Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello Revisionist History listeners. I'm excited to announce
Speaker 1: that this season I'm offering a bunch of perks from
Speaker 1: my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to pushkim
Speaker 1: plus for those who just can't get enough. We're giving
Speaker 1: every episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus We've
Speaker 1: created many episodes released weekly and I'm calling them tangents.
Speaker 1: And of course you'll never hear any adds. Subscribe to
Speaker 1: pushkim plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. So as a condition
Speaker 1: of our experiment, I'm giving you the ability to access
Speaker 1: every bit of data you want from everyone in the experiment. Yes,
Speaker 1: I would like that, and I know that sounds crazy,
Speaker 1: but I'm going pie in the sky like you said. Yes, no,
Speaker 1: you get that request granted. I'm bizarre of the magic
Speaker 1: wand I've granted your request. Experiments come in many forms.
Speaker 1: There are natural experiments, experiments based on observations from the
Speaker 1: real world, thought experiments where we gain out a problem
Speaker 1: and its potential solution in our heads, and formal experiments,
Speaker 1: the ones that scientists design and perform in the laboratory
Speaker 1: but there's another type of experiment. My favorite kind of experiment,
Speaker 1: the magic wand experiment, where I call up the smartest
Speaker 1: people I know and ask them to think big, to
Speaker 1: give me the experiment of their dreams. Because remember, we
Speaker 1: are changing this environment because you're giving me all this money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm giving you unlimited money. I'm limited money, elon musk money.
Speaker 1: I'm letting you go nuts. I'm letting you This is
Speaker 1: a magic wand. The poet Homer invented the magic wand
Speaker 1: in his Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. The
Speaker 1: god Hermy has used a magic wand to make people sleep.
Speaker 1: Athena used it to make Odysseus old and then young again.
Speaker 1: Circe used a wand to turn the crew of Odysseus
Speaker 1: into pigs. Then, for a few thousand years, not much
Speaker 1: magic wand action until now, when all of us at
Speaker 1: Revisionist History have decided to revive the magic wand for
Speaker 1: the greatest of all forbidden pleasures, nerdy experiments. My name
Speaker 1: is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome back to Revisionist History, my podcast
Speaker 1: about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. To kick off this season,
Speaker 1: we've asked scientists. What if Hugh could design an experiment
Speaker 1: with our considering any financial, logistical, ethical, practical constraints. The
Speaker 1: experiment that allows you to answer the question that could
Speaker 1: never otherwise be answered. The experiment so far fetched, so fantastical,
Speaker 1: so offensive that you don't usually even admit that you
Speaker 1: want to do it, unless someone calls you up and says, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, how many? How many do you want in
Speaker 1: each in this experiment? One hundred males and one hundred females?
Speaker 1: Dream big you can, Okay, sure, I'll give you a thousand.
Speaker 1: I'll give you. The idea for this season of Revision's
Speaker 1: history was born in frustration. I've always believed that those
Speaker 1: of us alive in the twenty first century are all
Speaker 1: modern and smarty pants. But over and again I get
Speaker 1: into a serious discussion with some brilliant person, and after
Speaker 1: that person had dropped all of their expert bluster, they
Speaker 1: would say, oh, but we don't really know the answer
Speaker 1: to that, or I wish we knew, but we don't.
Speaker 1: It took me back because I suddenly remembered that's what
Speaker 1: my dad used to always say whenever I pasted him
Speaker 1: with a question. Big sigh, hand to his forehead, slight
Speaker 1: shake of the head, and then no idea, no idea,
Speaker 1: which I thought was just Graham Gladwell, but now I
Speaker 1: realize is everyone. The great sobering discovery of my middle
Speaker 1: age is that the list of things we don't know
Speaker 1: is a lot longer than the list of things we
Speaker 1: do know, which suggested to me that we really need
Speaker 1: to get cracking. Hence this season of revisionist history, a
Speaker 1: season devoted entirely to experiments, starting with this special category
Speaker 1: of magic wands. I got lots of suggestions about magic
Speaker 1: wand experiments on the physical world, suggestions like that of
Speaker 1: my friend David Epstein, author of the wonderful book Range
Speaker 1: Why Generalists Triumph in a specialized World. David wrote me
Speaker 1: the following email, which I asked him to read out loud.
