Malcolm Gladwell and Joe Rogan examine Talking to Strangers, where Gladwell reveals how evolutionary trust biases led investors to overlook Bernie Madoff’s $65B Ponzi scheme, while police aggression—like North Carolina’s <1% "going beyond the ticket" success rate—fueled Sandra Bland’s fatal arrest. They debate mind-reading tech, cultural miscommunication (e.g., Irish vs. Italian drinking norms), and Gladwell’s argument that alcohol’s societal harm outweighs marijuana’s risks, citing campus assaults and institutional normalization. Rogan’s creative process—tying notes into "club sandwich" performances—contrasts with Gladwell’s narrative-driven research, like uncovering Cuban spy Anna Montez’s handler’s cryptic claim about a missing operative, while both critique journalism ethics. Ultimately, the episode underscores how systemic trust failures and cultural blind spots distort human judgment, from policing to storytelling. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, that was a book about, I was struck by how many of the kind of high-profile cases that we got obsessed with were at their root about the same thing, which is that individuals were, two people who didn't know each other well, had an exchange and they got each other wrong.
So, you know, everything from Amanda Knox to Bernie Madoff to Larry Nasser at Michigan State to Jerry Sandesky at Penn State, and then to the signature case, which the book is organized around, which is the Sandra Bland case.
Remember the young woman in Texas who gets pulled over by the southern road?
They're all at root, fundamentally the same problem, which is there's an exchange between, and the exchange just goes wrong.
And the question is why?
That's what I began to get really fascinated by, is you'd think at this point in human evolution, we'd have got this thing about talking to strangers down, and we clearly don't.
And we're being pushed to talk more and more to strangers, right, in a kind of globalized world.
And if we're bad at it, that doesn't bode well, does it?
Well, I think there's also an issue today with people not learning the necessary skills in how to talk to people because so much communication is done digitally.
It seems to be a giant issue with young kids.
They're more awkward initially talking to people than I think I remember.
No, I think that's probably – you forget how much – I mean adolescence used to be this one long rehearsal in how to be a normal human being in conversation.
And now the rehearsal, it's like the rehearsal got cut in half.
And, you know, instead of getting to the point where we play basketball with basketballs, we're still just doing wind sprints or something.
Yes, it seemed likely that she was killed versus that she committed suicide.
I didn't think that someone would commit suicide being in jail for three days.
Especially one of the things that you highlighted in the book, and you actually played in the audio version of it, her little sort of affirmations, you know, and she was, she sounded very positive and upbeat and calling everybody kings and queens and thanking God and being very thankful and being aware of life and humility and just graciousness and gratitude.
It didn't seem, I mean, obviously you don't know what kind of dark things can happen to a person when they're incarcerated for three days for a bullshit reason.
Maybe that's the straw that broke the camel's back.
She did have, you know, she had a complicated emotional history.
She had previously tried to commit suicide And she'd had, she was emerging from quite a difficult period in her life and went to Texas to start a new leaf.
And so there is an interpretation.
Like I said, I don't really have strong feelings on this particular part of the story, but there's an interpretation that says, here's a woman who's emerged from a very difficult period in her life, goes, leaves, she was in Illinois.
She drives halfway across the country to start over.
And on the first day that she arrives in Texas to start over, she gets pulled over by a cop.
And by the way, she had thousands of dollars in outstanding tickets.
So she had a history of this bullshit stuff with cops where, you know, the same trap that many poor people in this country get into, which is they get the police use people as an ATM, right?
They like set them up for non trivial things, and when they can't find, when they can't pay the fine, they get another fine and when you know how that goes, she was part of in that trap.
So here she is trying to start over after a difficult time.
First day she gets to Texas, she gets pulled over again and she, in her mind, it's the same.
She's like, oh my God, I tried to start over and I can't.
And then she's in jail and she can't make bail.
And there's a scenario where you can see that she just began to despair.
I mean, I find the whole thing about, I went to that town when I was reporting the book, and it's kind of hard to be, to kill, to kill someone and get away with it requires a level of expertise and forethought that struck me was not present in that little town in Texas.
I mean, it's just not, I don't, they're not like, they're not thinking, these are not people playing chess, right?
I think they just encountered it with this cop, and he's not very good at his job, and he gets way over his head, and he completely misreads her, and he pulls her off to jail, probably deeply regrets the whole incident, and they're all embarrassed and sitting around and hoping it'll just all go away.
And meanwhile, she's all alone in a prison cell, spiraling deeper and deeper into depression.
It's insane that you can keep someone in jail for three days for failure to signal.
It seems like there should have been an initial review of the circumstances that led to her getting pulled out of the car in the first place, and the cop should have been fired immediately.
You're screaming at her because she lit a cigarette?
And I feel like, I don't know, you and I are probably the same age.
There's this, so the cop's 29.
If you grew up with cigarettes, you have a different understanding of the meaning of lighting a cigarette.
So what's happening in the encounter is he pulls her over.
What he does is he sees her coming out of this university campus.
And while she's still on campus property, she rolls through a stop sign.
And then he notices that she's got out of state plates, and she's a young black woman, and she's driving Hyundai, like not a Mercedes-Benz.
And he thinks, huh, I'm going to check this out.
So she pulls onto the road and he drives up behind her aggressively.
He speeds up behind her.
So what does she do?
Well, what any of us would do, she gets out of the way, thinking, oh, he's going to, he's going to, you know, the scene of an accident or something.
I better get out of his way.
She pulls over to get out of his way and he goes, oh, you didn't use your turning signal.
And he pulls her over and pulls him behind her.
Now, by the way, whenever I hear a fire department truck or a police car coming and I pull over to get out of the way, I do not use my turning signal, right?
You just get out of the way.
It's reflexive.
So her immediate thought is, when he does this, is like, oh, this is bullshit, and he tricked me.
And he knows what he's doing.
That's exactly what he wanted.
He wanted to get her in a situation because it's all a pretext.
He just wants, he thinks, oh, maybe there's something weird with her.
So then he, we have this all on tape, of course, because this is one of those instances that was captured entirely on the dash cam, the officer's dash cam.
He goes up to the window and he says, he looks at her and he realizes she's agitated.
Why?
Because she's pissed off.
And he goes, ma'am, is there something wrong?
And she's like, well, you know, I want to know why I'm pulled over, blah, blah, blah.
And then he goes back to his car and he comes back to her.
And he later says in the deposition that when he goes back to His vehicle to check on her license and registration.
He begins to develop suspicions that she's up to no good, she's got drugs or guns.
And so she comes back and they commence to have this increasingly heated conversation.
And she lights the cigarette because she's trying to calm herself down.
And this is my point.
You and I, who grew up in an era where people smoked all the time, know that one of the principal functions of lighting a cigarette was to calm your nerves.
And in her mind, I think, in her mind, she's trying to signal to the cop, let's de-escalate this.
And one of the ways I'm going to show you that I want to de-escalate this is I'm going to take a moment and light a cigarette and just take it down a notch and let's have a real conversation.
He doesn't understand the meaning of that gesture.
And he thinks, oh, he thinks several things.
He thinks, one, she's messing with me.
She's defying my authority by lighting a cigarette.
She's going to blow smoke in my face or something nefarious.
Or she's going to take the lighted cigarette and put it out of my.
So even on the level, I try and identify in the book all of the different ways.
And when I come back to the case at the end of the book, I go through this in more detail.
All the different ways in which he completely misunderstands her.
And one of them is he doesn't understand the meaning of lighting a cigarette in a moment of tension.
And that's still more evidence why you need, if you're a cop or anyone dealing with a stranger, you need to slow down and not jump to any conclusions because there's so much you can miss.
What it seemed to me when I listened to it initially, and then I listened to it again in your audio book, there's a thing that happens with police officers.
I've never been a police officer, but I was a security guard for a brief period of time, and I recognized it in myself, and I recognized it in a lot of people that I work with, is that you start treating the other people like the other.
Like it's us and them.
It was us.
I worked at Great Woods.
It's a performance center in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
And we would catch a lot of people smuggling booze in, things like that.
And there was an attitude that you got, and I was only there for one summer, but there's an attitude of they were the bad people, and you were the good guys.
It was us and them, and we stuck together, and they weren't us.
And cops get that a hundred times worse because there's guns involved and they can get shot at.
We've all seen videos of cops pulling people over.
And he says, Can I see your hands, please?
And the guy pulls out a gun and shoots at him.
We've all seen those videos.
This is always in the back of the mind of cops.
