Malcolm Gladwell's 12 Rules for Life

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: So one thing that chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle, you can give it essentially antidepressants, and it will fight again.

00:00:34
Speaker 1: There's a Canadian like me, my age, almost exactly, who teaches my favorite subject, psychology at my alma mater, the University of Toronto. His name is Jordan Peterson.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: If you want to understand a complex nervous system, it's a good idea to understand a simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards. And it turns out that seratonin governs status, emotional regulation, and posture in lobsters just like it does in human beings, and so that would just blew me away.

00:01:07
Speaker 1: He wrote a very provocative self help book called Twelve Rules for Life. Rule number one stand up straight with your shoulders back. Rule number two treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Rule number twelve, pat a cat when you encounter one on the street. Peterson's book was a sensation, and soon all kinds of other people were doing twelve rules, like the economist Tyler Cowen, whose blog Marginal Revolution is the first thing I read every morning. I particularly like Cowen's rule number seven, learn how to learn from those who offend you every time you turn a corner. Twelve rules the columnist Megan McCardell rule number three. Always order one extra dish at a restaurant, an unfamiliar one. You might like it, which would be splendid. If you don't like it, all you lost was a couple of bucks. The exercise of curiosity requires a risk, a sacrifice, a commitment. I love that. Also, mccardle's rule number twelve. Always make more dinner rolls than you think you can eat. For some reason, dinner rolls loom much larger in our imaginations than in our stomachs. Whoa Megan mccardal makes her own dinner rolls. Everybody's doing twelve rules. Wait, I'm jealous. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about Malcolm Gladwell's twelve Rules for a Living, my guiding principles. My wisdom distilled. EXCEPT thought about this for like a month, and I realized I don't have twelve rules. I just don't. I mean, I have rules like the fact that I only drink five liquids ever, water, tea, red wine, espresso, and milk in some combination. But that's not a rule for living. It's just pointlessly provocative. Self denial the least attractive part of my personality. If you want a cocktail, you should have a cocktail. I only have one rule, pull the goalie.

00:03:32
Speaker 3: What do you mean when you say you're obnoxious? Ah the most specific.

00:03:37
Speaker 4: If I found something funny which is still a disease I have, I will say it, even if it's gets me in some trouble. I never thought I was particularly cruel, but I was a class cut up.

00:03:51
Speaker 1: My one rule for living came to me from the work of two people, Cliff Assness and Aaron Brown, both philosophers of a sort and friends. This is Clifford Assnes. He's in his mid fifties, bald Goate grew up middle class, Jewish and Long Island.

00:04:06
Speaker 4: I was in the honors classes, and I was the cut up in the honors class. Whi's always a strange thing to be. You don't think of those classes as having one.

00:04:13
Speaker 3: But we had him.

00:04:14
Speaker 4: Wasn't always me too. We were not perfectly well behaved, so obnoxious. I was tolerable, but I found myself extremely funny.

00:04:24
Speaker 1: Now I should say that I didn't find Cliff Astness obnoxious, he's delightful company. Instead, I suspect he is what psychologists call disagreeable short digression. Psychologists believe that human personality can be assessed along five dimensions extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and finally agreeableness. My sense of Cliff Astness, he's at the low end of that last trait number five. He's low agreeable disagreeable, which is not the same as obnoxious. It's rather the quality of not being depended on or particularly interested in the approval of others. When I went to interview Cliff Astness in Manhattan, I turned on my digital recorder and discovered that my memory flash guard was full, And after much fluster and fumbling, I realized I had no idea how to delete any of the existing data from the flashguard to make room for my interview with Asnes. Now, the rational thing would have been for me to hand Asness the digital recorder and ask him to figure it out. Because Cliff Astness has an IQ I'm guessing two to three standard deviations higher than mine. He could have solved the problem in about thirty seconds, but I didn't hand on the recorder because I was embarrassed, because I worried that he would think I was pathetic and that concern was more important to me than actually fixing my tape recorder issues. I am agreeable, I am interested in the approval of others. I am the opposite of cliff Astness. So I ended up running down forty second Street, two cross down blocks to Staples to get another flashguard to replace the one. I was too embarrassed to ask for help figuring.

