Speaker 1: Pushkin. So one thing that chapter one is about is
Speaker 1: the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a
Speaker 1: dominance battle, you can give it essentially antidepressants, and it
Speaker 1: will fight again. There's a Canadian like me, my age,
Speaker 1: almost exactly, who teaches my favorite subject, psychology at my
Speaker 1: alma mater, the University of Toronto. His name is Jordan Peterson.
Speaker 1: If you want to understand a complex nervous system, it's
Speaker 1: a good idea to understand a simple one first and
Speaker 1: then sort of elaborate upwards. And it turns out that
Speaker 1: serotonin governs status, emotional regulation, and posture in lobsters just
Speaker 1: like it does in human beings, and so that would
Speaker 1: just blew me away. He wrote a very provocative self
Speaker 1: help book called Twelve Rules for Life. Rule number one
Speaker 1: stand up straight with your shoulders back. Rule number two
Speaker 1: treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Rule
Speaker 1: number twelve, pat a cat when you encounter one on
Speaker 1: the street. Peterson's book was a sensation, and soon all
Speaker 1: kinds of other people were doing twelve rules, like the
Speaker 1: economist Tyler Cowen, whose blog Marginal Revolution is the first
Speaker 1: thing I read every morning. I particularly like Cowen's rule
Speaker 1: number seven, learn how to learn from those who offend
Speaker 1: you every time you turn a corner. Twelve rules the
Speaker 1: columnist Meghan McCardell Rule number three. Always order one extra
Speaker 1: dish at a restaurant, an unfamiliar one. You might like it,
Speaker 1: which would be splendid. If you don't like it, all
Speaker 1: you lost was a couple of bucks. The exercise of
Speaker 1: curiosity requires a risk, a sacrifice, a commitment. I love that. Also,
Speaker 1: mccartell's rule number twelve. Always make more dinner rolls than
Speaker 1: you think you can eat. For some reason, dinner rolls
Speaker 1: loom much larger in our imaginations than in our stomachs. Woe.
Speaker 1: Megan mccartell makes her own dinner rules. Everybody's doing twelve rules. Wait,
Speaker 1: I'm jealous. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This
Speaker 1: episode is about Malcolm Gladwell's twelve rules for living my
Speaker 1: guiding principles. My wisdom distilled. EXCEPT thought about this for
Speaker 1: like a month, and I realized I don't have twelve rules.
Speaker 1: I just don't. I mean, I have rules like the
Speaker 1: fact that I only drink five liquids ever, water, tea,
Speaker 1: red wine, espresso, and milk in some combination. But that's
Speaker 1: not a rule for living. It's just pointlessly provocative self
Speaker 1: denial the least attractive part of my personality. If you
Speaker 1: want a cocktail, you should have a cocktail. I only
Speaker 1: have one rule. Pull the goalie. What do you mean
Speaker 1: when you say you're obnoxious? Ah, be more specific. If
Speaker 1: I found something funny which is still a disease I have,
Speaker 1: I will say it, even if it's gets me in
Speaker 1: some trouble. I never thought I was particularly cruel, but
Speaker 1: I was a class cut up. My one rule for
Speaker 1: living came to me from the work of two people,
Speaker 1: Cliff Assness and Aaron Brown, both philosophers of a sort
Speaker 1: and friends. This is Clifford Assness. He's in his mid fifties,
Speaker 1: bald goatee. Grew up middle class Jewish in Long Island.
Speaker 1: I was in the honors classes, and I was the
Speaker 1: cut up in the honors class. It's always a strange
Speaker 1: thing to be. You don't think of those classes as
Speaker 1: having one. But we had him. It wasn't always me
Speaker 1: to We were not perfectly well behaved, so obnoxious I
Speaker 1: was tolerable, but I found myself extremely funny. Now I
Speaker 1: should say that I didn't find Cliff Aastness obnoxious. He's
Speaker 1: a delightful company. Instead, I suspect he is what psychologists
Speaker 1: call disagreeable short digression. Psychologists believe that human personality can
Speaker 1: be assessed along five dimensions extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience,
Speaker 1: and finally agreeableness. My sense of Cliff fastness, he's at
Speaker 1: the low end of that last trait number five. He's
Speaker 1: low agreeable disagreeable, which is not the same as obnoxious.
Speaker 1: It's rather the quality of not being depended on or
Speaker 1: particularly interested in the approval of others. When I went
Speaker 1: to interview Cliff Assenes in Manhattan, I turned on my
Speaker 1: digital recorder and discovered that my memory flashguard was full,
Speaker 1: And after much fluster and fumbling, I realized I had
Speaker 1: no idea how to delete any of the existing data
Speaker 1: from the flashguard to make room for my interview with Assnes. Now,
Speaker 1: the rational thing would have been for me to hand
Speaker 1: Asthenes the digital recorder and ask him to figure it out.