And I think that was just a guy who, as you said, 29 years old, is a young guy.
He's not that bright, not good at communication.
And he is this attitude that he's a cop and that you have to listen to the cops because he's them and you're you.
And that's like when he's telling her to put the cigarette out and she's saying, I don't have to do that.
What's remarkable about that tape, which I must have seen 50 times, and which has been viewed on YouTube, you know, even like a couple million times, is how quickly it escalates.
The whole thing is, it's insanely short.
You would think if I was telling you the story of this, you would think, oh, this unfolds over 10 minutes.
And it doesn't.
It unfolds over a minute and a half.
And that, I remember years ago, I wrote my second book, Blink, and I have in that book a chapter about a very famous, infamous police shooting in New York, a case of Amadou Diallo.
Remember that one where he was shot like 40 times by cops?
And one of the big things I was interested in talking about in that case was how long does it take, how long did it take for that whole terrible sequence to go down.
So from the moment the police develop suspicions about Amadou Diallo to the moment that Amadou Diallo is lying dead on his front porch, how long, how much time elapsed?
And the answer is like two seconds.
It's boom, boom, boom.
It's like, and I had a conversation with actually here in the Valley with Gavin DeBecker.
And he was talking about this question of time, that when you're a security guard guarding someone, you know, famous, a lot of what you're trying to do is to inject time into the scenario.
Instead of, you don't want something to unfold in a second and a half where you have almost no time to react properly.
What you want to do is to unfold in five seconds.
If you're going to add, I'm making this up, I can't remember his exact term, but basically what your job is, is to add seconds into the encounter so that you have a chance to intelligently respond to what's going on.
And so he hit this great riff about how good Israeli Secret Service guys are.
And one of the things they do is they're either not armed or they don't, they're trained not to go for their weapons in these situations.
Because his point is, so say you're guarding the president, you're a body man for the president, you're walking through a crowd, somebody comes up to you, like pulls a gun, wants to shoot the president.
His point is, if you're the secret security guy and your first instinct in response to someone pulling a gun is to go for your own gun, you've lost a second and a half, right?
Your hand's got to go down to your, your whole focus is on getting to your own gun.
And in the meantime, the other guy whose gun's already out has already shot.
You've lost.
You need to be someone who forgets about your own gun and just focuses on the man in front of you, right, and protecting the president.
But it was all in the context of time is this really crucial variable in these kind of encounters.
And everything as a police officer you should be doing is slowing it down.
Wait, you know, analyze what's happening.
And that's what he doesn't do.
The cop in this instance speeds it up.
Right?
He goes to DEF CON, you know, she lights a cigarette and within seconds he's screaming at her.
This is like, you know, a parent shouldn't do that.
I mean, let alone a police officer by the side of the highway.
Well, so in the deposition he gives, which I get toward the end of the book, and I got the tape of the deposition, it's totally fascinating.
It's like he's sitting down with the investigating officer looking into the death of Sandra Bland, and he's got, I don't know how long it is, two hours.
And he's walking them through what he was thinking that day.
And he makes the case that he was terrified, that he was convinced.
He says he goes back to his squad car, comes up, and there's some evidence to support this.
So he pulls her over and he goes to the passenger side window and leans in and says, ma'am, you realize why I pulled you over?
Blah, blah, blah.
And are you okay?
Because she doesn't seem right to him.
She gives him her license.
He goes back to his squad car.
And he says, while he's in the squad car, he looks ahead and he sees her making what he calls furtive movements.
So he's like – Furtive movements also – He thinks she's being all kind of jumpy and you don't know.
He just says, I saw her moving around in ways that didn't make me happy.
And then when he returns to the car, he returns driver's side, which is crucial because if you're a cop, you go driver's side only if you think that you might be in danger, right?
He doesn't, if you go driver's side, you're exposing yourself to the road.
The only reason you do that is that when you're driver's side, you can see the it's very, very difficult if someone has a gun to shoot the police officer who's pulled them over if the police officer is on the driver's side, right?
You have an angle if they're on the passenger side.
So why does he go?
If he thinks she's harmless, there's no reason for him to go back driver's side.
I think this guy, I think these two things are linked.
I actually believe him.
He constructs this ridiculous fantasy about how she's dangerous.
But I think that's just what he was trained to do.
He's a paranoid cop.
And then why is he so insistent that she be compliant for the same reason?
Because he's terrified.
He's like, do exactly what I say because I don't know what's going to happen here, right?
And she's, you know, I don't know.
I don't think those two strains of interpretation are mutually exclusive.
Well, so there's another element here that I get into, which is I got his record as a police officer.
So he'd been on the force for, I forgot, nine, ten months.
And we have a record of every traffic stop he ever made.
And when you look at his list of traffic stops, you realize that what happened that day with Sandra Bland was not an anomaly.
That he's one of those guys who pulls over everyone for bullshit reasons all day long.
So I think I've forgotten the exact number, but in the hour before he pulled over Sandra Bland, he pulled over four people, four other people, for equally ridiculous reasons.
He's that cop.
And he's that cop because he's been trained that way.
They have quotas.
Strain of modern policing, which says go beyond the ticket.
Pull someone over if anything looks a little bit weird because you might find something else.
Now, if you look at his history as a cop, he almost never found anything else.
His history as a cop.
In fact, I went through this, I forget how many hundreds of traffic stops he had in nine months.
If you go through them, he has like, once he found some marijuana on a kid, and by the way, the town in which he was working is a college town.
So, I mean, how hard is that?
I think he found a gun once, misdemeanor gun.
But everything else was like pulling over people for, you know, the light above their license plate was out.
Well, I looked at, I didn't look at the rest of the cops on his force.
What I looked at were state numbers to the wherever there, several American states give us, like North Carolina, for example, will give us precise, complete statistics on the number of traffic stops done by their police officers and the reasons for those stops.
So when you look at that, so I look at the North Carolina numbers, for example, in the North Carolina Highway Patrol, it's the same thing.
They're pulling over unbelievable numbers of people and finding nothing.
Like 1%, less than 1% hit rates in some cases of being hit ready being finding something of interest.
So like, they're pulling over 99 people for no reason in order to find one person who's got a bag of dope or something in the car.
You cannot conduct policing in a civil society like that and expect to have decent relationships between law enforcement and the civilian population.
So the question is, why does he keep doing it if...
This is a guy who day in, day out, pulls over people for no reason and finds nothing and continues to do it.
Now, there's two explanations.
One is he's totally cynical and thinks this is the way to be an effective police officer.
Explanation number two is this is a guy who has a powerful fantasy in his head that one day I'm going to hit the jackpot, I'm going to open the trunk and there's going to be 15 pounds of heroin and I'm going to be the biggest star who ever lived.
Well, so this is so this is one of a really, really crucial point in the argument of the book, which is I think the real lesson of that case is not that he's a bad cop.
He's in fact doing precisely as he was trained and instructed to do.
He's the ideal cop.
And the problem is with the particular philosophy of law enforcement that has emerged over the last 10 years in this country, which has incentivized and encouraged police officers to engage in these incredibly low-reward activities, like pulling over 100 people in order to find one person who's got something wrong.
That has become enshrined in the strategy of many police forces around the country.
They tell them to do this.
I have a whole section of the book where I go through in detail one of the most important police training manuals, which is, you know, required reading for somebody coming up, in which they just walk you through this.
Like, it is your job to pull over lots and lots and lots and lots of people, even if you only find something in a small percentage of cases.
Why, that's what being a proactive police officer is all about.
So they are trained to, that phrase, go beyond the ticket, is a term of art in police training.
Like, you've got to be thinking, sure, you pull them over for having a taillight that's out, but you're thinking beyond that.
Is there something else in the car that's problematic?
That's what you're trying to find.
So there, he was being a dutiful police officer.
And the answer is to re-examine our philosophies of law enforcement, not to not, I mean, you can't dismiss this thing by saying, oh, that's just a particularly bad cop.
He's not great, but I don't know if he's any worse than, you know, he's just doing what he was trained to do.
The issue is they're this is standard practice to treat citizens that are doing nothing wrong as if they're criminals and pull them over and give them extreme paranoia and freak them out to help you find something.
And like, now understand that this is a country with very, very low levels of gun ownership, which means that a police officer does not enter into an encounter with a civilian with the same degree of fear or paranoia that the civilian has a handgun, right?
Which is a big part of this.
Regardless of how one feels about gun laws in this country, the fact that there are lots of guns makes the job of a police officer a lot harder.