Speaker 1: It might be really fun to talk to a string theorist.
Speaker 1: I haven't kept up with this in years, but I
Speaker 1: remember at one point hearing that if you wanted to
Speaker 1: directly test string theory, you'd need a particle collider the
Speaker 1: size of the Solar System. And then I seem to
Speaker 1: recall that there was some writing about the feasibility of
Speaker 1: a collider wrapping around the entire Solar System. Come to
Speaker 1: think of it, if you had a particle collider that big,
Speaker 1: maybe we could basically recreate the Big Bang, maybe finally
Speaker 1: figure out why gravity is such a weird weak force
Speaker 1: and what dark matter is. So yeah, okay, I vote
Speaker 1: for Solar system sized particle collider. David, I love you.
Speaker 1: You know that. Don't take this personally. We need to
Speaker 1: have a few ground rules, like we're not doing physics
Speaker 1: experiments or for that matter, anything on space travel, crypto,
Speaker 1: the bond market, or the ramifications of the Supreme Court decisions.
Speaker 1: It's that or etc. I am limiting this set of
Speaker 1: magic wands to the basics human things, exercise, diet, and babies.
Speaker 1: I'll let you guess why my show my wands. Second
Speaker 1: ground rule, the reason to do magic wands is to
Speaker 1: help us think about the things we want to know
Speaker 1: but aren't allowed to find out. Magic wands are supposed
Speaker 1: to make you feel a little uncomfortable. My guess is
Speaker 1: that you will feel uncomfortable at least once over the
Speaker 1: next forty minutes, and that's totally fine. So here are
Speaker 1: my top five experiments that can never be done. Drum
Speaker 1: roll please. We begin with the penis test. This was
Speaker 1: the idea of Harvard University child psychologist Joyce Benninson. She's
Speaker 1: the author of a deeply fascinating book called Warrior and Warriors.
Speaker 1: Here's what she would do with her magic wand Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'll say it, and that is if we could
Speaker 1: randomly cut off a bunch of infant babies at birth
Speaker 1: boys penises and attached them to randomly selected girls and
Speaker 1: have them raised by their parents as the opposite sex
Speaker 1: from what they were biologically destined to be because the
Speaker 1: parents are misinformed, and then look at their activities and interests.
Speaker 1: We removed the penises of one group of boy babies,
Speaker 1: babies born with X Y chromosomes. We attached those body
Speaker 1: parts to a group of newborn girls, the double X
Speaker 1: chromosome babies. So the parents of the boys assumed they're
Speaker 1: raising girls, and vice versa. Remember this is all with
Speaker 1: a magic wand no one's suffering. Are we socializing them
Speaker 1: with our controls with boys of penises and girls without? Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: just to be as clean as possible, I would keep
Speaker 1: them just with one another. I would isolate them so
Speaker 1: there's no other influences That to me would be just
Speaker 1: the strongest one. I think it would be a beautiful experiment.
Speaker 1: What Beninson wants to test is the impact of parenting
Speaker 1: on gender identity. It's really hard to untangle nature and nurture.
Speaker 1: People have been arguing about this for millennia, So Beninson says,
Speaker 1: let's just wave our magic wand put together a massive,
Speaker 1: perfectly designed experiment and settle this issue once and for all.
Speaker 1: If your mom and dad are confused about what gender
Speaker 1: you belong to, does that make any difference to you.
Speaker 1: Beninson has been researching the behavior of children for more
Speaker 1: than four decades, and she's pretty sure what the answer is.
Speaker 1: She thinks that if you take boys and raise them
Speaker 1: as girls, nothing's going to change. Remove the penises, dress
Speaker 1: them in pink, None of that will alter their behavior.
Speaker 1: Those would be the ones engaging in rough and tumble play.