00:06:10
Speaker 4: Out here you may include this is this is. This is not a secret. I don't work as hard as people think. I goof off a lot.

00:06:22
Speaker 1: Cliff Astness likes puzzles, games, problems that engage the imagination.

00:06:28
Speaker 4: I have been caught several times playing internet chess in my office from people, and I say, caught. I'm the senior guy at the firm. I don't, I don't, I don't quit over this. But people come in and I'm like, yeah, I gotta beat this guy, hold on more or lose. I'm not a great chess player.

00:06:43
Speaker 1: He doesn't play conventional chess. He plays one minute chess, known as bullet chess. If you're curious, this is what a typical bullet match sounds like. It's like Einstein playing ping pong. By the way, when Astnes says I'm the senior guy at the firm, he's referring to the fact that he heads a company called aq R Capital Applied Quantitative Research, a hedge fund with two hundred and twenty five billion dollars under management, which brings me to philosopher number two, the second architect of the Pologuli principle, Cliff Astnes' friend Aaron Brown. If we were to create a disagreeableness scale where zero is like a golden retriever and ten is mister Spock, Cliff Astness would be a solid seven. Aaron Brown is an eight, maybe even an eight point five. Brown is a member of the tribe of mathematically minded finance guys known as quants. The Wall Street Quants used to gather after work at the Odeon Restaurant in downtown Manhattan to talk about Gaussian probability in the bond market.

00:07:59
Speaker 5: Yeah, so there's different definitions of quant. So remember quant is an insult invented in the mid nineties that became adopted as a point of pride.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown is a big guy beard, impassive demeanor. When I met him, I was reminded of my favorite joke about engineers. The optimist sees the glasses half full. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The engineer wonders why the glass is twice as large as it needs to be. Brown grew up in Seattle. His mom had a master's in chemistry. His dad had a PhD in physics. Did a lot of unconventional work for the Air Force, like the time he inherited a strange contraption.

00:08:41
Speaker 5: The Air Force had even this guy like two million dollars over ten years to build some machine, and they didn't know what it was supposed to do, but they know he was really smart. And then he killed himself, and so the Air Force said, is there anybody who wants this machine? You can figure out what it does and fix it him. My dad said, chure, I'll take it, and he had in our base learn.

00:08:59
Speaker 1: A tortured genius builds a sinister contraption with millions of dollars of secret Pentagon money. The man mysteriously commits suicide. The Air Force says, who wants the machine? Aaron Brown's dad says, over here, over here. He puts it in his basement and says to his teenage son, Aaron, Hey, take a look if you want, Like it's a box of legos. This is how you raise a child to be an eight point five?

00:09:27
Speaker 3: What was the machine?

00:09:28
Speaker 5: It was just this huge fish. I stared at that thing for hours and hours. I couldn't have tubes and wires and this and that. And he turned it on and it did kind of you know, lights would light up and do interesting things. But we never figured out what it was intended to do. His note his notes were indecipherable, and he burned some of them. So either he was the guy who invented like the Universal Wonder Machine and whatever, or he was just some crazy guy who liked quit wires together.

00:09:55
Speaker 1: It was the thing from that movie from Back to the Future, the flat the flux capacitor.

00:10:00
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, maybe he didn't. Maybe he teleported himself to some other civilization or something.

00:10:09
Speaker 1: When Aaron Brown was a teenager, Seattle was in the midst of a deep recession. All around him, people are losing their jobs. He decides he needs a marketable skill. He teaches himself poker and finds a big money game in the basement of a local tavern.

00:10:23
Speaker 5: And I figured out two really important things. I was much better than these guys. I could easily win money consistently, and they let me win it and walk out with it. You know, a kid comes in plays, walks out. So that's like epiphany for me that says, okay.

00:10:39
Speaker 3: You're how old?

00:10:40
Speaker 5: Fourteen? But I was a shy kid. This took every ounce of courage I possessed a walk in there. You know, there are people who could have done this and it wouldn't have been a big deal. But for me, it was like the most traumatic event in my life. But when I walked down, I said, Okay, I never have to worry about getting a meal, you know, having a place to stay because you always find a poker game.

