Live Episode: Noah Feldman and Malcolm Gladwell

He's also the co founder of Pushkin Industries, the company that makes this podcast. Malcolm just published a new book called Talking to Strangers. We started there. Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you Malcolm for coming to Boston. I want to start by just asking you about the

person to whom this book is dedicated, Yes, namely your father. Yes, the book starts with a very sweet anecdote about him, and then somewhere buried in the middle of the book, like at the beating heart of the book, isn't actually deeply moving and a little bit shocking story in which he figures what led you to think that he should be the Is he the inspiring figure for this book? Well, he was. I lost my father in twenty seventeen, so

he was clearly on my mind. But he well, I you know, I opened the He does in some way inspire this book because I tell the story at the very very beginning of the book of when my parents would come to Manhattan, I would put them up at the Mercer Hotel, which is the most sort of celebrity written hotel in New York and is a joke because

my parents. No two individuals know less about celebrity culture than my parents, and so it was always a kind of inside joke on my part to think of them mingling with rock stars Joe and you shared with no one but yourself until now, and then you're inside Joe. So one time, my dad's staying there and I asked him what he had done in the previous afternoon. He said, oh, I had a wonderful conversation with someone in the lobby

about gardening. And so the only problem was that people kept coming up to this man and asking him to sign bits of paper and taking his picture, and so I suppolled, you know, who was it? So I have no idea, um, And it was clearly some just being the Mercer, some massive celebrity and I've scased the last this was ten years ago, the last ten years trying to figure out who it was. And you can be a pretty big celebrity in the Mercer Hotel and no one will come over to you because it's not cool

to do that. First of all, there's several key facts here. What is that it's in the part of a part of the Mercer that's only opened guests, and this is where they were, so right away, the fact that own other celebrities were coming up to this celebrity is brucial. Second is my father. How all I can say is he had a clear preference for talking with other Englishmen, ay and be for people his own age. So I think it's someone born in the nineteen thirties in England

who liked gardening, and he was a major celebrity. So so I've been asking people and someone recently said, I think a very good guess Michael Caine. Ah. Can you can imagine people approaching Michael Caine. You can imagine Michael Caine talking about apparently he's a big gardener that I was. That actually surprises me. And and also kind of lower middle class as my father was. And you know when

Britt's congregate. Outside of England, they do the class thing instantly and then when they realized also do that inside of English. Yes, they just do that everywhere. They might do it more aggressively outside of him, but like once they discover they're from the same narrow slice. Like I once saw my father who was chatting with someone who was from the same town in Kent that he was from, and my father with that they hadn't done the class

thing yet, and he told it was a woman. He told this woman that he used to break into some estate and play in the garden, and she paused and said, oh, that was my estate, And that was the end of the conversation. But what is my father did like to talk to strangers, and he um he embodied one of the principles of the book, which is he did not expect a conversation with a stranger to yield much about

the stranger. In other words, he could talk for an hour with gardening about gardening with Michael Caine and never discovered that Michael Caine was a famous actor. And is that because talking about gardening is a form of small talk or is it the opposite? Is it that talking about gardening is so deeply interesting to the gardeners that that you can have a deep, substantive, meaningful conversation. It never comes up you know, what do you do for

a living? Or no, it's you've lost your Harrison's outfear. Well, it's very English to have a subject that allows you to avoid all intimacy, like the weather, like the weather or gardening, but also it's something to do genuinely. A wonderful fact about my father, which is I think he understood that if you spend too much time gathering information on a person you're talking to, you're only going to

find ways of alienating yourself from that person. So my father, the more you know, the less yeah, you don't want to will be yeah, you don't want to discover it, you don't have in common with them. So he was famous. So my father was a you know, he was a mathematics PhD. Whose head was somewhere up here, but he

was always falling into conversation with people like his. He was great friends with our neighbor who probably had a seventh grade education, and it's because they never got past They would also talk about Guardian a person now but I sort of love that sort of you know that I love that, and that's sort of part of where I end up in the book, which is that we expect to weigh too much from these conversations, and they're

dangerous when they get too aggressive. But in your book, you've got lots and lots of examples of conversations that go awry. Yeah. In fact, there's almost there are very few conversations in the whole book other than your father's conversation with the unnamed Englishmen, that go okay at all.

So I'm sort of wondering, do you agree with your father's idea that, you know, maybe we should just talk less to everybody you know, or at least less to people whom we don't have immediate and total connection to. Or is the whole point that we should talk to them but not expect very much from the conversation. I think the whole point is that we should talk to them and not expect very much in the conversation. Noways

I've become Then why talk at all? No, because you can have a meaningful conversation in the absence of drawing aggressive conclusions about the nature of the person you're talking to.

So I think this is I mean, the real issue in the book, and the reason the book begins and ends with the story of Sandra Bland, is that the thing about that encounter, she's pulled over by the side the road in small town taxes by a police officer, and the thing that leads that encounter to end in tragedy is that the police officer takes it upon himself to reach enormously consequential conclusions about Sandra Bland in the absence both in the space of thirty seconds and in

the absence of any real evidence at all. Right, that's what what is wrong with what he does, among other things, is it is in such a hurry, and his ambitions are so enormous he really thinks he pulls her over because he thinks there is a chance he pullsoever because she's out of state, black and driving a hunday. Right, And there are policies covering at least two of those things, officially in one of them on officially, yeah, that there are.

And he has been trained to pull over people who are who are you know the phrase what the lovely in quotation marks phrase that law enforcement uses curiosity ticklers. So she has violated, she has she has activated several of his curiosity ticklers by virtue of she and he had noticed her while she was turning out of the campus of Prairie View University, and he noticed her notices that while she's on university territory, she rolls through a stop sign. So she has rolled to a stop sign.

She's black, she's twenty eight, she's driving a Honday, she's got Chicago plates. And he says, that's for curiosity ticklers, and so he contrives a reason to pull her over. He sort of creates the reason, creates the reason by driving up fast behind her, which leads her to get out of his way, and then she doesn't use her turn signal. He has his pretexts, and then he creates a fantasy about this person he's pulled over. And the

fantasy is that she's dangerous. And this comes up later in the you know, in the course of the investigation, he gives this deposition. And what's weird actually what the deposition is that even though the case itself when it happened, attracted attention, you know, around the world as far as I can find. That was like one minor story in the Austin Statesman about the deposition, and that was it.