Speaker 1: Those would be the ones who would be punching each
Speaker 1: other and competing to show they're the best. They would
Speaker 1: be the ones who loved transportation, vehicles and weapons. As
Speaker 1: for the girls, Beninson says, calling them Johnny and giving
Speaker 1: them baseball caps isn't going to change anything. The one
Speaker 1: with the penises, right, who are actually xx females, they
Speaker 1: would be much more concerned about their survival. They're taking
Speaker 1: care of either the dolls or the actual babies. They're
Speaker 1: cleaning and making sure hygiene is better. They're cooking, either
Speaker 1: real or pretend. They're doing the kindest things that anybody
Speaker 1: who goes into a preschool sees are not socialized by anyone,
Speaker 1: but naturally occurring. And you would see the division so
Speaker 1: that in this case, the ones with the penises would
Speaker 1: be crowding around the sync and crowding around the stove
Speaker 1: and the baby dolls and dressing up, and the ones
Speaker 1: without the penises would be jumping on top of each
Speaker 1: other's heads and competing to throw the best arrow or
Speaker 1: paper airplane or whatever it is. Parenting does not override biology.
Speaker 1: That's what Benninson already believes. So why do the magic
Speaker 1: wand if she already knows the answer, Because we don't
Speaker 1: just do experiments to learn the truth. We also do
Speaker 1: experiments to persuade others of the truth, in this case,
Speaker 1: to persuade the legions of neurotic North American parents who
Speaker 1: believe that it is their own practice and attitudes that
Speaker 1: shape their children's fundamental nature. Okay, so most people will
Speaker 1: say to me nowadays, at least here in the West,
Speaker 1: that parents are raising their daughters arbitrarily to be a
Speaker 1: certain way, and parents are raising their sons, and all
Speaker 1: we have to do is stop that, and then there
Speaker 1: will be no basic instincts, there will be no divide
Speaker 1: between males and female. Else, there will be nothing that
Speaker 1: we are motivated or emotionally attracted to naturally biologically. No,
Speaker 1: maybe you're one of those parents in the Nurture over
Speaker 1: Nature camp. Maybe you think that what Joyce Benson thinks
Speaker 1: is crazy and offensive. Maybe you're right. Maybe there are
Speaker 1: children out there who are shaped by their parents careful administrations,
Speaker 1: like a lump of clay from a potter's wheel. That's
Speaker 1: why we're doing an experiment. Wait, so how long do
Speaker 1: you let this experiment run? At what point do you
Speaker 1: unblind the parents? Okay, so now we're talking about ethics, right,
Speaker 1: because if I want to waved ethical constraints, but from
Speaker 1: your purposes, it needs to run for how many years
Speaker 1: to get a persuasive result? Well, I mean, obviously hormones
Speaker 1: come online and you'd have to do too much to
Speaker 1: me to run this through puberty. But I would absolutely
Speaker 1: run it through age five. Just think if Benson's right,
Speaker 1: nature triumphs over nurture. So you're lying on your shrink's
Speaker 1: couch and the shrink is making you think it's all
Speaker 1: your mother's fault, which is what they do, of course,
Speaker 1: only now you get to say, actually, there was this
Speaker 1: cool experiment where they chopped off the penises of little
Speaker 1: boys and found out mom doesn't matter that much. Have
Speaker 1: I shocked your delicate sensibilities? Just wait, We've got four
Speaker 1: more experiments to go after the break. Okay, We're back
Speaker 1: on to our next impossible, possibly unethical, but super interesting
Speaker 1: and useful experiment, the magic of New York University psychologist
Speaker 1: Adam Alter. I had a lot of internal debate about
Speaker 1: whether to include this one because Adam happens to be
Speaker 1: a very good friend of mine, so I worried it
Speaker 1: would look like favoritism. But then I thought back to
Speaker 1: the first six seasons of revisionist history and decided it's
Speaker 1: a little late in the day to be raising journalistic standards. Kidding, Okay,
Speaker 1: So what I want to do is I want to
Speaker 1: go to every hospital in the country, every maternity ward,
Speaker 1: and when every baby is born, some person randomly walks
Speaker 1: around and puts a little sticker on the baby's forehead,
Speaker 1: and the sticker determines which condition the child will be
Speaker 1: in for the first let's say, fifty years of life. Okay, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you have a magic let's be modest about it. You
Speaker 1: have a magic wind. You're allowed to fifty Okay, it's
Speaker 1: a fifty year experiment. And what we're going to do
Speaker 1: is based on the color of the sticker, We're going
Speaker 1: to assign kids to different conditions of exposure to screens
Speaker 1: and social media, and we're going to track their progress
Speaker 1: across the lifespan, across those fifty years or even longer.
