#1029 - Malcolm Gladwell - How to Convince the World of Bulls**t & Evil

Talk to me about the history of the death penalty, fettered past that I didn't realize existed.

Oh my goodness. In what country? In America.

Yes.

Well, this is a subject we dig into in this new

series we've done on revisionist history, the Alabama murders. And, you know, the history of the death penalty in the United States is not a...

In other countries, the battle is essentially about whether you should have it or not.

and in america the battle is really

uh we'd like the states to have the right to do it but they have to do it humanely it's this absurd position where the an issue is not the morality of the state taking someone's life the issue is that the state should take someone's life in a manner that seems consistent with the values of america so

there is this you know the used to be the case you know it was the it was the way back when it was

we

hung you publicly. Then we moved on from that.
And then was the firing squad, which was considered to be more humane. Then they moved on from the firing squad and they went to the electric chair.

And then from the electric chair, they went to

lethal injection.

And then from lethal injection, they have now gone on

to

nitrogen gas, to asphyxiating you with nitrogen gas.

I didn't know about the most recent

17 Pro Max that came out of the past. This is the latest wrinkle.
Right. So they've been, and at each stage, the intention was, formally, the intention was to make the death more humane and

certain for the person being executed. But in fact, the intention was to make the process of execution more acceptable to the public.

So they're looking for the way that the form of executing somebody that is the easiest to watch. So you can imagine how

hanging would be

quite a spectacle, you know, a disturbance, but you wouldn't take your child to a hanging.

You know, the

execution by firing squad might be a little less dramatic. But certainly the big jump was the electric chair was gruesome.

I mean, somebody whose brains are literally being fried in front of your eyes and their eyes are popping out and things. So there really was, that was up until the 1970s.

And the move to lethal injection was the idea was that we can put people down the way we put down horses. And that's really quite calm and seem, appears at least to be kind of calm and humane.

And it's done by medical people. And it's all very kind of,

so that's, that's the kind of like, it's a very curious, peculiarly American approach to this subject.

And what is the,

what's the current status of that in the US? Well, a guy, we get into this in the podcast, a very brilliant Canadian like me,

a guy named Joel Zivet,

who's an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist with a kind of side interest in the death penalty.

People have been using lethal injection for

40 years, since the late 70s. It had become the standard for if you wanted to kill somebody and you're a state government in the U.S.,

you inject them with three drugs. The first is a

sedative.

The second is, it calms you down. The second is a paralytic, which just kind of like

keeps you in one place. And the third is potassium chloride, which stops your heart.
And that's the was that you got calmed down, you were buckled in, and

the paralytic just kept you still, and then we stopped your heart with potassium chloride.

And what Joel Zivitt discovers is that's not how you die during

lethal injection. You die because the first thing you get, which is typically some kind of barbituate, the sedative, so alters your the

the pH, the acidity of your blood, that essentially your lungs are on fire and burn up.

And you can't cry out in pain because you've been given a paralytic.

And so you spend a few minutes in exquisite agony as you're, imagine pouring

acid. Imagine forcing someone to drink a cup of acid.
That's essentially what we're doing. And then

I give you another drug which makes it impossible for you to be heard as you silently scream. That's lethal injection.
And so ever since

he showed the world that,

there's been this idea that, oh, maybe we should move to asphyxiating people with nitrogen.

Sounds humane, comparatively.

It is. Honestly, when I was doing this, our podcast is all about

this murder that took place in Alabama, and all of these issues come up in the course of, as the state tries to figure out how to, what to do with the killers. And it is the most,

not only are the details of these things just so bizarrely macabre. I don't know, how do you pronounce that word? I never know.
Macabre. Macabre.
Did you say macabre? Yeah, yeah.

The details are so absurdly that way. But then what's additional is that there is simply no interest in any of these details on the part of, we were talking about a case that happened in Alabama.

The state government of Alabama is just just completely indifferent to all these.

They don't even like,

they don't even seem to care what happens to somebody that they're executing.

They're just kind of, and that was the kind of one of the many revelations in doing this little mini-series we did called the Alabama Murders, was the kind of,

it's almost as if

for the state of Alabama and other states,

the cruelty is the point.

That telling them that what they thought was humane actually isn't, doesn't diminish their motivation and enthusiasm. It seems to increase it.

We're going to have this come up with the

young person that shot Charlie Kirk. It sounds like.
I think the day that

the

chief of police did a press conference,

one of the first things that he said was, we will be seeking the death penalty. Yes, Utah is a state.
Now, Utah has used where Charlie Kirk was killed,

has in some cases gone back to the firing squad. Oh, wow.
Okay. Really.

We could pull that out again.

Nostalgia. Brilliant.
Yeah.

Play the old stuff. Play the old songs again.

It is. It is very like, you know, the band from the 70s playing its hits.

Now, I don't know. In some states,

it's considered, this is again very American. You get to choose your method.

I don't know whether that's the case in Utah. What would you choose?

Firing squad. I'd go firing squad, too.
It's a pretty heroic way to.

The one that I would really want is guillotine.

Oh, that's epic. Yeah.

Yeah. And then have your head placed somewhere magnificent for the rest of time.

Well, you know, the thing about guillotine was, you know, guillotine at the time was considered this great progressive innovation. It wasn't,

it was intended to be a vast improvement over like

tying people to the wheels of wagons and running them over. It was like, look, we're a civilized society.
We should be able to kill people quickly and cleanly.

And so the guy, the guy who gave the guillotine his name, whatever his name was,

the Jacques Guillotine, that was his, his whole thing is that, you know,

we're we're a civilized country. This is we're frenchmen of the 18th century you know we can't be playing these games um

so like i would there's something to be said chops the head off with a big blade

yeah there's something to be said for um i mean it's an you know the very fact we're having this conversation is

is

absurd right like

why why are states killing people like i it just seems like it's just the idea that we're entertaining this conversation in 2025 is slightly incredible. It's a sign of just how strange America is.

I mean, you're new to America. Does this not strike you as just being bizarre?

Not particularly. I think that the desire for retribution has existed throughout every

sort of human's thought processes, whether they're modern or from five decades ago or forever ago.

You know,

capital punishment, is that the sort of the title for this kind of a thing? Right, yeah.

Mutiny, you know, pirates on pirate ships, stuff like that. There is this sense of

there is a particular line that if you cross it,

the threshold is you pay the ultimate price, which is that you no longer get to live. I understand, my point is, I understand the psychological compulsion from humans.
It doesn't surprise me.

