0:15

Pushkin. So

0:21

one thing that chapter

0:23

one is about is the fact that if a lobster

0:25

is defeated in a dominance battle,

0:28

you can give it essentially antidepressants,

0:30

and it will fight again. There's

0:34

a Canadian like me, my

0:36

age, almost exactly, who

0:39

teaches my favorite subject, psychology

0:41

at my alma mater, the University of Toronto.

0:45

His name is Jordan Peterson. If

0:50

you want to understand a complex nervous system,

0:52

it's a good idea to understand a simple

0:54

one first and then sort of elaborate upwards.

0:56

And it turns out that serotonin governs

0:59

status, emotional regulation, and

1:01

posture in lobsters just like it does

1:03

in human beings, and so that would just blew me

1:05

away. He wrote

1:07

a very provocative self help book called

1:10

Twelve Rules for Life. Rule

1:12

number one stand up straight

1:15

with your shoulders back. Rule number

1:17

two treat yourself like someone

1:19

you are responsible for helping. Rule

1:22

number twelve, pat a cat

1:24

when you encounter one on the street. Peterson's

1:28

book was a sensation, and soon all

1:30

kinds of other people were doing twelve rules, like

1:33

the economist Tyler Cowen, whose blog

1:35

Marginal Revolution is the first thing I read every

1:37

morning. I particularly like Cowen's

1:40

rule number seven, learn

1:42

how to learn from those who offend

1:44

you every time

1:46

you turn a corner. Twelve rules the

1:48

columnist Meghan McCardell Rule number

1:51

three. Always order one

1:53

extra dish at a restaurant, an unfamiliar

1:56

one. You might like it, which would

1:58

be splendid. If you don't like it, all

2:01

you lost was a couple of bucks. The

2:03

exercise of curiosity requires

2:06

a risk, a sacrifice, a

2:08

commitment. I love that. Also,

2:13

mccartell's rule number twelve. Always

2:16

make more dinner rolls than you think you can

2:18

eat. For some reason, dinner

2:20

rolls loom much larger in our imaginations

2:23

than in our stomachs. Woe.

2:26

Megan mccartell makes her own dinner rules.

2:30

Everybody's doing twelve rules. Wait,

2:33

I'm jealous. My

2:39

name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist

2:42

History, my podcast about things overlooked

2:44

and misunderstood. This episode

2:46

is about Malcolm Gladwell's twelve

2:49

rules for living my guiding principles.

2:51

My wisdom distilled. EXCEPT

2:56

thought about this for like a month, and I

2:58

realized I don't have twelve rules. I

3:01

just don't. I mean, I have rules

3:04

like the fact that I only drink five liquids

3:06

ever, water, tea,

3:09

red wine, espresso, and milk in some

3:11

combination. But that's not a rule

3:13

for living. It's just pointlessly provocative

3:16

self denial the least attractive part

3:18

of my personality. If you want a cocktail,

3:20

you should have a cocktail. I

3:22

only have one rule. Pull

3:25

the goalie. What

3:32

do you mean when you say you're obnoxious? Ah,

3:35

be more specific. If

3:37

I found something funny which

3:40

is still a disease I have, I

3:42

will say it, even

3:44

if it's gets me in some trouble.

3:47

I never thought I was particularly cruel, but

3:49

I was a class cut up. My

3:51

one rule for living came to me from the work

3:53

of two people, Cliff Assness

3:56

and Aaron Brown, both philosophers

3:58

of a sort and friends. This

4:00

is Clifford Assness. He's in his mid fifties,

4:03

bald goatee. Grew up middle class

4:05

Jewish in Long Island. I was in the honors

4:07

classes, and I was the cut up in the honors class.

4:09

It's always a strange thing to be. You don't

4:11

think of those classes as having one. But we had him.

4:14

It wasn't always me to We were not perfectly

4:16

well behaved, so obnoxious

4:20

I was tolerable, but I found

4:22

myself extremely funny. Now

4:24

I should say that I didn't find Cliff Aastness

4:27

obnoxious. He's a delightful company.

4:30

Instead, I suspect he is what psychologists

4:32

call disagreeable short

4:35

digression. Psychologists

4:39

believe that human personality can be assessed

4:41

along five dimensions extraversion,

4:44

conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness

4:47

to experience, and finally agreeableness.

4:52

My sense of Cliff fastness, he's at the

4:54

low end of that last trait number

4:56

five. He's low agreeable disagreeable,

4:59

which is not the same as obnoxious. It's

5:01

rather the quality of not being depended

5:04

on or particularly interested in the

5:06

approval of others. When

5:09

I went to interview Cliff Assenes in Manhattan,

5:12

I turned on my digital recorder and discovered

5:14

that my memory flashguard was full,

5:17

And after much fluster and fumbling, I

5:19

realized I had no idea how to delete

5:22

any of the existing data from the flashguard

5:24

to make room for my interview with Assnes. Now,

5:26

the rational thing would have been for me

5:29

to hand Asthenes the digital recorder

5:31

and ask him to figure it out. Because

5:34

Cliff Assness has an IQ. I'm guessing two

5:36

to three standard deviations higher than mine.

