TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Intelligence 3.0 feat. Felix Biederman

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

Back in October, we did a deep dive into the work of the king of the airport books: Malcolm Gladwell. Riley, Milo, and Alice join Felix Biederman (@ByYourLogic) of Chapo Trap House (@chapotraphouse) to discuss the horror and the banality of the truest of thinkers. This was previously only available to our Patreon subscribers, but we figured everyone needed a pick-me-up given the state of Britain at the end of 2019. If you want access to other Patreon bonus episodes (and our powerful Discord server) sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31753429 *COME SEE MILO* If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  

Hi, it's me, Milo, and what you're about to hear is our unlocked recording of our conversation with Felix Bederman about one of the most galaxy brain thinkers to have ever lived, Malcolm Gladwell. So if you're wondering how everything is giving you cancer, or why actually, when you really think about it, the key to solving gun crime is if everyone grows mushrooms in their back garden, then go ahead and listen along. The reason why I've unlocked an episode this week is because it's been Christmas, so you haven't recorded quite as much as we usually do, but if you're a bonus subscriber, you'll

be getting a bonus in your inbox this Thursday, as per usual. Now, as you're hearing my voice, you're probably aware that the reason for this is I have some dates to plug. I have ill-advisedly booked a room in Liverpool to do my show on the 17th of January, and I don't know anyone in Liverpool. If you live in Liverpool, if you know anyone who does live in Liverpool, please buy a ticket to that. It's a critically acclaimed show, and it's going to be at the Hot Water Comedy Club.

There is a link in the description, which takes you to a kind of general splash page for all my gigs. The Liverpool ones near the top. Also, I'm doing a date in London on the 18th, which is actually a filming of the show, so if you want to come and see that and be immortalised on film and say hi to the guys, do come down to that. I'm also doing Leicester Comedy Festival in February, and I'm doing the Vault Festival in London in late February, early March.

Any of those dates, you can catch on the same link. I'm also now doing Melbourne Comedy Festival in Australia in March and April, so do get down to those. Cheers and enjoy the episode. The last time we did this, we did an episode about a public intellectual with you, Felix. It was Steven Pinker. It was the new year. It was the first episode we did of 2019.

I feel like a lot has happened since then, like everything. Well, yeah, no. I was just going to say that. I didn't read the Steven Pinker book before the episode, but I sort of read it during the episode. Okay, that was the beginning of 2019, and I want to sort of been incorporating Mr. Pinker's thinking strategies into my life since then, and I just want to share my dick has stopped shrinking.

That's a huge thing. Wow. Yeah, it's a mental joke. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It was shrinking kind of every week, and then I started using his thinking techniques, and it just stopped. When this was even before Steven Pinker did his seminal legal text, sex trafficking, maybe

it's more of a vibe, actually. Maybe it's about the friends you made along the way. Yeah, in that time, I learned, similar to Donald Trump, I'm constantly visited by the mafia, come to my office to make deals, and it always gave me a lot of anxiety about possibly being persecuted for my associations. But Pinker's legal strategy of like, oh, well, the guy's doing human trafficking actually didn't like me. That helped me a lot.

I realized I could employ the same strategy. It's just been like, it's been a good year, like Frank Sinatra says. I was picking up that prostitute to tell her that I didn't want to have sex with her. Exactly. Steven Pinker is kind of like just intellectual telekinesis by focusing really hard and pressing your palms up against your eyeballs. You can change the nature of reality around you. But today we're talking about Malcolm Gladwell, patient zero of the pop science bestselling

journalist, idiot, subspecies of human. True Gladwell on the Gladwell Alignment Chart. Yeah, so everybody listening at home, take out your Gladwell Alignment Chart and put a big wet circle on True Gladwell, and Nate can drop the theme song here. You can put it in your birth months and it helps you find out which Gladwell you are. Hi, everyone, welcome back to this week's bonus episode of Trash Future. I am Riley. You may remember me from every previous episode, Free and Bonus.

I'm, of course, joined in studio by Milo on the phone from Glasgow is Alice, and then joining us also by phone from the Wilds of America is Chapo Trap House's Felix Biedermann. How is everybody? Oh, good. We were discussing burgers and how they were going to make at the end of history happen sooner. Right. Right.

So I think I'll explain this again. So when people have to understand, like think about periods of strife in history, the 100 years war, 30 years war, the other wars, like what was, what was like, you know, how would you eat back then? Well, typically what, what, what, you know, eating meant was like everyone lived in a different like hut on somebody's farm, and every farm produces the different stuff. Like if every farm made the same things, like the economy wouldn't work very well. You would just have like a wheat nation and you'd have like a barley nation and that's

not really how things work. So farms producing different things. If you were like a, like a normal person at the time, sort of a serf, you know, your dinner every night would be like, you know, scallions and dirt if you lived on a scallion farm, whereas like someone else would just eat like uncooked, unrefined wheat. And you know, what, what is, you know, in, in the Tanakh, of course, the first Ted talk eating is described as like a very sensual, very spiritual experiences, a sign of like former enemies, you know, making peace with each other because they're eating the same

thing. Except at this time. Why are you eating each other's bussy? Yes, of course. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Everyone ate different things though at this time.

Yet when burgers came about significantly less children in the world died, you know, they were significantly less wars because it was like, even if you were going to declare war on each other over like, you know, some island that either great power had a God given right to possess or, you know, someone had weapons or so. If everyone ate was eating burgers, it was something very basic that we all shared. And I want to point out, you know, what do you see on Facebook? The first thing is, you know, you're the real drug addicts. I raised my kids.

What's this? What's the second thing you see? Absolutely glistening food. Yeah. And that is, that is, I said this before, but like no one who's ever been friends with each other at Facebook is fought each other in war. So that's just sort of something to think about. Exactly.

And my name is Malcolm Gladwell. That's when I knew it was kicking off as when Winston Churchill deleted Benito Mussolini from his top eight on Myspace. Well, like they didn't have Facebook and then they only had Myspace. Well, you know, the thing is like Churchill, like he, the allies sort of like linked up, so to speak, like they were sort of like, I fuck with you, you know, you're dope. Like I saw this kid playing acoustic guitar. I fucking fell in love with this shit because I don't have any socials.

Like they all did that. Yeah. Yeah. My mom's bombshell. They all did that because they saw each other posting pictures of meals and we're like, yo, you chef it up. Yeah, like the axis, the opposite, they're in the Facebook group together, but it's like the wine moms who say fuck group.

And so that they're together, but they all hate each other because they have that like contrarian thing going. Right. And like every Hitler was the alpha mom and like everyone pretends to pretend to like Hitler, but they secretly resented him because he wrote a book called the art of subtly not giving a fuck. That was the best seller. He wrote it in prison.

And, you know, it was like from bad bitch press and long time editor Joseph Goebbels helped edit it. You know, chapters that resonated with a war and depression scarred German populace chapters, like stop trying to make Jews happen. It's not going to happen. Hello, I guess in many ways was the original Laina Dunnett client. Yes. He did it first.

I was going to say, actually, what, what you forgot about Churchill is that he's like a fave star guy because he's always doing those like little witty, witty retorts for you. He's a weird twist. A guy. Shit. Yeah, he was doing just like Winston Churchill, just doing line break jokes about the Bengal famine down.