00:10:59
Speaker 3: Did you pay you way through Harvard with poker?

00:11:01
Speaker 4: Yes?

00:11:03
Speaker 1: Aaron Brown ends up on Wall Street, then goes to work for Cliff Astness at AQR Capital. Of course, a match made in Heaven.

00:11:12
Speaker 3: Do you guys think the same way? Do you have differences in the way you approach problems?

00:11:15
Speaker 5: Well, the massive difference and the reason he has billions of dollars and I have a comfortable living. He cares far more. He gets literally physically angry when things don't work and lose money. I'd rather work on an interesting problem than profitable problem.

00:11:35
Speaker 1: Now what do these two do aside from making money? Of course, they do thought experiments, write them up and post them online on something called SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, in my opinion, the greatest website on the Internet. It's a place where anyone, anyone can post any kind of paper or research or argument, and every article posted is then ranked according to its popularity. As I'm writing this, there are seven hundred and ninety eight seven hundred and forty five papers on SSRN. I don't know if you remember. Back at the beginning of this season an episode called Divide and Conquer, I talked about my love of law review articles. Well, where do you think I read law review articles? Not in law reviews? Are you kidding? Why would I wait two years for some dusty publication to put something out. I read them on SSRN because that's where everyone posts their articles the minute they finish. In Manhattan. For years, the most important source of gossip was page six of the New York Post. SSRN is page six for Dorks, so not long ago. I'm on SSRN poking around and lo and behold what is the number one ranked paper at the time. Pulling the goalie Hockey and Investment Implications by Clifford Astas and Aaron Brown. I thought I didn't have any rules for living. I was wrong.

00:13:05
Speaker 5: Pulling a goaltender down three so really giving a big advantage on the power of flay with possession firmly a standler.

00:13:16
Speaker 1: Here's the issue. You're playing hockey. Your team is down by one goal late in the game. The coach of the losing team typically removes his own goalie and substitutes in an extra attacker. So instead of having five offensive players and a goalie guarding the net, he now has six offensive players and no one guarding his net.

00:13:39
Speaker 4: That don't make him pay for it, I'm shorthanded goal.

00:13:43
Speaker 1: It's a tradeoff. Pulling a goalie makes it easier for the other team to score and put the game even further out of reach, But at the same time, your extra attacker increases your chances of scoring a goal and tying the game. Now, if you watch hockey, you know that coaches typically pull a goalie with a minute or a minute and a half left in the game. But that's just hockey tradition. It's not based on data. When exactly should you pull the goalie?

00:14:12
Speaker 3: Tell me the genesis of this paper I love so much.

00:14:16
Speaker 5: Okay, Well, Cliff and I talk a lot about sort of quant sports stuff, and I have always been talking to him about decisions that coaches make that are mathematically indefensible, but you know, makes sense from the coach's motivation. And specifically we were talking about Seattle Seahawks twenty fourteen Super Bowl New New England Patriots. I got the ball on the one yard line, second down, twenty six seconds.

00:14:41
Speaker 6: To go, second in goal, Russell Wilson, what are you doing?

00:14:45
Speaker 4: He gets picked up by the undrafted rookie free agent.

00:14:48
Speaker 6: From Western Alabama, Malcolm Butler.

00:14:51
Speaker 4: Who preserves the victory.

00:14:53
Speaker 6: And it will leave everybody asking why in the world.

00:14:56
Speaker 1: With marsha on in the back building, the Seahawks throw the football twenty one reasons. At this point, Brown goes on a tangent for maybe fifteen minutes about that particular play, which has gone down in Super Bowl lore as one of the worst coaching decisions in the history of football. But Brown convinces me that in fact, it was the right call, the rational call, and I would explain his logic to you, except that we have much bigger fish to fry. Anyway, talk turns to pulling the goalie in hockey, and Cliff says to Aaron, Oh, I've done some work on this already.

00:15:34
Speaker 4: It's probably six seven years ago, man, five six years ago. I wrote this model and xcept out of pure personal interest. I thought I had a neat way to think about the problem, and essentially it was it's really hard to think about what five minutes left, but with ten seconds left, it's really easy to think about.