5:39

He could have solved the problem in about thirty

5:41

seconds, but I didn't

5:43

hand on the recorder because I was embarrassed,

5:46

because I worried that he would think I was pathetic

5:49

and that concern was more important

5:51

to me than actually fixing my tape recorder

5:53

issues. I am agreeable,

5:56

I am interested in the approval of others.

5:58

I am the opposite of Cliff Assness.

6:01

So I ended up running down forty second

6:03

Street, two cross down blocks to Staples

6:06

to get another flashguard to replace the

6:08

one. I was too embarrassed to ask for help

6:10

figuring out here

6:14

you may include this. This is um.

6:17

This is not a secret. I don't work as

6:19

hard as people think. I goof off

6:21

a lot. Cliff Fastness

6:24

likes puzzles, games, problems

6:26

that engage the imagination. I have

6:29

been caught several times playing internet

6:31

chess in my office from people. When I say

6:33

caught, I'm the senior guy

6:35

at the firm. I don't, I don't, I don't quit over

6:37

this. But people come in and I'm like, yeah, I gotta beat

6:39

this guy, hold on or lose. I'm not a

6:41

great chess player. He doesn't play

6:44

conventional chess. He plays one minute

6:46

chess known as bullet chess. If

6:48

you're curious, this is what a typical bullet

6:51

match sounds like. It's

6:59

like Einstein playing ping pong. By

7:02

the way, when Astnes says I'm

7:04

the senior guy at the firm, he's referring

7:07

to the fact that he heads a company called AQR

7:10

Capital Applied Quantitative

7:12

Research, a hedge fund with two

7:14

hundred and twenty five billion

7:16

dollars under management, which

7:18

brings me to philosopher number two,

7:21

the second architect of the Polagully

7:23

principle, Cliff Astness's friend

7:26

Aaron Brown. If we were to

7:29

create a disagreeableness scale where

7:31

zero is like a golden retriever and

7:33

ten is mister Spock, Cliff Astness

7:35

would be a solid seven. Aaron Brown

7:38

is an eight, maybe even an eight point five. Brown

7:45

is a member of the tribe of mathematically

7:47

minded finance guys known as quantz.

7:50

The Wall Street quants used to gather up to work

7:52

at the Odeon Restaurant in downtown Manhattan

7:54

to talk about Gaussi improbability in the

7:56

bond market. Yeah,

7:59

so there's different definitions of quants. So remember

8:02

quant of an insult and rented in the mid

8:04

nineties that became adopted

8:06

as a point of pride.

8:09

Aaron Brown is a big guy beard, impassive

8:12

demeanor. When I met him, I

8:14

was reminded of my favorite joke about engineers.

8:17

The optimists seized the glass is half full.

8:19

The pessimist sees the glass as half

8:21

empty. The engineer wonders

8:23

why the glass is twice as large as it needs to be.

8:28

Brown grew up in Seattle. His mom

8:30

had a master's in chemistry. His dad

8:32

had a PhD in physics. Did

8:34

a lot of unconventional work for

8:36

the Air Force, like the time he inherited

8:39

a strange contraption. The

8:41

Air Force had given this guy like two million dollars

8:43

over ten years to build some machine, and

8:46

they didn't know what it was supposed to do, but they knew he

8:48

was really smart. And then he killed

8:50

himself, and so the Air Force, is

8:52

there anybody who wants this machinery can figure out

8:54

what it does and fix it on. My dad, said Cheryl Tagot,

8:56

And he had in our basement a

8:59

tortured genius builds a sinister contraption

9:02

with millions of dollars of secret Pentagon

9:04

money. The man mysteriously commits

9:06

suicide. The Air Force says, who

9:09

wants the machine? Aaron

9:11

Brown's dad says, over here, over

9:13

here. He puts it in his basement and

9:15

says to his teenage son, Aaron, Hey,

9:18

take a look if you want, Like it's a box of legos.

9:23

This is how you raise a child to be an

9:26

eight point five? What was the

9:28

machine? It was just a huge I

9:30

stared at that thing for hours and hours.

9:33

I couldn't add tubes and wires and this

9:35

and that. And he turned

9:37

it on and it did kind of you know, lights would light up and do interesting

9:39

things, but we never figured out what it was intended to do.

9:42

His notes were indecipherable and

9:44

he burned some of them. So either

9:47

he was the guy who invented like the Universal

9:50

Wonder Machine and whatever, or

9:52

he was just some crazy guy who liked

9:54

to put wires together. Maybe it was that was the

9:56

thing from that movie from Back to the Future to flat

9:59

the flux capacity. Yeah, yeah,

10:03

maybe he didn't. Maybe he teleported himself to some

10:05

other civilization or something. When

10:09

Aaron Brown was a teenager, Seattle

10:11

was in the midst of a deep procession. All

10:13

around him, people are losing their jobs. He

10:16

decides he needs a marketable skill.

10:18

He teaches himself poker and finds

10:20

a big money game in the basement of a local tavern.

