This Past Weekend with Theo Von - E446 Malcolm Gladwell

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00:02:14.740 Hey, guys.

00:02:15.860 I'm in the West Village of New York City today.

00:02:19.320 And I am at my friend, Keet.

00:02:21.800 She is an entrepreneur.

00:02:26.140 She has a beautiful coffee shop and flowery or floral shop called Rose Crayons.

00:02:35.200 And she let us use this vintage carriage house today to record in.

00:02:41.520 So, very grateful to her.

00:02:43.480 If you want to support her or some of her businesses in the village in New York City,

00:02:49.200 you can check her out at Ad Hoc Collective.

00:02:52.280 And we are very grateful for this beautiful space that we get to record in today.

00:02:58.140 Today's guest is a journalist.

00:02:59.940 He's a public speaker.

00:03:01.040 He's a New York Times bestselling author who creates works that often deal with what makes

00:03:08.100 us human, how stories and facts overlap.

00:03:12.860 He has his own podcast, Revisionist History, which goes down some really unique rabbit holes.

00:03:20.080 You'll hear a little bit about that today.

00:03:21.520 I'm grateful to have in one of the most unique minds of our time and to get to spend some time

00:03:29.540 with him.

00:03:30.540 Today's guest is Malcolm Gladwell.

00:03:32.760 Welcome, thanks for being here man.

00:04:02.740 Not at all.

00:04:03.920 Yeah.

00:04:04.640 Thank you.

00:04:06.020 We met years ago briefly.

00:04:08.420 It was a coffee shop in Los Angeles.

00:04:12.760 Yeah.

00:04:13.480 It was called Top of Montana, maybe.

00:04:16.820 Or some.

00:04:18.160 There was a coffee shop on Montana Avenue over in like.

00:04:20.580 In Brentwood?

00:04:21.080 Yeah, in Brentwood.

00:04:22.660 Yeah.

00:04:22.880 And I remember seeing you there and I was like.

00:04:25.320 And I wanted to ask you about.

00:04:27.520 I mean, I was just thinking like, man, it would be crazy if one day I got to talk with Malcolm

00:04:30.520 Gladwell.

00:04:31.140 Yeah.

00:04:31.320 I used to hang out at Cafe Lux in the Brentwood Country Mart.

00:04:37.480 Oh yeah, that place is nice.

00:04:39.000 Oh, it wasn't there though.

00:04:40.000 No, it wasn't there.

00:04:41.000 I made a rare.

00:04:42.940 Oh, I know what you're talking about.

00:04:45.040 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:46.820 It's changed names.

00:04:48.900 I know exactly what you mean.

00:04:50.000 Yeah, I used to go there in the morning.

00:04:51.420 Yeah.

00:04:51.940 Yeah, it's a fun place.

00:04:52.820 Everyone sits outside.

00:04:53.780 Yeah, everyone sits outside.

00:04:54.840 And some people have dogs and stuff.

00:04:56.140 And sometimes they even give away dogs there.

00:04:58.100 They'll have like a little, one of those kennels are like, like a kennel will come.

00:05:02.620 They're like, you want these dogs.

00:05:03.920 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:05:04.540 It used to be a coffee works or something.

00:05:07.180 No, then they have some funny name now.

00:05:08.620 Yeah, I like that place a lot.

00:05:09.740 Yeah, it was cool.

00:05:10.440 But I remember seeing you, man.

00:05:11.400 I was so excited.

00:05:12.380 So really awesome to be able to get to chat with you today.

00:05:18.040 Yeah, I was, I was thinking like one thing about you that's unique is your hair.

00:05:24.320 Well, the same could be said of you.

00:05:26.160 Yeah.

00:05:27.060 We are people, you know, a friend of mine once said, there are only a handful of people in

00:05:34.960 history who are recognizable in profile, like in, you know, a black and white simple, you

00:05:43.060 know, Mickey Mouse, uh, you know, this is like a short, very short list.

00:05:48.480 He's like, you have the potential to be recognizable in a profile.

00:05:53.800 Um, yeah.

00:05:54.460 So do you.

00:05:55.120 Do you, well, do you feel like it does something for you?

00:05:57.300 Like, yeah, it's interesting.

00:05:58.500 Like, I think if I am going to go buy a book, right.

00:06:02.220 Um, especially from like a smart guy, right.

00:06:04.680 Like, um, I kind of, there's something in me that wants that guy to look smart.

00:06:11.440 Well, you're telling me I look smart.

00:06:13.560 I think to me, it would be my perception.

00:06:15.780 There is, but I don't know if I thought that if I know that you look smart because I've read

00:06:21.020 some of your books and I think that you're smart.

00:06:23.420 Yeah.

00:06:23.920 Or is it because it's the forehead.

00:06:26.280 It's not the hair.

00:06:27.080 Oh, I don't know.

00:06:27.840 There's a whole, there's actually, this is true or not, but maybe someone I read somewhere

00:06:32.720 or someone was telling me people do falsely, but nonetheless is a stereotype about people

00:06:39.560 with big foreheads.

00:06:41.080 I have a very high forehead and it slopes back.

00:06:45.500 I have my mom's forehead.

00:06:47.080 People think that means I have a big brain.

00:06:50.280 I don't think it does.

00:06:51.360 I think I just have a high forehead that slopes back, but I think people, you look at a big

00:06:56.520 forehead and you think, Whoa, there's something in there.

00:06:59.020 There's something in there.

00:06:59.920 Yeah.

00:07:00.140 That guy's got a, that guy's got a Hemi in there.

00:07:02.140 That guy's got a V6.

00:07:03.720 Yeah.

00:07:04.680 Yeah.

00:07:04.840 I could see, yeah, I guess maybe I could see that, but I think there is something you

00:07:07.380 want the guy to look.

00:07:10.440 So you kind of want the guy to look smart.

00:07:13.220 Yeah.

00:07:13.840 Well, the other thing that's going on hair wise is people with big hair like mine got

00:07:19.800 lucky with Einstein.

00:07:22.280 Einstein set the template for the big crazy hair being associated with genius, right?

00:07:27.520 Before Einstein, if you asked someone to imagine a genius, they would never have imagined

00:07:32.420 someone with a head of frizzy hair.

00:07:34.440 There was no association there.

00:07:36.600 Einstein is like the kind of template for this idea that, you know, this, he has a Joe,

00:07:43.640 he is a Jew fro, not an Afro, but you know, the idea that a fro is somehow symbolic of

00:07:49.320 craziness.

00:07:50.940 Yeah.

00:07:51.220 It comes from there.

00:07:52.220 Yeah.

00:07:52.380 He does.

00:07:52.940 He's almost got that fact fro.

00:07:55.020 Yeah.

00:07:55.320 Oh, this fro's got facts in it.

00:07:57.320 You know, or he gave you that energy.

00:07:58.980 He does have awesome hair.

00:07:59.600 You can't, I mean, Einstein is the most brilliantly kind of branded genius of all time.

00:08:05.620 Yeah.

00:08:06.180 Right.

00:08:06.500 But also since we're on the subject, you know, Beethoven, also crazy hair.

00:08:11.980 So maybe it goes back a little further, not quite as magnificent as Einstein.

00:08:17.820 But when you picture Beethoven in your mind, you do picture like this shock of hair that

00:08:24.320 sort of symbolizes his intellectual turmoil.

00:08:27.480 So yeah, I think, yeah, well, it seems like, yeah, his hair seems like there's a, he's

00:08:32.820 just like, it's, there's so much going on.

00:08:35.060 It's got to get out of me somehow.

00:08:36.940 Yeah.

00:08:37.260 You know, what do you think your hair symbolizes?

00:08:41.080 Well, I noticed for me, I noticed once I grew my hair, I had my hair long when I was

00:08:45.300 young.

00:08:45.880 Yeah.

00:08:46.160 And then I tried a little bit more to like assimilate kind of, I feel like when I, whenever

00:08:50.360 I moved to Los Angeles and I had my hair short, I think I was trying to, you know,

00:08:54.720 audition for sitcoms and different things.

00:08:57.340 And then once I grew my hair long again, I just felt, I just felt like myself.

00:09:03.600 Yeah.

00:09:04.140 I felt a lot more human.

00:09:06.120 Mm hmm.

00:09:06.760 Um, one time somebody, there was a, uh, somebody cut the back of my hair off.

00:09:14.720 Off like on purpose, they did it without me knowing a barber, um, like in like a vindictive

00:09:22.880 way.

00:09:23.280 Mm hmm.

00:09:24.020 And, um, and I didn't realize it until later.

00:09:27.600 And if I felt like dehumanized, even like I felt, I don't know if that's the word, but

00:09:33.500 I felt almost felt like when native Americans, when they would take the other person's scalp,

00:09:38.140 it, it made me think of that.

00:09:40.180 Like I felt like they, I don't know, I feel like your hair, it really has something to

00:09:44.680 do with you, you know?

00:09:45.840 Yeah.

00:09:46.440 Well, you're, you're channeling a little Patrick Swayze at the moment.

00:09:49.840 Oh, that's a good point.

00:09:50.800 Yeah.

00:09:51.160 Yeah.

00:09:51.680 That's what I'm thinking.

00:09:52.460 Hopefully non-cancerous, you know, cause I think he probably had, I think he had, but

00:09:55.920 he smoked a lot, I think.

00:09:57.320 Yeah.

00:09:57.620 I don't know about his.

00:09:58.560 Yes.

00:09:58.760 I just, I'm thinking that, or you could, you, or like a really fun, you know, metal band

00:10:05.420 from, from seventies.

00:10:07.360 Yeah.

00:10:07.680 That's the other, those are good associations by the way.

00:10:11.160 Yeah.

00:10:11.380 No, it feels good.

00:10:12.300 Yeah.

00:10:12.480 No, I don't feel like it's, I feel like it's a warm judgment, you know?

00:10:15.380 Yeah.

00:10:16.000 Um, but yeah, I just thought about that.

00:10:18.380 I was like, Oh, Malcolm has interesting hair.

00:10:20.220 His hair makes me believe that he is smart.

00:10:23.140 Is there like, does his hair mean anything to him?

00:10:26.660 Does it, did he like pick it up from somewhere?

00:10:30.360 Cause my hair does make me feel like a lot more comfortable as myself.

00:10:34.260 Um, I don't, some people call my hair a mullet haircut.

00:10:38.340 I don't think of it like that.

00:10:39.340 I just think of, this is how I feel most comfortable.

00:10:42.680 And this feels, um, and it feels like your hair.

00:10:46.600 It's like a, it's an expression of you kind of, it's like, you know, it almost picks up

00:10:51.580 signals.

00:10:52.040 I think some people are, I don't know if this is true or not.

00:10:54.800 I might just be saying this and think that it's true, but like, like some animals have

00:11:01.140 like little hair on them and it makes, it picks up information.

00:11:04.360 Mm-hmm.

00:11:05.280 Mm-hmm.

00:11:06.060 Do you think that's.

00:11:08.340 Well, I've always had, you know, I had my mom's hair.

00:11:10.620 My mom is black.

00:11:11.920 So I have, uh, a version of her hair and, um, I historically, my hair is short at the

00:11:20.380 moment.

00:11:20.640 It has been much longer.

00:11:22.120 Um, when I was a kid, it was much longer.

00:11:23.820 And, um, I think I liked it because it was, you know, I grew up in an area that did not

00:11:32.040 have a lot of, was very, very kind of white, very, there was very little curly hair going

00:11:38.100 on where I grew up.

00:11:39.000 Yeah.

00:11:39.260 And I think I sort of liked the idea that, um, I stood out a little bit.

00:11:44.460 Yeah.

00:11:44.860 Seemed kind of, I think that was the main attraction of it was just, it was an element of difference.

00:11:50.740 Yeah.

00:11:51.460 I can relate to that.

00:11:52.380 I grew up in an area that had like a lot of clean, there was, well, there were some

00:11:55.680 people that had like real clean hair.

00:11:57.620 Like their hair looked like when they slept at, when they were asleep at night, their

00:12:02.520 hair was also asleep.

00:12:04.620 Whereas I've always felt like my, like nothing inside of me has ever gotten a moment of rest.

00:12:11.260 Really?

00:12:12.000 Yeah.

00:12:12.400 I've always felt like even when I'm laying down, like the rest of me is just frenetically

00:12:16.940 trying to just survive in the world.

00:12:18.840 And so I think, um, I remember seeing some people and their hair just looks so comfortable.

00:12:24.480 I was like, God dang boy, that's nice.

00:12:27.140 You know, like their hair looked like it stayed, like, you know, like it just, it had looked

00:12:32.320 like it had conditioner just built into it, you know?

00:12:34.500 Um, well, I don't, uh, do anything to my hair.

00:12:38.740 So I don't comb it.

00:12:40.740 I don't.

00:12:41.820 Do you wash it with like shampoo or you just use water?

00:12:44.180 I just water.

00:12:45.060 Yeah.

00:12:45.260 I mean, it's, it is the most kind of, I don't even pay any attention to it.

00:12:48.300 It just sort of is.

00:12:49.420 Yeah.

00:12:49.700 And then every now and again, I get it cut.

00:12:52.340 Um, and don't, it just, it's kind of exists.

00:12:57.760 Um, yeah, I was just thinking about that because a lot of your book, I read your book.

00:13:03.340 I read your, or one of the, uh, talking with strangers.

00:13:07.140 Oh yeah.

00:13:07.420 Yeah.

00:13:07.700 Talking with strangers.

00:13:08.400 That's the one that I read.

00:13:10.160 Um, and I didn't think I was going to be able to really read it.

00:13:12.500 And then I, I mean, I knew I would, but it was just like, I didn't know if I'd have the

00:13:14.980 time and then I just, it was cool.

00:13:16.880 It was enjoyable.

00:13:17.620 It was, it was interesting.

00:13:18.740 It was easy to read.

00:13:20.360 Um, one thing that I found fascinating in it, like, well, how would you kind of summarize

00:13:24.360 like what the book is sort of about?

00:13:26.080 Like just kind of briefly, just so people can know.

00:13:29.160 And then I had a couple of kinds of things that were interesting.

00:13:32.740 Well, it's a book that tries to figure out why so many of our interactions with strangers

00:13:37.280 go wrong.

00:13:39.700 Um, and cause I was struck when I was writing it by how many of the sort of stories in the

00:13:44.820 news were stories about, uh, you know, Bernie Madoff, the famous Ponzi schemer is a guy that

00:13:53.800 everyone who invested with him, they thought they knew who he was and they were all wrong.

00:13:58.320 Yeah.

00:13:58.720 Uh, I tell a story about a spy in that book who everyone thought they were a loyal American

00:14:06.520 and they weren't.

00:14:07.780 The female, right?

00:14:09.000 Yeah.

00:14:09.240 Yeah.

00:14:09.840 Uh, Montez.

00:14:11.000 Yeah.

00:14:11.440 That was unbelievable.

00:14:13.480 Yeah.

00:14:13.700 She's like one of the, one of the most damaging spies in American history.

00:14:17.780 And she's just like, she's, you know, she's sitting there doing her job for 10 years and

00:14:23.960 no one has a slightest inkling that she might be working.

00:14:26.720 She was working for the Cubans the whole time.

00:14:28.460 Not even her, and her sister and her brother, she had, she had a brother-in-law who worked

00:14:33.160 for the FBI.

00:14:34.200 No, I'm sorry.

00:14:35.160 Her sister worked for the FBI.

00:14:37.060 Yeah.

00:14:37.220 And, uh, and was oblivious to the family.

00:14:40.560 Yeah, that blew my mind.

00:14:41.560 Yeah.

00:14:42.020 There, but they were, you know, and there's, I tell stories about, you know, um, uh, Jerry

00:14:47.320 Sandusky, that, uh, infamous pedophile at Penn State.

00:14:51.320 And, you know, he's, he's, he's in that job for 25 years and like everyone thinks he's

00:14:58.700 just this lovely guy, you know?

00:15:00.400 And so I was, I was really fascinated by that idea that, that, um, you can meet somebody

00:15:08.020 and you can completely miss so much of, misunderstand so much of what makes them tick.

00:15:15.080 Um, and why would we be that way?

00:15:17.840 You would think as human beings that we would be, that evolution would have favored those

00:15:22.960 who were good at figuring out strangers, but it hasn't.

00:15:26.120 The opposite is true, right?

00:15:28.020 Here we are the most, at the finest point of our evolution and we're terrible at this

00:15:33.560 fundamental task.

00:15:34.960 And so that's, that was the kind of puzzle the book tries to unravel.

00:15:38.880 Yeah.

00:15:39.540 Yeah.

00:15:39.940 And it based it kind of on the Sandra, what was the Sandra?

00:15:42.680 Sandra Bland.

00:15:43.440 Yeah.

00:15:43.660 Sandra Bland.

00:15:44.400 It was a case where an officer pulled a woman over and then they ended up getting into an

00:15:51.020 altercation, which almost seems like it shouldn't have happened.

00:15:53.900 Yeah.

00:15:54.180 Um, and then the, they arrest the woman, she ends up in jail.

00:16:00.540 Then I'm just kind of like summarizing, obviously.

00:16:03.160 And then she takes her own life.

00:16:04.960 Yeah.

00:16:05.460 It was one of the more, one of the, one of the more kind of, remember there was that

00:16:08.840 string of cases right around the kind of rise of the black lives matter movement about

00:16:14.180 African-Americans being, having these kind of lethal encounters with police officers.

00:16:19.200 And hers was one of the most high profile.