And every police officer will tell you that.
In Canada, you don't have that fear.
But it's also Canada, and it's small town Canada.
And so when you encounter a police officer in my little town, he's like, he's people helping people.
He's like driving like a Camry, and he's, you know, he's like this genial person who.
He's either kicked off for ⁇ I've forgotten the precise language they use, but for basically being impolite to a civilian.
But yeah, I don't think there's a lot of.
But I don't know whether, I mean, I still think we're saying the same thing, which is the thing that's driving him, his motivation, is not rational, right?
And if you were a rational actor, you would never engage in an activity where 99.9% of your police stops resulted in nothing.
Right.
He is off in some weird kind of fantasy land for a reason, which is that's what, in certain jurisdictions in this country, that's what law enforcement has come to look at look like.
I mean, I would really be curious, like, what would happen to the numbers?
Like, because what you were saying that they use people as an ATM, they really do.
I mean, people are glorified revenue collectors.
They're pulling people over, trying to write huge tickets.
And I believe it's North Carolina where you're talking about that's got this creepy law that they've recently, I think they've recently changed it, where you're allowed to just confiscate people's money.
Because if you see, like, I pull you over, hey, Malcolm, why do you have $3,000 on you?
You have $3,000 in cash?
What are you doing with $3,000?
Give me that money.
And they take it, and you have to prove that you weren't going to buy heroin or buy illegal guns or whatever.
And then most of that money wound up going to the police department.
So they used it to build a fucking gym for the cops or whatever.
I mean, it's literally they had an incentive to keep the money.
And is that North Carolina that did that?
unidentified
There's a number of states that have those confiscated laws.
This is what I talk a little bit about the Ferguson case in my book later on in the night.
This is what Ferguson was ultimately about.
The focus in the Ferguson case was whether the officer in that case is Darren Wilson, what he did and didn't do to Michael Brown.
But the real story, when the Department of Justice investigated, the real story is not the encounter machine knows two.
It is that the police department in Ferguson was being run as a revenue-generating arm of the city government.
And people in city government were directing the activities of law enforcement to maximize revenue.
And there's these incredible stories of, there's one, a story where there's a guy who's just been playing basketball and he's sitting in his car parked by the basketball court, like cooling off after playing basketball.
Cop rolls in, pulls up behind him, and ends up writing eight tickets, including, accuses the guy of being a pedophile, gets him for one of the things he gets him is putting a false name on his driver's license when his driver's license, his real name was like Michael and his driver's license said Mike.
Like that's the level of eight tickets, right?
That was routine practice.
And so you, you know, you, there is a reason why a kid like Michael Brown in Ferguson gets really angry at law enforcement because law enforcement was a completely discredited institution in that city.
For years and years and years and years and years, they had been basically praying.
They'd been preying on the lower-income community of that town.
So of course, relationships between the population and the cops had reached a low ebb.
That's a real ⁇ you know, there's a ⁇ it's funny.
One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was the kind of conversations we have around these things.
Ferguson's a great example.
95% of the conversation about Ferguson was just about trying to break down what happened between the cop and Michael Brown.
And the issue, when we finally look at it in a systematic manner, we realize, oh, no, no, no, it's not about that.
It is about a system that had been in place for years and years and years and years in which the African American population of that town had been preyed upon by the police department.
That is the broader, and you cannot come to an understanding of what happened with Michael Brown until you're willing to engage that case on that much more broader systemic level.
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to sort of start with the premise of why are we so bad at, you know, like I tell the story in a book of the Larry Nasser case at Michigan State.
So there you have a case where everyone thinks they know this guy.
He's their friend.
He's this gifted doctor.
The parents are willingly bringing their kids to be treated by him.
The parents are in the room while he is abusing their kids and they don't see it.
The kids are saying something weird happened and the parents are dismissing it.
So I wanted to, that's a good example of a phenomenon that I wanted to try and explain, which is how is that possible?
How can we think we know someone and be so completely wrong?
How can you take your kid to a doctor and think the doctor is the greatest possible doctor and in fact what he's doing is abusing your child in front of you, right?
And that's a very similar kind of problem to Bernie Madoff.
People invested their life savings with this guy.
Not little old ladies in Dubuque.
Sophisticated, savvy, incredibly intelligent investors handed over millions of dollars to this guy who was not even, I mean, the Madoff fraud was so outrageous, he didn't even bother to, he didn't even put it in T-bills.
My favorite story in the Madoff chapter is the greatest hedge fund in the world is Renaissance Technologies.
These are the guys out in Long Island who have had like 30% returns for 25 years.
They're like all PhD are, you know, AI geniuses, literally geniuses.
And they found themselves, years before Badoff was busted, they found themselves with, I think, $30 million in a Madoff fund because of some complicated transaction.
And they're all geniuses.
So they look at what Madoff's doing and they're like, hmm, that doesn't look good.
Like, that doesn't make any sense to me.
And so like, what should we do?
We have $30 million stake in a fund and we don't understand what the guy's doing.
And you would think logically they would sell their stake.
Their own legit returns are twice his illegitimate returns.
They actually make the point that his returns are really low for us.
Like, there's no reason for us to keep their money.
But they don't sell.
So that's what I was trying to understand.
Like, they can't even, you know, there's this notion I talk about in a book that's called default to truth, which is this idea from a researcher called Tim Levine, which is as human beings, we're trusting engines.
We are evolved to give people the benefit of the doubt.
And once you understand that, and why do we do that?
Because it's the right move 99% of the time.
Most people are being truthful.
And if you have as your strategy, I'm going to believe what people say.
It makes you a fantastic friend, a wonderful person to work with.
It means that you can escape through the world with a minimum of fuss.
The paranoid person is a person whose life is a nightmare, right?
Because they are suspicious of everything that moves.
So we evolved to be trusting engines because that makes your life easier.
That's the best part of human.
People want to mate with you.
Like, if you want to talk in evolutionary terms about who passes on their genes, nice people pass on their genes.
Given the choice between having a child with a crazy, suspicious, paranoid person or a loving, trusting person, you choose a loving, trusting person 100% of the time.
So multiplayer out times a million years of human history, you realize trusting genes beat paranoid genes every day of the week, right?
So that's what we are.
We're credulous by evolutionary choice.
So those guys at Renaissance, they're no different.
They may be smarter than the rest of us, but they're not constructed differently.
Their inclination is to believe people.
And they're like, well, I don't know.
Guy says he's a good investor.
Why not?
Let's hang on to it.
See what happens.
That's their motive.
You don't get to run an organization as successful as Renaissance technologies if you're some crazy paranoid person.
How would you even invest in anything if you were crazy and paranoid?
Well, he, when you realize what a sociopath he actually was, is in the interviews after he's caught, where he's demanding certain things and complaining about certain things.
He doesn't seem to have any remorse.
He wants better treatment.
He wants better food.
He doesn't seem to have any remorse that he's literally robbed people of their retirement, ruined the last part of their lives, where they thought they were going to have a considerable sum of money to sit back and just enjoy their grandchildren.
No, now they're broke.
Now they're poor.
Now they have to figure out a way to get by and eat.
In fact, what's weird, there's so many things weird about the Madoff case.
One of them is we forget that he doesn't get caught.
He turns himself in.
And he turns himself in because not because he's screwing up, but because he's, quote unquote, so good.
Because remember, the financial crisis hits in 2008, and his clients are losing so much money on their legit investments that they go to Madoff and say, can I have some of my money back from you?
I've got to pay off all the stuff I've done that has gone sour.
So like, in effect, no one ever caught him.
He gets caught by a once in a, you know, one in a million circumstance where he's the only one making any money for his clients, so they come after him.
My point is, if you're totally rational and you look at this, you say, here's a guy who managed to bamboozle the most sophisticated people in the world to the tune of billions of dollars for 25 years, and he only gets caught because we had a once-in-a-lifetime financial meltdown.
Isn't the rational lesson of that that we should all be Bernie Madoffs?
Right?
It's like super easy.
It's like not that hard.
All I have to do is, you know, he dressed really nicely.
I get really nice office space on the east side of Manhattan.
They thought that he was – so there were some – people thought that he actually had investments, but he was – there was a suspicion, for example, that he was front-running, that because he had a larger business sort of managing the deal flow in the NASDAQ, they that he would get advance word of where money was flowing and he would jump ahead of the queue, buy stocks before other people did, and profit off the, when the stock would rise, he would just sell and profit off that difference.
So there was a feeling that he had a dubious kind of illegitimate strategy that nonetheless legitimately made him a lot of money.