10:23

And I figured out two really important

10:25

things. I was much better

10:28

than these guys. I could easily win money

10:30

consistently, and they

10:32

let me win it and walk out with it. You know, a kid

10:34

comes in plays, walks out, So

10:37

that's like epiphany for me, that says, okay,

10:39

you're how old? Fourteen? But

10:41

as a shy kid, this took every

10:44

ounce of courage I possessed to walk in there. You

10:46

know, there are people who could have done this and it wouldn't have been a big

10:48

deal. But for me, it was like the most traumatic event

10:50

in my life. But when I walked out,

10:52

I said, Okay, I never have to worry about getting

10:55

a meal, you know, having a place to stay because you always

10:57

find a poker game. Did you

10:59

pay you a way through Harvard with poker? Yes? Aaron

11:03

Brown ends up on Wall Street, then

11:05

goes to work for Cliff Assness at AQR

11:07

Capital. Of course, a

11:10

match made in Heaven. Do you guys

11:12

think the same way? Do you have differences in the way you approach

11:14

problems? Well, the massive difference

11:16

and the reason he has billions of dollars

11:18

and I have a comfortable living. He

11:22

cares far more. He

11:25

gets literally physically

11:27

angry when things don't work

11:29

and lose money. I'd rather

11:31

work on an interesting problem than profitable problem.

11:35

Now what are these two do aside from making

11:37

money? Of course, they do thought experiments,

11:41

write them up and post them online on

11:43

something called SSRN, the

11:45

Social Science Research Network, in

11:48

my opinion, the greatest website

11:50

on the Internet. It's

11:53

a place where anyone, anyone can

11:55

post any kind of paper or research or

11:57

argument, and every article posted is

12:00

then ranked according to its popularity. As

12:02

I'm writing this, there are seven

12:04

hundred and ninety eight seven hundred and

12:07

forty five papers on SSRN. I

12:10

don't know if you remember. Back at the beginning of this

12:12

season an episode called Divide

12:14

and Conquer, I talked about my love of

12:16

law review articles. Well, where do

12:18

you think I read law review articles? Not

12:20

in law reviews? Are you kidding? Why

12:22

would I wait two years for some dusty publication

12:25

to put something out. I read them on SSRN

12:28

because that's where everyone posts their articles

12:30

the minute they finish in Manhattan.

12:33

For years, the most important source of gossip

12:35

was page six of the New York Post. SSRN

12:39

is page six for Dorks, so

12:43

not long ago. I'm on SSRN

12:46

poking around and lo and behold,

12:48

what is the number one ranked paper at the time.

12:51

Pulling the goalie Hockey and

12:54

Investment Implications by Clifford

12:56

Astness and Aaron Brown. I

13:00

thought I didn't have any rules for living. I

13:03

was wrong. Pulling

13:06

the goaltender down three

13:09

so really giving a big advantage on

13:11

the power of flay with possession firmly

13:14

a standard. Here's

13:16

the issue. You're playing hockey.

13:18

Your team is down by one goal late in the

13:20

game. The coach of the losing

13:23

team typically removes his own

13:25

goalie and substitutes in an extra

13:27

attacker. So instead of having five

13:29

offensive players and a goalie guarding the

13:31

net, he now has six offensive

13:33

players and no one guarding his net.

13:39

That don't compare for it a

13:41

shorthanded goal. It's a trade

13:43

off. Pulling your goalie makes it easier

13:46

for the other team to score and put the game even

13:48

further out of reach, but at the same time,

13:50

your extra attacker increases your chances

13:53

of scoring a goal and tying the game. Now,

13:59

if you watch hockey, you know that coaches

14:01

typically pull a goalie with a minute or a minute

14:03

and a half left in the game, but that's just

14:05

hockey tradition. It's not based on data.

14:09

When exactly should

14:11

you pull the goalie? Tell me the

14:13

genesis of this paper I love so much.

14:16

Okay, Well, Cliff and

14:18

I talk a lot about sort of quant

14:20

sports stuff, and I

14:22

have always been talking to him about decisions

14:25

that coaches make that

14:27

are mathematically indefensible, but are you

14:30

know makes sense from the coach's motivation. And

14:32

specifically we were talking about Seattle

14:34

Seahawks twenty fourteen

14:37

Super Bowl New England Patriots. I got the

14:39

ball on the one yard line, second Town, twenty six

14:41

seconds to go, second in goal, Russell

14:43

Wilton, what are you doing? He getting

14:45

picked up by the undrafted rookie

14:48

free agent from Western Alabama,

14:50

Malcolm Butler, who preserves the

14:52

victory. And it will leave everybody asking

14:55

why in the world with Marshawn in

14:57

the back build did the Seahawks throw the football?

15:00

Twenty one reasons. At this point, Brown

15:02

goes on a tangent for maybe fifteen

15:05

minutes about that particular

15:07

play, which has gone down in

15:09

Super Bowl lore as one of the worst

15:11

coaching decisions in the history of

15:13

football. But Brown convinces

15:16

me that in fact it was the right

15:18

call, the rational call, and

15:20

I would explain his logic to you, except

15:23

it we have much bigger fish

15:25

to fry. Anyway, talk

15:28

turns to pulling the goalie in hockey, and

15:30

Cliff says to Aaron, Oh,

15:32

I've done some work on this already. It's

15:35

probably six seven years ago. Five

15:37

six years ago. I wrote this model and

15:39

X out out of pure personal

15:41

interest. I thought I had a neat way

15:43

to think about the problem,

15:46

and essentially it was it's really

15:48

hard to think about what five minutes left, but

15:50

with ten seconds left, it's really easy to think about.

