The Jordan Harbinger Show - 256: Malcolm Gladwell | What We Should Know about Talking to Strangers

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Malcolm Gladwell (@gladwell) has written bestsellers that are probably on your shelf right now, including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. His latest book is Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know. What We Discuss with Malcolm Gladwell: Why, if we don't know how to talk to strangers, we invite conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. Why the information we gather from face-to-face human interaction isn't as uniquely valuable as we think it is. Why television makes us worse at reading other people. Why we think we can tell if someone is lying, guilty, or deceptive -- and why we're almost always wrong. What determines the direction of Malcolm's projects, and how he researches and organizes the massive amount of information that goes into them. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/256 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Today, Malcolm Gladwell. What so excited for this one. Malcolm Gladwell, one of the most popular authors in the world. He has books we've all read like Blink, the tipping point, outliers, among others. His newest book is Talking to Strangers, what we should know about the people we don't know. Basically, all the tools we have when we talk to our friends and family betray us when we talk to strangers. And this book is a deep dive on that. I've had Malcolm Gladwell on my interview wish list for probably a decade and change now. So this is a huge thrill for me. We believe that the information we gather in face-to-face human interaction is uniquely valuable somehow. But that's just not the case. For example, you'd never hire a babysitter

without meeting them. And then we find that the information is not accurate. For example, the CIA had a massive failure evaluating double agents from Cuba and East Germany that were working for, of course, the United States, but also secretly working for Cuba and East Germany. We'll explore why this is the case and what happened there and maybe how we can even avoid it in the future. We'll also discuss why television makes us worse at reading other people. It's like social experience, but it's the wrong kind. It's actually worse than none at all. We'll also explore that not only can we not tell if someone is lying guilty or deceptive,

we're almost always wrong when it comes to that. Of course, I couldn't resist asking Malcolm a bunch of questions about his research process, organization, and how he chooses the things he dives into and writes about. This is a great episode. I've really had a lot of fun doing it. If you are wondering how I managed to book all these amazing guests, well, they're usually through my network, and I'm teaching you how to create and build and maintain networks for personal or professional reasons.

It's a free course because the more people that know about this type of thing, the better. Six-minute networking is the name, and it's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, no credit card, none of that BS, just pure freeness. By the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter, so come join us, and you'll be in great company. Now, here's Malcolm Gladwell. Six years between books, man. Somebody's putting in the work. Does that seem to you like a long time? It does. It does seem like a long time. You and Robert Green, I think, are the only people that I've looked at recently that have spent that much time between books. Well, remember, I do my revisionist history podcast, which takes up six

months of every year. So I'm on half time for four of those years. That's really why it took as long as it did. Oh, okay. Well, I'm not accusing you as being late. No, no, no, no. I'm, you know, I'm not being sensitive. But it's worthy of explanation. Well, it's also probably why the work is good, because I think we've all seen what happens when everybody puts out a book every year, every two years. There's overlap in the content, one might say, or lack of originality. Yeah. I noticed. this with fiction writers, there's now an expectation that they come out with a book a year. That's crazy. Who can come up with a good book idea every single year? I always sort of secretly hypothesize that they have a research team that's coming up with a lot

of it, structuring a lot of it, and then maybe the real author goes and then gives it a couple once-overs with an editor and then back to their new book. Now you're depressing me. Well, you never know. You've said that this is your angriest work. Why is that the case? Well, because I've written books that begin in with a sense of wonder or curiosity or awe. Outliers is a book about I'm in awe of the success of certain people and I want to make sense of it. But this one really begins with the Sandra Blan case, which made me angry. Not just me. It made many, many Americans angry.

And I was even angrier, maybe even more angry with the way that I thought that that string of high profile cases involving law enforcement and African Americans were just kind of, I felt like we just kind of pushed them aside and went on with our lives. That struck me as being profoundly wrong. The Sandra Blan case, do you have a three-sentence kind of overview or ten-sentence overview? So if Ferguson is the kind of first of this rash of high-profile cases, Sandra Ben is in the mail. This is about a year later. Young African-American woman is from Chicago is in Texas, just has a job interview in a rural Texas town.

And she's pulled over by a white police officer for failure to use a turning signal. and they have a conversation that quickly escalates into an altercation, drags her out of the car, she's put in prison, and three days later she commits suicide in her cell. And the whole thing is captured on the officer's dash cam. That allows us to really witness in real time how a conversation between two strangers could go awry. And that's where the book begins.

It's like, let's figure it out and let's see whether we can prevent this kind of thing happening again. That one was tricky for me because I did watch. the video because you said you watched it hundreds of times or something like that. Because my first gut reaction was, well, I understand why he was mad. Look at her mouthing off and getting upset. And then I was like, well, okay, let me put myself in her shoes. Well, of course I understand why she's upset and saying that stuff to him. I'd be pissed off too. And then you go, oh, well, wait a minute. If they're both right, then what went wrong?

Yeah. And also, it's funny how, as is so often is the case with these kinds of controversies that our expectations about what happened color our interpretation to a large degree. So I remembered the first time I watched that. My sense was she was being a little bit lippy. Now, not that I blamed her, but I was like, you know what? She could have handled that. And then as the more I watched it, the more I thought my initial reaction was wrong. And she's actually, the pivotal moment in the confrontation is when she lights a cigarette.

