Malcolm Gladwell at University of Pennsylvania 2/14/2013

welcome it is my great pleasure on behalf of Penn's 450 Benjamin Franklin scholars to welcome you to the 2013 Benjamin Franklin lectureship for the fast past 50 years BFS has provided a home for the intellectually restless and the relentlessly curious our students pursue many different major courses of study from all appends undergraduate schools but they share a core dedication to the idea that complex problems are not likely to succumb to single perspectives or single disciplines we couldn't be happier than to have malcolm gladwell as our visitor to the program which this year is working in collaboration with our overall intellectual theme here at Penn on the topic of proof Malcolm Gladwell worked with our freshmen earlier today in our integrated Studies course on the topic of thinking taught jointly by a political theorist Jeff green a philosopher Karin Detlef s'en and a cognitive scientist Sharon Thompson chill our event today is co-sponsored by the theme Year program run by the office of New Student Orientation and academic initiatives in the Provost's office the Center for cognitive neuroscience the department of classical studies and and Dean Dennis - Turk of the college at Penn and that's integrating knowledge I think right there we have two introductions for our speaker today first may I present our Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and integrated studies professor for our spring 2014 class Rebecca Bushnell so thank you Peter and and let me take this opportunity to commend once again your inspired leadership and vision in establishing the integrated Studies Program which has been such a wonderful addition to the under grade undergraduate landscape at Penn and I am very much looking forward to teaching this program myself in 2014 along with my colleague and collaborator Dennis de Turk so it's always a special treat to welcome today's guest speaker Malcolm Gladwell to the University of Pennsylvania with his special talent for drawing on a wide range of research areas than in untangling any number of a complex social topics it's hardly surprising that he is the focus of such great admiration here at Penn where we so value interdisciplinary thinking and understand that most complex questions and ideas require the perspectives of multiple fields of knowledge within that context as presents today at an event affiliated with the integrated Studies Program is of course especially fitting I'm also happy to hear that he met today with our ISP students but Gladwell's base of admirers reaches far and wide on this campus because of his dynamic ability to provoke thought and debate he's the person that every recent cohort of Penn students wants to hear speak and indeed by our count today is actually Gladwell's third visit to the School of Arts and Sciences in the past decade and I've had the pleasure of welcoming him and his most recent talk here three years ago but today however the honor of introducing our esteemed guest Falls to an undergraduate melissa Bestwick a freshman benjamin franklin scholar in the integrated studies program because she and the other 75 students in this year is P class have been reading Malcolm Gladwell's work in connection with their course this semester on thinking so the means by which melissa earned this coveted opportunity was to write an introduction to write an introduction today's talk is interesting in its own right she actually won a contest among her fellow isp students and therefore pleased to congratulate melissa on her big win and to turn the podium over to her to introduce malcolm gladwell [Applause] my name is Melissa Beswick I'm a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania studying the biological basis of behavior first off I would like to thank you all for being here and wish you a happy Valentine's Day a year ago I never would have guessed that I would have the honor of introducing one of my absolute favorite authors to such a large crowd one of the things that has always struck me especially in unusual situations like the one I'm in now is the fact that we live in a pretty weird world from international to interpersonal relations it's often challenging to understand why things happen when I was younger I remember being confused by some of the actions of those around me how did that one boy always know exactly where to go on the soccer field when did I become the only girl in my grade to not own a pair of ugg boots these types of questions seem trivial at the time until I realized that fields like statistics psychology and economics could actually explain such events when I first discovered mr. Gladwell's books in high school I was immediately enthralled finally I had found someone who is able to illuminate the patterns that people display and the hidden forces that shape our perceptions and the perceptions of those around us even though I was merely a curious high school student and had no background knowledge of the topics mr. Gladwell discussed I was able to understand and apply the concepts of outliers blank and the tipping point to my own life part of mr. Gladwell's magic is that he has such an intuitive understanding of the questions and forces that motivate people he is able to simplify complex concepts and integrate disciplines he is able to maintain his own sense of style and individuality while still widely appealing to the public as evidenced by his national magazine or his presence on Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people his for New York Times best-selling books and his work for The New Yorker mister Gladwell takes an innate human instinct the desire to think about thinking and understand the underlying patterns that shape our existence and makes it accessible mister Gladwell's works have personally affected my academic path the interdisciplinary nature of his books influenced my decision to apply to the integrated Studies Program a residential program in which about 80 of my peers and I approach broad philosophical questions from multiple perspectives at the start of this semester we attempted to answer the question what is thinking through the lenses of political theory cognitive science and philosophy trying to integrate such a broad range of topics has given me an even deeper appreciation for the seemingly effortless nature of mr. Gladwell's works additionally Blanc was one of the first books I read that analyzed human behavior and now I plan on studying neuroscience for me it was comforting to know that there were rational reasons behind the behaviors I had noticed in my classmates maybe the talented athletes did not consciously analyze the field every few seconds but rather relied on their honed intuition perhaps the middle school ugh epidemic had reached its tipping point to put it simply reading Malcolm Gladwell's works made the world seem a little less weird now let us all welcome Malcolm Gladwell thank you very much for those that lovely introduction I really appreciate it and it's delight to be invited back I it's the last time I was here was as I think the Dean said three years ago and at the time if memory serves I talked about about getting drunk about drinking and getting drunk and how I thought that universities should teach their undergraduates how to drink properly and so I'm a little surprised that I got invited back after that but this time I wasn't given any freedom in what I could talk about I was I was told I really had to talk about proof so after some reluctance I decided all right I'll talk about proof so that's obviously a big topic so I thought that