Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers | Full Interview | The Jordan Harbinger Show Ep. 256

yeah you've said that this is your angriest work why is that the case well because you know I've written books that begin in a sense of with a sense of wonder or curiosity or aw hell ours is a book about you know I'm in awe of the success of certain people I want to make sense of it but this one really begins with the Sandra bland case which made me angry yeah I've made many not just me made many many Americans angry and I I was and even angrier even maybe even more angry with the way that I thought that that string of high-profile cases involving law enforcement and african-americans were just kind of I felt like we just kind of pushed them aside and went on with our lives and I that struck me as being profoundly wrong the Sandra bland case do you have like a three sentence kind of overview or ten sentence over so if Ferguson is the kind of first of this rash of high-profile cases Sandra banners in the mails about a year later young african-american woman is from Chicago he's in Texas just has a job interview in a rural Texas town and she's pulled over by a police of white police officer and on her failure to use a turning signal and they have a conversation that quickly escalates into a altercation he drags her out of the car she's put in prison and three days later she commits suicide in her cell and it's the whole thing is captured on the officers dashcam and that's that allows us to really kind of witness in real time um how a conversation to choose between two strangers could go awry and that's the that's where the book begins it's like let's figure it out and let's see whether we can prevent this kind of kind of thing from happening again that one was tricky for me because I I did watch the video because you said you'd watched it thousands of hundreds of times or something like that and I was like because my first gut reaction was well I understand why he was mad look at her mouthing off and getting upset and then I was like well okay let me put myself in her shoes well I of course I understand why she's upset and saying that stuff to him I'd be pissed off too if I were in her situate and then you go oh well wait a minute if I'm if they're both right then then what went wrong yeah yeah and also it's funny how s is so often within is the case with these kinds of controversies that our expectations about what happened color our interpretation to make to a large degree and often our memories about what happened are so I remembered the first time I watched that my sense was she was a being a little bit mm-hmm lippy no not that I had blamed her but I was like you know what you know she could have handled that and then as the more I watched it the more I thought my initial reaction was wrong and she's actually you know when the pivotal moment in the confrontation is when she lights a cigarette and the officer says ask her to put out the cigarette and she refuses she says I don't have to put out a cigarette I'm in my car she's totally right mhm but you know it dawned on me that the reason she's lighting the cigarette is to calm herself down that's why we because no one smokes anyway we forgotten why people smoke right yeah one of the big reasons they smoke is to cut themselves down sure so she's trying to de-escalate her own feelings and also I think by extension deal deescalate the situation and he reads it in one of you know in number 10 of his epic misc Miss readings of the situation reads that act as defiance I also picked that up initially I was like oh she look at her is throwing that in his face and then I went well she's freaking out so what she did but I only noticed that may probably after you'd said something about that in the book yeah it didn't occur to me in the initial yeah run it's it's a hard one and you know the by the end of it we I'm sure we'll get into it by the end of the book my conclusion is the real solution to this problem is not to have police conduct these kinds of stops but um like you could have so the the problem begins not with its that the the the mistake I think is because we have videotape of this encounter to think they encounter begins when the videotape starts rolling but in fact it begins when he spots her on the street and he makes this decision which is consistent with his training to pull her over because she's she's discrepant she's out of state plates in a small Texas town a young black woman Haeundae I think done day I'm I'm a car guy I somehow I become obsessed with the fact that the hunt factory's driving a Hyundai matters I kind of sort of think it does because it it signifies her class right so if she's I don't think he pull if she's in a outie everything else being equal her chances of being pulled over are think are lower and if she's in an Audi with Texas plates she's fine he had good point um and if she's most of all if she's white you know she's no there's no way he's pulling her over it's that combination so he's saying to himself you know this is not a this is a largely black area of Texas my problems are probably lucky wipeouts okay more sense so she's black woman it's a college town but she's not a college student from Chicago and he really is like thinking well someone's going on here and as I described in the book all of those inferences are deeply problematic but that's where it begins it begins before the tape starts with him like jumping into a conclusion about someone because they're driving a Hyundai and there's ten colors black right yeah and it's it's kind of impossible people go well that's racist and it's but it's also yes and it's probably there's probably some of that in there it's hard to credibly argue that there's none of that in there yeah but then your book says and that's also not the whole picture because otherwise the uncomfortable idea here is well so many people are just racist and that makes them do all this bad stuff but it's really their training of course and the way that we misperceive people's actions and so I do want to get into those particular details because in a way this book is this is a tough statement to make it's sort of like blink but about people but it's one other side of the same ten side died that maybe these little characteristics are it's not exactly yeah the same thing but it's how our impressions might be right at first but for reasons we can't explain or how we form impressions that are completely wrong based on the wrong data yeah yeah yeah so in a weird ways this thing this is a to preface a lot of this conversation hmm we did a a different kind of audio book with this book and