Speaker 1: Because Cliff Assness has an IQ. I'm guessing two to
Speaker 1: three standard deviations higher than mine. He could have solved
Speaker 1: the problem in about thirty seconds, but I didn't hand
Speaker 1: on the recorder because I was embarrassed, because I worried
Speaker 1: that he would think I was pathetic and that concern
Speaker 1: was more important to me than actually fixing my tape
Speaker 1: recorder issues. I am agreeable, I am interested in the
Speaker 1: approval of others. I am the opposite of Cliff Assness.
Speaker 1: So I ended up running down forty second Street, two
Speaker 1: cross down blocks to Staples to get another flashguard to
Speaker 1: replace the one. I was too embarrassed to ask for
Speaker 1: help figuring out here you may include this. This is um.
Speaker 1: This is not a secret. I don't work as hard
Speaker 1: as people think. I goof off a lot. Cliff Fastness
Speaker 1: likes puzzles, games, problems that engage the imagination. I have
Speaker 1: been caught several times playing internet chess in my office
Speaker 1: from people. When I say caught, I'm the senior guy
Speaker 1: at the firm. I don't, I don't, I don't quit
Speaker 1: over this. But people come in and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I gotta beat this guy, hold on or lose. I'm
Speaker 1: not a great chess player. He doesn't play conventional chess.
Speaker 1: He plays one minute chess known as bullet chess. If
Speaker 1: you're curious, this is what a typical bullet match sounds like.
Speaker 1: It's like Einstein playing ping pong. By the way, when
Speaker 1: Astnes says I'm the senior guy at the firm, he's
Speaker 1: referring to the fact that he heads a company called
Speaker 1: AQR Capital Applied Quantitative Research, a hedge fund with two
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five billion dollars under management, which brings
Speaker 1: me to philosopher number two, the second architect of the
Speaker 1: Polagully principle, Cliff Astness's friend Aaron Brown. If we were
Speaker 1: to create a disagreeableness scale where zero is like a
Speaker 1: golden retriever and ten is mister Spock, Cliff Astness would
Speaker 1: be a solid seven. Aaron Brown is an eight, maybe
Speaker 1: even an eight point five. Brown is a member of
Speaker 1: the tribe of mathematically minded finance guys known as quantz.
Speaker 1: The Wall Street quants used to gather up to work
Speaker 1: at the Odeon Restaurant in downtown Manhattan to talk about
Speaker 1: Gaussi improbability in the bond market. Yeah, so there's different
Speaker 1: definitions of quants. So remember quant of an insult and
Speaker 1: rented in the mid nineties that became adopted as a
Speaker 1: point of pride. Aaron Brown is a big guy beard,
Speaker 1: impassive demeanor. When I met him, I was reminded of
Speaker 1: my favorite joke about engineers. The optimists seized the glass
Speaker 1: is half full. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
Speaker 1: The engineer wonders why the glass is twice as large
Speaker 1: as it needs to be. Brown grew up in Seattle.
Speaker 1: His mom had a master's in chemistry. His dad had
Speaker 1: a PhD in physics. Did a lot of unconventional work
Speaker 1: for the Air Force, like the time he inherited a
Speaker 1: strange contraption. The Air Force had given this guy like
Speaker 1: two million dollars over ten years to build some machine,
Speaker 1: and they didn't know what it was supposed to do,
Speaker 1: but they knew he was really smart. And then he
Speaker 1: killed himself, and so the Air Force, is there anybody
Speaker 1: who wants this machinery can figure out what it does
Speaker 1: and fix it on. My dad, said Cheryl Tagot, And
Speaker 1: he had in our basement a tortured genius builds a
Speaker 1: sinister contraption with millions of dollars of secret Pentagon money.
Speaker 1: The man mysteriously commits suicide. The Air Force says, who
Speaker 1: wants the machine? Aaron Brown's dad says, over here, over here.
Speaker 1: He puts it in his basement and says to his
Speaker 1: teenage son, Aaron, Hey, take a look if you want,
Speaker 1: Like it's a box of legos. This is how you
Speaker 1: raise a child to be an eight point five? What
Speaker 1: was the machine? It was just a huge I stared
Speaker 1: at that thing for hours and hours. I couldn't add
Speaker 1: tubes and wires and this and that. And he turned
Speaker 1: it on and it did kind of you know, lights
Speaker 1: would light up and do interesting things, but we never
Speaker 1: figured out what it was intended to do. His notes
Speaker 1: were indecipherable and he burned some of them. So either
Speaker 1: he was the guy who invented like the Universal Wonder
Speaker 1: Machine and whatever, or he was just some crazy guy
Speaker 1: who liked to put wires together. Maybe it was that
Speaker 1: was the thing from that movie from Back to the
Speaker 1: Future to flat the flux capacity. Yeah, yeah, maybe he didn't.
Speaker 1: Maybe he teleported himself to some other civilization or something.
Speaker 1: When Aaron Brown was a teenager, Seattle was in the
Speaker 1: midst of a deep procession. All around him, people are
Speaker 1: losing their jobs. He decides he needs a marketable skill.
Speaker 1: He teaches himself poker and finds a big money game
Speaker 1: in the basement of a local tavern. And I figured
Speaker 1: out two really important things. I was much better than
Speaker 1: these guys. I could easily win money consistently, and they
Speaker 1: let me win it and walk out with it. You know,
Speaker 1: a kid comes in plays, walks out, So that's like
Speaker 1: epiphany for me, that says, okay, you're how old? Fourteen?