So people were like, well, as long as he can get away with it and I can profit off it, I'm fine.
But the truth is he wasn't doing that at all.
And truth is, he was just, he had some Confederate in the attic of his company essentially making up trade orders from scratch.
I believe it was recorded somehow on a phone or something, or maybe it was after he was in jail where he was talking about trying to get money back from one of his biggest investors.
The guy had gotten like a billion dollars from him over the years.
You have a friend who's an incredible salesman and has gone around Europe into Saudi Arabia and whatever and raised a $20 million fund, $20 billion fund.
And they're promising a 20% return a year on your investment, right?
So you give them a million, you're getting $200,000 a year back from this thing.
You know it's all bullshit, but no one else does.
What is the rational thing for you to do?
The rational thing for you to do is to take your, on your million dollar investment, is to take the $200,000 that is made in quotation marks every year out of the fund.
So you say most people, you know, when you invest in stocks, normally what you do is you check the box.
I want my, I want any dividends or earnings reinvested in the fund.
Don't check the box.
Take the real cash.
So if you're investing with this phony friend of yours for 20 years, you're going to get $200,000 a year for 20 years.
That's $4 million.
You will make $4 million clear out of your $1 million initial investment in 20 years, right?
That's smart if you know what's going on.
So that's what some people did with Madoff.
They're like, yeah, I don't know what he's doing.
These returns are pretty fantastic.
I'm just going to take all my earnings off the table every single year.
So they are the ones who, the real winners of this whole thing with those people.
Yeah, so what happens is they appoint, remember they appoint after the scandal breaks and Madoff is invested, they bring in a kind of supervisor, financial supervisor, who has the power to claw back winnings from money from the people who took cash off the table.
But not everyone had to claw back.
And the question was, how far back do we go?
So if you were investing with Madoff 25 years ago and you took 10 million off the table between 1990 and 1993, do you have to give that up too?
So without the crash of 2008, there's a very, very strong possibility that Bernie Madoff would still be going gangbusters.
All he has to do to keep surviving is to take in enough money to cover withdrawals.
So there's some, like we said, there's some portion of people who are withdrawing their winnings.
He just needs to make enough to get enough new money to cover the withdrawals.
So he's got a $50 billion hedge fund.
And let's imagine there's a billion in withdrawals coming out every year.
He's got to raise a billion.
Now, if you're Bernie and you already have 50, it's not that hard to raise another.
And particularly because he had people all around the world and he was giving them these huge fees to raise money for him.
So that's the other way.
The people who really made money from him were the people who had, I've forgotten what it was, but you would be, say you're Joe, the financial guy in Zurich.
You have a whole bunch of wealthy European clients.
Bernie would let, for every million you raise for Bernie, Bernie would let you keep, I've forgotten what it was, 100 grand.
That's a nice business.
That's real money.
So you just kick back 900 to Bernie and keep 100 grand, and you're free and clear.
Well, the Bernie Madoff story and all of these stories, but this one in particular, it goes to this question of we really think we're good at spotting liars and we're not.
So virtually every profession that is invested in investigation of human beings has some belief that we know how to figure out who's liking this.
And the truth is, nobody does.
And if someone tells you they are good at spotting liars, there's a 99% chance that they're lying.
So you can think if we did an experiment here where I had 100 people parade through this office right now, the studio right now, and every one of them made a statement in front of you.
And some were lying and some would tell the truth.
And I asked you, Joe, tell me who's lying and who's not.
Your accuracy rate, your success rate, would be 52 to 54%.
In other words, slightly better than chance.
You might as well flip a coin.
Slightly better if you don't.
And that's not about you.
Anyone in that chair watching these people parade in front of us is going to do a slightly bit better than chance.
And the reason we're slightly better than chance is there are a small fraction of people who are such epically bad liars that there's just we're not going to lose those people.
One thing that you can tell though is if it's an area of your own personal expertise, right?
Like if someone tried to talk to you about what it takes to write a book and get a book published and get a book on the New York Times bestseller list and they were just making things up, you would give that.
I used to think that I was really good at spotting liars.
And then I met this guy.
I met him through a friend.
And I had given myself a pass.
And then I met him through this friend.
He was a friend of a friend, so I just assumed he was okay because my friend is a very good friend.
And this guy was claiming to be this Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.
And he was writing for this online magazine that was like a well-read magazine in the martial arts world.
And it was the Abu Dhabi Combat Club.
They were responsible for this big, the Abu Dhabi Submission World Championships.
This is the biggest championships in the world.
It's very highly regarded, high prestige.
This guy was talking about these fights that he had had.
And, you know, people bullshit a little bit.
So you give people a little bit of room for that.
But then he was talking about this particular move that he had pulled off in a fight that he had just learned from my friend.
And it's a very difficult move.
It's called the twister.
It's basically a guillotine from wrestling, and it's set up from a position called side control.
It's really complicated.
You have to wrap someone's leg around.
You have to roll onto your left shoulder.
You have to get behind them.
You have to grab their arm, put it over your shoulder, grab a hold of their spine, and it's essentially like a spine lock.
It's a very difficult move to pull off.
And it takes a long time to master the steps.
It takes a long time to understand the position.
So this guy learned it, and then a couple days later, he claimed to have pulled it off in Thailand.
And it was like, it's like one of those scenes in a movie where the record scratches and everybody just goes, what?
And I remember we were like, what's going on?
So then my friend winds up rolling with him.
Rolling is sparring.
You do jiu-jitsu rolling, and he comes back to me and he goes, there's no fucking way that guy's a black belt.
It doesn't even make sense.
He goes, he's like, he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.
Like, this is really weird.
So he winds up having this confrontational conversation with him on the phone while I'm in the car.
He's talking to him.
And he goes, I want to know what you are because you're not a fucking black belt.
So tell me what's going on.
And so they say, no, no, no, I'm a black belt in Japanese jiu-jitsu.
It's different.
Time goes on.
He tells this guy to go fuck himself.
Time goes on.
The guy winds up killing someone.
He winds up murdering this girl that he's having sex with, murdering her husband.
And he gets caught driving around his car, the guy's car, after he's killed the guy.
And then he winds up trying to recruit a friend to kill someone.
It's like this whole big thing, and he winds up going to jail.
And he's in jail now.
But I remember thinking, okay, you don't know shit about catching and spotting liars because you didn't spot that guy as being completely full of shit.
Like, I thought he was a little full of shit, but I didn't know he was like a complete sociopath and a murderer.
Using that scenario, would you have done a better job if all I gave you was the transcript of this guy speech?
So there's a lot of interest in this question in the community of people who study deception.
So there's many different.
I can, suppose I'm trying to improve my ability to spot lies.
We can do three things.
I can listen to you face to face as you're telling me something that's either true or false.
I can, we could do this entirely on the telephone.
So I don't see you, I just hear you.
Or I can just read the transcript of what you say and try to decide whether it's true or false.
And it seems to be the case that we're better when we just when we remove sight and sound and all we have are this the word the plain words on the page.
In what being present does is it introduces all kinds of noisy information that just distracts us from the core question of whether the truth is being told.
So maybe it was, maybe if all you had was a transcript, and as this guy is describing this particular, what was the name of the move?
Maybe as you're looking at the way he describes, and all you're doing is focusing on the precise way in which he describes this very, very intricate move, and you would realize, oh, he actually doesn't understand what he's talking about.
And you would have seen it clearly in that moment if you – but maybe there was something about his presentation that threw you off the scent.
There's a hilarious version of this on, I'm a runner, and on all the running message boards is one called Let's Run, which is this sort of, and they're constantly catching people who lie about their marathon times.
That's like a – I love those insidery – Well, I have this thought about how much culture is shifted through the internet and how much culture will shift again in an even more astronomical way once we can read minds.
And I don't think we're far away from that.
I think we're a few decades away from some technology that allows people to establish intent and to see thoughts.
And I think they've already, there's some sort of theoretical work they're doing on this right now, and there's different models that they're trying to achieve.
I think that's going to eliminate a lot of the bullshit of communication.
And I think it's going to happen really quickly, just like Google sort of eliminates a lot of the bullshit of people telling stories about something, and someone goes, what?
What happened?
Wait a minute.
What year?
And they Google it, that didn't happen.
And they can find out like almost instantaneously.
I think we're going to be able to figure that out with people.
I think there's going to be a way where we can see intent and we can read minds.
I don't think we're far away from that.
