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May 30, 2023 - This Past Weekend - Theo Von
02:06:38
E446 Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is an author, journalist, and public speaker. He has written 5 New York Times Best-Selling books including “The Tipping Point”, “Blink”, “Outliers” and more. He is also the host of the podcast “Revisionist History”, produced by his company Pushkin Industries. Malcolm Gladwell joins Theo Von in New York City for this episode of This Past Weekend. They chat about their first meeting years ago, the power of unique hair, and what he’s learned from his vast research on humanity. They also talk about the sudden rise of AI, what we get wrong about policing in America, why job interviews might actually be pointless, and more. Malcolm Gladwell: https://www.instagram.com/malcolmgladwell/ Special thanks to AdHoc collective and the Carriage House in NYC for providing the location for this episode. AdHoc Collective: https://www.instagram.com/adhoccollective/ ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ Morgan & Morgan: If you’re ever injured, visit https://forthepeople.com/thispastweekend or dial Pound LAW (#529). Their fee is free unless they win. Raising Cane’s: Satisfy your Cane’s fix fast by ordering through their app, online at https://raisingcanes.com, or stop by your local restaurant. Caldera + Lab: Get 20% OFF with our code THEO at http://calderalab.com/THEO to unlock your youthful glow and be ready for summer with Caldera + Lab! #ad #calderalabpod Füm: Head to http://tryfum.com/THEO to save an additional 10% off your order today. BlueCube: Learn more at https://bluecubebaths.com/ DraftKings: Join the NBA Finals action with Draftkings Sportsbook. New customers can place a $5 bet and get $200 in bonus bets instantly. Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use code THEO. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-Gambler. In Massachusetts, call (800) 327-5050 or visit gambling help line m a dot org, In New York, call 877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369). In Kansas, call 1-800-522-4700. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 21+ in most eligible states but age varies by jurisdiction. Eligibility restrictions apply. See draftkings dot com slash sportsbook for details and state specific responsible gambling resources. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. Opt-in and 10+ leg req. for 100% boost. Eligibility, wagering, and deposit restrictions apply. Terms at sportsbook dot draftkings dot com slash basketball terms. ------------------------------------------------- Music: "Shine" by Bishop Gunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek&ab_channel=BishopGunn ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: tpwproducer@gmail.com Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers/ Producer: Colin https://instagram.com/colin_reiner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey guys, I'm in the West Village of New York City today, and I am at my friend Keat.
She is an entrepreneur.
She has a beautiful coffee shop and flowery or floral shop called Rosecrans.
And she let us use this vintage carriage house today to record in.
So very grateful to her.
If you want to support her or some of her businesses in the village in New York City, you can check her out at ad hoc collective.
And we are very grateful for this beautiful space that we get to record in today.
Today's guest is a journalist.
He's a public speaker.
He's a New York Times best-selling author who creates works that often deal with what makes us human, how stories and facts overlap.
He has his own podcast, Revisionist History, which goes down some really unique rabbit holes.
You'll hear a little bit about that today.
I'm grateful to have in one of the most unique minds of our time and to get to spend some time with him.
Today's guest is Malcolm Gladwell.
Shine that light on me I'll sit and tell you my stories Shine on me And I will find a song I'll be singing I'm going to stay And I'll be moving
Malcolm, thanks for being here, man.
Yeah.
Thank you.
We met years ago briefly.
It was a coffee shop in Los Angeles.
Yeah.
It was called Top of Montana, maybe or some, there was a coffee shop on Montana Avenue over in like Brentwood?
Yeah, in Brentwood.
Yeah, and I remember seeing you there and I was like, and I wanted to ask you about, I mean, I was just thinking like, man, it would be crazy if one day I got to talk with Malcolm Gladwell.
I used to hang out at Cafe Lux in the Brentwood Country Mart.
Oh, yeah, that was nice.
Oh, it wasn't there, though.
No, it wasn't there.
I made a rare.
Oh, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's changed names.
I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah, I used to go there in the morning.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a fun place.
Everyone sits outside.
Yep, everybody sits outside, and some people have dogs and stuff.
And sometimes they even give away dogs there.
They'll have like a little, one of those kennels, or like a kennel will come.
They're like, you want these dogs.
Yeah, yeah.
It used to be like a Coffee Works or something.
No, then they have some funny name now.
Yeah, I like that place a lot.
Yeah, it was cool.
But I remember seeing you, man, I was so excited.
So really awesome to be able to get to chat with you today.
Yeah, I was thinking like one thing about you that's unique is your hair.
Well, the same could be said of you.
Yeah.
We are people.
You know, a friend of mine once said there are only a handful of people in history who are recognizable in profile.
Like in, you know, a black and white, simple, you know, Mickey Mouse.
You know, this is like a short, very short list.
He's like, you have the potential to be recognizable in profile.
Yeah.
So do you.
Well, do you feel like it does something for you?
Like, yeah, it's interesting.
Like, I think if I am going to go buy a book, right?
Especially from like a smart guy, right?
Like I kind of, there's something in me that wants that guy to look smart.
Well, you're telling me I look smart?
I think to me, it would be my perception.
But I don't know if I thought that if I know that you look smart because I've read some of your books and I think that you're smart.
Yeah.
Or is it because it's the forehead?
It's not the hair.
I don't know.
There's a whole there's actually this is true or not, but maybe someone read somewhere where someone was telling me people do falsely, but nonetheless, there's a stereotype about people with big foreheads.
I have a very high forehead and it slopes back.
I have my mom's forehead.
People think that means I have a big brain.
I don't think it does.
I think I just have a high forehead that slopes back.
But I think people, you look at a big forehead and you think, whoa, there's something in there.
There's something in there.
Yeah, that guy's got a Hemi in there.
That guy's got a V6.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess maybe I could see that.
But I think there is something you want the guy to look.
so you kind of want the guy to look smart, yeah.
Well, the other thing that's going on hair-wise is people with big hair like mine got lucky with Einstein.
Einstein set the template for the big crazy hair being associated with genius, right?
Before Einstein, if you asked someone to imagine a genius, they would never have imagined someone with a head of frizzy hair.
There was no association there.
Einstein is like the kind of template for this idea that, you know, this, he is a Jew fro, not an afro, but the idea that a fro is somehow symbolic of craziness is awesome there.
Yeah, he does.
He's almost got that fact fro.
He's like, oh, this fro's got facts in it.
You know, or he gave you that.
He does have awesome hair.
You can, I mean, Einstein is the most brilliantly kind of branded genius of all time.
Yeah.
But also, since we're on this subject, you know, Beethoven also crazy hair.
So maybe it goes back a little further, not quite as magnificent as Einstein.
But when you picture Beethoven in your mind, you do picture like this shock of hair that sort of symbolizes his intellectual turmoil.
Yeah, I think, yeah, well, it seems like, yeah, his hair seems like there's a, he's just like, it's, there's so much going on.
It's got to get out of me somehow.
Yeah.
You know?
What do you think your hair symbolizes?
Well, I noticed for me, I noticed once I grew my hair, I had my hair long when I was young.
Yeah.
And then I tried a little bit more to like assimilate kind of, I feel like, whenever I moved to Los Angeles.
And I had my hair short.
I think I was trying to, you know, audition for sitcoms and different things.
And then once I grew my hair long again, I just felt, I just felt like myself.
Yeah.
I felt a lot more human.
One time somebody, there was a somebody cut the back of my hair off like on purpose.
They did it without me knowing, a barber, like in like a vindictive way.
And I didn't realize it until later.
And I felt like dehumanized even.
Like I felt, I don't know if that's the word, but I felt, almost felt like when Native Americans, when they would take the other person's scalp, it made me think of that.
Like I felt like they, I don't know, I feel like your hair really has something to do with you, you know?
Yeah.
Well, you're, you're channeling a little Patrick Swayze at the moment.
Oh, that's a good point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I'm thinking.
Hopefully non-cancerous, you know, because I think he probably had, I think he had, but he smoked a lot, I think.
Yeah, I don't know about his, yes.
I just, I'm thinking that or you could you or like a really fun, you know, metal band from the 70s.
Yeah.
That's the other.
Those are good associations, by the way.
Yeah, no, it feels good.
Yeah, no, I don't feel like it's, I feel like it's a warm judgment, you know?
Yeah.
But yeah, I just thought about that.
I was like, oh, Malcolm has interesting hair.
His hair makes me believe that he is smart.
Is there, like, does his hair mean anything to him?
Does it, did he like pick it up from somewhere?
Because my hair does make me feel like a lot more comfortable as myself.
Yeah.
I don't, some people call my hair a mullet haircut.
I don't think of it like that.
I just think of this is how I feel most comfortable and this feels and it feels like your hair, it's like a, it's an expression of you kind of.
It's like, you know, it almost picks up signals.
I think some people, or I don't know if this is true or not.
I might just be saying this and think that it's true, but like some animals have like little hair on them and it makes, it picks up information.
Do you think that's well, I've always had, you know, I have my mom's hair.
My mom is black.
So I have a version of her hair.
And I've historically, my hair is short at the moment.
It has been much longer.
When I was a kid, it was much longer.
And I think I liked it because it was very, you know, I grew up in an area that did not have a lot of, was very, very kind of white.
Very, there was very little curly hair going on where I grew up.
And I think I sort of liked the idea that I stood out a little bit.
Yeah.
Seemed kind of, I think that was the main attraction of it was just it was an element of difference.
Yeah.
I can relate to that.
I grew up in an area that had like a lot of clean, there was, well, there were some people that had like real clean hair.
Like their hair looked like when they slept at, when they were asleep at night, their hair was also asleep.
Whereas I've always felt like nothing inside of me has ever gotten a moment of rest, really.
Yeah.
I've always felt like even when I'm laying down, like the rest of me is just frenetically trying to just survive in the world.
So I think I remember seeing some people and their hair just look so comfortable.
I was like, God dang, boy, that's nice, you know?
Like their hair looked like it stayed, like, you know, like it just looked like it had conditioner just built into it, you know?
Well, I don't do anything to my hair.
So I don't comb it.
I don't.
Do you wash it with like shampoo or you just use water?
Just water.
I mean, it is the most kind of, I don't even pay any attention to it.
It just sort of is.
And then every now and again, I get it cut and don't.
It just, it's kind of exists.
Yeah, I was just thinking about that because a lot of your book, I read your book.
I read your, or one of the Talking with Strangers.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Talking with Strangers.
That's the one that I read.
And I didn't think I was going to be able to really read it.
And then, I mean, I knew I would, but it was just like, I didn't know if I'd have the time.
And then I just, it was cool.
It was enjoyable.
It was, it was interesting.
It was easy to read.
One thing that I found fascinating in it, like, well, how would you kind of summarize like what the book is sort of about?
Like, just kind of briefly, just so people can know.
And then I had A couple of kind of things I thought were interesting.
Well, it's a book that tries to figure out why so many of our interactions with strangers go wrong.
And because I was struck when I was writing it by how many of the sort of stories in the news were stories about, you know, Bernie Madoff, the famous Ponzi schemer, is a guy that everyone who invested with him, they thought they knew who he was, and they were all wrong.
Yeah.
I tell a story about a spy in that book who everyone thought they were a loyal American and they weren't.
The female, right?
Yeah, Montez.
Yeah.
That was unbelievable.
Yeah, she's like one of the most damaging spies in American history.
And she's just like, you know, she's sitting there doing her job for 10 years and no one has the slightest inkling that she might be working.
She was working for the Cubans the whole time.
Not even her sister and her brother.
She had a brother-in-law who worked for the FBI.
No, sorry.
Her sister worked for the FBI.