this afternoon I would start by asking a relatively simple question which is what level of proof do we need about the harmfulness of some activity before we act right obviously we never act against something that we think is wrong unless we have some evidence if somebody called Obama tomorrow and said in Canada right now they're massacring all left-handed people Obama wouldn't invade Canada the same day right he would say I'd like to have some evidence before I act we I think we're right to ask for evidence before we we should in fact it's it is improper and reckless to act in the absence of evidence but I think that there are case times and cases in our society when we ask for too much evidence before we act I think sometimes we use the the desire for proof as an excuse an excuse not to do anything and as a result of that I think there are lots of cases where we let people suffer when they shouldn't when they needn't to have to suffer now I realized that that's a pretty bold and vague claim but I want to illustrate it by giving you two examples one from the not-too-distant history and one from today that involves the bulbs everyone everyone in this room and everyone at this university let's start with the case in the past it involves a guy named Frederick Hoffman and Frederick Hoffman it's a really unusual figure he was born in Germany in 1865 and immigrated to this country as a young man and does all kinds of odd jobs he's homeless for a while and finally he gets a job in his late twenties with the Prudential Insurance Company and rises to a quite high level at that company becomes the senior statistician for Prudential now you should know that at that time in the early part of the 20th century insurers are incredibly powerful institutions in this country far more powerful than they are than they are today this was a era before Medicare before Medicaid before Social Security before any kind of private health insurance working class families in this country relied on insurance companies to pay for things like to take care of their family if they were to die young to take care of their burial expenses to cover some portion of their health care costs and so if you were if you are a working-class family at the turn of the last century somebody would come to your door someone from one of the major insurance companies would come to your door every week and you would give them a nickel for every person in your household and that would be your insurance policy right and there were basically two insurers that mattered that in the beginning of the 20th century one was metropolitan MetLife and the other was Prudential the company that Frederick Hoffman worked for and this was also the beginning of the last century a time before we had any kind of organized collection of Health Statistics you know today if you want to know exactly how many Americans had breast cancer last year you can look it up if you want to know exactly how many Americans died of a heart attack last year you can go in the internet you can find that in 30 seconds there was none of that collection of data at the beginning of the 20th century all we had was the census that took place every four years that gave us a kind of overall sense how many Americans they were and what they did for a living but every other bit of evidence about the kinds of illnesses that Americans suffered how long they lived what sort of what sort of diseases they had all that stuff was scattered all over the place was found in a thousand different places and the only institution in the country with the means and the motivation to gather that kind of evidence with the insurers and that's what Frederick Hoffman did he set out and he would cover the entire country and he would go and visit towns and cities and villages all across this land and he would interview doctors and hospitals and funeral directors and he would visit all the major employers and he would go to the cemeteries and he would talk to people and he would walk around the town and he would try and get a sense of what people are dying of and he would look at the local industries and he would say well how does the mortality rate in this particular industry compared to the national average because he was currently trying to get a sense of whether the people in that town were insurable and if they could be insured what should their premium be Waite and Hoffman in the course of this work in the early 20th century makes a series of extraordinary contributions to our understanding of health and disease for example he is the first person to draw a link between cigarette smoking and cancer 50 years before that information was confirmed by medical sciences Hoffman wrote a paper in 1950 and saying from my evidence that I've gathered there was almost nothing more injurious to your health than cigarette smoking he also did a lot of work on Indian reservations in sort of giving us a picture of the health of native peoples but perhaps his most important contribution was in our understanding of what is what was then called miners asthma or what is today called black lung disease coal mining at the turn of the 20th century was an enormous industry it was one of the most important industries in the entire country coal is what powered the railroads it's what heated people's homes it's what generated electricity it's powered all the ships in the sea the coal industry was among the largest and most lucrative and most important industry in the entire country and one of them inescapable facts about coal mining was that it generated a lot of dust when you're working inside a mind and you're chipping away at a seam of coal in the process of extracting that call from the ground you would generate all kinds of particles of coal and they would they would be in the air right and they and even more so every coal mine had a room at the top of the mine called the breaker and the breakers where the coal that was brought up from below was was cleaned of all of its impurities and was broken up into the right size and to the kind of the kind of size of the coal that you would sell and breaker rooms where thousands of people would work many of them children by the way were incredibly dusty there was so much dust in a breaker room that if I was standing here in a breaker room I couldn't see the other side of the stage it was so it was so dust that you could barely see your own feet when you were working there and the issue in around coal mining that had been a big issue ever since coal money became important at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was did it harm miners to inhale coal dust right now everyone was an agreement that miners inhale called us there was no question about that in fact as far back as 1830 people doctors had done all of these examinations of miners who've been mining for 10 or 20 years about what they would what happened to them when they woke up in the morning and what would happen is they would have a coughing fit and in their coughing fit they would cough up black inky spittle which was basically the contents of their lungs mixed in with a lot of coal dust and it was disgusting right and they would cough more and more of it the more they mined in the the more time they spent in the coal mines that was absolutely beyond question the thing that no one could agree on was was of that weather that was dangerous did it harm the health of someone to inhale all of this dust from coal mining and the coal miners said that it did they were from the very beginning of coal mining said look this is right this is a serious problem by the time were 40 