I mean, I know this Neuralink thing that Elon Musk is very, Elon's very hush-hush about.
There's these different sort of electronic brain interfaces that they're trying to experiment with.
But wouldn't your worry be that if we read, we're able to read someone's thoughts, intentions, what we would in fact discover is even more confusing than what we know now.
In other words, maybe what's inside my head right now are 35 different thoughts and intentions warring with each other.
That I cannot count the number of times when I have had reactions to things that people have said in the moment that turn out to be wrong, deeply and badly wrong.
And one of the things that I have learned as an adult is to deeply distrust those kinds of reactions and to wait.
And very often what will happen, in my case, sometimes the waiting takes a long time.
I'm the kind of person who sometimes a month will pass and I will think back on a situation and I'll think, oh my God, I totally misunderstood that.
This person who I thought was a jackass is actually someone, you know, a lovely person who I should give a second chance to, or whatever.
That comment that someone made that I thought was stupid is in fact extremely thoughtful and insightful.
This will happen weeks, months later, whatever.
If you were able to read my mind in the moment, you would judge me for my mistake and not give me an easy way to correct it.
In other words, you would trap me in, like, what if I've had a reaction to something you've said in this conversation, in which I've said, Jesus, I can't believe that.
That's dumb.
And then I'm driving back to LA tonight and I think, oh, actually, oh, that's really interesting.
I hadn't thought about it at the time.
I don't want you to short-circuit my learning process about you.
I want to give me the privacy of my six hours of thinking about what you said and allow me, give me that kind of time to come to a reasoned and insightful conclusion about how I feel.
I mean, if one person has it, right, then yeah, I get it.
If I can read your mind, oh, I said something and Malcolm thinks I'm a retard.
Like, you know, there's that.
But there's another possibility that both people have it.
And this is also one of the things that would be fascinating about this is one of the things about forbidden words is that forbidden words carry with them intent.
They have automatic intent, right?
But you can say the exact same word and have different intent behind it.
If we could understand clearly what your intent is, then taboo words would automatically become meaningless.
It wouldn't mean, it's not about sound you make.
It's not about forbidden sounds.
What it's about is thoughts and what you're trying to convey and what's happening to you as a human being.
Like, what is your process for the way you communicate?
What is your process for the way you're trying to develop these thoughts in your mind and express them to people?
Well, part of the problem with that is language, right?
And part of the problem with making certain aspects of our language forbidden is you limit people's ability to colorfully communicate and express themselves in certain ways.
I think that alone, just eliminating that alone, eliminating confusion.
And also highlighting, you know, you could highlight real problems with people's thoughts and the way people communicate, but also eliminate many problems.
So you'd say, oh, he doesn't mean that.
Like, you could see what he means.
Like, this is where his mind is.
You could see, you could literally see the thoughts.
So one of the things I got really interested when I was writing my book was how our kind of cultural frames of reference profoundly complicate our attempts to understand other people.
And so in your scenario where I have some kind of window into your thinking and intention, I still need to know, in order to make sense of you, I still need to have a very clear idea of the cultural kind of rules of the road that you're using.
Particularly if, you know, I mean, I'm a Canadian and you're not.
But imagine if the difference between us was more profound.
You know, then you're still like, like I was, there's a really cool thing.
I've been obsessed with memory.
I'm doing all these things on memory in revisions history this coming season.
And I was reading about this really fascinating experiment, which is done with Korean and American college students, adults, essentially.
And what I do is I give you three circles, paper circles.
And one is past, one is present, one is future.
And I say, those are three concepts.
Represent those three concepts with these three circles.
So the American kid has past here, present in the middle, future over on the right, right?
Three independent circles.
The Korean kids piles all three circles on top of each other.
Now, what does that mean?
I don't know what that means.
It means something interesting, right?
It means that they're not separating these three modes the way that we are.
They're certainly coming at experience with a very different set of assumptions.
So maybe so I think of the Civil War as a long time ago, but if I'm Korean, maybe the Civil War is as present in my kind of consciousness as something that happened last week.
Maybe that's what that means?
I'm not exactly sure.
I'm sort of guessing because I don't know the, I haven't fully investigated.
But the point is, there are, I've just given you one random example.
There are way, way incredibly different rules that different cultures use to organize experience.
So if I'm looking at you and reading your thoughts, I have to know those rules because those rules are sorting out how people – so this is only – I'm not dissing this notion that you're talking about.
I'm saying that it needs to have another layer as well.
It's interesting when you think about like the Tower of Babel, right?
Like this idea that at one point in time everyone spoke the same language and God sort of set it up so that it was we were never going to be able to really communicate with each other because everybody has a bunch of different languages and we'll never figure it out.
That's the sort of crunched up version of it.
If there was a way to change the way, like all languages are essentially little symbols that are written down on paper or typed out and then sounds that you make with your mouth and they convey intent.
If there was a way to do another version of language, a universal version of language that's eventually adopted.
Like I'm reading in this book about these people that were kidnapped by Native Americans and they were assimilated into the tribes and they learned the language and this happened over a course of a couple of years.
And I was thinking like, what would that be like if you, you know, that's how you learn a language.
You're kidnapped by, you know what I mean?
But if there was a new language, how long would it take for adults to learn a new language?
If someone came up with a new language of completely universal characters and this language is conveyed through this technology rather than through your mouth.
So it's your thoughts, your thoughts interface with some sort of technology.
It creates whatever, hieroglyphs, some sort of visual language that we all agree upon.
And then this is universal.
This is universal throughout all cultures.
And the only thing that we'd be confused is about assumptions and rules as far as what's okay with the people.
Can't we kind of do that already in a sense that we could have a universal language and then we have a device sitting on our phone or something that when we I'm in you know I'm in some or I'm in Bulgaria and I'm ordering coffee, I speak it in the device and it simply translates, either translates me directly into Bulgarian, that's actually not that hard.
No.
Or it translates this into this common language that the Bulgarian translator service is.
And if you think of the technology at a slightly more advanced level than it is now, it could be done in a very seamless way.
Like it doesn't have to be some bulky box.
It could literally be that I am speaking in English and what you're hearing is a filter and what you're hearing is this other language.
What you're sort of was saying is, yeah, like the internet, you have to translate English into bits in order for the computer to translate it into an emoji.
That's almost, I feel like that's almost what you're saying, although it's not exactly the same thing.
It just seems like this is not the best we can do.
Noises with your mouth.
And then, you know, learning English is incredibly complicated for someone who speaks Mandarin and vice versa.
You know, it's all very, what if we all said, hey, look, this is some new version of a language.
Like, whenever there's a, whether it's contact or whenever there's some movie about extraterrestrials, there's always a team of scientists and linguists and geniuses to get together and they go, look, we're going to establish a universal language.
They communicate with these people.
And closed encounters of the third kind, it was music.
That they would figure out some way.
We're going to figure out a way to talk.
If we had some enormous financial incentive or some enormous crisis was in play and we had to all communicate with the same language.
And so, remember when they were trying to push the, well, you're from Canada.
The metric system was actually real over there.
It was real.
When I was in high school, they were trying to push the metric system.
And I remember there was like a concerted effort.
They're like, we're going to have to learn the metric system because it's a universal system that the whole world uses.
I think it's the children of very rough immigrants.
And they stayed in these communities and Italians.
Yes, exactly.
That's what I am.
And so the immigrants of these people that were willing to take a risk and get on a boat when there wasn't even YouTube videos to watch, these are savage people that made it over here.
And they're really rough.
And they had rough childhoods and they raised rough children.
And the echoes of that persist on the East Coast of the United States.
The amount of drinking that went on in Irish immigrant communities is, it's funny because I stumbled across years ago.
I've always been obsessed with drinking and alcohol.
In fact, I have a chapter on it in this book.
But so years ago, it turns out that the place in America where alcohol studies, as they're called, were really birthed was New Haven, which makes perfect.
So in the 50s, a bunch of people get really, really interested in understanding how drinking works.
And in New Haven, of course, you have the perfect model because you have two very large groups of immigrants.
You have Irish and Italians, right?
In all of New England, you've got those two to work with.
And of course, they could not be more different in the way they drink.
So even in immigrant Italian communities in the 50s, these are people who are, in terms of volume of alcohol consumed, way up at the top.
They're drinking with every meal.
They're making wine in their backyards.
But the levels of alcoholism are infinitesimal.
The amount of social dysfunction associated with drinking can't, I mean, it's just not, it's negligible.
These are the healthiest drinkers you can imagine.
Side by side are the Irish.