Yeah. Getting his Netflix special canceled. Yeah, that was a big deal. Like Clement, Clement Attlee was a comedy reporter who got him canceled. And it was like, it was a huge deal. But, you know, by that same token, Stalin was one of those people who had to post pictures side by side and be like, you know, to liberals, these things are the same and that really like for the first few years, you know, the other

great powers love that. They were like, wow, you know, you're so great. But then because his avi was a drawing of a girl and soon Stalin was a girl and they would hit on him. But then when they met him at Yalta, Roosevelt was so old, like so diminished by his sicknesses, he still thought Stalin was a girl because Stalin was like very handsome, but like almost pretty like a one, like he was, he had like a petite, like a petite bone structure kind of thought.

Yeah. But the other great powers were like, that's no, he's like, he did a reveal that he's, he's a guy, it's a catfish thing. Yeah. And FDR, yeah, he FDR just fucking died after that. Well, no, the problem is FDR saw Joseph Stalin, we thought was a woman and then just like got up from his chair to kiss him on his on the forehead. Rub it on the small, yeah, his heart just started pounding out of his chest.

And like, there was an old timey car horn. The original Biden. Yeah. Well, yeah, FDR is actually Joe Biden's dad. A lot of people don't know that. And he went up to Stalin and he said something weird, like, you know, oh, honey, are you running away with my kiss or something? And everyone was like, what, what?

This is 1943 and you can't, you're like, you still can't say that. Sorry, I'll come right. He's like, guys, I'm going to die this year. And that was it, you know, that's kind of like how the allies fell apart. And it's like very sad. So here's the thing that last nine or so minutes of of the theory of of the Democratic burger piece theory and then the retelling of World War two as different kinds of posters and stuff makes a lot more sense than

Malcolm Gladwell's actual theories that he actually puts forward, which I'm going to segue us into now, if that's all right with the assembled, the assembled multitudes. No, I want to go back and do the burgers thing for another 20 minutes. We're about to get into the Korean war is hentai segment. So so I've got these. I've got this in front of me. I've digested a shit ton of Malcolm Gladwell's reading over the last sort

of several weeks and I hurt my brain doing it. But I want to start off with a little bit of who is Malcolm Gladwell. So Malcolm Gladwell, like we all know he's a sort of famous doofus, but the roots of Malcolm Gladwell is that, and this is a quote from his, from what he said about himself, I decided I wanted to work in advertising. So I applied to 18 advertising agencies in the city of Toronto and received 18 rejection letters, which I framed and put on a row in my wall. Well, that's very normal.

There's to be fair, all of the advertising in Toronto is just like, hey, bud, do you want to buy a pop? Well, no, I mean, I actually, this is the loom in it. I did not know this. That's Malcolm Gladwell was actually he wanted to be a six God. No, he wanted to be Canadian Don Draper, but he just didn't have the stunning good looks and his his tiny body couldn't handle all the alcohol.

Cigarettes, they make bitches like you. Canadian Don Draper, you've done it again. We'll get to the simple cigarette. Well, well, well, well, yeah, similar to Drake, you know, he had to sort of make it like he had to become sort of a star in America to come back and become a six. Now, yeah, this is the hero's journey that everyone talks about. It's Joseph Campbell shit. Yeah. So Malcolm Gladwell, much of his sort of income now,

in addition to writing these bestseller books, he also gets paid a lot of money in speaking fees for banks, pharmaceutical companies, tobacco companies, and so on. He's basically like a combination of Hillary Clinton and Sideshow Bob. And so this is from the disclosure section of his website because he has a he has to disclose. Have I given paid speeches to companies or industries mentioned or affected by my articles? Yes, I have. If you've been affected by the issues raised in this program.

Yes, I have. Yo, my money real good. I'm about to I'm about to win an awful Gladwell class action lawsuit. I'm about to get my Gladwell settlement. But like you just get paid in insights. Yeah, he just it just means it comes to your house and gives you lectures. Mr. Gladwell, this court finds that your literature did not make the plane test either glad or well. What do you what do you have to say to that selling PPI again?

Damn. Yes, I have on several occasions over the past four years, given paid speeches on the tipping point to many pharmaceutical companies. So could that create a bias in favor of the pharmaceutical industry? Who can say? Wow, yeah. I mean, he's not saying no. Great shit. That's rules.

That's a 50 50 shot of anything in the world. Yeah. I love it when the guy whose whole thing is like, oh, you know, you can like systematize anything and like find the like the weird truth in like how these big systems work is just like in response to his own. Like, are you just a corrupt shit? He's like, I don't know. I guess that is that is tough.

Yeah. The the start of this book is, you know, people say things all the time for fucking likes and it doesn't mean a fucking thing. Well, it shouldn't be. I kind of his face banks. No, I was trying to think of this actually. Like, I wish I think he's Chris Lowville. Like, I think a little bit.

Yeah. Where it's like, you may have to explain Chris Lowville. Felix, I'm going to leave this one to you. Um, I don't want to like give too much about Chris Lowville away because like people try to get him in trouble, which I like. Oh, I'm sort of against. I'm like a I'm like a civil libertarian liars on the internet. Kind of like if someone like spends a lot of time lying.

Yeah, you're not going to call the Marine Corps and be like, you know, did this guy actually serve in Grenada? Yeah. It's like people. Yeah. My my first my first rule is like lying is really funny. But like, uh, so Lowville is he you've probably seen his posts. Like he first blew up because he would post these like sort of ill fitting pants

and blazers like over turtle necks and like sort of very gaudy aces shirts and be like patient visit outfits. And we get like 9000. He never did. He never did them up properly. Like he would like have them either done up unevenly or do like the button of the jacket to the pants. But like they were all you could always see his dick perfectly in them.

It was very funny. That's what women wants is we want the guy who we can see his dick and we don't he doesn't know how to button a shirt. Yeah. Damn. But anyway, like he would pose that he was like a back surgeon for a while. And he like I'm not a back surgeon, but I'll take a look. He said he was a 24 year old back surgeon.

And it's like it's so awesome. It's so awesome. But like women would get really horny for like they like he would just I mean, I already am fits. Yeah. I mean, yeah, he's given women like back boob jobs. Like he's getting titties on the back for titties. The best Chris Lovel posts are always the ones where he'll like take a picture

of like eight different pairs of shoes that are probably just still in the store being like wish I had a girlfriend I could spoil too bad. My last lady cheated on me. Well, that's the Chris Lovel signature is like it'll just be a picture of like it's obviously like $300. That's like for rent or something. And he'll be like this is for my future wife. If a woman wakes up at 8 a.m. every day, she deserves 10 bands a week.

It's like most people sort of wake up at 8 a.m. Like that's not like very uncommon. Like he took a he took a fucking day trip to Hawaii. He said he didn't actually go to Hawaii. But like he's like I was going to go to Hawaii with a girl. But and I also paid her student loans. But she cheated on me. So I'm just going to Hawaii myself.

But he was gone for like a day. Like no one's ever taken a day trip to Hawaii. And his he was like I wish I had a wife to drink margaritas in Hawaii with. You know the thing that they famous the famous Hawaiian drink. Well, what people don't know is that Chris Lovel actually lives in a pineapple under the Pacific Ocean. And therefore he can go on a day trip to Hawaii because you know it's not very fun. Whatever he wants.

But that's what yeah. So oh yeah. The last thing is like in Hawaii he like posted a video of his hotel room. And the thing that like the biggest tell for him I think was like it was just like a normal like mid mid-range hotel room. Right. And he like put he like posted a video of the shower. It's just like a regular glass shower.

You see like any fucking like a Marriott or fucking whatever. And he's like ooh see through shower. You know I'm going to do something in there. And it's like it's every hotel for the past 15 years. I like he rocks though. Like I don't think he's doing anything with this beyond like exchanging dudes with like like I don't give a shit. He's not doing I don't spend like back surgeons.