15:53

Cliff shared his calculations with Aaron

15:55

Brown. Aaron made them better and built

15:58

a beautiful computer model, and

16:00

their conclusion was a team

16:02

down by one goal should pull its goalie with

16:04

five minutes and forty seconds left

16:07

in the game, and a team down by two

16:09

goals should pull its goalie with eleven

16:11

minutes and forty seconds left. Eleven

16:14

minutes and forty seconds with

16:17

an undefended goal. No

16:19

one in all of hockey pulls

16:21

their goalie without much time left. If

16:23

a coach did that in a playoff game with

16:25

real stakes involved, the entire

16:28

arena would probably go up in smoke.

16:33

In basketball and baseball, there's

16:35

been a statistical revolution over the past

16:37

generation known as moneyball, where

16:39

advanced metrics have been applied to maximize

16:42

every aspect of the game. Hockey

16:44

is a step behind, with the exception

16:47

of my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs, who

16:49

have a genuine quant as their leader. This

16:52

is a sport where players pick fights

16:54

with each other in full knowledge of the fact

16:56

that the penalty for their transgressions

16:58

will materially diminish their team's chances of

17:00

winning. Baseball is

17:02

quantum theory. Hockey is the

17:04

grown up, professional version of Red Rover.

17:07

Red Rover, let Wayne Gretzky come over

17:09

her. Hockey

17:11

coaches are not looking for strategic

17:13

tips on SSRN, So

17:15

what do they do. They keep their goalie

17:17

in place until the very last minute, defending

17:21

the goal. And why do they keep

17:23

doing that? Because anything else

17:25

would be impossibly disagreeable.

17:32

Imagine you're a coach of a hockey team

17:34

down three one with eleven minutes and forty

17:36

seconds left in the game. You pull your goalie.

17:39

The other team scores, so now it's four one

17:41

with half of the final period left, and now

17:43

your fans think that you've robbed them of what

17:45

might have been a reasonably interesting game. They'll

17:48

hate you, and

17:51

so are your players, because it's an awful

17:53

lot more humiliating to lose a lopsided

17:55

game than a close one. The Cliff

17:58

and Arran strategy maybe,

18:01

again in our geeky sense, optimal, but

18:03

it doesn't provide the optimal or

18:05

the maximum amount of entertainment. It

18:07

is very high probability you create

18:10

a laugher where

18:12

you get down by three, down by four, And of course, if you

18:14

follow Cliff and Arran's cold vulcan

18:16

model, you never put the goalie back in. You're

18:18

still an infinitesimal chance you will tie

18:20

it, and you lose fourteen to nothing.

18:23

And it's embarrassing and maybe entertainment

18:25

in a sideshow kind of way, but it's not what they

18:27

want. Who would try this or

18:30

anything like it, Not anyone

18:32

who has any normal human expectation

18:35

of being liked and applauded. But

18:37

do Cliff and Aaron need to be liked and applauded,

18:40

No, they don't. Assnes

18:42

founded his firm with a couple of other PhD

18:45

graduates from the finance department of the University

18:47

of Chicago, which is like the geek

18:49

capital of the world, and

18:51

his basic hiring philosophy ever since

18:54

has been to hire more PhDs

18:56

disagreeable quants just like

18:59

him. He's now up to seventy

19:01

three PhDs. For comparison

19:03

purposes, the economics faculty at

19:05

MIT has forty one PhDs.

19:08

He's a one point seven eight o x

19:11

MIT and counting. Now

19:13

does he need that many PhDs? I

19:15

have no idea, But how much more

19:17

fun is office life for insanely

19:20

smart, disagreeable people if at

19:22

all times they are surrounded by dozens

19:24

and dozens of other insanely smart and

19:26

disagreeable people circling

19:28

each other's arguments like vultures.

19:32

Was kind to be one of the watershed days in financial

19:35

markets histories. It was a manic Monday in

19:37

the financial markets. The

19:39

Tao tumbled more than five hundred points

19:42

after two pillars of the street tumbled

19:44

over the weekend. Remember the start

19:46

of the financial crisis in two thousand and eight,

19:49

when no one knew what to do as stocks were

19:51

falling in banks teetering on the brink, and

19:53

everyone was running around screaming for the Secretary

19:55

of the Treasury to do something. Aaron

19:58

Brown told me that if he had been Treasury

20:00

Secretary, he would have done nothing.

20:04

In fact, he would have gone on vacation

20:06

for a few months, because the truth was no

20:09

one knew what to do. And when no one knows

20:11

what to do, Aaron Brown says, the rational

20:13

thing is to wait until you have the data you

20:15

need before you start throwing around

20:17

trillions of dollars in bailout money.