The deposition was completely ignored. Even when the deposition is like deeply revealing, deeply revealing, and you realize what a what a you know, like I said, like this bizarre fantasy that he creates in that moment that she is dangerous and harboring some deep criminal intent on the basis of the flimsiest and most misleading of cues. And it's that that I think is problematic and that we need

to sort of zero in on. One of the fascinating things though about your treatment of that whole deposition is that you believe him when he says he thought she

was dangerous. I do. You can imagine that other readers might be more skeptical and say, you know, and you consider this view in the in the book and passing at least, No, he was just a racist, and not only an individual way, but also in the production of the structural racism of the cops and the stop and frisk and so forth, rather the pulling over of supposed

to traffic violations. And then later in a deposition under oath, he wanted to explain why he stopped her, and he made up these reasons after the fact yeah, but you don't think that you buy what he's saying. And that's partly because you're I don't want to say this, but maybe you're defaulting to truth and believing his account. I am devaulting to truth. I have two the magic thing in the book, defaulting to truth. And you're not supposed

to do it. Yeah, I have. Well, you are supposed to do it, but let me explain will to do it. You're be able to do it. That makes me why I believe him when he says that two reasons. One is that if you look at his so we have from the Texas how he Patrol has on file, you can find it a complete record of every traffic stop he ever made as a member of the of the police force. And what you see when you look at that is that Kim stopping Sandra blend On the flimsiest

of pretexts was not an anomaly. It was what he did. Yes, he was, I mean he is. The further you can say, you can say that he is by the standards of what we want, what the Texas Harry Patrol wants a cop to be. He's not a bad cop. He's an ideal cop. They are trained to stop people on the flimsiest of pretext and he did exactly as he was trained to do. His whole career was stopping people on flimsy pretexts. Right. So it's like if you look at the list of reasons of first of all, you look

at the number of people he stopped, he's stopping. He's jumping out of his car four or five, six times an hour. And to put this in context, if you go back twenty five years and you do a similar search of what police officers did, you will discover they never got out of their car. If you were a police officer in smalltown, Texas in nineteen seventy five, you get out of your car to get donuts, like you did not the last thing you did was pull over people who are driving down a road for Note that

the whole notion of policing was different. You sat in your car and you waited for a call after some and you reacted to something you could happen. This is a whole new way of policing, and he was the perfect embodiment of this new philosophy he's starting and you look at the list he's stopping people for. You know, the light above their license plate is out and he

pulls you over. Why because he thinks that maybe there may be reason to believe that if you're the kind of person who didn't attend to the broken bulb above your license plate, then you're also the kind of person who is smuggling drugs. Right, that's the theory. He never

found anything. Right, if you look at his long time on the force, the man stops, you know, dozens upon dozens of people, and the sum total of all of that frenzied activity is like, once he stops a kid who is I think has a token amount of marijuana in his car. He may have got a gun once, but basically he's coming up with nothing. So so reason number one for me to believe him is that he is so. What he does with sangel Blend is so a part of who he is. There's not an expression

of some kind of of latent prejudice. It is an expression of his training as a police officer. Secondly, it's not inconsistent to say that he's scared of her because he's a racist. In fact, it's entirely consistent. That's why he's scared of her because she's actually bigger, than he is, and she's black, and that makes it And because he assumes that big black people are scary, it makes it really easy for him to construct a scenario where she's a threatening criminal and he is trying to uphold law

and order. So the racist argument and the argument that she's scary are consistent, not inconsistent. And thirdly, there are actual things that he does. He approaches her for the first time on the passenger side, which is what you do when you're not scared, and then he goes back to his car, and then the second time he goes up after he sits in his car, and he constructs this fantasy. He approaches her on the driver's side. And that's the only reason you would do that on a

highway traffic stop. So he exposed himself to the traffic by approaching on the driver's side. Is if you think the person has a gun, because you can defend yourself if you approach on the driver's side, and you are a target if you approach on the passenger's side. So that all those things make me think, yeah, the man's terrified.

I mean. And by the way, the way we train police officers in the present day is to be terrified, right, like that the only way that the reason people who deny that, think that he's making up a cover story are wholly ignorant of the totally perverse way modern law enforcement works. Right, He's trained to be terrified. Of course he's terrified. So I'm feeling a little terrified. That was

a very effective invocation of the experience. When you think about people who talk to strangers for a living, yeah, cops are an example, and it's particularly egregious because after all, he's talked to all those people that he stopped, Yeah, and he's tried to make some termination about how dangerous they are. But another kind of person, there are two other kinds of people who immediate leap to my mind when I think about people who talk to strangers. One

is salespeople. Yeah, because you're often selling to strangers and they're it's sort of an interesting counterexample because there you're doing everything you can to comprehend them in order to produce an effective sale. And I just wonder whether I don't I have no idea, I wonder if salespeople do better at talking to strangers insofar as they're trying to make a sale and in fact, to the extent this comes up in your book, it's from the other side.

It's from the buyer, as it were, you know, the person who believes what the salesman is this the pitch that the salesman is saying. Yeah. And then the other group of people who also come up in the book are anthropologists. Yeah, and you take us into the into Central America, a very intrepid part of anthropologists to actually Indonesia, to Indonesia. Sorry, who go to a village where people drink alcohol that turns out to be is it one hundred and oh that story? Yes, yeah, I'm mixing up

my anthropology stories. Yes, there's several anthropologists anthropologies, Yes you are, I'm talking about the drunk anthropologists. Yes, yeah, you know all of Malcolm's I mean as as you can guess and as you will know as soon as you read this book. It's a classic, the great read. And every you know anecdote could have a name, and this is

the Adventure of the Drunken Apologists. Yes, every it's like every you can play a game where every Malcolm god Well anecdote could be turned into the name of a Sherlock Holms story. That's sorry. You know, so here these anthropologists they do really well and talking to strangers, it seems, at least in your I'm sure not all anthropologists do do well that that that's what they're trying to do.