years old we're we're having these coughing fits and coughing up essentially black ink and this is not good for for living a long and healthy life but the medical community and the coal mining companies had a very different position for years and years and years they would look at this and they would say you know what we've studied this issue and we don't think it's a problem I made all kinds of arguments one of their arguments was look if you look at coal miners very closely you'll see that they have far lower rates of other kinds of respiratory diseases so there was a claim made that tuberculosis which was one of the great killers of people around the world and particularly Americans in the 19th century they said tuberculosis rates are lower among coal miners so the suggestion was that something in that coal dust that they were inhaling was protecting them against a far worse disease right other people said you know maybe the dust particles are shaped in such a way that they're pretty harmless you know there's it's possible that certain things you inhale could harm your lungs but this is a different kind of animal it's something that's quite an oculus other people said look if you're coughing up all of this coal dust then that's a sign of your body working right the system's working you're you've got dust inside your lungs but then you're getting rid of it through your coughing and that means that maybe in the end the the health effects of inhaling all this dust are not so bad so for years and years and years nobody paid particular attention to the problem of coal dust because they had all of these arguments that they used to convince themselves that it wasn't a health risk and then along comes Frederick Hoffman now Hoffman is interested in this issue because he works for their Prudential Insurance Company they insure lots and lots of miners it's a big business of theirs there are hundreds of thousands of miners in America in the turn of the 20th century and they really want to know are these people dying young because if they're dying young we have to charge them a higher premium so Hoffman goes and he examines this issue and in 1918 he publishes this Fame support was called mortality from respiratory diseases in the dusty trades and it comes ad was published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the government in federal government in 1918 and basically what he says is that everything the medical community and the coal miner coning coal mining companies have told you about miners asthma is wrong first of all he looks at the statistics and he says there is no evidence whatsoever that miners have lower rates of tuberculosis than anybody else none that's a statistical illusion right so if you think there's something magically protective about the dust particles these guys are breathing in you're kidding yourselves then he says he looks at autopsies of the lungs of dead miners and he points out that in a typical miner a third of their lungs will be covered in coal dust would be sodden with coal dust right whereas if you take the an autopsy and look at the lungs of someone who wasn't a miner maybe 1% of their lungs will be covered in coal dust and if you take those two lungs you take the lungs of the healthy person on miner and you put them in water they'll float and if you take the lungs of someone who was a coal miner and you put them in water they'll sink and he says if you want to believe that there's nothing harmful about inhaling lots of coal dust you have to believe that that test-1 sinking and one floating doesn't matter I don't buy it then he looks at the death rates from asthma asthma would be you'd think would be something that would be linked if you've got a lot of stuff in your lungs as most irrelevant disease to look at it looks at it as money says look coal miners are dying of asthma at a rate five times higher than other working aged men that's significant right five times is a big deal and then he looks at the census figures and he says if you look at men who are farmers about twenty nine percent of them are still working after the age of forty five but if you look at miners only seventy percent of them are working after the age of forty five if mining is really a healthy profession where are all these men going right why they disappearing from the profession if it's supposedly so healthy so he adds all this up but he says look I don't buy it I think that this miners asthma's thing is something that we should be concerned about so here we have the senior statistician from one of the most powerful and important institutions in the country publishing a report on the health of workers in one of the most important and critical industries in the country and saying there's a problem so what do you think happens nothing happens nothing I think whatsoever and why does nothing happen because all kinds of people stood up and read Hoffman's report and said you've got no proof and it was true the only way to tell with certainty whether coal dust is killing miners is to conduct a formal study is to take a very large group of men who are working in non mine working on a farm and take an equivalent group of men who are working in the mines follow them for 30 years make a note of every illness they come up with and when people die and how they die and at the end of that study break open your blinded data and see who's dying faster than the other than the other group right that's the way you get proof did Frederick Hoffman do that no he didn't what he did was he rounded up little bits of evidence from here and there and said this is what I believe but let's be clear about one thing that when Hoffman's critics said that they didn't believe him because he didn't have enough proof is that what they really meant right I think if you believe that you're being naive there was more than enough evidence in his report to suggest at the very least that coal dust was something that was problematic and that coal dust inhaling called us was a problem to be taking seriously and at the very least we should be studying this problem and figuring out what should we should do next but the real truth the real reason all of those critics told him that he didn't have enough proof is they were using the notion of proof as an excuse not to do anything right solving a problem of coal dust was difficult it meant you had to completely restructure the way you designed a coal mine you had to put in all kinds of ventilation shafts right it meant you had to change the design of the of the breakers it meant it was going to be difficult it was going to be expensive it was going to be inconvenient so the mining companies who didn't want to go through all of that rigmarole simply shrugged and said look you know coal mining is it's a dangerous business it's inherently dangerous there's no getting around that miners know what they're getting into there are risks in any human activity there's no sense in getting in a panic over some possible hypothetical health risk so nothing was done the industry hems and Haws in the wake of Hoffman's report and they go into this protracted period period of denial and and confrontation and do you know how long it took for the mining industry to finally own up to the health consequences of miners asthma or black lung disease 50 years it was not until the 1970s that people suddenly realized that tens of thousands of miners were dying horrible deaths vastly prematurely because of the dust they inhaled while working in the mines now I think we can all agree that that is a appalling story right that should never have happened the