And the officers asked her to put out the cigarette and she refuses. She says, I don't have to put out a cigarette. my car. She's totally right. But dawned on me that the reason she's lighting the cigarette is to calm herself up down. Because no one smokes anymore, we've forgotten why people smoke. Right. Yeah. One of the big reasons they smoke is to calm themselves down. Sure. So she's trying to de-escalate her own feelings and also, I think, by extension, de-escalate the situation. And he reads it in number 10 of his epic misreadings of the situation, reads that act as defiance. I also picked that up. Initially, I was like, oh, look at her, just throwing that in his face. And then I went, well,

she's freaking out so what she did. But I only noticed that probably after you'd said something about that in the book. It didn't occur to me in the initial run. It's a hard one. And by the end of the book,

my conclusion is the real solution to this problem is not to have police conduct these kinds of stops. The problem begins not with the mistake, I think, is because we have videotape

of this encounter. To think the encounter begins when the videotape starts rolling. But in fact, it begins when he spots her on the street and he makes this

decision, which is consistent with his training, to pull her over because she's discrepant. She's out-of-state plates in a small Texas town, young black woman, Hyundai. I think the Hyundai, I'm a car guy, and I somehow become obsessed with the fact she's driving a Hyundai matters. I kind of sort of think it does. Because it signifies her class, right? So if she's in a Audi, everything else being equal, her chances of being pulled over, I think are lower. and if she's in and outy with Texas plates, she's fine. And if she's, most of all, if she's white, there's no way he's pulling her over. It's that combination.

So he's saying to himself, this is a largely white area of Texas. It's a college town, but he's not a college student from Chicago. And he really is like thinking something's going on here. And as I describe in the book, all of those inferences are deeply problematic. But that's where it begins. It begins before the tape starts with him, like, jumping into a conclusion about someone because they're driving a Hyundai and their thin color is black, right? Yeah, people go, well, that's racist, but it's also yes and.

There's probably some of that in there. It's hard to credibly argue that there's none of that in there. But then your book says, and that's also not the whole picture. Because otherwise, the uncomfortable idea here is, well, so many people are just racist and that makes them do all this bad stuff. But it's really their training, of course, and the way that we misperceive people's actions. And so I do want to get into. those particular details. Because in a way, this book is, it's sort of like blink, but about people,

but it's one other side of the same ten-sided die that maybe these social characteristics are. It's not exactly the same thing. But it's how our impressions might be right at first, but for reasons we can't explain or how we form impressions that are completely wrong based on the wrong data. Yeah. To preface a lot of this conversation, we did a different kind of audio book with this book. And in the audiobook, instead of me just reading my book, what I use is I bring in all the tape. So it's produced like a podcast. So you will hear the encounter between Sandra Bland and the cop. Sandra Bland did these videos, these YouTube videos, and you'll hear her voice because they're still up on YouTube. And then you'll hear at the end of the book, I have the tape from the cop's

deposition in the investigation. You'll hear him justifying what he did. It's a wholly different story when you hear all those voices. And throughout the whole book, you will hear, like I interviewed one of the CIA guys who did all that, did the enhanced interrogation. It's different when you hear his voice. And I think since this is a book about emotional understanding, the audiobook is in some ways because it's so much easier to grasp the emotional context. When you hear the police officer's tone of voice, you get it, right? And when you hear her, her voice closely, you get it in a way you don't. I don't know. So anyway, I just say that to throw that there because it's like, it frames a lot of the kind of nuance that the book is concerned with. I'm an audiobook guy and I consumed that and I

liked it. And I think you brought this up in an interview. I can't remember which one, because I've listened to 50 Gladwell interviews in the last week, right? Oh, man, you must be so sick of me. I'm enjoying this, but once it's over, man, I'm done. You're done with me. I'm done. I'm waiting for moving on. Yeah, moving on. But you mentioned this, and it was like, there was somebody who had discriminated against African-American people in his apartment buildings for, like, decades. Donald Sterling. Yeah. It was the owner of the Clippers. Yeah, it's this weird thing. So this is one of the motivating ideas behind the book, which is that there has long been. It was a brilliant essay written by a story named Charles Payne about 10 years ago or so, maybe more than that.

And he writes about how, if you were a Southern segregationist in the 60s, the project, the thing you were trying to do was to get race discussed entirely on a personal level to make it the whole racial issue about, you know, white people and black people being able to get along and be nice to each other. And if you could do that, then you could avoid consideration of the structural ways in which racism is embedded in our society. They wanted to make this about, am I nice to my black neighbor, and not about voting rights or gerrymandering or segregation, legal segregation. And the argument of the essay is that that perspective, one, the way we talk about race now in America is that way, in personal terms. And the great example of this is the owner of the Slippers, the Los Angeles

Clippers, Donald Sterling, who owns a team forever and ever and ever. And early on in his 10 years He's a big landowner in L.A., and there are two separate actions brought against him by the Department of Justice for systematic discrimination against African Americans. He's driving black people out of his buildings and he's not renting to black people. He is nailed, settles with the DOJ, plays a fine. Nothing happens. Then fast forward to 2017, and there's this famous case, right, where his girlfriend secretly records him making very disparaging comments about black people to her. and that's released. And there's a huge brouhaha. And he's forced out of the league and he's no longer an owner of the league. And this is exactly what they were talking about. The guy in every single way, it is a worse thing to systematically discriminate against black people in renting apartments than it is to make in private a disparaging comment to your girlfriend. We got upset about the latter and we gave him a pass on the former. And I, in this book, what I'm trying to say is the same thing happens here is that the These instances happen, and we say, oh, it's a racist cop.