And I don't need to tell you that the story is very different than the Irish.
That is a super interesting question.
You've got, so they're not, one group's not richer than the other.
They come to America, not at the same time, but they're 19th century, early 20th century, come to America in large numbers.
There are some, you know, Irish culture looks a lot, but it was Catholic, right?
Now, there may be Catholic in different ways.
But on the surface, these are, you'd think that they would use the bottle in the same way.
No.
The Irish are, the Irish, the men are slinking off to the pub.
And in Italy, everyone's gathered around steaming bowls of pasta and drinking like one and a half glasses of wine, mild homemade wine with their dinner.
Well, I'm, you know, I'm reserved English and Jamaican.
Jamaicans not big drinkers in the same kind of the difference, actually fascinatingly of the many weird alcohol facts, if you look at young people, it's like a college-age young people in America and look at their drinking habits.
The black students drink and get drunk markedly less than white kids.
Real differences in drinking behavior by race at that age.
Asian students don't drink much either.
Drinking is like a it's like a it's like a white thing.
It's like a crazy white thing, increasingly, or problematic drinking.
Well, this, you know, in the alcohol chapter in my book, I talk about all the strange things that have happened with drinking patterns on campus.
And I was struck in doing that chapter, I was interested in the connection between drinking and drunkenness and sexual assault on campus.
Because all of those, the overwhelming majority, if you talk to people who study sexual assault on campus, they will tell you that you almost never see one of these cases where both parties aren't drunk, right?
Which doesn't explain them entirely, but it's a huge factor in making sense of what happens.
And when you dig into that, you see these really weird patterns.
First off, when I was in college, I did not know, and I went to college in Canada, not a teetotaling population.
I did not know a single person who had ever been blackout drunk.
And then now, if you talk to a 20-year-old college student in America, they will name friends of theirs who get blackout drunk on a weekly basis.
I've been talking to friends about this, about Europe, about how in Europe, particularly in Italy and France, you're allowed to drink wine at a very young age.
And the taboo aspect of it, the forbidden fruit, all that goes away.
It's a just, it's a, I don't think young kids should be drinking because I think it's terrible for your brain development.
But I think there's a thing in keeping them from drinking or making it illegal where it becomes so taboo and so intoxicating that they can't wait until they can legally do it or they try to get a hold of it before it's legal and it has a certain excitement to it that just doesn't it doesn't have in parts of Europe.
Well, the issue with blackout is just at what point does your hippocampus shut down and you cease to have the ability to make memories.
So that's just, that's a very narrow clinical explanation of, so there may be a whole different set of manifestations of drunkenness that have to do with alcohol's effect on other parts of your brain.
It would vary depending, I think, on drinking history.
But I mean, as a, there's a kind of a, there's a consensus figure where most people, I wish I, it's in my book, I wish I could remember, I think it's something like 0.16 or something like that.
If you think of the, if the level, legal level for drinking, for driving is 0.08, I think it's roughly 2x that level.
And most people at that level will be at risk, will have at least the beginnings of memory impairment.
So that feeling, when you get really drunk at a party and the next morning you can only remember little bits and pieces of what happened that night, that's because your hippocampus was at your moment of peak intoxication, your hippocampus was starting to shut down.
So remember, though, this is an interesting point, and a crucial point about blackout, which is your hippocampus doesn't necessarily control how articulate you are or how fluid your speech is.
It's just about memory.
So Hitchens could have been the most articulate person in the world.
But the next morning he would not have remembered a single thing he said on Bill Maher.
I mean, I'm assuming if he was drunk, he was going to be a blackout.
No, it wasn't blackout.
But you don't know.
There's fascinating stories in the literature about when people were discovering blackout in the 50s.
And there would be these stories like they would, some guy would come in, he would wake up in Las Vegas, and he would say, what am I doing in Las Vegas?
And he would go and he would see his clothes hanging in the closet.
And he would say, what is going on?
And then he would go down to the desk and say, what?
And they say, oh, you checked in last night.
And he would look in his wallet and he would see he had a plane ticket from Cleveland.
And they would reconstruct.
And there's a, in fact, this very story was told in the, you know, one of the big medical journals in the 50s.
The guy reconstructs.
He's a salesman living in St. Louis who gets really, really drunk.
And then his hippocampus shuts down and he continues to function.
So he goes, gets in his car, drives to the airport, buys a plane ticket, goes to Vegas, does, he doesn't know what he does in Vegas, does whatever he does in Vegas, and then wakes up like two days later.
So we're going to deal with alcohol very differently.
But let's assume we're doing shots of tequila.
There's a point at where things start to get hazy.
So you might remember that I asked you that question, or you might not.
And then as we keep drinking and our blood alcohol levels get higher and higher, at a certain point, your hippocampus will completely, like the off switch, has been thrown.
So it goes from being sluggish and impaired to just being down.
Well, your blood alcohol level has to fall to the point where it can work again.
So you fall asleep and over the course of eight hours of sleep, you know, your alcohol is processed by your liver, blood alcohol falls, hippocampus snaps back into action.
Well, it's just friends, listening to classic rock and getting drunk in Boston.
But it's something I occasionally enjoy.
I enjoy alcohol.
I like having a drink of wine with a glass of wine with a meal.
I like having a drink with friends occasionally.
But I don't have a problem with it, and I know people who do.
And so I feel weird talking about it, knowing those people that do have a problem with it.
With pot, though, the people that have a problem with pot, it's rare.
And it's usually people that have some sort of an, and I do believe there is an issue with people who have some sort of an underlying schizophrenic issue that could come from especially high doses.
If they smoke a lot of pot in one night, they can have a schizophrenic episode.
I've actually seen it, particularly from edibles.
I've seen it.
But that's, to me, that's absolutely the least taboo.
And I think there's a lot of benefits to pot.
I think pot makes you more sociable.
I think it makes you friendlier.
I mean, some people get paranoid from it, but I think that's what that really is, is marijuana illuminating how vulnerable you actually are.
That we sort of protect ourselves from this overwhelming existential angst that you get when you get high on pot.
We're in these metal boxes with combustion engines, you know, like trusting the people next to us going 60 miles an hour, paying attention, not looking at their phone.
You know, it's like, it's very life.
And then we get in planes and who knows what the fuck's going on with the engine.
This guy's flying it over the sky.
We're very vulnerable all the time.
There's diseases and, you know, not to mention, you know, war and all sorts of other things that could fall.
If I said that, oh, I'm, you know, I'm on the board of Anheuser-Busch, you probably would hit me up for tickets to the Super Bowl.
Right?
It's just not the same.
Whereas there's no, in terms of the amount of social damage, what Anheuser-Busch has created has produced 100 times the social damage than what Philip Morris has produced.
You know, so it's like, I've always puzzled about it.
I don't know how we got it in our heads.
Like, to treat one like it's completely taboo, and the other we kind of shrug.
You know, there are a bunch, I was reading about this recently.
How many colleges accept, not just accept alcohol advertising and sponsorship, but you go to a college football game and Bud Light will be an active sponsor of the event.
We'll have some huge relationship with the school.
Am I right in thinking there does seem to be like, why is it every time I turn around and I listen to some comic and they say, well, when I was growing up in Boston, I'm like, of course you're from Boston.
It's been a while since I bomb-bombed, but I've had jokes that ate shit.
Yeah.
Well, there's a process that I go through every two years.
I put out a special and then I write a new one.
And in the process of writing a new one, you don't write it in a vacuum.
You write it, and then I bring that stuff to the comedy store.
And fortunately, with the comedy store, you're doing 15-minute sets with 15 other talented people.
So you don't have to be up there for a long time.
The comedy store also, the audience is very unique in that a lot of them understand that they're going to see these guys like Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock and work out comedy.
I, you know, I don't, I'm not a stand-up comedian, but I give a lot of speeches, like in conferences and corporate settings, which is a very, in some ways, a very different animal and in some ways, quite a similar animal, but, And I've been doing it for 20 odd years now.
And the thing I'm always that blows me away is how different audiences are.
Like, and one thing that you, after doing it for about 10 years, you start to get a little bit smarter about reading the room at the beginning to know who they are and what.
And it's, you know, it makes a difference.
Like, there are some, some audiences are generous, and they'll, if they see the, in my case, the punchline, it's not necessarily a joke, but it's the payoff to whatever story I'm telling.
Some people, when they see it coming, if you think about it as a line, they'll reward you the minute they see it.
Some people will wait until the last possible moment.