20:20

This is exactly the kind of thing that

20:23

someone with a disagreeable score of

20:25

eight point five would say. In

20:27

times of panic, the agreeable

20:29

Treasury Secretary would want to be a

20:31

calming presence, to project stability

20:34

and wisdom, to have others look at him

20:36

and nod approvingly and murmur something

20:38

about the importance of a firm hand at the

20:40

tiller. But not Aaron Brown. He

20:43

doesn't care about Wall Street's feelings. He

20:46

cares about the trillion dollars people

20:48

would be calling for his head. He

20:50

would be poolside in Boca, browsing

20:53

ssr end on his BlackBerry.

20:58

Oh man, how great

21:01

if we could all be as disagreeable

21:03

as Cliff and Aaron. Suppose

21:09

you were let me give you a hypoetical scenario. You

21:12

have a plucky young team and inexplicably

21:15

you have ended up in the Stanley

21:17

Cup Finals and you're up against,

21:20

you know, one of the great Pittsburgh Penguins teams

21:22

in the last couple of years. Would

21:24

you consider pulling

21:26

the goalie to start the game. Absolutely,

21:29

I would love to do it. Now, I'd have to do the math.

21:33

Do the math, always whip

21:36

it right back. A

21:47

few years ago a movie came out

21:49

called No Good Deed, starring

21:52

Taraji p Henson as a

21:54

woman named Terry and the ridiculously

21:56

handsome address Elba as

21:58

Colin. No

22:04

Good Deed is a home invasion movie,

22:06

and home invasion movies are of a piece

22:09

with pulling the goalie. They

22:11

are meditations on disagreeableness.

22:14

Not to get pretentious, but both goalie

22:16

pulling and the home invasion genre are

22:19

versions of the canonical story of God

22:21

commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac.

22:25

Sarin Kyrkagard wrote about it in Fear

22:28

and Trembling. God commands

22:30

Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac

22:32

to demonstrate his loyalty, and the rational

22:35

thing is for Abraham to obey

22:37

God because if God is all powerful,

22:39

then Abraham's future and the future

22:41

of his family depend on being in God's

22:44

good graces. But how can

22:46

he look his son in the eye and then kill

22:48

him. It's a disagreeableness

22:50

test. How much will you let the

22:52

thought of what others think of you and

22:54

what you think of yourself get in the way of

22:56

doing what is right in the eyes of God? On

22:59

the one side is fear, on the other

23:01

trembling. This is

23:03

exactly what goes on in home

23:05

invasion movies. Absolutely, that's

23:08

Amy Logos who wrote No Good Deed.

23:10

To me, that's at the core of

23:12

why these movies are interesting

23:14

to people. Why the home invasion genre,

23:18

you know, it's an actual genre at this point,

23:21

you know why it sort it persists.

23:24

I called Lugos up after the Revisionist

23:26

History research team determined that No

23:28

Good Deed was the most perfectly cureka

23:30

guardian of all home invasion movies. It

23:33

puts you in these incredibly

23:36

morally ambiguous situations where

23:39

the audience can see the direct

23:41

path to success. So

23:43

here's the premise of No Good Deed. It's

23:48

late on a Friday night, reigning hard

23:53

Terry is at home with her two small children. Okay,

23:57

finishing the doorbell rings. It's

24:00

interests Elba, I'm

24:03

sorry I lost

24:05

La macaw. He

24:07

says he's been in an accident and he forgot

24:10

his cell phone. Can he come in

24:12

and use her phone? She

24:14

lets him in, Of course she does. He

24:22

kind of has to be insanely

24:24

handsome. Yes, for

24:26

that to work. She's not gonna let

24:28

me in if I show up wet

24:31

and bedraggled at one hundred and thirty pounds.

24:33

She's not like, I

24:36

don't know. I mean I think, I think, I think maybe she

24:38

would. I think ultimately, yes,

24:40

I think his insane good looks are a huge

24:43

part of that, and another, you

24:45

know, another big part of her

24:48

character. You know, she's sort of been primed

24:50

for this moment in her

24:52

life. Leading up to this moment, right, she's feeling

24:55

unseen, she's feeling unsatisfied in her

24:57

marriage, she's feeling neglected. This

25:00

handsome stranger shows up and

25:03

compromises her her instincts,

25:06

you know, on some level, because

25:08

he so handsome. It's awkward

25:11

at first, but he's super charming.