And that's what we get rile up about. And then we neglect the fact that actually there's a whole system behind that that explain what happened. And that's where we should be spending our attention. Your mom had an instance of this. I think you talked about this again in another piece where was it your neighbor in England or something like that? It said something about South Africa and she wanted to move that.

So my mom was Jamaican. She married my father who was white in the late 50s in England. And they actually had this exact thing. There are numerous instances where someone yelled a racial effort at her, and there were also, it was a famous case where my parents rented an apartment in London, and then once the landlord found out, my mother was black, rescinded, the, kicked him out. If you ask my mother, you know, which is worse? She was like, well, you know, having a baby and being exhausted and moving into an apartment

and then being told to turn around and move out again, that was infinitely worse. But the systematic institutional stuff is the stuff that we ought to be concerned about. But she got over somebody calling her the N-word. But it took a long time to get over the flagrant injustice of someone taking back a lease just because of the color of your skin. That's the kind of sub-theme of the book. It's like, let's talk about the things that matter here. You'd mention we believe the information we gather face-to-face in human interaction is uniquely valuable, such as you'd never hire a babysitter without meeting that babysitter. Because we think, well, she seems like she's got a good head at our shoulders.

but that data not necessarily that useful for that sort of small smudge. The examples you give, one, which was particularly interesting, was the CIA failure of evaluating double agents from Cuba. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because that was a major national security issue based on these exact same concepts. Yeah, so I tell a bunch of spy stories in the book, mostly because I'm obsessed with spies. Yeah. Are you obsessed with spies?

I am, yeah. Are you like me, someone who reads every book with the word spy in the title? Yes, and also a lot of my shows are, this person was undercover in Pakistan for the CIA, but not really. This person was the trainer for the disguises or whatever. You know, that's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm having that too stuff too. I tell these two little-known spy stories. And both of them involve Cuba, because the Cubans, you know, they played the U.S. for a fool for years and years and years. They're both about the fact that the Cubans pulled the wool over the eyes of not kind of over-seasoned. CIA, sophisticated CIA counterintelligence people were repeatedly fooled by Cubans on matters like one case of spy was really high up in the American intelligence establishment. In another case, it was that the spy network that we were running inside Cuba was almost entirely turned. And it's like this kind of fascinating window.

And look, if they can't do it, they say if an agency, if the most sophisticated intelligence agency in the world, full of people who are trained in the arts of detecting deception, can be so easily fooled by a tiny little, you know, country with very few resources sitting in the middle of the Caribbean. What hope do the rest of us have? I wonder if small countries have to do that because they're never going to outgun a major power. So they just go, you know what?

All we got is the ninja stuff. Friend of mine who was a spy obsessed as I am. This has been one of his rants for years, which is that what are the most successful countries at spying in the world over the last hundred years? East Germany. Israel. Israel.

Cuba. North Korea. Oh, yeah, North Korea. It's all these little... Iran, probably. Iran. In fact, this should have been a chapter of my last book,

David and Goliath, because this is exactly a disadvantage that turns into an advantage. You can't afford an F-16, but you can't afford to sneak a double agent into, yeah. But I always wonder, I read this thing,

this like amazing paper in some journal on espionage by a former CIA guy who says, if you look at the Cold War and you look at the utter futility the U.S. and the Soviet Union had in detecting spies within their own ranks. So we had two spies, Robert Hansen and Alder James, who basically gave away the store.

We had spies inside the Soviet Union who gave away the store. If you look at the record of this, you realize it's all a wash. We knew everything we wanted to know about them. They knew everything they wanted to know about us. It's almost as if he said, we should have met in 1950. I just said, you know what, guys? it's pointless. Since you can't know if there's a traitor in your midst, let's just shut down all of our clandestine services. I mean, it's a whimsical notion, but would have saved us a lot of

cash. Sure. Yeah. And then the other side says, sure, you go ahead and do that and we'll follow you. No, but suppose you're the CIA and you say, okay, I'm not going to run any humnet, so human intelligence. All I'm going to do is the tech stuff. I'm going to tap phones and intercept signals and do all that kind of stuff. But I'm not running any more agents. So you remove the possibility for your enemies to turn agents and fill you with false information. And you also shut down a thing which your enemies can penetrate, right? So there's no CIA for them to infiltrate. And there's no agent for them to turn. So you could do it unilaterally. It's not clear to me that you would be... The problem is this is maybe a positive.

story. This general had said, we have spy satellites that can see a license plate from space. That's fine if you're attacked by a license plate. But it's not good if you want to find a guy living in a cave in Afghanistan. That you need human because their signals intelligence is maybe they make a cell phone call from a village once every three weeks. Meanwhile, they're just sitting around with goats. Yeah, yeah. Or whatever. I once heard a guy, senior military guy, talk about the same paradox is if you have a bomb, which can take out a bath, is so accurate it can take out of just the bathroom in like a mansion somewhere in the desert, then you think that's an advantage is actually not because now you need to have intelligence

that can locate someone in a place as specific as the bathroom. Right. Yeah. Before when you wiped out like the entire house. Yeah. And all you need to know is he was in the house. Now you got to know where he is in the house, right? That's sort of funny.

I wonder like if you reconstruct how we found Sama bin Laden, for example, doesn't that begin? It's an awful lot of intercepted signals, right? How much is it? Do we ultimately have a human source? Yeah. We do. They did an operation where they were going door to door saying, were your kids vaccinated?