number of people who suffered needlessly because of this demand for proof is actually astronomical we should have acted on this in 1918 instead we acted on this in 1975 we look around the room and we say to ourselves we would never do that would we we're much too educated and sophisticated and empathetic to ever look at the suffering of someone else and say oh we're not going to act until we have proof right but we do do that all of us do that everyone in this room is doing that even as we speak now what am I talking about I'm talking about football what do we know about football we know about football approximately what Frederick Hoffman knew about coal dust in 1918 we know that the act of playing tackle football of players receiving Lee repeatedly receiving blows to their head results in some percentage of football players in profound long-term injury bringing is a your brain is a big piece of soft tissue floating inside of a very very hard skull and when you receive a blow to your head what happens is that tissue bangs up against the side of the of your skull and that banging causes bruising and causes blood vessels to tear and eventually if it happens often enough and a typical offensive lineman might receive blows to the head a thousand times in one season if that happens enough it results in atrophy of the brain tissue the disease in question is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE is the short term CTE is I'm sure you've all heard about it is Alzheimer's on steroids right it causes but hey first of all it starts with behavioral and personality changes then disinhibition and irritability then dementia and then death it is a truly horrible way to die if you look at that is the brain of someone who has been diagnosed with CTE it looks like desiccated fruit it's just about as scary a thing as you'll ever see if Alzheimer's is degeneration of the brain brought on or augmented by age then CTE is degeneration of the brain augmented by injury and every year every year that passes the list of football players who we now know to have suffered from this terrible illness gets longer and longer just last year junior style one of the greatest linebackers in the history of professional a professional football shot himself in the chest at the age of 42 when the autopsies braying what do they find CTE the great Pittsburgh Steelers Center Mike Webster died homeless in 2002 a guy who made millions of dollars in his life ended up dying under a bridge in Pittsburgh the autopsy his brain what did he have CTE Terry long an offensive lineman for the Steelers killed himself in 2005 by drinking antifreeze what did they finally looked in his brain CTE Justin strelzyk another football player drove his car at 90 miles an hour into a tanker truck what do they find CTE Andre waters used to play in this city was an all-pro safety for the Philadelphia Eagles shoots himself in ahead and they managed to get enough pieces of his brain to do a diagnosis of what CTE Dave Duerson all-pro safety for the Chicago Bears shoots himself in the chest couple years ago what do they find CTE I could go on I've listed only a tiny fraction of the players who in the last just in the last several years have suffered horrible deaths and upon examination we see in their brain the marks of the results of years of trauma from playing football now what should we do about that well I don't know about the pro game but I think that on the basis of what we can see has happened this strikes me as a very strong case for stopped playing football at the University at high school level at least until we figure out more about just how widespread this particular problem is it's not as if football is some crucial part of the educational mission of colleges and high schools right it's if you told me that some portion of the class studying physics would someday come down with dementia as a result of their studies I would say well that's a hard call should we should we ban physics or not we kind of need physics right this is not physics this is a game it's entertainment it is no connection whatsoever to the function of universities when people die of a dumb and violent 19th century game that serves no educational function I think the obvious thing to do is to stop playing the domin violent nineteenth-century game but here's the problem we're still playing the Dom in violent 19th century game the facts about CTE had been known now for years and every year that passes we get more and more evidence from prematurely dead football players about the reach of this terrible disease and yet schools across the country continue to play football now why is this I've actually been very curious about this in recent months so I'm starting to have conversations with senior people at universities and high schools about why they continue to play football and the first answer I get the private answer is well we continue to play football because if we got rid of football the Alumni would go crazy right he would our fundraising we we have to have football now I'm not sure that argument even merits a response the best thing that could be said about it is that it's not an argument the function of a university is not to maximize contributions from its alumni right the function of a university is to prepare its students to have a healthy and fulfilled life as adults if you're willing to risk permanent industry injury to your own students because you want to raise money from your alumni you're in the wrong business right you should be doing something else the next argument is no batter it's you know after after people I talk to have gone on and on about how we couldn't do that they say well you know football's an inherently risky game lots of things in life are risky people should be allowed to assume risks in the course of doing something they love totally true I agree with that but if that's the case then why don't we actually treat football like an inherently risky discipline sport right I would be happy if then colleges sat down with every freshman before they started their first game as a football player and made them sign an agreement which said something like this in agreeing to play college football you are incurring a real but unknown risk of the depression and early death there is no known cure for this condition should you suffer from dementia we would ask that you have your family donate your brain to our Medical Center for analysis and if evidence of CTE is found we promise to compensate your state accordingly for wrongful death pain and suffering medical expenses and lost income I would be happy I would I would withdraw my requirement that football we stop playing football if everybody was signing that that waiver before their first game last I checked nobody is then is a third argument and this is the argument that always gets me they say who says football is dangerous who says CT is killing people you've got no proof you know what their apps do right we don't have proof we don't know how many players have developed CTE this is a condition that could only be diagnosed upon autopsy right you've got to die before we know what you've got CTE and you have to allow us you have to donate your brain to some kind of scientific Center so we can take a look at it we know that every professional football player who has died under these sorts of circumstances has been found to have CTE in their brain but we have no clue about what the prevalence of this disease is it could be one percent of football players it could be twenty percent of football players I've heard figures as high as that but all we know is that