25:13

They flirt a little waiting for the tow

25:15

truck to come. There's a whole lot of something

25:18

in the air, and then halfway

25:20

into the movie she sees him

25:22

for who he really is, a deeply

25:25

evil guy. She

25:27

runs to the kitchen to call the cops

25:29

and sees that he's cut the phone line. She

25:32

looks around, terrified to see where he's gone,

25:34

can't find him. Then, oh my god, runs

25:37

upstairs to find him playing with her daughter

25:44

again. All right, let's do it. Let's go

25:47

and up such a skirt. No

25:51

Ryan, Ryan, Baby, you

25:53

gotta go to bed. Okay, Ryan

25:56

and I just having some fun. That's a long Ryan's

26:02

past your bad times. Amy

26:05

Lugo says she went to see No Good Deed on

26:07

opening night at a theater in ball Albyn Hills

26:09

in Los Angeles. You know it was

26:11

it was a really rousing

26:13

I mean, there were lines out the door to get in,

26:15

and the place was packed, and people were screaming

26:18

and shouting at the screen, and it was wait, what point

26:20

do you remember what point they're screaming? I'm the entire

26:23

after they get to back to

26:25

the house where Collin's X

26:27

is murdered. I don't think I could hear a

26:29

word for that. The rest of the film from then

26:32

on, it was just people

26:34

screaming at her what she should do? Wait,

26:37

and did they have well, I mean, what with

26:39

a range of things they were suggesting did they say

26:41

were they saying to her run, yeah, kill

26:44

him? You know? It was like it was it was everything

26:47

from like run get out of there, to kill him,

26:49

to you know, to like just every

26:51

everybody had their answer of what she should do

26:53

next, and they were one hundred percent sure that's

26:56

what she should do. Exactly

27:00

what should Terry do? She's

27:02

a baby and a four year old. A psychopath

27:05

is threatening her children. At one

27:07

point, she grabs a fire extinguisher

27:10

and hits him over the head and he tumbles

27:12

down the stairs, but he's Idris

27:14

Elba. He gets back up. Later,

27:16

Idris herds them all into her car and they

27:19

drive to another house. On the way, they

27:21

get pulled over by a cop. He's suspicious,

27:24

but Idris reaches into the back seat

27:26

and takes her baby into his arms.

27:29

So Terry can't tell the officers she's in trouble.

27:31

Can't she What should she do?

27:34

I felt like I needed high level

27:36

assistance, someone who could put

27:38

the home invasion dilemma into broader

27:41

context, So I called

27:43

up Sam Harris, author

27:46

podcaster, neuroscientist, the

27:48

kind of person who would publish his own twelve

27:51

rules, or if pressed, maybe even

27:53

twenty four. So yeah, if someone

27:57

breaks into your house, I mean,

27:59

there are a few things that are relevant

28:01

to flag there. One is the

28:03

time of day is relevant if someone breaks

28:05

in in the middle of the night and you are there.

28:09

Now you're talking about somebody who hasn't taken

28:11

any care to

28:14

show up when you're not there. And

28:16

the kind of person who does this is

28:19

the kind of person who either doesn't care

28:21

to find a

28:24

person in the house that he's breaking into, or

28:26

finding a person there is part of the fun,

28:29

right, And so this selects for the

28:31

scariest kind of criminal that

28:33

would be interest Elba in no good

28:36

deed. You can't assume

28:38

that this person has

28:41

any ethics that you

28:43

can interact with profitably

28:45

by bargaining, by

28:48

pleading your case by I mean,

28:50

this is just that's not who's coming through the window,

28:53

you know, in all likelihood. Halfway

28:56

through my interview with Sam Harris, I began

28:58

mentally calculating his score on the Disagreeableness

29:01

Index. I'm thinking

29:04

nine point five, and I must

29:06

admit this is highly counterintuitive

29:09

and perhaps impossible

29:12

to act on. But I

29:14

mean, just just think this through. Sam

29:17

Harris says, you have only one option.

29:20

When Idris elba is upstairs

29:22

playing with your kids, that's your

29:24

opportunity run. Everything

29:31

in us recoils at the idea

29:33

of doing that, except it does

29:35

change the situation in a surprising

29:37

way. One It introduces significant

29:40

uncertainty in the mind of

29:42

your attacker, because now

29:45

he knows the clock is ticking. You

29:47

can You'll be summoning help in

29:49

a matter of moments or

29:52

minutes at the longest, and

29:55

then you know, you

29:57

will discover just what sort of attacker

30:00

this person is. We'll

30:03

discover just what sort of attacker

30:06

this person is. Now,

30:11

if your concern is that he's going

30:14

to kill your child because you didn't follow

30:16

instructions, well, then very likely

30:18

this is the sort of person who is going to kill your child

30:20

anyway, right, and kill

30:22

you as well. It's late

30:25

in the third period, you're Taraji

30:27

Henson. You're losing down

30:29

by a goal to a psychopath. Now

30:31

running away carries a huge social

30:33

cost and a real risk of an even

30:35

more disastrous outcome, But at

30:38

the same time, it increases your

30:40

chances of winning from zero to

30:42

something slightly greater than zero pull

30:46

the goalie. That is a totally

30:49

rational option, and may in fact be the only rational

30:51

option. But it's

30:53

impossible, isn't it. You've got to

30:55

be disagreeable level eight or nine

30:57

to pull that off. I imagine how you will

31:00

look to your child, or to your wife,

31:02

or to anyone else who's terrified

31:04

and looking in your direction for help if

31:07

you just bolt from the house house at

31:09

that moment, it's you know, it's only

31:11

when you come with the cavalry and rescue

31:14

everyone that you know you seem

31:16

like you were, you know, wise and responsible.

31:18

But in those moments, it just seems like a total

31:20

failure, and you know, main fact,

31:22

feel like a failure. I know

31:25

that sounds crazy. I thought he

31:27

can't be right, but he

31:29

is right. The job of a parent

31:32

being held hostage by address Elba

31:34

is not to win a parental popularity contest.