So I wonder is there something we could learn from either salesman or anthropologists, Yes, about how to go about talking strangers. The end of the salesman part is really interesting because what is it that a successful salesperson does. They The first thing they do before they size up the person they're trying to sell to, is they sell themselves, right. They established their credibility, their friendliness, their interests there. You know, I once seen one of my earlier books, I like

when you Go to Sell a book. Yes, I had a profile of the number one car salesman in America. Who was this guy in rural New Jersey. And he was really really fascinating and he was his record was I mean, he was like an order of magnitude better than anybody else. And he was the kind of most there was nothing. He wasn't a fast talking, slick guy. He was the opposite. He was this guy. When you met him, he just oozed authenticity and he impressed upon

you before he even sized you up. He impressed upon you the fact that he was a straight shooting, normal guy who was not trying to hustle you. On the contrary, he just cared about, you know, serving your interests. And he was genuine. I think he actually genuine he believed that that's what he was doing. But kinds of genuine. There's he genuinely believed that's what he was doing, and

there's that is genuinely what he was doing. I think that's genuinely what he was doing because he pointed out he was just doing people the favor of selling them. Because because he made this really interesting point, which is that if you're a car salesman, and I love the fact that we've now detoured into car salesman's but he says the thing about the mistake he was I asked him to talk about, what are the mistakes your peers make? So why what does everyone else do such a bad

job of selling cars and you are so good? And he said, well, the mistake they make is that they think it's all about the person in front of them. But he said, no, no no, success in this business is about referrals. He's like a successful sale for me, is whether I don't sell the person in front of me a car, But they liked me so much that they go home and when their friends are buying a car, they say, oh, you should go talk to that guy. He was really nice. That's where was a volume business.

Yes you want, you want, and that person might tell four people and you might sell three cars because of that one successful. So the other rule he had was you can never dismiss so anyone who comes into the dealership deserves your full attention. So he never judged anyone. If you were a seven year old kid, he would treat you as seriously as if you were, you know, a millionaire. Why because you don't know who the seven

year old kid's father or uncle or grandfather is. So he would spend this whole afternoon who the seven year old kids? I thought it was kind of fascinating. But the point was he begins with establishing his own credibility. And this is of course exactly what Brian and Cinia in the cop in the Sandra Bland case does not do. He behaves without regard for his own credibility. In fact, he blows his credibility before she even meets him by

pulling her over on a nonsensical traffic stop. And the idea that we have trained police officers to behave in such a way that their credibility is destroyed before they even meet the person they're pulling over is incredib Right. We should be taking the people training cops and sending them to meet with this car salesman and he could

teach them something, right. So, I mean, it's funny because I spent a lot of time in a book with these two brilliant criminologists who have rethought a lot of David Weisbergen and Larry Schreman, and they think endlessly about this. It's like the first task of a police officer in dealing with any member of the public is to establish their credibilion integrity. But you can't do anything before you do that, whereas presumably what a lot of people think

is that they should establish our authority. Yes, exactly, and that is there's a huge difference between those two those two things. Now, when you talk though about the salesman who established his authority, that's also what your spies did in the book. Yeah, right, they were really good at establishing their authority. Yeah, there's a lot of spies in the book In case you loved it, it's a lot of spies and a lot of really cool spies. Yeah, and so you establish authority and then the other person

will believe whatever you say. Do you think people believe what the salesman said or they discounted what he was saying, but they needed to buy a car, and they figured he was a nice guy and they might as well buy the car from him. No, I think that I think they were. They are when they enter a dealership. They are desperate to find someone who seems to have their best interest at heart. There's I mean, I think. I mean his argument was that people enter a car

dealership and their expectations are really, really low. They've had so many bad experiences over the years, and that just by being a normal human being he can sell well caused anyone else in America ms the stunning thought. But spies. So since writing a book, I've the more I think about this, the more of a radical position I take on spies. Okay, good, let's get let's to the let's get into some spy radicalism. So spies and there's I was reading this article in one of the you know,

they are all these journals devoted to spies. We're academic and Bertward who writes in there like they're all x CIA officers or XMI six officers. And there was one really really brilliant essay I read recently by a guy who said, you know, if you take the long view and you see that, well, during the Cold War we had Aldri Shames and m Robert Hansen and a couple of other ones. But if you look at all of the damage they did, they basically give gave away all

of our key secrets. It only took a few but they gave away all of the secrets because they had they were really high up boats in the CI and FBI. And on the flip side, we had a couple of people who come over from the Soviet side who basically gave away all their key secrets. He said, so it was a wash in the end, like the Cold War itself, the Cold like the Cold War itself. And he's like, so this guy was like, who is himself a spy guy?

He's like, looking at the evidence of the Cold War, you should we should just give up, Like we should just have saved ourself billions of dollars by by shutting down all of the covert covert espionage operations of the CIA, like we ended up no further ahead than we then we would have been if we had had no spies at all. And I tell the story in the book. We need a treaty for that though, right, because it has to be bilateral doesn't work if we give up

our spies and they don't give up their spies. It has to be you have to sign a treaty. We have to total disclosure of every total disclosure, which everyone would then lie about. But uh if but if we don't, no, no, no no, no, you don't have to do it. You can be don't know, think about this laterally. It can be done utilaterally because we're shutting. If we shut down our spy service, then there is no spy service for

them to infiltrate. Right, we have removed the post, but there's no spies, no no by on the non spots, there's no what are they gonna do? So the Soviets send a spy like go and spine the Department of Agriculture like, go ahead, it's all yours, go right in. No, there's no more, well there is the Defense Department. I mean I like this. I like that, I like where you're going here, and maybe the defense but there is

like the defense department, I know. But mostly what the Soviets are doing is spying on our spies, and we're spying on the round. Although I guess the Chinese do it differently because they are mostly trying to steal technology, technology and secrets. Okay, so let's let's blog and secrets. But it's clear that an awful lot of this activity is just a merrygo round, yes, and we should sing around.

And billions and billions and billions of dollars were spent on the merrygor around, right, So this is I found like for a spy to say this, and like I tell the story and of how I opened the book with a story of how the there's a defector comes over from Cuba and he calls together all the leading CIA people running our Cuban espionage operations. It says, um, not one, but not two and nuts free, but every single spy you have in Cuba right now is a

double agent working for Castra. The whole thing. Like so like it was pointless, why bother shut you know? We had an operation in Havana inside the whatever it is, the Swiss embassy for years and years years the whole thing was a wash, like it worse than a wash. But so okay, let me let me try to up the radicalism here. So you can imagine someone saying, well, this is true of all arms races, right, each side

goes like crazy. And there is a theory that at the point that the way the United States quote unquote won the Cold War was just by outspending the Soviets. So then there was a point we just waste more money than you do, and since we can afford to, we win. Yeah. Depressing, but maybe it's true. But if you ask the Defense depart in people, they would say,