when you look at a two teams playing football in a field chances are that someone on that field is gonna die a horrible death well before their time because of their playing football that's all we know do we know how many times you have to get hit in the head before you develop CTE we don't know clue we know that the majority of players who have been diagnosed with this condition are people who spent many years in the NFL right so it suggests to us that there is some connection between the total number of hits you take to the head and your chances of coming down with this illness but then again a not inconsiderable portion of people who have been diagnosed with CTE have been either college players or even players who only played in high school so clearly it's a more complicated question than it looks and there may be some other vulnerabilities that make certain kinds of people more likely to come down with this disease than others we don't know what they are do we know that cracking down on concussions and treating them promptly and properly would severely slow the on the onset and course of this disease we don't we know that there are two kinds of hits you get on a football field one is the traumatic yet the concussion which has immediate consequences and the other are repetitive sub-concussive impacts the little hits that a lineman will get on absolutely every play in absolutely every practice and game we don't know which one is more important some people say this is about concussions some people say no they are red heading red-herring this is really about repetitive sub-concussive impacts in other words you can solve the concussion problem and it may be the case that this CTE continues to be an issue we don't know the point is there are lots of things we don't know about this disease but let's be clear calling for proof in this case is an excuse right it's an excuse for inaction in exactly the same way it was an excuse for inaction after Frederick Hoffman came out with his 1918 report on minors asthma because what are the supporters of football saying they're saying the same thing the coma company said at the turn of the century they're saying well getting rid of football would be difficult it would be costly it'd be inconvenient right so what do they do they shrug and they say well football is an inherently dangerous business there's no getting around that football players know what they're getting into there's no sense getting into a panic about some hypothetical health risk so what happens nothing happens nothing's done and what happens when nothing is done the same thing that happened in the coal mines a hundred years ago people die or deaths you know every year I live every I live in New York every week I go to a go and work at the Bob's library at New York University and it's this ten story building that has a huge atrium in the middle and in 2003 two students went up to one of the high floors and jumped over the railing and committed suicide jumping into the atrium and the university did not wait they didn't conduct a study they didn't call in epidemiologists to determine if the suicide rates at Bob's who were any higher than any other any other facility on their campus what they did they act they go dude was they act they put up he immediately put up plexi glass screens that blocked anyone from jumping over the balcony into the atrium and then three years ago a student on the ninth floor climbed up over the plexiglass screen and jumped to his death in the atrium and what did NYU do they didn't conduct a cost-effectiveness exercise to see what further improving the suicide prevention barriers was going to cost them they didn't bring in anyone to do an analysis of whether this would actually lower the suicide rate on campus no they didn't know the answers to those questions but not knowing the answers to those questions didn't stop them from acting so what they did is they went and a cost of tens of millions of dollars put in a full-length aluminum screen that stretches from the bottom all the way to the top that makes it absolutely impossible for anyone to commit suicide at Bob's library anymore you know they didn't stop at all that and gather all that evidence first because they believed correctly that sometimes we are called to act in the absence of absolute proof now there was a campus there was a suicide on this campus three years ago I'm sure some of you remember it a guy named Owen Thomas was 21 years old a junior at Wharton grew up in Allentown Pennsylvania not so far away and Owen Thomas was the captain of the Penn football team and when they sent his brain to be analyzed do you know what they found they found CTE in a 21 year old let me read to you from his the article on his death in the New York Times oh and Thomas a popular six-foot to 240 pound junior lineman for Penn with no previous history of depression hanged himself in his off-campus apartment after what friends and families have described as a sudden and uncharacteristic emotional collapse doctors at Boston University subsequently received permission from the family to examine Thomas's brain tissue and discovered early stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy a disease linked to depression and impulse control the article continues Thomas never had a diagnosis of a concussion on or off the football field or even complained of a headache his parents said although they acknowledged he was the kind of player who might have ignored the symptoms to stay on the field because of this several doctors said his CTE whose only known cause is repetitive brain trauma must have developed from concussions he dismissed or from the thousands of sub-concussive collisions he withstood in his dozen years of football most of which most of them while his brain was developing so what did Penn your University do in response to the suicide of Owen Thomas did they put up the equivalent of an aluminum screen no they honored him before the season opener the next year against Lafayette am I the only one who finds that appalling that's like the owner of a coal mine in 1900 giving out gold watches to minors who died of black lung disease here's what your university spokesman said after Owen Thomas's suicide while we will never know the cause of Owen Thomas's depression and subsequent suicide we are aware of and deeply concerned about the medical issues now being raised about football head injuries and will continue to work with the Ivy League and the medical community in addressing these issues Owens untimely death was a terrible tragedy and we continued to grieve for his loss where to start let's start with a statement we will never know the cause of oh and Thomas's depression and subsequent suicide are you kidding me what is there more to know a healthy young man with no previous history of depression hangs himself in his apartment and when they do an autopsy on his brain they find he has that the beginnings of a debilitating neurological disorder caused by taking too many hits on the football field and then the statement we are aware and deeply concerned about the medical issue is being raised about football head injuries can you believe that right we are so aware and deeply concerned about the medical issues being raised about football head injuries that three years after oh and Thomas's death pennant in use to play football in my book that does not count as concern that is moral indifference so what should you do what should Penn do well actually a better question is what should you do well it's your classmates who are dying right it's your classmates who are putting