On this episode of the podcast, Joe Biden sits down with his good friend Malcolm Gladwell to discuss his new book, "Outliers" and the controversial case of the Sandra Bland case. Malcolm talks about what it's like to be a police officer in America, and why he thinks we should all be better at talking to strangers. He also talks about why we need to learn how to talk to strangers and why it's so important to be good at it. And he talks about how we should talk to people we don't know and how we can improve our ability to do so. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, and our ad music was made by Micah Vellian and Haley Shaw. Additional music written and performed by Haley Shaw, and produced by Ian Dorsch and Sarah Abdurrahman. Thanks to our sponsor, SoundCloud, and to everyone who helped make this podcast possible. Thank you so much for all the support, and for the support we got from listeners like you, the listeners, the fans, the reviewers, the sponsors, the supporters, and the reviewers and the listeners who sent in questions, and all the work they sent in! and the amazing people who sent us the questions and support. Thanks again and thanks back to everyone for the amazing work sent in. We can't wait for more episodes, we can't thank you enough! - Thank you. - Joe Biden, Malcolm, Thank you, Joe, Thank You, Maureen, and I'm so much, Thank Me, and Good Morning America, Good Morning, Good Life, Good Luck, Good Blessings, and God Bless You, and Much Blessings. -- Thank You. -- Joe Biden -- - - P.S. -- -- This episode is coming Soon, My Dear Friend, My Brother, Malcolm -- by: Malcolm, -- By: Malcolm ( ) , Thank You ( ) -- ( ) , , My Brother & My Brother ( ) - , and My Sister, My Sister ( ) & My Sister . , & My Friend, Sarah ( ) . | , etc., , Thank You , My Sister & My Fellow Brother, My Dad,
00:00:27.000I kind of enjoy – I used to hate that process with my first one and then I've grown to enjoy it because when you say your book out loud, you see it in a different way.
00:00:38.000Like, oh, you get a little bit of a different perspective on it.
00:00:42.000Well, I'm a giant fan of your work, man, particularly Outliers.
00:01:06.000I was struck by how many of the kind of high-profile cases that we got obsessed with were at their root about the same thing, which is that individuals were...
00:01:18.000Two people who didn't know each other well had an exchange and they got each other wrong.
00:01:23.000So, you know, everything from Amanda Knox to Bernie Madoff to the...
00:01:30.000To Larry Nassar at Michigan State, to Jerry Sandusky at Penn State, and then to the signature case, which the book is organized around, which is the Sandra Bland case.
00:01:40.000Remember the young woman in Texas who gets pulled over by the side of the road?
00:01:44.000They're all, at root, fundamentally the same problem, which is there's an exchange between – and the exchange just goes wrong.
00:02:07.000And we're being pushed to talk more and more to strangers, right, in a kind of globalized world.
00:02:13.000And if we're bad at it, that doesn't bode well, does it?
00:02:17.000Well, I think there's also an issue today with people not learning the necessary skills in how to talk to people because so much communication is done digitally.
00:02:47.000In how to be a normal human being in conversation.
00:02:52.000And now the rehearsal, it's like the rehearsal got cut in half.
00:02:55.000And, you know, instead of getting to the point where we play basketball with basketballs, we're still just doing wind sprints or something, you know.
00:03:54.000It seemed likely that she was killed versus that she committed suicide.
00:03:59.000I didn't think that someone would commit suicide being in jail for three days.
00:04:04.000One of the things that you highlighted in the book and you actually played in the audio version of it, her little sort of affirmations, you know, and she sounded very positive and upbeat and calling everybody kings and queens and thanking God and being very thankful and being aware of life and humility and just graciousness and gratitude.
00:04:29.000It didn't seem—I mean, obviously you don't know what kind of dark things can happen to a person when they're incarcerated for three days for a bullshit reason.
00:04:37.000Maybe that's the straw that broke the camel's back.
00:04:40.000She did have—you know, she had a complicated— Oh.
00:05:17.000She drives halfway across the country to start over.
00:05:20.000And on the first day that she arrives in Texas to start over, she gets pulled over by a cop.
00:05:26.000And by the way, she had thousands of dollars in outstanding tickets.
00:05:31.000So she had a history of this bullshit stuff with cops where the same trap that many poor people in this country get into, which is they get – the police use people as an ATM,
00:05:48.000They like set them up for untrivial things and when they can't find – when they can't pay the fine, they get another fine and when – you know how that goes.
00:06:24.000I mean I find the whole thing about – I went to that town when I was reporting the book and it's kind of hard to be – to kill – To kill someone and get away with it requires a level of expertise and forethought that struck me was not present in that little town in Texas.
00:06:56.000They just encountered it with this cop and he's not very good at his job and he gets way over his head and he completely misreads her I think it's almost more tragic.
00:07:27.000It's insane that you can keep someone in jail for three days for failure to signal.
00:07:32.000It seems like there should have been an initial review of the circumstances that led to her getting pulled out of the car in the first place and the cop should have been fired immediately.
00:07:42.000You're screaming at her because she lit a cigarette?
00:07:45.000Meanwhile, this is fascinating, and I feel like, I don't know, you and I are probably the same age.
00:07:51.000So the cop's 29. If you grew up with cigarettes...
00:07:57.000You have a different understanding of the meaning of lighting a cigarette.
00:08:00.000So what's happening in the encounter is he pulls her over.
00:08:04.000What he does is he sees her coming out of this university campus, and while she's still on campus property, she rolls through a stop sign.
00:08:13.000And then he notices that she's got out-of-state plates, and she's a young black woman, and she's driving a Hyundai, like not a Mercedes Benz.
00:08:42.000She pulls over to get out of his way and he goes, oh, you didn't use your turning signal.
00:08:46.000And he pulls her over and pulls him behind her.
00:08:49.000By the way, whenever I hear a Fire department truck or a police car coming and I pull over to get out of the way, I do not use my turning signal.
00:09:10.000He wanted to get her in a situation because it's all a pretext.
00:09:12.000He just wants – he thinks, oh, maybe there's something weird with her.
00:09:15.000So then he – we have this all on tape, of course, because this is one of those instances that was captured entirely on the dash cam, the officer's dash cam.
00:09:25.000He goes up to the window and he says – He looks at her and he realizes she's agitated.
00:09:32.000And he goes, ma'am, is there something wrong?
00:09:35.000And she's like, well, you know, I want to know why I'm pulled over.
00:09:39.000And then he goes back to his car and he comes back to her.