No I also I'm going to go on the record as like Chris Lovel. Great. Don't don't fuck with Chris Lovel. He's enjoying the basic hotel shower on a level that most of us aren't. And again tying tying this back to Malcolm Gladwell. Now that we know who's the guy who I think would be impressed by Malcolm Gladwell. I've got another sort of some of his stuff I've digested. So we can one of the first like sort of Malcolm Gladwell anecdotes I have is that he went on.

I think some of you all probably know this. Bill Simmons's basketball podcast and argued that Nigeria would actually feel the world's best basketball team. If you can define Nigeria as including the Caribbean all countries near Nigeria and any country where Nigerian people also live. That's a great point. Which is every country. I can't be the only one who believes in Japan.

I can't be the only one who believes that if the troops put a team together they could dominate the NFL. Damn. That's what that's what means that that's like what's going to get you that Republican like state Senate seat just that just say that. Because if the troops put a team together it would be on so many fucking roids that it probably would. The joke with that was that someone did actually tweet that I think it was like

gimmick hip hop group the young cons. But I might be wrong about that. But the thing is that the troops actually do put together a football team and it's terrible. Army versus Navy is always shitty. Yeah. It's because every time the troops try to dunk they just immediately crash and 14 of them die. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like that is that is the funniest thing. Just like no one in the NFL or like NBA like there's no one who's like oh this guy is from the army. Yeah. It would be cool if like they were actually good because there would just be a Gilbert Orita's event every day. Every day someone would fucking blow out a gun.

Just freak out. That would be the only way that they would stop playing rock and roll part two at sporting events is because it would like it would just like trigger like freak out. In between the like wall to wall Pat Tillman memorial segments. Yeah. Yeah. So I also have some of his famous conclusions from his book Outliers. And again I think we probably know a couple of these.

So I'm going to do them three of these really quickly. And then I have one I'm going to go into a little bit longer. So here's one. Tech billionaires tend to have been born in 1958. If you're looking to just fucking cake up. Be born. Absolutely be born out here. That's a huge guy.

Go back and do some Marty McFly shit. Get your parents to fucking like 1957 and then you're absolutely going to get like going to get this money. What an incredibly useful insight because most people who were born in 1958 did become tech billionaires. That's how it worked. There was something magical about that. What he's saying is they were just coming out of college at a time when personal computing

was becoming inexpensive and widespread. The effect of this is like to be one of those like live posters online who's like the hell year 2016 and then the next year. Oh the even worse year 2017 just forever. So by that logic 1958 it gets better and better as you go further and further back. Exactly. The year where everyone's a billionaire. Um he also pushed.

Let's all meet up in the year 1980. Folks. 1985 you could get a fantastic handjob. I'm talking really good handjob folks. The kind of handjob you can't get anymore. They won't let you have it. Folks. They took they're taking it away.

They won't let America. They won't give it to the liberals. The liberals they looked at the handjob and they said bye bye. They said bye bye handjob. Okay. Oh here's another one. This is kind of a gremlins trump. You're a little bit too high on the high end.

Yeah. You got to get you got to go low. But here's the here's another one. The broken window policing theory which basically says in short that if you allow the police a free hand to punish minor infractions of the rules with overwhelming force then you will use what Gladwell calls the power of context to dissuade larger scale rule breaking. Damn.

Yeah. So if you just arrest everyone then there won't be anyone in the in the neighborhood and then fewer windows will be broken. I love it when law enforcement is the punisher. That's my favorite way. Like I love it when like you like you park your car on a double yellow line and a cop comes up and just like shoots you in the face and sodomizes your corpse. And you're like well damn well I sure won't murder anyone now.

Yeah. I've been this this neighborhood looks very nice. No one's parked weird and it's interesting textualized now. There's more context. It's almost as though all of the people who live here are terrified for their lives. Great. We call that the power of context. We do.

So here's the third one. Why does he give these names to these things by the way? I think it's because he's like he wants to seem like he's doing a scientific theory. And so you have like the theory of relativity or whatever. And so because he wants all of these things to seem like reified concepts if he gives them like names with like capital letters at the front or whatever. And it's like we call this the power of whatever. It sounds like he's doing real stuff instead of just sort of shitting out of his doo doo ass.

Yeah. It's I think that's it. He's like Huey Lewis in the news. You know just kind of like oh that's the that's the power of this what that is. Yes. Here's here's the third one. That Asians are good at math because rice farming is labor intensive. Just like math.

This is the bogus thing. This is incredible. And so rice is a wet food. And so Asian cultures reward hard work specifically unlike African hunter-gatherer cultures because they don't have rice in Africa anywhere. Yes. Yeah. So basically Malcolm Gladwell says living in Africa is too easy.

Malcolm Gladwell heavily implies that people of African descent don't work very hard because rice doesn't grow there if you're born in Africa. That's casual. You know. I mean I mean I'm in ranked right farming. And yeah he's just like but he'll just think of something like oh yeah math it makes it needs you. You need to be diligent while doing it.

What else needs requires diligence rice farming Asians are good at math. I bet that's connected. Oh you really you love to say it. You really do. I want to go with with another one and I kind of I actually kind of picked this specifically because I knew it would resonate with you Felix. It is it is Malcolm Gladwell's scientific theory of why people in Appalachia are genetically pissed.

Amazing. That is in the American sense not in the British sense. So I'm going to read from this from the book here. So why was Appalachia the way that it was. It was because of where the original inhabitants of the region came from. The so-called American backcountry states were settled overwhelmingly by immigrants from one of the most for world's most ferocious culture cultures of honor. They were Scott's I read no no no no this is I actually Mr. Gladwell and I we share a theory

and I do think so the sort of Wisconsin Ohio the guy who like where's the Thanos hat. And it's like damn every day is like the lottery. That's the Bavarian that is the Bavarian. His life is sort of simple joys and cream cakes. Yeah music. Yeah optimism having a good time alcohol abuse whereas the Scott's Irish for their their life is marked by alcohol abuse among other things but it is a pissed culture. You know and if you were to look to where Hinders sold the most records I bet it would

correlate with sort of Scott's Irish migration patterns. So do we think that Trapped is a fundamentally Ulster band. Well also the also the other there are on those murals. The alcohol the alcohol divide too between like the happy beer drinker and the pissed whiskey drinker. Oh yeah classic. So I'm going to continue. I will happily murder a paperist to get my hands on another whiskey.

So what he says is the people of the region were steeped in violence. Herdsmen scraping out a living on rocky and infertile land. And when they immigrated to North America they moved to the American interior remote lawless rocky and reproduce the new world the culture of honor that they created in the old world generations and generations to come. So basically he's saying that like is he an appellation weep. Like you said actually I'm the samurai of this shit. One of my favorite at a base is the highlander.

It does sadly not concentrate on the and the traditions of the Scottish island as much as I'd like but he's a traditional Scottish blade in this film and they're engaged in typical highlander. You can see because I am dressing this very special warrior skirt which is actually the same like oh my relationship but it's the big man we man relationship. That kid that said it's tape from the Hanway Forge video that kid was Scott's Irish actually. Yeah he was absolutely. So here's what they actually did to prove this is they did an estate is Malcolm Gladwell

then talks about a scientific experiment that was done to prove that people from Scott's Irish are genetically pissed down. Was it called Northern on. Well what they did was they took a they took they did a thing in a university where they had a bunch of men who are either from the region of Appalachia or not all grad students fill in a questionnaire and then they sent it in a hallway and then they either fucked with them or they didn't then they measured how pissed they got. Is this the University of Wasp studies like you just get bored and just decide to fuck with

the like the Irish. Did they did they control for whether or not the person the experiment was actually lucky because they were on parole. So as the young man tried to squeeze by in a narrow hallway the experimenter would look up annoyed and say the word asshole for the Northerners there was almost no effect. They got out of the way five or six feet beforehand whether they had been insulted or not. The Southerners by contract by contrast would give only less than two feet call a Southerner

an asshole and he's itching for a fight. Southern men are genetically touchy. Wow I've been saying that Roy Moore proved anything. Yes. So also like this just to give you an idea also of like the science like how scientific Gladwell is this was study was immediately disproven like right away that just. Well you know you win some you lose some. Yeah that's that's the title of my of my next book which is just the shrug emoji.

