Malcolm Gladwell on Near Misses

and the Art of Battling Giants. It's a book that takes a closer look at events in which one outcome is greatly favored over another and discusses why sometimes those outcomes don't turn out as expected. This episode is a little different from our typical Solvable and that we don't exactly solve a problem here, but in the spirit of the show, we're very optimistic in our discussion of a big idea, and as you listen, you'll begin to get a sense of exactly why we chose now to have

this particular discussion. Imagine you're living in Britain in the late nineteen thirties. Germany is preparing to attack your country. It's the start of the Second World War. The military is mobilizing. Preparations are being made for mass casualties. You're debating whether or not you should stay in the city or move to the countryside until the danger has passed.

The British Military Command does a kind of projection of what they think is going to happen, and they think they're going to have six hundred thousand dead, one point two million wounded, and mass panic. They think that no one's going to go to work, which means that all of industrial production in England will cease. They think that the army will be useless because the army will be spend all of its time trying to keep the civilians like from going nuts. They really think it's over. The

fear and uncertainty in the air are palpable. But what are you going to do? Can you still go to work? What about friends of family? Will they be safe? What is going to happen to all of you? And I know these questions may feel familiar. It's just funny about how a different circumstances in different times we have very different responses to people who have this kind of psychological reaction of invulnerability. They cannot be heroes or they can

be chumps. While our responses to the fear of an impending battle and its immediate physical threats may be quite different from our responses to the fear of a global pandemic. There's a way in which they're actually kind of similar community approach. We've fallen so in love with the language of personal freedom and responsibility that we've forgotten the power of collective appeals to community. Here's my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell.

We're going to examine the parallels and intersections of fear, vulnerability, and responsibility when it comes to war and a global pandemic. Malcolm, welcome back to Solvable. It's great to have you here once again. Thank you. So I want to tell you about the my earliest introduction to you. It was in twenty thirteen and you were on the Ted Radio Hour and you were giving an interview with Guy Roz about your book David and Goliath, because you had just done

a Ted talk on that. Do you remember that, I do, Yeah, great. I liked it because, you know, as a self proclaimed church guy, you gave a very different definition to David and Goliath, the battle what actually happened? And I love this book. I bought it it's one of my favorites. I think it's you know, a lot of people talk about blank and outliers in the other books you wrote,

but David and Goliath is by far my favorite. And I bought the book thinking I'm just gonna get all these you know, insights about you know, underdogs and misfits and all that, which I did, and I thought it was gonna be purely based on David and Goliath. But then I got to one chapter and it was chapter five and a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote this book called The Structure of Morale named J. T. McCurdy talks about

the bombings in Britain. Can you recount that? Yeah? Those, So this is, by the way, thank you for the kindroids about David and Glad. David and Glad happens to be my favorite of all my books as well. So this is something that has always not just fascinated me, but puzzled people for a long time. Which was at

the start of the Second World War. The British knew that the Germans had a fleet of bombers, and they also knew the state of their defenses against bombers were that there was nothing they could do to stop the Germans. So the first thing they did, of course, was they a lot of children who lived in London were moved to the countryside. The second thing they did was they got the fire trucks ready for what would be you know,

all kinds of all kinds of the normal things. More than that, they became convinced that the devastation would be such that the population of London would panic, and so they did things like they converted a whole series of buildings on the outskirts of London to psychiatric makeshift psychiatric hospitals, because they figured so many people will be traumatized, they assumed that some incredible percentage of the population of London

would flee the city. They really worried that the war would be over, panic in London would be such and would spread the rest of the country and people would see that the Germans could just come and bomb at will, and they thought, you know, this could be this could be it for us. They were terrified from top to bottom.

So the bombing comes in the fall of nineteen forty, the famous blitz, right, and it lasts about eight months, and the Germans come, you know, not every night, but there's one stretch where they come for fifty seven consecutive nights and they drop tens of thousands of tons of high explosive bombs on London. They damage a million buildings, they wipe out much of the East End, and the panic never comes, and nobody can believe it. They're like,

what happened? Why is everyone? In fact, not only does a panic not come, but like after a little while, people get so over it that they start going back to their business and you know, they go to where or they go to the pubs at night, they party, they do all the things young people are on in the streets. And as you can imagine, every psychiatrist, social scientists, psychologists in England at the time is like driving around

London saying, I am witnessing something that makes no sense. Right, we've terror the Germans have terrorized the population of London. And there's like kids playing you know, football in the streets, and there's couples like going dancing at night, and there's people dancing drinking in pubs and the bombs are falling. It's this completely bizarre event to kick off the war.