what do you mean intelligence services are expensive? They're really cheap, Like you can have an entire intelligence service of thousands and thousands of spies for the price of like one fighter bomber. Yeah, that the equipment is really expensive, but humans are relatively relatively inexpensive, and they don't actually have

you know, the James Bond, you know flying cars. I mean there is no queue strictly speaking, well, so you know, after yes, all right, although I will say that remember after snowdon and gives away the end at the store and at the NSA, there was all this handwringing about how much it was going to cost, and the numbers

were I mean, they were not trivial. They were talking about many, many, many billions of dollars, which again raised the point like if this thing that you've constructed over many many years, costing tens of billions of dollars, can be essentially destroyed by one guy working for Dell, not even like some random dude way off in the middle of nowhere who is a subcontractor for Dell and who

himself you know, Snowden gets kicked you gore to college education. Yeah, and he gets He tries to work for the CIA, gets a job because it's like uncle gets him in, gets kicked out. Why because he hacks into the personnel database and changes his job evaluations so he looks good. They discover this, I'm like, oh, this guy is a a fraud, be a hacker, and the movies he would have promoted him and see and see only got a job because his uncle weighs in. So what does he do?

They fire him? What does he do? He resurfaces at del and gets in again. Like if this is the system. Is there any point to having the system like there is this I you know, there is a point where you have to wonder. And it's funny when you think about it, how many American institutions are in the grip of arms races. I mean, basically, what twenty first century capitalism is is a series of I mean, is it is a you start with the marketplace, I mean you rapidly moved to a an arms race that has no

productive function. Coke versus PEPSI. I was going to say Harvard versus Yale, but that would maybe maybe a better example, more expensive, more expensive example, or you know, Harvard Deaconess versus you know about SIONI or some I mean, they're all of these things. They're all they all have the same function, which is they're on the same kind of treadmill. And there's no as a point on which the spending

no longer has any productive function. So the standard I mean sent there's a standard aswer to the question of why do we bother to compete, even though a lot of competition is idiotic and pointless. Usually it's the alternative is that we're colluding, and if we collude, we'll have

no incentive to try to do our jobs. Well, yeah, do you think that's just basically a ridiculous Well, you can compete on things that matter and what counts well, it would be nice, for example, if universities competed on how well they were educating children who needed to be educated for example. I mean, I mean, I would seem to be just we think we are competing on that, Like that's what we tell ourselves. That's a sad thing

about it. Maybe sad institution that you work for. Yes, I did hear your I did hear the podcast about the LSA TU So yeah, yeah you yeah, I was going to tell you, by the way, I'm probably most people you ever heard the Malcolm's episode about the LSAT. I only give eight hour open open everything. Yeah, I've never done the So good for you. Yeah, we're think it's because it as you say, it seems were you revealed to us what year else's score was. Well, I

revealed to you what my score was. I got a lower score on the l set than I ever got on any other standardized test. Okay about that? Is that good? No? We were you was impressed by its idiocy, as I was deeply impressed by the idiocy. Yeah, I the logic games. I just thought were they and truth to be told, they bear no relationship to anything that one ever does in the wall ye leaving the speed out of it speed yea. For those you listen, the episode was all

about I didn't understand why the while they had time limits. Yeah. Um. And then when I went to the people who would make an administer the el set and asked that question, they h it's like, no, one didn't have a good answer. Well, no, no, it was worse than that. It was like they had never occurred to him that that was that would be an issue, Like so they Well, I think you got the right answer. I mean you buried the answer a

little bit in the episode. But you pointed out that law school exams are typically timed and they measure whether they else that is any good by saying if it predicts predicts first year grades, so that they are. So it's really the law school's fault. It's not the fault of the exam. It's really involved with the law schools. But it was weird to find someone who was engaged in doing something and was radically incurious about the reasons

for doing that thing. Right, that's that's only weird to you, Malcolm. Most of the world is people doing whatever they do every day and not keeping it. Who it about? What it is that they're Yeah, no, it's it's funny. And the other thing, um, no, I won't. I was going to say something disparaging, but I won't. You can say

you can be disparaging. No. The other thing this is totally um tangential and parenthetical, is that so you have an institution which is making constructing these tests and administering them and has been doing so for seventy years, and by the way, it makes a lot of money doing it, and you know, no one's particularly challenging their right to do so. Um, and they don't serve any real productive function. So the only reason to persist is if they're having fun. Right,

So that was I was looking. I was like, okay, so I can think of no behind the closed door, they would all be shortling to themselves, you know. So my thought was the only I can't. There's no reason for you guys to be doing what you're doing unless you wake up in the morning with joy in your heart and think I'm going to come up with some really like killer quests and I don't even but this example actually underscores what I was sort of the question I was raising a couple of minutes ago, namely, so

the lsdas the law school. I don't even know when that all stands for. They have no competition, right, I mean, as you say, they're doing it for fun. I mean, in fact, in recent years, a couple of law schools, including mine, I've started experimenting by saying what you could take to gre Yeah, I love you. That's what they call an experiment. I mean, it's ridiculous thing. One ridiculous

steridized test. You can take another steridized one which does not have logic games on unless we must be forgot. But I mean the justification, if there is one for that, it would only be if you have two different tests, then maybe that would create some competition, and it would lead the people who make up to tests in theory. I mean, this is all in theory to think about whether you know they could do something differently instead of just as you say, just being out there to have fun.

Not that having fun. It's such a bad motive. No, No, I thought that's why I'll do my job. If I had thought they were having fun, I would have called the whole thing off and did not attack them, right but right, but they appeared not to be having fun. They committed this end of not having fun, unlike the drunken Anthropologists. Yes, yes, yes, who did have fun. Yeah. I was fascinated by the chapter about alcohol here. There

was tons. I mean, there's always stuff in every chapter that I don't know, but in that chapter, I feel like I didn't know anything, Like everything I thought about alcohol consumption was wrong. Can you tell the story of the drunken Anthropologists? I can't. I can. So that chapter began because I was looking for since I was interested in this question of conversations between strangers going awry. Naturally, I thought that campus sexual assault would be a reasonable

place to start. Like that's that seems to be albeit a highly controversial, highly country but part, some part of that problem is about that that clearly conversations are going badly awry. Right. So I began to go and talk to people who studied this problem, and there are many of them, and all of them, five minutes into the conversation would say, well, you know, this is about alcohol.