And that was a huge problem because now when people actually make sure that people are being vaccinated, they're like get out of our neighborhood, they're attacking those people because they think they're all spies, which is you're not supposed to do that kind of thing. You're not supposed to cross intelligence and humanitarian operations for that reason. Yeah. Okay. So it was a mix. Yeah.

I'm being whimsical. But I do think in general, the absolute futility of human beings' efforts to successfully read deception in others suggest to us that some things we do ought to be changed. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Malcolm Gladwell. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

And don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Malcolm Gladwell. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Malcolm Gladwell. You give another example in the book of judges being just horrible at deciding who's going to be a flight risk for bail versus a computer. There are a couple of other examples in the book as well.

One experiment, which is really fascinating, I'd love for you to speak to this, this experiment where people are asked to complete words, and the words would be like DA blank blank, and I'd go dark. And then it would be like, T-O-U-blank, oh, tough. And then you say, well, these words, what do you think they say about you? And I say, oh, nothing. I say dark, tough, malicious. I don't know. They don't say anything about me. But then, of course, when we have other people do it

and you ask me, what do these words say about other people? I just think I know them better than they know themselves. Yeah. So this is called the asymmetricality of something, something inside. It goes to this heart of we have enormous confidence in our ability to draw meaningful conclusions about people based on very superficial evidence. So, yeah, you see how,

people complete a list of words. You look at that list and you say, oh, man, you did dark. You completed DA as dark and T.O. Blank, blank, blank as tough. And you say, oh, man, you must be this brooding psychopath. Yeah, exactly. But in fact, that's nonsense. You can't draw meaningful conclusions about somebody from the way they complete words in a psychological questionnaire.

But this is this weird thing about human beings and strangers, which is like, we are super, super crazily confident. So another example would be the Boston Marathon Bomber. DeSarnoff was on trial. Sarnaev or something like that. Yeah, I'm mingling his name. One of the reasons he gets a death sentence, the jury is convinced that he has shown no remorse.

And this was a big argument of the prosecution, that he was a guy. And they gave various, they had video from him in prison. And during the trial itself, everyone was look at him and say, the guy clearly is not remorseful at all, based on his facial expressions. I mean, it was a really brilliant riff by a psychologist named Lisa Feldman-Barrant.

Oh, she's been on the show before. Yeah, she's great. She's totally brilliant. So she's this riff in her book when she was like, wait a minute. First of all, what does remorse look like? I don't know what it looks like. Why are we so sure we know what it looks like? Why are we so sure that everyone demonstrates remorse in the same way?

And thirdly, he's not American. He's Chechen. So what do we know about Chechnan society? And what we do know about Chechno's society is that if they did manifest remorse on their faces, in a certain way. It wouldn't be the same way we do. Right? They have very different cultural codes about how men are supposed to behave and manage their emotions in stressful situations. So like you can't, no, maybe he didn't feel remorse or maybe he did. You cannot sit there and accurate determine whether he did or didn't based on your perception of the expressions on his face. And that is

fundamental error that we keep making over and over and over and over again, right? I am sitting here. I've met you for the first time half an hour ago. Some part of my mind. my brain is trying to figure out what you're thinking. Sure. I'm saying. What evidence am I using? The expressions on your face. Yeah, which are masked terror.

If I'm something that goes wrong. No, but if you were my brother, I would know what they mean if I'd grown up with you. Sure. I have no clue what your expressions mean. Again, I can't turn off the part of my brain that wants to say, oh, he looks a little bored. Ooh, is he enjoying this conversation? Oh, is he enjoying this conversation? I hope Malcolm likes me after this.

Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to quiet that part of the brain and get into the academic part. It actually is funny. As a host, I had to manage my emotions all the time because I do think about, oh, I should look really interested, but I also want to make sure I'm listening and I also want to make sure I connect what's going to happen next without thinking about my next question and becoming non-president. Are you actively and consciously managing your demeanor? Yeah, sometimes. Not all the time because that's a waste of cognitive resources. Most people don't really care what I look like, but I can't just sit there and go and stare upwards because I'm thinking about what you're saying. Because a lot of times when I have a conversation, I'll look in a different direction because I'm listening.

That doesn't work very well on camera or when I'm talking with you like this because you might go, what's going on? Everything okay? So, yeah, I have to be more like, I'm paying attention, like doing the friends thing. I'm being present right now. Whereas I'm not necessarily always going to look matched. And we can get into what matching is in a second. But yeah, I do manage it to a degree. There's like an element of high school drama acting involved in doing a show like this.

Yeah, yeah. When I interview people, the thing that's on my mind is almost more than the quality of the questions I'm asking, I am very consciously trying to communicate engagement. So I want them to feel like I'm listening to them very diligently and I care about what they say because I feel like only under those circumstances will people open up. Of course, yeah. But I'm aware, like, it took me a long time to figure out that you can't just feel that. You have to manifest it in a way that people can pick up on. Doesn't help matters if I look checked out, even though I may not be at all, right? Right.

We are professionals who are talking about the way we conduct our business. Most encounters between strangers are not in that kind of rarefied context. Correct, yeah. You're out in the wild. You can't manage your emotional expressions in a way that maximizes their chances of being read appropriately. Like in a Sandra Blank case, she's legit upset. She's been pulled over for no reason. She's had bad encounters with cops in the past.