And so this British psychiatrist comes along. J. T. McCarthy, the guy you mentioned the top, and he tries to explain what happened, and I think that's what that's the thing. It sounds like that drew your eye to that chapter. Yes, yes, And that's what gets me because when I read this, I thought about it all the time. When I first read this, and this was back in twenty thirteen, I

thought about it all the time. And I remember he divided them into three groups to direct hits, and those are the people that are dead, people that just didn't make it through the bombing. Then there were near misses. Those were people who were experiencing the devastation of the bomb but did not experience death, or even people who were close to someone who experienced the devastation of the bomb,

family member, whatever. Then there were the majority of London experience what he called remote misses, which is mean you heard about the bomb a few feet over, you felt the rumbling, you felt the building shake, but you didn't experience any devastation. And one are the quotes that you wrote the book was that the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors because the majority

of the community is experiencing remote misses. They have this experience of feeling invulnerable as opposed to the people who experienced near misses, who they actually have a higher sense of fear or a higher sense of actual danger when the bombs fall. Yeah. So yeah, he does this thing which is in retrospect. I think it's incredibly brilliant. He says that your reaction to a traumatic event is a

function of your proximity to it. So you're right, there's the people who are most proximate to a traumatic event, other ones who are killed by it. They're presumably the ones who are the most terrified at the moment before they died. But they're dead, right, Yeah, they can't spread we don't know how they felt. They can't spread their feelings.

They have no impact. They're gone. Right. Second group near miss is they're the ones who the bomb drops in the other room and they crawl out of the wreckage. Those people have traumatized, Like there's no doubt about that. Like, that's that's like, that's like you're in a car accident and your car is totaled and they take you out with the jaws of life. M right, that's that's your that's your near miss, right, that'll stay with you. Has that ever happened to you, by the way, run You're

ever in a car accident like that? No, I have not either. I know some people who have a man that like dead stays with you. That's like some serious I actually have a personal near miss story, which is I when I was a kid, And funny enough, this is not traumatic for me, but traumatic for my father.

When I was a kid, I was going hiking with my father in the winter on this gorge went in Canada, and I'm about seven, and there's a sheer sheet of ice down the side of the gorge that runs all the way to a frozen not a frozen over, but a freezing cold, fast moving river. I slip slide down the side of the gorge and come to a halt six inches from this fast moving rapids river. Where had I gone six more inches, I would be dead. Of course. Wow.

My dad never got over that. He like, you know, he had to repel down the ice and like I'm just sitting there six inches from the water on the ice, right that was for him, that's a near miss, like and he would talk about that, you know, forty years later, like it had just happened, right, He's not the remote miss though, is the category that really interested in McCurdy And he said, if the bombs across a street and you survive, your response is not trauma but exhilaration. It's

like you get a new lease on life. Can I read you from McCurdy? Absolutely, when we had been afraid that we may panic in an air aid, and when it has happened, and when we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe. The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self confidence that is the very father and mother of courage. By the way, how much do you low the way these guys right, Oh, brilliant,

there's no what what like practicing site today. They would write that in some gobble. It's like some academic and gobbledegook. And he's talking about the father and mother of courage.

I love that. You know the rest of that passage, I think it starts you started in the middle, but it starts with we are all not merely liable to fear, but we also are prone to being afraid of being afraid, which I always love, because I've realized that most of their ways in which that I've I've ever been afraid of always been the anticipation that was really killing me.

I think I've very much embraced this ideology because the idea of getting through the fear is kind of what J. T. McCurdy gets at when he talks about what happens with the British. He's basically saying, like, they got through the fear, and because the majority of them went through remote misses, it's all of a sudden like I don't even need to be scared anymore. Yeah, yeah, though I walk through the value of death. Oh there goevil, for thou art

with me. That Tiblical line is about this very phenomenon that what it says is that the function of religious faith is to turn a near miss to a remote a remote miss. Right. It's not that the danger is removed, there's you're still walking to the valley of death. But the idea is that God's with you, so you know, it's it's not as it is no longer an occasion for panic and fear. It's something that you can see to the other side of. Oh. Absolutely, that's my church moment. Too. Hey, hey,

we in here man, it's Tuesday. So so let me ask you this. So we're at we're at the end of the bombing. Um, how does the courage of the English factor into the German plan? Because their goal was to break the English and when it didn't happen, how did courage factor into that plan? Well? So this actually I talk a little about this in UM the bombom mafia. Oh nice, like the plug. Yes, that it's super interesting. The Germans also assume that the British will crumble. That's

why they're doing this thing. No one had ever done this in the history of warfare, before large scale aerial bombing of civilian populations. It was considered to be first of all, no one had bombers before. But in you know, in the in the wars of the nineteenth century, you fought armies. You didn't you didn't slaughter civilians. But the Germans were like, oh, we think that if we bomb the civilians, we'll bring the entire country to its needs.