They all said this, and I realized, Okay, so maybe I should rethink and start talking thinking about more about alcohol. And that's interesting on another on a number of levels, in part because if you read books about campus assault, there are books written about it that don't mention alcohol, which is quite incredible. But really, do you see this gap between the way an issue is discussed in public and luay an issue is discussed by the research community.

Um anyway, so it led to this long question about Okay, so what happens when you're drunk? Um? That would that might impair the um the conversation that's being had between

two strangers at a party or what have you. And the common position is that what happens when you drink is you become disinhibited, which is what I thought, Yes, that you simply then the normal, the kind of surface constraints on your um personality melt away, and some kind of purer version of yourself emerges in vino veritas right

for better or words for better fans uh. In fact, the contemporary position on alcohol now is on drunkenness is very different from that, and that is that drunkenness causes myopia, and what that means is that when you're drunk, what happens is your higher cognitive functions start to shut down and you're capable only of making sense of things in the immediate term that are right in front of you.

And that's a significant That sounds like a subtle difference, but it's significant because your personality is your normal personality is a function of you, of a careful weighing of short term versus long term consequences. Right that, Noah, you are who you are because you're not just thinking about what's happening now. You're thinking about tomorrow and next week. And if you say something rude or stupid or offensive to me right now, you know it'll matter tomorrow and right.

But if you're drunk, that falls away, and what's left is not Noah anymore. Because Noah is someone who thinks about tomorrow. What's left is the version of Noah that doesn't think about tomorrow, which is not Noah. Right, And to the extent that we it's a version of Noah that doesn't think about tomorrow. Yes, but that's not a version you approve of. True, But it's a separate question. I think we can discuss it without without a view

of like, which is the essential Noah? Oh? No no, I would say, it's the non essential no yeah, okay, isn't your non essential self the portion of yourself that you would not willingly choose to be? Well, that would be super nice if that were true. But it might be the other way around, right, I mean, it could be that the portion of myself that I don't want to be is actually the essential me, and that to me, who goes all the work, goes into producing the public me,

is the inessential me. Do you want to lie on the couch and should? I mean, I'm I'm getting to that, Believe me, I'm getting to I'm going to get to psychoanalysis and talking to strangers, I promise you, Okay. Regardless of whether drunken Noah is the anti Noah or simply

altered Noah, it's not typical Noah, and it's not ideal Noah. Yes. Right, So if this version, if drunken, the drunken version of ourselves, is this radically altered, less than altimal verse, then that's hugely problematic, right, And it makes it hard to understand, for example, how consent can ever be appropriate when people are very drunk, because the notion of consent assumes that you're it is your self. It is your essential self

that's consenting, not your altered self. But also it means that I think that we have Also it raises the question of whether the transformed drunken self is someone who is much more likely to engage in criminal behavior, which

turns out to be true. Right, That's what a lot of this sexual assult is about, is that people get very, very drunk thinking that it is a harmless, fun state, and in fact it's a state that radically increases their chances of being criminal sexual predators, right on the one side of the equation. So anyway, what does this have

to do with the drunken anthropologists. Well, a lot of this rethinking of drinking begins in the fifties, with all the sense of pological work that starts going around the world and observing that in other parts of the world drunkenness doesn't look like drunkenness in the United States. Right, So if if drunken, henkenness is culturally the drunkenness. So if drunken that's just how often you get drunk, But what you do when what you do when you get

drunk differs dramatically from culture. So these the the anthropologists. So these two lovely this couple um who taught a brown for many years. They went to Bolivia in the fifties and they observed that this tribe they were living with would get would drink essentially grain alcohol, but the most potent liquor imaginable. Every Friday night they would get together as a group and they would get so wasted that, like I mean, they would just drink too. But there

was no no observable pathology. It didn't lead to fights, it didn't lead to you know, absenteeism from work, it didn't lead to broken marriages, that didn't lead to and they were like so stunned by this, like how could this be? And the answer is it goes to this question of biopia, that when you are drunk, you were at the mercy of your immediate environment. And they had constructed an immediate environment that was entirely benign, more than benign,

that was socially positive. So when they got so, yeah, they were surrounded by like happy things. They sang songs and they held hands and it was all love. Was like a rave, but with grain alcohol. It was like a rave with green yes exactly, if that's what frat parties were we would not have sexual assaults, right, But frat parties are the opposite. They are places where the thing that is immediately in front of this of these you know, wasted eighteen year olds is not something that

brings out their best self. It is rather something that brings out, in many cases, their worst self. The fact that we allow this to happen on campuses and we are seemingly oblivious to its consequences enrages me because the answer is the answer to engage in some rat cultural experiment to change the cultural norms. Because I mean, that's the thing about anthropologists, right, they go all over the world. They see incredible things, and they report back that what

we think is intuitive isn't intuitive. But their explanation tends to be a teeny bit different from the explanations that often come up in the other work of other social scientists. They tend to say, it's a different culture. So those folks had put a lot of time and effort into figuring out a culture. Maybe it was luck, maybe it wasn't where getting drunk actually gave them some kind of communal solidarity, and so maybe we should be trying to produce a culture like that. Yeah, I agree, I think

we should be. I think the idea of so some people have been trying to produce a culture around drinking. It's just that the culture that has been produced around drinking on campuses in the last twenty five years is the most monstrously maladaptive culture imaginable. So we know you can produce powerful cultures around it, but we have surrendered that task to people who do not have the best

interests of nineteen year role college students at heart. And it's time we went back and took back that particular culture. It is quite possible to have fun at a party without getting blackout drunk, right at the very least, it makes sense. You know, in telling in retelling the story of the Stanford rape case, there are many things that strike you. One is that here is a party at Stanford where there is a lot of very young people are getting very very drunk, and there appeared to be

no adults anywhere, no sober people present. How is that good? Idea? Like, here's a college that has not like there are a lack of resources at Stanford for this kind of thing. When I was at you know, getting drunk in college at the University of Toronto in the nineteen eighties. They were always sober adults at our parties. It just it was the way it was constructed, and so whenever something got out of hand, the sober adult came in and

made sure it didn't go too far. I suspect that's why the number of these incredibly problematic incidents in my college years was small. I never knew of a single person who went to the hospital suffering from alcohol poisoning. I never knew of a single person although I got drunk.