00:09:42.000And he later says in the deposition that when he goes back to his vehicle to check on her license and registration, he begins to develop suspicions that she's up to no good, she's got drugs or guns.
00:09:55.000And so she comes back and they commence to have this increasingly heated conversation.
00:10:01.000And she lights the cigarette because she's trying to calm herself down.
00:10:09.000You and I, who grew up in an era where people smoked all the time, know that one of the principal functions of lighting a cigarette was to calm your nerves.
00:10:17.000And in her mind, I think, in her mind, she's trying to signal to the cop, let's de-escalate this.
00:10:24.000And one of the ways I'm going to show you that I want to de-escalate this is I'm going to take a moment and light a cigarette and just take it down a notch and let's have a real conversation.
00:10:35.000He doesn't understand the meaning of that gesture.
00:11:19.000And that's still more evidence why you need, if you're a cop or anyone dealing with a stranger, you need to slow down and not jump to any conclusions because there's so much you can miss.
00:11:31.000What it seemed to me when I listened to it initially and then I listened to it again in your audio book, There's a thing that happens with police officers.
00:11:40.000I've never been a police officer, but I was a security guard for a brief period of time, and I recognized it in myself, and I recognized it in a lot of people that I work with, is that you start treating the other people like the other.
00:13:19.000What's remarkable about that tape, which I must have seen 50 times, and which has been viewed on YouTube, you know, even a couple million times, is how quickly it escalates.
00:13:46.000I remember years ago I wrote my second book, Blink, and I have in that book a chapter about a very famous, infamous police shooting in New York, a case of Amadou Diallo.
00:14:14.000So from the moment the police develop suspicions about Amadou Diallo to the moment that Amadou Diallo is lying dead on his front porch, how long – how much time elapsed?
00:14:49.000And he was talking about this question of time, that when you're a security guard guarding someone famous, a lot of what you're trying to do is to inject time into the scenario.
00:15:03.000Instead of, you don't want something to unfold in a second and a half where you have almost no time to react properly.
00:15:08.000What you want to do is to unfold in five seconds.
00:15:11.000If you can add, oh, I'm making this up.
00:15:14.000But basically what your job is, is to add seconds into the encounter so that you have a chance to intelligently respond to what's going on.
00:15:49.000Somebody comes up to you, like pulls a gun.
00:15:54.000The point is, if you're the secret security guy and your first instinct in response to someone pulling a gun is to go for your own gun, you've lost a second and a half, right?
00:16:05.000Your hand's got to go down to your – your whole focus is on getting to your own gun.
00:16:08.000And in the meantime, the other guy whose gun's already out has already shot.
00:18:19.000And he says, while he's in the squad car, he looks ahead and he sees her making what he calls flirtive movements.
00:18:26.000So he's like – Furtive movements also.
00:18:28.000He thinks she's being all kind of jumpy and – you don't know.
00:18:32.000He just says, I saw her moving around in ways that didn't make me happy.
00:18:35.000And then when he returns to the car, he returns driver's side, which is crucial because if you're a cop, you go driver's side only if you think that you might be in danger, right?
00:18:45.000If you go driver's side, you're exposing yourself to the road.
00:18:48.000The only reason you do that is that when you're driver's side, you can see the...
00:18:52.000It's very, very difficult, if someone has a gun, to shoot the police officer who's pulled them over if the police officer is on the driver's side.
00:19:00.000You have an angle if they're on the passenger's side.
00:20:08.000I didn't get any fear, and I thought that version of it that he described just sounds like horseshit.
00:20:14.000It sounds like what you would say after the fact to strengthen your case.
00:20:18.000Well, so there's another element here that I get into, which is I got his record as a police officer.
00:20:26.000So he'd been on the force for, I forgot, nine, ten months.
00:20:29.000And we have a record of every traffic stop he ever made.
00:20:32.000And when you look at his list of traffic stops, you realize that what happened that day with Sandra Bland was not an anomaly.
00:20:42.000That he's one of those guys who pulls over everyone for bullshit reasons all day long.
00:20:47.000So I think I've forgotten the exact number, but in the hour before he pulled over Sandra Bland, he pulled over four people, four other people, for equally ridiculous reasons.
00:21:03.000That's a kind of strain of modern policing which says, go beyond the ticket.
00:21:07.000Pull someone over if anything looks a little bit weird because you might find something else.
00:21:11.000Now, if you look at his history as a cop, he almost never found anything else.
00:21:15.000His history as a cop, in fact, I went through this, I forget how many hundreds of traffic stops he had in nine months.
00:21:22.000If you go through them, he has like, once he found some marijuana on a kid, and by the way, the town in which he was working is a college town, so, I mean, how hard is that?
00:21:31.000I think he found a gun once, misdemeanor gun, and But everything else was like pulling over people for the light above their license plate was out.
00:21:44.000That's the level of stuff he was using.
00:22:12.000Several American states give us, like North Carolina for example, will give us precise, complete statistics on the number of traffic stops done by their police officers and the reasons for those stops.
00:22:29.000So when you look at that, so I look at the North Carolina numbers.
00:22:32.000For example, in the North Carolina Highway Patrol, it's the same thing.
00:22:35.000They're pulling over unbelievable numbers of people and finding nothing.
00:22:40.000Less than 1% hit rates in some cases of being a hit rate being finding something of interest.
00:22:47.000So they're pulling over 99 people for no reason in order to find one person who's got a bag of dope or something in the car.
00:22:56.000You cannot conduct policing in a civil society like that and expect to have decent relationships between law enforcement and the civilian population.
00:24:51.000But he's basically doing the job like a jackass.
00:24:55.000He's doing a jackass version of being a cop.
00:24:57.000Well, so this is one of a really, really crucial point in the argument of the book, which is I think the real lesson of that case is not that he's a bad cop.
00:25:08.000He's in fact doing precisely as he was trained and instructed to do.
00:25:17.000And the problem is with the particular philosophy of law enforcement that has emerged over the last 10 years in this country, which has incentivized and encouraged police officers to engage in these incredibly low-reward activities,
00:25:33.000like pulling over 100 people in order to find one person who's got something wrong.
00:25:37.000That has become enshrined in the strategy of many police forces around the country.
00:25:44.000I have a A whole section of the book where I go through in detail one of the most important police training manuals, which is, you know, required reading for somebody coming up, in which they just walk you through this.
00:25:56.000Like, it is your job to pull over lots and lots and lots and lots of people, even if you only find something in a small percentage of cases.