That's the wisdom of crowds. A similar study where like Gladwell plays just like fucking fortnight for hours and hours against like gamers from Alabama and just counts how many times they use the N word when he kills them. Oh that guy said Frank Sinatra I'm counting that as an N. You know 12 year olds are actually genetically predisposed to be better than me at this. I mean again he's he's right. Yeah if you if you were good if you're going to be good at fortnight you are likely to have

been born 12 years ago at any given point in time. Oh thank you Malcolm but like that's something like that's the essence of what Gladwell does. It's kind of like using phrenology to tell you if you genetically like coriander but somehow anytime he's taken seriously by policymakers there are disastrous results. He's found a way to like burn cereal. It is a it is so stupid mind numbing and nothingy and yet anytime it always goes horribly wrong for everyone. He is the perfect malin influence.

He is actually chaotic Gladwell. Yeah he's like what if what if a Ted talk was completely wrong. Like is Ted talk whenever Ted talks are normally they're not normally wrong. They're just like banal and stupid but like they actually it's like what if the Ted talk about how to tie your shoelaces didn't even teach you to tie your shoelaces. What if it taught you to tie your shoelaces so both of your shoes became tied together. And they were like yeah it's actually misdirects you. Yeah this is like fundamentally like Gladwell sucks is because like if I was hit like he

could really just say anything and like that's the true test of character here at that point in your career is like sort of a bullshit public until actual you know either sort of keep doing the same shit or like really do whatever because the same people will keep buying your books and you'll still you'll make exponentially more money until you die. So like that could mean you know you do this bullshit where it's like oh you know if you completely fuck up how you read data actually people from Nova Scotia are they speak Japanese better than people born in Japan. And it's just it's like it's wrong but like boring. But like what he could do is like he could do a Ted talk where he's like this is the best way to

drive. And he doesn't do that because he sucks as a guy. You gotta drive slowly when you're drunk that's the rule. We need like a Malcolm Gladwell for the non-PMC. French public intellectuals do this. Like yeah that's true. But an Ori Levy will literally do like a Ted talk about how to drunk drive better. I swear. You know when you have had four glasses of border and you get only say you want to go and fuck your mistress but you are too drunk to ride the scooter because you're in full off so you need to take the family Citroën and you need to not run over the gendarm anyway.

Look the cop can't see you if you wear a black face. You have the court ordered car that makes you do a breathalyzer to unlock it but you have to draw a little picture of the Prophet Muhammad. So I have a few more of Gladwell's. They serve not from his books. These are just from his different articles. So here's Gladwell on smoking. If the campaign to curb tobacco use is successful it could play serious strain on the nation's social security and Medicare programs. Smokers who die at 60 are likely to have their final bills paid by their employer's health insurance plan whereas if they never smoke but lift a 70 the burden shifts onto the public sector.

Sure Malcolm sounds great. That's a great one. I didn't think of it that way. We could save the most money if everyone was aborted at birth. Anytime you smoke that's why smoking is cool. We subconsciously understand this. It all ties into ancient legends. It's like Jordan Peterson shit. What ancient legend do we think of when someone's glumly smoking so they won't balloon the national debt and pass that onus down on their children. That's the terminator lawyering himself into like molten iron. It's a pharmacist. You accept the sins of your society but into your fucked up lungs and then you die early. Yeah absolutely. Anytime I see someone smoking I'm just like

virtue signal much. Exactly. In many ways like the original smoking was like living in a barrel and masturbating publicly. Absolutely. If you're not a coward. Well exactly. It's addictive too. So here's the next thing he said. This is about Enron. Enron's numerous side deals were by any measure evidence of extraordinary recklessness and incompetence but you can't blame Enron for covering up the existence of its side deals because it did openly push in logistics. That's what I've been saying. Enron's gonna sell for it. It's cold being poly. And we can't shame Enron for that. Enron is just a small bean. Do you guys I mean like a lot of people who listen they're like a

little bit younger than me but I remember when Skilling and Leigh they testified in front of Congress and they were like where did I go wrong. I lost a friend. You know it was that shit. They were trying too hard at their side hustles but here's what God well says. It didn't cover up the existence of side deals. It disclosed them. The argument against the company then is more accurately that it didn't tell investors enough about its side deals but then what is enough. It scarcely would have helped investors if Enron had made all three million pages public. The odd of the deal. I mean you know that's one of the dumbest things he's ever read because like well when like companies okay like we work's a good example. When we work went public

they had to disclose their bizarre ownership structure that is I wouldn't say like totally similar to Enron's practices but it's a similar like vein of semi-legal fraud. And it caused investors potential investors like potential like not malign investors like pension funds and shit like that to be like this seems like it will blow up. I don't think I'll buy this and it cratered the price and hopefully like the party most harmed by this would be like the households that own we work. It probably never works out that way but like I mean it collapsed anyway so what's the fucking point. Like he's saying oh well if they if everyone knew how bad it was you know the stock the company would have collapsed and everyone would have lost their money but it's

like that happened later after Enron executives like repeatedly told their own employees no we're doing better than ever buy more stock while they were selling the same thing to pension funds and shit like it just after they did like they were able to do years more evil shit like like this shit they did to the California energy market this is the one of the shittiest arguments he's ever made. Have you considered that the only two options are you either systematically lie about this stuff or you give everybody three million pages of documents just to their inbox. The two genders. Yeah you just get giant like sacks like Miracle on 34th street and you just dump them all in front of them. Yeah that's the only thing he's making it sound like no one ever

reads those but like the reason that finance companies have people who they make work 120 hours a week for their first seven years is to read those. That's the reason they abuse those people is to do this. Listen you either die Enron or you live to see yourself become WeWork. And what I find funny right is like that Malcolm Gladwell will look at something that has two extremes right which is yeah lie or disclose so much the data becomes useless and he's like well because these two extremes exist we couldn't possibly do anything else so no one can say where the limit is so we can't really blame Ken Lay for this massive fraud. And I've got one more before we go into the book talking to strangers. This is a five hit

combo like are these in quick succession. It's wounding me on American versus Canadian healthcare. An interesting thing that about Canada is that Canada doesn't have the and every dog is going to wake up when I say this inner city problem that America does it does not have a large and entrenched underclass and that's a huge burden on a healthcare system. A lot of the cost of American healthcare is a function of who we are as a nation. We're a country that runs up a big healthcare tab. We're a country that has yet to figure out how to address the social challenges we face which is big fat wet bitches. As a result the healthcare system carries much of the burden and that's why Gladwell then concludes that's why I never trust cross-national comparisons of

healthcare spending. It's just not useful until you've normalized these differences. You know like America's the end of my deck. I'm happy to normalize the difference between Asia and Africa according to what kind of farming they do apparently. Yeah but you can't compare the American and Canadian health systems because America has an inner city problem. All right well I feel like you know I did not come in this to defend Gladwell but I feel like I'm repeatedly sort of thrust in that position. Repeatedly would have gone to hospitals. The doctors are just talking about rims and hoes and there's like they're not listening to anything like Everlast or Led Zeppelin and you know I'm 13 and I love this music and none of my classmates