Do we think, would I have thought that in the modern world, we would have transcended that in the same way as we transcended shitting in the street and and uh open warfare that you just do on your neighbor because you don't like him or something um yeah in in some ways but i think the

the compulsion the desire to do it makes makes makes total sense to me and you get this lock-in from the past uh there is i would imagine an argument a sort of a twofold argument uh one being uh this person did something so heinous that they do not deserve to live anymore.

And secondly,

this is

a deterrent to other people who would consider doing this in future.

One, oddly enough, one is the second one is very sort of utilitarian.

And the first one is actually kind of like karmic and astral. And

I think, I don't know, what do you make of that post-mortem on the sort of modern world of it?

Well,

I guess I'm more

puzzled by

you're speaking in terms of this being an understandable human response to an act of brutality.

But I'm more puzzled by the fact that if it is an understandable human response, why is it confined in the developed world to the United States?

Why is it not understandable in England, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal?

you know, on and on and on. Greece, Italy, they don't have an understandable human response.

Canada, Bermuda, Jamaica. How long ago did France must have used the guillotine relatively recently? Until I think the 80s.
So it's been a good,

it's been a good 40 years. Yeah.
They were one of the last holdouts. But I mean, look, when you have come up with the entire genre yourself,

you've got to keep playing the old songs. You know, you've got to keep using the guillotine until the 80s.

It is, it goes to this thing that I'm so obsessed with, which is that I do not believe that either Americans or non-Americans fully appreciate just how weird America is.

I think that Americans think, oh, the rest of the world is kind of like us, only just a little less so.

And non-Americans, if they don't know America well, just assume, oh, it's like, you know, it's like, it's like England, but it's bigger.

Actually, it's not like England. It's bigger.
Like Canadians are, I'm a Canadian. Actually, I'm an Englishman, but I'm an adoptive Canadian.

Canadians make, we make this mistake all the time because we really, you know, we watch the same same sports, we watch a lot of the same television.

It looks, if you drive from Detroit across the border or Buffalo across the border to Toronto, it all looks the same.

If you didn't know there was a border there, you would think you would still, and yet the differences between Canada and the United States are just phenomenal.

Like, so it's that, that's something that's always puzzled me that

this country that

I'm an immigrant to is just, I don't understand why it's so singular.

Yeah. Why is 50 countries combined together under a single government, single currency, single language? I think you get some weird externalities when you just combine that many people with.

Yeah. What's the line from the Paul Simon song?

A loose accumulation of millionaires and billionaires.

I wasn't familiar with that. Something like that.
That's from Days of Miracle and Wonder.

yeah, yes, it's not. I mean, where you are living in Texas is not the same country as where I live in New York State.
No, that's correct.

Speaking of trajectories over time, do you think that the tipping point

aged with difficulty? Like lots changed in the information landscape from then until now.

I'm particularly interested in sort of what you

didn't or couldn't foresee,

what happened that you couldn't have predicted in that way, which obviously led to the revenge of. Yeah.

I mean, we're talking about two books written 25 years apart. My first book, The Tipping Point, my last book, Revenge or The Tipping Point.
When I wrote the first book,

the internet is really just in its infancy.

And

all of social media doesn't exist.

And

the Cold War has just ended, and we're absurdly optimistic about the future of the world. And I'm 30-some-odd years old,

and you know, my world is, my life is ahead of me. And then 25 years later, when I write the sequel,

I don't know whether the dynamics

that I'm describing in the original tipping point are that, you know, the simple idea, the spread of ideas can usefully be

understood as similar to the spread of disease, that the same contagious principles that govern epidemics of disease govern epidemics of ideas. That idea was a novel idea

in

the year 2000. Today, it's a commonplace idea.
So, in essence, it's not that the ideas of the book became dated, it's that they became commonplace. Right? Now, everything's viral now.

We talk about that. And everybody, we use that.
When we say something on

Twitter, it's become viral. We are using the language of epidemics of disease.
We have adopted that metaphor as our own.

So the task.

So when I sat down to write this kind of sequel to my first book, it wasn't that I was saying, okay, I got it wrong and this is what I missed. I mean, I did a little bit of that in the book.

It was more like, okay, the task is different now. We've all accepted this metaphor.
Let's dig a little deeper and try and understand what it means.

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Do you feel like a Cassandra in that context? Being able to

virality and the contagion?

Well, not really. I mean, I feel there's something kind of very self-regarding about calling oneself a Cassandra.
Look, I I love the question I love the question because everyone's

desire this compulsion the temptation to see yourself as the prescient clairvoyant that could have I would have said it before I think it it speaks it speaks to you that you're like ah fuck you know like I just kind of said because I got the listen academics were talking about I got this idea from yeah sociologists were using this metaphor in this way it wasn't like I somehow saw it.

I just kind of stumbled on this idea and said, I love this idea. I think it's a good idea.
It's who popularizes it, not who came up with it.

So, okay, I'm interested in how your view of influence has evolved

since the tipping point. Obviously, you're saying dynamics that you noticed back then are now very commonplace in terms of how people describe stuff now.

So that's something that's the same. What's changed? What's differed? What's evolved?

So one of the ideas that I spent a lot of time with in the original Tipping Point and in the sequel is

just the observation that social influence is asymmetrical.

and this is true of epidemics of disease, many kinds of epidemics of disease, which is that

if you look at COVID,

every person infected with COVID does not carry an equal risk of infecting someone else. The job of infecting is done by about 5% of the population.
That 5%

might be 100 or even 1,000-fold more likely to pass on their infection to someone else than the rest of us. That's an asymmetry.
Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's a massive asymmetry.

That is very similar to the way ideas spread.

If a hundred of us think that Taylor Swift is a great singer, we are not equally responsible for spreading that news to the rest of the listening, music-loving public.

There's going to be four or five of us who do all the work, right? Who have, by virtue of their social position or their

or the kind of trust that people have in them or

how socially connected they are, they can tell the world that this unknown artist named Taylor Swift is great. But if somebody is, if my mom listens to Taylor Swift in her nursing home,

she's not that and loves her. It's not a consequential fact in the history of the trajectory of Taylor Swift, right? With all due respect to my mom.

She's not like, does not have her finger on the paws of popular culture.