31:37

It is to maximize their child's chances

31:39

of survival. I

31:41

try to convince Amy Lagos of this. Amy

31:44

Lagos, herself, the mother of two

31:46

small children, wish me

31:48

luck. She should run

31:51

without her children, like she should just

31:54

well, this is what I want to get. This is told me what

31:56

I want to talk about. Let's think about this

31:58

rationally. She

32:02

what's he going to do to the kids when she's not

32:04

there? Right? Right?

32:07

Is there any right? I mean, the

32:10

only reason to mess with her kids is

32:12

to get leverage over her. Well, not

32:14

necessarily. She doesn't know

32:17

what his motivation is, right,

32:20

I mean, Oh, I mean he just could be

32:22

just a psychopath standard issue. Yes, yeah,

32:25

I mean I'm telling you. If I'm in my house

32:28

and I realize that

32:31

there is somebody there is a psychopath

32:33

in my house, I am not leaving

32:35

my kids like you could. You could burn

32:38

the house down and I would stay with the kids. No,

32:41

no, No. The fact

32:43

that he's a psychopath is exactly why

32:45

you should leave your children behind. It's your

32:48

only chance to save them. Amy run but

32:50

the love of God rule

32:53

number one for living pole

32:55

the goalie. In

33:02

common law, there's a principle called

33:04

duty to retreat, which holds

33:06

that a person being threatened as a duty

33:09

to retreat to a place of safety to

33:12

exhaust all avenue of escape before

33:14

they can justifiably use force in

33:16

self defense. In

33:19

the past several years, though about half

33:21

of American states have passed stand

33:23

your ground laws. Now, what's

33:25

to stand your Ground law. It's a law that

33:27

effectively repeals duty to retreat.

33:30

It says you don't need to exhaust

33:32

all avenues of escape to claim self

33:34

defense in a court of law. You can

33:36

stand your ground, defend yourself,

33:39

and the law will support that choice.

33:42

Duty to retreat is a legal principle

33:45

that gives people license to act disagreeably.

33:48

I am not a coward if I cut and run

33:50

the first opportunity. I am, in

33:53

fact, acting morally and responsibly.

33:57

Stand your Ground laws sanction the Socially

33:59

Agreeable Act. They

34:01

say, what matters is that you preserve

34:04

your honor in front of family and community.

34:06

I did not run. I stood

34:09

by ground. So

34:11

what's happening in those states that now have

34:14

stand your ground laws? Well,

34:16

I refer you to stand your ground

34:18

laws. Homicides and Injuries,

34:21

Journal of Human Resources, Summer

34:23

twenty seventeen. I

34:26

think overall, we found about a seven and a half

34:28

seven point seven percent increase

34:31

in the overall homicide rate. That's

34:34

Chandler McClellan, adjunct professor

34:36

at American University, first author

34:39

of the study in question, states

34:41

that pass stand your ground laws saw

34:43

their murder rates rise seven

34:45

point seven percent compared

34:47

to states that didn't pass those laws. Well,

34:50

the fact that the homicide rate increases

34:53

in these cases suggests that

34:56

that's not the case. That people were using

34:58

these laws and standing their ground

35:01

in cases where they're actually

35:03

not being lefully threatened. They could

35:05

de escalate the situation, they could get away, but

35:08

instead they're using to engage

35:10

in self defense and use lethal

35:12

force against this threat. And

35:14

as a result, you're seeing this kind of net

35:16

increase in homicide

35:19

rates. And who are all these extra

35:21

people getting killed in STANDI ground states?

35:24

White men? I think our estimates

35:26

kind of show about twenty twenty five

35:28

percent increase in homicides

35:30

among white males. And actually

35:33

that seems a little

35:35

high, little high,

35:37

it's a huge. Yeah,

35:40

exactly, it is, um But nevertheless,

35:42

that's kind of what that's what fell out the modeling.

35:45

Yeah, Yeah, we speculate that

35:48

because the white male population

35:51

is the population this most interested

35:54

in the gun culture, more

35:56

likely to be members of organizations

35:58

like the NRA, Because

36:00

white males are so entrenched in this sort

36:02

of culture, we think that these

36:05

laws are most salient for them, and

36:07

as a result, their most

36:09

aware of them and they're most likely to act

36:11

on them. So a

36:14

certain kind of white guy who is really

36:16

into guns and the NRA gets

36:18

super excited about stand your ground laws

36:21

and instead of looking to avoid violence or

36:23

run away, grabs his gun and stands

36:25

his ground. That is, right

36:27

before the other guy shoots him dead.

36:31

Tragic is the is the most

36:34

appropriate word, but the other

36:36

word disappropriate here is ironic that the

36:39

NRA has been

36:41

pursuing a policy agenda with stand

36:43

your ground that has the effect of getting its

36:46

own members killed. It

36:49

is a little ironic and figuring

36:54

out when to pull the goalie or what

36:56

to do when Adress Elba shows up late

36:58

at night seem like abstract

37:00

intellectual exercises. They

37:03

are not. They are rehearsals

37:06

for real life, because

37:08

being disagreeable when you need to be

37:10

disagreeable is hard, especially

37:13

because the world around us, the crowd

37:15

in the stands, the short sighted

37:17

lawmakers. They encourage us

37:19

to do the easy and agreeable

37:21

thing, which gets us

37:23

killed, pull the

37:26

goalie.