in the audio book instead of me just reading my book what I use is I take I bring in all the tape so it's produced like a podcast so yeah you will hear the encounter between Sandra bland and the cop you will hear Sandra when did these videos these YouTube videos and you'll hear her voice cuz they're still up on YouTube you'll hear it taught you and you get a sense of and then you'll hear at the end of the book I have the tape from the cops deposition and in the investigation you'll hear him justifying what he did and hearing it's a wholly different story when you hear all those voices and throughout the whole book you will hear like I interview the guy who this is one of the CIA guys who did all that did the enhanced interrogation it's different when you hear his voice right and I think a lot of this is since this is a book about emotional understanding that the audiobook is in some ways a better book because it's so much easier to grasp the emotional context when you hear his the police officers tone of voice you get it mm-hmm right and when you hear her her voice closely you get it in a way you don't know I said anyway I just say that to throw that there because it's like it frames a lot of the kind of nuance that the book is concerned with I'm an audiobook guy and I did I consumed that and I liked it and I think you brought this up in an interview I can't remember which one cuz I've listened to 50 Gladwell interviews in last week right oh man you must be so sick of me I'm I'm enjoying this but once it's over man I'm done I'm waiting for ya moving on but you mentioned this and it was like there was somebody who had discriminated against african-american people in his apartment buildings for like decades Donald yeah it was the owner of the Clippers yeah it's just like it's this weird thing so this is a this is one of the motivating ideas behind a book which is that there has long been it was a brilliant essay written by a historian named Charles Payne about ten years ago or so maybe more than that and he writes about how if you were a southern segregationists in the sixties the project the thing you were trying to do was to get race discussed entirely on a personal level to make it the whole racial issue about you know white people and black people being able to get along and be nice to each other and and if you could do that then you could avoid consideration of the structural ways in which racism is embedded in our society they wanted to make this about am i nice to my black neighbor and not about you know voting rights or gerrymandering or segregation legal segregation and the argument of the essay is that that perspective won and the way we talk about race now in America is that way in personal terms and the great example of this is the owner of the saint of the Clippers the Los Angeles Clippers Donald sterling who owns a team forever never never and early on in his tenure as owner he's a big land landowner in LA and there are two separate actions brought against him by the Department of Justice for systemic discrimination against African Americans he's driving black people out of his buildings and he's not renting to black people and he is he he is nailed settles with the DOJ plays a fine nothing happens then fast forward to 2018 and he 2017 and he is there was his famous case right where his girlfriend secretly records him sit making very disparaging comments about black people to her and that's released and there's a huge brouhaha he's forced out of the league and he's no longer an owner of the league and this is exactly what they were talking about the guy in every single way it is worse it is a worse thing to systematically discriminate against black people in renting apartments than it is to make in private a disparaging comment to your girlfriend right we got upset about the latter and we gave them a pass on the former and I in this book what I'm trying to say is the same thing happens here is that these instants happen and we say oh it's a racist cop right and that's what we get riled up about and then we neglect the fact that actually there's a whole system behind that to explain what happened and that's where we should be spending our attention the your mom had an instance of this I think you talked about this again and another piece where your was at your neighbor in England or something like that it said something about South Africa and she well she my mom's good so my mom was Jamaican um when she just she married my father who was white in the late 50s in England and they actually had this exact thing there are numerous instances where my mother was you know where someone yelled a racial epithet at her and there were also a famous case where my parents rented an apartment in London and then once the landlord found out my mother was black rescinded least oh wow kicked him out and if you ask my mother you know which is worse she was like well you know having a baby and being exhausted and moving into an apartment and then being told to turn around and move out again that was infinitely worse but the systematic the the institutional stuff is the stuff that we ought to be concerned about she got over somebody calling her the n-word but it took a long time to get over the the the flagrant injustice of someone taking back a lease just because of your skin so that's you know that's a that's a kind of sub theme of the book it's like let's talk about the things that matter here you'd mentioned we believe the information we gather face to face and human interaction is uniquely valuable such as you'd never hire a babysitter without meeting that babysitter because we think well she seems like she's got a good head at our shoulders but that data not necessarily that useful for that sort of small smudge and the examples you give one which was particularly interesting was the CIA failure of evaluating double agents from Cuba can you speak to that a little bit because that's that was a major national security issue based on these exact same concepts yes way I tell a bunch of spy stories in the book mostly because I'm yeah I am yeah are you like me someone who reads every book with the word spy in the title yes and also a lot of my shows are this person was undercover in Pakistan for the CIA but not really this person was the trainer for the disguises you know yeah I'm having to that to stuff too so I was naturally I you know I and I die tell these two I think they're little-known spy stories and one of them is about both of them involved Cuba because the Cubans you know they played the US for a fool for years and years and years and they're both stories about I don't want to Brewin them because