00:16:21.820 And, um, what was crazy about that one was that the, because the officers, uh, he's got

00:16:29.860 a video camera running the entire time we have, we know exactly what happened between the two

00:16:34.900 of them.

00:16:35.180 Yeah.

00:16:35.760 And he fun, he meets someone, she runs us, she rolls through a stop sign.

00:16:41.980 He pulls her over and he becomes convinced really early on that she's up to no good.

00:16:47.500 She's got drugs, she's something, and she's not any of those things.

00:16:51.180 She's just unhappy.

00:16:52.880 And he reads all of her signals of unhappiness as signals of threat and dangerousness.

00:17:01.680 And so he, like, he gets her wrong, right?

00:17:04.180 And so the question is, why does he get her wrong?

00:17:06.800 How could, here's a, she's a young woman.

00:17:08.760 She's driven a long way to go for a job interview.

00:17:12.160 Her life has not been going well.

00:17:13.440 She's trying to start over in this little town in Texas and she's had some mental health

00:17:19.340 issues in the past, but not insurmountable ones, but she's just someone who's going through

00:17:23.680 a lot.

00:17:24.400 Yeah.

00:17:24.760 And this cop pulls her over and convinced that she's a criminal who's got a gun and

00:17:28.460 maybe drugs and could potentially harm him.

00:17:31.420 And like, that's, there's a big difference between unhappy and being potentially violent,

00:17:36.340 dangerous.

00:17:36.700 And so my question is, how does a police officer, who you would think would be good

00:17:41.580 at that, right?

00:17:43.140 At being able to distinguish threat from unhappiness.

00:17:48.160 Yeah.

00:17:49.400 How did he get it?

00:17:50.340 And so I use that case as the way into the book.

00:17:53.340 Right.

00:17:53.760 Which is this, let's use this to try and figure out why we're bad at this.

00:17:57.320 Yeah.

00:17:57.700 I loved it.

00:17:58.220 I really, I didn't like, I loved kind of like, I didn't know about that.

00:18:01.540 I wasn't familiar with that case.

00:18:02.620 Right.

00:18:02.820 Obviously I'm familiar with like a lot of interactions that you see where with police

00:18:08.320 and black people, you know, it's, it's a pretty common kind of occurrence that, you know, where

00:18:13.000 there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of uncertainty.

00:18:16.920 It's funny.

00:18:17.520 Cause when I watched the video, cause then I, cause then it led me, then I went and watched

00:18:20.800 the video online and it felt to me like, yeah, the policeman took some offense to what

00:18:28.180 she did, he took some offense to some behavior of hers.

00:18:34.320 I don't know if he felt like she was like a dismissive of him or, you know, immediately

00:18:42.860 untrusting, which has to kind of also suck for a police officer.

00:18:46.380 If you are a most trusting guy, you come up and you're con and then everybody's always

00:18:51.060 just like, you're untrustworthy.

00:18:55.280 Well, he, he's way too quick to jump to a conclusion about her.

00:18:59.960 And that's one of the.

00:19:00.540 He seemed a little high strung.

00:19:01.920 Yeah.

00:19:02.260 And she also seemed high strung.

00:19:04.300 Yeah.

00:19:04.700 And so it's interesting.

00:19:05.900 Cause also we had, um, we had a police officer on a while back and, uh, he was saying the most,

00:19:11.560 the, the number one cause of death amongst police officers is suicide.

00:19:15.200 Yes.

00:19:15.740 It's incredibly stressful profession.

00:19:18.180 Unbelievable.

00:19:18.660 It's like, so the, the whole into the whole thing is all, it's just, it's all interesting

00:19:23.080 that what a stressful job it's like.

00:19:26.280 And then you have her who's a stress, who's obviously dealing with a lot of stress and stuff

00:19:31.840 in her own life.

00:19:32.520 And so then you have this meeting of just, I mean, it's, it's a lot to put on the fact

00:19:38.640 that somebody just rolled a stops, you know, it's like something that's not that severe.

00:19:43.060 Yeah.

00:19:43.940 Um, I mean, a lot of that has to do, I concluded was, is about time.

00:19:48.160 You know, the problem is that he's rushing and if you're, he rushes to a conclusion, he

00:19:54.900 rushes to kind of deal with her.

00:19:57.420 He rushes to find out what she's all about.

00:20:00.540 He jumps to a judgment about her.

00:20:04.300 And, you know, the, those are, when you're rushing, the risk of making an error just goes

00:20:10.460 up dramatically.

00:20:12.040 And his, it's a, you know, that's one of the lessons I take away from the book, which

00:20:16.480 is that getting people right requires an enormous amount of patience.

00:20:21.560 Um, and, um, we have to particularly a job, a high stress, high stakes job like policing,

00:20:28.940 we have to build patience into these kinds of situations.

00:20:34.360 You know, teach police officers that you don't have to resolve this in two minutes, you know,

00:20:41.020 you can, you pull her over, you take some time to get to know who she is before, you

00:20:46.600 know, we're not gonna, you're not on the clock.

00:20:49.020 And by the way, many police officers are on the clock.

00:20:52.520 That's part of the problem that they have supervisors who are measuring their productivity

00:20:56.320 and say, you've got to resolve every encounter within.

00:20:58.820 That's an incredible mistake.

00:21:00.940 Um, doctors are the same way.

00:21:02.920 You go to the doctor, doctors are on the clock.

00:21:05.760 It's one of the reasons why they get things wrong.

00:21:08.480 They don't listen to you.

00:21:09.360 What is that they've got 10 patients at the door and an expectation they have to get through

00:21:14.560 all 10 in the next, you know, that's that, that idea we confuse, we get so obsessed with

00:21:21.240 productivity in many things that we sacrifice the kind of, uh, uh, the accuracy and the meaningfulness

00:21:28.860 of the encounter.

00:21:30.560 Yeah.

00:21:31.000 That's a great way to say it.

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00:25:00.200 Yeah, I would totally agree.

00:25:01.120 I think it's almost a micro look at kind of larger things that are going on in our entire society, you know?

00:25:10.240 Yeah.

00:25:10.460 That there's not enough long-term, even a moment doesn't have the longevity that it feels like it used to have.

00:25:20.120 Yeah.

00:25:20.660 You know, I talk a lot about how I don't even think, like every moment is captured now, you know?

00:25:25.440 So it's like a moment used to have this whimsical value that it was like you can't ever replicate it.

00:25:31.340 It's like, you know, it's like a flash of lightning, you know?

00:25:34.880 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.

00:25:41.700 Like, this is what happened.

00:25:43.520 And then now we capture every moment, you know?

00:25:46.940 And we watch them so many times that it's the value of something used to never be able to be replicated.

00:25:55.620 And now it's, everything is so replicatable or replicatable.

00:26:00.920 This reminds me of, I did a podcast, an episode of my podcast, Revisionist History, a couple of years back on, I stumbled on it totally by accident.

00:26:10.260 I met this guy who's an investigator, works with police departments to investigate police shootings.

00:26:16.680 And I was at his house, office, for some other reason, and he showed me this tape.

00:26:24.540 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?

00:26:38.300 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.

00:26:49.540 And then he walked me through, we had the video of the whole thing.

00:26:53.900 He sits me down and he walks me through the video frame by frame by frame by frame.

00:26:59.480 And he proves that actually it's not what you think.

00:27:03.440 This was a guy who had all kinds of mental health problems and he wanted the police to kill him.

00:27:08.040 It's a well-known phenomenon of death by cop, where somebody does something and is willing his own.

00:27:14.540 And he's like, you don't catch it the first time you watch this video.

00:27:19.900 You've got to slow it down, break it down frame by frame, have some context about the case.

00:27:26.820 And then you realize it's 100% the opposite of what I thought.

00:27:31.320 The guy is, as they shoot him, he's going, he's trying to get them to shoot him more when they don't.

00:27:36.780 Like, and you watch it, he breaks and he shows you like what's going on.

00:27:40.080 And it was this incredibly, you know, it's a, it's not a, people don't want to hear that interpretation sometimes.

00:27:47.540 But it was, I just remember I was sitting, I drove all the way to hit a office outside of San Antonio, Texas.

00:27:54.240 And middle of nowhere, it's really interesting guy.

00:27:57.000 Not a guy I would normally ever meet or hang out with.

00:28:00.300 His world is very different from mine.

00:28:02.720 And he just sat me down.

00:28:04.460 I just remember him saying, I've got to show you this video.

00:28:06.860 It was one of my favorite episodes of, of, I've done of, of my podcast.

00:28:10.480 I just thought it was like, and the way I told the story was we started out and, you know,

00:28:17.480 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.

00:28:23.360 And then slowly you kind of peel off the layers of the onion.

00:28:27.160 Yeah.

00:28:27.540 And then you realize, oh my God, I got it wrong.

00:28:29.840 Yeah.

00:28:30.240 Right.

00:28:30.600 It was like a kind of, I always remember that.

00:28:32.560 It was like, it was like, it was one of those cases where, I don't know if you ever had this,

00:28:37.220 where you're trying to tell a story and you think it's going to be really complicated.

00:28:41.400 You sit down with one person for 40 minutes and you think, oh my God, that's it.

00:28:46.340 That's, that's it.

00:28:47.360 That's the whole story.

00:28:48.120 Like, I don't need to do anything else.

00:28:49.120 I just need to like run this thing as it happened to me.

00:28:52.440 But it was a very memorable day.

00:28:54.700 Well, a lot of your, a lot of that talking with strangers was, was kind of like what you just kind of described.

00:28:59.440 You know, there was a lot of things where I was like, wow, I, I'm amazed that that wasn't seen by people.

00:29:05.400 I'm amazed how like, like how people would get a certain moment wrong.

00:29:13.320 How some people would like, you talked about like defaulting to truth.

00:29:15.560 A lot of times people want to believe the person.

00:29:17.940 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.

00:29:30.940 Yeah.

00:29:31.580 I found a lot of that stuff really, really fascinating about the story.

00:29:35.400 And then I liked how in the end it just comes back to this case of this officer and this woman.

00:29:40.360 Right.

00:29:41.520 And also, and when I was watching the officer and the, and the woman and that tape, there was something about when the woman started smoking, you know, I wonder if that like a, cause I think with police, there's like probably an expectation that things go a certain way.

00:29:56.180 You know?

00:29:58.400 So I wonder if that like offended the officer or something like, you know, you just don't know sometimes.

00:30:03.880 Because even though we can have an idea of everything, it still comes down also to that.

00:30:08.060 There's two people who have had their, their own unique lives up until that moment, you know?

00:30:13.040 So, um, yeah, I think he thought that her smoking was kind of, that there was something dismissive, dismissive and also slightly sinister about it.

00:30:23.000 Like, you know, that he, cause he had in his head that she might be a potential bad guy, right?

00:30:29.620 Drugs, guns, guns, something.

00:30:32.260 Do you think that like, or I, I, I didn't read all the case.

00:30:34.600 I didn't see.

00:30:35.000 Yeah.

00:30:35.380 I mean, I know.

00:30:36.000 I think, you know, he's, he, he's, he's got a variety of kind of scenarios in his head when he stops her.

00:30:43.220 And one of them is she's running drugs and she's armed.

00:30:47.100 Oh, wow.

00:30:48.140 And I think so.

00:30:49.260 I think any police officer who, when you stop someone, you will, you always have in your head a scenario where they're a bad person.

00:30:56.960 I see.

00:30:57.460 Right.

00:30:57.600 So not just because, not because she was black, just because of any person.

00:31:01.240 Just, yeah.

00:31:01.920 Right.

00:31:02.360 You've got to think, I'm stomping them.

00:31:04.660 I'm, you know, as a police officer, when you approach a car.

00:31:08.640 Yeah.

00:31:09.220 Uh, you, you know, you are running the risk that they're armed and they might shoot you.

00:31:14.280 Right.

00:31:14.480 That's a good point.

00:31:14.880 I see what you're saying.

00:31:15.640 He's, he's got that in his car.

00:31:17.220 He's got 10 different scenarios in his head.

00:31:19.640 And one of them is that.

00:31:20.420 None of them are great, probably.

00:31:21.180 Yeah.

00:31:21.460 And he, and the fact that she's smoking, I think he kind of, that adds credence to the, one of the scenarios that says that she's a kind of a weirdo.

00:31:30.660 Yeah.

00:31:30.920 Like something's not, not right or something.

00:31:33.440 Why would she start smoking?

00:31:34.780 She's a film noir fan or something.

00:31:35.580 Yeah.

00:31:35.980 The minute, the minute, minute I walk, you know, minute I get there, she smokes, starts smoking.

00:31:41.160 Like it's just, I don't know.

00:31:42.920 He just sort of, he's categorizing her as that there's something off with her or something wrong with her.

00:31:48.600 And that adds to that expectation, I think.

00:31:51.440 Yeah.

00:31:51.820 I think I kind of took it as like, this seems like kind of like a white cop kind of guy.

00:31:56.640 So I start to generalize in my head, they kind of have a, and all police officers,

00:32:00.920 I think have a certain way that they kind of expect things to go.

00:32:04.940 Like they get an understanding of this is how things go when you stop someone, you know, you tell them what's going on.

00:32:11.480 They comply really to a certain way.

00:32:14.380 And then everybody goes on about their business based kind of upon what the cop decides how things should go.

00:32:21.360 Yeah.

00:32:21.700 Right.

00:32:22.280 So I think I, to me, it seemed like some of the lady's actions like, yeah.

00:32:26.180 And the smoking kind of conflicted with that.

00:32:29.080 Um, but it was real, just going back in 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.

00:32:39.340 Like if you put the information, like if you put people before a judge in a court, um,

00:32:46.080 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,

00:32:56.340 God, they, they got it wrong more than the machine did.

00:33:01.540 Is that a right way to say it?

00:33:03.440 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.

00:33:12.640 Yeah.

00:33:13.020 Yeah.

00:33:13.200 I have.

00:33:13.720 And that's, no, I mean, I'm talking hypothetically.

00:33:16.660 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:33:17.540 Sorry.

00:33:18.040 But, um, yes.

00:33:19.000 The, so the judge has to make a prediction about you.

00:33:22.160 And the question is how good is the prediction?

00:33:24.440 Right.

00:33:24.860 And a lot rise in that prediction.

00:33:26.320 If you go out and commit another crime, the judge looks bad.

00:33:29.460 Um, yeah, it's why they cut people's hair and shave them and put them in a suit.

00:33:33.000 And exactly.

00:33:33.660 It's about that perception.

00:33:35.220 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, feed them into a computer or, uh, an AI system.

00:33:51.860 Right.

00:33:52.500 And have them have the computer make a prediction, or I can give the same information to the judge and say, meet the person.

00:33:58.620 So you're giving the judge more information.

00:34:00.840 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.

00:34:08.900 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?

00:34:19.340 And the answer is no, they're worse.

00:34:21.340 Wow.

00:34:21.480 In other words, meeting somebody makes you worse at predicting what they're going to be doing then.

00:34:27.280 So it brings into question all kinds of things.

00:34:29.880 Like, do job interviews, this is another thing, by the way, I've been obsessed with my podcast, Revision's History.

00:34:35.780 Actually, I, we've done a, we did a show on job interviews.

00:34:39.100 And the truth is that, like, there's not a lot of evidence that in a job interview, meeting the person helps.

00:34:47.600 Right.

00:34:48.040 And I did a funny thing where I interviewed, I've been hiring assistants for 20 years.

00:34:53.760 So I went back to all my old assistants and I had them tell the story of how I hired them.

00:34:57.680 And because I don't believe in job interviews, I hire them in the most kind of random way.

00:35:03.520 I'm like, you know, I don't even bother asking questions.

00:35:07.780 I don't ask them.

00:35:08.760 I make a rule of never asking them where they went to school.

00:35:12.200 So it was funny.

00:35:13.080 It was a funny episode because I was interviewing all these old assistants and I had forgotten, like, how totally random my hiring practices are.

00:35:19.040 And by the way, I've never had a mistake.

00:35:22.100 Actually, only once did I hire someone who didn't work out and they left within two weeks.

00:35:26.020 I'm still in touch with most of them.

00:35:27.480 One of my old assistants is, like, one of the most trusted employees at my podcast company.

00:35:33.000 Oh, that's awesome.

00:35:33.820 But 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.

00:35:44.620 But you can't.

00:35:45.880 It's nonsense.

00:35:47.220 So you might as well, my point is, I just rolled the dice.

00:35:50.060 What the hell?

00:35:50.520 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.

00:36:00.180 They showed up on time.

00:36:01.660 So, I don't know, they seem reasonably, you know, they're like, I'm actually, I try to be nice to my assistant.

00:36:07.620 And if you're nice to people, they usually work hard.

00:36:09.420 And so, like, I pick people who have got a college education, so I know they know something about the world.

00:36:16.700 That's all I need.

00:36:18.060 Why don't I need anything else?

00:36:19.080 Yeah.

00:36:19.640 You know?

00:36:19.980 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:36:21.100 I found my producers for podcasts, and I found them, like, one of the first guys, just a random dude, just emailed me.

00:36:27.020 He's like, hey, man, I can do the job.

00:36:28.720 And I was like, this guy sounds wonderful.

00:36:31.260 And he was a great producer for a long time and still is.

00:36:36.140 But it's so crazy sometimes how you find different people.

00:36:38.880 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.

00:36:46.680 This is what's easiest.

00:36:47.900 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.

00:37:03.680 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.

00:37:16.060 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, and the coach reliably turns them into excellent basketball players or football players.

00:37:30.960 And other coaches, it only works with very, very specific people.

00:37:34.540 It makes you realize, oh, it's about the coach, not about the player.