37:28

I have an aunt. She's

37:31

Australian who once a year calls me to

37:33

ask when she should convert her Aussie

37:35

dollars to wherever she's going that year

37:37

on vacation. For about ten years,

37:39

I explained, Aunt Cynthia, you know,

37:42

we do have views on currencies, but their micro

37:44

views their fifty one percent chance of being right,

37:47

let alone on a given day. So

37:50

I'm loath to give this to you. And she'd always

37:52

act like I knew the answer. I just refused to

37:54

tell her. Year after year, his

37:56

Australian aunt called and Cliff

37:58

refused to help her. Then one

38:01

day Cliff Assess realized

38:03

he didn't have to always be disagreeable.

38:06

She'd say, once, should I convert my dollars

38:09

to Japanese? Yend? And I'd go not

38:12

this, But next Thursday and

38:17

everyone was happy. She

38:20

I was lauded for giving her the truth.

38:23

She was happy because she really feels she knows

38:25

what she's doing. She never checks before

38:27

or after. And I did not harm her one drop

38:30

because nobody knows what day to do it, and she was

38:32

always going to do it on some arbitrary day. I

38:35

just picked the arbitrary day. So

38:37

there's a case of maybe it's seloptimal,

38:39

but I picked a high EQ. If

38:41

not IQ were

38:43

protecting your reputation as opposed to her,

38:46

was just making my aunt not mad at me.

38:49

He could be Cliff Assenes polar of

38:51

goalies he could also be Cliff

38:53

Assness dutiful nephew. Malcolm

38:56

glad Bell's first rule for living polar

38:59

goalie. But be wise enough to know

39:01

that disagreeableness is not a matter

39:03

of temperament. It is a choice. But

39:06

okay, I'd love that you take calls from your aunt about

39:08

currency

39:10

and what did he say next? Anyone

39:12

who's successful it won't take calls from their crazy

39:15

aunt is no friend of mine. Malcolm

39:19

Gladwell's second rule for living two

39:23

Down ten ago. Revisionist

39:35

History is a Panoply production. The

39:38

senior producer is Mila Belle, with

39:40

Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our

39:43

editor is Julia Barton. Flawn

39:45

Williams is our engineer. Fact checking

39:47

by Beth Johnson, Original music

39:49

by Luis Gara, Special thanks to

39:52

Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg.

39:55

I'm Malcolm Gladwell. What

40:05

makes you a good poker player? Two

40:08

things. There's

40:10

just the basic mathet theory, which why

40:13

don't want say anybody you can learn, but if you're quiet,

40:15

you can learn it. But the

40:17

real thing that sets ship apart is

40:21

something I think you have to do by traditional

40:23

wisdom. You have to learn this in your teens while

40:26

your brain is still forming, and you have

40:28

to do it under intent sleep deprivation. So

40:30

we do these seventy two hour sessions with

40:33

maybe a few powered amps in between, and

40:36

you're pushing every sense you have in the world,

40:39

sometimes more than every sense you have in the world in the middle

40:41

of the pod. And that developed

40:44

certain mental abilities that

40:46

the way I think about it is, I think

40:48

you managed to harness the processing power

40:50

of your unconscious brain so

40:53

that you're not staring at people

40:55

in the table and sort of you know, enumerating

40:57

tells to you that person, you know mood

41:00

as jit. Your unconscious brain

41:02

is so much better at noticing

41:04

what people do, kind of like blink, you know, you

41:07

just look at somebody and you know, you don't

41:09

know he holds the ace and jack you know

41:11

it's not doesn't tell you that, but it says this

41:13

guy is afraid to lose,

41:16

or this guy is afraid of being

41:18

bluffed, and it tells

41:20

you what they're going to do if you do something.

41:23

So it tells you when you can push and they're going to fold,

41:26

or when you can draw them in and

41:28

they're going to go high. This outtake

41:30

goes on for a long time. If

41:33

that bothers you, I don't care anymore. It

41:36

is a curse. I would

41:38

never recommend to somebody to do it. Yes,

41:42

you can make money from it, but it

41:45

strips away a lot of illusions. Right.

41:47

It's a lot more pleasant in life to believe that

41:49

there are things like love and friendship and honor

41:52

once you ruthlessly strip all that away and

41:55

just look very objectively how people

41:57

act. There's probably something that the psychopaths

41:59

do. The world's

42:01

a bleak place, so

42:03

it's kind of a dangerous road to go down. Do

42:05

you feel like you went down that road? Yeah?

42:08

Yeah, how did it affect your love it?

42:11

What it meant is that you're bleak.

42:14

You're just kind of you know, you

42:16

don't really trust anybody in

42:20

a sense. You trust them, you know what they're going to do, and

42:23

because you know what they're gonna do, it just

42:25

h I guess it almost makes

42:27

you treat them like robots that you

42:30

can predict what they're going to do, you know their program,

42:32

and therefore you can't really

42:35

trust that there's a love and friendship

42:37

and honor or anything like that. So

42:40

that's one of the reasons to move to finance. I actually

42:42

moved from poker to sports betting

42:45

and then to finance.