Speaker 1: But as a shy kid, this took every ounce of
Speaker 1: courage I possessed to walk in there. You know, there
Speaker 1: are people who could have done this and it wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been a big deal. But for me, it was
Speaker 1: like the most traumatic event in my life. But when
Speaker 1: I walked out, I said, Okay, I never have to
Speaker 1: worry about getting a meal, you know, having a place
Speaker 1: to stay because you always find a poker game. Did
Speaker 1: you pay you a way through Harvard with poker? Yes?
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown ends up on Wall Street, then goes to
Speaker 1: work for Cliff Assness at AQR Capital. Of course, a
Speaker 1: match made in Heaven. Do you guys think the same way?
Speaker 1: Do you have differences in the way you approach problems? Well,
Speaker 1: the massive difference and the reason he has billions of
Speaker 1: dollars and I have a comfortable living. He cares far more.
Speaker 1: He gets literally physically angry when things don't work and
Speaker 1: lose money. I'd rather work on an interesting problem than
Speaker 1: profitable problem. Now what are these two do aside from
Speaker 1: making money? Of course, they do thought experiments, write them
Speaker 1: up and post them online on something called SSRN, the
Speaker 1: Social Science Research Network, in my opinion, the greatest website
Speaker 1: on the Internet. It's a place where anyone, anyone can
Speaker 1: post any kind of paper or research or argument, and
Speaker 1: every article posted is then ranked according to its popularity.
Speaker 1: As I'm writing this, there are seven hundred and ninety
Speaker 1: eight seven hundred and forty five papers on SSRN. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you remember. Back at the beginning of
Speaker 1: this season an episode called Divide and Conquer, I talked
Speaker 1: about my love of law review articles. Well, where do
Speaker 1: you think I read law review articles? Not in law reviews?
Speaker 1: Are you kidding? Why would I wait two years for
Speaker 1: some dusty publication to put something out. I read them
Speaker 1: on SSRN because that's where everyone posts their articles the
Speaker 1: minute they finish in Manhattan. For years, the most important
Speaker 1: source of gossip was page six of the New York Post.
Speaker 1: SSRN is page six for Dorks, so not long ago.
Speaker 1: I'm on SSRN poking around and lo and behold, what
Speaker 1: is the number one ranked paper at the time. Pulling
Speaker 1: the goalie Hockey and Investment Implications by Clifford Astness and
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown. I thought I didn't have any rules for living.
Speaker 1: I was wrong. Pulling the goaltender down three so really
Speaker 1: giving a big advantage on the power of flay with
Speaker 1: possession firmly a standard. Here's the issue. You're playing hockey.
Speaker 1: Your team is down by one goal late in the game.
Speaker 1: The coach of the losing team typically removes his own
Speaker 1: goalie and substitutes in an extra attacker. So instead of
Speaker 1: having five offensive players and a goalie guarding the net,
Speaker 1: he now has six offensive players and no one guarding
Speaker 1: his net. That don't compare for it a shorthanded goal.
Speaker 1: It's a trade off. Pulling your goalie makes it easier
Speaker 1: for the other team to score and put the game
Speaker 1: even further out of reach, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: your extra attacker increases your chances of scoring a goal
Speaker 1: and tying the game. Now, if you watch hockey, you
Speaker 1: know that coaches typically pull a goalie with a minute
Speaker 1: or a minute and a half left in the game,
Speaker 1: but that's just hockey tradition. It's not based on data.
Speaker 1: When exactly should you pull the goalie? Tell me the
Speaker 1: genesis of this paper I love so much. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: Cliff and I talk a lot about sort of quant
Speaker 1: sports stuff, and I have always been talking to him
Speaker 1: about decisions that coaches make that are mathematically indefensible, but
Speaker 1: are you know makes sense from the coach's motivation. And
Speaker 1: specifically we were talking about Seattle Seahawks twenty fourteen Super
Speaker 1: Bowl New England Patriots. I got the ball on the
Speaker 1: one yard line, second Town, twenty six seconds to go,
Speaker 1: second in goal, Russell Wilton, what are you doing? He
Speaker 1: getting picked up by the undrafted rookie free agent from
Speaker 1: Western Alabama, Malcolm Butler, who preserves the victory. And it
Speaker 1: will leave everybody asking why in the world with Marshawn
Speaker 1: in the back build did the Seahawks throw the football?
Speaker 1: Twenty one reasons. At this point, Brown goes on a
Speaker 1: tangent for maybe fifteen minutes about that particular play, which
Speaker 1: has gone down in Super Bowl lore as one of
Speaker 1: the worst coaching decisions in the history of football. But
Speaker 1: Brown convinces me that in fact it was the right call,
Speaker 1: the rational call, and I would explain his logic to you,
Speaker 1: except it we have much bigger fish to fry. Anyway,
Speaker 1: talk turns to pulling the goalie in hockey, and Cliff
Speaker 1: says to Aaron, Oh, I've done some work on this already.