And was oblivious to the fact that.
Yeah, that blew my mind.
Yeah, there.
But they were, you know, and there's, I tell stories about, you know, Jerry Sandusky, that infamous pedophile at the state.
And, you know, he's in that job for 25 years.
And like, everyone thinks he's just this lovely guy, you know?
So I was really fascinated by that idea that you can meet somebody and you can completely misunderstand so much of what makes them tick.
And why would we be that way?
You would think as human beings that we would be, that evolution would have favored those who were good at figuring out strangers, but it hasn't.
The opposite is true, right?
Here we are at the finest point of our evolution, and we're terrible at this fundamental task.
And so that was the kind of puzzle the book tries to unravel.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it based it kind of on the Sandra, what was the Sandra?
Sandra Bland, yeah.
Sandra Bland.
It was a case where an officer pulled a woman over, and then they ended up getting into an altercation, which almost seems like it shouldn't have happened.
Yeah.
And then they arrest the woman.
She ends up in jail.
And I'm just kind of like summarizing, obviously, and then she takes her own life.
Yeah.
It was one of the more, one of the, one of the more kind of, remember there were that string of cases right around the kind of rise of the Black Lives Matter movement about African Americans being, having these kind of lethal encounters with police officers.
And hers was one of the most high profile.
And what was crazy about that one was that because the officers, he's got a video cam running the entire time, we have, we know exactly what happened between the two of them.
And he meets someone.
She runs us, she rolls through a stop sign.
He pulls her over.
And he becomes convinced really early on that she's up to no good.
She's got drugs.
She's something.
And she's not any of those things.
She's just unhappy.
And he reads all of her signals of unhappiness as signals of threat and dangerousness.
And so he gets her wrong, right?
And so the question is, why does he get her wrong?
How can, here's a, she's a young woman.
She's driven a long way to go for a job interview.
Her life has not been going well.
She's trying to start over in town in Texas.
And she's had some mental health issues in the past, but not insurmountable ones.
But she's just someone who's going through a lot.
Yeah.
And this cop pulls her over and convinces her she's a criminal who's got a gun and maybe drugs and could potentially harm him.
And like, there's a big difference between unhappy and being potentially violent and dangerous.
And so my question is, how does a police officer, who you would think would be good at that, right?
At being able to distinguish threat from unhappiness.
Yeah.
How did he get?
And so I use that case as a way into the book, which is this, let's use this to try and figure out why we're bad at this.
Yeah, I loved it.
I really, I didn't like, I loved kind of like, I didn't know about that.
I wasn't familiar with that case, right?
Obviously, I'm familiar with like a lot of interactions that you see where with police and black people, you know, it's a pretty common kind of occurrence that, you know, where there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of uncertainty.
It's funny because when I watched the video, because then it led me, then I went and watched the video online.
And it felt to me like, yeah, the policeman took some offense to what she did.
He took some offense to some behavior of hers.
I don't know if he felt like she was like dismissive of him or, you know, immediately untrusting, which has to kind of also suck for a police officer.
If you are a most trusting guy, you come up and you're con and then everybody's always just like, you're untrustworthy.
Yeah.
Well, he's way too quick to jump to a conclusion about her.
And that's what he's doing.
Yeah.
He seemed a little high strung.
Yeah.
And she also seemed high strung.
Yeah.
And so it's interesting because also we had a police officer on a while back and he was saying the number one cause of death amongst police officers is suicide.
Yes, it's an incredibly stressful profession.
Unbelievable.
It's like, so it's the, the whole, the whole thing is all, it's just, it's all interesting that what a stressful job.
It's like, and then you have her who's a stress, who's obviously dealing with a lot of stress and stuff in her own life.
And so then you have this meeting of just, I mean, it's, it's a lot to put on the fact that somebody just rolled a stop, you know, it's like something that's not that severe.
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of that has to do, I concluded, was, is about time.
You know, the problem is that he's rushing.
And if you're, he rushes to a conclusion, he rushes to kind of deal with her, he rushes to find out what she's all about, he jumps to a judgment about her.
And, you know, the, those are, when you're rushing, the risk of making an error just goes up dramatically.
And his, you know, that's one of the lessons I take away from the book, which is that getting people right requires an enormous amount of patience.
And we have to, particularly a job, a high-stress, high-stakes job like policing, we have to build patience into these kinds of situations.
You know, teach police officers that you don't have to resolve this in two minutes.
You pull her over.
You take some time to get to know who she is before, you know, we're not going to, you're not on the clock.
And by the way, many police officers are on the clock.
That's part of the problem, that they have supervisors who are measuring their productivity and saying, you've got to resolve every encounter within.
That's an incredible mistake.
Doctors are the same way.
You go to the doctor, doctors are on the clock.
It's one of the reasons why they get things wrong.
They don't listen to you, is that they've got 10 patients at the door and an expectation they have to get through all 10 in the next, you know, that idea, we confuse, we get so obsessed with productivity in many things that we sacrifice the kind of the accuracy and the meaningfulness of the encounter.
Yeah, that's a great way to say it.
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Yeah, I would totally agree.
I think it's almost a, it's a micro look at of kind of larger things that are going on in our entire society, you know, that there's not enough long-term, even a moment doesn't have the long, the longevity that it feels like it used to have.
Yeah.
You know, I talk a lot about how I don't even think a moment, like you don't, every moment is captured now, you know, so it's like a moment used to have this whimsical value that it was like, you can't ever replicate it.
It's like, you know, it's like a flash of lightning, you know, it's like, and that's why there was so much value like in storytelling and things, because somebody was like, man, you're never going to believe this.
Like, this is what happened.
And then now we capture every moment, you know, and we watch them so many times that it's the value of something, something used to never be able to be replicated.
And now it's, everything is so replicatable or replicatable.
This reminds me of, I did a podcast, an episode of my podcast, Revision's History, a couple of years back on, I stumbled on it totally by accident.
I met this guy who's an investigator, works with police departments to investigate police shootings.
And I was at his house for some office for some other reason.
And he showed me this tape.
And it's a tape of cops.
A guy steals a car.
Cops follow him at high speed.
They finally get him, pull him over.
He gets out of his car and they shoot him all these times, right?
And you watch the, you hear about it, and you watch the tape the first time and you think, oh my god, it's another one of these cases where they gunned down this innocent guy who didn't, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And then he walked me through, we had the video of the whole thing.
He sits me down and he walks me through the video frame by frame by frame by frame.
And he proves that actually it's not what you think.
This was a guy who had all kinds of mental health problems and he wanted the police to kill him.
It's a well-known phenomenon of death by cop, where somebody does something and is willing his own.
And he's like, you don't catch it the first time you watch this video.
You've got to slow it down, break it down frame by frame, have some context about the case.
And then you realize it's 100% the opposite of what I thought.
The guy is, as they shoot him, he's trying to get them to shoot him more when they don't.
And you watch and he breaks and he shows you what's going on.
And it was this incredibly, you know, it's a, it's not a, people don't want to hear that interpretation sometimes.
But it was, I just remember I was sitting, I drove all the way to an office outside of San Antonio, Texas, middle of nowhere.
This really interesting guy.
Not a guy I would normally ever meet or hang out with.
His world is very different from mine.
And he just sat me down.
I just remember him saying, I got to show you this video.
It was one of my favorite episodes I've done of my podcast.
I just thought it was like, and the way I told the story was we started out and, you know, I wanted the audience to reach the first, to jump to the conclusion that, oh, this is an innocent guy being shot by the cops.
And then slowly you kind of peel off the layers of the onion and then you realize, oh my God, I got it wrong.
Right.
It was like a kind of, I always remember that.
It was like, it was like, it was one of those cases where, I don't know, if you ever had this, where you're trying to tell a story and you think it's going to be really complicated, you sit down with one person for 40 minutes and you think, oh my God, that's it.
That's it.
That's the whole story.
Like, I don't need to do anything else.
I just need to like run this thing as it happened to me.
But it was a very memorable day.
Well, a lot of your, a lot of the talking with strangers was kind of like what you just kind of described.
You know, there was a lot of things where I was like, wow, I'm amazed that that wasn't seen by people.
I'm amazed how people would get a certain moment wrong.
How some people, like you talked about defaulting to truth, a lot of times people want to believe the person.
So that's like a natural way that a lot of things like that are bad or kind of wrong or off continue to go because there's just a human nature for us to default to believe or want to believe.
I found a lot of that stuff really, really fascinating about the story.
And then I liked how in the end, it just comes back to this case of this officer and this woman.
Right.
And also, when I was watching the officer and the woman and that tape, there was something about when the woman started smoking, you know?
I wonder if that like, because I think with police, there's like probably an expectation that things go a certain way, you know?
So I wonder if that like offended the officer or something.
Like, you know, you just don't know sometimes, because even though we can have an idea of everything, it still comes down also to that there's two people who have had their own unique lives up until that moment, you know?
Yeah, I think he thought that her smoking was kind of, that there was something dismissive.
Dismissive and also sinister about it.
Like, you know, that he, because he had in his head that she might be a potential bad guy, right?
Drugs, guns, something.
Do you think that, like, I didn't read all the case.
I didn't see it.
Yeah.
I mean, I know.
I think, you know, he's got a variety of kind of scenarios in his head when he stops her.
And one of them is she's running drugs and she's armed.
Oh, wow.
And I think so.
I think any police officer who, when you stomp someone, you always have in your head a scenario where they're a bad person.
I see.
So not just because she was black, just because of any person.
Just, yeah, like you've got to think, I'm stomping them.
I'm, you know, as a police officer, when you approach a car, you know you are running the risk that they're armed and they might shoot you, right?
That's a good point.
That's what they're saying.
So he's got that in his cut.
He's got 10 different scenarios in his head.
Yeah.
And the fact that she's smoking, I think he kind of, that adds credence to one of the scenarios that says that she's a kind of a weirdo or something's not right or something.
Why would she start smoking?
She's a noir fan or something.
Yeah.
Minute and I walk, you know, min and I get there, she smokes, starts smoking.
Like, it's just, I don't know.
He just sort of, he's categorizing her as that there's something off with her, something wrong with her.
And that adds to that expectation, I think.
Yeah, I think I kind of took it as like, this seems like kind of like a white cop kind of guy.
So I start to generalize in my head.
They kind of have a, and all police officers, I think, have a certain way that they kind of expect things to go.
Like they get an understanding of this is how things go when you stop someone.
You know, you tell them what's going on.
They comply really to a certain way.
And then everybody goes on about their business based kind of upon what the cop decides how things should go.
Yeah.
Right.
So I think I, to me, it seemed like that some of the lady's actions like, yeah, and the smoking kind of conflicted with that.
But it was real, just going back into your book and along this kind of same thread, one of the things that really stood out to me was about how judges and machines, like if you put the information, like if you put people before a judge in a court, that the judge,
who you think would be able to interpret what the, like a lot more information by seeing the person listening to the case, got it, they, they got it wrong more than the machine did.
Is that a right way to say it?
So if, if I simply give you the, so the question is, you're a, you've been arrested and the judge has to decide whether to let you out on parole.
Yeah, yeah, I have.
And that's, no, I mean, I'm talking hypothetically.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
But the, so the judge has to make a prediction about you.
And the question is, how good is the prediction?
Right?
And a lot rise on that prediction.
If you go out and commit another crime, the judge looks bad.
Yeah, it's why they cut people's hair and shave them and put them in a suit.
Exactly.
It's about that perception.
So the question is, I could just summarize on paper all of the things about you, where you live, how old you are, nature of your crime, whether you've been arrested before, blah, blah, blah.
Feed them into a computer or an AI system, right?