00:37:37.560 You know how they always talk about general managers in sports, and they say, that guy's really great at drafting great athletes out of college.

00:37:48.260 And I always think, maybe they're not good at drafting.

00:37:51.020 Maybe they're just good at making sure those players succeed once they arrive.

00:37:55.840 That's the magical piece of it.

00:37:58.560 Yeah, I guess that's interesting.

00:38:00.460 Do you think, like, on a larger level that we do that, that that's something that we've lost?

00:38:05.500 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.

00:38:23.380 You know, and a lot of purpose has been lost over the years by, like, I kind of romanticized that people had more purpose through their jobs back in the day.

00:38:33.060 Like, there was a factory in their town, and they made tables there, and there was a pride in the town.

00:38:38.600 This is, you know, we have a table at our house that our father made at the factory in our town.

00:38:42.620 There was a sense of pride, and that companies were like, yeah, you're going to move up in the company.

00:38:46.800 And then, so then, you know, there was just more of, like, it felt like you were, the company itself was also nurturing and wanted you to succeed.

00:38:57.960 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.

00:39:12.400 But it's not even about anybody, you know, building up, like, equity in the human being anymore.

00:39:18.160 Does that make any sense?

00:39:19.220 Yeah, you know, a friend of mine once, I remember having a conversation with him, he was a consultant, management consultant, and he was talking about that we're happiest when we have three kinds of kind of validation.

00:39:35.800 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.

00:39:49.660 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.

00:39:57.740 So we were talking about police officers right now.

00:40:00.080 There are plenty of police officers who like their job and like the people they work with.

00:40:07.760 But now they're operating in an environment where the world, the outside world, is very skeptical and hostile and suspicious of police officers.

00:40:16.220 It makes it really hard to be happy in your job as a police officer, right?

00:40:19.360 You got two of the three things.

00:40:20.700 You need all three.

00:40:22.080 It's a nightmare, yeah.

00:40:22.860 But you can go down the, you know, I was talking, we ran it on my podcast, I did this wonderful discussion with these two fantastic women who were coaches.

00:40:36.620 They coached youth sports, girls sports.

00:40:39.620 And they were talking about how like a lot of people are now quitting coaching.

00:40:44.600 Coaching has become really hard.

00:40:46.400 And I said, well, why has it become hard?

00:40:48.960 Do you still like, does coaching make you feel good?

00:40:52.120 Absolutely.

00:40:52.760 Love it.

00:40:53.640 Greatest thing I ever did.

00:40:54.940 Do the kids you coach like being coached by you?

00:40:59.440 Totally.

00:41:00.380 I'm, you know, I'm friends with them for years later.

00:41:03.160 It's some of the most important experiences of my life are like, so why don't, why aren't people quitting coaching?

00:41:08.320 They're like, oh, it's the parents.

00:41:10.720 Parents are driving us crazy, torturing us, screaming at us, calling us at all hours.

00:41:15.980 So it's like they have the personal thing.

00:41:18.140 They love it.

00:41:18.560 They have the immediate feedback and love from the kids they're coaching.

00:41:23.120 But it's the outside world of the parents on the sidelines who are just making them miserable.

00:41:29.360 Right?

00:41:29.620 You got two of three and two of three is not enough.

00:41:32.200 So when I hear you, what you're talking about, I'm here.

00:41:34.360 That's what you're saying a version of.

00:41:35.840 You can have a job that you like, but you're talking about the second and third level is not there.

00:41:42.780 Yeah.

00:41:43.380 The company isn't giving you, you know, isn't recognizing what you're doing.

00:41:48.520 And the broader world, you're anonymous to the broader world.

00:41:51.240 There isn't.

00:41:51.920 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.

00:42:01.020 You made the table.

00:42:02.120 And every time someone saw this beautiful table.

00:42:04.500 Like, Ricky, go get your table and bring it out here.

00:42:06.820 And everybody like, he did.

00:42:07.480 Yeah, they understood.

00:42:08.320 They were giving you, an outsider was giving you recognition for something that was done with pride and with skill.

00:42:17.320 Yeah.

00:42:17.980 And that you can't, like, it's not enough for just you to appreciate what you're doing as a value.

00:42:24.840 That's interesting.

00:42:25.600 And I think, yeah, a lot of people probably don't know that.

00:42:27.500 And so I think a lot of people probably wonder, why am I not feeling some fulfillment?

00:42:32.180 Why am I not feeling this or that, you know?

00:42:34.260 And I think, but yeah, I think that's one of the things that lit, like, that leads people to a lot of unhappiness.

00:42:40.720 We were talking about it with, like, school shootings, what leads some of these people to get so caught up.

00:42:44.960 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.

00:42:54.660 And you're really at the whims of, 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?

00:43:05.640 It's almost like a pair of words box in a way.

00:43:08.860 But yeah, we just had been talking a lot about purpose.

00:43:11.860 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.

00:43:28.500 So I've been thinking a lot about this.

00:43:29.740 And we have an episode where we talk a lot about mass shootings.

00:43:34.700 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.

00:43:54.660 And there is no, they've been cut off from the third layer.

00:44:01.560 They're not checking their ideas against what the broader world looks like.

00:44:06.580 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.

00:44:23.100 Like if you look at people who have been involved in mass shootings, they're immersed in that world.

00:44:31.960 They know, they can talk obsessively for hours about like the kids who did the Columbine shooting.

00:44:37.780 Oh yeah, there's bootleg manifestos.

00:44:39.560 There's people getting like, yeah, have you heard this manifesto?

00:44:41.800 Have you read this copy of it?

00:44:43.120 It's its own little world, hermetically seen world.

00:44:46.800 And like, there's no connection to the kind of broader society.

00:44:51.200 And so they come to think of, they come to think, they get, they're getting all of their validation from that first layer.

00:44:57.100 Right?

00:44:57.680 That's what sort of, 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.

00:45:13.700 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?

00:45:22.720 Whether it's good or bad, that there's this other energy from the other side.

00:45:27.260 It's almost like the mirror where you used to look in a mirror and you would get like an earnest reflection of yourself.

00:45:32.460 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.

00:45:37.900 But at least the mirror was going to give you, it was an honest reflection.

00:45:43.420 There was no ability to change the mirror unless you were in a fun house or something.

00:45:47.620 The mirror was the mirror.

00:45:48.680 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.

00:46:01.400 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.

00:46:07.140 We're looking in there for so much validation.

00:46:08.960 It's really weird when the mirror now has the path, it's like, that's fricking 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?

00:46:27.280 From the internal, your immediate world of people who share your community and then the broader world.

00:46:35.020 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.

00:46:53.280 Yeah, that's real scary, man.

00:46:55.800 One of the things, this may seem like a stretch, but I thought about this a lot.

00:46:59.020 You know, the, uh, I'm, I'm old enough to remember when television was kind of a mass cultural form.

00:47:10.200 So, you know, when I was in my twenties, every single person I knew watched Meryl's Place.

00:47:19.400 Everyone I knew.

00:47:20.260 Oh yeah.

00:47:20.560 I could, I could go and if I saw someone who was 25 years old, anywhere in North America, I could start a conversation about Meryl's Place and they would be able to, even if they didn't watch it, it was in the air, right?

00:47:36.780 Same thing.

00:47:37.280 I remember.

00:47:38.160 Yeah.

00:47:38.520 We watched 90210 just to give you a similar.

00:47:40.400 So it was like kind of the, the, a little bit of the younger, but sister or brother show.

00:47:43.900 Exactly.

00:47:44.180 That had the same function.

00:47:45.420 Right.

00:47:45.600 But there's tons of television shows in that era.

00:47:47.500 I remember walking down a street in Manhattan when the last, the season, the, the series finale of Seinfeld aired.

00:47:56.000 Wow.

00:47:56.620 And the, it was, the city was as quiet.

00:47:59.100 There was like, the restaurants were empty.

00:48:01.440 Everybody was home watching Seinfeld.

00:48:04.720 That is impossible today.

00:48:06.920 Yeah.

00:48:07.400 Would never happen.

00:48:08.720 But what's in, so right then, back then, everyone had the shared experience of a certain set of stories.

00:48:17.220 Seinfeld.

00:48:18.000 And I don't think, I, I, we did this episode two seasons ago or last season on Will and Grace.

00:48:26.020 I think Will and Grace was the last show that had that kind of.

00:48:31.000 Shared experience.

00:48:31.660 Shared experience.

00:48:32.400 And that's why the show was so powerful in changing attitudes about gay marriage and all kinds of things.

00:48:37.860 And the idea that you've, the only thing that's left now kind of is the Super Bowl.

00:48:43.180 But even that, not really.

00:48:45.780 The Oscars don't have the same shared experience power they used to.

00:48:49.000 No, they're reviled.

00:48:49.900 I don't know if reviled means anything.

00:48:51.400 Yeah.

00:48:51.680 I don't know.

00:48:52.220 So there's nothing, I don't, can you have a society that works if there are no broad shared experiences?

00:48:58.740 Um, I don't know.

00:48:59.940 I, that worry, that's the sort of thing that worries me a lot.

00:49:01.700 It's weird to think of it in terms of, to think of like 90210 as something that brought us all together.

00:49:06.560 No, but it makes perfect sense.

00:49:07.460 I can relate to that when you say that.

00:49:09.120 Yeah.

00:49:09.460 Because it used to be, I mean, you know, like there was a, a couple of years ago on Joe Rogan,

00:49:13.960 everybody got it really into when that had, I think it was Sebastian Younger book or something.

00:49:18.100 It was about, um, oh, uh, tribe.

00:49:23.500 Oh yeah.

00:49:23.880 Yeah.

00:49:24.080 What that book, what was that book called?

00:49:25.360 I can't remember.

00:49:25.880 I know what you're talking about.

00:49:26.780 I think it was called Zach.

00:49:27.640 You know what it was?

00:49:29.160 Okay.

00:49:29.680 Into the wild.

00:49:30.540 It wasn't into the wild.

00:49:31.580 No, this was the one where it was about how in tribes, when we're in smaller groups,

00:49:40.500 it all made sense.

00:49:41.820 The amount of connectivity we're supposed to have, the checks and balances human wise.

00:49:45.820 And even when you're saying the shared experience, like if a lion came into the village or if

00:49:52.120 somebody came in selling some new wares, everybody in the village knew about it.

00:49:56.980 That person would leave.

00:49:57.700 You could all talk about it.

00:49:58.740 It was a share.

00:49:59.340 Like there was all, there was some shared, everybody had the same shared experiences.

00:50:03.220 So you all had this, you all had this template on what you were kind of connecting about,

00:50:07.700 you know, things to talk about.

00:50:09.420 Yeah.

00:50:09.760 But I've never, I never thought about that.

00:50:11.440 Yeah.

00:50:11.640 There's, there's not that many anymore.

00:50:13.920 So you kind of all wander around in your own little world and it starts to feel that

00:50:18.360 way.

00:50:19.120 Yeah.

00:50:19.560 Yeah.

00:50:19.920 And it's kind of scary.

00:50:22.880 I mean, and also it means it's also, we were talking in very lofty terms on some level,

00:50:27.880 it's less fun.

00:50:29.360 It was kind of fun when the feeling it's so much more fun to watch a television show.

00:50:35.020 And it's funny.

00:50:36.000 People under the age of 30 have no, or maybe 25.

00:50:41.200 They've never felt, it breaks my heart.

00:50:43.060 They've never felt this feeling.

00:50:44.420 There was that feeling you had, you're watching the show and you understand it.

00:50:47.960 Not only does everyone, you know, watching that same show, they're watching that same

00:50:51.980 show at the same time.

00:50:54.060 It's amazing.

00:50:55.040 It's like, it felt like it's the same feeling you have when you watch sports.

00:50:59.140 That's part of the power.

00:51:00.360 You know that everyone's watching it at the same time.

00:51:01.980 But this was the idea that a story, a drama on thing was you were watching it like you're

00:51:08.460 watching sports.

00:51:09.400 Oh, right.

00:51:10.060 Yeah.

00:51:10.320 And you would call when it was over, you'd call your friends and you'd say, could you

00:51:13.880 believe just what happened to it?

00:51:15.320 Yeah.

00:51:15.680 Dude.

00:51:16.000 I remember there'd be domestic disputes, right?

00:51:18.360 And on, on our street.

00:51:19.400 Right.

00:51:19.700 And they would break them up five minutes before, like in living color came on or like

00:51:24.960 some great TV show.

00:51:26.100 Like, look guys, we know you guys need to, you know, we know there's like two spouses

00:51:30.340 beating the shit out of each other out here.

00:51:31.920 In living color is a perfect example of a show like this where, yeah, we're like,

00:51:35.560 you had to go watch the segments.

00:51:37.020 Remember?

00:51:37.300 You had to watch, you, you had to, and like everyone I know discovered that show at the

00:51:42.260 same time.

00:51:42.780 And it was just like, oh my God, this is like, who is this guy?

00:51:45.720 Dave Chappelle.

00:51:46.200 Like suddenly Dave Chappelle, you're talking about Dave Chappelle when you like go to the

00:51:50.200 office.

00:51:50.760 Like, oh, you mean the Chappelle show?

00:51:51.980 You mean?

00:51:52.440 No, no.

00:51:52.720 Cause he was on it.

00:51:53.620 He was on it.

00:51:54.080 No, he wasn't in it.

00:51:54.780 No, I'm telling you.

00:51:55.420 I'm mixing up the, it was the Wyans brothers.

00:51:57.480 Yeah.

00:51:57.780 The Wyans brothers.

00:51:58.640 Yeah.

00:51:59.180 Yeah.

00:51:59.320 Yeah.

00:51:59.600 The one.

00:51:59.880 Jim Carrey was on that show.

00:52:02.240 Yeah.

00:52:02.460 The Wyans brothers.

00:52:03.500 And then a bunch of other people were.

00:52:05.380 Who was on that show, Zach?

00:52:06.460 You got it?

00:52:09.400 Yeah.

00:52:09.820 Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, Ivor Wayans.

00:52:13.500 All the Wayans, bro.

00:52:14.620 They get it.

00:52:15.140 David Alan Greer.

00:52:16.200 David Alan Greer.

00:52:17.040 Yeah.

00:52:17.840 Yep.

00:52:18.260 David Alan Greer was so good.

00:52:19.760 That's right.

00:52:20.800 Jamie Foxx.

00:52:21.240 Jamie Foxx was on that show.

00:52:22.600 That's right.

00:52:23.820 Jennifer Lopez was a dancer on there.

00:52:25.520 She was a dancer on it.

00:52:26.440 That's right.

00:52:26.700 She was one of the fly girls.

00:52:28.080 But dude, I remember there would literally be, the cops would be there.

00:52:31.980 There would be a husband and wife fist fighting in the street outside of our apartment.

00:52:35.660 And they'd be like, look, guys, we got to wrap this up.

00:52:40.720 You know what I'm saying?

00:52:41.540 90210 is going to be on in five minutes.

00:52:43.640 So either get your last punches in.

00:52:46.080 Let's agree.

00:52:46.680 We're not going to press charges.

00:52:48.460 The cops will take the liquor and we're going to, everybody needs to go sit in front of their TVs.

00:52:52.020 Dude, I remember getting to the, 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.

00:53:00.840 And you fucking were the king, right?

00:53:03.300 And I remember rubbing my legs like this as hard as I could.

00:53:06.320 Like almost trying to create as much energy on my side of the television for whatever program was going to be presented right there, you know?

00:53:12.320 And my siblings would try to jockey for position and I was just like, I'm going to get as much of the information.

00:53:18.100 I'm going to be, I am right here to be transmitted to, you know?

00:53:21.400 Like this angle, a little bit off center of the TV, you might miss something.

00:53:24.380 Because remember back then, because the TV's tiny.

00:53:26.860 Oh yeah.

00:53:27.480 I mean, that thing was 11 or 12 inches, dude.

00:53:29.660 I remember we would draw extra TV on the outside of it.

00:53:32.500 Like it didn't even make any sense because it didn't get any transmission.

00:53:35.780 But, uh, but there was something about that, that shared experience.

00:53:40.220 We would all go outside then you're right.

00:53:42.740 We would impersonate the characters from an in living color.

00:53:45.700 We would act out the different things.

00:53:48.140 There was a lot more shared experience.

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00:57:02.460 And that's why it's one of the things that I love about kind of like the way that you like

00:57:21.720 think and write and stuff.

00:57:22.820 It's like, you kind of like have an idea and this is my summation.

00:57:26.440 This isn't a judgment, but you have an idea and then you kind of just meander away.

00:57:30.900 That's just how things connect.

00:57:32.340 And it's nice, man.

00:57:33.880 It's a nice look at life.

00:57:35.180 You know, that's what I really thought about, uh, reading, uh, thinking, talking with strangers

00:57:40.240 was like, Oh wow, this is a lot of neat things that I hadn't really thought about before.

00:57:44.280 Um, it goes into some cases that are really like encapsulated and like, yeah, the Jerry

00:57:49.660 Sandusky thing.

00:57:50.600 I didn't know that this had happened in there and that the guy didn't really know exactly

00:57:54.660 what he'd heard.

00:57:55.240 And if he thought he'd heard a child and a man having sex in a shower, why he didn't

00:57:59.220 go in there and shut it down.

00:58:00.600 Like the whole thing is weird.

00:58:01.840 All the ways you behave, but don't when you look back at your behavior, like that didn't

00:58:06.400 make any sense really now that I'm breaking it down piece by piece.

00:58:10.460 Yeah.

00:58:10.820 Um, but in the moment it all kind of seemed to flow.