Speaker 1: It's probably six seven years ago. Five six years ago.
Speaker 1: I wrote this model and X out out of pure
Speaker 1: personal interest. I thought I had a neat way to
Speaker 1: think about the problem, and essentially it was it's really
Speaker 1: hard to think about what five minutes left, but with
Speaker 1: ten seconds left, it's really easy to think about. Cliff
Speaker 1: shared his calculations with Aaron Brown. Aaron made them better
Speaker 1: and built a beautiful computer model, and their conclusion was
Speaker 1: a team down by one goal should pull its goalie
Speaker 1: with five minutes and forty seconds left in the game,
Speaker 1: and a team down by two goals should pull its
Speaker 1: goalie with eleven minutes and forty seconds left. Eleven minutes
Speaker 1: and forty seconds with an undefended goal. No one in
Speaker 1: all of hockey pulls their goalie without much time left.
Speaker 1: If a coach did that in a playoff game with
Speaker 1: real stakes involved, the entire arena would probably go up
Speaker 1: in smoke. In basketball and baseball, there's been a statistical
Speaker 1: revolution over the past generation known as moneyball, where advanced
Speaker 1: metrics have been applied to maximize every aspect of the game.
Speaker 1: Hockey is a step behind, with the exception of my
Speaker 1: beloved Toronto Maple Leafs, who have a genuine quant as
Speaker 1: their leader. This is a sport where players pick fights
Speaker 1: with each other in full knowledge of the fact that
Speaker 1: the penalty for their transgressions will materially diminish their team's
Speaker 1: chances of winning. Baseball is quantum theory. Hockey is the
Speaker 1: grown up, professional version of Red Rover. Red Rover, let
Speaker 1: Wayne Gretzky come over her. Hockey coaches are not looking
Speaker 1: for strategic tips on SSRN, So what do they do.
Speaker 1: They keep their goalie in place until the very last minute,
Speaker 1: defending the goal. And why do they keep doing that?
Speaker 1: Because anything else would be impossibly disagreeable. Imagine you're a
Speaker 1: coach of a hockey team down three one with eleven
Speaker 1: minutes and forty seconds left in the game. You pull
Speaker 1: your goalie. The other team scores, so now it's four
Speaker 1: one with half of the final period left, and now
Speaker 1: your fans think that you've robbed them of what might
Speaker 1: have been a reasonably interesting game. They'll hate you, and
Speaker 1: so are your players, because it's an awful lot more
Speaker 1: humiliating to lose a lopsided game than a close one.
Speaker 1: The Cliff and Arran strategy maybe, again in our geeky sense, optimal,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't provide the optimal or the maximum amount
Speaker 1: of entertainment. It is very high probability you create a
Speaker 1: laugher where you get down by three, down by four,
Speaker 1: And of course, if you follow Cliff and Arran's cold
Speaker 1: vulcan model, you never put the goalie back in. You're
Speaker 1: still an infinitesimal chance you will tie it, and you
Speaker 1: lose fourteen to nothing. And it's embarrassing and maybe entertainment
Speaker 1: in a sideshow kind of way, but it's not what
Speaker 1: they want. Who would try this or anything like it,
Speaker 1: Not anyone who has any normal human expectation of being
Speaker 1: liked and applauded. But do Cliff and Aaron need to
Speaker 1: be liked and applauded, No, they don't. Assnes founded his
Speaker 1: firm with a couple of other PhD graduates from the
Speaker 1: finance department of the University of Chicago, which is like
Speaker 1: the geek capital of the world, and his basic hiring
Speaker 1: philosophy ever since has been to hire more PhDs disagreeable
Speaker 1: quants just like him. He's now up to seventy three PhDs.
Speaker 1: For comparison purposes, the economics faculty at MIT has forty
Speaker 1: one PhDs. He's a one point seven eight o x
Speaker 1: MIT and counting. Now does he need that many PhDs?
Speaker 1: I have no idea, But how much more fun is
Speaker 1: office life for insanely smart, disagreeable people if at all
Speaker 1: times they are surrounded by dozens and dozens of other
Speaker 1: insanely smart and disagreeable people circling each other's arguments like vultures.
Speaker 1: Was kind to be one of the watershed days in
Speaker 1: financial markets histories. It was a manic Monday in the
Speaker 1: financial markets. The Tao tumbled more than five hundred points
Speaker 1: after two pillars of the street tumbled over the weekend.
Speaker 1: Remember the start of the financial crisis in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, when no one knew what to do as
Speaker 1: stocks were falling in banks teetering on the brink, and
Speaker 1: everyone was running around screaming for the Secretary of the
Speaker 1: Treasury to do something. Aaron Brown told me that if
Speaker 1: he had been Treasury Secretary, he would have done nothing.
Speaker 1: In fact, he would have gone on vacation for a
Speaker 1: few months, because the truth was no one knew what
Speaker 1: to do. And when no one knows what to do,
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown says, the rational thing is to wait until
Speaker 1: you have the data you need before you start throwing
Speaker 1: around trillions of dollars in bailout money. This is exactly
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that someone with a disagreeable score
Speaker 1: of eight point five would say. In times of panic,
Speaker 1: the agreeable Treasury Secretary would want to be a calming presence,
Speaker 1: to project stability and wisdom, to have others look at
Speaker 1: him and nod approvingly and murmur something about the importance
Speaker 1: of a firm hand at the tiller. But not Aaron Brown.