And then some people will wait a beat after the punchline is over and then think about it and reward you.
Those three audiences, that makes a world of difference in how you tell the story, in your expectation going in.
Because if you think it's an early rewarding audience and it's a late rewarding audience, you can get, you'll be 10 minutes in and you're totally bummed out because you think it's a disaster.
But in fact, it's not.
And then you get, I develop all of these shorthands about audiences.
I don't know if they're true or not, but in my experience, I remember once giving a talk to a group of engineers on early on a Monday morning in Minneapolis in February.
So it's freezing.
It's 8 o'clock in the morning.
They're engineers and they're all white guys.
They're like Norwegians, right?
An incredibly thoughtful, interesting audience.
Listen to every word, but they are not going to reward you until they have thought about what you said and they'll wait like, you know, there's a five-second lag between whatever payoff you give and their response.
Right.
If you go, I've also given a talk to like a group of teachers in New Orleans.
So there you have a room that is largely female, that will be much more diverse.
So maybe 50% black, for example, 20% Hispanic, 30% white, just way more.
They're going to reward you the minute they see it coming.
They're teachers, first of all.
So their whole thing is about listening, rewarding, seeing the best in something and celebrating it.
I mean, completely different.
And if you go into the engineers in Minneapolis and the teachers in New Orleans with the same expectation, you're going to, it's going to be a disaster.
But so that, like, it took a long time to figure that out.
Because for the longest time, I would walk away from someone, I would think, from some talks and would think I just did, committed the worst possible offense.
And you go to these meetings and you know that half of the room voted one way and the other half voted the other way.
And that it doesn't come up.
It doesn't block half of you from appreciating, half of them from appreciating what you're saying.
They're totally open to, as long as you are respectful and take the time to explain what you think and why and how it matters to them, then people will listen and engage and ask really good questions.
And I don't see, so funny, the Washington is divided and online is divided.
I just don't see it elsewhere.
Maybe I'm not getting an accurate picture of the whole country, but in these, you know, give a talk with a group of whatever, educators in New Orleans.
Well, I think when it comes to political discussions, that's when people get really divided because I think they feel like they're supposed to be divided.
There was a really interesting video that I watched yesterday where Donald Trump Jr. was getting heckled by these alt-right characters for not being right-wing enough.
I was like, holy shit.
But I took a lot of pleasure in watching that play out, not because I want Donald Jr. to get heckled, but because this is what I've always said, there's people that are just extreme.
And it doesn't matter if they're in Antifa or if they're in the Proud Boys, if they're far left or far right.
It's the same thing.
They're just finding an ideology and they're taking it to the extremist level and they're angry at the people who aren't woke enough.
Or they're finding an ideology and they take it to the furthest level and they're angry at people that aren't separatists, that aren't white supremacists.
They're angry at people that like Mexicans at all, any Mexicans.
I mean, there's people that are that racist, that are mad at subtle racism.
They're mad at people that there's just people that are extreme.
And you can't make everyone happy.
It is impossible.
And some people don't want to be happy.
They want to find ways in which you're not woke enough.
Their concern is not the overwhelming good of the world.
Harmony, peace, love, compatibility, communication, and community.
That's not what their concern is.
Their concern is finding ways you're wrong.
So finding ways that they're right and ways that you're wrong.
So they'll find some reason why you're not woke enough.
Now, as someone who's on his book tour and has been doing this for 20 years, let me just say, you have to do the Q ⁇ A. The Q ⁇ A is symbolically crucial.
It's like everyone says, okay, everyone sees you get up there and you do your prepared bit.
And everyone's like, okay, fine.
I know you can do your prepared bit, but you're asking me to spend $28 on a book.
And what I want to know is, are you someone who is meaningfully engaged in the ideas that you're talking about in your book, right?
But what was interesting, too, is that what he was using as an excuse was that the left-wing media is going to take his quotes and take them out of context.
Well, you know, that's a thing where people want to just get you.
You got them, so they want to get you.
People are booing, fuck you, you're a loser.
No, no, no, no.
You're a loser.
You know, it's just noises instead of going, love, love you.
Have a good one, guys.
Take care.
But instead, you're right.
Do the Q ⁇ A. Don't even, you know, it's not that hard to answer questions.
I think there's a real problem with answering questions in front of a crowd, though, where people screaming out things.
I think real thoughtful conversations should be had one-on-one.
And you and I are having this conversation, it's great.
But if there was a third person there talking to, we would have to work that guy in or that girl in.
We'd have to figure out when she's talking, when we're talking.
And if you get another person, okay, now you got a real problem.
Now you have four people.
And it's very difficult.
If you watch those panel shows, for some reason, the network news shows post-election, pre-election, their election coverage, they still haven't figured that out.
I once gave a talk in Colombia, and the Colombians take themselves in the best way very seriously, right?
They consider themselves the most cultured people in America, yeah.
And they think they speak the most beautiful Spanish, and I'm told they may well do.
So I was talking with the, I was going to go this little kind of lecture tour of major Colombian cities, and I was talking to the organizer, and the standard question you ask is, well, how long I should talk for some period of time, and then we'll do Q ⁇ A. How long do you think I should talk?
And the guy goes, I don't know.
How's three hours?
He was dead serious.
And you realize, like, this is the same.
So when Fidel Castro would give those six-hour speeches, you realize it's not just, I mean, Castell a little bit crazy, but there's also, there are cultures that have an expectation that if you're going to go and hear somebody speak, it's not going to be over in 40 minutes, right?
You have to commit to the experience.
And they literally wanted me to start at 9 and end at noon.
And you realize in that context where people are used to hours and hours and hours, what an extraordinary – I mean, it is – think about Lincoln as a kind of badass entertainer, not entertainer, performer.
So he walks into a world where everyone's thinking they're going to be there for two hours.
You have to main, the trick is always, even though it's false, you have to hold in your heart the conviction that there is a way to say this perfectly and beautifully.
Like, how do you certain things, structural things you can only see, I think, when it's on the page and you've kind of put all the pages in front of it.
So are you starting when you have to sit down and write new material, are you starting cold or do you have in the previous year, were you kind of building up little bits and pieces that you're now putting together?
I don't, but if I did, I would definitely see flaws.
I would go, that's too wordy, or that's clunky, or that's forced, or I don't like how I acted that out, or I don't like, maybe that wasn't done yet.
You know, there's a cooking period, and everybody has a different take on it.
And I've been, my friend Anthony Jeselnik has a three-year cycle, and he might be right.
He takes the first year, he just does clubs in LA and develops material.
The second year, he goes on the road and he goes to comedy clubs in a row.
The third year, he takes that to theaters, and then he's ready to film at the end of the third year.
And his last special was excellent.
But he's just a very good comic, very good writer.
But his process might be right.
There's some guys that were doing it on a one-year cycle.
they were doing a new special every year and i don't think that's right that's gotta be yeah It's too hard.
It's not just too hard.
The material suffers.
It's half-cooked.
A lot of it is gooey on the inside.
It's just not ready.
It's just not done.
I mean, some of the bits are really good, then some of the bits aren't.
And you have to fill the whole hour.
And the problem is also when you're doing a special every year, you have your own audience.
So those people love you.
So they're laughing at stuff that's not even that good.
Like you have to be doing that in front of a bunch of people that didn't expect to see you.
And that's hard to do.
It's a lot of weird tricks you could play on yourself as a comic.
You could think you're better than you are, or that the bits are better than they are, or that you don't have to worry about things anymore.
You don't have to grind.
You don't have to throw yourself into the gladiator pit that is the comedy store on a Tuesday night.
But you do.
You do.
There's no other way.
If you want to be top-notch, you have to do the things that top-notch people do.
I mean, there's no books written on this.
There's no university course, but all the best people will tell you.
There's a process.
This is the process.
It's one of the weird art forms in that no one teaches it.
Anybody who does teach it is terrible.
There's no one who can.
I've never seen a real world-class headliner who sells out theaters who teaches a course on comedy.
I've never seen it.
And I couldn't teach you how to do it anyway because your way of doing it would be very different than Jamie's way of doing it, which would be very different than Stephen Wright, which is very different than Sam Kinnison.
It's like everybody's got their own weird little thing that makes them funny.
I always love in any particular field, there's the insider's choice, and then there's the popular choice.
Like the most hilarious one is if you ask an architect who their favorite architect is, 99 times out of 100, you will never have heard of that architecture.
It's always some obscure German guy from like the 30, you know, or it's some like, you know, experimental Dutch guy who did, he's on one building, and it's like amazing.