But you can all, you can imagine that there are people who are, you know, massively social connected and have bona fides there are people who when we want to know what to listen to we we listen to them and if that person likes tail swift it really matters that process asymmetry which i was really fascinated with in the original tipping point and i was this it's the great commonality between diseases and spreads of ideas i think it's that's gotten more marked in the i think everything's asymmetrical now

i you know i in if you'd asked me 25 years ago i would say that select kinds of contagious ideas have this pattern.

But

many other things are kind of like spread randomly or spread equally through the population.

I think everything's asymmetrical now. I think that

I don't think you can find a phenomenon that isn't marked by the fact that 5% of the infected population is doing 90% of the work.

Why?

Because I think,

I mean, here's an analogy, which is

before there's air travel, international air travel, so we're in the 19th century. And if you had

a contagious disease,

it would spread to another country only if somebody got

on a passenger ship, crossed the ocean, and was still infectious at the time they got off the ship, right? So things did move around the world, but they moved relatively slowly around the world.

That's where quarantine came from, right? Quarantia.

Yeah.

Exactly. That you could, you, and it was possible to kind of nip these things in the bud.

Now,

then there's the age of jet travel. And all of a sudden, I could be in, I could catch a cold in New York and be in,

and spread it to my dinner partner in London that night, right? Like,

so what's happened is that a technological intervention has sped up and and enhanced the asymmetrical process. So

the small group of people who travel a lot become hugely important in spreading disease, right? Because they have access now to way more.

You know, if you,

so, you know, I travel a lot. Like I would be one of those.
I probably travel more than 99% of. the human population.

If I have, if I'm deep, if I'm very infectious with a cold and I get on a six-hour flight to Los Angeles, I am like, like patient zero. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm doing the work of

a hundred people. Um, so that when you think about the digital age, it's doing that for ideas.
There's just so many more contacts between people now and access to ideas and the

and the um

the kind of uh uh the social power, the connective power of certain kinds of individuals is just so enhanced. Right.
The virtue of the interconnectedness, it allows the super spreaders to

be just way more

effective and powerful. And not only that,

there's an additional thing, which I actually get into in my book when I talk about the opioid crisis, but technology also allows people who want to spread things to better identify who the super spreader is.

That's crucial, right? As opposed to being, you know, 25 years ago, you say, I think that most ideas

are spread by a very small group of influential people. I have a vague idea who they are, but I don't know for sure.

Now, I feel like we sort of don't know for sure, but our certainty about who the super spreader is is much greater. And that means that the super spreader's power is enhanced even further, right?

That's an interesting

transparency or obviousness

and awareness of everybody of the influence of the person and of the, you know, the

common knowledge idea? It's kind of like the emperor's new clothes. It's not enough to know the emperor has no clothes on.
You need to know that everybody else knows as well.

And if that person is the most influential, but.

Does everybody else know that they're the most influential?

Well, if you have this big number next to their Instagram account or their YouTube subscribers or, or, you know, their newsletter lists or whatever,

oh, other people,

here's an objective statement of how many other people think this person is a person of note. And

yeah, it's this odd

people accumulate reach, the opportunity to be connected to more people. That reach gives them a degree of authority independent of their authority, right? They may have some authority already,

some sort of trust, prestige, dominance type thing.

And then everybody's awareness of the fact that other people are aware of their authority supercharges this even more. So, yeah, I can see how these things sort of square

cube. And yeah.

The original observation, though, is

this idea of the transparency of asymmetry. So not only, so we know things are asymmetrical, but now we know where the asymmetry lies, has affected nearly every field that you can imagine.

Let me give you two random examples. The big one is in fighting crime.
Because of our ability now to precisely track and model

outbreaks of criminal behavior, we now know if you go to a criminologist and they look at a map of Austin, Texas, or London, England, or New York City, they can tell you exactly

the

15 or 20 city blocks where 50% of the crime in those cities takes place on a regular basis. They can tell you

down to the stretch of sidewalk

where

a criminal act is most likely to occur. And we can put police there and we can effectively shut down that criminal act.

That is, crime is a highly contagious asymmetrical activity where a small group of people commit a huge majority of the crimes.

And they commit it they commit those crimes in predictable places at predictable times according to predictable patterns and if you know all those things you can completely tell your

your policing your law enforcement

um i was talking to a guy yesterday who uh

uh is working in um he runs the anti-mosquito spraying program in a county in Florida. And

they used to spray huge amounts of pesticide over the entire county with planes. Now they use drones and LIDAR.

And now what you do is you figure out exactly where the swarms of mosquitoes are and you only

you send the drone to that exact spot and you just spray the spot, right?

It's like, it's like hilarious.

It's like the Ukraine war going on with pesticides and mosquitoes. in a random part of Florida.
But that's the same thing.

Mosquitoes are massively asymmetrical. It's like all of the damage is being done by a group in a very specific spot.
And now that we know where the spot is, you can fight the epidemic at its source.

You don't have to spray everything. That's a great metaphor for how the world has changed in the last 25 years.

Yeah, I mean, that's a new way to talk about super spreader, right? Super efficient spreader, perhaps. Yes.

You mentioned OxyContin there, opioids. Why is the OxyContin saccla family such a good

through-line case study? Literally, morally, pharmaceutically, like what is it that they all bring together in one example?

Well,

you have to understand that OxyContin, the most infamous drug of the last hundred years, the drug that kicked off this opioid crisis in the United States that

at its peak was claiming, whatever, 120,000 lives a year. I mean, unbelievable carnage.
There's nothing particularly special about OxyContin. It's just

a reworking of a drug, of drugs that have been around for years and years and years.

They made it a little more powerful, they made it a slow release, but it's not, it wasn't like it was some dramatic breakthrough.

So in other words, OxyContin is not the product of some kind of innovative genius. What it is, is the product of

a marketing innovation. That what they realized, what Purdue, the maker of OxyContin, realized in the 1990s and early aughts as this epidemic had started, is that if you look at

how

an addictive painkiller is prescribed by doctors across the United States, there is a massive asymmetry. Most doctors don't prescribe it at all because they are doctors.

They are aware of how dangerous opioids are. and they dramatically limit their patients' access to them.

A very, very, very small group of doctors in a very, very specific parts of the country don't give a shit.

And

what Purdue was able to do using the kinds of databases that we have now that we didn't have 20 years ago that track the prescribing habits of every doctor in America is precisely identify and target the tiny fraction of doctors who didn't give a shit.