Speaker 1: Alter wants to do this because he points out that
Speaker 1: we basically have no idea what the long term effects
Speaker 1: of screen time and social media are, hence the Altar
Speaker 1: screen test. There are two camps right now. There's a
Speaker 1: camp that thinks that social media screens all the concerns
Speaker 1: about those are a moral panic, there's nothing to be
Speaker 1: concerned about. And then there's another camp that thinks this
Speaker 1: is really a serious concern. What are all the things
Speaker 1: we're looking for. The thing that I want to know,
Speaker 1: number one is is it bad for your well being?
Speaker 1: Are you less happy? Do you have a less meaningful life?
Speaker 1: You less connected to other people if you have access
Speaker 1: to screens throughout your life? And how much is a problem?
Speaker 1: Is one hour a day? Okay? Is three hours? Okay?
Speaker 1: Is five? I'm sure there's a point at which it
Speaker 1: becomes problematic. There's some evidence that your ability to distinguish
Speaker 1: subtle facial cues that show, say the difference between fear
Speaker 1: and sadness comes from spending a lot of time as
Speaker 1: a kid, as a very young kid, looking at people
Speaker 1: face to face. So I would like to know too,
Speaker 1: kids who spend a huge amount of time in front
Speaker 1: of screens never to develop those capacities. Is there a
Speaker 1: critical period where if you don't develop them young, it
Speaker 1: becomes very hard to develop them later on. And I
Speaker 1: think there's some evidence to suggest that the ability to tell,
Speaker 1: for example, to get a sense of the effects of
Speaker 1: your actions on other people seems really important. So as
Speaker 1: a little kid you take another kid's toy, that kid
Speaker 1: bops you on the head and says, don't do that.
Speaker 1: That's really important to learn. And I think to the
Speaker 1: extent you're spending a huge amount of time on screens,
Speaker 1: the feedback you get when you do social things is
Speaker 1: low fidelity, it's slow to arrive, it's not physical, and
Speaker 1: so I think these kids are going to learn social
Speaker 1: things less quickly, and I think that might be problematic
Speaker 1: as well. So that's the early part of life as
Speaker 1: we get older. I mean, you just have to talk
Speaker 1: to parents of teens and even to the teens themselves,
Speaker 1: and they'll tell you I am less happy because I
Speaker 1: have access to social media. A lot of teens will
Speaker 1: tell you this, and their parents will say the same.
Speaker 1: And I'd like a sort of hard edged way to
Speaker 1: measure that. What does that exactly mean? And is it
Speaker 1: because you're exposed to the best one percent of everyone
Speaker 1: else life that you become less happy? Or is there
Speaker 1: something else going on? So those are the kinds of
Speaker 1: questions that I'd want to know about teens in particular.
Speaker 1: What's interesting about Adam Alter's magic wand is that it
Speaker 1: runs counter to the penis test. The penis test has
Speaker 1: the potential to absolve parents of all blame. Alter's experiment
Speaker 1: has the potential to make you feel really, really bad
Speaker 1: about a decision you made for your children. There's no
Speaker 1: middle ground with magic wands. There is only Euvboria on
Speaker 1: the one hand, and a mountain of guilt on the other.
Speaker 1: This reminds me oddly love of my own childhood because
Speaker 1: I was the only child in my primary school without
Speaker 1: was that the only one, one of the only ones
Speaker 1: without television? Right, So I was the child who was
Speaker 1: listening to these conversations about things that I'd never heard of,
Speaker 1: these television shows which meant nothing to me. Who the
Speaker 1: pattern of my days was different for everybody else's. So
Speaker 1: I sort of get how that works, and just see
Speaker 1: how I turned out needlessly provocative, irrationally obsessed with running
Speaker 1: a delightful podcast host. You see what I'm saying. Was
Speaker 1: it because I didn't watch television until I went to college?