they're really fun and I don't want to you know I don't want reduce any ones inside him to read the books sure but um they're both about the fact that the Cubans pulled the wool over the eyes of not not kind of you know over seasoned CIA I mean sophisticated CIA counterintelligence people were repeatedly fooled by Cubans on matters like one case a spy was really high up in the American intelligence establishment and another case it was that the spy network that we were running inside Cuba was almost entirely turned it's like this kind of fascinating window and look if they can't do it they say if an agency if the most sophisticated intelligence agency in the world full of people who are trained in the arts of of detecting deception can be so easily fooled by a tiny little you know country with very few resources sitting in the middle of the you know the Caribbean what what what hope to the rest of us how the asking sense of strangers hey I wonder if small countries have to do that because they're never gonna out gun a major power so they just go you know what all we got is the ninja sniff that's all well it's funny you say that that friend of mine he was a spy obsessed as I am has this has been one of his rants for years which is that the best so what are the what are the most successful countries at spying in the world over the last hundred years East Germany Israel Israel Cuba it's all these little um I don't know North Korea oh yeah North Iran probably Iran yeah it's oh yeah you're right this is a total like this should have been in a chapter of my last book David and Goliath because this is exactly a disadvantage that turns into an advantage you can't do you can't afford a an f-16 but you can't afford you know to sneak up a double agent into uh ya know it's like but I always wonder this is a tangent but I thought of doing this so what I read this thing that's like amazing paper in some journal on espionage and by a former CIA guy who says if you look at the Cold War and you look at the utter futility the US and the Soviet Union had in detecting spies within their own ranks so we had two spies Robert Hanssen and James who basically gave away the store they also we had spies inside so the Union who gave away the store and this guy says if you look at the record of this you realize it was oh it's on the wash we knew everything we wanted to know about them they knew everything they wanted to know about us he was like you know it's almost as if he said we should have met in 1950 I just said you know what guys it's pointless you can't since you can't know if there's a traitor in your midst let's just shut down all of our how our clandestine services I mean it's a whimsical notion but yeah what it saved us a lot of cash sure yeah and then we the other side says sure you go ahead and do them well we'll follow no but if you have no so this is actually a serious thing suppose you're the CIA and you you say okay I'm not gonna run any I hum 'not so human email yes all I'm gonna do is the tech stuff I'm gonna tap phones and intercept signals and do all that kind of but I'm not running anymore agents so you remove the possibility for your enemies to turn agents and fill you with false information and you also shut down a thing which your enemies can penetrate right so there's no CIA for them to infiltrate sure and there's no agent for them to turn so you could do it unilaterally it's not clear to me that you would be the problem is then you end up a general it said this or this is maybe apocryphal story this general had said we have spy satellites that can see a license plate from space that's fine if you're attacked by a license plate but it's not good if you want to find a guy living in a cave in Afghanistan that you need human because they're SIGINT signals intelligence is maybe they make a cell phone call from a village once every three weeks meanwhile they're just so your health codes yeah or whatever although I like the fact that we're doing this digression this is one of my favorite subjects the UM so a couple things here that to back up your point I once had it hurt a guy senior military guy talked about the same paradox is if you have a bomb which can take out you know a bathroom is so accurate it can take out of just the bathroom in like a mansion somewhere in the desert then you think that's an advantage is actually not because now you need to have intelligence that can locate someone in a place as specific as the bathroom right right yeah before when are you wiped out like the entire house yeah and all you need to know is he was in the house there you know where he is in the house right that's sort of funny but uh I wonder like if you reconstruct how we found some Obinna Laden for example doesn't that begin it's an awful lot of intercepted signals replace an awful lot of how much is it do we ultimately have a human source yeah we do they did that they did a operation where they were going door-to-door saying we're your kids vaccinated oh right and that was a huge problem because now when people actually make sure that people are being vaccinated they're like get out of our neighborhood they're attacking those people because they think they're all spies which is not you're not supposed to do that kind of thing you're not supposed to cross intelligence and humanitarian operations for that reason yeah okay so it was a mix yeah I'm being whimsical but I mean but I do think in general the absolute futility that the know of the of human beings efforts to successfully read deception in others suggests to us that some things we do ought to be changed that's yeah of course you can give another example in the book of Judges being just horrible at deciding who's going to be a flight risk for bail versus a computer there are a couple of other examples in the book as well one experiment which is really fascinating I'd love for you to speak to this this experiment where people are asked to complete words and the words would be like it would be da blank blank and I'd go dark and then it'd be like tou blank blank Oh tough and then you say well these words what do you think they say about you and I say nothing I'm not it's not I say dark tough malicious I don't know they don't say anything about me but then of course when we have other people do it and you ask me what is these words say about other people I just think I know them better than they know themselves yeah so this is called the asymmetric ality of something something inside sorry it's been a long day it's a club yeah so this is this thing that we have it goes to this heart of we have enormous confidence in our ability to draw meaningful conclusions