That's how we got the opioid crisis.

It is exactly what we're talking about.

It's finding the swarm of mosquitoes. It's looking at the block in New York City where all the crime is.

They found those doctors and they said, we're going to ignore every, we're talking about 2,000 doctors out of the hundreds of thousands of doctors who could potentially have prescribed OxyContin.

They find that group of 2,000 and they put all of their resources in trying to convince those 2,000 people to prescribe as much oxycontin as is humanly possible.

That is the entire, that's all you need to know about the opioid crisis, right?

It's just a ruthless application of this kind of asymmetry that we've been talking about.

Everyone else up to that point was under the illusion that if I want to sell lots of a given drug, I got to reach everybody, right?

I need as many customers as possible, doctor customers as possible. And Purdue's like, no, you don't.
Well, you're nuts. You need to focus on 2% of the population in order to make this thing take off.

And

that's how we get to 120,000 deaths a year.

Is there a way that an epidemic of drugs differs from an epidemic of ideas, or even, I guess, an epidemic of viruses?

Do ideas spread in the same way? Or is there something else going on?

Well, you know, I mean, I'm hesitant. One should always be hesitant about making sweeping statements about.
Especially when the word epidemic is being used, yes. I think that the

I would say that the commonalities are greater than

we imagine.

Obviously,

you don't die in the same numbers from a noxious idea that you do from

a dangerously addictive opioid.

So there's that.

And

ideas,

there are some weird differences, which is, when I was doing my book and I was talking to all these people who studied the opioid crisis, the thing that they couldn't understand was why it lasted so long.

It should have, normally when you look at an epidemic of disease or that's killing lots of people, is they burn out really quickly. The crack epidemic in the 90s doesn't actually last that long.

The HIV.

Well, we really get a really powerful medical intervention early on, but HIV doesn't, in the Western world, does not hang around for decades. It gets tamed pretty quickly.

The flu comes every fall and it's gone by the spring, right? You're not, people, large numbers of people aren't coming out with, but opioids linger. That was what was so weird.

It goes on for 25 years. It's still going on.

It's finally starting to fall, but it's at a high level because it moves from opioids to heroin and then heroin to prescription drugs to heroin and then heroin to fentanyl and then fentanyl to mixtures of ulcer

and just keeps going and all these people who study this for a living they're observing this and they keep waiting for it to burn out right like there's a there's a well-known generational mechanism where if your dad or mom is addicted this happened with crack the kids of people whose parents were addicted to crack did not touch crack

you saw what happened and you were like i want no part of it right um it's interesting with the the the uh genetic predisposition that would be carried through as well.

So what you have to assume there is the environmental like inverse role model effect is so powerful that it's got escape velocity to get over

you having the role building block genetics of an addict. Yeah.
Yeah, that's impressive. Really?

I mean, you see a lesser version of this with, I mean, alcoholism clearly runs in families, but I think that might be because

to use the same kind of model that you're talking about, that there,

people can be functioning alcoholics for their entire lives. And so the kind of lesson that the child is receiving is a little bit more mixed.
With crack, you literally saw your parents

disintegrate in front of your eyes. It's a really, really powerful, concentrated lesson that this is something you stay away from.

If the natural path of alcoholism was that one of your parents starts drinking when you're 12 and they're dead by 16, then I would imagine that the alcoholism would not run in families in the same way.

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There's this idea called the region beta paradox.

Things that are not bad enough to be bad, but not good enough to be good.

Living in a house that's in an all right location and the rent's not too expensive, but there's mold in your landlord's dick or being in a relationship with somebody and they're not abusive, but you're really not that in love.

And maybe they're cheating on you actually and you're not too sure. All of these people would be worse if their situations,

all these people would be better off if their situations were worse. Worse.
Oh, that's fascinating. It would kick them out the bottom.

And

I talked about this a few years ago, and

as the internet does, clipped it and did a thing. And somebody asked me at this live show I did in Australia last year, stood up, and he says, you know, you have done live events.

And sometimes questions are a little more verbose. They're a little bit rambling.
And this one was real sharp and short. And he says, I think I'm in region beta.

Should I purposefully make my life worse so I get out of it? And I was like,

this is kind of a radical solution. It's a high-risk strategy, but I don't know.
It might work. And we came up with a slightly different solution.
But I thought that was really funny.

It's like... Well, the version of that is the difference between the Cold War and, you know, Russia and Ukraine.

We never, the Cold War never becomes a hot war because the consequences of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States are existential.

Russia and Ukraine just are just like slowly over time randomly destroying each other. And, you know, they can, both of them are carrying on, right? So it's like

they're in, they're in, what's the phrase? Region beater? Region beater. Yeah, beta, you guys would call it region, region, region, beta paradox.

That conflict is in

100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it really is.

I suppose one solution here would be if you're an alcoholic, you could start trying crack.

That might be a way.

Yeah, another radical one. Another thing I'm interested in, this parental contagion idea, I've been having a lot of

conversations recently about embryo selection, IVF embryo selection,

polygenic risk scores and stuff like that, and

the potential

the potential sort of tiger mom implications pre-birth that could roll back. So I'm interested in this parental contagion idea that you talked about.

Well

I'm a little bit of a skeptic on

that kind of apologenic screening, because the things that you're interested in are the ones that are impossible to screen for. Right.
So

intelligence, if it's definable at all, is probably the result of an unknowable interaction between so many thousands of genes that God knows how you select for it.

And then the other thing is like,

if you don't have a handle on the ways in which a genetic susceptibility interacts with the environment, then you could select for something and it could all come to naught. Right? Like

when I think about what

intelligence is or what what it what the kind of determinants of success are, they are There's so much A, randomness, and B,

so much of it is about motivation.

And

motivation is the least genetically determined of all the

character traits. Conscientiousness is the,

you know what's the big five? Conscientiousness, neuroticism.

openness to experience,

agreeableness and extroversion. Agreeableness and extroversion.

Conscientiousness is the least genetically determined of all those. Extroversion is the most.
Yeah. And that's because conscientiousness is powerfully environmentally determined.

If you like your job and you like your boss and you like your coworkers, you'll work hard. If you hate them all, you won't.
Whereas, you know, if an extrovert in a

room full of

sour people is still an extrovert. They're still yucking it up.
Like Like they're not, you're relatively impervious to that.