Speaker 1: He doesn't care about Wall Street's feelings. He cares about
Speaker 1: the trillion dollars people would be calling for his head.
Speaker 1: He would be poolside in Boca, browsing ssr end on
Speaker 1: his BlackBerry. Oh man, how great if we could all
Speaker 1: be as disagreeable as Cliff and Aaron. Suppose you were
Speaker 1: let me give you a hypoetical scenario. You have a
Speaker 1: plucky young team and inexplicably you have ended up in
Speaker 1: the Stanley Cup Finals and you're up against, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the great Pittsburgh Penguins teams in the last
Speaker 1: couple of years. Would you consider pulling the goalie to
Speaker 1: start the game. Absolutely, I would love to do it. Now,
Speaker 1: I'd have to do the math. Do the math, always
Speaker 1: whip it right back. A few years ago a movie
Speaker 1: came out called No Good Deed, starring Taraji p Henson
Speaker 1: as a woman named Terry and the ridiculously handsome address
Speaker 1: Elba as Colin. No Good Deed is a home invasion movie,
Speaker 1: and home invasion movies are of a piece with pulling
Speaker 1: the goalie. They are meditations on disagreeableness. Not to get pretentious,
Speaker 1: but both goalie pulling and the home invasion genre are
Speaker 1: versions of the canonical story of God commanding Abraham to
Speaker 1: kill his son Isaac. Sarin Kyrkagard wrote about it in
Speaker 1: Fear and Trembling. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son
Speaker 1: Isaac to demonstrate his loyalty, and the rational thing is
Speaker 1: for Abraham to obey God because if God is all powerful,
Speaker 1: then Abraham's future and the future of his family depend
Speaker 1: on being in God's good graces. But how can he
Speaker 1: look his son in the eye and then kill him.
Speaker 1: It's a disagreeableness test. How much will you let the
Speaker 1: thought of what others think of you and what you
Speaker 1: think of yourself get in the way of doing what
Speaker 1: is right in the eyes of God? On the one
Speaker 1: side is fear, on the other trembling. This is exactly
Speaker 1: what goes on in home invasion movies. Absolutely, that's Amy
Speaker 1: Logos who wrote No Good Deed. To me, that's at
Speaker 1: the core of why these movies are interesting to people.
Speaker 1: Why the home invasion genre, you know, it's an actual
Speaker 1: genre at this point, you know why it sort it persists.
Speaker 1: I called Lugos up after the Revisionist History research team
Speaker 1: determined that No Good Deed was the most perfectly cureka
Speaker 1: guardian of all home invasion movies. It puts you in
Speaker 1: these incredibly morally ambiguous situations where the audience can see
Speaker 1: the direct path to success. So here's the premise of
Speaker 1: No Good Deed. It's late on a Friday night, reigning
Speaker 1: hard Terry is at home with her two small children. Okay,
Speaker 1: finishing the doorbell rings. It's interests Elba, I'm sorry I
Speaker 1: lost La macaw. He says he's been in an accident
Speaker 1: and he forgot his cell phone. Can he come in
Speaker 1: and use her phone? She lets him in, Of course
Speaker 1: she does. He kind of has to be insanely handsome. Yes,
Speaker 1: for that to work. She's not gonna let me in
Speaker 1: if I show up wet and bedraggled at one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty pounds. She's not like, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: mean I think, I think, I think maybe she would.
Speaker 1: I think ultimately, yes, I think his insane good looks
Speaker 1: are a huge part of that, and another, you know,
Speaker 1: another big part of her character. You know, she's sort
Speaker 1: of been primed for this moment in her life. Leading
Speaker 1: up to this moment, right, she's feeling unseen, she's feeling
Speaker 1: unsatisfied in her marriage, she's feeling neglected. This handsome stranger
Speaker 1: shows up and compromises her her instincts, you know, on
Speaker 1: some level, because he so handsome. It's awkward at first,
Speaker 1: but he's super charming. They flirt a little waiting for
Speaker 1: the tow truck to come. There's a whole lot of
Speaker 1: something in the air, and then halfway into the movie
Speaker 1: she sees him for who he really is, a deeply
Speaker 1: evil guy. She runs to the kitchen to call the
Speaker 1: cops and sees that he's cut the phone line. She
Speaker 1: looks around, terrified to see where he's gone, can't find him. Then,
Speaker 1: oh my god, runs upstairs to find him playing with
Speaker 1: her daughter again. All right, let's do it. Let's go
Speaker 1: and up such a skirt. No Ryan, Ryan, Baby, you
Speaker 1: gotta go to bed. Okay, Ryan and I just having
Speaker 1: some fun. That's a long Ryan's past your bad times.