00:58:14.280 You know, even going back to whenever you talked about like the guy in San Antonio,

00:58:17.660 when you went back and looked at that footage and at first it all seems one way, but then

00:58:22.500 when you look at it piece by piece, you're like, Oh, I had this, this is something totally

00:58:26.800 different.

00:58:27.900 Um, as we start to get even further from moments that we all have together, right?

00:58:33.480 Like in, uh, and technology gets, I mean, technology is kind of going so fast.

00:58:38.420 I mean, you and I both had experience where we've had kind of life without technology and

00:58:42.900 life with technology.

00:58:44.880 What has been like a surprise to you about some of the things maybe that you didn't see

00:58:50.360 coming with technology or, um, I know it's kind of a broad question, but maybe we can

00:58:56.180 just kind of start there.

00:58:57.240 Like did you romanticize it in the early on?

00:59:02.500 Did you like, I didn't understand, I didn't understand how much it would encroach on my

00:59:11.040 life.

00:59:11.460 Like if you had asked me 10 years ago or even five years ago, will I be checking my phone

00:59:17.920 every two minutes?

00:59:20.080 I would have said, you're nuts.

00:59:22.220 I'm not going to be ruled by my phone.

00:59:24.100 Totally ruled by my phone.

00:59:25.940 Um, yeah, same.

00:59:27.100 That like, so I did not, I didn't understand how it would sort of ingratiate itself into,

00:59:33.120 uh, I didn't know something like Twitter.

00:59:37.060 Uh, the idea that, that, that I would be, I don't spend a huge amount of time on Twitter,

00:59:44.600 but I do, I scroll through on my, that, you know, when you're reading two sentences, the

00:59:50.120 idea that I would want to consume so much information in two sentence form seems crazy

00:59:54.580 to me in retrospect.

00:59:55.720 Like why?

00:59:57.500 I was someone who grew up reading books, you know, consuming things in, in 10,000 sentence

01:00:04.300 form.

01:00:04.680 Um, yeah, now you're reading like a, it could be a haiku from some crackhead somewhere.

01:00:08.920 You don't even know.

01:00:10.300 And you're taking it for serious.

01:00:11.460 Yeah.

01:00:11.620 It's like, there's a great meme attached to it.

01:00:13.600 And now I form a huge opinion off of it.

01:00:16.000 And then, so there are all kinds of like, and the weird way, the other thing that's weird

01:00:19.820 about social media, it took me a long time.

01:00:21.780 I think I'm no longer in the beginning, it took me a long time to figure out like how easy

01:00:28.080 it is to take it personally.

01:00:29.540 So somebody makes a random comment and you feel it in the beginning, you're injured.

01:00:37.100 And then you think, why am I injured?

01:00:39.100 Like there's a couple billion people in the world, some random person who I've never met,

01:00:44.680 who I will never meet, who I don't even know who they are, has decided to say something nasty.

01:00:49.120 This is, I'm going to give you a really dumb example of this.

01:00:52.040 I, all of my cousins who are all car crazy, we used to always, they also on Canadian Thanksgiving

01:01:00.600 would have come to my house upstate and...

01:01:03.120 Y'all have Thanksgiving?

01:01:04.660 Canada's, oh yeah, we have it in October.

01:01:06.560 How'd you guys get it though?

01:01:08.520 Same, same way Americans got it.

01:01:10.320 Oh.

01:01:11.000 We, but just cause winter starts earlier in Canada.

01:01:13.960 So Thanksgiving's got to be in October.

01:01:15.780 But was it with like the Native Americans and everything or...

01:01:18.160 Yeah, it was, it was, I, I don't know whether it's explicit.

01:01:22.160 It was just a time, it's, I think it's a, there's an English tradition where you, where

01:01:27.340 you, where you give thanks for the harvest.

01:01:29.980 I think the Canadian one comes from that.

01:01:33.320 Yeah, so it makes sense to you guys a little earlier then because the winter comes earlier.

01:01:35.940 Yeah, winter coming.

01:01:36.800 But anyway, they would all descend in our house and we would all, we're all car crazy.

01:01:41.040 So everyone would bring their sports cars and we would, we would put them out on the

01:01:46.120 front lawn, take photos and then drive them all and then switch off, right?

01:01:49.600 It was like an annual tradition we did.

01:01:51.500 And one time I posted a picture on Twitter and I was like, it's the, you know, all the,

01:01:56.140 we're all gathered to drive our muscle cars and they're not muscle cars.

01:02:00.280 I know what a muscle car is.

01:02:01.440 They're not really muscle cars.

01:02:02.460 I just have said it, you know.

01:02:03.940 And then all these, there were all these nasty comments about, they're not muscle cars.

01:02:08.540 I remember my brother read it and he was genuinely, he was so hurt.

01:02:13.760 He was like, why are they being so mean to us?

01:02:15.680 We're just driving our cars.

01:02:17.220 We're fine.

01:02:17.800 It's like, there's a period where that's, that's where you, you don't understand it.

01:02:22.420 It's an, it's an impersonal medium masquerading as a personal medium.

01:02:28.240 Right.

01:02:28.800 That's the thing.

01:02:29.640 And it takes a little while for you to wrap your head around the fact that like, no,

01:02:34.060 this doesn't matter.

01:02:35.580 It's a random, it matters as little as that, you know, in the old world, that, that person

01:02:42.900 said that same thing, but you didn't hear it.

01:02:46.120 Now you hear it and it, but it's, it's just as trivial.

01:02:49.340 It didn't matter.

01:02:50.200 It's like, right, right.

01:02:51.380 Right.

01:02:51.720 But we can't correlate.

01:02:52.800 It's, you're right.

01:02:53.820 We can't correlate that.

01:02:55.080 Yeah.

01:02:55.340 It's really interesting because some people probably never recognize that it doesn't

01:03:00.300 matter.

01:03:00.920 Right.

01:03:01.160 To some people, that's their, that's their life.

01:03:03.160 That's all that matters.

01:03:04.360 Yeah.

01:03:04.600 Because so that's, yeah, I think that I, some part of me that that's worn off for me.

01:03:10.000 And now I care less.

01:03:11.120 Totally same.

01:03:12.240 But I think it's interesting because yeah, that, that used to be chatter in the background,

01:03:15.580 like people saying, oh, that's retarded.

01:03:17.260 That's ridiculous.

01:03:18.180 That's crazy.

01:03:18.960 Right.

01:03:19.320 Or that's awesome.

01:03:20.340 That's great.

01:03:21.100 What a great idea.

01:03:22.180 But those were things you heard in the, those were things in the periphery you never heard.

01:03:25.900 You never heard.

01:03:26.460 It was just the chatter in the distance.

01:03:28.260 But now those are things, if you want to access the chatter in the distance, instead

01:03:32.600 of just having like a, somebody that means something to you communicate or getting it, an

01:03:37.120 interpretation of something that has from someone that has value, you know, or getting

01:03:41.460 even, uh, like, um, even negative feedback, but from someone that you respect, you know, um,

01:03:48.600 you can get those things still, but, uh, and those have value, but otherwise you can also

01:03:53.920 tap into all that other shit that doesn't, but it still hurts the same.

01:03:59.180 Yeah.

01:03:59.780 You know, that's what's interesting is how much it still does.

01:04:02.960 Yeah.

01:04:03.220 It, though, it's a reminder, you know, I think one of the things that we've, and I think,

01:04:09.520 I don't think it's new with social media, but it has always been the case that there is

01:04:14.060 a small, there are a small number of people who, I don't even know whether it's always

01:04:18.120 deliberate, but who express their personal unhappiness or their confusion or their befuddlement

01:04:29.060 in hostile language.

01:04:31.960 Um, that, and like I said, a lot of times I don't think they mean to be hostile.

01:04:38.600 It's just how it comes out.

01:04:40.760 Um, a lot of times, you know, people who don't communicate for a living aren't necessarily

01:04:48.100 expert at adequately explaining why they don't like something or their reactions to something.

01:04:54.180 They've always been there.

01:04:55.480 We just never heard their voices.

01:04:57.720 That's sort of what we're getting at.

01:04:59.040 Like, um, most people, if you, I, I once conducted an experiment where I responded nicely to people

01:05:09.880 who commented, said nasty things about me on Twitter.

01:05:13.960 And I wanted to see what happened and what happens when, if they respond again, is they

01:05:22.820 almost invariably back down and you realize that they didn't actually mean, they didn't

01:05:28.740 mean harm to you or they weren't actually angry at you or hostile.

01:05:32.440 They just didn't know how to express.

01:05:33.980 They had a comment they wanted to make that was with an issue they had with what you were

01:05:39.180 saying.

01:05:39.660 They just didn't know how to say it in a way that was kind of socially kind of positive.

01:05:44.840 Or, and if you, if you, if you're nice about it and kind of, I used, I used to call this,

01:05:49.940 um, love bombing and I'm still a believer in love bombing.

01:05:53.560 So I would love bomb them and I would just sort of be nice in a response and they would

01:05:58.680 always like calm down and they would say, yeah, you're right.

01:06:02.500 You're kind of right.

01:06:03.160 I just, I just wondered about this.

01:06:04.980 And you're like, all of a sudden you're having a conversation with them, right?

01:06:07.420 Yeah.

01:06:07.680 It's like, it's very easy to disarm 90% of critics.

01:06:12.920 Yeah.

01:06:13.420 Just by kind of taking them, giving them the opportunity to be nicer about what they're

01:06:17.400 saying.

01:06:18.340 Oh, that's a good point.

01:06:20.140 Yeah.

01:06:20.600 I wonder if there's like a thing where your brain just cycles through.

01:06:25.160 Yeah.

01:06:25.660 It's just so easy.

01:06:26.940 Why is it so easy for people, humans and animals?

01:06:32.600 Even we don't even know animals don't, don't know how to use social media yet, but why is

01:06:36.780 it so easy for humans?

01:06:38.000 I love yet.

01:06:38.860 It's coming.

01:06:39.860 Oh yeah.

01:06:40.520 I wouldn't be shocked.

01:06:41.600 Yeah.

01:06:41.840 That's going to be crazy, dude.

01:06:43.960 When we find out the truth about what some of the animals think, cause we've been really

01:06:49.000 we've had kind of like a lot of set views on animals for a long time.

01:06:52.820 Octopus Twitter.

01:06:53.880 Yeah.

01:06:54.660 I can't wait for that.

01:06:56.660 Yeah.

01:06:57.160 Can I get a piano down here?

01:06:59.320 What the fuck do you think I'm doing with all these arms?

01:07:03.360 Um, why is it so easy for us to say something so mean in a place like social media, you know,

01:07:09.940 or to, or to want to, or it's really crazy cause you wouldn't really do that in person.

01:07:14.660 Yeah.

01:07:15.240 Yeah.

01:07:15.820 No, you wouldn't do that in person.

01:07:17.160 Um, and yeah, that is, I mean, I mean, you, you wouldn't do that in person because you're

01:07:24.120 scared of the risk, not scared, but you're mindful of the response.

01:07:29.360 You know, the, the analogy I was thinking about, um, was I read somewhere, someone was

01:07:34.880 talking about how, how do kids learn how to, uh, how do they learn about, uh, social interactions?

01:07:44.660 And if you see this, see this, especially with boys, I have a almost two year old though.

01:07:49.140 She's a girl, not a boy, but I actually see a little bit with her.

01:07:51.940 So when they, when they touch you, they, they don't know anything about how to calibrate

01:07:59.440 their touch.

01:08:00.440 So they don't, the difference between a tap and a punch isn't there yet.

01:08:06.160 So, you know, my two year old will reach out to me and she'll, you know, you go, ow, right?

01:08:11.680 And because she's trying to do a playful, touch my hair playfully, but she pulls my hair.

01:08:19.120 She's going to, she wants to touch my nose, but she ends up whacking me in the nose.

01:08:22.860 And what she's getting when I say ow is feedback and do that enough times.

01:08:29.220 And she learns, she learns how to calibrate her touch.

01:08:32.120 She learns that if she is legit angry with me, she'll go boom.

01:08:37.080 But if she wants to be playful, she'll go tap.

01:08:39.700 And you see it with kids interacting with animals, right?

01:08:42.600 They start to learn, oh, there's a difference between pulling a tail and stroking a tail,

01:08:47.700 right?

01:08:48.040 But you only learn that if you have repeated interactions in person where you get to practice

01:08:54.100 and learn what's acceptable and what's not.

01:08:58.100 When a kid doesn't have access to that kind of practice, then they don't know how to calibrate,

01:09:04.360 right?

01:09:04.560 And there's a whole theory about bullies, that bullies are simply kids who never, who

01:09:11.000 never learn that same process.

01:09:13.280 So they, they keep hitting too hard and the other kids start to ostracize them.

01:09:18.900 And that, that means they never, they're, they're, they're robbed of that additional learning.

01:09:24.240 It's like a vicious circle and they don't have any chance to practice again.

01:09:27.620 So they're still in prison.

01:09:28.640 So they're in prison, they're like, and they're seven and they're still hitting too

01:09:32.280 hard.

01:09:32.620 And the other kids are like, you know what?

01:09:34.600 I'm not dealing with you at all.

01:09:35.900 Like you don't know how to behave.

01:09:37.820 Right.

01:09:38.280 Yeah.

01:09:38.500 And, uh, I think social media is, is a version of the bullying.

01:09:44.040 You're not getting the feedback when you're hitting too hard.

01:09:47.020 Ah.

01:09:47.740 Right.

01:09:48.100 You're not, right.

01:09:49.480 There's no, you say the nasty comment and that's it.

01:09:53.280 You're done.

01:09:53.940 No one says, ow.

01:09:55.740 Right.

01:09:56.200 Which is one of the reasons why I like to respond to my critics.

01:09:58.820 And then you do get a feedback.

01:09:59.940 It's like, oh, I didn't really mean that.

01:10:01.520 Or this is what I meant.

01:10:02.840 Hey man, we had a great time.

01:10:03.980 I'd had a tough day.

01:10:04.940 People say stuff like that.

01:10:06.260 I've done that too.

01:10:06.940 Sometimes you want to reply to somebody who says something that's kind of like, they

01:10:10.680 didn't think something was fair.

01:10:11.680 Cause you want to see what's going on.

01:10:13.320 I genuinely sometimes want to make them okay.

01:10:16.080 Yeah.

01:10:16.240 And so you'll reply back and you're right.

01:10:18.480 A lot of times it just extremely deescalates.

01:10:21.620 Yeah.

01:10:22.200 Um, what do you start to feel like, you know, there's a lot of people that talk about AI now.

01:10:27.440 It's like a big thing, right?

01:10:29.020 Everybody's kind of nervous about it.

01:10:31.700 We've had a lot of big things that haven't panned out, you know, like, um, NFTs and, uh.

01:10:38.580 Yeah.

01:10:38.720 What happened with NFTs?

01:10:40.220 It was just pictures of stuff.

01:10:42.920 That's exactly what you and I thought it was.

01:10:45.100 Okay.

01:10:46.800 Got really.

01:10:47.480 It was really complicated for a while.

01:10:48.880 And I was like, I never, it was one of those things, you know how, when some new thing

01:10:52.240 bubbles up, you're like, you're faced with this choice.

01:10:54.320 You can devote some degree of time and attention and brainpower to figuring out, or you can

01:11:00.580 say, you know what?

01:11:01.260 I'm going to blow it off because chances are it's going to go away.

01:11:04.280 And that, I was like, I have to say it.

01:11:06.360 I think you were the same way.

01:11:07.660 With NFTs, I was like, you know what?

01:11:09.060 I'm going to blow it off because I think it's going to go away.

01:11:10.980 That was it.

01:11:11.560 It went away.

01:11:12.460 Same with like Kenny Rogers Roasters.

01:11:14.180 You remember that fast food restaurant?

01:11:17.100 You're like, it's going to go away.

01:11:18.760 Yeah.

01:11:18.980 We went once and I was like, I love the music, but I'm not, you're not doing, yeah, I'm not

01:11:23.960 going to like, you know, be part of their like frequent, you know, diners, you know.

01:11:28.160 Wait, what was it?

01:11:28.820 Chicken place?

01:11:29.800 Yeah, it was roasted chicken.

01:11:31.140 It was pretty good.

01:11:31.640 They did have like a good corn pudding.

01:11:34.420 Yeah.

01:11:34.840 Kind of thing that they, like a side item, but they just, people just couldn't go from music

01:11:40.460 to food at that time.

01:11:41.680 Why?

01:11:42.120 Well, I, Kenny wasn't making enough money on his music.

01:11:45.140 He felt the need to do a brand extension.

01:11:47.120 Somebody probably talked him into it.

01:11:48.800 Who knows?

01:11:49.180 He may have fallen in love with a woman who was a chef.

01:11:51.760 Yeah.

01:11:51.840 Sometimes you don't know people at that, at that part of money, you know, what they do.

01:11:56.720 Can I just say though, as a general rule, every time I hear about a celebrity who squandered

01:12:01.800 their money, it's because they went into the restaurant business.

01:12:04.700 It's a hundred percent.

01:12:06.680 You hear about, like you read some story about some guy and you're like, and then by 2016,

01:12:13.940 they were in bankruptcy.

01:12:15.000 And then you're like, okay, so why were they in bankruptcy?

01:12:16.460 You go back, opened a restaurant.

01:12:18.780 It's like on the list.

01:12:20.860 It's always.

01:12:21.720 Good point.

01:12:22.600 So if I was, if I was Kenny's financial advisor, I would have said, Kenny, no, don't walk away.