You know, it's like some, he did a church outside of Antwerp and it was, it blew everyone's mouth.
I would say the insider A pic is David Tell because David Tell is probably one of the greatest comics of all time and doesn't get enough love because he has no social media presence.
He wears the same hat and the same shirt and the same jacket and the same pants every day.
He has no thought whatsoever about his look.
All he does is just write new and better jokes constantly.
He's one of the most prolific comics, but he'll still have a hard time selling places out, and it doesn't make any sense.
Although lately, he and Jeff Ross have done this thing called bumping mics where they go on stage and they sort of work together and they talk shit.
And like, Jeff will say something funny, and then Dave will say something funny, and Dave will do his bits, and Jeff will make fun of him, and they'll go, and it's really entertaining.
And they do a series of shows doing that, and that has elevated his profile.
I'm sure somewhat, but I try to shut down the analysis part of my brain as much as possible.
I try to shut down, like, why did he write it like that?
Why doesn't he do it this way?
I try to just be a fan.
I try to just watch, you know?
But I'm sure I know some things are coming, or I know the way I would do it, or I know Dave very well, so I know how he would do it.
I'm sure there's some sort of difference between, but that's like the same as a musician, right?
If you're a musician, if you're a guitarist and you're watching an amazing guitarist, even though they're really good, you're probably like, hmm, okay, I see what he's doing.
My worry as I get older is that increasingly my reactions are simply versions of, I would have done it.
That's not how I would have done it.
As opposed to, so if, say, Pumlan comes to me for advice, my first, and I think about, oh, that's, here's the advice I'd like to give on this piece of writing.
My first, someone, actually, I was talking, a friend of mine yesterday brought to me an essay she's working on, incredibly interesting essay about the role of women in cinema.
And I give a, so we're walking around and I'm telling her my response to it.
And after I give it, then my first thought was, wait, did I just say if I was doing it, I would have done it this way?
In other words, did I just simply impose my own Standards and preferences on her, which is not advice.
That's actually the worst thing.
What you have to do is inhabit her mind and fix it according to her own intentions and style.
And I'm constantly paranoid about the notion that I am not being truly empathetic at the moment of giving advice.
I'm just projecting my own.
And I think that's something that happens when you get so when you become so sure of your own methods and professional personality.
I wouldn't have done that when I was 25 because I didn't know what it meant to be to write a Malcolm Gladwell thing.
I was just kind of reacting as a human being.
But now I kind of have this thing burned into my skull.
Jerry Seinfeld was going to open up an advertising agency for a while.
He had thoughts about, I know he had done a couple of commercials and apparently he had written some of the commercials and he had decided that he was going to write commercials.
But he has, in my opinion, the most underrated sitcom of all time and curb your enthusiasm.
There's times that I've watched that show where I've been literally weeping, laughing, like holding my sides laughing.
And it's so odd the way he does it.
Do you know how he writes things?
They have like a place where they like, okay, you're trying to sell me a toaster and Jamie's trying to stop me from buying that toaster, but you're mad at Jamie and you're trying to be persuasive at me at the same time.
That's how they write.
So they just do multiple takes with really talented people and they find magic.
I mean, it's crazy how open-ended it.
I've talked to different guys that have been on the show about how they do it.
Like, you only have so much time and you only have so much energy.
And if you're wasting your time on things that you don't like that have nothing to do with you, if people like something, like that's how I feel about music and movies and so many things.
There's so many things that are, I just don't like them at all.
But some people do.
I mean, you know, some people will, I think their music is dog shit, but they'll have a full staple center of people rocking out.
Well, I must be wrong.
It's not me.
It's not them.
It's just like everyone's different.
People have different tastes.
Some people like really cheesy rom-coms.
They like it.
They really enjoy it.
They seek comfort in this movie where you know it's going to work out in the end.
It's going to.
It's not like in the end a fucking meteor is going to land on the building and kill everybody and the screen is going to splatter with blood because their bodies explode.
You're not going to see that in this movie.
In this movie, everything's going to work out great.
This is a random thought, but I don't know any men who watch them.
And I've come to the belief that they are – there's something – they're actually for women and they're a very comforting kind of reassuring fantasy about how the world works.
That the system is – so I had – can I tell you my – this is an incredibly complicated theory that I developed once about these kinds of things.
A Western is where is conceptually a world in which there is no law and order and a man shows up and imposes personally law and order on the territory, the community, right?
So there is also a Eastern.
What is an Eastern?
An Eastern is a place where, by contrast, is a story where there, well, I get this straight.
There's four types.
The Eastern is where there is law and order.
So there are institutions of justice, but they have been subverted by people from within.
So an Eastern would be the Serpico is an Eastern.
It's a crooked cop who is – it's the bad apple who has, you know, screwed up the – there are lots – tons and tons of Hollywood movies are Easterns.
The Northern is the case where law and order exists and law and order is morally righteous.
System works.
Show Law and Order is a Northern.
It's a functioning apparatus of justice which reliably and accurately produces the correct result in confronting criminality every single day when it's on TV.
The Southern is where the entire, wait, the Southern is all John Grisham novels are Southerns.
They are where the entire apparatus is corrupt and where the reformer is not an insider but an outsider.
So in every John Grisham novel, the same, they all proceed, and I love John Grisham, just to be clear, but they all proceed from the same premise, which is the system is rotten to the core.
And only this white knight who comes in from the outside can save us.
So in the Western, there is no system.
In the Northern, there's a system and it's fantastic.
In the Eastern, the system is reformed from within.
But in the Southern, the system has to be reformed from without.
I read my serious stuff, but I devour, people send me, publishers send me these things in the mail.
Just because I don't have to buy them anyway.
They know that I'm obsessed with, like Lee Child's, although he didn't with his most recent, Lee Child's publisher, for years you'd send me galleys the minute.
So when you set out to write a book, do you have a premise stewing in your head where it's just like throbbing where you're like, that's it, that's the one?
I'll write it up, and then I'll see where can I go from there.
Like there'll be, every one of my books began as a very, very simple one chapter.
I didn't know what surrounded the chapter, but there was something in the book in talking to strangers, I got interested in these spy stories.
That story of I tell of Anna Montez, the Cuban spy who rises to the top of the American intelligence establishment.
I began with that, and I went and talked to the guy who caught her.
And I had such a fantastic interview with him.
And that just got me incredibly excited.
That got me this whole thing about here's a woman spying in plain sight for Castro at the top of the American intelligence establishment for 10 years.
No one catches her, even though she's not some master spy.
She has the codes that she's using in her purse and the radio she's using in a shoebox in her closet.
Like, we're not talking about James Bond, right?
And like, she does it, and no one even comes close to her.
They're all like, really, really smart people.
And that was such a fascinating notion that even in the most sophisticated and by definition paranoid agency in the American government, they're spies that get away with all the stuff.
In fact, so I go and I interview the guy who caught this woman, Anna Montez, and I'm leaving to go back to drive back.
He's in a small town in Wisconsin.
And I, you know, as one does, I turned off my tape recorder and put it in my bag, and I'm walking back to my car.
And he says, I'll walk you to your car.
It's like, okay.
And we're walking down the street, and he begins to tell me another story, even better than the one I went there to talk to him about, which, of course, my tape recorder is no longer running, so I don't have the story anymore.
Yeah, there was a story recently where Iran assassinated some people that they suspected were CIA spies.
And I always wondered, like, how many people are spies and like, you know, homeland style, living in some other country, assimilating into their culture, getting jobs in organizations, even in terrorist groups, infiltrating.
Well, there was a story I told in one of my podcast episodes, Revisionist History Season 2, I think, that I ran across.
I love reading these memoirs of like mid-level retired intelligence officers, and there's tons of them.
And people don't really read them, and I love, they're just because invariably, like in the middle of the book, they'll tell you some, they'll just drop some crazy story.
And this guy, it was the former general counsel of the CIA, wrote his memoirs, really interesting memoirs, and immediately tells a story about how the CIA, a guy who was a really big deal terrorist in the 70s and 80s, really big deal, has a change of heart and comes to the CIA and says, I no longer believe in what I'm doing.
I'd like to work for you.
And proceeds to work for the CIA for some period of time, unknown period of time.
And he's way up high in Middle Eastern terrorist organization.
And that fact leaks to the New York Times.
And a reporter for the New York Times basically writes a story outing him.
What I didn't realize is that there's an established pattern of people at the intelligence services and editors of newspapers talk all the time about things like this.