And I, I've come to the opinion that when it comes to explaining performance,

conscientiousness and motivation are way, way, way, way, way, way more important than we realize. And if that's the thing that's the least genetically determined, then what are we doing here?

Yeah, I mean, I suppose the argument would be trying to gain 1% or 0.1% wherever we can, the same as playing classic music to your unborn baby while it's in the womb because it's going to help the brain complexity of the brain development.

Or, you know, people are the same reason that I use a temperature-controlled mattress duvet that tracks my HRV and I try to not eat three hours before I get, you know what I mean?

Like, people are trying to, are you on the HIV train? I am on the HRV train. Look at me.
I think I'm on the HRV train. Yes.
Whoop brothers. Whoop brothers indeed.
Whoop, baby. Yeah.

Whoop, whoop. We could do a whole side thing on whoop.
I'm a whoop obsessive. Whoop, its chief function for me is, sorry, this is a digression.

The sleep score, really what it is, is I think I had a shitty night. I think whoop tells me I didn't.
This happened last night. My daughter wakes me up at four o'clock in the morning.

Daddy, daddy, I want to.

And I can't get back to sleep and I wake up dreading my whoop score. Whoop said I had a great night of sleep and I've been fine ever since.
But what about the gaslighting in the other direction?

That's what you need.

But what happens when you think you had a great night's sleep, you wake up and... and almost never happens.
It's only for me, it only ever works. If I think I had a great night, I had a great night.

Maybe Will,

I could get the CEO's whoops. Did he skew my numbers? Maybe he gave me a sleep.

I could ask him whether or not he could give me like optimistic whoop.

I just want to be gaslit. I'm happy to be gaslit.
I only want to be gaslit in one direction now. I always want to assume that I've got more sleep.

What's your HIV average?

Probably in the 50s, high 50s. It's not that great.
Good for you. No, that's high.
I mean, I'm lower, but but I'm a good deal older. It drops with age.
Easiers, such as myself.

Parental contagion. Parental contagion.

So there's, I mean, I guess the,

I'm so impressed by this unknown interaction between environment and genes that I'm hesitant to kind of

go too far on.

There was a great book written that I wrote about at the time 30 years ago it was written by called Do Parents Matter by Judith Harris and

she basically summed up all of the evidence about

what impact parental child raising has on the kid and he answers the evidence says not a lot basically if your kid you're feeding your kid and they have a roof over their heads and you're not terrifying them every night, it doesn't matter what you do.

And the book, of course, is enormously controversial. Now that I'm a parent, I totally agree with it.

But like, I just think it's such a, the whole relationship between

parents and the outcomes of their children is so

muddy and murky and

that I don't even know what to make.

I don't know what to make of it in any context now. I don't like, in fact, I have a game that I play with people, which is

when I say, you know, people all love to play the game of, well, in this way, I'm just like my mom, or in this this way, I'm just like my dad. And I say, no, no, no, no.
Skip a generation.

The only way to do that usefully is to, is to think about your four grandparents. Because there's too much noise with your parents.
Who knows? You grew up with your mom and your dad.

Like, who knows, like, who knows if you're.

Shed environment, N of two.

Yeah, but who knows? And you have such a tangled psychological relationship. Who knows if you're even accurately representing the way they are, the way you are, right?

I can skip, I could give you, I could go on for half an hour about my father, and were my father alive and listening to it.

I'm quite sure there's a possibility he would listen to that and say, I am nothing like that.

Right?

My, and that's just the reality of your parental relationship. Your version of your parent and your parents' version of themselves are going to be different.

So, like, I don't know, how do we even start figuring out how your parent influences you? At least with your grandparents, there's a degree of remove.

So, I can say,

my dad would tell a story about my mom's father, who was this kind of

quiet, thoughtful, bookish guy.

But

people would always ask him to give speeches at weddings. And my father once went to an event where my grandfather was speaking, saw him and said, oh, no, he went to an event where I was speaking,

saw me and said, I saw you. And I saw, I thought it was daddy.
They all called him daddy. I thought it was daddy.
Now, so there's an example of like, it was clear.

the relationship between me and my grandfather is clear. But like, you would never have walked into my father and said, oh, I see that's Malcolm.

You know, like, it's too much noise. One of my friends, his answer to the question,

if you could go for dinner with four people living or dead, who would it be? His answer to that is always his four great-grandfathers.

says you would learn far more from sitting down with your own genetics than you would for sitting down with some genius. 100% agree.
How cool would that be? 100%. How cool would that be?

Although, and I didn't know my grandparents very well, so I would settle for my four grandparents.

But yeah, the four grandparents.

I didn't know mine either. Can I give you, I came up with this idea a couple of weeks ago.

I'm going to give it to you. It's my show.
I can do what I want.

But it's called the parental attribution error. We love blaming our parents.
It's practically a rite of passage in modern psychology. But there's a double standard buried in the trend.

We attribute what's broken in us to our upbringing while claiming what's strong in us is ours alone.

Call it the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error, where we blame others' actions on their character, but excuse our own by pointing to circumstance.

This is a skewed way of assigning credit and blame. We externalize the bad, internalize the good.
We're quick to blame and slow to credit.

You say that you're anxiously attached because no one held you when you needed it, but isn't your ability to be alone with your emotions and to endure discomfort quietly also forged in the same crucible?

You blame your parents for pushing you too hard in school, convinced that it made you perfectionistic and neurotic, but when was the last time you acknowledged that same pressure gave you ambition, discipline, and drive?

Do you point to a childhood where mistakes weren't tolerated as the reason that you fear failure? But what about your meticulousness and your standards and your refusal to phone it in? Basically,

as far as I can see, people are more than happy to lay the blame for their shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but very rarely lay the credit for their victories there too.

And I just, I thought that was an interesting asymmetry.

Yeah. That's like,

that is,

it's funny that you, that is a, a, a beautiful allegory to the fundamental attribution error that there are, we make, I, I have my own version of that, which is what I call the

asymmetrical parental attribution error. Okay.
I love asymmetries.

And that is that we indulge in that, but typically when we indulge in that, we only ever make reference to one of our parents at a time.

So you don't say, I got this bad from my mom and this bad from my father. What you do is you're in a moment or a stage where you say, well, you're just blaming dad.

And then yours pass and you flip and you just blame mom for a while. And then you flip.
It's at only one time you can only hold one

disparaging.