about people based on very superficial evidence so yeah you have this you see house people complete a list of words and you look at that list and you say oh man you did dark you did you completed da as darkened and tío blank blank blank is tough and you know and I give you a good you say oh man you must be this brooding psychopath yeah exactly brick but in fact you know that's nonsense I mean you can't draw meaningful conclusions about somebody from the way the complete words in a psyche in a psychological questionnaire right but um but that we this is this weird thing about human beings and strangers which is like we are super super crazily confident in our ability to kind of make so another example would be is that I talk in the book about the Boston Marathon bomber - Sarnoff was Don Troy and I ever something like yeah yeah I'm mingling his name one of the reasons he gets the death sentence is that the juries the jury is convinced that he has shown no remorse and this was a big argument of the prosecution that he was a guy and they gave various they had video from him and when he was in prison and they also during the trial itself everyone was look at him and say the guy clearly is not remorseful at all based on his facial expressions I mean was a really brilliant riff by a by a psychologist named Lisa Feldman Barry oh oh yeah yeah she's great yeah she's totally brilliant so she's a stripper in her book when she was like wait a minute how do you first of all what does remorse look like I don't know what it looks like why are we so sure we know what it looks like why are we so sure that everyone demonstrates remorse in the same way and thirdly he's not American he's Chechen right so what do we know about Chechen and Society and that and what we do know about Russian society is said if they did manifest remorse on their face in a certain way it wouldn't be the same way we do right they have very different cultural codes about how men are supposed to behave and manage their emotions in stressful situations she's like so like you can't know maybe he didn't feel remorse or maybe he did you cannot sit there and accurately determine whether he did or didn't based on your perception of the expressions on his face and that is you know fun them at a fundamental error that we keep making over and over and over and over again right I mean I am sitting here I've met you for the first time half an hour ago I am some part of my brain is trying to figure out what you're thinking Sharon I'm saying yeah right and whatever evidence am I using the expressions on your face yeah which are you know masked terror goes wrong no but like and I don't if I if I if you were my brother I would know what they mean I grown up with you sure I have no clue what your what your expressions mean again I can't turn off the part of my brain that wants to say oh he looks a little bored oh is he enjoying this conference always he joins curse I hope Malcom likes me after this yeah I mean who know that's you know I'm trying to quiet that part of the brain and get into the academic part it actually is funny as a host I I had to manage my emotions all the time because I do think about oh I should look really interested but I also want to make sure I'm listening and I also want to make sure I connect what's gonna happen next without thinking about my next question and becoming nonpresent do you are you actively unconsciously managing your your demeanor well yeah sometimes not all the time because that's a waste of cognitive resources most people don't really care what I look like but I can't just sit there and go mmm and stare upwards because I'm thinking about what you're saying cuz a lot of times when I have a conversation I'll look in a different direction because I'm listening that doesn't work very well on camera or when I'm talking with you like this because you might go I'm over here what what's going on are you yes um everything okay so yeah I have to be more like I'm paying attention like a normal person I'm doing the friends thing I'm being present right now whereas I'm not necessarily always we're gonna look matched and we get into what matching isn't it necessary yeah I do manage it to a degree there's a like a element of high school drama acting involved in doing a show like this yeah yeah you have to when I interview people the thing that's on my mind is almost more than the quality of the questions I'm asking I'm trying to keep I am very consciously trying to communicate engagement so I want them to feel like I I'm listening to them very diligent mhm and I care about what they say cuz I feel like only under those circumstances will people open up of course yeah and but I am but I'm aware like it took me a long time to figure out that you can't just feel that you have to manifest it in a way that people can pick up on I didn't help doesn't help matters if I look checked out even though I may not be at all right right but that's a kind of but you you know we're talking about we are professionals who are talking about the way we conduct our business you know most encounters with between strangers are not in that kind of rarefied contact correct yeah you're out in the wild and you you know you can't manage your emotional expressions in a way that that maximizes their chances of being read appropriately like in the Sandra bland case you know she's legit upset she's been pulled over for no reason she's had bad encounters with cops in the past you know there's she's not sitting there thinking oh my god is the way I'm feeling in my heart being perfectly represented on my face no she's just trying to manage the fact that she has overcome with emotion and really distressed that's true I think and if I try to manage my communication in the same way we're doing now where we have a specific there's a specific context that happens when these lights and cameras turn on where everyone goes okay maybe I'll be slight 10% different than I am in real life I also do things where instead of going mmm-hmm like I would in a normal conversation I do things with my hands so that they don't have to edit it out or it doesn't go over your audio I mean there's all kinds of little things but we see people like that in the wild where we go this person I don't know what was that they're strange they're likable but there's something off and the reason is because they're acting a little bit too matched they're a little bit too dramatic and it doesn't it seems strange yeah yeah it seems fake um I wonder you know going back to this thing about so I part of the book where I talk about how do i how judges are so bad at making bail decisions and how an AI