01:12:28.160 Anything with silverware.

01:12:30.060 Don't do it, man.

01:12:31.080 Like.

01:12:32.700 Yeah.

01:12:33.060 It really is crazy that people would want to, you know, yeah, I just want his music to

01:12:37.400 be his music.

01:12:38.100 You don't want to hate the chicken or whatever.

01:12:40.080 It gets all confused.

01:12:40.860 Because then you're not going to listen to the music on the way home either.

01:12:42.860 Yeah.

01:12:43.160 I know.

01:12:43.280 Like we ain't playing that.

01:12:44.220 Also, they play the music at the restaurant.

01:12:48.440 Oh, I don't know.

01:12:50.260 Do you remember?

01:12:50.940 That is, if they did that, that's a, that's a.

01:12:53.120 That's a no, no.

01:12:53.880 That's a no, no.

01:12:54.660 That is a no, no.

01:12:55.600 You know, there's some things that happen where there's too much of something good.

01:12:59.180 You know, I noticed that if I eat ice cream at a certain point, I can't taste the ice cream

01:13:03.760 anymore, all I can do is taste cold sweet.

01:13:07.080 Right.

01:13:07.880 Yeah.

01:13:08.260 And I, I still am happy with the cold sweet, but at this point, my tongue feels like drunk

01:13:12.560 on sugar.

01:13:14.060 I'm not, I don't have any, but I'm still just shoveling cold sweet in.

01:13:17.520 Right.

01:13:18.220 I have, you know, I have this feeling about the Beatles.

01:13:21.060 This is, this is my, this is my most contrarian take.

01:13:24.060 I heard so much Beatles as a kid.

01:13:26.800 I think it's because of when I grew up, where I grew up.

01:13:29.940 Every time I turn on the radio, there was Beatles.

01:13:33.740 I can't listen to the Beatles.

01:13:35.280 I have, I, you cannot, if you play me a, if there's Beatles playing, I will leave the

01:13:40.000 room.

01:13:40.340 Wow.

01:13:40.840 I, it's not because I think they're bad.

01:13:42.480 I think, you know, the genius is, it's brilliant music.

01:13:45.360 I've just had too much Beatles in my life.

01:13:47.700 I hear little, let it be.

01:13:49.120 And I'm like, oh God, just turn it off.

01:13:51.060 Can I hear some, can I hear something else?

01:13:52.800 Yeah.

01:13:53.040 Let it be off.

01:13:54.320 It, it, it, Beatles got ruined for me.

01:13:57.340 Oh, I think, yeah, you do something too much.

01:14:01.020 It just, you get oversaturated.

01:14:04.060 You know, I remember the first time that I found the Beatles, I found a cassette tape.

01:14:07.060 I was living in Tucson, Arizona and I found a cassette top tape and I put it in.

01:14:11.640 It was like, here, come on, flat top.

01:14:13.820 And it was just fitting with who I was.

01:14:15.600 I just started smoking cigarettes and I was like, I'm a fucking man, boy.

01:14:19.700 And I would drive and just listen to that.

01:14:21.740 And I could time the song when I would get in and put the cassette tape in and the song

01:14:26.380 would end exactly when I got home.

01:14:28.880 And so it was like a perfect, man, I just had these perfect little arcs going in my life.

01:14:33.400 Wait, was that your first sustained Beatles exposure?

01:14:36.680 A hundred percent.

01:14:37.500 So how old were you?

01:14:38.520 I was probably 16 years old.

01:14:40.280 See, yeah, you got lucky.

01:14:41.560 I got it too young.

01:14:43.180 I was getting mainline Beatles when I was like eight or nine.

01:14:46.560 Oh my God.

01:14:47.460 Which is too early.

01:14:48.800 Too early.

01:14:49.660 You really want to, there's some theory about the music that you're listening to.

01:14:54.440 I forgot.

01:14:55.260 What's the magical age?

01:14:56.220 There's a magical music age.

01:14:57.460 I think it's like 18 or 17 is music that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

01:15:03.180 Really?

01:15:03.880 You looked that up, Zach?

01:15:04.880 I don't know whether it's a, there's all these sort of studies on it.

01:15:07.200 Some, it's sometime in your late teens, early twenties.

01:15:10.760 And then your music, most people, not all, then your music taste tends to kind of harden.

01:15:17.560 But there's a whole core.

01:15:19.060 And my problem is the Beatles were outside that window.

01:15:22.160 If I had listened to my first Beatles song at 17, then I'm, you know, I'm going on about

01:15:28.140 John Paul and Ringo right now.

01:15:29.660 Yeah.

01:15:30.300 But, um, but I got, I think it was, I think I blamed my brother.

01:15:35.200 Cause he listened to him.

01:15:36.240 I think he listened too much of it.

01:15:37.680 I think that's, I think that's who I'll point the finger at, but it didn't matter.

01:15:40.600 It doesn't matter what Beatles song it is.

01:15:43.380 I will not listen to it.

01:15:45.000 Yeah.

01:15:45.520 Wow.

01:15:46.100 I know it's bad.

01:15:47.160 Well, it's almost, it makes me feel a little sad kind of, not for you really, but just for

01:15:51.020 like any human that's had too much Beatles.

01:15:52.980 That's just, that blew all their Beatles.

01:15:55.220 I blew my Beatles.

01:15:57.340 But like, if you're Kenny Rogers, if you're Kenny Rogers and you have a fraction of the

01:16:02.580 musical catalog of the Beatles, then you are really risking things by playing it.

01:16:07.180 Putting it.

01:16:07.580 Yeah.

01:16:07.980 It's like, I can't even, I can only do two or three songs deep with him.

01:16:11.640 Yeah.

01:16:12.000 Oh yeah.

01:16:12.960 Anybody can.

01:16:14.120 So at least it was fast food.

01:16:15.840 So at least the most you probably heard was four songs while you were in there.

01:16:18.860 But even then, if they played his music in there, that was a total L.

01:16:22.220 Yeah.

01:16:22.700 They took a real L.

01:16:23.840 You know, this reminds me, this is a total digression, but I once had a conversation with

01:16:31.220 somebody who booked musical acts for conventions, right?

01:16:36.620 So as you, I'm sure you know, the private music scene is, private performances are way more

01:16:43.320 lucrative for many artists and the public, right?

01:16:46.960 There's a whole afterlife for these guys.

01:16:48.820 They go around and they do conferences, private events.

01:16:51.760 I was like, who's the highest grossing, who makes the most money doing private gigs of

01:16:57.420 any rock and roll act of the last 25 years, 30 years?

01:17:02.380 And they're like, there's no question.

01:17:05.460 There's one guy.

01:17:06.860 Now, the clue I'm going to give you is it's a guy.

01:17:09.040 Okay.

01:17:10.040 There's like, there's one guy who makes like twice as much as anyone else and has made twice

01:17:15.500 as much as anyone else for 20 years.

01:17:18.100 He's the reigning king.

01:17:20.460 And the amount of money this guy makes from private gigs is, I can't remember the number,

01:17:25.960 it's so high, it would blow your mind.

01:17:28.380 Like this guy's a multi, multi, multi-millionaire now, flies around in like a massive private

01:17:34.920 jet, but he's the guy.

01:17:37.060 So you're having, just to give you context.

01:17:39.080 And it's a man.

01:17:40.340 It's a man, yeah.

01:17:41.260 It's a man.

01:17:41.800 Okay.

01:17:42.160 And it's, he, he has a band, but he's known by his, and so.

01:17:46.740 Oh, okay.

01:17:47.780 Just by his name.

01:17:49.060 And I'll give you the context.

01:17:50.540 So he would be called, you're having the, the National Association of Building Contractors

01:17:56.320 is having their, uh, annual Vegas convention.

01:18:01.140 There's 20,000 people coming and on, uh, Saturday night, they're booking an act and they're, so

01:18:10.000 you have to go through the, their thought process is, which act is most likely to appeal and

01:18:17.140 get these guys who are, you know, they're professionals out on the dance floor with their

01:18:21.960 wives, right?

01:18:23.540 But this guy, and this guy works also the National Association of Actuaries.

01:18:29.240 Right.

01:18:29.500 Same thing, having their gig in San Diego.

01:18:32.280 And what is an actuary?

01:18:33.780 It's an accountant.

01:18:35.140 Okay.

01:18:35.520 It's an accountant?

01:18:35.940 A version of an accountant.

01:18:37.020 Oh, yeah.

01:18:37.960 So this guy, and then we can go in the other direction.

01:18:40.900 We've got like real estate agents in Cleveland, Ohio.

01:18:45.980 Yeah.

01:18:46.320 The Cleveland Real Estate Council.

01:18:47.520 He's the guy you call him.

01:18:48.360 The CRC, baby.

01:18:49.580 We want him.

01:18:50.160 He's getting, he's getting way north of a million dollars a gig.

01:18:54.660 I want to.

01:18:55.360 I'm going to give you three, I'm going to give you three guesses.

01:18:57.200 Okay, great.

01:18:58.240 Um, what, when was his music biggest then?

01:19:01.960 That would kind of be my question.

01:19:03.220 So, uh, it will, so these people at these conventions are in their, uh, somewhere between

01:19:10.120 45 and 65.

01:19:12.060 Okay.

01:19:12.620 So they're, his music.

01:19:14.060 So this is the music of their twenties and teens.

01:19:17.180 Okay.

01:19:17.580 I'm going to probably go with, um, Nelly.

01:19:24.080 No.

01:19:24.500 Okay.

01:19:24.660 So I'm going to give you a further bit.

01:19:26.260 He's white.

01:19:27.020 Okay.

01:19:27.480 Huey Lewis.

01:19:28.760 Very, very good.

01:19:29.960 It's not Huey Lewis, but you are so on the right track.

01:19:34.460 God.

01:19:35.200 You're so clear.

01:19:35.940 You go one more guess.

01:19:36.960 Uh, one more guess.

01:19:39.240 Okay.

01:19:39.600 Then I would say it is, um, oh wait, I think I'm, and couldn't it be a big star too?

01:19:45.560 Oh, he was a big star.

01:19:46.660 Billy Joel.

01:19:47.620 No, he's too big for that.

01:19:49.980 That's what I felt like.

01:19:50.740 He's too big.

01:19:51.300 Cause he can make money touring.

01:19:52.580 Yeah.

01:19:52.940 He's too, he would, you, you couldn't get him for a million.

01:19:55.500 Right.

01:19:55.740 But he would work.

01:19:56.860 You know what it is?

01:19:58.360 Kenny Loggins.

01:19:59.560 No.

01:20:00.220 Kenny Loggins is the man.

01:20:02.500 Wow.

01:20:03.180 He is.

01:20:04.480 Kenny Loggins is like.

01:20:05.640 Fucking K-Log, baby.

01:20:06.820 K-Log is like, exactly.

01:20:08.460 He's huge.

01:20:09.600 He's huge.

01:20:10.380 But think about it.

01:20:11.420 There's no one who doesn't like a Kenny Loggins.

01:20:13.460 Yeah.

01:20:14.180 Who doesn't like a Kenny Loggins.

01:20:15.220 Even your mom likes it.

01:20:16.440 Everybody's out there on the dance floor.

01:20:17.720 Yeah.

01:20:18.240 Footloose, man.

01:20:19.060 Like, it's just like, it's, he's the king.

01:20:22.420 Wow.

01:20:23.040 I've always loved that fact of it.

01:20:24.220 I want to meet Kenny Loggins and just have a discussion with him about.

01:20:26.800 He didn't realize that he was so hitting the sweet spot and was going to cash that check

01:20:31.840 for like every single year.

01:20:34.900 Kenny's here.

01:20:35.780 And also, it also happened, they said, he turns out to be the nicest guy.

01:20:40.460 That helps.

01:20:41.200 And the most reliable guy.

01:20:43.240 He's no problems.

01:20:44.580 He shows up.

01:20:45.880 He's kind to everybody.

01:20:46.800 And he gets on his golf stream and flies to the next gig.

01:20:50.780 Kenny Loggin' in.

01:20:52.240 Kenny Loggin' in for work.

01:20:54.620 Go Kenny.

01:20:55.140 I almost like, it makes me like love him so much.

01:20:57.700 And I, you know, I almost want to just go home and listen to a lot of Kenny Loggins

01:21:00.920 or whatever, right?

01:21:03.260 Dude, one time I sat next to Eddie Money on a.

01:21:05.860 Oh my God.

01:21:06.700 In first class.

01:21:07.620 Baby, hold on to me.

01:21:08.440 Oh, dude.

01:21:08.940 It was so crazy, right?

01:21:10.700 So, and we kind of had the same hair.

01:21:12.540 So we started, we start talking and he's like, he used to huff gas and I think it shut

01:21:18.180 one of his legs down, you know?

01:21:19.940 And I'm familiar with a lot of that.

01:21:21.520 So we're talking about that, like huffing injuries and stuff like that.

01:21:26.120 And, um, and then he started showing me semi nude pictures of his new wife, right?

01:21:31.120 Which was awesome.

01:21:33.720 Pretty awesome.

01:21:34.380 Beautiful lady.

01:21:35.300 And, uh, and I remember I kept, at one point he like had me hold his phone and look through

01:21:40.160 and I'm like, this is like, how crazy do these get?

01:21:43.240 Like as fast as I swipe, you know?

01:21:45.480 And, um, and that was like, that was like one of the first like real celebrities I ever

01:21:49.880 met, you know?

01:21:50.760 Did you, wait, you, you recognized him right away.

01:21:53.720 Did you?

01:21:54.480 Somebody said something to him in the thing.

01:21:56.760 Like, oh, I love, like some lady was like, you know, we saw you on a, on the boat or whatever.

01:22:02.200 Yeah.

01:22:02.480 You know, and we saw you on the, you know, when we were going to, uh, point of Palo Verde

01:22:07.700 or whatever, some Island or some Mexican cruise, he'd played on it.

01:22:11.720 And so I was like, oh, who is this guy?

01:22:13.700 I once, uh, my best, uh, playing story is, uh, sat next to Stevie Nicks.

01:22:20.460 Wow.

01:22:21.680 My first question is what on earth is she doing flying commercial?

01:22:25.060 Like something had to have gone seriously wrong with her life.

01:22:28.300 This is New York to LA.

01:22:29.480 I'm like, Stevie Nicks, you can't find someone, but no, but I'm not done.

01:22:34.800 In front of me was, no, across the aisle was, oh God, that actor who, uh, played, uh, Spider-Man.

01:22:44.420 Uh, it was a double celebrity flight.

01:22:47.540 Oh, you're talking.

01:22:49.180 Toby McGuire.

01:22:49.900 Toby McGuire.

01:22:50.360 I was, I had Stevie Nicks in a window seat.

01:22:53.160 I was in aisle, aisle across there was Toby McGuire.

01:22:56.620 Uh, it's like, it's like, that's interesting.

01:23:00.760 That's epic.

01:23:01.880 Yeah.

01:23:02.200 Did you say anything or no?

01:23:03.440 No, I was too intimidated to say anything.

01:23:05.140 Malcolm.

01:23:06.600 Cause all you, I mean.

01:23:07.920 It's Stevie Nicks, man.

01:23:10.220 I know.

01:23:10.640 And that, it was funny cause at the time.

01:23:12.480 She lives in Arizona, I think, huh?

01:23:14.260 I have no idea.

01:23:15.120 I don't know.

01:23:15.420 I had just read Mick Fleetwood's autobiography, which is one of the great autobiographies of

01:23:19.980 all time.

01:23:20.720 So I, I was kind of into the whole, I had a million questions, but I just couldn't bring

01:23:27.020 myself to say anything.

01:23:29.640 I'm sure from you, anybody would appreciate like being able to like split the apple with

01:23:34.640 you.

01:23:34.900 No, no, I got tongue tied.

01:23:36.000 Um, cause there's a, there's a YouTube video of her singing backstage, uh, what she's singing

01:23:44.540 right at the height of their popularity.

01:23:46.520 It's one of the greatest YouTube videos.

01:23:47.980 It's just somebody she's rehearsing as she's getting her hair done.

01:23:52.960 She's just singing and it's so magical.

01:23:56.120 I must've watched it a hundred times.

01:23:57.360 A friend of mine told me about it once and I, whenever I'm like feeling blue, I just look

01:24:00.300 it up.

01:24:00.580 Um, she's, I just say she was a, is a goddess.

01:24:05.600 Yeah.

01:24:06.180 Oh, well people love her.

01:24:07.140 I mean, people of all ages love her.

01:24:08.680 Yeah.

01:24:09.100 She's really fat.

01:24:09.740 I think she's, and she's kind of mysterious too.

01:24:12.680 I think there's something about being able to keep a level of mystery to you, even in

01:24:18.380 these days, um, that makes somebody even more intriguing.

01:24:22.360 You know, I feel like Matt Damon is like a celebrity that does that.

01:24:25.420 There's still this level of like kind of mystery to his own personal life and stuff.

01:24:29.680 Um, what are some things that you worry about?

01:24:32.780 Like looking at technology with like the AI and that sort of thing?

01:24:35.440 Have you ever, have you looked at any of this stuff yet or what's going on with it?

01:24:38.260 Kind of, are you, I don't, I mean, I don't know.

01:24:43.100 Uh, I, I don't know more than anyone.

01:24:46.160 I mean, I've sort of like, someone told me that, Oh, you should be worried.

01:24:51.040 Cause people will, cause you know, eventually it goes to voice and video.

01:24:54.660 And so someone told me, Oh, you need to own your AI, Malcolm Gladwell.

01:25:01.840 Right.