She's not sitting there thinking, oh, my God, is the way I'm feeling in my heart being perfectly represented on my face. No, she's just trying to manage the fact that she is overcome with emotion and really distressed. That's true. I think if I try to manage my communication in the same way we're doing now, there's a specific context that happens when these lights and cameras turn on where everyone goes, oh, okay, maybe I'll be a slight 10% different than I am in real life. I also do things where instead of going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, like I would in a normal conversation, I do things with my hand so that they don't have to edit it out or it doesn't go over your audio. I mean, there's all kinds of little things. But we see

people like that in the wild where we go, this person, I don't know, what was that? They're strange. They're likable, but there's something off. And the reason is because they're acting a little bit too matched. They're a little bit too dramatic. And it seems strange. Yeah. It seems fake. I wonder, you know, going back to this thing about part of the book where I talk about how judges are so bad at making bail decisions and how an AI system is better. Why that's interesting is that the judge on paper knows more than the AI. The algorithm makes this decision based simply on criminal record of defendant, suspect. And the judge has the criminal record plus the evidence of his eyes. He sees the defendant in front of him. And yet that fact that he can see the defendant,

that additional information does not seem to make him a better decision maker, makes the judge a worse decision maker. So it's not just that the evidence that he's picking up in the encounter is awash or irrelevant. It's actually making the judge worse. That's weird. It gets me wondering about things like job interviews, are you sure if you're an employer that the evidence you gather from the face-to-face encounter with a prospective employee is adding or detracting from your ability to make a good decision about their fit for the job you're hiring them for? It's really unclear. Like, I'm more and more convinced that what the job interview is, it's that people are applying the lessons from dating. Like, in dating, you want to meet the person face-to-face because you want to know

whether you're attracted to them, right? So there's no question that's a good idea. We don't hire people that we want to sleep with. That's not the way. Generally not a good idea. We hire people because of their abilities and their abilities are not manifest in their physical presence. Like I was talking about this with my dentist. He does a lot of pro bono work because he's obsessed with this idea that one of the ways in which we subtly discriminate against people is by looking at their teeth. Totally. And people who are poor and can't afford good dentists. and I had bad teeth. It is a huge roadblock. And I think about this, if I'm looking for an audio company, and what if I'm looking to hire somebody and they have bad teeth? If I didn't meet them

and just considered their objective qualifications for the job, if I just emailed with them or talk to them on the phone, the teeth wouldn't be an issue. But if I met them, what if on some unconscious level I was repulsed? And that is a horrifying thought that I would judge somebody on the basis of the fact that they or their parents could not afford advanced tennis. They got hit with a baseball last week, playing with their kid. They couldn't afford to get their teeth fixed

because they don't have a job yet. Yeah. I mean, that's really where I'm going with the story of Sandra Bland is we have to take these misperceptions we have of strangers seriously. You really have to think about how do we restructure the world

so that we can account for these kind of errors. I want to talk about friends. This is a particularly cool pop culture reference that you came up with for the book. this show has strong emotions that are displayed on the face, perfectly matched, as you called it. So when Ross is perplexed or Monica's angry, it's really clear they go over like the textbook,

facial muscle movements, facts, FACS. What is that again? Facial action coding system. Yes, Echman, I think, came up with this. Paul Echman here in service, yeah. Just as there is musical notation that allows you to describe in writing what music sounds like, there's a thing called FACS, which is,

face notation, it allows me to describe in writing what's going on in your face right now. So what's called Action Unit 1 is when the inner part of your eyebrows go up. And then Action Unit 6 is like something else. Every conceivable expression your face could make has been coded. So there are people out there who are experts in facts. So I found a fax expert, a woman named Jennifer Foggi. And I gave her two minutes of a friend's episode chosen at random. It's one where Ross discovers his sister making out with...

Monica. Monica and Chandler. Chandler making out. And Ross is upset because he doesn't want his sister to going out with his best friend. So I give this to Jennifer Foggi, and I say, give me a fax reading of all of their facial expressions. And she does that. By the way, so genius. And then I sit down with Jennifer.

I say, okay, we're going to go through this two-minute section and do the facial expressions of the actors, match the emotions that they're supposed to feel in that. So she said, okay, in this instance, Ross's face shows anger as it is classically expressed, you know, action unit 6, 12, 15, and whatever. Is he supposed to feel angry in that moment? The answer is yes. And all done the list, when Joey looks dumb, does his face match the expression of, yes. When Monica is surprised, do her eyes go wide and her jaw drop and her eyebrows go up?

Yes. Cartoon level accuracy. Cartoon level congruity between what's on your face and what's in your heart. They do that because they're trained actors, right? And that's why, even though the plots of friends are absurdly complex, no one in history has ever watched an episode of Friends and said they lost me. What is going on in the show? Yeah, never happened.

Why? Because they catalog, everything is perfectly cataloged during that. If you watch a lot of TV, you can come to the false impression that that's the way things work in real life. That's what's going on in your face. But in truth, that's not true at all. And a significant number of people are what are called mismatched. And that is that their facial expressions under certain circumstances do not match the way they feel on the inside. And those people give us bits.

Sarnayev, so no remorse. Well, we don't know because he was mismatched. In the book, you give the example of Bernie Madoff where he looked very calm and collected and nice. And, oh, well, that's mismatched because he's obviously a complete psycho who has no concern for anybody but himself. So we think this is what an emotion is supposed to look like. but it's not. But we've trained ourselves to think that the way someone looks and acts is the way that they feel, but that's just not true. Not true at all. In that chapter, I talk about the Amanda Knox case, the famous case where an American teenager goes as a year abroad in Italy and gets falsely accused of murdering her roommate. And that case is all about the fact that Amanda Knox is mismatched. There's never any evidence linking her to the crime.