system is better and what's why that's interesting is that the judge on paper knows more than the AI the AI makes the algorithm makes its decision based simply on the criminal record of the defendant suspect and the judge has the criminal record plus the evidence of his eyes he he sees the defendant in front of him and yet that fact that he can see the defendant that additional information does not seem to make him a better decision maker it makes the judge a worse decision-maker so it's not just that the evidence he's picking up in the encounter is you know a wash or irrelevant it's actually it's making the judge worse right that's weird so not that I gets me wondering about things like job interviews are you are you sure if you're an employer that the evidence you gathered from the face-to-face encounter with the prospective employer playi is adding or detracting from your ability to make a good decision about their fit for the job you're hiring them for it's really unclear like I am more and more convinced that what the job interview is is turning it's just it's it's people are applying a lessons from dating like in dating you want to meet the person face-to-face because you want to know whether you're attractive right so there's no question that's a good idea um we don't hire people that we want to sleep with right that's not generally not a good idea yeah no it's not the way works we have people because of their abilities and their abilities are not manifest in their physical presence right so and what if you're scared off like I was thinking of musing about this about um with this with my dentist about just a lot of pro bono work because he's obsessed with this idea that um one of the ways in which we subtly discriminate against people is by looking at their teeth totally and people who are poor and can't afford good dentistry and had bad teeth get I mean it is a huge roadblock in and I don't think about this what if I if I'm looking for an I have a little company in their audio company and what if I'm looking to hire somebody and if I and they have bad teeth if I didn't meet them and just consider their objective qualifications for the job if I just email with them or talk to them on the phone the teeth wouldn't be an issue but if I met them what if some on some unconscious level I mean I was repulsed by their a good year right I mean and that is horrifying thought that I would judge somebody on the basis of the fact that they could not they are their parents could not afford you know advanced tennis everything I hit with a baseball last week playing with their kid and how they can't yeah I get King couldn't afford to get their teeth fixed so then I'm a job yet yeah yeah I mean there's a million and then I think it's time as a society that we start take that kind of I mean that's really where I'm going with the story of Sandra bland is we have to take these misperceptions we have of strangers seriously you really have to think about how do we restructure the world so that we can account for these kind of errors I want to talk about friends this is a particularly cool pop culture reference that you came up with for the book this show has strong emotions that are displayed on the face perfectly matched as you called it so when Ross is perplexed or Monica is angry it's really clear they go over like the text book facial muscle movements I think with facts FAC s what is that again facial action coding system yes Eckman I think came up with yes well I've been here and here instead of just come here yes so there's that there is a just as there is musical notation that allows you to describe in writing what music sounds there's a thing called facts which is face notation it allows me to describe in writing what's going on your face right now so you know what's called action unit one is when the inner part of your eyebrows go up and then action unit six is like something else every conceivable expression your face could make has been coded so and there are people out there who are experts in facts so I found it a facts expert woman named Jennifer forgot II and I gave her two minutes of a friends episode chosen at random and it's what it's one and I it's one where where I always got my friends people mixed up anyway it's when where Ross discovers rachel has been he discovers his sister making out with Monica right Monica and Chandler Chandler making out right Ross is upset because he doesn't want his sister to going out with his best friend so I give this to Jennifer for gaudí and I say give me a fax reading of all of their facial expressions um and she does that and by the way so genius then I say oh then we say Ike sit down with JIT if I said okay we're gonna go through this 2 minutes section and do the facial expressions of the actors match the emotions that they're supposed to feel in that so if she said okay in this instance Ross's face shows anger as it is classically expressed you know action unit 6 12 15 and whatever does Roz he's supposed to feel angry that moment dancers yes you know and all done list when Joey looks dumb does his face match the expression of yes when Monica is surprised to her eyes go wide and her jaw drop and her eyebrows go up yes a cartoon level cartoon level congruity between what's on your face and what's in your heart they do that cuz they're trained actors right and that's why even though the plots of friends are absurdly complex no one in history has ever watched an episode of friends and said they lost me what is going on what a show yeah yeah never happened why because they catalogue everything is perfectly catalogued during that if you watch a lot of TV you can come to the false impression that that's the way things work in real life that's what's going on in your face but truth that's not true at all and a significant number of people are what are called mismatched and that is that their facial expressions under certain circumstances do not match the way they feel on on the inside and those people give us Fitz tsarnaev so no remorse well we don't know because he was mismatched and you in the book you give the example of Bernie Madoff where he looked very calm and collected and nice and oh well that's mismatch because he's obviously a complete psycho who has no yeah concern for anybody but himself so we think this is what an emotion is supposed to look like but it's not but we've trained ourselves to think that the way someone looks and acts is the way that they feel but that's just not true not true at all and then that is a source of more so I they in that chapter I talked about the Amanda Knox case mm-hmm you know the the famous case where an American