Malcolm Gladwell | Talking to Strangers - What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know

thank you it's a pleasure to be here although I noted with some alarm that this event is sponsored by the New York Times because I worked four years for the Washington Post the archrival of the New York Times so this is a bit like asking a Tottenham fan to show up for an event supporting Arsenal so I'm everything I say is under protest just so you know I wanted to talk a little bit about it a paradox about human communication which i think is extremely important and relatively under-recognized and that is that everything that is good and meaningful and powerful about a human communication has a price as it turns out I think the price is worth paying but I think sometimes we overlook the consequences of the fact that there is this particular consequence to effective communication and the best way to illustrate this paradox is to tell you a story from my new book which is called talking to strangers which I encourage you all to buy in triplicate and and to listen to the audiobook by the way which is a very special kind of audiobook but in the book I tell a story that came from a man named Brian Mattel Donatella is a former high-ranking CIA officer he ran the Latin American desk for the CIA for many years and he wrote a memoir and I have a particular affection for the memoirs of mid-level retired government bureaucrats because I find them paradoxically to be source of many great ideas and he in the middle of his book he tells this incredible story about two men a man called the mountain climber and a man called Florentino a spiaggia and it was so striking that I called up Brian Attell and went to see him lives in Miami has all these guys do and I said you in your book you write this incredible story about these Florentine OSBI on the mountain climber tell me more there must be more to this who who is the mountain climber is why I can't tell you and I said well can you at least tell me what his real name is this is no I can't can you tell me where he is he says no no I saw secret I would have to you know so this is like waving red meat in front of a dog so I immediately set to work to try and find the mountain climber and for a year and a half I put my you know every conceivable corner I put my name out that I was looking for the mountain climber and then one day and this by the way I'm gonna warn you I'm about to engage in a egregious act of name-dropping so just forgive me in advance but on your phone when you get a normal phone call you see the number of the person calling you and then sometimes it says unknown ID or you know someone has managed to evade this process what you may not know is there's a level above that when someone calls from the deep state there's it's not even unknown ID it's just a kind of string of nonsense words like blue and then if you get that blue you know anyway I'm on the phone I'm looking at my phone one day rings and it says blood I think this is so exciting so I answer it and it's this is the active egregious name-dropping and I hear Malcolm Gladwell I go yes Barack Obama now that's a story for another time you'll have to have me come back you want to know what that baby weight point is a week later I look at my phone and it's bula again I think Barack is calling me back so I answer it and this time it's Malcolm Gladwell yes it's the mountain climber I hear you've been looking for me so who is the mountain climber mountain were was the most legendary CIA operative of his generation he was started out in Soviet Russia and he was the gold standard he spoke Russian like a Russian he was this incredible as tradecraft was impeccable he was the Russians were so in all of him they taught a course at their spies training school on how to be like the mountain climber that's how big he was at one point the mountain climber is like eating lunch in Moscow and these two KGB agents slide in that crossed the table from him take out a briefcase open it up it's full of cash and they just say all this is yours if you just come and work for us mountain climber of course was of the generation of government official who was incorruptible and he says no does so well they promote him to be CIA station chief in Havana which doesn't sound like a promotion but it is because Havana is the backdoor to all of America's enemies it's a crucial posting and he gets down he realizes the CIA's operations in Cuba are in a disarray and so he systematically rebuilds the the the us's network of spies in Cuba until he has this very large incredibly high functioning network and Langley the his bosses back and Langley are absolutely thrilled with his work and finally he's promoted to a very top job in the CIA and one day he gets a call from someone way up high CIA who says mountain climber you need to get on a plane right away and fly to Frankfurt and go to the CIA the briefing center there there's someone you need to meet so he flies to Frankfurt and he walks into the debriefing Center and who was there but a man named Florentino sp Agha now who was Florentino SP Agha Florentina la spiaggia is the Cuban version of the mountain climber he's this kind of dashing brilliant espionage agent who rose to the top of the Cuban intelligence service and gets promoted to the point where he's running the entire Cuban intelligence operation in Eastern Europe out of Bratislava but at a certain point Florentino becomes disillusioned with Fidel Castro and decides that he wants to defect and this is 1987 Cold War's still up so he says to his girlfriend Marta also Cuban but Marta is it low-ranking Cuban people at that point in Eastern Europe had their passports taken away so he has this government issue Mazda and he drills holes in the Tron puts Marte in the trunk very strong relationship between two of them and drives to the border with Austria talks us way across the border shows up at the US Embassy says my name is Florentine OSB Agha I am a high ranking member of the Cuban intelligence service I have a story to tell they are thrilled and they say well we're gonna take you to the debriefing Center in Frankfort where and he says fine but I'll tell you everything I know on one condition I will only tell it to the mountain climber right because he had known about the legend of the mountain climber from his time in Havana so that's why the two men meet and they you know they