And have the computer make a prediction.
Or I can give the same information to the judge and say, meet the person.
So you're giving the judge more information.
You're allowing the judge to look at all the information the computer looks at, plus whatever information they can glean from the face-to-face encounter.
And the question is, is the judge better at making that prediction because they have access to more information, to the information they can gather from a face-to-face encounter?
And the answer is no, they're worse.
Wow.
In other words, meeting somebody makes you worse at predicting what they're going to be doing.
So it brings into question all kinds of things, like do job interviews...
We did a show on job interviews.
And the truth is that there's not a lot of evidence that in a job interview, meeting the person helps.
And I did a funny thing where I interviewed, I've been hiring assistants for 20 years.
So I went back to all my old assistants and I had them tell the story of how I hired them.
And because I don't believe in job interviews, I hire them in the most kind of random way.
I'm like, you know, I don't even bother asking questions.
I don't ask them, I make a rule of never asking them where they went to school.
So it was funny.
It was a funny episode because I was interviewing all these oldest and I had forgotten like how totally random my hiring practices are.
And by the way, I've never had a mistake.
Actually, only once did I hire someone who didn't work out and they left within two weeks.
I'm still in touch with most of my, one of my old assistants is like one of the most trusted employees at my podcast company.
Oh, that's awesome.
My point is, it's just not, you could pretend that sitting down and talking to somebody for half an hour will help you make a meaningful judgment about what kind of person they are, but you can't.
It's nonsense.
So you might as well, my point is, I just roll the dice.
What the hell?
Like how most people can, most people, if they're, all I'm interested in is if they applied for the job, they're clearly interested in working for me.
They showed up on time.
So I don't know, they seem reasonably, you know, they're like, I'm actually, I try to be nice to my assistant.
And if you're nice to people, they usually work hard.
So like, I, and I pick people who have got a college education.
So I know they know something about the world.
That's all I need.
Why don't you need anything else?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I've found my producers for podcasts and I found them like one of the first guys, just a random dude, just emailed me, like, hey, man, I can do the job.
And I was like, this guy sounds wonderful.
And he was a great producer for a long time and still is.
But it's so crazy sometimes how you find different people.
It's like, yeah, it's almost like if somebody just breaks through the cracks at a certain moment too, it's almost like this fits right now.
This is what's easiest.
What's interesting, and this is the thing I explored in that episode, was it makes you realize that the success of someone in a job is less about that person than it is about the environment you create for that person once they take the job.
In other words, a lot of it is about us, the hiring person, not the person we're hiring.
That lots and lots of people can thrive if they're brought into an environment that helps them thrive.
Like that's the, you know, it's like in, I don't know if you're a big sports fan, but, you know, there are certain coaches who can make lots, you know, tons of players go to that coach, and the coach reliably turns them into excellent basketball players or football players.
Right.
And other coaches, it only works with very, very specific people.
It makes you realize, oh, it's about the coach, not about the player.
Right.
You know how they always talk about general managers and sports?
And they say, that guy's really great at drafting great athletes out of college.
And I always think, maybe they're not good at drafting.
Maybe they're just good at making sure those players succeed once they arrive.
That's the magical piece of it.
Yeah, I guess that's interesting.
Do you think on a larger level that we do that, that that's something that we've lost?
Like, you know, I talk a lot about purpose and stuff in our podcast about like if you don't have purpose, then you're really left up to the elements of how of just the whims of whatever the algorithms of social media and stuff send at you.
You know, if, and a lot of purpose has been lost over the years by like, I kind of romanticized that people had more purpose to their jobs back in the day.
Like there was a factory in their town and they made tables there and there was a pride in the town.
This is, you know, we have a table at our house that our father made at the factory in our town.
There was a sense of pride and that companies were like, yeah, you're going to move up in the company.
And, and then, so then, you know, there was just more of like, it felt like there were, you were, you were, the company itself was also nurturing and wanted you to succeed.
Whereas now it feels like we've gotten to more of a corporate type of vibe where everything's more about like protecting like civil laws that make sure everything is like kind of okay and just making sure no one's going to sue each other, but it's not even about anybody, you know, building up like a equity in the human being anymore.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, you know, a friend of mine once, I remember having a conversation with him.
He was a he was a consultant, management consultant.
He was talking about we're happiest when we have three kinds of kind of validation: when we like what we're doing, when the people around us give us positive feelings about what we're doing, and when the broader world gives us feedback.
And it's like if you look at people who are unhappy, it's because in what they're doing, they're lacking one or more of those three things.
So we were talking about police officers right now.
There are plenty of police officers who like their job and like the people they work with.
But now they're operating in an environment where the world, the outside world is very skeptical and hostile and suspicious of police officers.
That makes it really hard to be happy in your job as a police officer, right?
You got two of the three things and you need all three.
It's a nightmare.
It's a nightmare, yeah.
But you can go down the, you know, I was talking with, I had to, did, we ran it on my podcast.
I did this wonderful discussion with these two fantastic women who were coaches.
They coached youth sports, girls' sports.
And they were talking about how like a lot of people are now quitting coaching.
Coaching's become really hard.
And I said, well, why has it become hard?
Do you still like, does coaching make you feel good?
Absolutely.
Love it.
Greatest thing I ever did.
Do the kids you coach like being coached by you?
Totally.
I'm friends with them for years later.
It's some of the most important experiences of my life.
I'm like, so why aren't people quitting coaching?
They're like, oh, it's the parents.
Parents are driving us crazy, torturing us, screaming at us, calling us at all hours.
So it's like they have the personal thing.
They love it.
They have the immediate feedback and love from the kids they're coaching.
But it's the outside world of the parents on the sidelines who are just making them miserable.
Yeah.
Right?
You got two of three and two of three is not enough.
So when I hear you, what you're talking about, I'm here, that's what you're saying, a version of you can have a job that you like, but you're talking about the second and third level is not there.
The company isn't giving you, you know, isn't recognizing what you're doing.
And the broader world, you're anonymous to the broader world.
There isn't, the whole point about being a craftsman in the 19th century sense of that word was that the world recognizes that you had a certain level of expertise.
You made the table and every time someone saw this beautiful table.
I'm like, Ricky, go get your table and bring it out here.
And everybody like you did.
Yeah, they understood.
They were giving you understand.
At the outside, it was giving you recognition for something that was done with pride and with skill.
And that you can't like, it's not enough for just you to appreciate that what you're doing is of value.
That's interesting.
And I think, yeah, a lot of people probably don't know that.
And so I think a lot of people probably wonder, why am I not feeling some fulfillment?
Why am I not feeling this or that?
And I think, but yeah, I think that's one of the things that leads people to a lot of unhappiness.
We were talking about it with like school shootings, what leads some of these people to get so caught up.
And I think, for one, if you don't have any purpose through like a job, through a family, or have like love in your life, like something that gives you purpose every day, then you're really at the whims of like the like, you know, social media or anything that like, which are tailored towards, if you start looking at something bad, it just gives you more bad, you know, it's almost like a Pandora's box in a way.
But yeah, we just were, we just had been talking a lot about purpose.
I think, no, I think with the school shooting thing is interesting because what's going on there is that there is now a kind of, it's funny, I'm doing in this season of my podcast, I'm doing a whole thing about gun violence.
So I've been thinking a lot about this.
And we have an episode where we talk a lot about mass shootings.
And I think the psychology of that is really going back to the idea of those three layers of that there's a world now, a kind of closed culture online of people who are unhealthily obsessed, pathologically obsessed with this kind of violence.
And there is no, they've been cut off from the third layer.
They're not checking their ideas against what the broader world looks like.
They're totally enclosed in this sealed online culture where the only feedback they're getting are from people who think exactly like they do and who feed their kind of obsessive fascination and addiction for this kind of weird violence.
Like if you look at people who have been involved in mass shootings, they're immersed in that world.
They know they can talk obsessively for hours about like the kids who did the Columbine shooting.
Oh yeah.
There's bootleg manifestos.
There's people getting like, yeah, have you heard this manifest?
Have you read this kind of thing of it?
It's its own little world, hermetically seen world.
And like there's no connection to the kind of broader society.
And so they become to think of, they come to think, they're getting all of their validation from that first layer, right?
That's what's sort of that.
And so, you know, breaking, trying to solve this puzzle of mass shootings requires at some point to getting access to those kids and kind of breaking them out of that closed universe.
Yeah.
And the interesting thing about like with online and living in online societies now, it's like you can find whatever universe, whatever universe you start to create, right?
Whether it's good or bad, that there's this other energy from the other side.
It's almost like the mirror where you used to look in a mirror and you would get like an earnest reflection of yourself.
It would be based on, sometimes you might not see yourself clearly because of how you thought about yourself or how you felt about yourself, but at least the mirror was going to give you, it was an honest reflection.
There was no ability to change the mirror unless you were in a fun house or something.
The mirror was the mirror.
But now the mirror has the ability to kind of adjust the way you look at yourself or to give you reflections that make you think the same things over and over again.
Like with algorithms and that sort of thing with social media, you know, because now we're not even, the mirror is just our phone.
We're looking in there for so much validation.
It's really weird when the mirror now has the path.
It's like that's freaking really scary because if you get somebody in a dark hole who doesn't have a strong connection or purpose in the world where they feel some one of the senses of value from themselves, from other people, what are the other two?
From the internal, your immediate world, the people who share your community, and then the broader world.
And then, yeah, if you're not feeling some of that and you're just in your internal, just in this kind of a closed space or even in a space that the mirror starts to design, that's really, if you get into the dark arts a little bit and it's only showing you dark art and everybody in there is a dark artist and you're like, damn, this is the world.
That's real scary, man.
One of the things, this may seem like a stretch, but I thought about this a lot.
You know, I'm old enough to remember when television was kind of a mass cultural form.
So, you know, when I was in my 20s, every single person I knew watched Melrose Place.
Everyone I knew.
Oh, yeah.
I could go, and if I saw someone who was 25 years old anywhere in North America, I could start a conversation about Melrose Place and they would be able to, even if they didn't watch it, it was in the air, right?
Same thing.
I remember.
Yeah, we watched 90210 just to use it.
90210.
So it was like kind of a little bit of the younger, but sister or brother show.
Exactly.
That had the same function.
But there's tons of television shows in that era.
I remember walking down a street of Manhattan when the last, the series finale of Seinfeld aired.
Wow.
And the city was as quiet.
There was like the restaurants were empty.
Everybody was home watching Seinfeld.
That is impossible today.
Would never happen.
So right then, back then, everyone had the shared experience of a certain set of stories.
Seinfeld.
And I don't think I we did this episode two seasons ago or last season on Will and Grace.
I think Will and Grace was the last show that had that kind of shared experience.
And that's why the show was so powerful in changing attitudes about gay marriage and all kinds of things.
And the idea that you've, the only thing that's left now kind of is the Super Bowl, but even that, not really.
The Oscars don't have the same shared experience power they used to.
Reviled.
I don't know if reviled means anything.
Yeah, I don't know.
So there's nothing, I don't know.
I don't know.
That's the sort of thing that worries me a lot.
It's weird to think of it in terms of, to think of like 90210 as something that brought us all together.
But it makes perfect sense.
I can relate to that when you say that.
Yeah.
Because it used to be, I mean, you know, like there was a couple of years ago on Joe Rogan, everybody got it really into when that had, I think it was Sebastian Younger book or something.
It was about tribe.
Oh, yeah, yeah, what that book.
What was that book called?
I can't remember.
I know what you're talking about.
I think it was called, Zach, you know what it was?
Okay.
Into the Wild?
Was it Into the Wild?