Speaker 1: Amy Lugo says she went to see No Good Deed
Speaker 1: on opening night at a theater in ball Albyn Hills
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. You know it was it was a
Speaker 1: really rousing I mean, there were lines out the door
Speaker 1: to get in, and the place was packed, and people
Speaker 1: were screaming and shouting at the screen, and it was wait,
Speaker 1: what point do you remember what point they're screaming? I'm
Speaker 1: the entire after they get to back to the house
Speaker 1: where Collin's X is murdered. I don't think I could
Speaker 1: hear a word for that. The rest of the film
Speaker 1: from then on, it was just people screaming at her
Speaker 1: what she should do? Wait, and did they have well,
Speaker 1: I mean, what with a range of things they were
Speaker 1: suggesting did they say were they saying to her run, yeah,
Speaker 1: kill him? You know? It was like it was it
Speaker 1: was everything from like run get out of there, to
Speaker 1: kill him, to you know, to like just every everybody
Speaker 1: had their answer of what she should do next, and
Speaker 1: they were one hundred percent sure that's what she should do.
Speaker 1: Exactly what should Terry do? She's a baby and a
Speaker 1: four year old. A psychopath is threatening her children. At
Speaker 1: one point, she grabs a fire extinguisher and hits him
Speaker 1: over the head and he tumbles down the stairs, but
Speaker 1: he's Idris Elba. He gets back up. Later, Idris herds
Speaker 1: them all into her car and they drive to another house.
Speaker 1: On the way, they get pulled over by a cop.
Speaker 1: He's suspicious, but Idris reaches into the back seat and
Speaker 1: takes her baby into his arms. So Terry can't tell
Speaker 1: the officers she's in trouble. Can't she What should she do?
Speaker 1: I felt like I needed high level assistance, someone who
Speaker 1: could put the home invasion dilemma into broader context, So
Speaker 1: I called up Sam Harris, author podcaster, neuroscientist, the kind
Speaker 1: of person who would publish his own twelve rules, or
Speaker 1: if pressed, maybe even twenty four. So yeah, if someone
Speaker 1: breaks into your house, I mean, there are a few
Speaker 1: things that are relevant to flag there. One is the
Speaker 1: time of day is relevant if someone breaks in in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night and you are there. Now
Speaker 1: you're talking about somebody who hasn't taken any care to
Speaker 1: show up when you're not there. And the kind of
Speaker 1: person who does this is the kind of person who
Speaker 1: either doesn't care to find a person in the house
Speaker 1: that he's breaking into, or finding a person there is
Speaker 1: part of the fun, right, And so this selects for
Speaker 1: the scariest kind of criminal that would be interest Elba
Speaker 1: in no good deed. You can't assume that this person
Speaker 1: has any ethics that you can interact with profitably by bargaining,
Speaker 1: by pleading your case by I mean, this is just
Speaker 1: that's not who's coming through the window, you know, in
Speaker 1: all likelihood. Halfway through my interview with Sam Harris, I
Speaker 1: began mentally calculating his score on the Disagreeableness Index. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking nine point five, and I must admit this is
Speaker 1: highly counterintuitive and perhaps impossible to act on. But I mean,
Speaker 1: just just think this through. Sam Harris says, you have
Speaker 1: only one option. When Idris elba is upstairs playing with
Speaker 1: your kids, that's your opportunity run. Everything in us recoils
Speaker 1: at the idea of doing that, except it does change
Speaker 1: the situation in a surprising way. One It introduces significant
Speaker 1: uncertainty in the mind of your attacker, because now he
Speaker 1: knows the clock is ticking. You can You'll be summoning
Speaker 1: help in a matter of moments or minutes at the longest,
Speaker 1: and then you know, you will discover just what sort
Speaker 1: of attacker this person is. We'll discover just what sort
Speaker 1: of attacker this person is. Now, if your concern is
Speaker 1: that he's going to kill your child because you didn't
Speaker 1: follow instructions, well, then very likely this is the sort
Speaker 1: of person who is going to kill your child anyway, right,
Speaker 1: and kill you as well. It's late in the third period,
Speaker 1: you're Taraji Henson. You're losing down by a goal to
Speaker 1: a psychopath. Now running away carries a huge social cost
Speaker 1: and a real risk of an even more disastrous outcome,
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it increases your chances of
Speaker 1: winning from zero to something slightly greater than zero pull
Speaker 1: the goalie. That is a totally rational option, and may
Speaker 1: in fact be the only rational option. But it's impossible,
Speaker 1: isn't it. You've got to be disagreeable level eight or
Speaker 1: nine to pull that off. I imagine how you will
Speaker 1: look to your child, or to your wife, or to
Speaker 1: anyone else who's terrified and looking in your direction for
Speaker 1: help if you just bolt from the house house at
Speaker 1: that moment, it's you know, it's only when you come
Speaker 1: with the cavalry and rescue everyone that you know you
Speaker 1: seem like you were, you know, wise and responsible. But
Speaker 1: in those moments, it just seems like a total failure,
Speaker 1: and you know, main fact, feel like a failure. I
Speaker 1: know that sounds crazy. I thought he can't be right,
Speaker 1: but he is right. The job of a parent being
Speaker 1: held hostage by address Elba is not to win a
Speaker 1: parental popularity contest. It is to maximize their child's chances
Speaker 1: of survival. I try to convince Amy Lagos of this.