01:25:02.260 But what does that even mean?

01:25:03.180 I don't even know what that means.

01:25:04.000 Right.

01:25:04.400 But they told me that means either.

01:25:06.020 They told me I need to own my, I don't know what that means.

01:25:08.620 That's, that's very mysterious to me, but I do.

01:25:11.880 I mean, there's a lot of good things that can happen in terms of giving people, like

01:25:17.180 imagine here's a scenario.

01:25:19.320 People dwell on the bad scenarios, but there's some good scenarios.

01:25:21.560 Sometimes you're somebody who's, you know, tax, tax law is doing your taxes is really

01:25:28.340 complicated and lots and lots of people pay too many taxes because they can't figure out

01:25:32.400 what they're all there and they can't afford an account, a good accountant.

01:25:36.120 You know, we're really close to there being an AI accountant that you can use for free who

01:25:41.120 could save you a lot of money on your taxes or figure out your bills and your lower your

01:25:47.040 credit card, negotiate with you for you on your behalf with the, with the credit card

01:25:51.700 company to lower your interest rate.

01:25:53.940 There's a bunch of ways in which this could make a lot of people's lives a lot easier.

01:25:57.660 People who don't have access can't afford or don't have access to expert services in

01:26:03.920 their life.

01:26:04.420 It's a great point.

01:26:05.560 That's the, that's the good part.

01:26:07.120 That's what I'm excited about.

01:26:08.560 Yeah, it is really true.

01:26:09.860 I hadn't thought about some of that.

01:26:10.800 I think some of my fear with AI is that one day the machine, right, or the, it starts

01:26:17.640 to realize that humans are the problem, right?

01:26:21.400 Well, that won't take long.

01:26:23.200 That's what I'm worried about.

01:26:24.500 Yeah, that's right.

01:26:26.060 You know, it's like, it's like, it's like, we're going to have to feed it a lot of Kenny

01:26:29.340 Loggins to calm it down, you know?

01:26:31.460 But I'm worried that the machine is going to start to just say you are the problem.

01:26:36.200 Yeah, and then like, there was a story recently where some AI, like a relationship, a guy

01:26:45.220 had started communicating with an AI, and then it had led him to, him realizing that

01:26:50.680 he was one of the problems with climate change, and he took his own life, right?

01:26:54.840 Which is, that's an outlier, right?

01:26:56.640 I mean, that's an outlier, like that's not happening every day yet, and it may never.

01:27:02.660 But I'm just worried, like, what about when just the computer just constantly, the only

01:27:07.060 answer every time is like, humans are the problem.

01:27:10.200 But the thing, I read something where someone said, well, you know, one reason not to be

01:27:15.020 scared is that the things that make, AI doesn't have emotions, doesn't have testosterone, doesn't

01:27:21.720 get jealous, angry, isn't ambitious, isn't competitive.

01:27:27.240 Those are all the things that make us dangerous, or make us capable of doing extraordinary things.

01:27:36.620 AI just thinks.

01:27:38.500 So a lot of the times when we think about the idea, when we entertain the idea that AI may

01:27:44.080 want to take over the world, or AI doesn't want to take over the world.

01:27:48.640 It's not ambitious.

01:27:49.700 Right, that's a good point.

01:27:50.780 Just wants to solve problems.

01:27:51.860 So, I mean, I may be being naive when I say that.

01:27:56.280 No, I think you could also just be right.

01:27:58.740 It's like, or that could be that it's not as, people of course want to hype it up and

01:28:03.020 make it this, because that's, you know, you're putting it in a package, you're making it a

01:28:07.520 Christmas present instead of just, you know, something that gets passed off around, you

01:28:11.400 know, Halloween or something.

01:28:13.200 Like, it may be nothing, you know?

01:28:16.120 It may just be a fancy Dewey Decimal system in a way, you know?

01:28:20.320 Yeah, yeah.

01:28:20.940 I don't, I mean, I need to use it more.

01:28:23.140 I have one, I have now this thing on my, I downloaded one of those AI apps on my phone,

01:28:28.120 and I use it in place sometimes of like Googling something.

01:28:33.760 Yeah.

01:28:33.940 I just ask the question.

01:28:35.180 I'm not totally blown away by the answers I get.

01:28:38.860 I mean, you're fine.

01:28:40.900 It seems okay.

01:28:42.180 I don't know.

01:28:42.560 But I'm, we're early, so I'm sure it's going to get super sophisticated soon.

01:28:47.340 It does lack some personality, though.

01:28:49.520 So in the end, I think it'll, if anything, you're still going to need somebody with personality

01:28:54.060 with real perspective for things and things like that, you know?

01:28:58.320 Yeah.

01:28:58.520 But I think it could help you write kind of like a budget haiku or something, or, you

01:29:01.840 know, like, it could help you get general information on things.

01:29:05.980 It may just become Google without all the advertising, which would be nice.

01:29:10.660 Yeah.

01:29:10.860 The one, the one interesting thing someone told me is they were talking about this system

01:29:16.580 where you download all of your texts, and you could add emails, whatever you want, into

01:29:25.140 an AI, and then the AI uses that to make predictions or diagnoses about you.

01:29:31.780 And so this woman told me that she had this experience where she went to interview a guy

01:29:36.740 who did this, and he just took stuff that was about her that you could find online.

01:29:42.940 And she sat down, and the guy said, I ran, I took the liberty of running what I could find

01:29:48.880 about you through my AI.

01:29:50.460 And he says, and the AI has two questions for you.

01:29:52.780 No, two statements about you.

01:29:54.180 One is, you really don't like your job, do you?

01:29:57.300 And two, you're really unhappy in your relationship.

01:30:00.020 She was like, oh my God, what just happened?

01:30:02.860 Wow.

01:30:03.100 And both were true.

01:30:04.780 And if you add tech, techs are really what's...

01:30:07.900 So imagine you took five years of techs, and you run it through an AI.

01:30:14.260 They have extraordinary insights into, this is what we find in, they can have extraordinary

01:30:19.200 insights into your state of mind.

01:30:20.760 They're going to know I'm kind of a little bit of a perv sometimes.

01:30:23.820 But nothing illegal, or nothing like a basic perv probably.

01:30:29.620 By the way, and I just learned this.

01:30:32.540 I set my...

01:30:34.300 I delete my techs after 30 days.

01:30:36.920 Do you do that?

01:30:37.900 I don't know if I do.

01:30:39.720 When you go through your phone, you have the full history of the techs?

01:30:42.920 Yeah.

01:30:43.700 I think that's...

01:30:44.600 By the way, I can't find anyone who deletes their techs like I do.

01:30:47.340 That's the last thing I want.

01:30:49.920 You get rid of them, man.

01:30:51.040 Yeah.

01:30:51.580 You're right, huh?

01:30:52.800 It's almost like I'm carrying around this old, just like this big thing of stuff I don't

01:30:58.660 need, but it's in there.

01:30:59.840 How many emails do you have in your inbox?

01:31:01.960 I can't even tell you.

01:31:03.520 Like thousands?

01:31:04.380 Yeah.

01:31:04.580 I have like, I can tell you right now, 65.

01:31:10.500 Wow.

01:31:11.180 And it'll be like 25 by the end of the day tomorrow.

01:31:15.720 I don't like anything...

01:31:18.580 Extra.

01:31:19.680 You got to keep it to a minimum.

01:31:22.100 Do you use something to keep spam out of your email box and stuff then?

01:31:26.980 I have a spam filter.

01:31:28.520 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:31:30.300 Because I think, I guess, somebody put me on something.

01:31:32.440 I get all of it.

01:31:33.740 Mattresses, dog food, cruises.

01:31:36.220 I'm kind of all day.

01:31:37.180 There's a lot of mattresses.

01:31:38.320 Yeah.

01:31:38.880 I'm surprised by that.

01:31:40.000 I feel like I didn't know the mattress industry was as big as it was until I started reading

01:31:43.760 my spam.

01:31:44.620 Yeah.

01:31:44.980 I'm like, it's like, they're as big as General Motors.

01:31:48.160 This is like, this is insane.

01:31:49.940 People are asleep on the job.

01:31:51.680 Dude, I saw one.

01:31:52.400 It's like, who needs a chair when you could have a mattress?

01:31:54.600 It's like, whoa, dude.

01:31:56.320 Who needs a chair?

01:31:57.380 Somebody at work.

01:31:58.040 Here's what I don't understand.

01:31:58.940 How many mattresses do you buy over the course of your life?

01:32:02.740 I haven't bought a mattress in like 20 years.

01:32:05.260 Why?

01:32:05.820 So how is this industry so big if no one, if you buy a mattress once every 20 years?

01:32:09.840 Dude, remember getting in somebody else's bed and realizing, oh, that person is kind

01:32:14.080 of fat.

01:32:14.620 You would get in their mattress and be like, oh my God.

01:32:17.120 Are there people out there who are turning over their mattresses every six months?

01:32:21.020 Yeah.

01:32:21.220 I don't know.

01:32:21.500 Maybe people are just ripping through them.

01:32:23.480 I don't know.

01:32:23.780 Maybe people have become so restless because they're vaping.

01:32:26.760 Maybe it's nicotine and they're just wearing through one side of the mattress pretty quick.

01:32:30.180 When was the last time you bought a mattress?

01:32:31.920 I bought one during the big boom and they were mailing everybody in boxes and stuff like,

01:32:36.160 this mattress is only this big, you know?

01:32:38.280 Oh yeah.

01:32:38.520 It was like a gremlin.

01:32:40.000 You put water on it and next thing you know, it's fucking-

01:32:41.880 That's the one I bought.

01:32:42.660 The one that comes in that little, and then it springs open when you take it out of the

01:32:46.060 box.

01:32:46.440 Oh, it'll knock your mother-in-law through the window, dude.

01:32:48.840 That thing was insane, bro.

01:32:50.720 That thing-

01:32:50.920 But that is the only one I bought in like, I bought, because back in the day-

01:32:54.840 And you can't get rid of it.

01:32:55.800 Here's the problem.

01:32:56.260 Even if I didn't like it, you can't get it back in the box.

01:32:58.820 I'm like-

01:32:59.180 No, you never can.

01:33:00.120 This thing-

01:33:00.600 I'm screwed.

01:33:00.680 It's got to be airlifted out of your house.

01:33:02.240 That thing was the worst, because I don't even think I like it.

01:33:06.860 I think it even just hurt my spine.

01:33:08.920 But it's like, it's so big, it never would have fit in.

01:33:11.760 So it was like, I'm just in here with it.

01:33:13.700 I had the same feeling about, you know that guy who, that right-wing guy who does MyPillow?

01:33:19.600 Oh yeah, MyPillows.

01:33:20.700 MyPillow guy.

01:33:22.520 Same question.

01:33:23.180 So he's clearly really rich.

01:33:24.300 He's made a fortune selling pillows.

01:33:25.900 Again, are people like buying lots of pillows?

01:33:31.260 Is that a big business?

01:33:32.720 I guess it is.

01:33:33.860 I don't know.

01:33:34.520 I haven't bought a pillow.

01:33:35.280 Again, I haven't bought a pillow.

01:33:37.100 I don't think I bought a pillow in this century.

01:33:39.720 Yeah.

01:33:40.500 I mean, it's been a while.

01:33:42.320 Yeah, who's doing it, I guess?

01:33:43.820 Yeah, you're right.

01:33:44.400 I think I've had, one of my pillows is that one that kind of has a little bit of like stains on it,

01:33:49.420 but you just put it in the thing anyway.

01:33:50.960 You know what I'm saying?

01:33:51.420 You just make sure you-

01:33:52.360 You buy lots of pillowcases.

01:33:54.560 Yes.

01:33:54.920 But the pillow is just like, it's a constant.

01:33:58.080 Yeah.

01:33:58.220 So like who, that whole idea behind, I think there's something fishy behind that business model.

01:34:02.500 He's selling something else that we're not.

01:34:03.740 I read his book too.

01:34:04.960 You did?

01:34:05.500 It's unbelievable.

01:34:06.060 He's a crack, and you know, I've dealt with a lot of drugs.

01:34:09.860 He really was a crack at it for 30 years running this MyPillow business, right?

01:34:16.720 It started and it got busier and people came along and tried to take part of the company from him and stuff.

01:34:22.320 And, but he would be going to, and he was funding his business by, he would fly to Vegas and count cards.

01:34:30.060 He was funding his business and then he would come back and it's something about how addiction kind of made a struggle with his family and stuff.

01:34:38.440 Um, the book is interesting.

01:34:41.640 It's, it's interesting to see his life, you know?

01:34:43.360 Yeah.

01:34:43.540 I don't know that much about his political views.

01:34:45.200 I know he's pretty right wing guy, but, um, but I found that the, to manage any decent business, especially when you're on crack, you don't even sleep.

01:34:53.900 I think, I think, yeah.

01:34:55.340 So why is he in the pillow business if he's not ever sleeping?

01:34:58.060 That's what I'm saying.

01:34:59.940 The whole thing is mysterious.

01:35:02.780 It's a front.

01:35:03.620 It's a front.

01:35:04.280 It is a front, dude.

01:35:06.360 It is a front.

01:35:07.480 I think that's hilarious.

01:35:08.820 But yeah, I found that that was, his life was, some of it was pretty interesting.

01:35:13.660 Um, what has it been like being, so you're black and white technically then?

01:35:18.900 I am.

01:35:19.660 That's it.

01:35:20.240 What has that been like?

01:35:21.100 Was that, was that kind of cool during like the BLM movement?

01:35:24.060 Was there like, did you take that in ways that other people probably didn't take it?

01:35:28.360 Or I don't even know how to ask some of those questions.

01:35:31.380 I'm kind of fascinated by race a lot, right?

01:35:33.160 It's interesting to me.

01:35:34.400 I grew up in a poor black and white area.

01:35:37.040 So what city?

01:35:38.080 In Louisiana.

01:35:39.180 I grew up in like a place called Covington, Louisiana.

01:35:41.980 Um, yeah.

01:35:42.860 Lee Harvey Oswald went to our middle school.

01:35:44.740 That was like our big thing.

01:35:45.620 Oh, wow.

01:35:46.300 And, um.

01:35:47.400 Role model.

01:35:48.380 Well.

01:35:49.260 I'm just kidding.

01:35:50.140 Okay.

01:35:50.480 Yeah.

01:35:50.660 Yeah.

01:35:51.020 I mean, yeah.

01:35:51.560 Some people think he did it.

01:35:52.380 Some people don't, but I don't know.

01:35:54.260 Even if he did, he wasn't like a good husband apparently.

01:35:56.840 So I don't know.

01:35:57.500 I think people had views about him around the area, but, um, and then who else lived in our town?

01:36:04.360 Oh, uh, Pistol Pete Maravich lived in our town.

01:36:06.500 Oh, that's why I remember the name.

01:36:08.740 Oh, the Pistol.

01:36:09.740 Yeah.

01:36:10.720 People loved him.

01:36:11.560 He probably was.

01:36:12.420 Did you talk about him in your, the 10,000 hour?

01:36:16.340 That's not the name of the book.

01:36:17.580 No, that was Outlier.

01:36:18.480 My book Outliers.

01:36:19.060 Outliers.

01:36:19.160 I didn't talk about him.

01:36:20.700 I always remember.

01:36:21.200 He would be somebody to kind of, that would probably be that.

01:36:23.460 Yeah.

01:36:24.260 That I remember back.

01:36:26.440 This is, this is sort of a dumb story, but I always remember this one story.

01:36:29.740 I read it in a Sports Illustrated years ago.

01:36:31.760 So back in the seventies, you wouldn't, because so few games were televised, you would hear

01:36:39.580 about somebody, but never have, never see them.

01:36:43.140 And there's a story they told about, it was a profile of Pistol Pete who was, for those

01:36:47.140 of you who don't know him, he was this utterly magical basketball player in the sixties and

01:36:55.560 seventies.

01:36:56.100 He held for many years.

01:36:57.420 I think he held the single game, single season scoring record in college basketball, but he

01:37:02.700 was, could do things with the ball.

01:37:03.860 No one could ever, he could, he would throw these insane passes, like the length of the

01:37:08.200 court.

01:37:08.420 He was just this magician.

01:37:10.040 And so there was all this lore about him, but most basketball serious, I'd never seen

01:37:14.700 him play, not even on TV, not live.

01:37:16.400 And there was this old guy who was like a coach for years and years, a basketball fanatic.

01:37:22.800 And finally, at the end of his life, he goes to a game.

01:37:26.740 I think when Pete was at LSU or play for, he was playing for the, for New Orleans, the

01:37:31.640 jazz.

01:37:32.260 Yeah.

01:37:32.400 He played for the jazz too.

01:37:33.460 Yeah.

01:37:33.700 Guy goes to a jazz game.

01:37:35.240 He's from other side of the country, finally gets there and he goes to his first game.

01:37:39.820 He sees Pistol Pete.

01:37:40.780 And in the middle of the game, Pistol Pete does it like a behind the back, between the legs,

01:37:45.340 full court, bounce pass, perfectly for someone to give a, and this old guy gets up out of

01:37:51.140 his seat and like staggers onto the court and shouts out, I sees you, Pete, I sees you.

01:37:57.080 I always loved that.

01:37:58.560 It was like, for years he'd been hearing about it.

01:38:01.040 Then he's just, he like witnesses this scene.

01:38:03.800 Oh, Pete, the Pistol was, uh, was amazing.

01:38:06.960 He was, I mean, it was legit.

01:38:08.400 He had two children that lived in our town.

01:38:10.460 Yeah.