00:27:33.000Now, understand that this is a country with...
00:27:36.000Very, very low levels of gun ownership, which means that a police officer does not enter into an encounter with a civilian with the same degree of fear or paranoia that the civilian has a handgun, right?
00:27:49.000Regardless of how one feels about gun laws in this country, the fact that there are lots of guns makes the job of a police officer a lot harder, and every police officer will tell you that.
00:29:50.000He's kicked off for, I've forgotten the precise language they use, but for basically being impolite to a civilian.
00:30:00.000But yeah, I don't think there's a lot of, but I don't, I mean, I still think we're saying the same thing, which is the thing that's driving him, his motivation, is not rational, right?
00:30:13.000And if you were a rational actor, you would never engage in an activity where 99.9% of your police stops...
00:30:22.000He is off in some weird kind of fantasy land for a reason, which is that's what, in certain jurisdictions in this country, that's what law enforcement has come to look like.
00:33:12.000And ends up writing eight tickets, including – he accuses the guy of being a pedophile, gets him for – one of the things he gets him is putting a false name on his driver's license when his driver's license – his real name was like Michael and his driver's license said Mike.
00:33:29.000Like that's the level of eight tickets, right?
00:33:34.000So you – there's a reason why a kid like Michael Brown in Ferguson is – It gets really angry at law enforcement because law enforcement was a completely discredited institution in that city.
00:33:48.000For years and years and years and years and years, they had been basically praying.
00:33:52.000They had been praying on the lower-income community of that town.
00:33:57.000So, of course, relationships between the population and the cops had reached a low ebb.
00:34:26.000It is about a system that had been in place for years and years and years and years in which the African-American population in that town had been preyed upon by the police department.
00:34:38.000That is the broader – and you cannot come to an understanding of what happened with Michael Brown until you're willing to engage that case on that much more broader systemic level.
00:34:51.000When you make the title of this book, Talking to Strangers, do you have a goal that you're trying to achieve?
00:34:58.000Are you trying to illuminate a certain aspect of communication?
00:35:02.000Are you trying to highlight issues that people have had with these stories, like the Michael Brown story?
00:35:12.000I wanted to sort of start with the premise of why are we so bad at, you know, like I tell the story in a book of the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State.
00:35:55.000A phenomenon that I wanted to try and explain, which is how is that possible?
00:35:59.000How can we think we know someone and be so completely wrong?
00:36:05.000How can you take your kid to a doctor and think the doctor is the greatest possible doctor and in fact what he's doing is abusing your child in front of you, right?
00:36:14.000And that's a very similar kind of problem to Bernie Madoff.
00:36:18.000People invested their life savings with this guy.
00:37:19.000My favorite story in the Madoff chapter is the greatest hedge fund in the world is Renaissance Technologies.
00:37:27.000These are the guys out in Long Island who have had like 30% returns for 25 years.
00:37:33.000They're like all PhD AI geniuses, literally geniuses.
00:37:39.000And they found themselves, years before Badoff was busted, they found themselves with, I think, $30 million in a Madoff fund because of some complicated transaction.
00:38:20.000So that's what I was trying to understand.
00:38:21.000Like, they can't even, you know, there's this notion I talk about, but it's called default to truth, which is this idea from a researcher called Tim Levine, which is, as human beings, we're trusting engines.
00:40:35.000Getting a decent return in the market is super easy.
00:40:38.000You go to Vanguard and they – they'll give you the market return.
00:40:44.000You're in your – it's not that hard.
00:40:45.000But these people are like – they wanted to do something fancier and that's what happened.
00:40:51.000Well, he, when you realize what a sociopath he actually was, is in the interviews after he's caught, where he's demanding certain things and complaining about certain things, he doesn't seem to have any remorse.
00:41:04.000He wants better treatment, he wants better food, he doesn't seem to have any remorse that he's literally robbed people of their retirement.
00:41:12.000Ruined the last part of their lives where they thought they were going to have a considerable sum of money to sit back and just enjoy their grandchildren.
00:42:16.000If you're totally rational and you look at this, you say, here's a guy who managed to bamboozle the most sophisticated people in the world to the tune of billions of dollars for 25 years and only gets caught because we had a once-in-a-lifetime financial meltdown.
00:42:29.000Isn't the rational lesson of that that we should all be Bernie Madoffs?
00:43:38.000Everyone knew there was something slightly fishy in what Bernie was doing.
00:43:41.000But they never went so far as to think that he was just making it up.
00:43:46.000So they knew something was up, but they didn't know it was 100% horseshit.
00:43:50.000They thought that he was – so there were some – people thought that he actually had investments, but he was – there was a suspicion, for example, that he was front-running, that because he had a larger business sort of managing the deal flow in the NASDAQ – That he would get advance word of where money was flowing and he would jump ahead of the queue,
00:44:14.000buy stocks before other people did, and profit off when the stock would rise.
00:44:18.000He would just sell and profit off that difference.
00:44:20.000So there was a feeling that he had a dubious kind of I don't know.
00:45:56.000You have a friend who's an incredible salesman and has gone around Europe and to Saudi Arabia and raised a $20 million fund, $20 billion fund.
00:46:05.000And they're promising a 20% return a year on your investment, right?
00:46:10.000So you give them a million, you're getting $200,000 a year back from this thing.
00:46:15.000You know it's all bullshit, but no one else does.
00:46:18.000What is the rational thing for you to do?
00:46:20.000The rational thing for you to do is to take your, on your million dollar investment, is to take the $200,000 that is made in quotation marks every year out of the fund.
00:46:30.000So you say, most people, you know, when you invest in stocks, normally what you do is you check the box.
00:46:35.000I want my, I want any dividends or earnings reinvested in the fund.
00:47:33.000So what happens is they appoint – remember, they appoint after the scandal breaks and made up is invested.
00:47:40.000They bring in a kind of supervisor, financial supervisor, who has the power to claw back winnings from – money from the people who took cash off the table.
00:47:52.000So – But not everyone had to claw back and the question was how far back do we go?
00:47:57.000So if you were investing with Madoff 25 years ago and you took $10 million off the table between 1990 and 1993, do you have to give that up too?
00:48:16.000The conversation, I really wish I could remember where I was hearing this conversation, but somebody had recorded Madoff talking to this guy, telling him, look, you've got to give that money back.
00:50:08.000The people who really made money from him were the people who had – I've forgotten what it was, but you would be – say you're Joe, the financial guy in Zurich.