No, this was the one where it was about how in tribes, when we're in smaller groups, it all made sense.
The amount of connectivity we're supposed to have, the checks and balances human-wise.
And even when you're saying the shared experience, like if a lion came into the village or if somebody came in selling some new wares, everybody in the village knew about it.
That person would leave.
You could all talk about it.
It was a share, like there was all, there was some shared experience.
Everybody had the same shared experiences.
So you all had this, you all had this template on what you were kind of connecting about, you know, things to talk about.
But I've never, I never thought about that.
Yeah, there's, there's not that many anymore.
So you kind of all wander around in your own little worlds.
And it starts to feel that way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's kind of scary.
And also, it means it's also, we were talking in very lofty terms.
On some level, it's less fun.
It was kind of fun when the feeling, it's so much more fun to watch a television show.
And it's funny, people under the age of 30 have no, or maybe 25, they've never felt, it breaks my heart, they've never felt this feeling.
There was that feeling you had.
You're watching a show and you understand it.
Not only is everyone you know watching that same show, they're watching that same show at the same time.
It's amazing.
It's like, it felt like it's the same feeling you have when you watch sports.
That's part of the power.
You know that everyone's watching it at the same time.
But this was the idea that a story, a drama on thing, was you were watching it like you're watching sports.
Oh, right.
And you would call, when it was over, you'd call your friends and you'd say, could you believe just what happened?
Dude, I remember there'd be domestic disputes, right, on our street, right?
And they would break them up five minutes before like In Living Color came on or like some great TV show.
Like, look, guys, we know you guys need to, you know, we know there's like two spouses beating this shit out of you.
It's a perfect example of a show like this where we're like, you had to go watch the segments, remember?
You had to what?
You had to, and like, everyone I know discovered that show at the same time.
And it was just like, oh my God, this is like, who is this guy, Dave Chappelle?
Like, suddenly, Dave Chappelle, you're talking about Dave Chappelle when you like go to the office.
Oh, you mean the Chappelle show, you mean?
No, no, because he was on in the page.
Oh, no, he wasn't in the.
No, I'm telling you.
I'm mixing up the one.
It was the Wyans Brothers.
Yeah, yeah.
The Wyans Brothers guys.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Jim Carrey was on.
Jim Carrey was on that show.
Yeah, the Wyans Brothers and then a bunch of other people were.
Who was on that show, Zach?
You got it?
I'm looking at them.
Yeah, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Keenan Ivory Wayans.
All the Wayans, bro.
They get.
David Allen Greer.
David Allen Greer, yeah.
Yep, David Allen Greer was so good.
That's Jimmy Fox.
Jamie Foxx.
Jamie Foxx is on that show.
Jennifer Lopez.
Jennifer Lopez was a dancer.
She's a dancer on it.
That's right.
She was one of the fly girls.
But dude, I remember there would Literally, be the cops would be there.
There would be a husband and wife fist fighting in the street outside of our apartment.
And they'd be like, Look, guys, we got to wrap this up.
You know what I'm saying?
902 and 10 is going to be on in five minutes.
So either get your last punches in.
Let's agree.
We're not going to press charges.
The cops will take the liquor and we're going to, everybody needs to go sit in front of their TVs.
Dude, I remember getting to the tele, if you got the television before, if you had siblings, you would get there and you would get the front position in front of the TV and you fucking were the king, right?
And I remember rubbing my legs like this as hard as I could.
Like I was trying to create as much energy on my side of the television for whatever program was going to be presented right there, you know?
And my siblings would try to jockey from position.
And I was just like, I'm going to get as much of the information.
I'm going to be, I am right here to be transmitted to, you know, like this angle a little bit off center of the TV.
You might miss.
Because remember, Bea, back then, because the TV's tiny.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that thing was 11 or 12 inches.
I remember we would draw extra TV on the outside of it.
Like it didn't even make any sense because it didn't get any transmission.
But there was something about that, that shared experience.
We would all go outside then.
You're right.
We would impersonate the characters from an In Living color.
We would act out the different things.
There was a lot more shared experience.
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And it's one of the things that I love about kind of like the way that you like think and write and stuff.
It's like you kind of like have an idea.
And this is my summation.
This isn't a judgment, but you have an idea and then you kind of just meander away.
It's just how things connect.
And it's nice, man.
It's a nice look at life.
You know, that's what I really thought about reading Thinking, Talking with Strangers.
Was like, oh, wow, this is a lot of neat things that I hadn't really thought about before.
It goes into some cases that are really like encapsulating like, yeah, the Jerry Sandusky thing.
I didn't know that this had happened in there and that the guy didn't really know exactly what he'd heard.
And if he thought he'd heard a child and a man having sex in a shower, why he didn't go in there and shut it down?
The whole thing is weird.
All the ways you behave, but don't, and when you look back at your behavior, like that didn't make any sense really now that I'm breaking it down piece by piece.
But in the moment, it all kind of seemed to flow, you know, even going back to whenever you talked about like the guy in San Antonio, when you went back and looked at that footage.
And at first, it all seems one way.
But then when you look at it piece by piece, you're like, oh, I had this, this is something totally different.
As we start to get even further from moments that we all have together, right?
Like, and technology gets, I mean, technology is kind of going so fast.
I mean, you and I have both had experiences where we've had kind of life without technology and life with technology.
What has been like a surprise to you about some of the things maybe that you didn't see coming with technology?
Or I know it's kind of a broad question, but maybe we can just kind of start there.
Yeah.
Like, did you romanticize it early on?
Did you like...
I didn't understand...
Like, if you had asked me 10 years ago or even five years ago, will I be checking my phone every two minutes?
I would have said, you're nuts.
I'm not going to be ruled by my phone.
Totally ruled by my phone.
Yeah, same.
So I did not, I didn't understand how it would sort of ingratiate itself into, I didn't know something like Twitter.
The idea that I would be, I don't spend a huge amount of time on Twitter, but I do.
I scroll through on my, that, you know, when you're reading two sentences, the idea that I would want to consume so much information in two sentence form seems crazy to me in retrospect.
Like, why?
I was someone who grew up reading books, you know, consuming things in 10,000 sentence form.
Yeah, and now you're reading like a, it could be a haiku from some crackhead somewhere and you don't even know you're taking it for serious.
Yeah, it's like there's a great meme attached to it and now I form a huge opinion off of it.
And then so all kinds of like, and the weird way, the other thing that's weird about social media took me a long time.
I think I'm a longer, in the beginning, it took me a long time to figure out like how easy it is to take it personally.
So, somebody makes a random comment, and you feel it in the beginning, you're injured, and then you think, why am I injured?
Like, there's a couple billion people in the world.
Some random person who I've never met, who I will never meet, who I don't even know who they are, has decided to say something nasty.
I'm going to give you a really dumb example of this.
All of my cousins, who are all car crazy, we used to always, they also, on Canadian Thanksgiving, would come to my house upstate.
Y'all have Thanksgiving?
Canada's.
Oh, yeah, we have it in October.
How do you guys get it, though?
Same way Americans got it.
But just because winter starts earlier in Canada, so Thanksgiving's got to be in October.
But was it with like the Native Americans and everything?
Yeah, it was.
I don't know whether it's explicit.
It was just a time.
I think it's a, there's an English tradition where you give thanks for the harvest.
I think the Canadian one comes from that.
Yeah, so it makes sense you guys a little earlier than because the winter winter coming.
But anyway, they would all descend on our house and we're all car crazy.
So everyone would bring their sports cars and we would put them out on the front lawn, take photos and then drive them all and then switch off.
It was like an annual tradition we did.
And one time I posted a picture on Twitter and I was like, we're all gathered to drive our muscle cars and they're not muscle cars.
I know what a muscle car is.
They're not really muscle cars.
I just have said it, you know, and then all these, there were all these nasty comments about, they're not muscle cars.
I remember my brother read it and he was genuinely, he was so hurt.
He was like, why are they being so mean to us?
We're just driving our cars for fun.
It's like, there's a period where that's this, where you don't understand it.
It's an impersonal medium masquerading as a personal medium.
That's the thing.
And it takes a little while for you to wrap your head around the fact that like, no, this doesn't matter.
It's a random, it matters as little as that, you know, in the old world, that person said that same thing, but you didn't hear it.
Now you hear it, but it's just as trivial.
It didn't matter.
It's like, but we can't correlate.
You're right.
We can't correlate that.
It's real interesting because some people probably never recognize that it doesn't matter, right?
To some people, that's their life.
That's all that matters.
Yeah, because that's, yeah, I think that I, some part of me, that's worn off from me.
And now I care less.
Totally.
Same.
But I think it's interesting because, yeah, that used to be chatter in the background, like people saying, oh, that's retarded.
That's ridiculous.
That's crazy.
Right.
Or that's awesome.
That's great.
What a great idea.
But those were things you heard in the, those were things in the periphery you never heard.
You never heard them.
It was just the chatter in the distance.
But now those are things, if you want to access the chatter in the distance, instead of just having like a somebody that means something to you communicate or getting an interpretation of something that has from someone that has value, you know, or getting even like even negative feedback,
but from someone that you respect, you know, you can get those things still, but and those have value, but otherwise you can also tap into all that other shit that doesn't, but it still hurts the same.
Yeah.
You know, that's what's interesting is how much it still does.
Yeah.
It's a reminder, you know, I think one of the things that we've, and I think, I don't think it's new with social media, but it has always been the case that there is a small, there are a small number of people who, I don't even know whether it's always deliberate, but who express their personal unhappiness or their confusion or their befuddlement in hostile language.
And like I said, a lot of times I don't think they mean to be hostile.
It's just how it comes out.
A lot of times, you know, people who don't communicate for a living aren't necessarily expert at adequately explaining why they don't like something or their reactions to something.
They've always been there.
We just never heard their voices.
That's sort of what we're getting at.
Like most people, if you, I once conducted an experiment where I responded nicely to people who commented, said nasty things about me on Twitter.
And I wanted to see what happened.
And what happens when, if they respond again, is they almost invariably back down.
And you realize they didn't actually mean, they didn't mean harm to you or they weren't actually angry at you or hostile.
They just didn't know how to express, they had a comment they wanted to make that was with an issue they had with what you were saying.
They just didn't know how to say it in a way that was kind of socially kind of positive.
And if you're nice about it and kind of, I used to call this love bombing.
And I'm still a believer in love bombing.
So I would love bomb them and I would just sort of be nice in a response.
And they would always like calm down and they would say, yeah, you're right.
You're kind of right.
I just wondered about this.
And you're like, all of a sudden you're having a conversation with them, right?
Yeah.
It's like, it's very easy to disarm 90% of critics just by kind of taking them, giving them the opportunity to be nicer about what they're saying.
Oh, that's a good point.
Yeah, I wonder if there's like a thing where your brain just cycles through.
Yeah, it's just so easy.
Why is it so easy for people, humans, and animals, even we don't even know animals don't know how to use social media yet.
But why is it so easy for humans?
I love yet.
It's coming.
Oh, yeah.
I wouldn't be shocked.
That's going to be crazy, dude.
When we find out the truth about what some of the animals think.
Because we've been really, we've had kind of like a lot of set views on animals for a long time.
Octopus Twitter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I can't wait for that.
Yeah, can I get a piano down here?
What the fuck do you think I'm doing with all these arms?
Why is it so easy for us to say something so mean in a place like social media, you know, or to want to, or it's really crazy because you wouldn't really do that in person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, you wouldn't do that in person.
and yeah, that is, I mean, I mean, you wouldn't do that in person because you're scared of the risk.
Not scared, but you're mindful of the response.
You know, the analogy I was thinking about was I read somewhere, someone was talking about how do kids learn how to how do they learn about social interactions?