Speaker 1: We just don't know, you know what? We need to
Speaker 1: give them our old school blackberries. Yeah, So as a phone,
Speaker 1: it's email and that's it, right. Yeah, So we're basically
Speaker 1: talking about creating a BlackBerry generation alongside an iPhone generation,
Speaker 1: and we're controlling, we're controlling for the nature of their
Speaker 1: phone and observing the outcome. Yes, no one is happier,
Speaker 1: by the way, with an experiment that brings back the BlackBerry. BlackBerry,
Speaker 1: as I'm constantly reminding people was made in my hometown.
Speaker 1: My tagline on my old BlackBerry emails was there's no
Speaker 1: school like old school. Oh man, I missed the simple
Speaker 1: pleasures driving down the highway rocking out to the Littus
Speaker 1: Nirvana album on my CD player while scrolling through my
Speaker 1: emails on my BlackBerry with my free hand. My son
Speaker 1: started kindergarten. He's five, and for the first time he
Speaker 1: got an iPad to take home. All of his little
Speaker 1: friends have got these screens, and so they talk about
Speaker 1: the things they do on the screens at the end
Speaker 1: of the day. And I think that's a completely different thing.
Speaker 1: How it's changed the way he's interacting with all these
Speaker 1: little kids versus what it's like to get him off
Speaker 1: the screen at the end of the day. I think
Speaker 1: both are interesting questions. Yeah, yeah, wait, I can't believe
Speaker 1: that in the middle of you imagining this magic wand
Speaker 1: experiment involving limited access to screens of social media, your
Speaker 1: own son, it's being good and I yeah, well, we
Speaker 1: had no say. This is what schools do today, They
Speaker 1: give kids iPads. Unfortunately. Okay, we have the penis test,
Speaker 1: we have the altar screen test. Next up. Nancy Siegel,
Speaker 1: who teaches a cal State Fullerton and studies what she
Speaker 1: calls scientific treasures. Twins. Twins are catnip for psychologists, and
Speaker 1: no one loves a twin more than Nancy Siegel, who
Speaker 1: is also herself a twin. Now, you might say, aren't
Speaker 1: identical twins in effect nature's magic wand a little bit
Speaker 1: of genetic wizardry that lets us see things we would
Speaker 1: never know about otherwise. Absolutely in fact, and this will
Speaker 1: require a little digression. Seagull once uncovered a totally bananas
Speaker 1: real life twins case study. Two sets of twins born
Speaker 1: a day apart in Columbia. One pair born in the
Speaker 1: lively capital city of Bogata, the other born one hundred
Speaker 1: and ten miles to the north, in the most rural
Speaker 1: area with no running water, no flush toilets, no nothing.
Speaker 1: One of the little boys up north was very sick,
Speaker 1: so at day one or two, his grandmother brought him
Speaker 1: to the better hospital in Bogata where he was switched
Speaker 1: with one of the twins and the other pair. So
Speaker 1: this is an extraordinary double switch case. So you had
Speaker 1: two sets of boys who were identical twins to somebody else,
Speaker 1: with growing up together thinking they were fraternal twins. So
Speaker 1: you can look at the unrelated pair. This is somebody
Speaker 1: that that person A was raised with, so twin B
Speaker 1: was unrelated to him. But then remember twin B has
Speaker 1: an identical brother somewhere else that person A was never
Speaker 1: raised with. So how similar are you to somebody you're
Speaker 1: unrelated to but raised with, but unrelated to and not
Speaker 1: raised with. So that was something I addressed in my
Speaker 1: book because I had that, and that was completely unique,
Speaker 1: completely unique, the Bogata twins. How did they discover the error? Oh?
Speaker 1: Good question. The boys up in the north moved down
Speaker 1: to Bogata to make a living. They became butcher's in
Speaker 1: a local supermarket. Actually, Bogata has a big city. It
Speaker 1: wasn't so local. But a friend of one of the
Speaker 1: other guys who was raised there went into the butcher's
Speaker 1: shop and she thought, Orgey, what are you doing here?