00:50:22.000You have a whole bunch of wealthy European clients.
00:50:24.000Bernie would let – for every million you raise for Bernie, Bernie would let you keep – I've forgotten what it was – 100 grand.
00:50:52.000So what can be learned in terms of communication from the Bernie Madoff story?
00:50:58.000Well, the The Bernie Madoff story and all of these stories, but this one in particular, goes to this question of we really think we're good at spotting liars and we're not.
00:51:11.000So virtually every profession that is invested in investigation of human beings has some belief that we know how to...
00:52:06.000Watching these people parade in front of us is going to do a slightly bit better than chance.
00:52:11.000And the reason we're slightly better than chance is there are a small fraction of people who are such epically bad liars that we're not going to lose those people.
00:52:21.000One thing that you can tell, though, is if it's an area of your own personal expertise, right?
00:52:26.000Like if someone tried to talk to you about what it takes to write a book and get a book published and get a book on the New York Times bestseller list, and they were just making things up, you would...
00:53:04.000I met him through a friend, and I had given myself a pass, and then I met him through this friend, and he was a friend of a friend, so I just assumed he was okay because my friend is a very good friend.
00:53:14.000And this guy was claiming to be this Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, and he was writing for this online...
00:55:21.000He winds up murdering this girl that he's having sex with, murdering her husband, and he gets caught driving around his car, the guy's car, after he's killed the guy.
00:55:33.000And then he winds up trying to recruit a friend to kill someone.
00:56:35.000Or I can just read the transcript of what you say and try to decide whether it's true or false.
00:56:40.000And it seems to be the case that we're better when we just...
00:56:46.000Sight and sound, and all we have are just the plain words on the page.
00:56:54.000What being present does is it introduces all kinds of noisy information that just distracts us from the core question of whether the truth is being told.
00:57:07.000So maybe if all you had was a transcript, and as this guy is describing this particular – what was the name of the move?
00:57:15.000Maybe as you're looking at the way he—and all you're doing is focusing on the precise way in which he describes this very, very intricate move, and you would realize, oh, he actually doesn't understand what he's talking about.
00:57:27.000And you would have seen it clearly in that moment if you—but maybe there was something about his presentation that threw you off the scent.
00:58:14.000And the only thing that we were taking into consideration, like he was supposedly fighting in Thailand, which turns out there was no fight at all.
00:58:38.000The only time you do a twister is if you're a highly skilled grappler and you think you can put someone in a position that they don't understand.
00:58:46.000It's a position, there's a common position called back mount where you would choke someone or you would transition to other moves from there.
00:58:54.000And he was almost there but not quite there because you're kind of on the side.
00:58:57.000So even seasoned grapplers occasionally make mistakes and get caught in a twister.
00:59:01.000But you have to be a fucking wizard to pull that off on somebody.
00:59:05.000It's not something, you have to be really good.
00:59:07.000It's not something that you can just do.
00:59:09.000So when he said he did it, we were all like, what?
00:59:34.000There's a hilarious version of this on – I'm a runner, and on all the running message boards is one called Let's Run, which is – and they're constantly catching people who lie about their marathon times.
00:59:44.000It's a hilarious little – How do they catch them?
00:59:47.000Well, there's all kinds of reasons, but a lot of it is – it starts with the eyeball test.
00:59:51.000So there'll be a – because a lot of marathons have – We're good to go.
01:00:43.000Well, I have this thought about how much culture has shifted through the internet and how much culture will shift again in an even more astronomical way once we can read minds.
01:00:54.000And I don't think we're far away from that.
01:00:56.000I think we're a few decades away from some technology that allows people to establish intent and to see thoughts.
01:02:02.000But wouldn't your worry be that if we're able to read someone's thoughts and intentions, what we would in fact discover is even more confusing than what we know now?
01:02:14.000In other words, maybe what's inside my head right now are 35 different thoughts and intentions warring at with each other.
01:03:37.000That I cannot count the number of times when I have had reactions to things that people have said in the moment that turn out to be wrong, deeply and badly wrong.
01:03:49.000And one of the things that I have learned as an adult is to deeply distrust those kinds of reactions and to wait and And very often what will happen, in my case, sometimes the waiting takes a long time.
01:03:59.000I'm the kind of person who sometimes a month will pass and I will think back on a situation and I'll think, oh my god, I totally misunderstood that.
01:04:08.000This person who I thought was a jackass is actually someone, you know, a lovely person who I should give a second chance to or whatever.
01:04:15.000That comment that someone made that I thought was stupid is in fact extremely thoughtful and insightful.
01:04:22.000This will happen weeks, months later, whatever.
01:04:24.000If you were able to read my Mind in the moment.
01:04:29.000You would judge me for my mistake and not give me an easy way to correct it.
01:04:34.000In other words, you would trap me in, like, what if I've had a reaction to something you've said in this conversation?
01:04:40.000In which I've said, Jesus, I can't believe that.
01:04:44.000And then I'm driving back to L.A. tonight and I think, oh, actually, oh, that's really interesting.
01:04:49.000I hadn't thought about it at the time.
01:04:50.000I don't want you to short-circuit my learning process about you.
01:04:55.000I want to – give me the privacy of my six hours of thinking about what you said and allow me – give me that kind of time to come to a reasoned and insightful conclusion about how I feel.
01:05:08.000That's interesting, but we're talking then about only one person having the technology because if you both have the technology, then there wouldn't be any issue.
01:05:18.000It wouldn't be confusion as to why someone was saying something.
01:05:21.000You have a much clearer path to understanding their thought process and their intent behind it.
01:05:43.000One of the things that would be fascinating about this is one of the things about forbidden words is forbidden words carry with them intent.
01:06:24.000For the way you communicate, what is your process for the way you're trying to develop these thoughts in your mind and express them to people?
01:06:32.000Well, part of the problem with that is language, right?
01:06:36.000And part of the problem with making certain aspects of our language forbidden is you limit people's ability to colorfully communicate and express themselves in certain ways.
01:06:47.000I think that alone, just eliminating that alone, eliminating confusion, and also highlighting, you know, you could highlight real problems with people's thoughts and the way people communicate, but also eliminate many problems.
01:07:04.000So you'd say, oh, he doesn't mean that.
01:07:22.000So one of the things I got really interested when I was writing my book was how our kind of cultural frames of reference profoundly complicate our attempts to understand other people.