They have another guy who clearly did it. And they drag her in. Why? Because she doesn't behave the way. the Italian police and the British tabloid press think someone whose roommate has been murdered ought to behave. And so if you don't think this kind of misapprehension has consequences, just look at the real world record. We are sending people to jail for years and years and years for crimes that had nothing to do with. Yeah, kids. I mean, she was like a college student, right? In college student, yeah. It's horrible. So we judge people's honesty based on their demeanor, but that's inaccurate.

So if they're nervous, we think, oh, they're lying, they're nervous. Well, are they or are they just surrounded by police officers that are yelling at them? telling them they're going to go to jail for 10 years for shoplifting, even though they didn't shoplift. I mean, that's enough to make you act nervous if you're a 12-year-old African-American kid who got picked up for something they didn't do or any kid, frankly, for something they didn't do. So the mismatch seems like dishonesty and this truth default theory, which you bring up in the book as well, plus the mismatch means we can get deceived really easily, even if we're a seasoned FBI agent. You cannot have any illusions about our ability to detect lies just by if you just look at the

made off fools everybody for 20 years. All these spies, tons and tons and tons of spies go undetected for years and years. I mean, I could just go on. Like Larry Nasser case at Michigan State, a pedophile is operating in plain sight for two decades and nobody, he kind of fools everybody. I mean, it's a kind of, it's pretty sobering to look at those examples. How do you decide what to explore and what to study? I'm wondering, actually, how often you start a topic, do this deep dive and then go, nah, change your mind. and abandoned it and go into something else?

Well, a fair amount. I mean, there's a certain amount of trial and error in all of these things. My whole question is, is it an interesting story? Or is it an interesting bit of research? And then if it is, then I hold on to it in the expectation that maybe someday it'll be useful. So there are little bits and pieces in this book that I kind of reported and learned about without realizing or knowing how I would use them. So I'll do, I have this whole huge amount of research I did on the Houston school system,

which I was going to put in a book and didn't. It's just sitting there. I'm sure I'll use it one day because it's super interesting, but that happens. You just kind of, you have to be willing to, I think, to experiment when you're writing a book like that. Yeah, they call it kill your darlings and show business. You do this amazing thing and then you go, it just doesn't fit. So you sit on it thinking someday because otherwise it kills you to just delete it or throw. Writers, I think it really is true that you put these darlings in a closet and you can use most of them.

I mean, if it's a good story, it's a good story. The podcast must help with that. I only have a 25-minute-long thing or an hour-long thing. Well, I think I will do my Houston school system for the podcast, maybe next year. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Malcolm Gladwell. Don't blink. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show.

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And now for the conclusion of our episode with Malcolm Gladwell. You study people and social phenomena at a level that few people do. So it seems like more than an interest. I don't know if it's an obsession or anything, but certainly your research gets to that level of, like, obsessive completion. and I assume you would agree that you have an analytical mind. I wonder if you ever think your life would have been easier

if you thought less about things. I think a lot of people feel that way. Well. Like, did it get you in trouble when you were younger? Not really. I mean, I wouldn't call myself hyper-analical. I don't think of what I'm doing is being analytical. I think what I'm doing,

the particular thing that I do a lot of is simply perspective-taking. So I spend a lot of time trying to see something through someone else's eyes. which is not the same as being analytical. No, it's not. It's less impressive. The question I always ask when I hear something is, why would that person feel that way?

Why do they think about it this way and I don't? Huge amount of my writing is just about that. It's about me inhabiting someone else's mind for a while. Do you ever look at your own work through other people's eyes? Like, do you read your reviews and go, ugh? Well, I mean, I read my reviews very sparingly because I don't think it's useful. If the review is really glowing,

it just swells your head. And if it's really negative, it just is a downer. They do make you aware of your tendencies. I don't always agree with critics who would call those tendencies problematic. I sometimes think that they're not problematic. They're just tendencies.

But a good review can be very useful in giving you some self-awareness. Is there any criticism that you hear of your work that you actually agree with? Maybe criticism you hear often where you go, I know, they're right. I'm working on this, or I do need to fix that?

Well, I mean, I'm an enthusiast. So I love trying on new ideas for size. And some people take me to task because they think I'm overly enthusiastic about cool new ideas. They're not wrong at all. But I sort of think I'd rather be on that side of if you're going to err on one side or the other of enthusiasm too little for new ideas or too much, I'd rather err on the side of too much enthusiasm. And I'm also fine with admitting when I'm wrong. I don't have any problem with that. So as long as you're willing to backtrack when you think your enthusiasm was misplaced, I think it's fine to be overly enthusiastic. I mean, I'm being unduly harsh with myself. I've just been an enthusiast. I think if someone's got a cool way of looking at something, I'm like, let's explore it. It's like, why would we? The future of the world is not at stake in a mountain level book. Yeah, I suppose also it's not necessarily built as like, this is a scientific textbook that it's a book to get these ideas. I want my readers, and I think my readers do do this, and this is why people have come back to my books again and again, and that is that

I think readers really enjoy the process of perspective taking. There's something about that exercise that is enormously appealing and kind of liberating. Why do you think humans, or why any research are shown that humans are evolved to trust implicitly. We didn't talk much about truth, default, theory, but there has to be a reason why we, by default, believe what people tell us or believe the impressions that we get. It has to be good for society at large somehow. It is, because no higher order activity can proceed without the presumption of trust. So if I trusted that the address you people gave me was correct, I trusted you would be here. I trusted that you would prepare for this interview.