Speaker 1: And he said, my name is William, and she could
Speaker 1: hardly believe it. So she took a picture of William
Speaker 1: showed it to her friend, Jororey, and Jorge, of course
Speaker 1: is a twin, right, he thinks he's a twin to
Speaker 1: the sky Carlos. And anyway, they sat on it for
Speaker 1: a while. But then Jorge went online and he saw
Speaker 1: himself in clothes he knew he didn't own, and he
Speaker 1: saw someone next to this guy who looked just like
Speaker 1: his twin brother, only it wasn't his twin brother. And
Speaker 1: they met, they got together, and of course they were
Speaker 1: all in shock, particularly because the one guy who was
Speaker 1: raised in the city knew that it thinks had gone right.
Speaker 1: He who'd been raised in a very rural area and
Speaker 1: he's someone who enjoyed the city. And the guy up
Speaker 1: in the north, who should have been raised in Bogata
Speaker 1: was desperate for education, wanted to learn, and had no opportunities,
Speaker 1: never went past the fifth grade. So there were some
Speaker 1: tensions in the beginning. But actually I will say that
Speaker 1: these four boys are the most gracious and loving of
Speaker 1: any of the switch of birth families I've encountered. They
Speaker 1: call themselves a group of four. They make decisions together,
Speaker 1: and any difference as they had, I mean, it was
Speaker 1: not their fault. These things just happened. Sometimes they get
Speaker 1: along beautifully. Now, all for all combinations of twins, It's
Speaker 1: an incredible story. Now, could you imagine a magic one
Speaker 1: replication of that real life experiment, sure, but Siegel has
Speaker 1: a better idea, a bigger idea. This is a new
Speaker 1: buzzword in the twin world, by racial twins. What are they?
Speaker 1: They come about naturally when an interracial couple marries and
Speaker 1: has children. So let's say you have a Caucasian mother
Speaker 1: and an African American father, So the children are really
Speaker 1: both by racial but given the way that the genes segregate,
Speaker 1: one child looks very Caucasian and one child looks very
Speaker 1: African American. Now these are fraternal twins, so you're not
Speaker 1: controlling for the genes. What I would like to do,
Speaker 1: if I could, would be to have a set of
Speaker 1: identical twins and have them look exactly the same, except
Speaker 1: that one would look Caucasian and one would look African American,
Speaker 1: or one would look Asian and one would look Hispanic.
Speaker 1: But still raise them together and just see what their
Speaker 1: different life experiences are like and have that would impact
Speaker 1: in their development. And I got this idea because I've
Speaker 1: had fraternal twins in my class at the university. Who
Speaker 1: are these biracial fraternal twins, And they've told me they
Speaker 1: have very different life experiences. But again, you're not controlling
Speaker 1: for the genes. So if you had monozygotic or identical
Speaker 1: twins like this, I think it would really show us
Speaker 1: in a new way. And this is what information we
Speaker 1: don't have so well. The magic wand we have to
Speaker 1: wave here is to take identical twins and make them
Speaker 1: not identical in their skin color exactly. We have the
Speaker 1: twins just the same, eat the same go to the
Speaker 1: same schools, same summer camps, play on the same soccer teams,
Speaker 1: and do that for hundreds of pairs of twins from
Speaker 1: thousands of different families, rich, poor, the Southern United States,
Speaker 1: the Midwest, country city, And after thirty or forty years,
Speaker 1: we gather them together in a big convention center and
Speaker 1: have them go up on stage one pairod of time
Speaker 1: and talk about all the experiences they shared as almost
Speaker 1: identical twins, What was same, what exactly was different? Who
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to be in the audience for that, because
Speaker 1: suddenly we would have a very different conversation about things
Speaker 1: like discrimination. I have to say, though, that of all
Speaker 1: these magic wands so far, this one is the hardest,
Speaker 1: the cruelest. Yes, it would teach us a lot, but
Speaker 1: I couldn't help thinking of my own mother who was
Speaker 1: an identical twin. She and her sister went to college
Speaker 1: in England from Jamaica in the nineteen fifties. What if
Speaker 1: my aunt had been white? What would it have meant
Speaker 1: for their relationship? If suddenly the person whom my mother
Speaker 1: had shared everything with for the first twenty years of
Speaker 1: her life was suddenly on the other side of the
Speaker 1: racial fence at a time and a place when the
Speaker 1: racial fences were really high. It's too much to think about.
Speaker 1: But that's why a magic wand is sometimes a powerful thing.