their lives at risk by playing this game I think all of you has to think about has to consider boycotting football games at Penn and I think you have to convince your friends to boycott football games at Penn and I think you have to pick it outside football games of Penn and I think you have to go to the administrators of this university and you have to ask them why is a world-class institution one of the finest universities of higher learning in its planet exposing its own students to the risk of injury and death and if they ask for proof tell them you don't need proof sometimes proof is just another word for letting people suffer [Applause] yeah we have time for questions there are stationary mics and the aisles those with questions please line up one on the left one on the right let the conversation continue for being here it's much appreciated on your website you talked about the two different hats that you wear for your different writings one as an author for your books and another in The New Yorker and that was published back in 2004 what has changed based on that over the course of almost a decade I don't think much I think that the job of a journalist which is what I am is simply to examine the world that I see it and ask questions and I don't think it matters whether you ask the questions in a book or in an article or in a talk before a group of people I think it's all it's all the same just as it doesn't matter if your musician plays a piece of music on a record on a CD or live before an audience thank you hi mr. Gladwell Malcolm I know whichever you prefer Malcolm Malcolm my name is Daniel I'm a sophomore here and longtime fan I'm particularly fond of your conversations with Bill Simmons over email so my question is regarding the benefits of football I think that you did a very good job showing what the costs of playing football and hosting a football team at the university are and you you named several examples of people who died or killed themselves because of football but what about the people like Robert wolf who this the scoreboard in the stadium is named after him and he's currently or he was the CEO of UBS or Hank Paulson who was you know an all-star football player in college or John Roberts the current Supreme Court justice who you know was the captain of his high school football team what about the success stories are the benefits that playing football rings well I guess the question is does playing a sport like football have been that are different from playing a sport that doesn't pose neurological the potential of neurological injury so is there anything special about playing football that you get that you wouldn't get from playing soccer or from running track or from rowing crew you know or from doing anything else where people don't repeatedly bash each other over the head and I would say that you that the things that you're pointing to about for which I think are totally exist by playing a competitive sport you learn I'm someone who was a athlete in college by playing competitive sport you learned so much about discipline about the the wonders of teamwork about being competitive all those kinds of things are extraordinarily important lessons but you don't have to put yourself at permanent risk of neurological damage to get those lessons there are things you can do that don't involve this right and that's all I'm saying we could have why doesn't pen decide to have the greatest soccer team in the United States and use that as the medium for teaching those lessons and for raising money from alumni no one's forcing you to keep playing this stupid game thanks Malcolm hi Malcolm thank you for the compelling talk I have a more general question about proof so I wanted to ask you in your opinion do you think based on what you said absolute proof should not be a reason for someone to believe or not believe in God oh and God yeah oh wow that's well as someone well I should say that I as someone who comes from a very very religious family I would say I don't think that any of my family members would say that they require absolute proof to believe in God I think they are satisfied with their their own faith and that that the existence of God has met whatever evidence they need to to live a Christian life and that they would say that absolute proof in that instance is impossible to find I think that's actually a very reasonable position in most cases perhaps the certainty is not something we're ever gonna find we have to learn how to make sense of our lives in the absence of that kind of perfect evidence so what about for you for me well I'm not a believer in quite the same way as my family and probably because I have different standards for for what I consider to be evidence of that sort but I have enormous respect for their position thank you hi Malcolm my name is ADA I'm a senior I just want to say I just learned about CTE today in class so I thought that was really interesting but in regards to putting in place certain policies on protecting students student-athletes how do you address the financial ramifications I know you said that you don't serve any function to society because it is entertainment but entertainment is a financial function and I think Super Bowl is a great example of that 200 million people see it every year if we pick it you know and say this is bad and this calls like a snowball effect how how can how can we address that how can we you know combat well I guess I'd say a number of things one is that I'm very very specifically talking about the place of football at educational institutions so I am if if grown men want to make millions of dollars a year and risk long-term neurological damage in so doing I can't say I'm fine with that but I I don't think I'm gonna try and stop them whatever right my issue is whether when you bring in 18 year old boys and you put them through this kind of love when you put them at risk for their own health for essentially the entertainment function of other of alumni and fellow students and to use as a harm raising tool for the university I think that's irresponsible so it's very specific the the kinds of the moral environment in which a university ought to operate is fundamentally different from the moral environment in which businesses operate and look when when when they let you in here the people who run this university they took responsibility for you and they do that they fulfill that responsibility in a thousand different ways most 99 percent of those responsibilities are fulfilled brilliantly right but it's just strike me there's a big glaring contradiction in the middle and I think it's time to resolve it thank you hi Michael I'm Bhishma you're allowed to call me mouthing after listening to your talk I'm not sure where I stand on banning football and universities but the question that I have for you is we give people the right to choose whether or not they want to smoke cigarettes at the age of 18 when why should we then curtail their freedom to choose to participate in an activity that can be considered dangerous and risky and where do we draw the line then yeah good question two answers one is the the analogy is not to whether people can choose to play to choose to smoke cigarettes the analogy would be if the university selected a group of cigarette smokers every year put them in a stadium surrounded them with 40,000 alumni and students and said we would like you to smoke ferociously for an hour and a half in order in order to further the fundraising arm of our institution now I'm all for someone happy to smoke outside if they want one why maybe doesn't bother