teenager goes does a year abroad in Italy and gets falsely accused of murdering her roommate and that case is all about how the fact the fact that Mendon ox has mismatched just know it and never any evidence linking her to the crime they have another guy who clearly did it and they dragged her in why because she doesn't behave the way the Italian police and the British tabloid press think someone whose roommate has murdered has been murdered ought to behave and so if you don't think this kind of misapprehension has consequences just look at the real world record we are sending people to jail for years and years and years for crimes that had nothing to do with kids I mean she was like a college student right it's horrible so we judge people's honesty based on their demeanor but that's inaccurate so if they're nervous we think oh they're lying they're nervous well are they or are they just surrounded by police officers that are yelling at them and telling them they're gonna go to jail for ten years for shoplifting even though they didn't shoplift I mean that's enough to make you act nervous yeah if you're a 12 year old african-american kid who got picked up for something they didn't do or any kid frankly yeah for something I didn't do so the mismatch seems like dishonesty and this truth default theory which you bring up in the book is well plus the mismatch means we can get deceived really easily even if we're a seasoned FBI agent I mean the history of I mean and you cannot have any illusions about our our ability to detect lies just by if you just look at them look at him madoff fools everybody for 20 years all these spies mean tons and tons and tons of spies go undetected for years and years I mean I could just go on like Larry Nasser case at Michigan State a pedophile is operating in plain sight for two decades and nobody you know he kind of fans everybody I mean it's that kind of it's pretty sobering to look at those examples how do you decide what to explore and what to study I'm wondering actually how you how often you start a topic do this deep dive and then go and then change your mind and abandon it and go into something else well a fair amount I mean there's a certain amount of trial and error and all of these things but you can always Michael questios is it an interesting story or is it an interesting bit of research and then if it is then I hold on to it in the expectation that maybe someday it'll be useful like there so there are little bits and pieces in in this book that I kind of reported and learned about without realizing or knowing how I would use them so I'll do like it has this whole I have this whole huge amount of research I did on the houston school system which i was gonna put in the book and didn't and she's sitting there I'm sure I'll use it one day cuz it's super interesting but you know it's just like that happens like you just kind of get to be willing to I think to experiment when you're writing a book like yeah they call it kill your darlings in show business you do this amazing thing and then you go it just doesn't fit that's right so you sit on it thinking someday because otherwise it kills you to just delete it or if writers writers you know I think it really is true that you you you have another you you put these darlings in a closet and you can use most of them I mean if it's a good story it's a good story yeah the podcast must help with that I only have a twenty five minute long thing or an hour long thing well yeah I will do my my houston school system I think for the podcast maybe next year you study people and social phenomena at a level that few people do so it seems like more than an interest I don't know if it's an obsession or anything but certainly a research gets to that level of like obsessive completion I assume you would agree that you have an analytical mind and I wonder if you ever think your life would have been easier if you thought less about things I think a lot of people feel that way like did it get you in trouble when you were younger I mean I think um I wouldn't call myself my hyper analytical really really what I don't think about what I'm doing is being analytical I think what I'm doing would I the particular thing that I do a lot of is simply perspective taking so I have I spend a lot of time trying to see something through someone else's eyes which is not the same as being analytic it's a little it's look it's kind of it's less impressive but I am very what I wrote the question I always ask when I hear something is why does that person feel why would that person feel that way like why do they think about it this way I don't like what is it about where they come from or do that and a lot of a huge amount of my writing is just about that it's about me and happening someone else's mind for a while do you ever look at your own work through other people's eyes like do you read your reviews and go okay well I mean I'm I don't read I read my reviews very sparingly because I don't think it's useful no to read if the review is really glowing it just as well as your head sure and if it's really negative it just is a downer so I don't really yeah I find them sometimes a little bit they do make you aware of your tendencies hmm I don't always agree with critics who would call those tendencies problematic I sometimes think that they're not problematic oh just tendencies but uh yeah it does it does a discipline skits um a good review can be very useful in giving you some self-awareness is there any criticism that you hear of your work that you actually agree with it may be criticism you hear often where you go I know they're right I'm working on this or I do need to fix that well I mean I'm an enthusiast so uh I love trying on new ideas for size and some people take me to task because they think I'm overly enthusiastic about okay cool new ideas they're not wrong at all I might be up but I sort of think um I'd rather be on that side of if if if you're gonna err on one side or the other of enthusiasm too little for new ideas yeah too much I'd rather err on the side of too much enthusiasm yeah and I'm also fine with admitting when I'm wrong or any problem with that so as long as you're willing to backtrack when you think you your enthusiasm was misplaced I think it's fine to be overly enthusiastic nobody said I mean I'm being unduly harsh with myself I've just a minute enthusiast I think if someone's got a cool way of looking at something I'm like let's explore it it's like why would why would we this is not yeah I'm not you know the I must I'm not the future of the world is not at stake and I'm out in double-booked yeah I suppose also it's not necessarily