do. They like Justin Bieber and like swag stuff and like Soulja Boy and you know basically that's why my healthcare costs so much. Yeah well the doctor is sagging his pants. The doctor's not listening to smart rap that's about social problems. Well the healthcare is free in Britain. No doctor's listening to lyrical cookout. No they never never. They'll never listen to logic. They'll never listen to any of that and it's like actually very sad but I do want to correct Gladwell. He said that like Canada has like no inner city problem which is not coded at all. No not at all. Yeah that's the least coded thing I've ever heard in my life. Yeah the cities are all doughnut shaped in Canada. It's a well-known fact. Exactly. That's the only thing he's referring to

but like Canada does have one of the most feared gangs in the earth. Drake's OVO gang does terrorize the six so like I would like to but that is just one city. Yeah and they mostly terrorize the six by stunting on everyone and then you see their you see the diamonds and then you have to go to the hospital to get your eyes treated so like exactly that's a big problem and like you can't compare America and Canada because yeah we have the OVO gang and in America they have the Treyway Bloods and so the healthcare systems are completely incommensurable. Well exactly and parents in Canada are always like you know you stay away from Drake's gang because if you see them on the street they're going to come up to you and give you sweets and stuff so stay

away from them. But like what all of this proves to me right is like if you think hard enough about something while trying to be clever and counterintuitive about it you can just kind of invent data to say whatever you want that you can decide that America's large underinsured population makes it a bad candidate for universal healthcare and that a better program would be to distribute free cigarettes to the poor. Yeah well actually ISIS if they really got together and you know worked together they could make the world's biggest hamburger. Yeah but they don't have the culture of hamburger cooking that like enables that kind of diligence. Yeah that's true. I think I figured out what Gladwell is like Pinker is just like Pinker is just sort of like it's

he writes these like books that are pleasant for like people to read that are like you know here's a new type of thinking but like Gladwell is like it's like all the capital in the world has chosen Gladwell to be principal skinner in the steam dam scene. Just point to every shitty thing in the world and be like oh actually we're having Aurora Borealis. I was so delighted. Actually this is fine. I was so delighted to learn that Pinker and Gladwell have actually been beefing back and forth in the pages of the New York Times. Have they? Yes. I did not know this. Pinker. This would not have happened if actually I was going to tell you. Pinker called Gladwell something like a facile thinker. It's amazing. But they're the same thing. They are. They're the

same one. I submit that there's a difference. I think Pinker has a million ideas. They're all insane and stupid. None of them work but he has a lot of ideas. Gladwell has no ideas but he can like recontextualize and like he can tell you something that like capital is already fine with but it's the problem of whatever. Like he's never going to give you a cloud ship, right? I think Gladwell is just like dumb and that he doesn't have any ideas whereas Steven Pinker is at least like a precocious seven-year-old. He does come up with an idea where if like a seven-year-old presented that as an idea at like the future exhibition you'd be like what a clever seven-year-old. We're going to move on to talking to strangers now which is Gladwell's new book

and it's a book that he sort of specifically wrote to counter Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement. Two things that if ever a book needed to be written. Finally. It was this one. I've been waiting dude. And so basically I'll do a little bit of setup here. Here's why Black Lives actually don't matter. Kind of he actually does he says if blue lives matter and black lives matter then the only thing we can all agree on is that all lives matter. Well to make black and blue using primary color is what you have to do. So he doesn't say it in those words but that's what his argument is. So Gladwell's premise in these tall tales of whimsy is that humans and this is another one of his capital letter phrases default to truth. That is we tend to take on face value the things

that people tell us even if we probably shouldn't and we also think that strangers are easy to understand based on what we interpret about them from meeting them and that's the big idea that this book is all about. Ironically default to truth really explains how anyone reads Malcolm Gladwell's books. Oh I guess that's why Asians are so smart as fucking nerds. So I always thought Asians were fucking gay. Now it all makes sense. So here's the thing right. Yo they're straight doing fucking rice man. Yo there's so much of it. You have to be so good at math to count that many. I'm gonna go get some of that and then I'm gonna fucking do me some accountancy. So here's the thing. This book contains some like genuinely awful and upsetting material including an entire segment on why we

really can't blame Brock Turner when he sexually assaulted that woman in a frat party and like because he didn't have a background in rice farming. I don't know but and this is also bookended by an account of Sandra Bland's murder by police in 2015 that suggests it was all a big misunderstanding in the result of bad training culture in police departments. So I'm gonna discuss the latter briefly here by way of introduction because this is how Gladwell introduces the book but generally I'm gonna not gonna focus on those bits. I'm gonna focus on the bits of the book that aren't discussed so much in reviews and that aren't as genuinely upsetting for this comedy podcast. So here is how Gladwell opens the book. We think we can see easily into the hearts of others

based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers and this is a blanket assumption of good faith. This is me again. On the part of the genuine monsters where the world is reduced to a comedy of manners, right? In this world it's easier to explain that the police are just sort of stupid rather than that they're white supremacists. Yeah, they're bumbling through their like well-intentioned like thinking about strangers or whatever. Because ultimately all this counterintuitive, we'll get back into this in a sec, but like all this counterintuitive shit that Malcolm Gladwell does, what he's really doing is he's looking at all of the say widely, like widely believed but like powerful criticisms of these institutions that are like

that are getting more power, like that the police are a fundamentally malin organization and he's trying to explain them away basically. Every cop every day trying not to shoot another black person is like basil faulty trying not to mention the war. They like desperately don't want to mention the war but they just keep accidentally mentioning it. It is kind of one crisis to another. Yeah and so he portrays like something like the police as that but he's trying to be counterintuitive but really he's just saying what like that he's really he's just saying what it's like most commonly believed about the police by a lot of people that they're basically good and defending rights blah blah blah. You know what is funny though parenthetically about this is

that the one group who will never say this about the cops are the cops. Every time you talk to like a police union or something in the aftermath of some horrible crime that they've done they're never like oh we're just trying to assume the best of like yeah fuck you we did that and we had to and it was good actually. Well it's because like he said like so he says um he opens the book uh Talking to Strangers is an attempt to understand what really happened by the side of the highway that day in rural Texas when Sandra Bland was stopped by police and then found dead in her cell three days later. Where was she? Where the passive voice? Yeah what really happened of course is that a police officer murdered a black woman because he's a white supremacist but Gladwell loves rejecting

simple answers because they're simple so they can't be right. The Texas police just finding dead people in their police cells like it's off milk being like oh I swear I bought that yesterday well that's what's going on. He keeps happening. Yeah and he loves to reject these ideas because they're simple so they couldn't possibly be right and they're simple then they require you to confront an uncomfortable truth about something. They're these big ideas and Gladwell loves small imperceptible ideas that excuse everything anyone in power does. You know so he says he wants to say question your assumptions but he never questions the assumption that the police are good or that the CIA is a competent spy force which we'll get to later. So spy force play this spy force theme tune.