00:15:53
Speaker 1: Cliff shared his calculations with Aaron Brown. Aaron made them better and built a beautiful computer model, and their conclusion was a team down by one goal should pull its goalie with five minutes and forty seconds left in the game, and a team down by two goals should pull its goalie with eleven minutes and forty seconds left. Eleven minutes and forty seconds with an undefended goal. No one in all of hockey pulls their goalie with that much time left. If a coach did that in a playoff game with real stakes involved, the entire arena would probably go up in smoke. In basketball and baseball, there's been a statistical revolution over the past generation known as moneyball, where advanced metrics have been applied to maximize every aspect of the game. Hockey is a step behind, with the exception of my beloved Toronto maple Leafs, who if a genuine quant is their leader. This is a sport where players pick fights with each other in full knowledge of the fact that the penalty for their transgressions will materially diminish their team's chances of winning. Baseball is quantum theory. Hockey is the grown up, professional version of Red Rover, Red Rover, let Waying Gretzky come over. Hockey coaches are not looking for strategic tips on SSRN, So what do they do? They keep their goalie in place until the very last minute, defending the goal. And why do they keep doing that? Because anything else would be impossibly disagreeable. Imagine you're a coach of a hockey team down three to one with eleven minutes and forty seconds left in the game. You pull your goalie. The other team scores, so now it's for to one with half of the final period left, and now your fans think that you've robbed them of what might have been a reasonably interesting game. They'll hate you and so your players, because it's an awful lot more humiliating to lose a lopsided game than a close one.

00:17:57
Speaker 4: The Cliff and Aaron strategy maybe, again inn our geeky sense, optimal, but it doesn't provide the optimal or the maximum amount of entertainment.

00:18:07
Speaker 3: It is very high.

00:18:09
Speaker 4: Probability you create a laugher where you get down by three, down by four, And of course, if you follow Cliff and Aaron's cold vulcan model you never put the goalie back in. You're still an infinitesimal chance you will tie it, and you lose fourteen to nothing. And it's embarrassing and maybe entertainment in a side show kind of way, but it's not what they want.

00:18:28
Speaker 1: Who would try this or anything like it, Not anyone who has any normal human expectation of being liked and applauded. But do Cliff and Aaron need to be liked and applauded. No, they don't. Astas founded his firm with a couple of other PhD graduates from the finance department of the University of Chicago, which is like the geek capital of the world, and his basic hiring philosophy ever since has been to hire more PhDs disagreeable quants just like him. He's now up to seventy three PhDs. For comparison purposes, the economics faculty at MIT has forty one PhDs at one point seven eight x MIT and counting. Now does he need that many PhDs? I have no idea, But how much more fun is office life for insanely smart, disagreeable people if at all times they are surrounded by dozens and dozens of other insanely smart and disagreeable people circling each other's arguments like vultures.

00:19:32
Speaker 5: Which is going to be one of the watershed days in financial market's history.

00:19:36
Speaker 1: It was a manic Monday in the financial markets.

00:19:39
Speaker 7: The Dow tumbled more than five hundred points after two pillars of the Street tumbled over the weekend.

00:19:45
Speaker 1: Remember the start of the financial crisis in two thousand and eight, when no one knew what to do as stocks were falling in banks teetering on the brink, and everyone was running around screaming for the Secretary of the Treasury to do something. Aaron Brown told me that if he had been Treasury Secretary, he would have done nothing. In fact, he would have gone on vacation for a few months, because the truth was no no one knew what to do. And when no one knows what to do, Aaron Brown says, the rational thing is to wait until you have the data you need before you start throwing around trillions of dollars in bailout money. This is exactly the kind of thing that someone with a disagreeable score of eight point five would say. In times of panic, the agreeable Treasury Secretary would want to be a calming presence, to project stability and wisdom, to have others look at him and nod approvingly and murmur something about the importance of a firm hand at the tiller. But not Aaron Brown. He doesn't care about Wall Street's feelings. He cares about the trillion dollars people would be calling for his head. He would be pullside in Boca, browsing SSRN on his BlackBerry. Oh man, how great if we could all be as disagreeable as Cliff and Aaron.