01:07:34.000And so in your scenario where I have some kind of window into your thinking and intention, I still need to know – in order to make sense of you, I still need to have a very clear idea of the cultural kind of rules of the road that you're using.
01:07:49.000And they're likely to be different from mine.
01:08:58.000It means something interesting, right?
01:09:00.000It means that they're not separating these three modes the way that we are.
01:09:06.000They're certainly coming at experience with a very different set of assumptions.
01:09:10.000So maybe… So I think of the Civil War as a long time ago, but if I'm Korean, maybe the Civil War is as present in my kind of consciousness as something that happened last week.
01:09:25.000I'm sort of guessing because I don't know that I haven't fully investigated.
01:09:29.000But the point is, I've just given you one random example.
01:09:32.000There are way, way incredibly different rules that different cultures use to organize experience.
01:09:42.000You and reading your thoughts, I have to know those rules because those rules are sorting out how people – so this is only – I'm not dissing this notion that you're talking about.
01:09:52.000I'm saying that it needs to have another layer as well.
01:10:04.000It's interesting when you think about the Tower of Babel, right?
01:10:09.000This idea that at one point in time everyone spoke the same language and God sort of set it up so that we were never going to be able to really communicate with each other because everybody has a bunch of different languages and we'll never figure it out.
01:10:24.000That's the sort of crunched up version of it.
01:10:32.000Change the way, like all languages are essentially little symbols that are written down on paper or typed out and then sounds you make with your mouth and they convey intent.
01:10:41.000If there was a way to do another version of language, a universal version of language that's eventually adopted.
01:10:49.000Like, I'm reading this book about these people that were kidnapped by Native Americans, and they were assimilated into the tribes, and they learned the language, and this happened over the course of a couple of years.
01:11:01.000And I was thinking, like, what would that be like if you—you know, that's how you learn a language.
01:11:06.000You're kidnapped by—you know what I mean?
01:11:09.000Like, you gotta— But if there was a new language, how long would it take for adults to learn a new language?
01:11:15.000If someone came up with a new language of completely universal characters and this language is conveyed through this technology rather than through your mouth.
01:11:50.000Can't we kind of do that already in a sense that we could have a universal language and then – We have a device, you know, sitting on our phone or something.
01:12:00.000That when we, I'm in, you know, I'm in some, before I'm in Bulgaria and I'm ordering coffee, I speak it in the device and it simply translates, either translates me directly into Bulgarian.
01:13:59.000What you're sort of saying is, yeah, like the internet, you have to translate English into bits in order for the computer to translate it into an emoji.
01:14:08.000I feel like that's almost what you're saying, although it's not exactly...
01:14:33.000Whenever there's, whether it's Contact, or whenever there's some movie about extraterrestrials, there's always a team of scientists and linguists and geniuses to get together, and they go, look, we're going to establish a universal language to communicate with these people.
01:14:46.000In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it was music.
01:15:47.000Because Boston is filled with people that want to get drunk and fight, and a lot of them are really mean, which is a great place to grow up.
01:15:54.000You develop a thick skin, and particularly as a comedian, it's a great place to start out and do comedy.
01:16:05.000The coldest parts of Canada, like, you know, I know lots of people, lots of members of my family are from Winnipeg, which is seriously cold.
01:16:30.000And so the immigrants of these people that were willing to take a risk and get on a boat when there wasn't even YouTube videos to watch.
01:16:38.000These are savage people that made it over here, and they're really rough, and they had rough childhoods, and they raised rough children, and the echoes of that persist on the East Coast of the United States.
01:16:52.000The amount of drinking that went on in Irish immigrant communities is – it's funny because I stumbled across – Years ago, I've always been obsessed with drinking and alcohol.
01:17:04.000In fact, I have a chapter on it in this book.
01:17:07.000So years ago, it turns out that the place in America where alcohol studies, as they're called, were really birthed was New Haven, which makes perfect sense.
01:17:18.000So in the 50s, a bunch of people get really, really interested in understanding how drinking works.
01:17:23.000And in New Haven, of course, you have the perfect model because you have two very large groups of immigrants.
01:18:17.000You've got – so they're not – one group is not richer than the other.
01:18:20.000They come to America not at the same time but they're in 19th century, early 20th century come to America in large numbers.
01:18:27.000There are some – you know, Irish culture looks a lot – but it was Catholic.
01:18:31.000Right now, there may be Catholic in different ways, but on the surface, these are, you'd think that they would use the bottle in the same way.
01:18:40.000The Irish are, the Irish, the men are slinking off to the pub, and in Italy, everyone's gathered around steaming bowls of pasta and drinking like one and a half glasses of wine, mild homemade wine with their dinner.
01:20:50.000Well, I'm reserved English and Jamaican.
01:20:56.000Jamaican is not big drinkers in the same kind of – the difference actually fascinatingly of the many weird alcohol facts, if you look at young people, it's like a college-age young people in America and look at their drinking habits.
01:21:19.000Black students drink and get drunk markedly less than white kids.
01:21:25.000Real differences in drinking behavior by race at that age.
01:21:30.000Asian students don't drink much either.
01:21:41.000I don't know why that's It's revered in our culture more.
01:21:48.000Yeah, I mean, getting fucked up is celebrated in white culture.
01:21:52.000Well, this, you know, in the alcohol chapter in my book, I talk about all the strange things that have happened with drinking patterns on campus.
01:22:02.000And I was struck in doing that chapter.
01:22:04.000I was interested in the connection between drinking and Right.
01:22:27.000Entirely, but it's a huge factor in making sense of what happens.
01:22:31.000And when you dig into that, you see these really weird patterns.
01:22:34.000First off, when I was in college, I did not know, and I went to college in Canada, not a teetotaling population.
01:22:42.000I did not know a single person who had ever been blackout drunk.
01:22:47.000And then now, if you talk to a 20-year-old college student in America, they will name friends of theirs who get blackout drunk on a weekly basis.
01:22:57.000Trevor Burrus What is the drinking age in Canada and what was it when you were in college?
01:23:01.000When I was in college, I was 18. Trevor Burrus Yeah.
01:23:05.000I've been talking to friends about this, about Europe, about how in Europe, particularly in Italy and France, you're allowed to drink wine at a very young age.
01:23:15.000And the taboo aspect of it, the forbidden fruit, all that goes away.