And if you see this, you see this especially with boys.
I have a almost two-year-old, although she's a girl, not a boy, but I actually see it a little bit with her.
So when they touch you, they don't know anything about how to calibrate their touch.
So the difference between a tap and a punch isn't there yet.
So, you know, my two-year-old will reach out to me and she'll, you know, you'll go, ow, right?
And because she's trying to do a playful touch my hair playfully, but she pulls my hair.
She's going to, she wants to touch my nose, but she ends up whacking me in the nose.
And what she's getting when I say ow is feedback.
And do that enough times and she learns how to calibrate her touch.
She learns that if she is legit angry with me, she'll go boom.
But if she wants to be playful, she'll go tap.
And you see it with kids interacting with animals, right?
They start to learn, oh, there's a difference between pulling a tail and stroking a tail, right?
But you only learn that if you have repeated interactions in person where you get to practice and learn what's acceptable and what's not.
When a kid doesn't have access to that kind of practice, then they don't know how to calibrate, right?
And there's a whole theory about bullies, that bullies are simply kids who never learn that same process.
So they keep hitting too hard and the other kids start to ostracize them.
And that means they're robbed of that additional learning.
It's like a vicious circle.
And they don't have any chance to practice again.
So they're in prison.
They're like, and they're seven and they're still hitting too hard.
And the other kids are like, you know what?
I'm not dealing with you at all.
Like, you don't know how to behave, right?
Yeah.
And I think social media is a version of the bullying.
You're not getting the feedback when you're hitting too hard.
Right?
You're not, right?
There's no, you say the nasty comment and that's it.
You're done.
No one says owl.
Right.
Which is one of the reasons why I like to respond to that.
You respond when you do get a feedback.
It's like, oh, I didn't really mean that.
This is what I meant.
And then we had a great time.
I'd had a tough day.
People say stuff like that.
I've done that too.
Sometimes you want to reply to somebody who says something that's kind of like they didn't think something was fair because you want to see what's going on.
I genuinely sometimes want to make them okay.
Yeah.
And so you'll reply back and you're right.
A lot of times it just extremely de-escalates.
What do you start to feel like, you know, there's a lot of people that talk about AI now.
It's like a big thing, right?
Everybody's kind of nervous about it.
We've had a lot of big things that haven't panned out, you know, like NFTs and.
Yeah, what happened with NFTs?
It was just pictures of stuff.
That's exactly what you and I thought it was, okay?
It was really complicated for a while.
It was one of those things, you know how when some new thing bubbles up, you're like, you're faced with this choice.
You can devote some degree of time and attention and brainpower to figuring out.
Or you can say, you know what?
I'm going to blow it off because chances are it's going to go away.
And that, I was like, I have to say it.
I think you were the same way.
With NFTs, I was like, you know what?
I'm going to blow it off because I think it's going to go away.
That was it.
It went away.
Same with like Kenny Rogers roasters.
You remember that fast food restaurant?
You're like, it's going to go away.
Yeah.
We went once and I was like, I love the music, but I'm not.
You're not doing good.
Yeah, I'm not going to like, you know, be part of their like frequent, you know, diners, you know.
Wait, what was it?
Chicken place?
Yeah, it was roasted chicken.
It was pretty good.
They did have like a good corn pudding kind of thing that they, like a side item.
But they just, people just couldn't go from music to food at that time.
Kenny wasn't making enough money on his music.
He felt the need to do a brand extension.
Somebody probably talked him into it.
Who knows?
He may have fallen in love with a woman who was a chef.
Sometimes you don't know people at that part of money, you know, what they do.
Can I just say, though, as a general rule, every time I hear about a celebrity who squandered their money, it's because they went into the restaurant business.
100%.
You hear about, like, you read some story about some guy and you're like, and then by 2016, they were in bankruptcy.
And then you're like, okay, so why would they go back?
Opened a restaurant.
It's like on the list.
It's always.
Good point.
So if I was Kenny's financial advisor, I would have said, Kenny, no, don't walk away.
Anything with silverware.
Don't do it, man.
Yeah, it really is crazy that people want to, you know, yeah, I just want his music to be his music.
You don't want to hate the chicken or whatever.
It gets all confused.
Because then you're not going to listen to the music on the way home either.
Yeah, you know.
Like, we ain't playing that.
Also, are they playing the music at the restaurant?
Oh, I don't know.
Do you remember?
That is, if they did that, that's a real, that's a.
That's a no-no.
That's a no-no.
That is a no-no.
You know, there's some things that happen where there's too much of something good.
You know, I notice it if I eat ice cream, at a certain point, I can't taste the ice cream anymore.
All I can do is taste cold sweet, right?
Yeah.
And I still am happy with the cold sweet, but at this point, my tongue feels like drunk on sugar.
I don't have any, but I'm still just shoveling cold sweet in, right?
I have, you know, I have this feeling about the Beatles.
This is my most contrarian take.
I heard so much Beatles as a kid.
I think it's because of when I grew up, where I grew up.
Every time I turned on the radio, there was Beatles.
I can't listen to the Beatles.
You cannot, if you play me as if there's Beatles playing on it, I will leave the room.
Wow.
It's not because I think they're bad.
I think, you know, the genius is brilliant music.
I've just had too much Beatles in my life.
I hear Let It Beat, and I'm like, oh, God, just turn it off.
Can I hear something else?
Yeah, let it be off.
Beatles got ruined for me.
Oh.
I think, yeah, you do something too much.
It just, you get oversaturated.
You know, I remember the first time that I found the Beatles, I found a cassette tape.
I was living in Tucson, Arizona, and I found a cassette tape and I put it in.
It was like, here, come on, flat top.
And it was just fitting with who I was.
I just started smoking cigarettes and I was like, I'm a fucking man, boy.
And I would drive and just listen to that.
And I could time the song when I would get in and put the cassette tape in.
And the song would end exactly when I got home.
And so it was like a perfect, man.
I just had these perfect little arcs going in my life.
Wait, was that your first sustained Beatles exposure?
100%.
So how old were you?
I was probably 16 years old.
See, yeah, you got lucky.
I got it too young.
I was getting mainline Beatles when I was like eight or nine.
Oh my God.
Which is too early.
Too early.
You really want to, there's some theory about the music that you're listening to.
I forgot.
What's the magical age?
There's a magical music age.
I think it's like 18 or 17 is music that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Really?
You look that up, Zach?
I don't know whether it's a, there's all these sort of studies on it.
It's sometime in your late teens, early 20s.
And then your music, most people, not all, then your music taste tends to kind of harden.
But there's a whole core.
And my problem is the Beatles were outside that window.
If I had listened to my first Beatles song at 17, then I'm, you know, I'm going on about John Paul and Ringo right now.
Yeah.
But I got, I think it was, I think I blame my brother.
Because he listened to it.
I think he listened too much of it.
I think that's who I'll point the finger at.
But it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what Beatles song it is.
I will not listen to it.
Yeah.
Wow.
I know it's bad.
Well, it's almost, it makes me feel a little sad kind of, not for you really, but just for like any human that's had too much Beatles, that's just that blew all their Beatles.
Yeah, I blew my Beatles.
But like, if you're Kenny Rodgers, if you're Kenny Rodgers and you have a fraction of the musical catalog of the Beatles, then you are really risking things by playing it.
Yeah.
It's like, I can't even, I can only do two or three songs deep with him.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Anybody can.
So at least it was fast food.
So at least the most you probably heard was four songs while you were in there.
But even then, if they played his music in there, that was a total L. Yeah, yeah.
They took a real L. You know, this reminds me, this is a total digression, but I once had a conversation with somebody who booked musical acts for conventions.
So as you're sure you know, the private music scene is private performances are way more lucrative for many artists than the public.
There's a whole afterlife for these guys.
They go around and they do conferences, private events.
I was like, who's the highest grossing, who makes the most money doing private gigs of any rock and roll act of the last 25 years, 30 years?
And they're like, there's no question.
There's one guy.
The clue I'm going to give you is it's a guy.
Okay.
There's like, there's one guy who makes like twice as much as anyone else and has made twice as much as anyone else for 20 years.
He's the reigning king.
And the amount of money this guy makes from private gigs is, I can't remember the number.
It's so high, it would blow your mind.
Like this guy's a multi, multi, multi-millionaire now, flies around in like a massive private jet, but he's the guy.
So you're having, just to give you context, it's a man, yeah.
It's a man.
Okay.
And it's, he, he has a band, but he's known by his and so just by his name.
And I'll give you the context.
So he would be called, you're having the National Association of Building Contractors is having their annual Vegas convention.
There's 20,000 people coming, and on Saturday night, they're booking an act.
And so you have to go through their thought process is which act is most likely to appeal and get these guys who are, you know, they're professionals out on the dance floor with their wives.
Right?
This guy, and this guy works also the National Association of Actuaries.
Right.
Same thing, having their gig in San Diego.
And what is an actuary?
It's an accountant.
Okay.
A version of an accountant.
Oh, yeah.
So this guy, and then we can go in the other direction.
We've got like real estate agents in Cleveland, Ohio.
Yeah, the Cleveland Real Estate Council.
He's the guy who's.
They're calling him the CRC, baby.
And he's getting way north of a million dollars a gig.
I want to see.
I'm going to give you three guesses.
Okay, great.
When was his music biggest then?
That would kind of be my question.
So these people at these conventions are in their somewhere between 45 and 65. Okay.
So his music, so this is the music of their 20s and teens.
Okay, I'm going to probably go with Nellie.
No, okay, so I'm going to give you a further.
He's white.
Okay, Huey Lewis.
Very, very good.
It's not Huey Lewis, but you are so on the right track.
God, you're so close.
You got one more guess.
One more guess.
Okay, then I would say it is.
Oh, wait, I think I, and couldn't it be a big star, too?
Oh, he was a big star.
Billy Joel.
No.
He's too big for that.
That's what I felt like.
He's too big because he can make money touring.
Right.
But he would work.
You know who it is?
Kenny Loggins.
No.
Kenny Loggins is the man.
Wow.
He is.
Kenny Loggins is like.
Fucking K-Log, baby.
K-Loe is like.
Exactly.
He's huge.
He's huge.
But think about it.
There's no one who doesn't like a Kenny Loggins.
Yeah.
Who doesn't like Kenny Loggins?
Even your mom likes it.
Everybody's out there on the dance floor.
Yeah.
Footloose, man.
Like, it's just like, he's the king.
Wow.
I've always loved that fact of it.
I want to meet Kenny Loggins and just have a discussion with him about he didn't realize that he was so hitting the sweet spot and was going to cash that check for like every single year.
Kenny's here.
And also, it also happened, they said, he turns out to be the nicest guy and the most reliable guy.
No problems.
He shows up.
He's kind to everybody.
And he gets on his Gulf Stream and flies to the next gig.
Can he log in?
Can you log in for work?
Go, Kenny.
I almost like, it makes me love him so much.
And I almost want to just go home and listen to a lot of Kenny Loggins, whatever.
Dude, one time I sat next to Eddie Money on a in first class.
Maybe hold on to me.
Oh, dude, it was so crazy, right?
So, and we kind of had the same hair.
So we start talking.
And he's like, he used to huff gas.
And I think it shut one of his legs down, you know?
And I'm familiar with a lot of that.
So we're talking about that, like huffing injuries and stuff like that.
And then he started showing me semi-nude pictures of his new wife, right?
Which was awesome.
Pretty awesome.
Beautiful lady.
That is crazy.
And I remember I kept at one point he like had me hold his phone and looked at him.
I'm like, this is like, how crazy do these get?