billed as like this is a scientific textbook that is going to it's it's a it's a book I was I DS my readers and I think my readers do do this and this is why people I've come back to my books again and again and that is that I think we just really enjoy the process of perspective taking they want to they I think that's a kind of there's something about that exercise that is enormous the appealing and kind of liberating why do you think humans or why any research has shown that humans are evolved to trust implicitly we didn't talk much about truth default theory but there has to be a reason why we by default believe what people tell us or believe the impressions that we get it has to be good for society at large somehow it is because almost nothing we know higher order activity can proceed without the presumption of trust so if I trusted that the you know the address you guys you people gave me was correct I trusted do you would be here I trusted that you would prepare for this interview I trusted there's a million things you trusted I would show up and that I would speak to you in good faith I mean because each of us made enormous I have you know never met you before and nor have you ever met me but this works because each of us made ten assumptions positive assumptions about the other party right before we even started mm-hmm and if we were the kinds of person people who thought twice about those presumptions then this would have never happened right yeah well I would have been super pissed if you didn't show up I spent like this you know but more than that like we would you know our laura's would be wrangling over this now you know like yeah so society and I always get the example of you can't put your child on a school bus in the morning unless you have implicit trust in the system you know you can't if you're on Wall Street oh when I was talking in the book about in the Madoff case trying to account for the fact that very seasoned Wall Street people were fooled by Madoff part of the reason is you can't be a financial trader or an investor unless you have a huge amount of trust in the system I mean we're goodness sake people are wiring millions of dollars to you know it you know it vanishes into the ether and you trust it's going where you want it to go and being invested according to the exact to the instructions you gave so that's the mindset that that weirdly we don't think of this the mindset and proclivity that gets rewarded in a place like Wall Street is the propensity to trust right that's true yeah in numerous situations what you know the F what is the effective leader in an organization the kind of person who is willing to believe in their employees to help them mentor them nurture them encourage them all of those things are based on a fundamental trust that the employee will respond accordingly that the employee is as dedicated and motivated about the work as the as the manager wants them to be I mean I could go on can't do anything that's so evolution of course favors people who have this predisposition because those are the people who succeed in the world that's a good point I mean we we literally get a stack of cash or something valuable and we go well I can't keep this in my own house where I know I could keep it safe I have to drop it off with a stranger and Chase Manhattan Bank and have them lock it in one of those boxes that I'm not allowed to even look at and make sure it's still there yeah and we just operate this way the whole economy the whole society operates this way and when somebody doesn't do that we go oh they're kind of weird they keep their money in their house something's wrong with whatever so this is this is it's so deeply ingrained in the human psyche so we can't assist a bit this is the argument of Tim Levine who's a communications University of Alabama um whose work I rely on very heavily in this book or I think it's absolutely brilliant and I'm really want more of the world to kind of appreciate his insights but this is his big argument that it is hugely adaptive to be try to be a truster but that but if you are someone who trusts you also have to accept the fact that this leaves you vulnerable to deception so and there's no way around that you have to accept that trade-off that 95% of the time I am better off because I trust implicitly but 5% a time that means I'm gonna get scammed right no way around it yeah you're right you for all you know nobody listens to this podcast and I'd this is the first episode and then you have to go home and fire someone red for for a proving that look was is he serious right now can't really tell from the look good writing is 20% I think typing you said an 80% organization yeah how do you organize your work clearly you use tons of sources from people to documents to yeah videotape I'm very iterative so I'll read something write a bit and then think about it and then read more and get a more information I was still adding to this manuscript of talking to strangers really really late and uh if you'd compare my first drafts is might like I did five drafts with my fifth draft huge differences so I really like to kind of I like listening to what others think about stuff that I've written I think I take it I take that kind of feedback very seriously to give to people who are responding in good faith and it really helps to the first time you write something even though you wrote it it's not what you think right what do you mean I mean it takes a long time to figure out how to express what you think and it takes a long time to figure out what you think so the first time when you do a first draft you're not doing either of those things you're still early in the process of knowing what you identifying what you really believe and you're early in the process of being able to express it so um and on particularly this book where there's a lot of chapters like the chapter on the Stampede rape case mm-hmm where I'm making a very subtle nuanced point and I desperately don't want to be misunderstood and I want to make sure that I communicate I want to walk that line very carefully it's hard to do and the first draft you know is never gonna is never gonna represent your feelings accurately you got to be willing I must have been 10 10 drops without that chapter right so that's like that's what I mean that a lot when I say organization what I include in that is it's 80% organization and reflection need to think about in sit with what you've written do want to make sure it communicates what you believe you know in an incredible number of cases we hold people accountable for things that they have written without asking a question but what a