00:21:09
Speaker 3: I suppose you were. Let me give you a hypothical scenario. You have a plucky young team and inexplicably you have ended up in the Stanley Cup Finals and you're up against one of the great Pittsburgh Penguin teams in the last couple of years. Would you consider pulling the goalie to start the game?

00:21:28
Speaker 5: I absolutely would love to do it, and I'd have to do the math.

00:21:33
Speaker 1: Do the math always, We'll be right back. A few years ago a movie came out called No Good Deed, starring Taraji p Henson as a woman named Terry and the ridiculously handsome Idris Elba as Colin. No Good Deed is a home invasion movie, and home invasion movies are of a piece with pulling the goalie. They are meditations on disagreeableness. Not to get pretentious, but both goalie pulling and the home invasion genre are versions of the canonical story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Sorren Kirkgard wrote about it in Fear and Trembling. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to demonstrate his loyalty, and the rational thing is for Abraham to obey God because If God is all powerful, then Abraham's future and the future of his family depend on being in God's good graces. But how can he look his son in the eye and then kill him. It's a disagreeableness test. How much will you let the thought of what others think of you and what you think of yourself get in the way of doing what is right in the eyes of God? On the one side is fear, on the other trembling. This is exactly what goes on in home invasion movies.

00:23:06
Speaker 8: Absolutely.

00:23:07
Speaker 1: That's Ami Lagos who wrote No Good Deed.

00:23:10
Speaker 8: To me, that's at the core of why these movies are interesting to people. Why the home invasion genre? You know, it's an actual genre at this point, you know why it persists.

00:23:24
Speaker 1: I called Logos up after the Revisionist History research team determined that No Good Deed was the most perfectly Kureka guardian of all home invasion movies.

00:23:33
Speaker 8: It puts you in these incredibly morally ambiguous situations where the audience can see the direct path to success.

00:23:43
Speaker 1: So here's the premise of No Good Deed. It's late on a Friday night, raining hard. Terry is at home with her two small children.

00:23:56
Speaker 5: Okay, finished.

00:23:57
Speaker 1: The doorbell rings. It's interests Elba.

00:24:02
Speaker 4: I'm sorry. I don't mean to bother you.

00:24:04
Speaker 5: I just lost Jola macaw as directed.

00:24:07
Speaker 1: He says he's been in an accident and he forgot his cell phone. Can he come in and use her phone? She lets him in, Of course she does. He kind of has to be insanely handsome. Yes, for that to work. She's not gonna let me in if I show up wet and bedraggled at one hundred and thirty pounds. She's not like, I don't know.

00:24:36
Speaker 8: I mean, I think maybe she would. I think ultimately, yes, I think his insane good looks are a huge part of that, and another, you know, another big part of her character. You know, she's sort of been primed for this moment in her life. Leading up to this moment, right, she's feeling unseen, she's feeling unsatisfied in her marriage, she's feeling neglected. This handsome stranger shows up and compromises her her instincts, you know, on some level, because he so handsome.

00:25:10
Speaker 1: It's awkward at first, but he's super charming. They flirt a little waiting for the tow truck to come. There's a whole lot of something in the air, and then halfway into the movie she sees him for who he really is, a deeply evil guy. She runs to the kitchen to call the cops and sees that he's cut the phone line. She looks around, terrified to see where he's gone, can't find him. Then oh my god, runs upstairs to find him playing with her daughter again.

00:25:44
Speaker 4: Again. All right, let's do it.

00:25:46
Speaker 6: Let's go and up.

00:25:48
Speaker 4: Such a scare.

00:25:50
Speaker 5: No, Ryan, Ryan, Baby, you gotta go to bed. Okay, Ryan, and I just hav him some fun.

00:25:58
Speaker 2: That's a lot we were No.

00:26:01
Speaker 5: Come on, fuck a ball, it's past your ball time.

00:26:04
Speaker 7: See.