I will continue. So why write a book about a traffic stop a traffic stop gone awry because the debate spawned by that string of cases was deeply unsatisfying. What a fucking fancy lad to be like oh the debate was unsatisfying. This debate does not please me. It's not a pleasant little amuse-bouche. Well wait is he saying I think he's saying what he's saying is like worse and he's saying that like people on some level like agreed with his assessment but they're like oh that's not a fun debate to have. It's fun to talk about how like cops could just fucking murder someone and nothing will happen. What he's actually saying is fucking terrible. Black Lives Matter is they're not a fun protest group. Why couldn't they be like those hippies burning the bras. No

they're just depressing. Yo listen I went to that Black Lives Matter protest. I did not not once. I did not get some watches as a semi. I want my money back. So he says one side made the discussion about racism looking down at the case from 10,000 feet. The other side examined each detail of the case. The racism playing with the magnifier. Yes Steven Pinker flying the racism plane examining the case from 10,000 feet. Malcolm Gladwell. That's why the feds haven't actually seen Jeffrey Epstein's plane is because they needed to look at racism. Yeah it's civil asset forfeiture for the racism plane. So the other side examined each detail of the case with the magnifying glass. One side saw forest but no trees. The other side saw the trees in

no forest. But each side was right in its own way. Prejudice and incompetence go a long way towards explaining social dysfunction in the US. But what do you do with either of these diagnoses aside from vowing and full earnestness to try harder next time? Abolish the police. No that's a big idea Alice. Oh sorry. What if I said that with capital letters like in capital A abolish the capital B police. Experts call this abolish the police. Yeah. But like even if you weren't like fully like abolish the police there's like a lot you could do that goes beyond trying harder. Like every other idea when his ideas are centered around like saving insurance companies money he's like yeah and I think just like half the population should be on dog leashes.

Being fed cigarettes constantly. Yeah we should take their houses and they live in a big kennel and you know we use their houses so the world's greatest minds can play Jenga against each other and that's how we prevented other 9-11 is to use these houses to make the world's biggest game of Jenga. And so next time someone flies into a town oh also we're going to make it so planes like that they're a see-through. But like when it comes to just like like this is like even if you were just like sort of a warren type reformist right you'd be like all right there's like a lot you could kind of do to at least make this not happen as much. But Gladwell's like hey shit man oh yo all you all you can do is try it tomorrow ain't problem.

These people are similar. These people are such Facebook people. So here's one of the books first big ideas and Gladwell calls this the friends fallacy. Before I go into it I'm going to go around the table not you Alice because you know what I'm about to say. Yes. What do we think the friends fallacy refers to? Friends they're not real I've never had any they're not real I don't they don't. Toby Young. Felix what do you think the friends fallacy refers to? All right so the reason that like Ross was good at archaeology was that he was friends with the time when he was child growing up in the in the series like in the canon of the series. Lath of heaven. Here's the thing. Lath of heaven. Here's the thing Felix he actually is referring

to the show friends. I knew it. I knew it. I just like I pulled something out of my like I tried to like go from existing Gladwell. I don't know what his thesis about friends possibly could be but like I knew it'd be like I knew it'd be because it's like every Gladwell book it's there's a rhythm it's like one of those pop songs that's been written by the same Swedish men since like 2003 where it's like all right you know tough idea first and then like all right we got a little something fun but it's gonna make you think. That's exactly what's happening he starts out with brutal police murder and then transitions to here's what's interesting about the show friends and here's why it explains all that murder down so here's what he says a standard season of friends

has so many twists and turns a plot narrative emotion that it seems as though viewers would need a flow chart to make sure they don't lose their way but in reality how how stupid you have to be to be like yeah I try to keep up with friends but it's just too like yeah you have to read the fan rookie yeah like that's your Evangelion he's just it's like friends his prestige tv to Malcolm Gladwell he's like wow the tv truly is the new movies friends is like the film memento like you have to watch it like three times to make proper sense of it so here's what he says but that is the most revealing thing he's ever said friends yeah yeah you know um how i met your mother is fun but like

i'm into really complex shit like for sure remember that episode i don't think you have friends why i don't think you have the the i don't think you have the iq to understand becker just watching friends with the subs instead of the dubs i don't know this is more of a dharma and greg household actually um so he says but in reality it is almost impossible to get confused watching friends sorry i can't get through some of these things it's nearly the most impossible not impossible it's a real journey wow friends is so complicated good thing it's hard to get confused i try i try watching friends in vietnamese then i find it more confusing that's actually better at math weirdly milo again you that's kind of what he says he says i think you could probably follow along

even if you turned off the sound so how is it he then segways into this how is it that judges do a worse job of evaluating defendants for bail than a computer program what this this section this section of talking to strangers is an attempt to answer this puzzle by talking about how the show friends is very transparent and easy to follow that's his segue from sitcoms a formulaic to why do judges why are judges racist come on everyone know everyone wants to hear how he puts these together oh absolutely to test this but like he didn't even put his premise together like he was i don't know i guess like he's at the point where no one actually edits it because like the way he wrote the preamble to the friends thing was like no one could possibly

keep up with all the plots and twists and turns oh but actually it's very easy to like he didn't he didn't put enough conditionals in the first few sentences that show friends is complicated good thing that's good thing you have me to guide you the hero's journey but it's an episode friends but actually friends is quite easy to follow unlike really complex television like storage wars or mori so that kind of stuff you really need to think about so he says to test this idea i don't know what idea is testing but whatever i contacted a psychologist who teaches at umass an expert in facs which stands for facial action coding system for analysis for some reason analysis her analysis tells us that the actors and friends make sure that every emotion their character is supposed to

feel in their heart is expressed perfectly on their face it's called acting that's what actors do Malcolm Stanislaw I didn't think about implementing it on their faces well you know like the thing is like when Barney the dinosaur wants to animate that like something he's saying is important the camera zooms in yes damn and this is like actually a very intelligent show like the way it's designed and we could actually learn how to like no longer have disparities in the criminal justice system if we follow the Barney when it gets really deep at zooms and on Barney's ass i'm just i'm very worried that alienated young white men will watch Barney and then and then start imitating the behavior also i mean i hope that ramp was worth it because

we probably woke up the like the Australian vegan youtuber who lives in the office next to him so when when Monica is worried that Ross doesn't approve of her relationship with Chandler she looks what what she looks like what they a facial expert would call fake happy when Ross reveals that he's thrilled they both look real happy the actors performances and friends are transparent and transparency is the idea that people's behavior and demeanor provides an authentic and reliable window onto the way they feel on the inside he is glad we'll just discover that most people aren't autistic is that yes he's discovered that the tv doesn't have little people in there acting out shadow puppetry but like don't forget that thing also that thing i

read about friends i condensed it a lot it was several pages long in the book and described in great detail the individual muscle movements on the actors faces in technical terms like the guys just padding out a word count the situation where joe tribiani is on two dates at once now you look at his face as he realizes the predicament he's in one eyebrow raises yes you know what yes that is oh no fuck fuck johnny son this is the real book written by now this is the most extraterrestrial shit like it just is like it i know that the people who like read Glebels book they're either like sort of guilty center right people or just like dopes but like i would presume all of them like know that an actor

employs their face when i would think but like i think the padding helps this because then you can think about how smart you are because you've read 60 pages or whatever of difficult ideas like if you just read the sentence actors act with a face then that's just some like there's just some like housewife in delaware watching ace venture a pet detective going why does the main act to keep having all these weird seizures it really detracts from my enjoyment of the performance um so let's let's just continue here with gladwell's anecdote about neville chamberlain oh fucking hell i met neville chamberlain as a charity to he was very down to earth and surprisingly funny um been waiting for his stance on neville chamberlain

for ages neville chamberlain's negotiations with adolf hitler are widely regarded as one of the great follies of the second world war folks very bad deal he went to get a deal he couldn't get a deal folks he can't he doesn't know deals no neville chamberlain the no deal prime minister hitler said bye bye chamberlain wrote to chamberlain after meeting hitler wrote to his sister hitler's appearance in manner when i saw him appeared to show that the storm signals were up but then he gave me the double handshake that he reserves especially for friendly demonstrations damn it sounds like neville chamberlain was a fucking idiot yeah um you could have done better i don't really believe in like monday morning coaching but uh no he could have done better yeah i mean