Although I have read this is maybe about the early nineties, I can't be so different from the late eighties studies suggesting that the rate of sexual assault on campuses was actually not so different then than it is now, that is to say, outrageously, shockingly terribly high. Yeah. Yeah, All I know is that the Yeah, the gathering of statistics in this area is an incredibly difficult Yes, so safely

because so much goes unreported. Yeah. All I can say for certain is that our best efforts at the moment suggests the sexual self problem is way, way, way worse than people imagine. I wanted to I promised one question about broadly speaking psychoanalysis. So here's the question. You talk a lot in the book about default to truth as some thing that we do and maybe something that we're

hard wired to do. Yeah, so you know your spies are being spies and they say, oh, I'm not a spy, and then people say, oh, I guess you're not a spy because we're you know, it's pro social to believe people unless you have really strong evidence not too How do you distinguish that from the situation where we kind of know that you're lying, but we really don't want to think that, where we're actually eager on some level, and you know, it could be on different levels, but

it could actually be on a you know, a subconscious level. We're eager to believe you because it would be just too terrible to believe the truth that my co worker in the next cubicle, who's an award winning you know, Cuba analyst, is actually you know, piling around personally with Fidel Castro, you know, on odd weekends. Yeah, it's it's devastating to think that. I mean, in all of your cases about the spies, you always have the person saying,

oh my god, we were just devastated to discover this. Yeah, so, how do you distinguish a kind of idea that we're just built to believe people, so we believe people from the idea that no, it's not that, it's that we kind of know they're lying on some level, but we but we know and we don't know at the same time because we just really, really really don't want to be disillusioned. Well, I there's many way stiensers that I

would say that. So a lot of my ideas in this book about why we do such a bad job of knowing when others are lying come from the work of this psychologist, Tim Levine and levine zanswer would be that real liars. So there's a in a psychological literature, there is a distinction between there's a big argument about what is a lie, and they don't count as lies. Untruths that are told with the intent of preserving social relationships are not considered lies what we would call white lies,

but they're the category why life is quite large. Yes, um, so, a true lie is a lie that's told deliberately and malicious maliciously with the intent of severing or rupturing social relationships. The number of the percentage of the population who tal

large numbers of true lies is really really small. So the con style of that with the statistics on the number of people who cheat on their spouses, I mean that by depending on the numbers you look at, that's you know, between a third and sixty percent of you know of Americans, depending on which studies you believe. That's a lot of people and they're all telling unless you think that's a white lie. Now, so is cheating on your I mean I'm talking about a cheating on this

on your spouse. Is an active an active deception, yeah, but it may not involve an actual lie. In other words, I'm talking about the moment when the two people confront each other and one of the fun party says that you're having an affair and the other party says, I'm not okay. So that's no. I don't know what percentage includes that moment. Yeah, I'm more interested in that act

where they confront each other. I'm not you know, you're talking about the commission of a social acts or maybe highly social acts, but social acts outside of overly social, overly social acts, but um but no deeply malicious acts meant to destroy. So made off made off level kinds of lies are really really rare. Um. So to add to you you, I agree with you. How do we know that a lot of so there is a there is a healthy literature in psychology and trying to figure this

question out. Yeah. Um, you know it's hard to tell. But you know, we do know that because you know what percentage of investment advisors are running massive Ponzi schemes. It's actually quite small, right, I mean there's a lot of Look, where's your money in like in a sock? I you this, No, No, it's in an index fund. Yea. The Wall Street Journal is not lying. I mean the index. The index is the index. So you know how you're you know, well, the person running the index fund, you're

saying it's not lying. You know, there's don't you don't even need a person. It's just an index, I know. But so therefore it's not you, whereas a human being with a with a you know, with an investment strategy could could be the nature of a Ponzi scheme? Is that advision it? Actually? Yeah? So we do know that there aren't ten madeups out there? Yeah, there are, you know,

there is a small number. And similarly, when we look in you know, what is the incident incidents of Since I talk about pedophilia in this book, how many you know, what is the real incidence of pedophilia in the population, So someone who is systematically deceiving those around him in in the in the in the name of pursuing a devan sexual agenda. It's actually it's quite small. It's like two three percent. That who that's small? Well, two three percent.

Now we're not saying that these are people who actively pursue their pedophilia, but who have those kinds of inclinations, But that that's quite small. Sure, yeah, okay, two or three people out of one hundred. It's nothing like sounds like a lot of people to me. I don't know. But it's because I have kids. I don't know. But if you but if you have as a baseline position that most people you deal with are not pedophiles, that's not an irrational position. It's not irrational, not by any string.

So you can send your kids to boy scout the world, and you shouldn't lie awake at night worrying about whether the boy scouts. But verify, yes, that's right anyway, So I don't think that your position is wrong. But I would say that it's it is probably rational to want to believe that the person you're dealing with is telling the truth, because most people actually are telling the truth. That's Slivian's argument. I think that's there's something and it's

a it's a rationalist argument, presumably built into some evolutionary theory. Right, it's rational, and so we've evolved this tendency. You know, what are the reasons why so many? And I guess my worry is, I'm not sure that covers the cases money of which you write about, where there's like stuff staring the person in the face, you know, the person who suspects the spy and says, gee, I suspect this spy and goes and ask the questions and the spy gives a lame answer, and the person's like, okay, I

believe you. And your your answer is you know, this kind of evolutionary default the truth. But my instinct, at least on reading those anecdotes was that's not enough to explain that because the person's doubts were already raised. It's really that they just didn't want to face it. They didn't want to take on board the painful reality you know spies thinking about spies as someone who has consumed

huge numbers of real and imaginary spy stories. But if you just look at the real ones, spies never get caught. Like show me a case where the first day that Joe Hill decided to turn coat and spy for the Soviet Union, even though he was a high ranking CIA officer, he was caught by counterintelligence. Never ever happens. If you do, like I woudn't want to write a book about it because it short no if you talk to these counterintelligence

officers about their record and uncovering spies. First of all, most counterintelligence officers never catch any spies, and to the extent they do, they catch them like after ten years. Like think about how long Aldrich aims possibly the worst by this country ever had. The man is a buffoon, he's a drunken His performance reviews are like terrible. He starts getting huge amounts of money from the Soviets for

his spying or what does he do? He spends it wildly and shows up at Langley and like a jaguar with his teeth capped and wearing a fancy you know BRIONI suit and like nobody nobody looks askance so like, I'm sorry at a certain boot, President, I'm sorry. At a certain point, you have to believe that this is something that is I just read this, this book about Klaus Fuchs. You know, the so Klaus Fuchs, he's the one who betrays the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

I hadn't realized that a Klaus Fuchs. I thought he was a kind of minor figure in Los Alamos. He's not. He's like a he's one of the greatest nuclear physics of his generation. And also his ties to the Communists go way back. He's a he's a Communist from the get go, which actually a good number of the nuclear scientists were deeply sympathetics. So it's like and you know, all kinds of people were like raising her hand and say, I don't know about Klaus, like Klaus goes. And then

Klaus was at Los Alamos. They had you on lockdown in the trend and you know, where to get out of Los Alimos to meet with his Soviet handler. He had to construct these elaborate reasons. Shore enough, like Klaus is always getting in a car, like driving off to the desert, and they're like, oh, where's Claus. I don't know he's he's going to, like, you know, where would you you're at Lost Alimos? Were you going for? I think the supports my theory. I think not you're a theory.