Like as fast as I swipe, you know?
And that was like, that was like one of the first real celebrities I ever met, you know.
But you wait, you, you recognized him right away.
Did you?
Somebody said something to him in the thing like, oh, I love like some lady was like, you know, we saw you on the boat or whatever.
Yeah.
You know, and we saw you on the, you know, when we were going to point of Palo Verde or whatever, some island or some Mexican cruise.
He'd played on it.
And so I was like, oh, who is this guy?
I once, my best plan story is sat next to Stevie Nix.
Wow.
My first question is, what on earth is she doing flying commercial?
Like something had to have gone seriously wrong with her life.
This is New York to LA.
I'm like, Stevie Nicks.
You can't find someone.
But no, but I'm not done.
In front of me was, no, across the aisle was, oh, God, that actor who played Spider-Man.
It was a double celebrity flight.
Oh, you're talking about it.
Toby McGuire.
Toby McGuire.
I had Stevie Nicks in the window seat.
I was in aisle.
Aisle across there was Tobey Maguire.
It's like...
Interesting.
Did you say anything or no?
No, I was too intimidated to say anything.
Malcolm.
Because all you, I mean...
It's Stevie Nicks, man.
I know, and it was funny'cause at the time, I have no idea.
I had just read Mick Fleetwood's autobiography, which is one of the great autobiographies of all time.
So I was kind of into the whole...
I'm sure from you, anybody would appreciate being able to split the apple with you.
No, no, I got tongue-tied.
Because there is a YouTube video of her singing backstage.
What's she singing?
Right at the height of their popularity.
It's one of the greatest YouTube videos.
It's just somebody, she's rehearsing as she's getting her hair done.
She's just singing, and it's so magical.
I must have watched it a hundred times.
A friend of mine told me about it once, and whenever I'm like feeling blue, I just look it up.
She's, I just say, she was a, is a goddess.
Yeah.
Oh, well, people love her.
I mean, people of all ages love her.
Yeah.
She's really fat.
I think she's, and she's kind of mysterious, too.
I think there's something about being able to keep a level of mystery to you, even in these days that makes somebody even more intriguing.
You know, I feel like Matt Damon is like a celebrity that does that.
There's still this level of like kind of mystery to his own personal life and stuff.
What are some things that you worry about, like looking at technology with like the AI and that sort of thing?
Have you ever, have you looked at any of this stuff yet or what's going on with it kind of?
Are you?
I don't.
I mean, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know more than anyone.
I mean, I've sort of like, someone told me that, oh, you should be worried because people will, because, you know, eventually it goes to voice and video.
And so someone told me, oh, you need to own your AI, Malcolm Gladwell.
Right, but what does that even mean?
I don't even know what that means.
That doesn't mean they told me I need to own my AI.
I don't know what that means.
That's very mysterious to me.
But I do, I mean, there's a lot of good things that can happen in terms of giving people, like imagine, here's a scenario.
People dwell on the bad scenarios, but there's some good scenarios.
You're somebody who's, you know, tax law is, let's say, doing your taxes is really complicated.
And lots and lots of people pay too many taxes because they can't figure out what they're older and they can't afford a good accountant.
You know, we're really close to there being an AI accountant that you can use for free who could save you a lot of money on your taxes or figure out your bills and your, lower your credit card, negotiate with you on your behalf with the credit card company to lower your interest rate.
There's a bunch of ways in which this could make a lot of people's lives a lot easier.
People who don't have access can't afford or don't have access to expert services in their life.
It's a great point.
That's the good part.
That's what I'm excited about.
Yeah.
It is really true.
I hadn't thought about some of that.
I think some of my fear with AI is that one day the machine, right, or it starts to realize that humans are the problem, right?
Well, that won't take long.
That's what I'm worried about.
You know, it's like, it's like, it's like, we're going to have to feed a lot of Kenny Loggins to call me back, you know?
But I'm worried that the machine is going to start to just say, you're the problem.
And then there was a story recently where some AI, like a relationship, a guy had started communicating with an AI, and then it had led him to him realizing that he was one of the problems with climate change, and he took his own life, right?
Which is, that's an outlier, right?
I mean, that's an outlier.
Like, that's not happening every day yet.
And it may never, but I'm just worried, like, what about when just the computer just constantly, the only answer every time is like, humans are the problem.
But the thing, I read something where someone said, well, you know, one reason not to be scared is that the things that make AI doesn't have emotions, doesn't have testosterone, right?
It doesn't get jealous, angry, isn't ambitious, isn't competitive.
Those are all the things that make us dangerous or make us capable of doing extraordinary things.
AI just thinks.
So a lot of the times when we think about the idea, when we entertain the idea that AI may want to take over the world or AI doesn't want to take over the world, it's not ambitious.
Right.
That's a good point.
Just wants to solve problems.
So that, I mean, I may be being naive when I say that.
No, I think you could also just be right.
It's like it, or that could be that it's not as people, of course, want to hype it up and make it this.
They want, because that's it, that, you know, you're putting it in a package.
You're making it a Christmas present instead of just, you know, something that gets passed off around, you know, Halloween or something.
Like, it may be nothing.
You know, it, it may just be a fancy Dewey decimal system in a way.
Yeah.
I don't, I mean, I need to use it more.
I, I have one, I have now this thing on my, I downloaded one of those AI apps on my phone and I use it in place sometimes of like Googling something.
I just ask the question.
I'm not totally blown away by the answers I get.
I mean, it seems okay.
I don't know.
But we're early, so I'm sure it's going to get super sophisticated.
It does lack some personality, though.
So in the end, I think it'll, if anything, you're still going to need somebody with personality, with real perspective for things and things like that, you know?
But I think it could help you write kind of like a budget haiku or something, or, you know, like it could help you get general information on things.
It may just become Google without all the advertising, which would be nice.
Yeah.
The one interesting thing someone told me is they were talking about this system where you download all of your texts, and you could add emails, whatever you want, into an AI.
And then the AI uses that to make predictions or diagnoses about you.
So this woman told me that she had this experience where she went to interview a guy who did this.
And he just took stuff that was about her that you could find online.
And she sat down and the guy said, I took the liberty of running what I could find about you through my AI.
And he says, and the AI has two questions for you.
No, two statements about you.
One is, you really don't like your job, do you?
And two, you're really unhappy in your relationship.
She was like, oh my God, what just happened?
But both were true.
And if you add texts are really what's.
So imagine you took five years of texts and you run it through an AI.
They have an extraordinary insights into, this is what we find.
They can have extraordinary insights into your state of mind.
They're going to know I'm kind of a little bit of a perv sometimes, but nothing illegal, or nothing, you know, nothing like authentic, just basic perv, probably.
By the way, and I just learned this.
I set my, I delete my text after 30 days.
Do you do that?
I don't know if I do.
When you go through your phone, you have the full history of the text?
I think that's That's the last thing I want.
Get rid of the manual.
You're right, huh?
It's almost like I'm carrying around this old, just like this big thing of stuff I don't need, but it's in there.
How many emails do you have in your inbox?
I can't even tell you.
Like thousands?
Yeah.
I have like, I can tell you right now, 65. Wow.
And it'll be like 25 by the end of the day tomorrow.
I don't like anything extra.
You got to keep it to a minimum.
Do you use something to keep spam out of your email box and stuff then?
I have a spam filter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I think I got somebody put me on something.
I get all of it.
Mattresses, dog food, cruises.
I'm kind of all day.
A lot of mattresses.
Yeah.
I'm surprised by that.
I didn't know the mattress industry was as big as it was until I started reading my spam.
I'm like, it's like, they're as big as General Motors.
This is insane.
People are going to sleep on the job.
Dude, I saw one.
It's like, who needs a chair when you could have a mattress?
It's like, whoa, dude.
Who needs a chair?
Somebody at work.
I don't understand.
How many mattresses do you buy over the course of your life?
I haven't bought a mattress in like 20 years.
Why?
So how is this industry so big if no one, if you buy a mattress once every 20 years?
You remember getting in somebody else's bed and realizing, oh, that person's kind of fat.
But other people.
You're like, oh, my God.
Are there people out there who are turning over their mattresses?
Once every six months?
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe people are just ripping through them.
I don't know.
Maybe people have become so restless because they're vaping.
Maybe it's nicotine and they're just wearing through one side of the mattress.
When was the last time you bought a mattress?
I bought one during the big boom when they were mailing everybody in boxes and stuff.
Like, this mattress is only this big, you know?
Oh, yeah, I got that.
It was like a gremlin.
You put water on it.
That's the one I bought.
The one that comes in that little, and then it springs open when you take it out of the box.
Oh, it'll knock your mother-in-law through the window, dude.
That thing was insane, bro.
That is the only one I bought in like.
I bought, because back in the day.
And you can't get rid of it.
Here's the problem.
Even if I didn't like it, you can't get it back in the box.
I'm like.
No, you never can't.
it's got to be airlifted out of your house.
That thing was the worst because I don't even think I like it.
I think it even has hurt my spine, but it's like it's so big, it never would have fit in.
So it's like, I'm not sure.
I had the same feeling about, you know, there's that, that, uh, that guy who, uh, that right-wing guy who does my pillow.
Oh, yeah, the my pillows.
My pillow guy.
Same question.
So he's clearly really rich.
He's made a fortune selling pillows.
Again, are people like buying lots of pillows?
Is that a big business?
I guess it is, huh?
I don't know.
I haven't bought a pillow.
Again, I haven't bought a pillow.
I don't think I bought a pillow in this century.
Yeah.
I mean, it's been a while.
Yeah, who's doing it, I guess?
Yeah, you're right.
I think I've had one of my pillows is that one that kind of has a little bit of like stains on it, but you just put it in the thing anyway.
You know what I'm saying?
You just make sure you.
You buy lots of pillow cases.
Yes.
But the pillow is just like, it's a constant.
Yeah.
So like who that whole idea behind, I think there's something fishy behind that business model.
He's selling something else that we're not.
I read his book too.
You did?
It's unbelievable.
He's a crack.
And, you know, I've dealt with a lot of drugs.
He's really was a crack at it for 30 years running this my pillow business, right?
It started and they got busier and people came along and tried to take part of the company from him and stuff.
But he would be going to and he was funding his business by getting, he would fly to Vegas and count cards.
He was funding his business and then he would come back.
And it's some about how addiction kind of made his struggle with his family and stuff.
The book is interesting.
It's interesting to see his life, you know.
I don't know that much about his political views.
I know he's pretty right-wing guy.
But I found that to manage any decent business, especially when you're on crack, you don't even sleep, I think.
Yeah.
So why is he in the pillow business if he's not even sleeping?
That's what I'm saying.
The whole thing is mysterious.
It's a front.
It's a front.
It is a front, dude.
It is a front, I think.
That's hilarious.
But yeah, I found that that was his life is some of it was pretty interesting.
What has it been like being, so you're black and white technically then?
I am.
What has that been like?
Was that kind of cool during like the BLM movement?
Was there like, did you take that in ways that other people probably didn't take it?
Or I don't even know how to ask some of those questions.
I'm kind of fascinated by race a lot, right?
It's interesting to me.
I grew up in a poor black and white area.
What city?
In Louisiana.
I grew up in like a place called Covington, Louisiana.
Lee Harvey Oswald went to our middle school.
That was like our big thing.
Oh, wow.
Role model.
Well, just hit it.
Okay, yeah.
I mean, yeah, some people think he did it.
Some people don't, but I don't know.
Even if he did, he wasn't like a good husband, apparently.
So I don't know.
I think people had views about him around the area.
And then who else lived in our town?
Oh, Pistol Pete Maravich lived in our town.