00:26:04
Speaker 1: Amy Lagos says she went to see No Good Deed on opening night at a theater and ball Hills in Los Angeles.

00:26:11
Speaker 8: You know it was it was a really rousing I mean, there were lines out the door to get in, and the place was packed, and people were screaming and shouting at the screen, and.

00:26:19
Speaker 1: It was wait, what point do you remember what point they're screaming?

00:26:22
Speaker 8: I'm the entire after they get to back to the house where Collins ex is murdered. I don't think I could hear a word for that. The rest of the film. From then on, it was just people screaming at her what she should do.

00:26:37
Speaker 1: And did they have well, I mean, what were the range of things they were suggesting did they say? Were they saying to her run.

00:26:43
Speaker 8: Yeah, kill him?

00:26:44
Speaker 6: You know?

00:26:45
Speaker 8: It was like it was it was everything from like run get out of there, to kill him, to you know, to like just every everybody had their answer of what she should do next, and they were one hundred percent sure that's what she should do.

00:26:59
Speaker 1: Exactly what should Terry do? She's a baby and a four year old. A psychopath is threatening her children. At one point, she grabs are extinguisher and hits him over the head and he tumbles down the stairs, but he's Idris Elba. He gets back up. Later, Idris herds them all into her car and they drive to another house. On the way, they get pulled over by a cop. He's suspicious, but Idris reaches into the back seat and takes her baby into his arms, so Terry can't tell the officers she's in trouble? Can she? What should she do? I felt like I needed high level assistance, someone who could put the home invasion dilemma into broader context. So I called up Sam Harris, author, podcaster, neuroscientist, the kind of person who would publish his own twelve rules, or if pressed, maybe even twenty four.

00:27:54
Speaker 6: So yeah, if someone breaks into your house, I mean there are a few things that are relevant to flag there. One is the time of day is relevant if someone breaks in in the middle of the night and you are there. Now you're talking about somebody who hasn't taken any care to show up when you're not there. And the kind of person who does this is the kind of person who either doesn't care to find a person in the house that he's breaking into, or finding a person there is part of the fun, right, And so this selects for the scariest kind of criminal.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: That would be Idris Elba in no good deed.

00:28:37
Speaker 6: You can't assume that this person has any ethics that you can interact with profitably by bargaining, by pleading your case. I mean, this is just that's not who's coming through the window in all likelihood.

00:28:56
Speaker 1: Halfway through my interview with Sam Harris, I began mentally calculating his score on the Disagreeableness Index. I'm thinking nine point five.

00:29:05
Speaker 6: And I must admit this is highly counterintuitive and perhaps impossible to act on. But I mean, just think this through.

00:29:16
Speaker 1: Sam Harris says, you have only one option. When Idris elba is upstairs playing with your kids, that's your opportunity run.

00:29:30
Speaker 6: Everything in us recoils at the idea of doing that, except it does change the situation in a surprising way. One It introduces significant uncertainty in the mind of your attacker, because now he knows the clock is ticket. You'll be summoning help in a matter of moments or minutes at the longest. And then you know, we'll discover just what sort of attacker this person is.

00:30:03
Speaker 1: We'll discover just what sort of attacker this person is.

00:30:11
Speaker 6: Now, if your concern is that he's going to kill your child because you didn't follow instructions, well, then very likely this is the sort of person who is going to kill your child anyway, right, and kill you as well.

00:30:24
Speaker 1: It's late in the third period, you're Taraji Henson. You're losing down by a goal to a psychopath. Now running away carries a huge social cost and a real risk of an even more disastrous outcome, But at the same time, it increases your chances of winning from zero to something slightly greater than zero pull the goalie.

00:30:48
Speaker 6: That is a totally rational option, and may in fact be the only rational option.

00:30:53
Speaker 1: But it's impossible, isn't it. You've got to be disagreeable level eight or nine to pull that off.

00:30:58
Speaker 6: I imagine how you will look to your child, or to your wife, or to anyone else who's terrified and looking in your direction for help if you just bolt from the house at that moment. Uh, it's you know, it's only when you come with the cavalry and rescue everyone that you know, you seem like you were, you know, wise and responsible. But in those moments, it just seems like a total failure, and you know, may in fact feel like a failure.