01:23:23.000I don't think young kids should be drinking because I think it's terrible for your brain development but I think there's a thing in keeping them from drinking or making it illegal where it becomes so taboo and so intoxicating that they can't wait until they can legally do it or they try to get a hold of it before it's legal and it has a certain excitement to it that it doesn't have in parts of Europe.
01:23:49.000So there's all kinds of The things that are new are way less beer and way more hard liquor.
01:23:55.000So hard liquor, when I was in school in Canada in the 80s, 95% of what we drank was beer.
01:24:02.000There wasn't any whiskey or tequila or vodka at our parties.
01:25:57.000And most people at that level will be at risk, will have at least the beginnings of memory impairment.
01:26:03.000So that feeling when you get really drunk at a party and the next morning you can only remember little bits and pieces of what happened that night, that's because your hippocampus was at your moment of peak intoxication, your hippocampus was starting to shut down.
01:26:49.000So remember, though, this is an interesting point and a crucial point about blackout, which is your hippocampus doesn't necessarily control how articulate you are or how fluid your speech is.
01:27:02.000So Hitchens could have been the most articulate person in the world, but the next morning he would not have remembered a single thing he said on Bill Maher.
01:27:53.000He's a salesman Living in, like, St. Louis, who gets really, really drunk, and then his hippocampus shuts down, and he continues to function.
01:28:01.000So he goes, gets in his car, drives to the airport, buys a plane ticket, goes to Vegas, does—he doesn't know what he does in Vegas, does whatever he does in Vegas, and then wakes up, like, two days later.
01:29:20.000Okay, so the hippocampus doesn't shut down all at once.
01:29:25.000So what it does is it shuts down slowly.
01:29:27.000So let's imagine we're both doing shots and So after, I mean, I'm quite sure your capacity, I'm, I mean, you're like, I'm half your weight.
01:29:43.000So we're going to deal with alcohol very differently.
01:29:45.000But let's assume we're doing shots of tequila.
01:29:48.000There's a point of where things start to get hazy.
01:29:51.000So you might remember that I asked you that question or you might not.
01:29:54.000And then as we keep drinking and our blood alcohol levels get higher and higher, at a certain point your hippocampus will completely, like the off switch, has been thrown.
01:30:04.000So it goes from being sluggish and impaired to just being down.
01:30:13.000Well, your blood alcohol level has to fall to the point where it can work again.
01:30:17.000So you fall asleep and over the course of eight hours of sleep, you know, your alcohol is processed by your liver, blood alcohol falls, hippocampus snaps back into action.
01:30:30.000What a ridiculous drug to be our most socially acceptable drug.
01:33:06.000It illuminates parts of your consciousness that I think a lot of people guard and protect and shield and I think sometimes doing something that breaks down those walls is good for you ultimately overall.
01:33:19.000There's a little bit of an adjustment period but I think you learn something about the normal state of consciousness.
01:33:24.000I don't think you learn much when you smoke cigarettes.
01:33:27.000I just think there's just a little bit of a head rush that you get out of it.
01:33:30.000But I know so many people that are sick from cigarettes.
01:35:56.000I mean, some people get paranoid from it, but I think that's what that really is, is marijuana illuminating how vulnerable you actually are.
01:36:04.000We sort of protect ourselves from this overwhelming existential angst that you get when you get high on pot.
01:36:32.000I mean, it's like, really, you know, life is crazy.
01:36:35.000We're in these metal boxes with combustion engines, you know, like, trusting the people next to us going 60 miles an hour, paying attention, not looking at their phone.
01:37:31.000It's incredible to me that, like, if I said to you that I was on the board of Philip Morris, you would say, Malcolm, that's pretty screwed up.
01:37:52.000In terms of the amount of social damage, what Anheuser-Busch has created has produced a hundred times the social damage than what Philip Morris has produced.
01:38:06.000I don't know how we got it in our heads.
01:38:09.000To treat one like it's completely taboo, and the other we kind of...
01:38:14.000Shrug, you know, there are a bunch, I was reading about this recently, how many colleges accept, not just accept alcohol advertising and sponsorship, but you go to a college football game and, you know,
01:38:31.000Bud Light will have, will be an active sponsor of the event, will have some huge relationship with the school.
01:39:32.000There does seem to be like, why is it every time I turn around and I listen to some comic and they say, well, when I was growing up in Boston, I'm like, of course you're from Boston.
01:42:18.000He said it was bombing, he couldn't get it to work right, he'll fuck up his act, but he knew there was a way to do it, and then it became...
01:42:47.000And then you try it again, and he keeps doing it.
01:42:49.000And he does it a hundred times or two hundred times, and then eventually it becomes bulletproof.
01:42:54.000And then he gets it down to that form that you see it on his comedy special, where it's just boom, punchline, bam, punchline, boom, punchline, bam!
01:44:12.000I'm not a stand-up comedian, but I give a lot of speeches, like in conferences and corporate settings, which is a very – in some ways a very different animal and in some ways quite a similar animal.
01:44:24.000I've been doing it for 20-odd years now.
01:44:27.000And the thing I'm always – That blows me away is how different audiences are.
01:44:37.000One thing that you – after doing it for about 10 years, you start to get a little bit smarter about reading the room at the beginning to know who they are and what.
01:45:14.000And they'll be like, oh, it's coming, and they encourage you.
01:45:17.000Some people will wait until the last possible moment...
01:45:21.000And then some people will wait a beat after the punchline is over and then think about it and reward you.
01:45:27.000Those three audiences, that makes a world of difference in how you tell the story, in your expectation going in, in – because if you think it's an early rewarding audience and it's a late rewarding audience, you can get – you'll be 10 minutes in and you're totally bummed out because you think it's a disaster.
01:47:23.000But so that like – and I took a long time to figure that out because you – for the longest time, I would walk away from someone I would think – from some talks and would think I just did – committed the worst possible offense.
01:47:34.000You're doing a different thing, though.
01:48:46.000It's a super interesting – I find it incredibly rewarding and I also find it sort of – it reaffirms my kind of faith in humanity for some reason.
01:50:00.000Maybe I'm not getting an accurate picture of the whole country.
01:50:05.000But in these – give a talk with a group of whatever, educators in – Well, I think when it comes to political discussions, that's when people get really divided because I think they feel like they're supposed to be divided.
01:50:19.000There's a really interesting video that I watched yesterday where Donald Trump Jr. was getting heckled by these alt-right characters for not being right-wing enough.
01:50:30.000But I took a lot of pleasure in watching that play out, not because I want Donald Jr. to get heckled, but because this is what I've always said.