I think the supports that people say wanted to they really didn't want to believe this about classrooms. Of course they didn't want to believe it, but they were. But they didn't want to believe it because in part because most people at Los Alimos were not spies, right Klaus, It's Klaus, and like basically Klaus. I mean there's like one other guy who's a spy, but maybe someone we don't know about, but most of them not spies, right. Um. So I want to make sure we ask some of

the audience questions. And this is the first question from Tyler from Westfield in New Jersey, and this question I'll you why I'm interesting this question. The question says, you're known to be an avid runner. How does running factor into your process as a writer and as a thinker?

And the reason I was especially attracted this question is that I didn't exactly meet you, but the first time I ever saw you was in the Equinox in the West Village when I lived in New York, and there were several rows of treadmills, and in the front row of treadmills in the center was always Malcolm running at like an unimaginable speed, and for a long time he was by far the fastest person in that gym. And

then a early two thousand supermodel. I was trying to figure out which one it was, one of the blond ones? Was it? Which one was? She was right next to you, and she would run right next to you really at that now, you'd tell me, at super high speed. This happened on more than one occasion. This is like a story about you and your father, Like you didn't even notice, and she was like pretty much as fast as as you are, and comparably skinny. And so I thought to myself,

first I thought I didn't know who you were. I was just like, wow, that guy is incredibly fast. And I was like, that guy's incredibly fast and doesn't notice the girl next to him, And then later I found out that it was you. So here's the question, how does that running factor into your process as a writer and as a thinker, other than making you oblivious to supermodels?

I don't know. I suppose, well, you know the you know this how iterative writing is, that you never finding a way to express what you really mean takes forever and that early and an awful lot of kind of what you discover when you write something down is how difficult it is to put your thoughts into words, or how difficult it is to know what you think. And so I always think that you running is really, among other things, a way in which I can simply take

time out to ruminate. All writers, I think, have to have some space in your life for rumination. Darthy from Boston And this is I don't think it means to be a mean question, but it's a teeny bit mean. When I was on my way over here, I asked my daughter what happens if I have to ask Malcolm a mean question? She said, you have to do it as a compliment sandwich, and I didn't. I didn't know what that was, but she explained to me. So I wanted to say, Malcolm, that's this is an amazing book. Yeah,

after the aha moment that birth's a new theory? How do you avoid confirmation bias while evidence gathering? And also great, great shirt? Did I do it right. Um, well, one answer is to say that all journalism is an expression of confirmation bias, but then so it confirmed the bio. Charthy holds, Yeah, I mean you're I think I guess. The defense I would say is that, unlike other forms of writing, the kind of journalism that I'm up part

of is meant to provoke, not convince. That is to say, I'm not and what I what I'd like to do is to present an argument, maybe an argument that readers haven't seen before. Not necessarily because I think I can persuade you to adopt it, or necessarily because I believe the argument is one hundred percent correct, but because I think it's incredibly useful to consider the problem from that angle.

So an example would be, you know, I don't talk a lot, like we went over this, I don't talk a lot about race in the case of Sandra Bland. Why Because it's really useful to think through the problem of what to do about police shootings and put race

to the side for a moment. Right, that's a good do I think that race doesn't belong, No race totally belongs, but it's useful to take a couple hours and set it aside and say, what if I thought about this outside of that of that particular prism, And that's what that's what I think useful nonfiction does. And so part of the part of the production of that kind of argument is confirmation bias, happily confirmation bison. Yeah, let's gather all the events we can for a particular point of

view and want it buy you. Let's see what happens. Yeah, and if you default to truth and believe it, that's your own fault you have. You got to read a skeptically, right, I mean you've got to read skeptically. Yeah. Nicole from Massachusetts, This is a very Massachusetts question, and it's kind of a deep one. Is Trump derangement syndrome a similar phenomenon to the Belgian coke crisis? This question requires a great

deal of unpacking the Belgian. Nicole is from Massachusetts. Yes, coke crisis was something I did a podcast episode about. Was an episode in the nineties or eighties in Belgium where Belgians became convinced by the way every time I say the word Belgian, I'm reminded of that great Monty Python episode about they wanted to come up with a nickname for Belgian's, remember, and one of them was sprouts, one of them was Flems, and then the winner was

dirty and Belgian best so so fantastic Um. But Belgians became convinced that coke was poisoning them and all these kids got sick. And then it turns out there was not conversions, and yeah it was it was just all um hysteria, a moral panic. Anyway, this person wants to suggest that people that Trump is somewhat trumped arrangement syndrome.

You know which is you know that you know that phenomenon when um one observes people who and the ques the name implies maybe that they're they shouldn't, but that people just can't stop thinking about Trump and how angry they are about Trump and how they are about Trump, and it just distorts their whole like frame of engagement with the world. Slash gives them great clarity and accuracy, depending on whether you're inside the syndrome or absence syndrome. UM,

I don't know. Maybe Nicole wins, she gets a freak of the well, she already bought a copy of the book. This is a serious question, and it connects up to the fact that this book really is about very serious things. It has it has all of the fun of him Malcolm Gottwell book, but it's framed as an inquiry into one of the deepest, hardest and most serious questions that

we're facing as a society. And the question is, do you think that we as Americans This is Christina from Boston, have improved in civil dialogue in the years, say, since nine to eleven, the last almost two decades, or have we regressed when it comes to talking to strangers. It's kind of a deep question. Well, in some ways we have regressed in a sense of um that you know, we're in a peculiar moment where we're we're obsessed with each other's differences and not what we have in common.