minute is the way they wrote it does the way they wrote it legitimately represent what they believe because there is a gap I would imagine this was a would you kind of nervous it all clenched up at all the handing this one in because there's a lot of sensitive stuff in here right when I read this I won whoo Q people getting mad and deliberately or otherwise misinterpreting what he meant about this one and then Q the regressive ultra one side or the other taking this and running with it and I'm like waiting for the the TMZ piece to come out about how you're suddenly like this closet I don't know whatever yes and you know I mean I think if you read the book carefully you'll know that I'm that I'm not taking I'm not I I don't think there's anything in this book that's I really this book is not it does now have morally objectionable moments to the opposite I mean I think got a lot of what I'm doing is in a very well-intentioned way trying to resolve difficult problems but does that mean there are people who will deliberately or always miss yeah but there always is you can't really avoid that you can't do work of your word and you can you can't let that stop you I mean the answer is just don't read Twitter yeah yeah saves you a lot of you don't have Twitter do you oh wait you do but I Twitter I like tweet out cat photos I mean I don't okay I don't I don't like or like I'm a big runner so I've tweet out like running daddy-o's and stuff I I rarely dip by towing contentious waters on Twitter because I looked and I only saw what looked to be fake Malcolm Gladwell's I didn't know there's a real one do it okay well at global with check mark well then I don't know why I assume that was but like I said only go there if you want to see cat photos photos in track and field that's probably why I was like oh there's nothing about his new book you know this is work in here there's nobody telling him I had I had a picture of a cat very very cute cat sitting next to copy of my book that was my that was my forearm oh that's your yeah that's your social media teams are sitting there facepalm right come on it's astonishing how much mileage you can get cats I don't disagree how can your insights be best used to inform interactions with strangers whose role or relationship in our life is especially consequential high levels of trust strong information and balance like doctors lawyers maybe your boss how would you take what you've written and talking to strangers and apply it in those instances well so I spend the most time on this with obviously with law enforcement and I think that what it requires what we have to understand is that solving this problem of misperception by police officers requires that we go back to really first principles that we have a very different philosophy of policing and very different ways of training police officers and I detail both those things in in the last part of the book that there are some really interesting new theories about crime and how its distributed in the population or actually in geographically distributed that can greatly improve the kind of social and moral efficiency of proactive policing now is he we have there are ways in which we can limit aggressive policing proactive policing to those very very very specific areas where it is necessary and and also we have clear empirical and statistical evidence to suggest that we do not need to be too aggressively police in the overwhelming number of neighborhoods fundamentally the problem with Sandra bland is it on that street at that time of day in that community proactive policing of the sort that brian encinia was practicing was completely uncalled for so that's really what by the end of the book I'm trying to say lettuce this we gotta go right back and think very very and understand something fundamental about crime and change law enforcement practice in along those lines I think for me then one of the top takeaways was don't believe the what you might read in someone's face because I I was one of those people who's like well she they don't look XYZ which is very human it's ginger wrong yeah also yeah you you bring us a lot of mysteries you help decode them all the time what mystery or phenomenon would you like to see solved isn't the right word but whatever you know what I mean especially in the social sciences in your lifetime oh wow what a great question I mean I guess the thing all of the things I think you know we are in the middle of this a second wave of so close social science if the first wave was what are the general principles that help us explain human behavior the second wave now is what is the what are the general principles that help us distinguish among human beings so you know first wave was Howard do you and I process information second wave is how can we explain the differences in the way you and I process information much more specific and interesting question and that idea that you know I think this is where the where we're moving you know if you if you think about something like the CTE problem in tackle professional football to bring the problem that not everyone who suffers repeated concussions or hits to the head develops this ruinous neurological condition called CTE some portion do and they so clearly developing this incredible this problem is a product both of your experience in a flip for your field plus some underlying susceptibility the next stage is for us to identify that susceptibility and say to a group of people you probably shouldn't play football right that's how you resolve that problem in football is by getting more sophisticated about understanding the micro differences between individuals that's a kind of good bottle for where I think social science is headed and so if I can understand how you know even making an argument what are the what's the best way to make an argument do you change your mind and how does that differ from the best way to change the mind of you know your mom or your best friend or you know someone you work with that's deaths are a really really crucial sub next stage of inquiry so the next book is arguing with strangers yes exactly Malcolm Gladwell thank you very much thank you so much you

Channel: THE JORDAN HARBINGER SHOW

Views: 11,526

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Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, malcolm gladwell, malcolm gladwell interview, malcolm gladwell podcast, talking to strangers, malcolm gladwell talking to strangers, jordan harbinger malcolm gladwell, social skills, communication skills, human nature

Id: SjghP1FcIyA

Length: 56min 51sec (3411 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 25 2019