01:50:45.000And it doesn't matter if they're in Antifa or if they're in the Proud Boys, if they're far left or far right, it's the same thing.
01:50:52.000They're just finding an ideology and they're taking it to the extremist level and they're angry at the people who aren't woke enough.
01:50:59.000Or they're finding an ideology and they take it to the furthest level and they're angry at people that aren't separatists, that aren't white supremacists.
01:51:05.000They're angry at people that like Mexicans at all.
01:52:04.000Now, as someone who's on his book tour and has been doing this for 20 years, let me just say, you have to do the Q&A. The Q&A is symbolically crucial.
01:52:14.000It's like everyone says, okay, everyone sees, you get up there and you do your prepared bit.
01:52:21.000I know you can do your prepared bit, but you're asking me to spend $28 on a book and And what I want to know is, are you someone who is meaningfully engaged in the ideas that you're talking about in your book?
01:53:08.000What was interesting too is that what he was using as an excuse was that the left-wing media is going to take his quotes and take him out of context.
01:53:56.000His wife or girlfriend, I've forgotten which of those things she is, she then disses the crowd about how the only way they could get dates is online because nobody would – did you see that?
01:55:09.000If you watch those panel shows, for some reason, the network news shows post-election, pre-election, they're election coverage, they still haven't figured that out.
01:56:22.000I would like to read his book thoughtfully and engage with him in the ideas in it and see for myself exactly the thing I was talking about before.
01:56:32.000Does he want to meaningfully engage with those ideas, with someone who doesn't necessarily share them, right?
01:58:12.000And the Colombians take themselves, in the best way, very seriously.
01:58:17.000They consider themselves the most cultured people in South America, and they think they speak the most beautiful Spanish, and I'm told they may well do.
01:58:26.000So I was going to go this little kind of lecture tour of major Colombian cities.
01:58:51.000And you realize, like, this is the same.
01:58:52.000So when Fidel Castro would give those six-hour speeches, you realize it's not just—I mean, Castro, a little bit crazy.
01:59:00.000But there's also—there are cultures that have an expectation that if you're going to go and hear somebody speak, it's not going to be over in 40 minutes, right?
01:59:35.000One of Lincoln's most famous speeches is incredibly brief.
01:59:39.000And you realize in that context where people are used to hours and hours and hours, what an extraordinary – I mean, it is – think about Lincoln as a kind of badass – He's an entertainer, not an entertainer, performer.
01:59:53.000So he walks into a world where everyone's thinking they're going to be there for two hours.
01:59:58.000He sits up there and he's done in five minutes.
02:00:01.000Do you realize what a, just a power move that is?
02:00:06.000Imagine him, so he comes in to his like aides and says this, holds it up and it's, you know, you've seen it in the Lincoln Monument on the mall.
02:01:50.000Type and then print it out because there's certain structural things you can only see, I think, when it's on the page and you've kind of put all the pages in front of you.
02:03:26.000But wait, I have a question that occurred to me when you were saying you were talking about that schedule that you're on, that you do a special.
02:04:16.000So what I'll be able to do in that window, say I have a bit that I know works, because it's on the special, I'll do that bit, because the people haven't seen it yet, and then after that bit, I will sandwich in some new stuff, and I'll try to make that new stuff come alive,
02:04:31.000and then I'll add a bit after that that I know is good, and then I'll sandwich in some new stuff.
02:04:41.000It's sandwiched in between, like, legit bits.
02:07:19.000And I couldn't teach you how to do it anyway.
02:07:21.000Because your way of doing it would be very different than Jamie's way of doing it, which would be very different than Stephen Wright, which is very different than Sam Kinison.
02:07:28.000It's like everybody's got their own weird little thing that makes them funny.
02:07:39.000I always love in any particular field, there's the insider's choice and then there's the popular choice.
02:07:45.000The most hilarious one is if you ask an architect who their favorite architect is...
02:07:50.00099 times out of 100, you will never have heard of that.
02:07:53.000It's always some obscure German guy from like the 30, you know, or it's some like, you know, experimental Dutch guy who did – he's on one building.
02:08:02.000And it's like amazing if you – you know, it's like some – he did a church outside of Antwerp and it blew everyone's mind.
02:08:08.000So who's the – who's your insider's – I would say the insider – A pick is Dave Attell.
02:08:18.000Because Dave Attell is probably one of the greatest comics of all time.
02:08:22.000It doesn't get enough love because he has no social media presence.
02:08:26.000He wears the same hat and the same shirt and the same jacket and the same pants every day.
02:08:32.000He has no thought whatsoever about his look.
02:08:36.000All he does is just write new and better jokes constantly.
02:08:39.000He's one of the most prolific comics, but he'll still have a hard time selling places out.
02:08:45.000Although, lately, he and Jeff Ross have done this thing called bumping mics where they go on stage and they sort of work together and they talk shit.
02:08:55.000Jeff will say something funny and then Dave will say something funny and Dave will do his bits and Jeff will make fun of them and it's really entertaining.
02:09:02.000They do a series of shows doing that and that has elevated his profile and for that, I'm very, very thankful.
02:09:07.000How long was he sort of in the wilderness?
02:11:01.000Like, why am I not loving comedy because I'm doing comedy?
02:11:03.000That's the dumbest fucking thing in the world.
02:11:05.000The reason why I got into stand-up comedy was because I loved watching it.
02:11:09.000Now, all of a sudden, I don't like it because I'm jealous or, you know, or it makes me compare myself to them and I don't like the feeling or it makes me...
02:11:45.000I can sit there Like an audience member and just laugh.
02:11:49.000But are you, and that's my question is, when you sit in an audience of, say, you're sitting in an audience watching Dave Patel, are you experiencing him differently than the audience is because you're a professional like him?
02:12:02.000I'm sure somewhat, but I try to shut down the analysis part of my brain as much as possible.
02:12:08.000I try to shut down, like, why did he write it like that?
02:12:18.000I know some things are coming, or I know the way I would do it, or I know Dave very well, so I know how he would do it.
02:12:25.000I'm sure there's some sort of difference between...
02:12:28.000But that's the same as a musician, right?
02:12:30.000If you're a musician, if you're a guitarist and you're watching an amazing guitarist, even though they're really good, you're probably like, hmm, okay, I see what he's doing.
02:12:50.000As opposed to – so if, say, Pamun comes to me for advice, my first – and I think about, oh, here's the advice I'd like to give on this piece of writing.