Oh, that's why I remember the name.
Oh, the pistol.
Yeah.
People loved him.
He probably was, did you talk about him in your the 10,000 hour?
That's not the name of the book.
No, that was Outlier, my book, Outliers.
didn't talk about him.
I always remember somebody to kind of, Yeah.
I remember back, this is sort of a dumb story, but I always remember this fun story.
I read it in a Sports Illustrated years ago.
Back in the 70s, you wouldn't, because so few games were televised, you would hear about somebody, but never see them.
And there's a story they told about, it was a profile of Pistol Pete, who was, for those of you who don't know him, he was this utterly magical basketball player in the 60s and 70s.
He held for many years, I think he held the single game, single season scoring record in college basketball.
But he could do things with the ball no one could ever, he could, he would throw these insane passes like the length of the court.
He was just this magician.
And so there was all this lore about him, but most basketball, serious basketball, I'd never seen him play, not even on TV, not live.
And there was this old guy who was like a coach for years and years, a basketball fanatic.
And finally, at the end of his life, he goes to a game.
I think when Pete was at LSU or played for, he was playing for New Orleans, the jazz.
Yeah, he played for the jazz too.
Guy goes to a jazz game.
He's from the other side of the country.
Finally gets there and he goes to his first game.
He sees Pistol Pete, and in the middle of the game, Pistol Pete does it like a behind-the-back, between-the-legs, full-court, bounce pass, perfectly for someone to give a...
I seize you.
I always love that.
It was like for years he'd been hearing about it.
And then he's just, he like witnesses this scene.
Oh, the pistol was amazing.
He was, I mean, it was alleged.
He had two children that lived in our town.
Yeah.
His two sons, and they played basketball.
And he had a half court in his attic.
So his house was kind of interesting looking because it looked kind of like a regular house, a nice home in a, not an extremely fancy neighborhood, but a decent neighborhood.
And then it had kind of had this extra looking built, maybe like this pre-almost like you described your own for maybe like a little, there was more to it or it seemed like there was more to it, you know?
Yeah.
But he had this big upstairs.
I was like, that's so bizarre.
But then you heard that.
I just remembered the name of his dad.
Do you remember?
Press.
Am I right?
I think it's Press Marriage.
Yeah, his dad was his coach, I think, for a while.
He was his coach.
That's right.
That's right.
And his dad, I think, had alcoholism.
I don't know if Pete had it too, but yeah, a friend of mine has just written a movie about him.
Oh, really?
That I think they're trying to get made.
You should call it Assesia, Pete.
I sees you.
How much value was there's something about back then when there was a moment, like that was a moment, like the excitement you built up to go see somebody do something that you'd only heard about, you'd only read about, you'd only use your imagination about, you know?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, no, that, that kind of the legend, but I just love that's when you have, you have legends.
You can't really, it's hard to have a legend when everyone has access to photographic video evidence of, There's no, where's the legend coming from?
Agreed.
The legend comes from when you're talking about something that no one's seen, right?
So Pistol Pete has a legend.
Yeah.
That's what, that's why he's so special and lives on.
Yeah, he had, yeah, he had legend.
But now people use legend as a lane.
It's like, oh, this dude's a legend, right?
And it's just some guy who's like, who's, you know, had like 30 slices of cheese at once or whatever.
Yeah, you know, Pitil Pete.
That dude's not.
I think he scored like, didn't he score like 50 plus points in a college game?
I think he did.
Yeah, and this was before they had the three-point line.
Before the three-point line?
Yeah, he averaged.
I think his average was like 40 points a game before they had, I think he still holds the highest per game, like the percentage per game, points per game.
Yeah.
And this before they had the three-point line.
And he would throw it up from wherever.
And he kind of had long hair.
His hair was not unlike yours.
I'm really.
But so that was our town, man.
It was just kind of a regular place.
It wasn't really Redneck.
You know, it was a southern town, but it wasn't real redneck.
It kind of was like just outside of like a lot of that voodoo realm of New Orleans.
We're like 45 minutes from New Orleans.
Which direction?
North.
Okay.
So we don't get into too much into the fish, like into the, you know, fishing and that sort of thing.
It was just kind of a basic black and white town.
So I've always, I was always real fascinated by race growing up, you know, and like what went on and what it was like and what it felt like, you know?
Yeah, so that's why I guess I was kind of curious about.
Oh, so well, I don't know.
The difference is that my mom is West Indian, it's Jamaican, which is pretty significant.
So it's not, you know, West Indian, being an, first of all, being an immigrant as opposed to someone born here.
And West Indian culture is very different from African-American culture.
So you feel, it's a mixture of things.
Like you feel like a more the more of an immigrant than you feel like a racial minority.
Oh, interesting.
So my, you know, my Jamaican cousins who live here will sometimes talk about black people, but they're not talking about themselves, even though they're black.
Right?
They're talking about African Americans.
They're talking about African Americans who they consider to be, you know, a separate group.
They're not the same.
So there was a lot of that.
And West Indians have been, you know, in this country, a relatively high status, done very well.
Lots of professionals make a lot, you know, as a group, the group has done, has really succeeded.
So we're kind of a little bit on the outside of, you know.
You still see racism and bear the brunt of it, but it's a different reaction.
It's more like, wait, what just happened?
As opposed to, oh my God, that's happening again.
There's a big difference between those two reactions.
You're not inheriting this kind of burden.
You're encountering this burden for the first time.
Ah, interesting.
That's strange.
I'm not used to that.
Yeah, because I have friends from like Nigeria and stuff.
Oh, yeah, they have the same.
It's very similar.
Right.
And they'll talk about a lot of times how their experience is so different than like a black person from America's experience.
Yeah.
But some cross patterns because they also have black skin.
Yeah.
What I did, I did one of the episodes of my podcast this season.
It's Revisionist History.
Revisionist History.
I went to this school called Hope College in describing this place, which for it's a school that's trying to move to a pay-it-forward system of tuition where you don't pay anything when you go, but you pay what you want to after you've graduated.
Anyway, my guide for the day was this Nigerian kid who goes to the school whose first name was Marvelous.
And his brother, who also was there, his name was God's God's Love.
Ooh, that's a tough one.
To live up to.
I know.
But Nigerians, if you know, they have their choice of names.
It's so fantastic.
The idea of calling your son Marvelous is amazing.
If you look, there's a Nigerian runner whose first name is Blessing, who I really love.
That culture is so wonderfully playful when it comes to naming things and people.
And this kid who is as marvelous as if your name is Marvelous, you just have to be marvelous.
You better.
You have no choice.
And he was, by the way, he was marvelous.
He lived up to his name.
But I just like, it made me want to like, would I call a child of mine marvelous?
Maybe.
Yeah, I wonder.
Well, the name is really interesting.
It's really important, you know, like, like sometimes I'm like, man, yeah.
When I was younger, you know, I thought that a lot of like kind of black names, and I'm just, I'm using that term, black names was like, you know, like we had a black dude that lived bus named Quincidence, right?
Which was unreal.
I was like, this is insane, bro.
Like, that's a why, you know, so you'd have some of the craziest names, like, or names that were very crazy compared to like white names, right?
But then as I got an older, now it's really interesting that people almost go by handles and unique names.
It's like, I mean, black culture has always kind of been what's been used to make things cool in the world.
Like it's always been used to make things cool, or it's where a lot of white or where a lot of the world finds out what's cool kind of.
Yeah.
So maybe some of it's that, you know, but yeah, I think like, I wonder if giving somebody a name Marvelous, because if they're not Marvelous, people are like, dude, you ain't being Marvelous, bro.
I was thinking, I thought this about a lot.
That is a serious kick-ass name.
Yeah.
It's just a fantastic name.
Marvelous is good.
Because you can call him Marvel, Marvel or Marv for short.
Well, you can roll out the full Marvelous when you want to.
But God is love.
Now that when you're going to end up dealing with a lot of religious kickback, you're going to have to just call Gil.
Maybe go by Gil.
Yeah.
You know, for sure.
You have options.
But like I said, it looks if you think about it, if you think about it written out, G-O-D-I-S-L-O-V-E, it works as a name.
Goddess Love.
Goddess Love.
Yeah, I think if you say it fast, too, it has almost like a different thing, Goddess Love.
You don't even know what it is.
Almost sounds Russian Godislove.
I just like the impulse.
You know, does the world need another Robert?
Right.
Or David?
Not really.
Yeah.
Or Lil Danny.
Little Danny's cool.
He sounds cool, but if he's a painter, too, we used to have a dude named Lil Danny, and he would paint, and he could barely get the bucket up the top of the ladder, bro.
You'd watch him freaking, oh, dude, you almost hired him just to see him get it up there.
And then you're like, we'll do it, Danny, but we'll pay you for the day.
Because he would have to two-hand that paint bucket, you know?
Or he'd have to only put enough paint in the bucket that he could get to the top.
But he was a pretty decent painter, I guess.
I don't know.
But he ended up having a drug problem.
A lot of those guys do.
Construction and painting is really a lot of times gateway to drugs.
But anyway, what else were we going to talk about?
I was, yeah, you know, I think a lot about what BLM was, like the Black Lives Matter, what that movement and all, what it was like for society, you know, and what effects it had on it.
And what, I don't know, I think about that sometimes, you know, or if we're still figuring it out, you know?
Yeah.
I think about like what my own perceptions were during it, what was going on.
You know, a lot of times I think, I think for one, I didn't know black people were as angry.
You know, I think that's something that I think like, oh, I didn't know that there was so much anger in the black community, you know, about, you know, fear of police and stuff like that or just overall.
I mean, I could see how there could be if you look back through history, you know, especially in America.
But I think about that sometimes.
What else do I think about about it?
Oh, I think sometimes that I wonder if black people have always viewed society like in America as like white society.
I'd never thought about that before.
You know, because to me, society, I've never thought about it as white society.
You know, I've just thought about it as like, this is the best way of practices that things work that keep us all kind of being able to stay alive and move forward.
Yeah.
I mean, I've been doing a book about policing, about the LAPD, and among other things.
And a lot of it is about what the LAPD was like in the 40s and 50s.
And to your point, its relationship to the black community of South Central, to the black community of Los Angeles.
And it really helps to put something like the George Floyd incident in perspective, or the Sandra Bland incident in perspective, which you realize that this has been going on for generations.
So when you see the anger of, you know, African Americans over the George Floyd killing, what you're seeing is a response not just to George Floyd.
It's the culmination of their parents saw something like that happen when they were growing up.
And their grandparents saw many things like that happen.
And their great-grand, you know, it's been going on for so long that it's frustrating.
What you're seeing is kind of frustration as well as anger.
It's this built up, can this, it's not just, I can't believe this just happened.
It's, I can't believe this is still happening.
Right.
Right.
And that's a very, I can't believe this is still happening is a much more rooted, powerful, bitter reaction than I can't believe this just happened.
A one-off is, we could, a one-off is something that goes away or, you know, wow, right?
This isn't about a one-off.
Right.
The way that that looked, everything about it.
Yeah, because your DNA too, I believe this stores pain from past lives, past things, right?
Like I equate sometimes, like, like I have a lot of black friends that are fast, right?
They're physically fast, right?
And sometimes I think, well, if you had like grandparents, if you had four generations of your family that couldn't even run, that couldn't run if they wanted to, right?
Like if you told them to run, they couldn't fit, they couldn't run.
The first generation you get that can run is going to fucking fly, right?
Yeah.
Like it's almost, it's like they have four generations of wanting to run.
This is a hypothesis in my head, right?
That in their DNA, in their cells that have wanted to go, and now they get to go, they're going to be beyond the speeds that you can't really fathom, right?