Right, okay. That's brilliant.
It's like,

I remember Scott Alexander had this idea. He called it thinking in superpositions, right? That you could have two worlds exist in your mind at the same time.

But when when you're talking about the parents, it's like you have to collapse the superposition down.

Like the uncertainty principle isn't able to exist, only one parent can exist in your mind at one time.

Yeah, it's never the interaction between the bookish father and the outgoing mother, and I am somewhere in between. It's like when you're not wanting to be outgoing, it's like, well, dad did tell it.

And when you can't chill out, it's like, well, mom did say. Spinary.
Yeah. And what's what's there are many interesting things about this, particularly now that I'm a parent.
The

one is that from a very early age, and this is an obvious, dumb observation, but it's nonetheless one that I've been thinking about. There is a

hypothetically, you might think, that the child, particularly the young child, thinks of their parents as a unit.

My parents don't want me to do this. My parents, but in fact, they never do.
From the very beginning, they're distinguishing between

the father and the mother or whatever.

And we continue to do this later. You know, I think this becomes even more kind of pronounced as we get older.
And it's a,

it is, in the beginning, it's understandable because you're correctly as a toddler understanding your parents relate to you independently and using different strategies.

But you are, to your point, you're completely missing the extent to which it is the interaction between your parents that also fundamentally shapes you. You're just blind to it.
Like they,

the consensus position of Joyce and Graham Gladwell was X. And X also had an effect on me, right? Not just Joyce and Graham individually.
Well, how many people,

when they get together, are different people to who they are when they're apart?

With some of my friends, there's a version of both of us that comes out. And maybe it's even more us, right?

It feels closer to our sense of self than I am when I'm on my own or with other people that I maybe even know better, but there's something or the reverse.

I'm around some person, and around them, all I can do is be bitter or resentful, or I think small-minded things, or I see the world in a scarcity mindset, or whatever.

Given the fact

you talk a lot in stories, which I think is why

it's very easy to read your writing,

when it comes to the medium of communicating

infectious ideas, obnoxious or benevolent, I guess.

Talk to me about the landscape of how storytelling infects

differently than facts and sort of how that plays together. Because I think in the modern world, people assume that people you should be convinced by the facts, follow the facts, follow the science.

But

I'm not convinced that that's the way that the human brain works, especially when you're trying to

change opinions, fuel empathy, even fuel hate as well. Yeah.

Well, the story does a lot better job of eliciting emotion.

And that's enormously important, obviously, in

anchoring an idea and making and giving an idea

leverage over somebody's

thinking or feeling.

The story embedded, this is a kind of more subtle point, but

a story to my mind is a narrative that

defies or a narrative that betrays the audience's expectations. That's what a story is.
The reason I will,

why did I watch

HBO's Task? I finished it on Sunday. I watched it every week for seven weeks.
Why did I keep watching? Well, it's interesting. I need one TV show to watch.

But fundamentally, I didn't know how it was going to end, right? So I knew if you had asked me before the final episode, how do I think it's going to end, I would have given you

six possibilities. Turns out almost all of them were wrong.
So the story, what made it satisfying to watch that through to the end, was that it did not conform to my expectation. And I knew that.

And that's why I was drawn to it, right? I knew that it was pointless to figure out, try and figure out how it was going to end.

And all stories, good stories, good songs, good, all have that quality of betraying our expectation. And we know that going in, and that's why we want it.

There's something fundamentally human about wanting our expectations to be betrayed. That's why we laugh at jokes, right? That's why there's so many things we do.

Why would, think about it, why would somebody pay an enormous sum of money to sit in an arena and have just somebody,

one person up on stage, just tell these abbreviated anecdotes about their life or the world. And the answer is because it's just a constant rush of betrayed expectations, right?

Like there's a, I always watch these little Instagram snippets of

Nate Brigasi.

And is that, am I pronouncing his name right? Brigatz Brigasi. I've only ever seen it written down.
Yeah. So, who I think is very, very, very, very funny in a kind of, but his portrayals are so

beautifully done and so subtle. And so, because he's working with this incredibly narrow template of, he's telling these

super kind of

prosaic and benign stories about family life. Right.
So you, and so your expectation is nothing can be funny or happen here, right? He's, he's taken so many things off the table.

There's going to be no,

you know,

dangerous, edgy commentary. There's no politics.
There's no sex. There's no violence.
There's no swearing. There's no nothing.
He's not going to rag on anybody. He's not going to make fun of anybody.

So you're like, so we've narrowed it, and that's why he's so inviting. You're like, okay, this dude is trying to thread the needle here.
He's going to do something.

He's going to betray me after taking 90% of the possible objects of betrayal off the table, right? And then he pulls it off, and you're like, oh my God, that's...

And so you laugh way out of proportion to

the quality of the joke. I mean, the joke is,

the joke itself is pretty mild, but the degree of difficulty is so great, that's what you're rewarding. You're like, you did it, man.
Like,

you did not see that coming. And you, you decided you want to paint in one color.
Right. That's like, and that's, that is the, so Aldush is a long way of saying

that a story is one of the few places where we are willing. to change our mind, right?

It's when we're talking about a betrayed expectation, we're talking about you change your mind.

And

facts don't, people have no difficulty whatsoever dismissing facts. But the kind of subtle mind changing that comes with a story is much harder to dismiss.

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Dude, that's so great. That's

such an interesting insight.

I had this conversation with Alex O'Connor, who is a upcoming

agnostic commentator, I guess.

We would have called him an atheist a few years ago, but I don't think that's that's that's kind of the in-term anymore. And he's very pro-religion.
He's he's fascinated.

He goes into every conversation with a

theologist or a believer, desperately hoping to believe on the other side. He just has a very high bar for it and is educated in the counter-arguments.
And

he said this real interesting thing: that what we are asking people to do in the modern world is to ignore

the

types of information and persuasion which is most most easily understood and believed in, story, myth, archetype, narrative, personification,

to dispense with that in place of stats, figures, numbers, charts, data, sterile, scientific, rational,

materialistic. And he goes, Is it any surprise that you can't sort of rip people across? You can't bludgeon them over the head with just more bar charts

in the hopes that you and then shame them for not

believing, right?

The thing which is most believable to you is the thing which you're not supposed to believe, and the thing which is least understandable and the least salient to you is the thing that you're now supposed to put all of your faith in.