Speaker 1: Amy Lagos, herself, the mother of two small children, wish
Speaker 1: me luck. She should run without her children, like she
Speaker 1: should just well, this is what I want to get.
Speaker 1: This is told me what I want to talk about.
Speaker 1: Let's think about this rationally. She what's he going to
Speaker 1: do to the kids when she's not there? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: Is there any right? I mean, the only reason to
Speaker 1: mess with her kids is to get leverage over her. Well,
Speaker 1: not necessarily. She doesn't know what his motivation is, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, Oh, I mean he just could be just
Speaker 1: a psychopath standard issue. Yes, yeah, I mean I'm telling you.
Speaker 1: If I'm in my house and I realize that there
Speaker 1: is somebody there is a psychopath in my house, I
Speaker 1: am not leaving my kids like you could. You could
Speaker 1: burn the house down and I would stay with the kids. No, no, No.
Speaker 1: The fact that he's a psychopath is exactly why you
Speaker 1: should leave your children behind. It's your only chance to
Speaker 1: save them. Amy run but the love of God rule
Speaker 1: number one for living pole the goalie. In common law,
Speaker 1: there's a principle called duty to retreat, which holds that
Speaker 1: a person being threatened as a duty to retreat to
Speaker 1: a place of safety to exhaust all avenue of escape
Speaker 1: before they can justifiably use force in self defense. In
Speaker 1: the past several years, though about half of American states
Speaker 1: have passed stand your ground laws. Now, what's to stand
Speaker 1: your Ground law. It's a law that effectively repeals duty
Speaker 1: to retreat. It says you don't need to exhaust all
Speaker 1: avenues of escape to claim self defense in a court
Speaker 1: of law. You can stand your ground, defend yourself, and
Speaker 1: the law will support that choice. Duty to retreat is
Speaker 1: a legal principle that gives people license to act disagreeably.
Speaker 1: I am not a coward if I cut and run
Speaker 1: the first opportunity. I am, in fact, acting morally and responsibly.
Speaker 1: Stand your Ground laws sanction the Socially Agreeable Act. They say,
Speaker 1: what matters is that you preserve your honor in front
Speaker 1: of family and community. I did not run. I stood
Speaker 1: by ground. So what's happening in those states that now
Speaker 1: have stand your ground laws? Well, I refer you to
Speaker 1: stand your ground laws. Homicides and Injuries, Journal of Human Resources,
Speaker 1: Summer twenty seventeen. I think overall, we found about a
Speaker 1: seven and a half seven point seven percent increase in
Speaker 1: the overall homicide rate. That's Chandler McClellan, adjunct professor at
Speaker 1: American University, first author of the study in question, states
Speaker 1: that pass stand your ground laws saw their murder rates
Speaker 1: rise seven point seven percent compared to states that didn't
Speaker 1: pass those laws. Well, the fact that the homicide rate
Speaker 1: increases in these cases suggests that that's not the case.
Speaker 1: That people were using these laws and standing their ground
Speaker 1: in cases where they're actually not being lefully threatened. They
Speaker 1: could de escalate the situation, they could get away, but
Speaker 1: instead they're using to engage in self defense and use
Speaker 1: lethal force against this threat. And as a result, you're
Speaker 1: seeing this kind of net increase in homicide rates. And
Speaker 1: who are all these extra people getting killed in STANDI
Speaker 1: ground states? White men? I think our estimates kind of
Speaker 1: show about twenty twenty five percent increase in homicides among
Speaker 1: white males. And actually that seems a little high, little high,
Speaker 1: it's a huge. Yeah, exactly, it is, um But nevertheless,
Speaker 1: that's kind of what that's what fell out the modeling. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we speculate that because the white male population is the
Speaker 1: population this most interested in the gun culture, more likely
Speaker 1: to be members of organizations like the NRA, Because white
Speaker 1: males are so entrenched in this sort of culture, we
Speaker 1: think that these laws are most salient for them, and
Speaker 1: as a result, their most aware of them and they're
Speaker 1: most likely to act on them. So a certain kind
Speaker 1: of white guy who is really into guns and the
Speaker 1: NRA gets super excited about stand your ground laws and
Speaker 1: instead of looking to avoid violence or run away, grabs
Speaker 1: his gun and stands his ground. That is, right before
Speaker 1: the other guy shoots him dead. Tragic is the is
Speaker 1: the most appropriate word, but the other word disappropriate here
Speaker 1: is ironic that the NRA has been pursuing a policy
Speaker 1: agenda with stand your ground that has the effect of
Speaker 1: getting its own members killed. It is a little ironic
Speaker 1: and figuring out when to pull the goalie or what
Speaker 1: to do when Adress Elba shows up late at night
Speaker 1: seem like abstract intellectual exercises. They are not. They are
Speaker 1: rehearsals for real life, because being disagreeable when you need
Speaker 1: to be disagreeable is hard, especially because the world around us,
Speaker 1: the crowd in the stands, the short sighted lawmakers. They
Speaker 1: encourage us to do the easy and agreeable thing, which
Speaker 1: gets us killed, pull the goalie. I have an aunt.