There's a million things. You trusted I would show up and that I would speak to you in good faith. I mean, because each of us made enormous, I have, you know, never met you before and nor have you ever met me. But this works because each of us made ten assumptions, positive. no assumptions about the other party, right, before we even started. And if we were the kinds of people who thought twice about those presumptions, then this would have never happened, right? Yeah. I would have been super pissed if you didn't show up. I spent a lot of time wrapping this, you know. But more than that, like, our lawyers would be wrangling over this and that.

You know, society, and I always give the example of, you can't put your child on a school bus in the morning unless you have implicit trust in the system. If you're on Wall Street, when I was talking in the book of a lot in the Madoff case, trying to account for the fact that very seasoned Wall Street people were fooled by Madoff. Part of the reason is you can't be a financial trader or an investor unless you have a huge amount of trust in the system. I mean, you're going to sake. People are wiring millions of dollars. It vanishes into the ether and you trust. It's going where you want it to go and being invested according to the instructions you gave. So that's the mindset that weirdly, we don't think of this. The mindset and proclivity that gets rewarded

in a place like Wall Street is the propensity to trust. That's true, yeah. In numerous situations, what is the effective leader in an organization, the kind of person who is willing to believe in their employees, to help them, mentor them, nurture them, courage them, all of those things are based on a fundamental trust that the employee will respond accordingly, that the employee is as dedicated and motivated about the work

as the manager wants them to be? I mean, that could go on. You can't do anything. of course favors people who have this predisposition because those are the people who succeed in the world. That's a good point. I mean, we literally get a stack of cash or something valuable and we go, well, I can't keep this in my own house where I know I could keep it safe. I have to drop it off with this stranger at Chase Manhattan Bank and have them lock it in one of those boxes that I'm not allowed to even look at and make sure it's still there. And we just operate this way, the whole economy, the whole society

operates this way. And when somebody doesn't do that, we go, oh, they're kind of weird. They keep their money in their house. Something's wrong with her. This is so deeply ingrained in the human cycle. This is the argument of Tim Levine, who's a communications researcher at the University of Alabama, whose work I rely on very heavily in this book, who I think is absolutely brilliant. And I really want more of the world to kind of appreciate his insights. But this is his big argument, that it is hugely adaptive to be a truster. But if you are someone who trusts, you also have to accept the fact that this leaves you vulnerable to deception. And there's no way around that. You have to accept that trade-off. That 95% of the time, I am better off because

I trust implicitly. But 5% the time that means I'm going to get scammed. No way around it. Yeah, you're right. For all you know, nobody listens to this podcast. This is the first episode. And then you have to go home and fire someone, right, for approving it. That look was, is he serious right now? Can't really tell from the look on his face. I know you're free. Good. Writing is 20%, I think, typing you, an 80% organization. How do you organize your work? Clearly, you use tons of sources

from people to documents to videotape. I'm very iterative, so I'll read something right a bit and then think about it and then read more and gather more information. I was still adding to this manuscript of talking to strangers

really, really late in the... If you'd compare my first draft with my fifth draft, huge differences. I really like listening to what others think about stuff that I've written. I think I take that kind of feedback very seriously, particularly the people who are responding in good faith. And the first time you write something, even though you wrote it,

it's not what you think. What do you mean? It takes a long time to figure out how to express what you think, and it takes a long time to figure out what you think. So the first time, when you do a first draft, you're not doing either of those things. You're still early in the process of identifying what you really believe, and you're early in the process of being able to express it. So particularly in this book where there's a lot of chapters like the chapter on the Stanford rape case, where I'm making a very subtle, nuanced point. I desperately don't want to be misunderstood. And I want to make sure that I communicate. I want to walk that line very carefully. It's hard to do. And the first draft is never going to represent your feelings accurately. I must have done 10 drafts of that chapter, right?

So that's what I mean that when I say organization, what I include in that is it's 80% organization. and reflection. You really need to think about and sit with what you've written to make sure it communicates what you believe. An incredible number of cases we hold people accountable

for things that they have written without asking a question. But wait a minute, is the way they wrote it, does the way they wrote it legitimately represent what they believe because there is a gap? I would imagine

would you kind of nervous at all clenched up at all handing this one in? Because there's a lot of sensitive stuff in here. When I read this, I went, ooh, cue people getting mad and deliberately or otherwise misinterpreting what he meant about this one. And then Q, the regressive ultra one side of the other, taking this and running with it. And I'm like waiting for the TMZ piece to come out about how you're suddenly like this closet, I don't know, whatever. Yeah.

No, I mean, I think if you read the book carefully, you'll know this book does not have morally objectionable moments to the opposite. I mean, I think a lot of what I'm doing is in a very well-intentioned way trying to resolve difficult problems. But does that mean there aren't people who will deliberately or otherwise miss, yeah, but there are always... You can't really avoid that. You can't really avoid that. And you can't let that stop you. I mean, the answer is just don't read Twitter. Yeah.

You don't have Twitter, do you? Oh, I do. But I tweet out cat photos. I mean, I don't... Or like, I'm a big runner, so I'll tweet out, like, running videos and stuff. I rarely dip my toe in contentious waters on Twitter. I looked and I only saw what it looked to be fake Malcolm Gladwell. No, there's a real one.

There's a real one. Okay. Act Gladwell. Act Gladwell with checkmark. That's probably why I was like, oh, there's nothing about his new book, you know, his work in here. There's nobody yelling at him. I had a picture of a cat, a very, very cute cat sitting next to a copy of my book. That was my promotion.