00:31:24
Speaker 1: I know that sounds crazy. I thought he can't be right, but he is right. The job of a parent being held hostage by Idris Elba is not to win a parental popularity contest. It is to maximize their child's chances of survival. I try to convince Amy Lagos of this. Amy Lagos, herself, the mother of two small children, wish me luck. She should run without her children, like she should just well, this is what I want to get. This is totally what I want to talk about let's think about this rationally, she what's he going to do to the kids when she's not there? Right?

00:32:07
Speaker 2: Right?

00:32:07
Speaker 1: Is it any right? I mean, the only reason to mess with her kids is to get leverage over her.

00:32:14
Speaker 8: Well, not necessarily know what his motivation is, right, I mean?

00:32:21
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean he just could be just a psycho standard issue.

00:32:24
Speaker 8: Yes, I mean, I'm telling you. If I'm in my house and I realize that there is somebody there is a psychopath in my house, I am not leaving my kids like you could. You could burn the house down and I would stay with the kids.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: No, no, No. The fact that he's a psychopath is exactly why you should leave your children behind. It's your only chance to save them. Amy, Run for the love of God, Rule number one for living pull the goalie. In common law, there's a principle called duty to retreat, which holds that a person being threatened as a duty to retreat to a place of safety to exhaust all avenue of escape before they can justifiably use force in self defense. In the past several years, though about half of American states have passed stand your ground laws. Now, what's to stand your ground? Law. It's a law that effectively repeals duty to retreat. It says you don't need to exhaust all avenues of escape to claim self defense in a court of law. You can stand your ground, defend yourself, and the law will support that choice. Duty to retreat is a legal principle that gives people license to act disagreeably. I am not a coward if I cut and run the first opportunity. I am, in fact, acting morally and responsibly. Stand your ground laws sanction the Socially Agreeable Act. They say, what matters is that you preserve your honor in front of family and community. I did not run. I stood ground. So what's happening in those states that now have stand your ground laws? Well, I refer you to stand your ground laws. Homicides and Injuries, Journal of Human Resources, Summer twenty seventeen.

00:34:26
Speaker 7: I think overall, we found about a seven and a half seven point seven percent increase in the overall homicide rate.

00:34:33
Speaker 1: That's Chandler McClellan, adjunct professor at American University, first author of the study in question. States that pass stand your ground laws saw their murder rates rise seven point seven percent compared to states that didn't pass those laws.

00:34:50
Speaker 7: Well, the fact that the homicide rate increases in these cases suggests that that's not the case. That people were using these laws and standing their ground in cases where they're actually not being lethally threatened. They could de escalate the situation, they could get away, but instead the using to engage in self defense and use lethal force against this threat. And as a result, you're seeing this kind of net increase in homicide rates.

00:35:20
Speaker 1: And who are all these extra people getting killed in standard ground states? White men?

00:35:25
Speaker 7: I think our estimates kind of show about twenty percent, twenty five percent increase in homicides among white males. And actually that seems a little.

00:35:35
Speaker 1: High, middle high. It's a huge dunburn.

00:35:39
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly, it is. But nevertheless that's kind of what that's what fell out the modeling. Yeah, Yeah, we speculate that because the white male population is the population this most interested in the gun culture, more likely to be members of organizations like the NRA, Because white males are so entrenched in this sort of culture, we think that these laws are most salient for them, and as a result, they're most aware of them and they're most likely to act on them.

00:36:13
Speaker 1: So a certain kind of white guy who is really into guns and the NRA gets super excited about stand your ground laws and instead of looking to avoid violence or run away, grabs his gun and stands his ground. That is, right before the other guy shoots him dead. Tragic astic is the is the most appropriate word, but the other word disappropriate here is ironic that the NRA is has been pursuing a policy agenda with stand your ground that has the effect of getting its own members killed.

00:36:49
Speaker 7: It is a little ironic and.