And again, asymmetries, this asymmetry between the power of story and the power of statistics.

Shapiro's got that famous facts don't care about your feelings. Like, it could not be more backward.

It's like feelings really do not care about your facts at all, especially if that feeling has come from a fable, right, or a story. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Although he's using it in a slightly, that's actually super interesting. I thought about that, but he is using that in a slightly

different context, which is that what he's saying is that you are really upset right now

over something

does not mean that the underlying thing is somehow

has been kind of existentially disabled.

Your displeasure does not disqualify us.

You haven't changed anything. It's still, you know,

so yeah, but

I happen to think he's one of the better.

He's not in my particular corner ideologically, but

I wish they were.

I wish most commentators were as rigorous in their thinking as he was.

I saw you made headlines last month about trans athletes. I imagine that was thrilling for you.

Do you see a tipping point dynamic going on there?

I think it's already tipped. I mean, this is one of the most puzzling.
Let me just say parenthetically that that was one of the strangest public controversies I've ever been a part of.

I was describing, I was the moderator on a panel.

I was describing my experience as a moderator, a moderated panel between a pro-trans participation and an anti-transpetition person.

And I'm trying to elicit a fair argument. Four years pass, and I'm on a podcast out of Johannesburg with one of the participants.

And I just think, I said, there was a moment in that discussion where I failed as a moderator. I didn't do a good job.
There was a moment where I should have moderated.

Moderating is difficult.

Ever moderated in your life? Yeah. Particularly on that topic? So that's all I said.
And then like the whole thing went. And I was like, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't recognize any of

us when you're involved in a controversy, you recognize the controversy. I did not recognize the controversy.
I was like, what are they talking about? You wouldn't have predicted this in advance.

No, it's like, what are they talking about? I was a moderator. No one ever mentioned the word moderator.
Like, I sort of changes when you know that I was the moderator, right?

Anyway,

it's already tipped.

This is, by the way, this is one of the most ridiculous

subjects in the following sense.

That most people, myself included,

would give their 100%

approval, support for the trans agenda.

The idea that we would be discriminating against a class of people over this particular characteristic is absurd and offensive, right?

But I think

this last random thing that's thrown into the agenda that says, oh, and by the way,

someone who is biologically male should be able to compete against biological females is deeply puzzling to a lot of people. Right? They're like, what does that have to do with, it's weird.

Like, what's it doing there? I don't think, and I think most people are in wholeheartedly in support of the agenda and just say that last item, which by the way,

it only involves like a dozen people in the entire United States. Like, it's so hypothetical.
It's like, most people just say, why are you adding that?

You're just antagonizing. You're giving fuel to

the right. By the way, during the election, what is the part of the trans agenda that the Republicans hammered again and again and again? Participation in sports.
That's what it came down to.

So you're giving your enemy a weapon.

you know, to use against you over what, a dozen? A hypothetical case involving a small number of people? Like, so that's why I find the whole thing puzzling. I don't, just don't, I don't understand.

Why are we even talking about this? It doesn't, can you name, can you name a signal trans athlete,

trans woman competitive elite athlete who is currently being disadvantaged by this policy? Can you give me the name? A trans woman athlete who's being disadvantaged.

Yeah, who's been locked out of competition with biological women as a result of the policies in elite sports. I would imagine that Leah Thomas would be at some point.
I feel like the

swimming association was one of the first bodies to have implemented this. I have to imagine if sh

they are going to continue to swim.

Right now they can't swim. So would that be a yes? So you have I've got one.
You got one. I got one.
Yes. Can you give me another? No.
Okay.

So why are we having why are we having so you you are a highly informed participant in public controversies, and I have touched on this issue, which everyone assumes is this hot button.

This is tearing our country apart.

So I have gone to a highly educated source and I've said, give me names, and you've come up with one who's not even irrelevant, who isn't even swimming anymore, right?

This is a definition of an absurdity.

Why are we wasting our time on something that is wholly hypothetical?

Why don't we discuss the actual issues that are of existential meaning and threat to the trans community? That's my point.

Interesting. I think on the you know, on the other side,

the right would say something like, this is the tip of the spear. This is sort of endemic of the encroachment into locker rooms and bathrooms.

This is, you know, the college sport thing is like, it's only half a wall away from it being about school as well.

And it, it, you know, it all kind of, especially with the interesting one about the locker rooms thing. I do, I've thought this for ages.

I think that the locker rooms thing and the sports thing are so tightly bound because, in order to get onto the sports field, you have to go through the locker room.

And there is this sort of

just

geographic map psychologically inside of people's heads where they play that role through. And you think, well, if the locker rooms

has to be happening in sport too. I wasn't aware of how few incidents

this is causing, but

certainly a lot of headlines.

But even the locker room thing is a separate issue. So there is a separate social issue of how do you accommodate somebody who belongs to a relatively new social category.

And we have a long history in America of struggling with that issue, right? It was the issue we struggled with with African Americans in the 50s and 60s in Jim Crow.

Do we let them into our, you know, in Birmingham, the 1960s, black black people are not allowed to use the same changing rooms as white people in department stores, right? Same issue, right?

Eventually, we figured out how to do that. And I think we can figure out how to do that with the trans community.
That's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about a completely separate thing, which is in elite sports, should the

incredibly small number of people who are trans women who

can

meaningfully compete at the elite level be allowed to compete in the female category.

That's the narrow thing that was being discussed on a panel of which I was a moderator.

So anyway,

it's an example of the internet occasionally is very dumb.

What was the story about the Harvard women's rugby team?

Oh, there I was interested in,

well, I was interested in this.

There's a certain amount of Ivy League bashing that I've done over the course of my career that

now that Ivy League bashing has become

an agenda item in Washington, I'm a little more circumspect about my Ivy League bashing. But I was just intrigued in my book about

the fact that

this university in the United States that plays more varsity sports than any other is Harvard,

which people think, oh, it must be some sports factory in the South or something. No, no, no, no.

Ivy League schools have the most athletes, have the greatest share of athletes on, recruited athletes on campus of any institution. My question is, well, why? That seems weird to me.

Why would an elite academic institution go out of its way to have lots of athletes on campus and also give those athletes a tremendous break at admissions?