Yeah, that's your social media team's just sitting there face palm, right? Like, come on. It's astonishing how much mileage you can get out of cats on the internet. I don't disagree. How can your insights be best used to inform interactions with strangers? whose role or relationship in our life is especially consequential, high levels of trust, strong information imbalance, like doctors, lawyers, maybe your boss. How would you take what you've written and talking to strangers and apply it in those instances?

Well, so I spend the most time on this, obviously, with law enforcement, and I think that what it requires, what we have to understand is that solving this problem of misperception by police officers requires that we go back to really first principles, that we have a very different philosophy of policing and very different ways of training police officers. And I detail both those things in the last part of the book that there are some really interesting new theories about crime and how it's distributed in the population

or actually in geographically distributed that can greatly improve the kind of social and moral efficiency of proactive policing. There are ways in which we can limit aggressive policing, proactive policing to those very, very, very specific areas where it is necessary. And also we have clear empirical and statistical evidence to suggest that we do not need to be too aggressively police in the overwhelming number of neighborhoods. Fundamentally, the problem with Sandra Bland is that on that street at that time of day,

in that community, proactive policing of the sort that Brian Insidian was practicing was completely uncalled for. So by the end of the book, I'm trying to say, we've got to go right back and understand something fundamental about crime and change law enforcement practice along those lines. I think for me, one of the top takeaways was don't believe what you might read in someone's face. Because I was one of those people who's like, well, if they don't look, X, Y, Z, which is very human. It's just wrong also. You bring us a lot of mysteries. You help decode them all the time.

What mystery or phenomenon would you like to see solved isn't the right word, but what? whatever, you know what I mean, especially in the social sciences in your lifetime. Oh, wow. What a great question. I mean, I guess all of the things, we are in the middle of the sort of second wave of social science. If the first wave was, what are the general principles that help us explain human behavior? The second wave now is, what are the general principles that help us distinguish among human beings? So first wave was how do you and I process information? Second wave is how can we explain the differences in the way you and I process information?

Much more specific and interesting question. And that idea that I think this is where we're moving, if you think about something like the CTE problem in tackle professional football. Not everyone who suffers repeated concussions or hits to the head develops this ruinous neurological condition called CTE. Some portion do.

So clearly developing this problem is a product both of your experience in the football field plus some underlying susceptibility. The next stage is for us to identify that susceptibility and say to a group of people, you probably shouldn't play football, right? That's how you resolve that problem in football is by getting more sophisticated

about understanding micro-differences between individuals. That's a kind of good model for where I think social science is headed. And so if I can understand how, even making an argument, What's the best way to make an argument to you change your mind? And how does that differ from the best way to change the mind of your mom or your best friend or someone you work with? That's a really, really crucial sort of next stage of inquiry. So the next book is arguing with strangers?

Yes, exactly. Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Great interview with Malcolm Gladwell. Had a lot of fun doing that. Unfortunately, what we did not have time for was to touch and do a little bit of a dive on what he calls truth default theory or what is called truth default theory. We're much better than chance at gauging

if someone is telling the truth, but we're much worse than chance in terms of telling or being able to tell if someone is lying. So what that means is we're pretty good at deciding if someone is telling the truth, but we're pretty bad at knowing if someone is actually lying. And that's because we as evolved, socially evolved humans, the default assumption is that people are honest or are at least being honest with us in that moment. We start by believing them, and only in the face of pretty overwhelming, damning evidence do we change our mind. And so that's why, for example, we tend to believe our first impression, even if we've

kind of made up that first impression in our own heads just based on truth default theory. So we assume that the person is who they say they are and that they're going to do what they say they're going to do until we have evidence to the contrary. And that works well in society. But some people aren't like that. con men, shady people that we date, marry, or happy to grow up with. Likewise, doubts trigger disbelief only when you cannot explain them away. So, for example, let's say we meet someone, we come up with a first impression. It's generally positive because truth default theory,

thanks for that. And then we start seeing a little bit of evidence on the contrary. And we say, oh, well, I'm starting to see that this person might not be the way they say they are. But we doubt someone, and then we're good at rationalizing our reason why we will still believe them, right? So doubts trigger disbelief only when you can't explain them away. So if we find somebody that we think is trustworthy and we find out they're stealing from us, we might say, oh, well, this person probably isn't doing that. That's truth default theory. And then they might say, oh, I didn't steal from you. In fact, I think that was missing before. We will start to rationalize that we still believe them, especially if we want to believe them. We're dating them. We don't think

we can replace them in the office, that kind of thing. Doubts only trigger disbelief when we can explain them away any longer. And I've done this to myself. I've worked with some total scammers in the past and addicts and stuff, and I realize now I had doubts the whole time, but I simply explained them away. So if you're explaining away too much, maybe it's time to trigger disbelief or at least be aware of truth default theory so that we can start to realize when we ourselves are rationalizing other people's bad behavior. It's like when someone's cheating on you and later when they're finally caught red-handed, You say to yourself, how could I have been so stupid? The signs were all there.

You're not stupid. It's truth default theory and the fact that doubts trigger disbelief only when we can no longer explain them away. That's why us humans are so easily duped. And those of us that pride ourselves and not being duped very often, well, typically we might have had a lot of trauma in the past. Or maybe we're not adapted well socially because, as Malcolm explained, society functions better when most of us trust. It's just that sometimes we're going to get conned in the process because people take advantage of that. Huge thank you to Malcolm Gladwell. The book title is Talking to Strangers, What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know.

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