00:36:53
Speaker 1: Figuring out when to pull the goalie or what to do when Idris Elbas shows up late at night seem like abstract intellectual exercises. They are not. They are rehearsals for real life, because being disagreeable, well when you need to be disagreeable, is hard, especially because the world around us, the crowd in the stands, the short sighted lawmakers. They encourage us to do the easy and agreeable thing, which gets us killed, pull the goalie.

00:37:28
Speaker 4: I have an aunt, She's Australian who once a year calls me to ask when she should convert her Assi dollars to wherever she's going that year on vacation. For about ten years, I explained ant Cynthia. You know, we do have views on currencies, but their micro views, they're fifty one percent chance of being right, let alone on a given day. So I'm loath to give this to you. And she'd always act like I knew the answer. I just refuse to tell her.

00:37:55
Speaker 1: Year after year, his Australian aunt called and Cliff refused to help her. Then one day Cliff asked us, realized he didn't have to always be disagreeable.

00:38:06
Speaker 4: She'd say, when should I convert my my ass to Japanese yen? And I'd go, not this, but next Thursday, and everyone was happy. She I was lauded for giving her the truth. She was happy because she really feels she knows what she's doing. She never checks before or after. And I did not harm her one drop because nobody knows what day to do it, and she was always going to do it on some arbitrary day.

00:38:34
Speaker 3: I just picked the arbitrary day.

00:38:37
Speaker 4: So there's a case of maybe it's so optimal, but I picked a high EQ if not IQ solution.

00:38:43
Speaker 3: You were protecting your reputation as opposed to just.

00:38:46
Speaker 4: Making my aunt not mad at me.

00:38:49
Speaker 1: He could be cliff astness polar of goalies. He could also be Cliff Astna's dutiful nephew. Malcolm glad Bell's first rule for living poll a goalie, but be wise enough to know that disagreeableness is not a matter of temperament, It is a choice. I'd love that you take calls from your aunt about currency and what did he say next?

00:39:12
Speaker 4: Anyone who's successful that won't take calls from their crazy aunt is no friend of mine.

00:39:19
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell's second rule for living. Two Down, ten to go. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer is mil Obel with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Garra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwein.

00:40:04
Speaker 3: What makes you a good poke player?

00:40:08
Speaker 5: Two things. There's just the basic math and theory, which I mean why once anybody can learn, but if you're quiet you can learn it. But the real thing that sets ship part is something I think you have to do by traditional wisdom. You have to learn this in your teens. While your brain is still forming and you have to do it under in can sleep deprivation. So we do these seventy two hour sessions with maybe a few powered amps in between, and you pushing every sense you have in the world, sometimes more than every sense you have in the world in the middle of the pod. And that developed certain mental abilities that the way I think about it is, I think you managed to harness the processing power of your unconscious brain so that you are not staring at people in the table and sort of you know, enumerating tells to you that person, you know, moods, chit. Your unconscious brain is so much better at noticing what people do, kind of like blink, you know, you just look at somebody and you don't know he holds the ace and jack you know, it's not doesn't tell you that, but it says this guy is afraid to lose, or this guy is afraid of being bluffed. And it tells you what they're going to do if you do something. So it tells you when you can push and they're going to fold, or when you can draw them in and they're going to go high.

00:41:30
Speaker 1: This outtake goes on for a long time. If that bothers you. I don't care anymore.

00:41:36
Speaker 5: It is a curse. I would never recommend to somebody do it. Yes, you can make money from it, but it strips away a lot of illusions. Right, It's a lot more pleasant in life to believe that there are things like love and friendship and honor once you're ruthlessly strip all that away and just look very objectively how people act. There's probably something that psychopaths do. The world's a bleak place, so it's kind of a dangerous road to go down.

00:42:05
Speaker 3: Do you feel like you went down that road? Yeah? Yeah, how did it affect your life?

00:42:11
Speaker 5: What it meant is that you're bleak, You're just kind of you know, you don't really trust anybody in a sense you trust them, you know what they're going to do, and because you know what they're going to do, it just h I guess it almost makes you treat them like robots that you can predict what they're going to do, you know their program, and therefore you can't really trust that. There's a lot of in friendship and honor or anything like that. So that's one of the reasons to move to finance. I actually moved from poker to sports betting, and then to finance