We won't even have to fight their army. Doesn't happen, right, Brits come through, Fine, then what do the Brits do? The Brits don't learn their own lesson. They have just been through an experience where they where people have proven to be a lot tougher and more resilient than they would have imagined, and then they turn around forget that

and try the same failed experiment on the Germans. And when confronted on this question the head of the British Bomber Command, his answer was basically, well, I don't think Germans are as tough as English people, which is like

such an obnoxious British thing to say. He couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that we were dealing here with something fundamental about human beings, which is that our powers of courage and resilience, even foolhearty powers of courage and resilience, are just way more considerable than we would have imagined. We're not rational actors. Rationally, if you are living in London during the Blitz of nineteen forty, you

should leave London? Are you kidding me? They're like, there's just no reason for sticking around, and you have people stick around. They're not rational. Yeah, it makes me think

of the earliest days of the pandemic. Yeah, if we talk about the fear that I had early on and the way that I feel now we know that those feelings are markedly different, because, like, if you go back to the British and everything you said about what the British thought was going to happen to them and the ways in which they prepared at the beginning, very similarly, a lot of us were doing that same things at

the beginning of the pandemic. But it feels like in this case, especially if we start looking at the COVID statistics. So at the time of this taping, out of a population of about three hundred twenty million Americans, yeah, over forty million Americans have been affected by COVID nineteen and of that over forty million, about seven hundred and twenty thousand have died. So it's about a two percent mortality rate, which means the majority of us have been experiencing remote

misses here. Two hundred and eighty million people are fine, I'm one of the two hundred and eighty million. I don't think I got it, or if I got it, I didn't even know I had it. So like you're you, You're right, the overwhelming number of Americans are people who

had remote misses here. Yeah, I think that. Unfortunately, because there were so many remote misses that there was a higher amount of preventable deaths that probably could have been missed if the people that had remote misses had continued the same practices. Now, I don't want this to become a conversation of everybody getting basket to get immunizations. You know, I understand that those are personal decisions, and I've done both because I feel like responsible for my community. But

a lot of people haven't. And I think it's because of this phenomenon of invulnerability. I e. COVID has come. It did not get me, it didn't get the majority of us. So we're good. Yeah, you don't have to be Yes. It's funny. I think it's a perfect illustration of what McCarty is talking about. Let's compare two actors here.

There is the person in East London in nineteen forty joining the Blitz who has observed five people on their street had their houses destroyed by German bombs, and you know, five of them died, but their house is still standing and their whole family is still alive. McCurdy would say, is that person is a remote miss and they're like, whatever, I'm fine, I survived, And they're the ones who are going to the pub, and they're the ones who are going dancing on a Saturday night, And those are the

ones who just went about business as usual. Now, that person's response to the Blitz is probably best termed as irrational in that they're not out of the woods. The Germans are still coming night after night, but their psychological interpretation of their experience is one of invulnerability. How is that person any different from the person who declines to get vaccinated today? I think it's exactly the same. Yeah,

only only one difference. The person joined the Blitz who act at all, and we know whose response was I'm invulnerable, I'm fine, I'm gonna go back to work is considered to be heroic and a hero. The unvaccinated person today is considered to be a social shame now for good reasons. But it's just funny about how a different circumstances, in different times, we have very different responses to people who have this kind of psychological reaction of invulnerability. They cannot

be heroes or they can be chumps. So the reason why I think that is, and you can help me with this, but the reason why I think that is is because bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID. Avoiding bombing feels more random than avoiding COVID because with COVID, there's a lot of people that can do a lot of things, right, Like, there's studies that show that wearing a mask helps prevent the spread of COVID. There's studies that show that getting immunized helps prevent the spread of COVID.

There's studies that show that social distance helps prevent the spread of COVID. All of these things that help prevent the spread. And there's people that at every juncture have avoided those three things and still not gotten sick. And I think those people that are in the remote miss category are somehow bolstering the numbers of people that feel invulnerable in a way that's actually spreading harm in a

way that the bombing does it. Yeah, necessarily, because it's still you could go to the pub and you could still get bombed, even though you're not afraid, but you could still get bombed. Yeah. The other aspect of this is what is your social responsibility here? You could argue that in nineteen forty during the blitz, you are actually

not reacting with panic. Is a fulfilling your social responsibility, that it's a good thing that you behave in that mildly irrational way because you're in the middle of a war. You have to fight, I mean, you have to sacrifice. Social responsibility in terms of a contagious disease is the opposite that behaving with caution and being appropriately fearful is part of the way that we end diseases. So you end a war by being irrational, you end up pandemic

by being rational. I love that. Right. You can even go further and just say that no soldier in wartime can do their job without being irrational. It's nuts, right, say more, Well, you can't. You're asking someone to go out and like risk their life for some I mean meaningful cause, but like it's still abstract to them. Like the rational response to being asked to fight in a war is to go crazy and get like sent to a psychiatric hospel for the That's actually the rational response.