Speaker 1: She's Australian who once a year calls me to ask
Speaker 1: when she should convert her Aussie dollars to wherever she's
Speaker 1: going that year on vacation. For about ten years, I explained,
Speaker 1: Aunt Cynthia, you know, we do have views on currencies,
Speaker 1: but their micro views their fifty one percent chance of
Speaker 1: being right, let alone on a given day. So I'm
Speaker 1: loath to give this to you. And she'd always act
Speaker 1: like I knew the answer. I just refused to tell her.
Speaker 1: Year after year, his Australian aunt called and Cliff refused
Speaker 1: to help her. Then one day Cliff Assess realized he
Speaker 1: didn't have to always be disagreeable. She'd say, once, should
Speaker 1: I convert my dollars to Japanese? Yend? And I'd go
Speaker 1: not this, But next Thursday and everyone was happy. She
Speaker 1: I was lauded for giving her the truth. She was
Speaker 1: happy because she really feels she knows what she's doing.
Speaker 1: She never checks before or after. And I did not
Speaker 1: harm her one drop because nobody knows what day to
Speaker 1: do it, and she was always going to do it
Speaker 1: on some arbitrary day. I just picked the arbitrary day.
Speaker 1: So there's a case of maybe it's seloptimal, but I
Speaker 1: picked a high EQ. If not IQ were protecting your
Speaker 1: reputation as opposed to her, was just making my aunt
Speaker 1: not mad at me. He could be Cliff Assenes polar
Speaker 1: of goalies he could also be Cliff Assness dutiful nephew.
Speaker 1: Malcolm glad Bell's first rule for living polar goalie. But
Speaker 1: be wise enough to know that disagreeableness is not a
Speaker 1: matter of temperament. It is a choice. But okay, I'd
Speaker 1: love that you take calls from your aunt about currency
Speaker 1: and what did he say next? Anyone who's successful it
Speaker 1: won't take calls from their crazy aunt is no friend
Speaker 1: of mine. Malcolm Gladwell's second rule for living two Down
Speaker 1: ten ago. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior
Speaker 1: producer is Mila Belle, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Beth Johnson, Original music by Luis Gara,
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: What makes you a good poker player? Two things. There's
Speaker 1: just the basic mathet theory, which why don't want say
Speaker 1: anybody you can learn, but if you're quiet, you can
Speaker 1: learn it. But the real thing that sets ship apart
Speaker 1: is something I think you have to do by traditional wisdom.
Speaker 1: You have to learn this in your teens while your
Speaker 1: brain is still forming, and you have to do it
Speaker 1: under intent sleep deprivation. So we do these seventy two
Speaker 1: hour sessions with maybe a few powered amps in between,
Speaker 1: and you're pushing every sense you have in the world,
Speaker 1: sometimes more than every sense you have in the world
Speaker 1: in the middle of the pod. And that developed certain
Speaker 1: mental abilities that the way I think about it is,
Speaker 1: I think you managed to harness the processing power of
Speaker 1: your unconscious brain so that you're not staring at people
Speaker 1: in the table and sort of you know, enumerating tells
Speaker 1: to you that person, you know mood as jit. Your
Speaker 1: unconscious brain is so much better at noticing what people do,
Speaker 1: kind of like blink, you know, you just look at
Speaker 1: somebody and you know, you don't know he holds the
Speaker 1: ace and jack you know it's not doesn't tell you that,
Speaker 1: but it says this guy is afraid to lose, or
Speaker 1: this guy is afraid of being bluffed, and it tells
Speaker 1: you what they're going to do if you do something.
Speaker 1: So it tells you when you can push and they're
Speaker 1: going to fold, or when you can draw them in
Speaker 1: and they're going to go high. This outtake goes on
Speaker 1: for a long time. If that bothers you, I don't
Speaker 1: care anymore. It is a curse. I would never recommend
Speaker 1: to somebody to do it. Yes, you can make money
Speaker 1: from it, but it strips away a lot of illusions. Right.
Speaker 1: It's a lot more pleasant in life to believe that
Speaker 1: there are things like love and friendship and honor once
Speaker 1: you ruthlessly strip all that away and just look very
Speaker 1: objectively how people act. There's probably something that the psychopaths do.
Speaker 1: The world's a bleak place, so it's kind of a
Speaker 1: dangerous road to go down. Do you feel like you
Speaker 1: went down that road? Yeah? Yeah, how did it affect
Speaker 1: your love it? What it meant is that you're bleak.
Speaker 1: You're just kind of you know, you don't really trust
Speaker 1: anybody in a sense. You trust them, you know what
Speaker 1: they're going to do, and because you know what they're
Speaker 1: gonna do, it just h I guess it almost makes
Speaker 1: you treat them like robots that you can predict what
Speaker 1: they're going to do, you know their program, and therefore
Speaker 1: you can't really trust that there's a love and friendship
Speaker 1: and honor or anything like that. So that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons to move to finance. I actually moved from
Speaker 1: poker to sports betting and then to finance.