when um when hitler gave me this this the secret handshake that he only does with his best friends i thought he was telling the truth and then we did like a blood brothers thing but it turns out i just got several diseases hitler had this special handshake that he reserved for people who really respected where he actually reached down and like felt for your foreskin to see if it was there or not that was his truest sign of respect so chamberlain and here's where gladwell gets into the theory chamberlain was acting on the assumption that we follow in our efforts to make sense of strangers we believe that the information gathered from a personal interaction is uniquely valuable you would never hire a babysitter for your children without meeting that

person first and companies don't hire employees blind they interview them over and over again completely hired hitler as a babysitter they do what chamberlain did they look people in the eye observe their demeanor and behavior and draw conclusions he gave me the double handshake yet all that extra information chamberlain gathered from his personal interactions with hitler didn't help him see hitler's true intentions more clearly it did the opposite so it's a Malcolm Gladwell way of saying things like um realize realize realize is is the cover of this book just the s that everyone used to draw he literally he took how i don't know how many pages to describe the act of lying this is the most like dawg just fucking trade bitcoin you want money that bad

like fucking jesus um but how did this get made here's the great thing i mean i get people buy this shit here's the incredible thing um gladwell goes on to do one of his capital letter big concepts from this course he fucking the conclusion he drew so the conclusion he draws from this is that appeasement happened the hitler babysitter phenomenon if only uh when someone was your babysitter you find it hard to believe later on that they were bad whoa that guy did the holocaust but he used to look after my kids he was such a nice dude um the conclusion so the conclusion he draws is that hitler was something called a mismatch which gladwell defines oh i can't wait for this shit gladwell defines this as someone who seems like they're telling the truth when they're actually

lying or vice versa that's just lying lying but hitler wasn't even lying hitler was like yeah i'm gonna kill the jews and that's what he did and what at what point did he lie well he was a bad guy he gave him the fucking special handshake he gave me a wink of irony he said that he was going to just stop his territorial expansion expansion with the sudeten land and then he didn't and that's because he's this thing that gladwell discovered he had his fingers crossed behind his back yeah more or less if you think about it this way right what gladwell has just done is compare sandral bland to hitler with 300 pages in between to try and make sure you don't notice incredible damn because sandra bland and people lie and then make problems for well-intentioned people

like the cops because sandra bland and hitler were both mismatches who's naturally puzzling nature combined with the quote power of context confused otherwise fine people with the best possible intentions i'd love to get confused by sandra bland did the double handshake because you wanted to die is it with the sandra bland tried to shake the cops hand but accidentally went for his gun like what the fuck down because he was an italian american cop and therefore his hands were his guns yeah these are weapons she reached for my weapon um yeah what the fuck am i hearing i mean this is this is it's grim it's grim it's really not good it's really really not good and also how like the main like the main problem with hitler apparently was that he lied because

if only hitler had been more honest then there wouldn't have been the whole hitler problem of like like world war two wouldn't have happened if like people had just been like hey don't trust this hitler dude as though like as though like the whole of world war two was like a fucking like the sting like classic short con where like it was tricked everyone into signing over poland from the police station it's like inside man um so i'll carry on here is glad well's discussion about bernie made off um oh boy and so what we have is we have the police politicians um because like these people couldn't possibly be stupid or idiots there must be some other explanation and now finance guys so this is a story about a hedge fund called renaissance technologies

that found itself invested with bernie made off and decided to then conduct an investigation into their investment with made off who they found immediately was an obvious fraud that's a dangerous business starting to conduct investigations if you're a hedge fund like that's how that's how you get like hyoid bone deficiencies hey this huge pile of gold taste that we have in our office where did these come from so did renaissance technologies sell off at stake and made off no they cut their stake in half after made off was exposed federal investigators sat down with the fund manager and asked him to explain why they didn't sell everything when they realized he was a fraud and the manager said i never as a manager really entertained the thought that it was actually

fraudulent what so finance trust trust no one not even yourself so on the one hand right we have this like mismatch thing and on the other we have a hedge fund manager lying to the sec and what a totally implausible i love this guy being like well i was thinking you know well we should stop investing in that guy because he's probably a fraud but then i'm thinking but i'm the guy who said we should invest in him in the first place so why the fuck am i listening into me this is someone smart like buddy made up because he tricked me in the first place and he's saying keep the money invested in me so why should i listen to myself who's fucking dumb over that guy who's smart it was a long island it was a long island base hedge fund so yeah that's basically

completely right um yeah he was never willing to he was willing to admit that he didn't understand what made off was up to but he was never willing to believe he was an out and out liar he and you can hear the capital letters on these next words coming up defaulted to truth damn yeah so no finance guys couldn't be stupid or liars no that's impossible whereas if he'd had his own like private rice farm allotment then he probably would have been able to work it out i didn't eat enough rice i mean it's like this is like unless you're like kind of an idiot or like deliberately not seeing things it's like this is very obvious it's like they figured out this is a Ponzi scheme and they're like all right so we obviously don't want like i don't know how much they had in there we don't

want to lose the entire amount but like well if we lose half we have the potential of like getting interest pay continue to get interest payments until this thing blows up or or like worst case scenario we can write off half which would be great for us and instead of glad well it was like this is the thing called the the friendship phenomenon where he thought Bernie made off was nice oh fuck we've discovered that people's decision making capacity can be heavily influenced by whether or not they think they're gonna get their dicks up kind of went to a joker voice there and i was just struck by the idea oh i got this yeah um so i have one more glad well story and this one actually ends this one's a really happy it's a happy ending okay we

needed finally after this down well i think all these kind of had happy endings because like the result was we understand each other now more because yeah it's not too america's anymore yeah just read even the hitler thing like you know glad well use that to make us understand stuff more so it's like technically everything's a happy ending yeah it's a word that glad well is going to give us the right which is which is what i'm when i'm when i'm arguing with the people the massage ball no yeah that's glad well is alan dirtowitz when he's like i've never got the massage from anyone who isn't in my family i've never seen even a film with a happy ending i i only ever watched the pianist i've only had sex with my family members why are you on tv

but i'm not inhale uh i've only ever had sex with my family members and we're all one big human family i like that he's he what he actually said was weirder right he said he had a perfect sex life yeah a perfect sex life i've never i've never missed he has really accurate come you say the same david he is uh dirtowitz is like we're gonna find out that he's just like he's an anti-semitic rusher guy who just dedicated his career to making jews allegedly as worse as it's gonna be the reverse of that movie about the nazi who finds out that his mom's jewish and he just finds out that his mom was like a deep cover nazi uh yeah because it's just like it's so not good for jewish people that we have this guy on tv who's just like and another thing uh

palestinians are bugs and uh my friend the pedophile was very nice although he is he is describing the stereotype that like all jews are incredibly competent and devious lawyers that's true that's true he's a dog shit lawyer it seems uh so i've got i'm gonna do our one last one and this is i saved it for last it's glad well story about the cia uh we learned to understand hell yeah and it's the story about the cia learning from a cuban defector about cube the cuban intelligence agency's understanding of cia's presence in the country and having it slowly revealed to them that every single one of their agents in cuba was actually a double agent working for havana and that every single one of their supposed agents in the eastern block