Speaker 1: Siegel had so many ideas. She described a magical wand
Speaker 1: where identical twins could be born twenty five years apart,
Speaker 1: same jeans, different generations. Think of all the things you
Speaker 1: could do once you suspend this little law of nature.
Speaker 1: We could go back to Adam Alter's screen test, because
Speaker 1: the perfect way to do his BlackBerry versus iPhone experiment,
Speaker 1: now that I think about it, is with massive numbers
Speaker 1: of identical twins, same jeans, different cell phones. Now imagine
Speaker 1: we'd placed those twins in different technological eras. The first
Speaker 1: set born in nineteen eighty who grew up without Instagram
Speaker 1: or Twitter, and another identical set born the year the
Speaker 1: iPhone came out two thousand and seven, and who grew
Speaker 1: up under the long dark shadow of Steve Jobs? What
Speaker 1: do we learn from that? We learn everything. I just realized.
Speaker 1: I gave you two or was it three? Magic one
Speaker 1: twin studies for the price of one. That's how we
Speaker 1: roll here at Provision's history. We've done the penis test,
Speaker 1: I Phone versus BlackBerry, multi racial twin studies, and now
Speaker 1: the magic wand has been passed. Stella Volpi a nutritionist
Speaker 1: and exercise physiologist at Virginia Tech University. How did you
Speaker 1: get to me? Because can I just tell you? I
Speaker 1: see this email from Malcolm Gladwell in my inbox, and
Speaker 1: I was at a conference and I said to my friend, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is real. I think this is the real Malcolm Gladwell. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is the real Malcolm Gladwell. And Stella Volpi's experiment
Speaker 1: was my very favorite. Her premise is this, Americans are
Speaker 1: getting less and less healthy. We need to try new
Speaker 1: strategies to change that. So for her Magic Wand, she
Speaker 1: divides the United States in half. One half is the
Speaker 1: control group, which continues life as ever, eating Doritos and
Speaker 1: watching Netflix. Over the other half, of the country those
Speaker 1: in the treatment condition. Volpie waves her magic wand and
Speaker 1: gets to work making all kinds of subtle and not
Speaker 1: so subtle changes. Right now, So much of our focus
Speaker 1: when it comes to getting people to improve their health
Speaker 1: behaviors is to tell them what to do and instruct
Speaker 1: them and cajole them and such. But you're talking about
Speaker 1: a series of interventions in their built environment. Should we
Speaker 1: just do it and not say anything? Yes? I did
Speaker 1: that actually in a dining hall at a university. Oh really,
Speaker 1: change we change the portion sizes. We decrease the portion sizes.
Speaker 1: The students didn't note. Turns out it worked the students
Speaker 1: instead of Volpie's stealth small portion cafeteria didn't gain the
Speaker 1: freshman fifteen, The students in the control group did. And
Speaker 1: you didn't tell them that you were decreasing the portion size.
Speaker 1: We didn't. Now did the students, any of them suspect
Speaker 1: what was going on? You know? They didn't because that
Speaker 1: and I really give credit to the food service employees.
Speaker 1: Students didn't quite know that the pizza was cut a
Speaker 1: little bit smaller, or that the cake was cut in like,
Speaker 1: instead of eighty four slices, there were ninety six. So
Speaker 1: this is what we had to work with the food
Speaker 1: service folks to do, and they were amazing. So Volpi's
Speaker 1: magic wand experiment is also a stealth operation. If you're
Speaker 1: in the experimental half of the country, you wake up
Speaker 1: one morning and you find a lot of the elevators
Speaker 1: are gone. What's your elevator threshold? So I can if
Speaker 1: I live in Manhattan in a twenty store building, You're
Speaker 1: not going to make me walk up. But what's the
Speaker 1: point at which I get to use an elevator if
Speaker 1: I'm otherwise unencumbered? Right? Three stories? Four? I'm going to
Speaker 1: say six stories. She wants to swap out hard chairs
Speaker 1: and offices for bouncy balls, give kids standing desks in
Speaker 1: the classroom, put a quote a mile between a parking
Speaker 1: lot and the building it serves. Give grocery stores a makeover.