02:12:59.000Actually, a friend of mine yesterday brought to me an essay she's working on.
02:13:04.000Incredibly interesting essay about the role of women in cinema.
02:13:12.000So we're walking around and I'm telling her my response to it.
02:13:16.000And after I give it, my first thought was, wait, did I just say...
02:13:23.000If I was doing it, I would have done it this way.
02:13:26.000In other words, did I just simply impose my own standards and preferences on her, which is not advice.
02:18:06.000And it's fantastic because you're not expecting that.
02:18:09.000You're thinking – you see the crusty old – it's like a Boston cab driver, right?
02:18:12.000Like some grizzled Irish guy who's like 70 years old.
02:18:16.000And you think, oh, you must hate these kids because they're young and beautiful and they're tipsy and it's a Friday night and he's driving a cab.
02:18:23.000And then the song comes on the radio, and they all start singing along in their kind of drunken way.
02:19:06.000Jerry Seinfeld was going to open up an advertising agency for a while.
02:19:13.000I know he had done a couple of commercials, and apparently he had written some of the commercials, and he had decided that he was going to write commercials.
02:20:09.000They have like a place where they like, okay, you're trying to sell me a toaster and Jamie's trying to stop me from buying that toaster, but you're mad at Jamie and you're trying to be persuasive at me at the same time.
02:24:21.000It's not like in the end a fucking meteor is going to land on the building and kill everybody and the screen is going to splatter with blood because their bodies explode.
02:24:31.000You're not going to see that in this movie.
02:24:32.000In this movie, everything's going to work out great.
02:25:11.000I would push, just gently push Dick Wolf aside and say, let me have this one and we're going to like completely, and we'll have it, you know, the villain will actually be one of the prosecutors.
02:25:24.000That's what we'll do or something along those lines.
02:25:26.000And every episode ends like No Country for Old Men style where it's over.
02:25:34.000But there's something – there's a drug in those where they're comforting and that people know that the bad guy is going to get caught and the good guy – I don't know.
02:25:43.000This is a random thought, but I don't know any men who watch them.
02:25:47.000And I've come to the – Belief that they are – there's something – they're actually for women and they're a very comforting kind of reassuring fantasy about how the world works.
02:26:00.000That the system is – so I had – can I tell you my – this is an incredibly complicated theory that I developed once about these kinds of things.
02:26:09.000So there's – we all know what a Western is.
02:26:12.000A Western is where is conceptually a world in which there is no law and order and a man shows up and imposes personally law and order on the territory, the community, right?
02:26:32.000An Eastern is a place where, by contrast, is a story where there are four types.
02:26:41.000The Eastern is where there is law and order.
02:26:46.000So there are institutions of justice, but they are – have been subverted by people from within.
02:26:52.000So an Eastern would be the – Serpico is an Eastern.
02:26:55.000It's a crooked cop who is – it's the bad apple who has, you know, screwed up the – there are lots – tons and tons of Hollywood movies are Easterns.
02:27:04.000The Northern is the case where law and order exists and law and order is morally righteous.
02:27:13.000Show law and order is a Northern – It's a functioning apparatus of justice which reliably and accurately produces the correct result in confronting criminality every single day when it's on TV. The Southern is where the entire – wait.
02:27:34.000The Southern is – all John Grisham novels are Southerns.
02:27:37.000They are where the entire apparatus is corrupt and where the reformer is not an insider but an outsider.
02:27:45.000So in every John Grisham novel, they all proceed—and I love John Grisham, just to be clear—but they all proceed from the same premise, which is the system is rotten to the core, and only this white knight who comes in from the outside can save us.
02:28:01.000So in the Western, there is no system.
02:28:05.000In the northern, there's a system that's fantastic.
02:28:08.000In the eastern, the system is reformed from within.
02:28:12.000But in the southern, the system has to be reformed from without.
02:28:16.000That's my complicated – so I feel like anything – you can place all art about law and order, about the criminal world, criminal justice, into one of these four categories.
02:28:26.000And the – so the Brits love the northern.
02:28:31.000So what is, you know, all of the famous British detective stories are always northern.
02:28:41.000It's like the system is like – and, you know, there's no corruption in the police department.
02:28:46.000They may be bumbling and Sherlock's got to help them out.
02:28:48.000But no one's, you know, off on some – there's no – there's never a case where there's a rotten cop who's selling out every – Is there a modern version of the Western?
02:28:58.000Because Westerns all seem to take place between the time of like 15, 1600, and 1880. Yeah, there is.
02:29:06.000Do you read the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child?
02:29:10.000No, but I watched one of the movies, the Tom Cruise.
02:32:12.000So when you set out to write a book, do you have a premise stewing in your head where it's just like throbbing, where you're like, that's it, that's the one?
02:32:40.000I didn't know what surrounded the chapter, but there was something in talking to strangers, I got interested in these spy stories.
02:32:50.000That story I tell of Anna Montez, the Cuban spy who rises to the top of the American intelligence establishment.
02:32:57.000I began with that, and I went and talked to the guy who caught her.
02:33:02.000I had such a fantastic interview with him, and that just got me incredibly excited.
02:33:07.000That got me in this whole thing about here's a woman spying in plain sight for Castro at the top of the American intelligence establishment for 10 years.
02:33:17.000No one catches her, even though she's not some master spy.
02:33:20.000She has the codes that she's using in her purse.
02:34:36.000It was one of those things where when he put together all the pieces to catch this one woman, Anna Montez, he realized, oh, there's someone else, and then he retired.
02:35:35.000There was a story recently where Iran assassinated some people that they suspected were CIA spies.
02:35:45.000And I always wondered, like, how many people are spies?
02:35:49.000And like, you know, homeland style, living in some other country, assimilating into their culture, getting jobs in organizations, even in terrorist groups, infiltrating.
02:36:03.000Well, there was a story I told in one of my podcast episodes, Visionist History, season two, I think, that I ran across.
02:36:10.000I love reading these memoirs of, like, mid-level, retired intelligence officers, and there's tons of them.
02:36:16.000And people don't really read them, and I love—because invariably, like, in the middle of the book, they'll tell you some—they'll just drop some crazy story.
02:36:26.000And this guy, it was the former general counsel of the CIA, wrote his memoirs, really interesting memoirs, and immediately tells a story about how the CIA, a guy who was a really big deal terrorist in the 70s and 80s,
02:36:44.000really big deal, has a change of heart and comes to the CIA and says, I no longer believe in what I'm doing.