was actually you guessed it a double agent maybe it was well you know like every day every day's chance like learn maybe it was maybe it was a mistake to stuff this entire like omnipower for federal agency with a bunch of like Yale dudes who jerked off in a coffin with their dads um well i did believe it was the vietnam war well that goes so far as a profile that's true so so after this was after this what after this came out fidel castrow then rub salt to the wound by releasing a documentary because the cubans had recorded everything the cia had been doing in their country for at least 10 years king on the screen identified by name where was every cia officer supposedly under deep cover there was video of every advanced

cia gadget transmitters hidden in picnic baskets in briefcases detailed explanations of which park bench cia officers used cia you yogi the bear oh oh don't mind that's just this picnic basket just name named cia officers but all of the names are extremely stupid it's like tremulous vanderbilt the 15th detailed explanations of which park bench cia officers would use to communicate with their sources and how the cia would even use different colored shirts to secretly signal their contacts like it's like this cia like a fucking gay club yeah tanky code yeah damn i love the cia a long tracking shot even showed a cia officer stuffing cash and instructions inside a fake

plastic rock so what's cinematography no they've been using the fake plastic rock in russia in like 2011 so they haven't learned from this at all and please do not look at the rock act as if the rock is not here another talk directly into the rock fake plastic rock my favorite radio head song another caught a cia officer stashing secret documents for his agents inside a rec car to junkyard and in a third a cia officer looked for a package in long grass with the side of the road was wife fumed impatiently in the car and both of them were like mic'd how much of being a cia officer is just stuffing hundred dollar bill wad into things i have to figure it's a non negligible amount into a fake plastic stripper yeah here's here okay so the conclusion

that i think anyone could reasonably draw from this is that the cia is like one of the they're all laurel and hardy clown everything the cia does is like from a laurel and hardy movie just just as a parenthetical my favorite cia and confidence story is that they got their entire network in beirut rolled up by hezbollah on the basis that their secret meeting place was a pizza hut which they used the codename for pizza on the basis that who would stake out it is but like on the basis that who would stake out every pizza place in beirut and it turned out the answer so that was hezbollah so yeah it's not like they're just like a shit load of these people and like the thing they want to find the most is the cia station also also um the station chief

william buckley no relation yes will it just william buckley yeah no relation uh he uh would just take the same hard same route to work every day like they legitimately just thought they were too stupid to notice any of this it's like one of the it's like one of the most arrogant ways like the american empire has ever conducted it like i think that they legitimately thought like aerobas were too stupid but i mean you learned that from watching us like all mi6 ever did was pedophilia and if we weren't doing that then communism like actually the mi6 was incredibly default to truth because it was all like yeah it to be an mi6 officer you had to be posh enough that even if you suspected the other person might be a commie you had to ignore it because you went to school

with their dad like had sex with their grandfather in a shower so here's the thing this is the conclusion that we've i think and the listeners most likely have all drawn from this do you want to hear what conclusion malcolm gladwell draws from this please of course the most stuff that money into this bussy the most sophisticated intelligence service in the world has just been played for a fool this is what makes no sense about the story it would be one thing if cuba had deceived a group of elderly shut-ins but the cubans fooled the cia an organization that takes the problem of understanding strangers very seriously because no elderly stuff is all pranks at the fucking old folks home just don vito as james says this angle turn

yeah that's it so malcolm gladwell can't just can't draw the conclusion from all the overwhelming evidence put in front of him that the cia is as corrupt as it is stupid he's like well something must be going on with all of these proper nouns there must be some kind of very subtle and interesting explanation for why this group of inbred yalees kept getting taken for fools by communists in the sixties it's because they didn't spend 10 000 hours like stuffing hundred dollar bills into things exactly they didn't do this is the most fundamental thing about gladwell he can't imagine that the police cia finance industry politics whatever he can't imagine that it's filled with transparently evil and

monumentally stupid people so he keeps having to come up with like cute theories to do with the show friends as to why this is all fine amazing because he has yeah because it's again it's like the seven-year-olds view of the world thing it's like those are the adults so they can't possibly be wrong i think i think that's right i found by the way i found steven pinker criticizing malcolm gladwell and he owns him by doing his own thing back at him because malcolm gladwell interviewed a guy and he talked about the eigenvalue right like one word eigenvalue and he because he had only ever heard it said called it the i gone i g on value with a capital i and steven pinker calls this the with all caps i gone value problem when a writer's education on

a topic consists in interviewing an expert he is apt to offer generalizations that have been now obtuse or flat wrong so that's amazing we have yeah literally the exact he's he's criticizing malcolm gladwell by being malcolm gladwell in the end you know we all become gladwell it's true that you either die steven pinker or you live to see yourself become malcolm gladwell jesus um so i wanted before we before we close up here because i think we're getting close to time um i want to do a quickly run around the table and see how we're all physically feeling after we just went through a distilled 20 cc shot of gladwell exhausted man i'm just having my just had my back doors blown in by knowledge yeah i don't feel like it's more it's it's more depressing

than i think the steven pinker thing because there's no whimsy to it yeah yeah yeah pinker's like yeah he's like oh what if we did cloud ships and the rationality internet no that pinker is like neoliberal willy wonka where you know it's gonna kill a bunch of children but you're like but he's like oh well what if we had a chocolate river but gladwell is is dismond um yeah yeah i feel i i feel like the fake plastic rock feel excited yeah that's that's that's that's exactly how i feel like when we read pinker like it was a blast like his his shit is so fun because like he has the same world view basically like the same view of the political economy and everything but like his solutions are such fucking brain dumb shit it's like oh you came to have a good time and like you

put like it's so stupid that i know he at least did some work on this book but gladwell is just like it's boring writing and his the things he ends up saying after he drags you through it just some tortured analogy is like oh uh well like black people actually like getting killed like it just like it's insane and then just something brutal and horrifying yeah i i feel like i've just been in like i feel like i've been in purge even the wildest of them which was for my money the uh why don't more people smoke cigarettes one was still like deeply unsatisfying because pinker would have been weirder about it he would have had the most pipes or something right right pinker pinkers would be like you know what if uh one in every 100 cigarettes uh they had a pink powder and it blew

up and you were silly that sounds like you also but you but you also won a million dollars it was only in max credits so you had to earn a million dollars to get it yeah and it's like steven that's a fucking dog shit idea but you worked really hard yeah you know what it is you know what it is pinker is the joker and i mean that like the 60s or the animated series sense where he's like the agents of chaos or whatever gladwell is the riddler like he will just lead you through all of this complicated bullshit in his novelty suits covered in question marks and you get to the end of it and you're like this is stupid why did i do this there was no point to this you didn't know why no yeah oh man i think that's that's that's absolutely true about um about pinker and and gladwell and

i think also because we're at like an hour and 17 i think that's where i'm probably going to call it um so time of death time of death time that we all died an hour and 17 minutes of having to discuss Malcolm Gladwell fellas do you know what's really crazy about acting is you know that Leonardo DiCaprio wasn't even really attacked by a bear like that was just CGI and yet he was like putting faces and stuff who's crazy and yet somehow Malcolm Gladwell uses that insight to justify police homicide well what if police were bears yeah what if that i think it only falls to me now to say Felix thank you so much for coming back on again and my pleasure subjecting yourself to pop science for a second time yeah i will only do steven pigger again i'm trying to preserve my own health i'm getting old

yeah now indeed so this is this is also a medical note to all listeners just read steven pigger you can't handle gladwell yeah and this was true no you really can if your mind being blown persists for four or more hours see a physician um practice self-care drink water because this is hard this hard on us yeah train professionals on closed ideas courses yes so uh with that in mind uh yeah thank you very much all for listening thank you Felix and we will see you next week later yeah you