And you know, at other times, other countries don't have these kinds of conversations. Canadians don't get together and enumeered all the ways in which they disagree. They do the opposite, right, They talk about things they all share. Um, that's the age, and they do it nicely. They do it nicely. The great Canadian project is this endless search for common ground gets a little tedious at times, but um, this country has decided, but less shooting each other. This country's society

doesn't want to do that. I guess that would be point number one. But two slash we've never done it. Maybe we've never done it. Be to be there. Yeah, but I you know, to going to back to the theme of this This book is a lot about misunderstandings that arise from hasty generalizations about strangers. I'm always struck on Twitter about how you know seventy five of what are classified as disagreements on Twitter or not disagreements, but

they are misunderstandings. Yeah that they just people have been bothered to figure out what the other person is arguing, or they delicated by the medium, which is designed to make it impossible for you to explain your argument in

any depth. It is astonished to me what a bad idea of Twitter is, Like if you it's one of those things like in retrospect, like who if they were so like who thought this was going to end up being Remember there was that golden period of a like a year and a half when they were serious people in this country who thought that Twitter was going to

save the world from tyranny. And I will say I was a skeptic in that moment, and I people were so angry with me for not believing in the condemptive power of Twitter, and I was like, I don't know, like I don't see how you know. And sure enough, what happens. It turns out Twitter is good for like cat videos. That's useful. But other than that, we had Facebook for that. We already had Facebook for that. But it is astonishing to me how like pointless it is.

But it is fascinating then that it has the reach that it has. I mean specifically among people who talk at length for a living, people who should do the best at going deeper conversational at least in principle, seemed to have this deep desire to communicate on Twitter, the framework in which all of the things that in theory make them worth listening to are taken away are stripped away. I mean, it's like, you know, your your example of in the LSAD podcast, your example of speed chess compared

to a real chess. All these people who are actually supposedly writers, you know, scholars, people who think in larger longer than a sentence or two, and that's who spends a lot of time yelling at each other. And this understand each other on Twitter. I have no answer for why we have the impulse to do that, but apparently we do, and distinctively that group of people, because it's not like Twitter has as many users as one of the formats that allows for a longer form communication. Yeah, yeah,

I don't. I don't get it. It's like the it's like the id of It's like the id of people who like to express themselves at length. It's like, really that they can sum it up in one sentence, which actually they can't. Yeah. Yeah, it joins along this I always even it should be this everything. Every institution, uh, in a kind of functioning society should have a sunset clause and then at that moment of sunset, everyone sits around and should say, well up or down? Good idea?

Do we should we start over? Like? Be very imagine if we hit like so, if we had a sunset clause on I mentioned higher education before, Yeah, super useful for us to say. In say, in twenty twenty five, we all get together and we say, okay, let's start over and see what we come up with. Right, we

would come up with something very very different. Similarly with Twitter, if we decided in twenty twenty Five's go, We're gonna shut it down for six months and then have a meeting and figure out what we want, whether we want to replace it or what we would replace it with. We would come up with something very different. There's no reason these things persist long past their their useful stage. Last question and it connects Canada to the time, when and why was the last time you applied your pull

the goalie rule in real life? Another recond ask that because you know we're almost done here, I'm pulling the goalie.

But this is another friends to one of my podcasts where I described the work of this hilarious hedge fund guy who published a paper on SSRN rolls quast website about when you should what is the optimal time to pull a goalie in a hockey game if if you are down a goal And his answer is like I forgot, it's like with six minutes to go far, far, longer than anyone would begin to imagine, and he does all the math and then if no one ever does that,

no one ever does that way. But the idea is that you should take big risks, take big way your way behind when you're way behind, when all is hopeless. Um, when was the last time I took a massive, unparalleled risk because I was otherwise almost certain to lose. Yeah, it's a really good question. It is a good question. Jim from Bridgewater. Well, no, I should add that you're willing to share. What about you? Have you ever pulled?

Do you ever? Um, that's a good question, I think, Um, yeah, I think I've I think I've done it in my personal life on multiple occasions. Um, you know, gone for like the big the big risk. Yeah, um, you know, hoping that it would make things work out. But as we know from the statistics of pulling the goalie, usually what happens is they just score a goal on you and it doesn't work out. Yeah, you usually fail. Yeah, so that would be me. Elizabeth Thorns politically didn't she.

I don think Elizabeth Tharos. I don't think Elizabeth what's her last name of Paris? Elizabeth Holmes Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes of Tharnis was playing without a goalie from the very This is not true. So think about her position if you think about this rationally. So, she had this idea that you could completely take over a huge corner of the healthcare market if you could do. Liabel diagnoses from

a drop of blood. She was, let's say, generously, twenty five percent of the way there, right, but we don't we don't really know how far she was, and her her gamble was I can get to one hundred percent. Undergraduate advisor appeared in the at least in the documentary and said she was zero percent of the because, okay, because I explained to her that it was impossible. Yeah, that's right. And then the other guy got it. The other advisor from Stanford got on and said, but she

was a genius, so it was possible. Yeah. So let's say, okay, let's say that she was fifteen percent of the way. They okay, So she was, in a sense, pulling the goalie. So she was faced with an all but impossible task. But there was this little glimmer of hope if she gambled everything that she could pull it off. And if she pulled it off, she would be a mega billionaire. I don't know, I mean. So she chose to play

very very very long odds. So did Bernie Madoff. According to that theory, Well no, no no, remember could have had the first pay scheme that worked by Bonnie Monoff never made an honest attempt to actually invest people's money. But he was a fraud from the start. Hers was not a fraud from the start. I mean, no one claims that she was. Did it was all fictional that when all the activity going on in her firm was just for show. No people were trying to solve the problem.

It's just the problem was pertually impossible to solve. But there was some little glimmer of not I don't mean to defend her, but I do want to point out you just there is a kind of little sliver of logic to what she was doing. She was classically pulling the goalie, like she was down by three goals with you know, deep in the third quarter, and she decided,

I'm going to go for broke. I'm gonna convince a bunch of rich people to give me lots of money, and I'm going to try and do this thing that i'm And had she succeeded, she would be right in the pantheon. Well, none of you has pulled the goalie by coming here tonight, and you've had a short thing from the beginning because you bought the book, and I'm thrilled that you did come and thrilled, and Malcolm came and joined us, and I'm really grateful to you, Malcolm

for the conversation and thank you all for coming. Thank you. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gancott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass,

Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobell. This week, we would also like to give a shout out to the Harvard Bookstore my home bookstore, for helping organize the conversation between me and Malcolm. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.