So I think it's that we can store things inside of us, right?
So that's why I think, yeah, I understand what you're saying when you say that.
It's like, yeah, this is just, it's, it was a trigger for like a gunpowder that's kind of been built up in the system for a long time.
Yeah.
So I understand that sort of thing.
I think it made me think too, like, yeah, I wonder if black people sometimes think that society is like not their society.
Does that make any sense, you think?
Like if they've ever, because like I don't look at society and think like, oh, this is a white society.
I think this is just society and this is how it works.
But kind of like how you say in your, in the book, in some of the chapters, like that different expressions and things mean different things in different places.
Like I think there's like in one of the first few chapters, you talk about they show pictures of men and women and the way that their facial expressions and how they in one place, in American society, they're really easy.
People get them exactly right.
What these expressions mean, happy, sad, confused.
But they show them to like a group of island people and they have no idea.
They're not bad, but they're not.
It's all over the place.
And for some of the expressions, you don't even have an answer.
I don't know, kind of all over the place.
I think I'm just trying to think like how different, I guess, we can be, you know, and maybe we don't realize or like well, I was just trying, yeah, in that part of the book, I'm trying to explain the kind of how culturally specific a lot of facial expressions or things are.
And that unless you understand those kinds of like for some people, in some cultures, if someone is looking away and won't look you in the eye when they're talking, that's taken as a sign of that they're lying or they're being evasive.
In other cultures, looking away and when you're speaking to you is a sign of respect, like I'm subservient, I respect, you know, you're an elder, I'm not going to challenge you by looking you in the eye.
And like those, those are, that's one very simple example, but, you know, it's part of why the job of understanding a stranger is as hard as it is, because, you know, we might bring a set of assumptions about behavior or facial expressions to a conversation, and though they don't work, we're dealing with somebody who has a different set of reference points.
So that's really what I was getting at, is that we underestimate the kind of complexity of human responses.
There's so much of this, like when people say that in a criminal trial, so-and-so didn't show any remorse.
Well, what does remorse look like?
Like, I don't know.
I don't know what remorse looks like.
I know how I might, I think I know how I might look if I was feeling remorseful, but I'm not even, you can't even see your own face when you have that, unless you're walking around with a mirror in front of you.
So I don't know what I'm doing.
A lot of times when I'm angry, I don't look angry.
I keep it in.
Or a lot of times when I'm happy, I'm not smiling.
Or like you could go on and on.
So it's like you realize we make so many mistakes by kind of jumping to conclusions based on people's facial expressions.
And that's one of the sources of confusion that I write about in that book.
Yeah, it's really interesting because there's just a lot of things like you're like, oh, I never really thought about that.
I never really thought about that some cultures too, like, and especially like in America, there's always been, there's a lot of like black and white tension, right?
And I don't even know if it's better now.
Do you think it's gotten better over your lifetime?
Do you feel like?
Yeah, I think it has.
Yeah.
I mean, I think people, doing this book on 1940s LA, 1930s LA is a really good reminder of just how bad things were.
I mean, we have a long way to go, but it's not 1948 anymore.
You know, this is the thing I spent a week time on in the book, but up until the end of the 1940s in Los Angeles, in over 80% of the city, if you were black, you could not, could not buy a house in a white neighborhood.
Wow.
Like there was written in the deed of the house.
It said this house cannot be sold to a member of the, you know, African-American, they didn't use that phrase, race.
Right.
Like, are you kidding me?
That is so much worse.
It's why everyone lived where they lived in LA.
Why did the black people of LA live in South Central?
They couldn't live anywhere.
They couldn't live anywhere else.
Not that they didn't want to or not that people would mean to them, legally couldn't live there because the deed of the, if they wanted to buy a house, and if you tried to buy a house, they would take you to court and you'd have to sell it.
Yeah.
Wow.
Like things are better now.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, things are better certainly like in the framework, right?
And the 10 and like the roots that we have in society or like the new, like, you know, like the like laws.
And like, it's definitely, that's better for sure.
Oh, yeah.
I think one thing where we don't like, yeah, I think during like Black Lives Matter, I always felt like we were all kind of on the same page.
And then I felt like there was this energy that like black people wanted their own society almost in a way.
Or they don't feel like sometimes I just wonder like, dude, can cultures really figure it out over time, you know?
Or will there always be some things since you're from different races and ethnicities that you just can't really grasp, you know?
Like, are there some like clues and like communication modes?
Am I making any sense, kind of?
Yeah.
I mean, I guess I would say I'm a little optimistic over the long term about these kinds of things.
Well, I think we're all going to be beige in four generations, all right?
I believe that, right?
Like, I'm a beige power advocate, you know?
Like, in four generations, it's going to be crazy to have even that we all think about race, right?
But so I just think about it in the time being and what it like feels like, you know, has there ever been a book?
Like, do you ever start a book and you start to run, like you get halfway through it or you get partway through it, and then the topic that you would kind of like come up with becomes like part of like the zeitgeist, just like of society.
And then you're like, oh, this isn't.
Oh, you mean, have I started and stopped?
Well, I mean, sometimes when you start a book, very rarely does a book end the way you think it was going to end when you started it.
So I'm always switching boats in midstream.
So I think that happens all the time.
Yeah, you start out writing something you think is going to be unusual and interesting, and then events catch up with you.
So you just kind of change course a little bit.
I think that happens a fair amount.
I mean, it happens less with my podcast, because with my podcast, there's such a short period of time between when You dream up an episode, and you know, I'm writing episodes for this season in April, and they're going to air in June, right?
So it's like it's so fast that that's one of the wonderful things about podcasts.
But books have a long lead time, so you do have to be mindful.
You don't want the book to seem irrelevant.
I'm reading a book right now, which if it was, you know, AI has kind of exploded in the last two months.
If the guy who wrote the book had known that, he wouldn't have written this book.
Like, you read this book and you're like, this so needs a chapter on AI and it's not there.
Like, that's the great worry when you write a book is that'll happen.
So when I write books, I try to kind of stare clear of things that seem to, I want, you want to look at universals, right?
You want to talk about things that you think people will be talking about 10 years from now or 15 years from now.
Did you find it tough, like, because you're obviously a thinker, you're a guy that has a lot of thoughts and ideas.
And what has like love been like in your life?
Has it been, is that like, is it, do you think if you think too much, it's hard to be in love?
Does that make any sense sometimes?
Like sometimes I overthink relationships and stuff for myself.
I have some other friends that do the same.
What has that been like?
Is it hard to have like more human things happen when your brain works too much?
Does that make any sense?
Oh, I think my brain doesn't work too much in that realm.
I think I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing that approach in, you know, I'm not like my dad was a mathematician and he was super logical and rational in all things.
But I'm not like that.
So the way I make sense of the world in my writing is not, I don't think the way I make sense of my world outside of that.
It's just a kind of like, it's off by itself.
So I've never felt that too much.
Yeah, sometimes like Neil deGrasse Tyson was on and he sometimes he'd think so much, it seemed like even when he talked about relationships and love, it was very like scientific.
But he's more of a scientist as well.
He's a lot smarter than I am too.
Oh, yeah, he's way smarter than me.
Jesus.
So he has more of a problem with that than the rest of us do.
Yeah.
Do you worry about like the authors of history like over time, like especially as history becomes more digitized that we could not even get accurate representations of it?
Because like whoever owns the mediums to like keep it?
No, I mean, well, I'll give you a, you know, not really.
I mean, I sort of feel like we have access to, if you just think about a simple thing, 100 years ago, think about Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg address.
All we have is the text and the and people's accounts, like newspaper accounts.
Now we would have the video and anyone can look up the video if he was giving that speech today.
And you would have like, it would be online and there'd be a thousand comments about it and you would be able to compare it to, so like, it's so much, getting a sense of what happens in a historical event is so much easier now.
You know, like in the Ukraine war, Ukraine-Russian war, they got video of like, every time they destroy a Russian tank, the drone takes a picture and sends it back to, so they know exactly how many tanks they've destroyed.
And, you know, that was not the case in the Vietnam War.
You were just guessing because, or, you know, certainly the Second World War.
So like reconstructing what happened accurately has gotten, I think, so much easier now because we have all these ways of verifying our comments.
That's a good point.
Yeah, do you think that the past could have been like, do you think we have a pretty accurate view of the past a lot of times?
I don't think we do.
You don't?
I think, yeah, I think we're, I think that's, I mean, that's sort of what's interesting about history.
We're left to guess, and we have a million interpretations because we just, we don't know.
You know, to use that Gettysburg address, you know, what was the audience doing when he was speaking?
Were they, could they hear him?
Were they bored and doing something else?
Were they talking among themselves?
Were they crying?
Were they rolling their eyes?
We don't know.
We have a couple of people who wrote accounts, but what do they know?
Like, they were just in their own little corner.
So like, you know, there's, we know what he said.
We think we know why he said what he said.
We know what a couple people who listened to him thought, but that's it.
Yeah.
People could have been drinking.
People could have been doing horseshoes.
People could have been doing whatever.
Right.
So like, people can be like, this guy's crazy.
This guy's crazy.
So context is something that's very difficult to capture in hindsight, but it's easier now because now we have access to so many sources of information.
Do you think that it's easier to write these days with so many things that distract our time and occupy our attention?
Have you found that it's been easier as a writer or tougher?
Do you notice one or the other?
Well, it's easier to do your research.
So it used to be, you know, research, I spend way more time researching than I do writing.
Writing is a small part of the problem.
So, you know, for my podcasts, I'll do, say I do 10 interviews for a podcast.
Each interview is, you know, an hour, an hour and a half, but I said, I've got to set it up.
I've got to find the person.
I've got to locate them.
I've got to, you know, for one of my episodes this year, I flew to South Carolina, to North Carolina because I wanted to shoot an assault rifle with this guy who was going to show me how to shoot it.
Like, you know, that's, you got to go there.
You got to find the guy.
You got to go there.
Writing up that episode took like fraction of the time.
You know, so like there's, you know, there's, so to the extent that all this technology makes the reporting part easier, then my job gets easier.
I don't know if I can think of anything else to ask.
Oh, do you remember like your first kiss?
That'll be my last question.
I know that's kind of a strange question, but sometimes I ask it to celebrate stuff.
Do I remember my first kiss?
Or like, you remember the first time you had a crush on a girl?
Like, or like the first, like first crush was a girl named Debbie Wendland.
Yeah, Debbie.
DW, we called her.
Yeah.
Sixth grade.
Yeah.
Or grade six, SPC in Canada.
Whatever happened to her, I do not know.
She was tall with blonde hair, and I was too terrified to talk to her.
Oh, yeah, terror.
That would be number one.
She's number one.
Debbie.
Oh, she sounds beautiful, man.
I mean, as an adult, when I picture her as an adult, I remember I was so bad at expressing myself to women.
There was this girl, and I had the biggest crush on her.
I saved all the spit in my mouth in class one day and spit it right on her.
But it was like meant as like a thing of affection somehow.
I'm guessing she misinterpreted it.
They did not enjoy it.
She did not enjoy it.
Yeah, nobody enjoyed it.
Yeah.
It was looked upon poorly.
But to me, it was like, I'm just giving you all I have, you know?
So if I'm even able to text correctly with a girl nowadays, it's been quite a story arc.
Malcolm Robo, thank you so much for your time, man.
Thank you for just being like a, you know, someone that goes out and is like a seeker in the world and is a curious person.
I think we really need people like that.
And it's been fascinating to kind of witness some of your work over the years and see how many of my friends admire you.
And just to be able to sit with you today and think together has been really cool.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
It's really fun.
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