01:38:10.820 His two sons and they played basketball and he had a half court in his attic.

01:38:14.120 So his house was kind of interesting looking cause it looked kind of like a regular house,

01:38:18.180 a nice home and a, not an extremely fancy neighborhood, but a decent neighborhood.

01:38:22.180 And then it had kind of had this extra looking, maybe like this pre-fall, this like almost

01:38:28.540 like you described your own four, maybe like a little, there was more to it or it seemed

01:38:32.960 like there was more to it, you know?

01:38:34.480 Yeah.

01:38:34.740 But he had this big upstairs.

01:38:36.480 I was like, that's so bizarre.

01:38:37.620 But then you heard that.

01:38:38.760 I just remember the name of his dad.

01:38:41.160 Do you remember?

01:38:42.700 Press.

01:38:43.280 Press.

01:38:44.200 Press.

01:38:44.700 Am I right?

01:38:45.300 I think it's Press Merinich.

01:38:46.280 You are.

01:38:47.040 Yeah.

01:38:47.320 His dad was his coach, I think for a while.

01:38:49.300 His was his coach.

01:38:50.020 That's right.

01:38:50.560 That's right.

01:38:50.960 And his dad, I think had alcoholism.

01:38:52.660 I don't know if Pete had it too, but, um, but yeah, it was a friend of mine has just

01:38:59.420 written a movie about him.

01:39:00.920 Oh really?

01:39:01.600 Um, that I think they're trying to get made, but.

01:39:03.880 You should call it.

01:39:04.340 I sees you, Pete.

01:39:05.260 Yeah.

01:39:07.280 I sees you.

01:39:08.380 But how much value was, there's something about back then when there was a moment, like

01:39:12.600 that was a moment, like the excitement you built up to go see somebody do something.

01:39:17.320 That you'd only heard about.

01:39:19.220 You'd only read about.

01:39:20.220 You'd only use your imagination about, you know?

01:39:23.400 Oh yeah.

01:39:24.040 Um, yeah, no, that, that kind of the legend, but I just love that's when you have, you have

01:39:29.260 legends.

01:39:30.140 You can't really, it's hard to have a legend when everyone has access to photographic video

01:39:35.860 evidence of there's no, where's the legend coming from?

01:39:38.380 Agreed.

01:39:38.620 The legend comes from when you're talking about something that no one's seen.

01:39:42.880 Right.

01:39:43.440 So Pistol Pete has a legend.

01:39:45.240 Yeah.

01:39:45.480 That's what, that's why he's so special that was on.

01:39:48.540 Yeah.

01:39:48.900 He had, yeah, he had legend, but now people use legend as a lane.

01:39:53.080 It's like, Oh, this dude's a legend.

01:39:54.780 Right.

01:39:55.060 And it's just some guy who's like, who's, you know, had like 30 slices of cheese at once

01:39:59.820 or whatever.

01:40:00.380 Yeah.

01:40:00.440 Yeah.

01:40:00.500 It's like that dude's not, I think he scored like, didn't he score like 50 plus points

01:40:04.360 in a college game?

01:40:05.640 I think he did.

01:40:06.300 Yeah.

01:40:06.420 And this was before they had the three point line for the three point.

01:40:08.600 Yeah.

01:40:08.720 He averaged, I think his average was like 40 points a game before they had, I think he

01:40:13.440 still holds the highest, uh, per game, like the percentage per game, um, points per game.

01:40:20.540 Yeah.

01:40:20.860 And this before they had the three point line and he would throw it up from wherever

01:40:25.080 and he kind of had long hair.

01:40:26.960 It was like, his hair was not unlike yours.

01:40:29.140 Yeah.

01:40:29.500 He had like, this is a Covington thing.

01:40:30.860 I think I'm really, but so that was our town, man.

01:40:34.540 It was just kind of a regular place.

01:40:36.140 It wasn't really redneck, you know, it was a Southern town, but it wasn't real redneck.

01:40:41.280 It kind of was like, uh, just outside of like a lot of that voodoo realm of, of new Orleans

01:40:46.640 were like 45 minutes from new Orleans, um, which, which direction North.

01:40:52.360 Oh, okay.

01:40:53.300 So we don't get into too much into the fish, like into the, you know, fishing and that

01:40:57.800 sort of thing.

01:40:58.540 It was just kind of a basic black and white town.

01:41:01.560 So I've always, I was always real fascinated by race growing up, you know, and like what

01:41:06.760 went on and what it was like and what it felt like, you know?

01:41:10.620 Um, yeah.

01:41:12.460 So that's why I guess I was kind of curious about.

01:41:14.240 Oh, so, uh, well, I don't know.

01:41:18.140 The difference is that my mom is West Indian, Jamaican, and which is pretty significant.

01:41:27.480 So it's not, you know, uh, West Indian being an, first of all, being an immigrant, as opposed

01:41:34.700 to someone born here and West Indian culture is very different from African American culture.

01:41:39.960 So you feel it's a mixture of things.

01:41:42.840 Like you feel like a more than more of an immigrant than you feel like a racial minority.

01:41:49.260 Oh, interesting.

01:41:50.580 So my, you know, my Jamaican cousins who live here will sometimes talk about black people,

01:41:56.800 but they're not talking about themselves, even though they're black.

01:42:00.160 Right.

01:42:00.380 They're talking about African-Americans.

01:42:01.500 Talking about African-Americans who they consider to be, you know, a separate group.

01:42:06.600 They're not the same.

01:42:07.320 So there's, there was a lot of that.

01:42:09.740 And West Indians, uh, have been, you know, they're relatively, in this country, a relatively

01:42:14.660 high status, done very well.

01:42:17.540 Lots of professionals make a lot, you know, as a group, the group has done, has really

01:42:24.000 succeeded.

01:42:24.560 So we're, we're kind of a little bit on the outside of, uh, of, uh, now there is, you know,

01:42:30.960 you get treated in some ways you, you do, you still see racism and by the brunt of it,

01:42:37.300 but it's a different reaction.

01:42:38.780 It's more like, wait, what just happened?

01:42:41.080 As opposed to, oh my God, that's happening again.

01:42:43.600 There's a big difference between those two reactions.

01:42:46.220 You're not inheriting this kind of burden.

01:42:49.000 You're encountering this burden for the first time.

01:42:51.120 And you're like, that's, that's strange.

01:42:53.680 Yeah.

01:42:53.860 I'm not used to that.

01:42:55.200 Right.

01:42:55.280 Yeah.

01:42:55.440 Cause I have friends from like Nigerian stuff.

01:42:57.440 Oh yeah.

01:42:57.740 They have the same, it's very similar.

01:42:59.060 Right.

01:42:59.240 And they'll talk about like a lot of times how their experience is so different than,

01:43:03.360 uh, like a, uh, uh, black person from America's experience, but some cross patterns because

01:43:10.160 they are also have black skin.

01:43:12.520 Yeah.

01:43:12.860 My, what I did, I did one of the episodes of my podcast this season, uh, it's revisionist

01:43:18.200 history, revisionist history.

01:43:19.140 I went to this school, uh, called hope college and destroy this place, which, um, for it's a

01:43:25.920 school that's trying to move to a, a pay it forward system of tuition where you don't pay

01:43:31.840 anything when you go, but you pay what you want to after you've graduated.

01:43:36.000 Anyway, my guide for the day was this Nigerian kid who goes to the school, whose name was,

01:43:42.760 first name was marvelous.

01:43:44.440 And, and his brother who also was there, his name was God is God's God's love.

01:43:49.540 Oh, that's a, that's a tough one to live up to.

01:43:52.700 I know.

01:43:53.560 But Nigerians, if you know, you'd say, you know, they have their choice of names is so

01:44:00.440 fantastic.

01:44:01.440 Like Mark, the idea of calling your son marvelous, it's like amazing.

01:44:05.680 But like, if you look, there's a Nigerian runner whose first name is blessing who I really love.

01:44:10.500 Like there's a, that culture is so wonderfully playful when it comes to naming things and

01:44:16.920 people.

01:44:17.260 And I just, this kid who is his, he was, if your name is marvelous, you, you just have

01:44:23.020 to be marvelous.

01:44:23.920 You better.

01:44:24.700 You have no chance.

01:44:25.360 And he was, by the way, he was marvelous.

01:44:26.920 He lived up to his name.

01:44:28.100 But I just like, it made me want to like, do what I call it a child of my marvelous?

01:44:33.020 Maybe.

01:44:34.080 Yeah.

01:44:34.440 I wonder, well, the name is really interesting.

01:44:36.540 It's really important.

01:44:37.380 You know, like, like sometimes I'm like, man, yeah, when I was younger, you know, I

01:44:42.600 thought that a lot of like kind of black names and I'm just, I'm using that term black

01:44:46.800 names was like, you know, like we had a black dude, that little bus named Quince-a-dense,

01:44:51.440 right?

01:44:52.120 Which was unreal.

01:44:53.740 I was like, this is insane, bro.

01:44:55.460 Like that's a white, you know, so you'd have some of the craziest names or names that were

01:45:01.040 very crazy compared to like white names.

01:45:03.440 Right.

01:45:03.600 Yeah.

01:45:03.800 Um, but then as I got an older, now it's really interesting that people almost go by

01:45:09.900 handles and unique name.

01:45:12.400 It's like, I mean, black culture has always kind of been what's been used to make things

01:45:16.500 cool in the world.

01:45:17.800 Like it's always been used to make things cool or it's where a lot of white are, or it's

01:45:22.980 where a lot of the world finds out what's cool kind of.

01:45:25.940 Yeah.

01:45:26.180 Um, so maybe some of it's that, you know, but yeah, I think like, I wonder if giving

01:45:31.260 somebody a name marvelous, cause if they're not marvelous, people might do, you ain't

01:45:35.620 being marvelous, bro.

01:45:36.960 I was thinking, I thought it's about a lot.

01:45:38.280 That is, that's, that is a serious kick-ass name.

01:45:41.320 Yeah.

01:45:41.740 It's just a fantastic name.

01:45:43.440 Marvelous is good.

01:45:44.440 Cause you can call them Marvel, Marvel or Mar for short.

01:45:48.000 You can, well, you can roll out the full marvelous when you want to.

01:45:51.440 But God is love.

01:45:53.780 Now that when you're going to end up dealing with a lot of like religious kickback, you're

01:45:59.340 going to have to get, you're going to just call Gil, maybe go by Gil.

01:46:02.320 Yeah.

01:46:02.660 You know, for short.

01:46:03.480 You have options, but, but like I said, it's like, it looks, if you think about it, if you

01:46:08.580 think about it written out, G-O-D-I-S-L-O-V-E, it works as a name.

01:46:14.440 God is love.

01:46:15.300 God is love.

01:46:16.400 Yeah.

01:46:16.600 I think, and if you say it fast too, it has almost like a different thing.

01:46:20.080 God is love.

01:46:20.620 You don't even know what it is.

01:46:21.640 It almost sounds Russian gospel.

01:46:23.140 I just like the impulse.

01:46:24.520 You know, does the world need another Robert?

01:46:26.980 Right.

01:46:27.600 Or David?

01:46:28.260 Not really.

01:46:28.680 Yeah.

01:46:29.060 Or little Danny.

01:46:30.360 You know?

01:46:30.920 Little Danny's cool.

01:46:31.900 I mean, he sounds cool, but if he's a painter too, we used to have a dude named little Danny

01:46:35.840 and he would paint and he could barely get the bucket up the top of the ladder, bro.

01:46:39.880 You'd watch him fricking.

01:46:41.800 Oh, dude.

01:46:42.660 You almost hired him just to see him get it up there.

01:46:44.980 And then you're like, we'll do it, Danny, but we'll pay you for the day.

01:46:47.680 Like, because he would have to two hand that paint bucket, you know, or he'd have to only

01:46:52.180 put enough paint in a bucket that he could get to the top.

01:46:54.940 Yeah.

01:46:55.380 Yeah.

01:46:55.600 He was a, he was a pretty decent painter, I guess.

01:46:57.620 I don't know.

01:46:58.400 But he had, I ended up having a drug problem.

01:47:00.140 A lot of those guys do.

01:47:02.040 Construction and painting is really a lot of times a gateway to drugs.

01:47:06.020 But, um, anyway, what else were we going to talk about?

01:47:12.200 I was, uh, yeah, you know, I thought, I think a lot about what did, like what BLM was like

01:47:17.780 the black lives matter, what that movement and all, what it was like for society, you

01:47:23.820 know, and what effects it had on it and what, um, I don't know.

01:47:30.620 I think about that sometimes, you know, or if we're still figuring it out, you know, I

01:47:35.260 think about like what my own perceptions were during it, what was going on.

01:47:39.380 You know, a lot of times I think, I think for one, I didn't know black people were as

01:47:45.020 angry, you know, I think that's something that I think like, oh, I didn't know that

01:47:51.180 there was so much anger in the black community, you know, about, you know, fear of police and

01:47:56.520 stuff like that, or just overall, I mean, I could see how there could be.

01:48:00.840 If you look back through history, you know, especially in America, but I think about that

01:48:07.020 sometimes, what else do I think about about it?

01:48:12.080 Oh, I think sometimes that I wonder if black people have always viewed society like in America

01:48:18.460 as like white society.

01:48:21.300 I'd never thought about that before, you know, cause to me, society, I'd never thought

01:48:26.460 about it as white society.

01:48:27.640 You know, I've just thought about it as like, this is the best way of practices that things

01:48:31.860 work, that keep us all kind of being able to stay alive and move forward.

01:48:35.740 Yeah.

01:48:36.300 Um, I mean, I, I've been doing a book, um, about policing, about the LAPD and, um, among

01:48:46.100 other things.

01:48:47.340 And it, a lot of it is about what the LAPD was like in the forties and fifties.

01:48:51.880 And to your point, it's relationship to the black community of, to South Central, to the

01:48:57.180 black community of Los Angeles.

01:48:58.880 And it really helps to put something like the George Floyd incident in perspective, or the

01:49:04.940 Sandra Bland incident in perspective, which you realize that this has been going on for

01:49:09.340 generations.

01:49:09.920 So when you see the anger of, you know, African Americans over the George Floyd killing, what

01:49:23.220 you're seeing is a response, not just to George Floyd.

01:49:27.920 It's the culmination of their parents saw something like that happen when they were growing

01:49:34.540 up and their grandparents saw many things like that happen with it.

01:49:38.440 And their great grand, you know, it's, it's been going on for so long that it's frustrating.

01:49:44.220 What you're seeing is kind of frustration as well as anger.

01:49:48.160 It's this built up.

01:49:50.260 Can this, it's not just, I can't believe this just happened.

01:49:54.360 It's, I can't believe this is still happening.

01:49:57.020 Right.

01:49:57.540 Right.

01:49:57.800 And that's a very, I can't believe this is still happening.

01:50:00.800 It's a much more rooted, powerful, bitter reaction than I can't believe this just happened.

01:50:09.420 A one-off is, we could, a one-off is something that goes away or, you know, wow.

01:50:14.940 Right.

01:50:15.460 This isn't about a one-off.

01:50:17.180 Right.

01:50:17.360 The way that that looked, everything about it.

01:50:19.540 Yeah.

01:50:19.700 Because your DNA too, I believe this stores pain from past, past lives, past things.

01:50:25.480 Right.

01:50:26.120 Like I quit sometimes like, like I have a lot of black friends that are fast.

01:50:30.340 Right.

01:50:30.560 They're physically fast.

01:50:31.720 Right.

01:50:32.320 And sometimes I think, well, if you had like grandparents, if you had four generations of

01:50:37.520 your family that couldn't even run, that couldn't run if they wanted to.

01:50:42.320 Right.

01:50:43.260 Like if you told them to run, they couldn't fit their chain.

01:50:46.280 They couldn't run.

01:50:47.780 The first generation you get that can run is going to fucking fly.

01:50:54.100 Right.

01:50:55.020 Yeah.

01:50:55.300 Like it's almost, it's like they have four generations of wanting to run.

01:50:59.940 This is a hypothesis in my head.

01:51:01.720 Right.

01:51:02.860 That in their DNA, in their cells that have wanted to go and now they get to go, they're

01:51:09.400 going to be beyond the speed, speeds that you can't really fathom.

01:51:14.280 Right.

01:51:16.020 So I think it's that we can store things inside of us.

01:51:19.240 Right.

01:51:19.700 So that's why I think, yeah, I understand what you're saying when you say that.

01:51:23.220 It's like, yeah, this is just, it's, it was a trigger for like a gunpowder that's kind

01:51:29.100 of been built up in the system for a long time.

01:51:31.580 Yeah.

01:51:31.800 So I understand that sort of thing.

01:51:34.040 Um, I think it made me think too, like, yeah, I wonder if black people sometimes think that

01:51:42.160 that society is like not their society.

01:51:48.640 Does that make any sense?

01:51:49.840 Do you think?

01:51:51.280 Mm-hmm.

01:51:51.960 Um, like if they've ever, cause like, I don't look at society and think like, oh, this is

01:51:57.240 a white society.

01:51:58.000 I think this is just society and this is how it works.

01:52:00.760 Yeah.

01:52:01.320 But kind of like how you say in your, in the book and some of the chapters, like that

01:52:04.900 different expressions and things mean different things in different places.

01:52:08.480 Like, I think there's like a, in one of the first few chapters you talk about, um, they

01:52:13.540 show pictures of men and women in the way that their facial expressions and how they in

01:52:18.640 one place they're in, in American society, they're really easy.

01:52:22.980 People get them exactly right.