So huge controversy in America about, oh, don't you dare give

an admissions break to black people. That's wrong.
That's a violation of the Supreme Court says outlaws it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Meanwhile, the exact same institutions are giving an equal, and in some cases, larger break to people who are really good at rowing or fencing. It strikes me as weird.

Does that not strike you as weird? It's very strange.

And why is one controversial and the other one is not?

I would guess that in a meritocratic

system,

people believe that something which is done based on merit

is maybe more deserving somehow, more justified in some sort of a way.

But what relationship is there between the merit here and the role of an academic institution? It's like saying,

if you were a high school kid applying to Harvard, is it useful to put on your application that you're a really good cook?

The answer is.

Well, if

cooking was something which was part of the competitive landscape for a varsity league college, perhaps that would be the case.

I think when people look at sports, but I mean, college sports is an entire category. Yeah, but these sports are absurd.
Like, it's fencing. No one's

the role.

Say that to a fencer with his big longer faith. When I make the point about, I talk a lot about tennis, which I think is the most ludicrous example.

Massive admissions breaks at elite schools for people who are tennis players. What is the definition of someone who's good enough to play Division I tennis in America?

That they spend their entire lives on the tennis court? Why do you want at your school someone who's not even participating in the undergraduate experience? They're just practicing their backhand.

What is so special about that solitary,

utterly

boring activity that merits them getting a admissions break that is equal or greater to the break that you give to somebody who is part of a historically disadvantaged minority?

I was going to say, is there something more special about somebody who's black than somebody who can play tennis well?

Someone who is a product of several centuries of racism in the United States absolutely has a moral claim on an admissions break that is an order of magnitude greater than someone who has spent their entire adolescence at a tennis academy in Florida hitting forehands.

What if they also play tennis?

Black tennis players are the rarest of them all, you know? Yeah, there's not a lot of them.

That's you know, well, tennis, being good at tennis is a linear function of how much money your parents have, so you would expect that the wealthiest uh uh ethnicities in the United States would have the most tennis players.

Interesting question on that. Um, Seth Stevens Davidowicz wrote a great book about uh, was it who owns the NBA, who wins the NBA, something like that.

And uh, he did a data scientist used AI to help him write this book in 30 days. It's brilliant.
And uh,

the most

common name

of

NBA players, the top five,

it's like Michael,

John,

they're very uh middle-class names. The reason is that even in the sport of basketball, one that people assume is going to sweep up these

poor kids from the streets and deposit them into the NBA. Uh, now LeBron, uh, born to a 16-year-old single mother, um,

it is uh remarkable for

the exception, the prince's rule. Yeah, how much of an outlier he is.

Because, I mean, if you are LeBron, you can beat the system, but not anyone else. Wow.
I wonder how many LeBrons have been born after LeBron now. That's my question.

Whether or not we're going to see a ton of LeBrons in the NBA in a couple of decades' time.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense because the degree of preparation

necessary now to make the NBA is just way higher.

The minute you

radically increase the amount of preparation necessary to excel in a given area, you skew it

by income,

by class and income. Yeah, pretty classic example, which is one of the reasons why I'm a big track and field fan.

One of the beautiful things about track and field is it is one of the last sports for which this is not true.

You do not need to have wealthy parents to be a great runner.

Oh, you like watching poor people do sports. That's what you're telling me.

I like to watch the poors.

They run faster. No, I like a sport where there is no distinction, where income and class don't buy you a head start.
That's what I like.

I like a sport where, name me another sport, where the Kenyan who grew up, you know, way off in the Rift Valley somewhere, it can meaningfully compete against someone who has the full power of Nike behind him and grew up in an upper middle class suburb of Dallas.

That's there's no other, give me another sport where that happens. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not even

cycling. Cycling.
Football. Like football in Europe.
If you don't come out of one of those football systems,

you're not playing. I think

it's any problem that you have with team sports. As soon as you get into team sports, right? It's got to be an individual sport for this.
I can't think of a team sport that would allow you.

Rowing is not going to be.

But even

a massive number of individual sports have become class-weighted, like tennis would be a perfect example. Golf, massively class-weighted.

Yeah,

golf's a particularly interesting one.

Tennis kind of

makes sense, at least to some degree, in that you need to be playing against people.

Like, it is interesting with track and field that, apart from, like,

wrestling,

which I don't think happens on the track or the field, it's just in the Olympics, that there's no track or field that is against an opponent in quite the, like, there isn't an opposition in the same way.

There's just competitors, right? Also doing the same thing to you independently of it. Like, the two javelin guys are like throwing the javelin javelin at each other as it's coming.

And that means that if you grow up in an area that has more better javelin players that can spend more time throwing the javelin at you, that you become more successful.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I hadn't considered that.

The egalitarian nature of the Olympics. The weird

running is really interesting. Distance running in particular is fascinating because,

you know, it starts out, since you're English. The English dominate middle distance running for

the longest time. And if and if it wasn't English, it was the English by proxy, the Australians and New Zealanders.
Then the Africans in the kind of 80s take over.

And all of a sudden, everyone starts saying, well, it's because they have a genetic advantage. That's because they start listing all these reasons.
And then what happens in the last 10 years?

All the Europeans are, now it's the English again, right? It's like,

so it's like we realized we made this.

It's this thing that we do,

which always strikes me as kind of fascinating, which is is that we toggle back and forth between our causal explanations for a phenomenon, just depending on where we're situated.

If we're winning, oh, it's like we have the culture of,

when we start losing, it's, oh, it's got to be genes. Cultural attribution era.
Yeah. And then we start winning again.
And like, now if you talk to the English, it's like...

If you talk to some English track and field coach, they'll tell you, oh, it's the long English long distance running tradition.

It's like, dude, you didn't say that 15 years ago when the Moroccans and the Kenyans were winning every race.

Like, you just started saying it because Josh Kerr started won the, and, you know, and, uh, you know, won the world championships. And now all of a sudden you've changed your mind.

Malcolm, Gladwell, ladies and gentlemen. Malcolm, I find you fascinating.
I think we could continue to do this for a long time, but I need to get on a flight to go on tour to your state. So

I need to leave. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you've got that's going on?

Listen, I think the latest podcast I did on my podcast for Visionist History, we have a series called The Alabama Murders.

It is the best thing I've ever done, and I would wholeheartedly recommend that to people. And I have a new book out of paperback, Revenge of the Tipping Point.
Sick. Malcolm, I appreciate you.

Thank you. Thank you so much.
This is really fun.

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