But people don't see that, you know, I'm glad they don't. They go through some experience in wartime believe that they are a in the remote miss category and that's where courage comes from. But so then it's courage irrational. Of course, it is Yeah, the rational thing, under any circumstances to run knowing that I guess the question that I'm really kind of that we're kind of like kind of circling.

Is understanding when courage is helpful, Yeah, and courage needs to be restrict yeah, Or making it clear to people who don't behave appropriately during a pandemic that the behavior that they're exhibiting is not courageous. It may feelgeous or come from the same psychological place as wartime courage, but it's not. It's and I This has been one of my frustrations with the messaging around things like vaccination in this country is that it's been too much about the

self and not enough about society. The argument should be very simple. When we say to someone you should get vaccinated. The wrong argument is you should get vaccinated because it could save your life. Well, most people are. They have a remote misattitude about that. It's like saying you should leave London because it will say their life. Now, I'm not leaving London as my home. The right answer is you have an obligation to other people who are more

vulnerable than you to get vaccinated. I thought, you know things the other day that the single most powerful thing that I read about the reason to get vaccinated were these personal testimonies from nurses who are describing what they've been through working in intensive care units during COVID, that seeing people die day and day out, working in these insane shifts, being completely burnt out. We are asking of people who you know, at the not the bottom of

the healthcare food chain, but pretty close to it. We're asking them to perform these unbelievably heroic acts. And if you don't get vaccinated, you're making the life of this group of unbelievably heroic people a whole lot harder. Why would you do that? Right? That's the argument, Right, So let's take it off the plane of let's acknowledge these people feel invulnerable. Yes, you feel invulnerable. Fine, it's not

about that, though. It's about you're making someone else's life miserable, and that's not what we do when we're in a civilized society. Can you think of some examples of times where community successfully went from eye to we in ways that we can learn from in trying to do that in this moment? Now? Yeah, well there's a bunch of examples, but one simple one would be One of the things that turns the corner on smoking is the introduction of

the idea of the dangers of secondhand smoke. We've been telling the smoker for a generation that they are endangering their own life, and we had very limited success in getting people to stop smoking under those circumstances. And then the conversation shift and we literally stopped talking about not talking exclusively about the smoker, and we started talking about the people around the smoker, and it became a matter of collective responsibility. Right. I'm old enough to remember when

you could smoke into of an airplane. They had a smoking section the back of an airplane. That stopped not because we were trying to prolong the lives of the people smoking in the back of airplanes, but because everyone said, oh, wait a minute, what about all the non smokers. It's about creating a safe environment and congenial environment for them.

That was a huge shift and really successful, because you know, it was a way of reaching smokers and to say you couldn't smoke, but you can't smoke in the back of the airplane. They may have felt invulnerable when it came to the individualized risks because most smokers do not die of lung cancer a lot too, but not most of them. Right, So it's for most people it's a pretty remote miss category. Do you think that that messaging is the only way to truly win the war during

this pandemic? Because again, knowing the majority of us have experienced remote missus. But now we're all making personal decisions as to how we're going to engage with the community and how we're going to be protective of those around us. So I guess the big greater question I'm asking is how do we take this information and use it to

end the war on COVID? Yeah? We stop. And to my mind, the great frustrating thing in public discourse in this country around a whole series of issues is we've fallen so in love with the language of personal freedom and responsibility that we've forgotten the power of collective appeals to community. We don't use that language anymore. No one ever says, it's not about you, it's about it's about

your service to others. Right, It's like the I mean, since we're being churchy today, the whole the whole message of the New Testament is about, like, you're do one too others as you would have to do it. I mean, not even a New Testament, the Old Testament too. The whole message is about some awareness of your place in a community, right, It's not about you. That is the

single most powerful, you know, message in human history. And we've like, well, suddenly get into these arguments where it's well, one side saying well, it's my personal choice and freedom and the other person the other side. I was saying, well, you need to be a rational actor and stop with the eyes already, Like enough with I I love it. I love it, Ronald. When we get churchy, Let's get churchy every time we do these. Yeah, don't pass with me, man,

I'll come with you with scripture every time. Yeah, I'm the one who quit scripture, not you. I was waiting for you to come back at me. I'm like I'm doing I walked in the Valley or Shadow of Death. I got crickets on your end. Malcolm, thank you so much for being with us again. It's always a pleasure of ue on the show. Thank you, Ronald, Always a pleasure. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of David and Goliath and

the co founder of Pushkin Industry. He also hosts one of our sister podcasts here at Pushkin Revisionist History available everywhere you get podcasts, and you should check out his new audio book, The Bomber Mafia. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah, booking by Lisa Dunn. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.