do the Cuban thing and they kiss on many cheeks and they have a big hug and I sit down and the mountain climber asks the question you're always supposed to ask when your debriefing a defector which is established tell me something that establishes your bona fides so the mountain Florentino says okay when you were CIA station chief in Havana you had a spy named Juan who was very high up in the personal staff of Fidel Castro and one used to take photographs of Castro's documents and send them to you and mount glamour is alarmed that that Florentino noses says yes that's true I had a guy named Juan he was one of my best sources and Florentino says to the mountain climber Juan was working for us he was a double agent the whole time and mount camera cannot believe this is his best guy and Florentine says wait I'm not done you would have got in Pedro who is really high up in the Cuban Air Force and who gave you chapter and verse on Cuba's military capabilities and once again the mountain cameras a little bit taking the bags is he yeah hired a guy named Pedro and Florentino says Pedro work for us double agent whole time and now the mountain climber is having heart palpitations his entire career is like you know disappearing before his eyes and Florentino says wait I'm not done you and a guy he was really high up in the Cuban intelligence Directorate and he told you everything you knew about Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union and mountain-climber says I did and Florentino says working for us the entire time double agent and now the mountain cameras on the floor it's like having a stroke this is like his this is the man who built one of the most brilliant careers of his generation in the CIA and it is now evaporating into dust and Florentino says wait I'm not done and then he lists he keeps going and going and going until he has named the entire network that the mountain climber ran when he was in Cuba and identified every single one of those spies as double agents working for Cuba it's the most one of the most devastating and embarrassing revelations of the Cold War the mountain climber picks himself up finally off the floor takes Florentino back to Langley tells the same story to the CIA brass and they are of course completely humiliated and then it gets worse because Castro learns that Florentino has defected and released his on Cuban television a ten part documentary which is basically just a Cuban television crew following the CIA's operatives around Havana and filming without their knowledge everything they did over the course of many years including and the thing the detail as someone who's now heavily into audio the detail that always gets me is the audio was perfect which meant that they had to have known in advance where the spies were and brought in some world-class sound crew to rig up some elaborate system to capture every bit of conversation perfectly it is as I said one of the most devastating revelations of the Cold War now think about this story for a moment on the one hand it's an espionage story about deception in espionage and that happens all the time so you might think well so what but it's weird in a number of key respects the first respect is generally when we think about who gets deceived we think that the person being deceived is to see because in some way they are vulnerable or naive right it's a little old lady in the middle of nowhere who gets the call from the you know someone claiming to be a nigerian prince who's found 10 million pounds of a suitcase that has her name on it right and you think oh really right and she gets taken in that's our normal narrative about deception in this case these people are not naive or marginalized right this is the most sophisticated spy agency in the world not only that it is the best operative at the most sophisticated spy agency in the world that's strange second thing we second part of our normal narrative about deception is that exception is something that happens once right you deal with you take your car to the Auto Body Shop and the guy there cheats you and so you never take it back to that same you learn well in this case it's not a didn't happen once and they learn it happens 48 times over the course of many many years and they never learn right third thing is we have a notion that somehow this person doing the deceiving is capable of that act because they are some kind of evil genius so they're the Bond villain right they're the people with some extraordinary Machiavellian talent that allows them to pull the wool over other people's eyes in this case though the all those Cuba really have 48 evil geniuses is Cuba large enough to have 48 I mean it seems implausible that they were able to locate 48 Bond villains within the country of Cuba capable of hoodwinking the CIA in fact when you read I'm happen to be a huge aficionado of spy stories real-life spy stories if you read stories of people who have successfully committed treachery against their country for years and years they're always hapless they're never evil geniuses there I tell the story in my book as well about a woman named Ana Montes who also was spying for the Cubans who rises to the very top of the American intelligence establishment ana Montes was a terrible spy when they caught her she had her codes that she used to communicate with her handlers in her purse and when they searched her apartment they found the radio she used to communicate with Havana in a shoebox in her closet who hides the radio in a shoebox in the closet right this is crazy the maybe the most damaging spy the 20th century was Aldrich Ames of course who was the CIA counterintelligence officer who who was in the entire time he was managing the CIA's counterintelligence effort against the Soviets was working for the Soviets and he handed over everything over the course of nine years to the Soviets and the total value if you could put a value of the secrets that he gave the Soviets is very clearly in the billions I mean it was he compromised the entire intelligence apparatus directed the Soviet Union so how much did Aldrich Ames ask for giving away billions of dollars in secrets to the Soviets well the Soviets paid him about two hundred thousand dollars a year Judas what an idiot this guy was he is literally in a position to give the Soviets everything no one has ever had more leverage over another country than Aldrich Ames had over