they're going to do. You know their program.

And therefore, you can't really trust that there's love and friendship and honor or anything like that. So that's one of the reasons to move to finance. I actually moved from poker to sports betting and then to finance.