me but that other scenario is the one that I have difficulty with hey Malcolm I just have a question not based on what you said because I agree with that 100% but how you say it and where you say so I mean gathering the courage to come to Penn and bash everything that Penn stands for in the sports way that's something I really I mean when I read of your books my main you know tipping point or I guess like sparking moment was not what you said but the way you thought and the way you did it and there's not flattery but rather I really want to learn and understand how do you gain the courage to come to a school and a Bachelor sports that's point number one and point number two if you know if you spoke to them if you charted and you that it's such an influential person what can we do and how do we get started so yeah well first I would say this I don't think this was a terribly courageous talk it would have been courageous that I had given this talk at spring football practice before the football team that I would say I would have got some points for that the second thing what should you do look every major and I'm not putting football on the same level as other ones but if you look at the recent history of the United States every major social movement for good in this country has at some point had at its heart the activities and the conscience of people in college the Vietnam War was fought what who by people like you the civil rights movement was the people who staff the civil rights movement who went down to the south to protest against Jim Crow where people like you I could go on and on and on time and time again it's people like you who have provided the moral ammunition to fight these sort of battles and this so this is exactly where to start there is no one better positioned to take up this cause there's nothing else that's going to convince the administration to take a second look at football then if undergraduates stopped going to the games if the only people at a Quaker football game were 1570 or old white guys smoking cigars it's over for football right it's not gonna happen any longer that's so the change has to come from you there's no there's no other it's not gonna it's not gonna be legislated in it's not the if you think Harrisburg is gonna step in and stop this you're crazy right so I think it just has to be the decision the collective decisions of all of you you know just start a boycott it's not that hard I don't know how many could go to games but I imagine some of you do just stop going it's not you know that's how these things get started thank you hello mr. Gladwell so I'm a graduate student here and so I've had probably like six to ten years of straight academic stress I'm sure a lot of students here have had the same and there's a recent article by Chuck Klosterman about Royce White's basketball player was exactly sort of mentally ill and he had this claim that everyone was mentally ill in America at least the vast majority because of the stresses and demands that capitalism has risen in all of us so from the academic and the in the in the just general American lifestyle point of view how do you respond to those kind of claims and connecting it to football do you think our greed of loving football is connected to our mental illness well you know even I wouldn't go that far I think that's a little bit I think what he read that piece I think what he was and he's a remarkably thoughtful guy I think what he meant was that we underestimate the amount of stress that were under I don't I think saying that we're all mentally ill is a step too far but I think he's right to point out that it's foolish to ignore the fact that many people in this country particularly those who come from less-advantaged backgrounds live their lives under an extraordinary burden of stress and that explains an awful lot of what is troubling and pathological and traumatic about the experience of growing up poor in this country or you know growing up with in a broken home or growing up with a parent in prison or any of the other things that we know are those are all that's what he's saying is like don't pretend that it's normal for a lot of people it's country because it's not if you're living paycheck to paycheck that is a profoundly different psychological experience than if you have a job that pays you well and you know you're going to be comfortable to the rest of your life so in that sense I think that he was on to something I would connect this to football only that what connects those two things is that there is this weird strain of indifference that we have under certain certain circumstances to the suffering of others we try to be good about that but sometimes we miss and I feel with football because the people who play it at the moment they're playing it are so healthy and so such kind of extraordinary examples of physical prowess it's impossible for us to understand that going on inside their head may be something that is terrifying and irreversible and fatal and we need to get over that we need to stop pretending that because someone looks like they are the picture of health that they're they actually are I mean that that just requires a leap of empathy that we've had difficulty with so far either Malcolm thank you for coming so the primary comparison that you made for football was obviously mining in the early 20th century and the solution in that scenario was not to completely eliminate mining but was to you know take measures to make it safer and I don't have statistics on this but the sense I have is that mining is still a more dangerous than average profession but one was sort of a level of risk that we've deemed to be somewhat acceptable so why is it that your solution for the problem of football is to eliminate it entirely as opposed to working to take measures to make the game safer good question I my position is that football we should stop playing it until we discover whether there is a safer version we can play so if you can prove proof and this time I really do want proof if you can prove to me that it can be played in a way that does not does not expose players to an undue level of long-term neurological damage I say bring it back now maybe that means playing flag football I don't all watch flag football I mean I don't have a problem with it to me I don't think you know but maybe some people do I'm sure that there are a lot of fans are there a problem with that so look if you can fix it fine but the question is what do you do while you're trying to discover a the extent of the problem and B how to fix it do you keep playing or do you take a timeout and my point is you don't keep playing if you don't know what they said the problem is what if we discovered that 20% of football players have CTE then keeping playing while we figure out that fact is a moral abomination right and if we discover that it's point zero zero zero one percent and actually we've identified all the people who ever had it then we can happily go back to play and stop being so worried about it but to my mind if you're an educational institution there is no justification for continuing to play in the absence of some degree of of knowledge about the extent of the problem it's fine if you're the Pittsburgh Steelers whatever but not if you're penned right why why would you do that and the second issue along these same lines is by continuing to do that you are opening your door up to all kinds of other problems like lawsuits if you don't think the lawsuits are coming around the corner you're wrong and when they come you know what's gonna happen that money's gonna