Speaker 1: Yeah waitum, Stella just had a good idea. This is
Speaker 1: going to My idea is to is going to link
Speaker 1: two of your things. Okay, your grocery store and your stairs. Idea,
Speaker 1: what about this? In the treatment condition, grocery stores can
Speaker 1: still carry whatever they want to carry, but everything that
Speaker 1: Stella deems to be unhealthy is now on the on
Speaker 1: a third floor of the grocery store. If you want
Speaker 1: a chocolate bar, if you want cheerios, you're going to
Speaker 1: walk up two flights to get them. Okay, that is
Speaker 1: so brilliant, Thank you. I love that. So we can
Speaker 1: do that, right, we can do that. Oh yeah, we
Speaker 1: can wave our magic one. Now. Think about how much
Speaker 1: we could learn from Stella Volpies idea. Maybe people without
Speaker 1: the elevators and with the parking lots down the street
Speaker 1: rise up in protest. Maybe they would all move to
Speaker 1: the other half of the country in a huff. That
Speaker 1: would tell us something, tell us to give up. But
Speaker 1: maybe they just shrug and get used to it. Or
Speaker 1: maybe Stella Volpi's treatment half of the country gets so
Speaker 1: fit and happy and tough minded that the slacker half
Speaker 1: gets envious and competitive and starts making the same changes
Speaker 1: in their world. Or maybe nobody wants to hire the
Speaker 1: slacker half, and all of a sudden there's a wave
Speaker 1: of workforce discrimination suits against the slacker half for being slackers,
Speaker 1: and the Supreme Court has to weigh in in Slacker v. Volpie.
Speaker 1: The point is, right now, we're getting nowhere. Insisting on
Speaker 1: trying to educate and persuade and create awareness. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: time for us to admit that all this talking does nothing.
Speaker 1: We just need to do stuff. I realized my school
Speaker 1: in Canada did a version of this. It's a subly
Speaker 1: cruel version of this, but this is Canada in the seventies.
Speaker 1: So the bus would drop me off at my school
Speaker 1: and all of the other kids from my bus route
Speaker 1: at eight thirty five in the morning. Okay, school starts
Speaker 1: nine in my littletown. From eight thirty five to nine,
Speaker 1: the doors to the school were locked, so you had
Speaker 1: twenty five minutes of enforced playtime. Now, I will point
Speaker 1: it to you. It's Canada. It's like twenty below to
Speaker 1: this day. I remember, you know I'm skinny. I'm a
Speaker 1: little skinny, Like the only way to stay warned is
Speaker 1: to run around like a madman for twenty five minutes.
Speaker 1: It was like, it's basically put a gun to our
Speaker 1: head and said, you you know, if you want to
Speaker 1: you can. You can just stand there, but you'll you'll
Speaker 1: get frostbite. See this belongs in the in the treatment condition.
Speaker 1: Do you know how long winter last us in Ontario?
Speaker 1: Like four months? For four months, I froze to death
Speaker 1: every single morning, and look and look look at the
Speaker 1: character it built in you? Right, good character? Absolutely? I
Speaker 1: have am I complaining now? The penis swap iPhone versus
Speaker 1: BlackBerry by racial twins Slacker v Vulpi. How is the
Speaker 1: world not a better place if we could learn from
Speaker 1: those four experiments? But wait, I know what you're thinking, Malcolm.
Speaker 1: You promised us five magic ones. Where's the fifth? The fifth,
Speaker 1: my friends, is so massive and wonky and random that
Speaker 1: I felt it deserved an episode all to itself. We
Speaker 1: did have to really put on a lot of gear
Speaker 1: to get it in there for food safety reasons. I
Speaker 1: think that's in our next episode. Our experiment of a
Speaker 1: season is just getting started. You're wearing like hard hats, gloves,
Speaker 1: hard hats, jackets, oh caps for our hair that didn't
Speaker 1: really work for either of us. Revisionist History is produced
Speaker 1: by Eloise Linton, Leeman Gustu and Jacob Smith, with Tali
Speaker 1: Emlyn and Harrison VJ. Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is mil Lo Bell. Original scoring by
Speaker 1: Luis Kara, mastering by Flawn Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Keishaw Williams. Him Maltain Glovell