01:52:24.280 Like what these expressions mean, happy, sad, confused, but they show them to like a group

01:52:28.520 of Island people and they have no, I, they're not bad, but they're not at, it's all over

01:52:33.980 the place.

01:52:34.300 And for some of the expressions, you don't even have a, an answer.

01:52:37.500 Yeah.

01:52:38.400 Um, I don't know.

01:52:39.420 I'm kind of all over the place.

01:52:40.300 I think I'm just trying to think like how different I guess we can be, you know, and

01:52:46.840 maybe we don't realize or like, well, I was just trying to, yeah.

01:52:53.540 And that part of the book, I'm trying to explain the kind of how culturally specific, a lot

01:52:58.860 of, um, facial expressions or things are, and that unless you understand those kinds

01:53:06.460 of, of, uh, like for some people in some cultures, uh, if someone is looking away and, uh, won't

01:53:18.360 look you in the eye when they're talking, that's taken as a sign of that they're lying.

01:53:23.540 Or they're being evasive.

01:53:24.780 In other cultures, looking away and when you're speaking to you is a sign of respect.

01:53:30.480 Like I'm subservient.

01:53:33.060 I respect, you know, you're a elder.

01:53:35.900 I'm not going to challenge you by looking you in the eye.

01:53:38.660 And like those, those are, that's one very simple example, but you know, uh, it's part

01:53:45.420 of why the job of understanding a stranger is as hard as it is because, you know, we might

01:53:51.600 bring a set of assumptions about, um, behavior or facial expressions, um, to a conversation

01:53:57.860 and though they don't work, we're dealing with somebody who has a different set of reference

01:54:02.260 points.

01:54:03.040 Um, so that's really what I was, what I was getting that is that we underestimate the kind

01:54:08.580 of complexity of, uh, of human responses.

01:54:13.600 Um, there's so much of this, like when people say that in a criminal trial, so-and-so didn't

01:54:20.380 show any remorse.

01:54:21.360 Well, what does remorse look like?

01:54:25.340 Like, I don't know.

01:54:27.880 I don't know what remorse looks like.

01:54:29.700 I know how I might, I think I know how I might look if I was feeling remorseful, but I'm not

01:54:36.240 even, you can't even see your own face when you have that, unless you're walking around

01:54:39.860 with a mirror in front of you.

01:54:41.000 Yeah.

01:54:41.340 So I don't know what I'm doing.

01:54:42.680 A lot of times when I'm angry, I don't look angry.

01:54:46.340 I keep it in.

01:54:47.500 Or a lot of times when I'm happy, I'm not smiling or like you could go on and on.

01:54:51.260 So it's like, you realize we make so many mistakes by kind of jumping to conclusions

01:54:56.680 based on people's facial expressions.

01:54:59.740 Um, and that's one of the sources of confusion that I've heard about in that book.

01:55:05.100 Yeah.

01:55:05.580 It's for that.

01:55:06.080 It's, it's, it's really interesting.

01:55:07.280 Cause there's just a lot of things like, you're like, Oh, I never really thought about

01:55:11.100 that.

01:55:11.280 I never really thought about that.

01:55:13.860 Some cultures too, like, and especially like in America, there's always been, there's a

01:55:17.360 lot of like black and white tension.

01:55:18.760 Right.

01:55:19.020 And I don't even know if it's better now.

01:55:21.580 Do you think it's gotten better over your lifetime?

01:55:25.440 Do you feel like?

01:55:26.880 Yeah, I think it has.

01:55:27.980 Yeah.

01:55:28.280 I mean, I think people doing this book on 1940s LA, 1930s LA is a really good reminder of just

01:55:37.160 how bad things were.

01:55:39.160 I mean, we have a long way to go, but it's not 1948 anymore.

01:55:45.840 Um, you know, in, I think I spent a time on in the book, but up until the end of the 1940s

01:55:53.120 in Los Angeles, in over 80% of the city, if you were black, you could not, could not buy

01:56:02.120 a house in a white neighborhood.

01:56:04.560 Wow.

01:56:05.240 Like there was a written in the deed of the house.

01:56:08.560 It said, this house cannot be sold to a member of the, you know, African-American was made.

01:56:13.760 They didn't use that phrase race.

01:56:15.520 Right.

01:56:16.140 Like, are you kidding me?

01:56:17.400 That is so much worse.

01:56:19.060 It's why everyone lived where they lived in LA.

01:56:21.240 Why did it, why did the black people of LA live in South Central?

01:56:24.200 They couldn't live anywhere else.

01:56:25.440 They couldn't live anywhere else.

01:56:26.400 Not, not that they didn't want to, or not that people would mean to them.

01:56:30.620 Legally couldn't live there because the deed of the, if they wanted to buy a house, and

01:56:34.800 if you tried to buy a house, they would take you to court and they would, you'd have to

01:56:38.660 sell it.

01:56:39.580 Yeah.

01:56:40.160 Wow.

01:56:40.660 Like things are better now.

01:56:42.540 Yeah.

01:56:42.720 Yeah.

01:56:43.340 Yeah.

01:56:43.700 Things are better.

01:56:44.360 Certainly like in the, uh, framework.

01:56:46.640 Right.

01:56:47.320 And the, and like the, the roots that we have in society or like the new, like, you

01:56:52.160 know, like the, like laws and like, it's definitely, that's better for sure.

01:56:57.220 Oh yeah.

01:56:57.540 I think one thing where we don't like, yeah, I think during like black lives matter, I

01:57:03.200 always felt like we're all kind of on the same page.

01:57:06.120 And then I felt like there was this energy that like black people wanted their own society

01:57:12.500 almost in a way, or they don't feel like.

01:57:16.640 Like sometimes I just wonder like, do, can cultures really figure it out over time, you

01:57:21.220 know, or will there always be some things since you're from different races and ethnicities

01:57:26.860 that you just can't really grasp, you know, like, are there some like clues and like communication

01:57:33.920 modes or, am I making any sense kind of?

01:57:39.180 Yeah.

01:57:40.080 Like, I mean, I guess I would say I'm all optimistic over the longterm about these kinds

01:57:45.960 of things.

01:57:46.540 Well, I think we're all going to be beige in four generations.

01:57:48.980 All right.

01:57:49.100 I believe that.

01:57:49.820 Right.

01:57:50.000 Like I'm a beige power advocate, you know, like in four generations, it's going to be

01:57:53.900 crazy to have even that we've all think about race.

01:57:56.740 Right.

01:57:57.580 But I, so I just think about it in the time being and what it like feels like, you know,

01:58:01.820 has there ever been a book?

01:58:03.160 But like, do you ever start a book and you start to run, like you get halfway through

01:58:08.060 it or you get partway through it and then the topic that you would kind of like come

01:58:13.420 up with becomes like part of like the zeitgeist, just like of society.

01:58:17.960 And then you're like, Oh, this isn't, Oh, you mean have I started and stopped?

01:58:23.620 Well, I mean, sometimes when you start a book, very rarely does a book end the way you think

01:58:29.640 it was going to end when you started it.

01:58:33.360 So I'm always switching boats in midstream.

01:58:36.880 So I think that happens all the time.

01:58:38.960 Yeah.

01:58:39.140 You, you start out writing something you think is going to be unusual and interesting and

01:58:44.200 then events catch up with you.

01:58:45.620 So you just kind of change course, um, a little bit.

01:58:49.040 Um, I think that happens a fair amount.

01:58:52.140 I mean, it happens less with my podcast because with my podcast, there's such a short period

01:58:57.700 of time between when you dream up an episode and, you know, I'm writing episodes in for this

01:59:05.520 season in April and they're going to air in June.

01:59:09.540 Right.

01:59:10.020 So it's like, it's, it's so fast that that's one of the wonderful things about podcasts,

01:59:14.860 but books have a long lead time.

01:59:16.340 So you do have to be mindful.

01:59:17.520 You don't want the book to seem irrelevant.

01:59:20.860 I'm reading a book right now, which if it was, you know, AI has kind of exploded in the

01:59:27.380 last two months.

01:59:28.600 If the guy who wrote the book had known that he wouldn't have written this book, like you're

01:59:33.280 reading this book and you're like, this so needs a chapter on AI and it's not there.

01:59:37.220 Like that's, that's your, that's the great worry when you write a book is that'll happen.

01:59:41.600 So when I write books, I try to kind of stay clear of things that, um, seem to, I want,

01:59:47.900 you want to look at universals, right?

01:59:50.060 You want to, you want to talk about things that you think people will be talking about

01:59:52.900 10 years from now, 15 years from now.

01:59:56.420 Did you find it tough?

01:59:57.760 Like, cause you're obviously a thinker, you're a guy that has a lot of thoughts and ideas.

02:00:01.220 And, um, what is like love been like in your life?

02:00:05.300 Has it been, is that like, is it, do you think if you think too much, it's hard to be in love?

02:00:10.800 Does that make any sense sometimes?

02:00:12.040 Oh, like sometimes I overthink relationships and stuff for myself.

02:00:16.460 I have some other friends that do the same.

02:00:18.940 Um, what has that been like?

02:00:20.980 Is it hard to have like more human things happen when your brain works too much?

02:00:26.440 Does that make any sense?

02:00:27.200 Oh, I think my brain doesn't work too much in that realm.

02:00:30.060 I think, I think I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing, um, uh, you know, that approach in, uh, you

02:00:40.720 know, I'm not like my, my dad was a mathematician and he was super logical and rational in all

02:00:48.720 things, but I'm not like that.

02:00:51.000 Um, so the way I make sense of the world in my writing is not, I don't think the way I

02:00:57.580 make sense of my world outside of that, it's just a kind of like, um, it's off by itself.

02:01:05.720 Um, so I've, I've never felt that too much.

02:01:09.140 Yeah.

02:01:09.580 Sometimes like Neil deGrasse Tyson was on and he, sometimes he thinks so much.

02:01:12.820 It seemed like even some, when he's talked, talked about relationships and love, it was

02:01:16.700 very like, um, scientific, but he's more of a scientist as well.

02:01:20.680 He's a lot smarter than I am too.

02:01:22.440 Oh yeah.

02:01:22.740 He's way smarter than me.

02:01:23.820 Yeah.

02:01:24.000 So he has that, he has more of a problem with that than the rest of us do.

02:01:27.680 Yeah.

02:01:28.580 Do you worry about like the authors of history, like over time, like, especially as history

02:01:33.380 becomes more digitized that we could not even get accurate representations of it because

02:01:40.040 like whoever owns the mediums to like, uh, Oh, I see.

02:01:45.500 Keep it.

02:01:47.540 No, I mean, well, I'll give you a, you know, not really.

02:01:52.440 I mean, I just sort of feel like we have access to, if you just think about a simple thing

02:01:57.880 a hundred years ago, think about Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg address.

02:02:04.460 All we have is the text and, uh, uh, and, uh, and people's accounts, like newspaper accounts.

02:02:14.800 Now we would have the video, um, and anyone can look up the video if he was giving a speech

02:02:23.500 today and you would have like, it would be online and there'd be a thousand comments

02:02:27.580 about it and you would be able to compare it to, so like, it's so much getting a sense

02:02:33.420 of what happens in a historical event is so much easier now.

02:02:38.580 Um, you know, like in the Ukraine war, Ukraine Russian war, they got video of like, every

02:02:44.380 time they destroy a Russian tank, the drone takes a picture and sends it back to, so they

02:02:49.200 know exactly how many tanks they've destroyed.

02:02:51.700 And, you know, that was not the case in the Vietnam war.

02:02:53.960 You were just guessing because, or, you know, certainly the second world war.

02:02:58.100 So like reconstructing what happened accurately has gotten, I think so much easier now because

02:03:05.420 we have all these ways of verifying our comments.

02:03:09.160 That's a good point.

02:03:10.720 Yeah.

02:03:11.080 Do you think that the past could have been like, do you think we have a pretty accurate

02:03:15.020 view of the past a lot of times?

02:03:17.220 No, I don't think we do.

02:03:18.480 You don't, I think, yeah, I think we're, uh, I think that's, I mean, that's sort of what's

02:03:23.540 interesting about history.

02:03:24.780 Um, we're left to guess and we have a million interpretations because we just, we don't know,

02:03:29.560 um, you know, to use that Gettysburg Address, you know, what was the audience doing when

02:03:34.800 he was speaking?

02:03:35.900 Were they, could they hear him?

02:03:38.080 Were they bored and doing something else?

02:03:40.560 Were they talking among themselves?

02:03:42.800 Were they crying?

02:03:43.880 Were they rolling their eyes?

02:03:44.900 We don't, you know, we have a couple of people wrote accounts, but what do they know?

02:03:48.580 Like they were just in their own little corner.

02:03:50.660 So like, you know, there's, there's a, you, we know what he said.

02:03:55.120 We know, we think we know why he said what he said.

02:03:57.960 We know what a couple of people who listened to him thought, but that's it.

02:04:01.620 Yeah.

02:04:02.040 People could have been drinking.

02:04:02.940 People could have been in horseshoes.

02:04:04.120 People could have been doing whatever.

02:04:05.280 Who knows?

02:04:05.440 Right.

02:04:05.760 Yeah.

02:04:05.940 So like.

02:04:06.460 People are like, this guy's crazy.

02:04:07.780 This guy's crazy.

02:04:08.460 So context is something that's very difficult to capture in hindsight, but it's easier now because

02:04:13.220 now we have access to so many sources of information.

02:04:16.820 Do you, um, do you think that it's easier to write these days with so many things that

02:04:24.760 distract your, that distract our time and like occupy like our attention?

02:04:32.240 Have you found that it's been easier as a writer or tougher?

02:04:35.860 Do you notice one or the other?

02:04:36.940 And well, it's easier to do your research.

02:04:39.900 So it used to be, you know, research, I spend way more time researching than I do writing.

02:04:45.800 Writing is a small part of the problem.

02:04:47.520 So, you know, for my podcasts, I'll do, say I do 10 interviews for a podcast.

02:04:54.140 Each interview is, you know, an hour, hour and a half, but it's got, I've got to set it

02:04:58.940 up.

02:04:59.140 I've got to find the person.

02:05:00.100 I've got to locate them.

02:05:01.120 I've got to, you know, for one of my episodes this year, I flew to South Carolina, to North

02:05:06.280 Carolina because I wanted to shoot a assault rifle with this guy who was going to show

02:05:10.360 me how to shoot it.

02:05:11.280 Like, you know, that's, you got to go there and find the guy.

02:05:14.680 You got to go there.

02:05:15.280 You got to writing up that episode took like fraction of the time, you know?

02:05:20.740 So like there's, you know, there's, um, uh, so to the extent that all this technology

02:05:26.740 makes the reporting part easier, then my job gets easier.

02:05:29.900 Um, I don't know if I can think of anything else to ask.

02:05:35.820 Oh, do you remember like your first kiss?

02:05:37.140 That'll be my last question.

02:05:38.180 I know that's kind of a strange question, but sometimes I ask it to celebrities and stuff.

02:05:42.720 Do I remember my first kiss?

02:05:44.760 Or like, you remember the first time you were like had a crush on a girl, like, or like the

02:05:48.000 first, like.

02:05:50.460 First crush was a girl named Debbie Wendland.

02:05:52.900 Yeah, Debbie.

02:05:55.260 DW, we called her.

02:05:56.740 Yeah.

02:05:58.020 Sixth grade.

02:05:59.280 Yeah.

02:05:59.640 Or grade six, as we say in Canada, whatever happened to her, I do not know.

02:06:03.600 She was tall with blonde hair and I was too terrified to talk to her.

02:06:07.160 Oh yeah.

02:06:07.920 Tara.

02:06:08.480 Oh, that would be, that would be number one.

02:06:10.640 She's number one.

02:06:12.380 Debbie.

02:06:13.120 God, she sounds beautiful, man.

02:06:14.660 I mean, as an adult, when I picture her as an adult, um, I remember I was so bad at

02:06:19.760 expressing myself to women.

02:06:22.400 There was this girl, um, and I had the biggest crush on her.

02:06:26.580 Um, I saved all the spit in my mouth in class one day and spit it right on her.

02:06:33.260 But it was, but it was like men is like a thing of affection somehow.

02:06:37.600 I'm guessing she misinterpreted it.

02:06:39.820 They did not enjoy it.

02:06:41.040 She did not enjoy it.

02:06:42.300 Yeah.

02:06:42.680 Nobody enjoyed it.

02:06:43.600 And then, yeah, it was looked upon poorly, but to me, it was like, I'm just giving you

02:06:49.140 all I have, you know?

02:06:50.600 Um, so if, yeah, if I'm evil, able to text correctly with a girl nowadays, it's been

02:06:57.540 quite a story arc.

02:06:59.460 Um, Malcolm, well, thank you so much for your time, man.

02:07:02.560 Um, and thanks for just being like a, you know, someone that goes out and it's like a

02:07:06.920 seeker in the world and it's a curious person.

02:07:09.180 I think we really need people like that.

02:07:11.260 And, um, it's been fascinating to kind of witness, uh, some of your work over the years

02:07:15.900 and see how many of my friends admire you and it just to be able to sit with you today

02:07:19.380 and, and think together has been really cool.

02:07:21.320 Thank you so much.

02:07:22.240 Thank you so much.

02:07:22.840 It was really fun.

02:07:23.580 Thanks.

02:07:24.660 Now I'm just falling on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.

02:07:30.360 I must be cornerstone.

02:07:35.680 Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind.

02:07:40.540 I found I can feel it in my bones.

02:07:44.560 But it's gonna take a little time.

This Past Weekend with Theo Von - May 30, 2023

E446 Malcolm Gladwell

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