the Soviet they would have given him anything and he says well a couple hundred thousand throw in some football tickets and I'll be happy I mean my point is these are not geniuses right that's the third and most kind of crucial puzzle of this so now you might say well maybe there's something about the world of intelligence that isn't you know it's different from the real world well that's not true I pick a domain where a major deception occurred and you will see the same three lessons in operation remember Bernie Madoff the men around the largest Ponzi scheme in history who did Bernie Madoff cheat not little old ladies the most sophisticated investors in the world did he do it once and then everyone got wise to him no he did it over and over again for 25 years and she never got caught he turned himself in remember he didn't get caught three was Bernie Madoff an evil genius no birdy Bernie's accountant was an 85 year old guy working out of a strip mall in Rockland County in New York for those of you who don't know New York Rockland County is a is a is a rural area up to the west and you can go from New York City in many directions and run into sophisticated intelligence people Rockland County is not that direction Bernie didn't even did it wasn't even trying to to like project the image of the successful hedge fund yet everybody falls for him right I could go on and on and on and on in fact all of you are bad at detecting deception I could do an experiment right now where I had a hundred people come up on stage and say something those are they're true or a lie true and say which is it right to ask all of you to judge who is lying or not and when we if we were to tally up your answers and we would find that you probably get between 52 and 54 percent of them correct you'd be slightly better than chance and the only who is even better than chance is that a certain percentage of people are such terrible liars we all get them right but other than that you're just flipping a coin right now why is that what should we make of the fact that we're really bad at this you would think wouldn't you that evolution would have prepared us to be better at detecting deception evolution is supposed to favor those who are good at things that are adaptive right that advance the species and nothing could be more adaptive clearly surely than being able to tell whether someone is lying or not well it turns out that that's probably not true so the guy named Tim Levine whose work I draw upon in my book and Levine argue is pretty persuasively that the opposite is true that evolution has not selected us to be good at detecting lies it has actually selected us to do to be gullible to be trusting engines to be the kind of person who has what he calls default to truth who just assumes that anyone they're speaking to is being truthful unless the gets absolutely overwhelming and the reason for that LeMond argues is that it's actually better as a species if we're trusting than if we are suspicious I mean think about it you're someone who has a choice of passing on your genes with two people one of them is paranoid and suspicious and one of them is loving and trusting and open who do you choose you don't say I'm very attracted to Susie because Susie has that lovely quality of paranoia and suspicion I can think of no one I would rather live my life with and have children with then this paragon of darkness and paranoia no you go with the person who's open and trusting now multiply that times a million years and you come to understand that people who are paranoid and trusting don't pass on their genes why because they're miserable people to spend time with but more than that the line argues it's because it makes better sense as a species if we're paranoid and if we're if we're not paranoid and trusting are not paranoid but rather trusting because think about it virtually everything that we do a value in the world requires that we do have that kind of implicit faith in the honesty of others right you can't have a successful relationship you can't cooperate with others you can't build civil society you can't start a company you can't do anything unless you're willing to face place your faith in others and that has tended to work over the course of human history because most of us are honest most of us are not like Bernie Madoff pulling the wool over people's our lives but with that fundamentally adaptive trust comes a price which is once in a generation someone's gonna come along and is gonna fool us right and we're going to be helpless in the face of that deception but Levine's point is that's a pretty good bargain so think about the mountain climber the mountain climber is someone who gets fooled in a way that almost no one has ever been fooled by Fidel Castro does that mean the mountain climber was a bad spy no the mountain climber went to Havana and he did what he was supposed to do is he found a group of people and he believed in them and he empowered them and he encouraged them and he built a vast network that generated an enormous amount of information for his bosses back in Langley it so turns out that in that instance he was fooled a hundred percent of the time by the Cubans but 999 times out of a thousand that's not the way the world works in 99 times out of a thousand that's the right strategy for getting what we want from society and for participating meaningfully with other other people now I don't imagine that most of you will ever be in a situation where you're dealing with spies or with Ponzi schemers but I think the same principle holds true for all of us as we go about our lives we are called in numerous different situations to believe in others that is the absolute best strategy if we want to lead a meaningful life and if we want to change the world but it comes with a price it means that we will inevitably make a mistake right when it comes to people sometimes but when we make a mistake like that it is not a sign of what we are doing wrong as human beings it's a sign of what we're doing right thank you

Channel: How To Academy

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Keywords: Malcolm Gladwell, How To Academy, How to: Academy, Royal Geographical Society, London, How to Change The World, Author, Talking to Strangers, The Tipping Point, 10k hours, The New Yorker, Revisionist History, TED

Id: Hgr1Wv8mwh8

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019