come out of your pocket you're paying tuition you're funding this place do you want your tuition to go up because you're paying for legal fees incurred by a portion of the school that is nothing whatsoever to do with this educational function if finally you idea I'd be outraged by that my money going to pay off some liability lawyer who's suing over a game I don't care about right so that's another thing to consider until we know it's just not worth it hi Malcolm thank you for speaking today I play football here I'm senior that's gonna be able to tell ya I obviously disagree with a lot of stuff you say obviously I'm well aware of the risks of CTE football I knew Owen well I'm trying to continue to playing football professionally I'm well aware that of the risks that are inherent with playing football I don't think any one of the team does isn't aware of that you said like you could play other sports I don't see myself six five 300 pounds punk soccer a running track football opens a lot of opportunities for students I personally wouldn't have been able to get into an Ivy League school without football and it's kind of opened up further doors for myself I'm sure that's the same at other schools across the country as well so you say Penn you know you're newly an institution football shouldn't be here because it's such a violent sport at the same time it's opened a lot of opportunities for myself and other players and you said that nothing is being done by the school they actually had a few rule changes concussion protocols changed I've seen a change many times obviously it's not major steps towards addressing it same thing has happened at the NFL level with doctors and outside people have to come in and review players I want to know what your thoughts are on like the minor rule changes especially in terms of like at the younger level where they're teaching kids how to tackle differently how to play differently not to lead with the head I want - what's your thought if that can continue help football continue yeah a couple of responses one is that the the issue of these concussion protocols is we don't know how important they are how much they solve the problem because as I said we don't know whether the issue is concussions or repetitive sub-concussive impact if the issue is really the thousand little hits not the two big hits that you get a season then there's not much a concussion protocol can do we don't have the answer to that question yet and so once again I I happen to believe until you know the answer to that question you have to stop others may disagree the second thing I would say is that you're absolutely right that football creates a series of opportunities for a class of people it is impossible to take away any activity and not harm somebody the question is you have to weigh the the harm that we create by canceling football against the benefit and in the in this case I think the the unknown risks are far greater than the benefits that are currently that are currently accrue to people such as yourself again you may differ the third thing is that I have nothing wrong with an ongoing attempt being made by the sport of football to clean up its act I think that's appropriate I think it's moving too slowly but they should do that the issue the core issue is what Penn should do while that ongoing cleanup effort occurs I think they should sit on the sidelines because I didn't see any point for them to participate and that so I have no problem with you playing football I just have a problem with you playing football at Penn and that's an important distinction fair enough hi I'm Malcolm my question kind of follows up on that originally in your talk you you did not differentiate as you have in the in the question and answer period the university setting and when you are doing your talk you talked about one of the options was for someone to sign off on a sheet that says I know what the risks are and I'm okay with it sort of like that gentleman said he was willing to do he's he's doing exactly as you said weighing the risks and benefits he's decided that it's okay with him to take that risk first of all I wanted to ask you why you have a problem with with that in particular and I understand now at the university setting but the other thing that struck me and I have to admit I'm a lawyer is as part of that you then said that the university would have to take on the responsibility of paying for a wrongful death action if that were to occur and I want to understand why that is unnecessary given in your mind if the person has assumed the risk because the harm is caused by the game of football that's being played on campus if you're going to if I give you a scholarship to come and play and have a football program which I believe in because I believe it it accrues all kinds of larger benefits to the University then it strikes me I have a responsibility towards those who play right you're you're playing because there's all kinds of things I want I like the football program for what it does for my image for my fundraising where I have conscripted a series of people to play yes yes we should make them aware of the risks but - you can't walk away you can't just say accept the risks or not if you do my hands are clean your hands aren't clean if you if someone accepts the risks of paying playing then the university has to step in and accept the risks of accept the responsibility of caring for that person if they get sick you know you get a thousand hits to the head over the course of a football season someone plays for years that pan means 4,000 hits right if we determined that 4,000 hits are in some cases enough to get CTE look the university that asked you to play football ought to chip in I guess times means a really really small thing to ask right and I don't think you can wash your hands of that of that responsibility thank you yeah what what well one last question no more hello mr. Gladwell thank you very much for speaking today something that you said that struck me particularly was that we need to learn to act in the absence of absolute proof but you also listed many examples of where in society today larger corporations and individuals are very reluctant to do so and that we use them as excuses so my question to you is how do we as a society learn to be more willing to act without absolute evidence that's I mean that's the that's the that's the crucial question right I don't know if there is a simple answer I just think you have to you have to be conscious of the fact that as a human being your responsibility is to keep your conscience alive you can't shut it down for your own convenience you have to be aware that that your actions have consequences that going to a football game is a voting for in a sense voting for football and you don't have to do that if you don't want to and you can stand up and say I don't want to vote for it and I don't think we should continue to do this it's just a just a matter of keeping those kinds of considerations in the forefront and not letting them be buried in the back well thank you all very much on the way to taking malcolm gladwell to dinner I'm reminded of the best definition of an intellectual I think I ever heard it's someone that bites the hand that feeds them lots of food for thought tonight thank you so much for coming Malcolm appreciate [Applause]

Channel: Penn Video Network

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Keywords: Malcolm, Gladwell, at, Penn

Id: EWaPXzTDEDw

Length: 68min 19sec (4099 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/scartol]

Why I don't like Mr. Gladwell