00:06:23.080And Blink is great because I just I'm just imagining someone living by this thesis, you know, rolling with their gut instinct for everything.
00:07:32.820Hold on. I am going to send you the back of the jacket, and I just want you to read the first two sentences.
00:07:39.320I feel like it's going to be a pull quote from like Oprah or something.
00:07:41.380It says, in understanding successful people, we have come to focus far too much on their intelligence and ambition and personality traits.
00:07:50.060Instead, Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, we should look at the world that surrounds the successful, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.0.99
00:08:02.880Oh, so it's like some fucked up genetic shit.0.97
00:08:05.560We will be taking a very dark turn towards the end of this episode when we get to the, let's say, genetic legacy portion.1.00
00:08:13.500Oh, we're two for two on dark turns for this podcast.
00:08:17.880So, you know, the initial pitch is just like, you thought that rich and successful people 100% earned their social and economic position.
00:08:25.900But Malcolm Gladwell is here to tell you that that's not entirely true.0.80
00:08:29.060And it's like, well, yeah, no one fucking thinks that.
00:08:32.120I'm going to read to you a quote from early on in his book where he sort of defines the thesis.0.85
00:08:37.480In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work.
00:09:04.860Jeff Bezos is not rich because he's like an extraordinary man.
00:09:07.320He's rich because he had all kinds of invisible advantages that he himself refuses to acknowledge.
00:09:12.160So on some level, it's like, yeah, there's like structural wind at the back of rich people.
00:09:16.600Yeah, I wanted to like this thesis. I'm very sympathetic to the basics because America is a very individualistic culture that lionizes people for their achievements. And it's nice to see pushback of any type against that. But on the other hand, the ideas he's debunking are ideas that like no one to the left of Ayn Rand actually believes, right?
00:09:35.720Right. Like I mentioned, his books are essentially a series of discrete essays. So I want to like
00:09:41.120walk through the chapters. The first chapter is about how star Canadian hockey players
00:09:46.860almost all had birthdays in the first few months of the year. This is explained by the fact that
00:09:52.860the cutoff date for Canadian junior leagues was in January. Right. What was happening was that
00:09:57.500at a young age, being a few months older is a big advantage. So the older kids in leagues were
00:10:02.640outperforming. Then in turn, they'd be selected for better teams, receive better coaching,
00:10:07.500have more resources dedicated to their development. So if you've heard this before,
00:10:12.980it might be because outliers popularized it, or it might be because this research has been around
00:10:18.020since the 1980s. And by the time outliers came out, it's something that was like so widely known
00:10:23.360that many schools factor it into how they evaluate students.
00:14:20.320Now, I couldn't find a copy of that study, but I'm pretty sure that Gladwell misrepresented it regardless because it was still untrue in 1996.
00:15:44.180And Gladwell uses this as like an example of the effect of practice and hard work, essentially arguing that the driving force behind the Beatles greatness was this period of time where they were just like practicing nonstop.
00:16:04.780And like a lot of cover bands have not become the Beatles.
00:16:06.980And, you know, even if you're using aggressive calculations, it looks like these gigs totaled somewhere between one and two thousand hours.
00:16:13.880And maybe a good time to note that Gladwell's claim here frequently switches between being a very specific statement about the importance of like 10,000 or 10,000-ish hours of practice and a general statement that like a lot of practice will probably make you very good at stuff.
00:16:27.600Right. Right. And his ability to like seamlessly move from one of those claims to the other is what makes it feel like you're actually sort of learning something because you're not paying attention to the fact that the basic claim here is like if you practice 10,000 hours or so, you're going to be pretty fucking good.
00:16:44.840And it's like, yeah, man, I know. I did not need a book about this. It's almost a surreal chapter to read because, like, in hindsight, we know that this is the most influential chapter of the book. But there's not an ounce of insight in this, right, for anyone who even thinks about it for a second. It's bizarre.
00:17:03.460The last thing I'll say about this on the merits is that the guy who actually did the violin study that Gladwell essentially relies on to develop this, he calls Gladwell's chapter a provocative generalization, which I thought was –
00:17:19.220He still wants to get invited to Davos, whoever that scientist is.0.95
00:17:23.220He's like, I don't want to burn any bridges, but like this is bullshit.0.99
00:17:25.940Right. I have this big picture complaint about the 10,000 hours idea, because if you read the back of the jacket and the thesis that Gladwell is pushing in the early chapters, it sounds sort of progressive. He's pushing the idea that successful people are often the product of circumstance. And you can see a progressive angle to this chapter, too, like you mentioned, right? You know, that it's not just about innate talent, right? It's about hard work.0.91
00:17:49.080But a lot of the framing in this chapter is that like successful people are extraordinarily hard workers. And you realize that big chunks of this book are actually a statement that we do live in somewhat of a meritocracy, right? Or at least highly successful people tend to have earned their success in some way. And that's more than just like a statement about how much practice you need to be good at a fucking violin, right? It's a statement about the fairness of the system, about whether rich people deserve their wealth.
00:18:16.040you know, Elon Musk put in his 10,000 hours. Did you? It also feels like another one of these
00:18:21.320concepts that sounds smart and insightful upon, yeah, like blink upon first encountering it.
00:18:28.980You're like, oh, 10,000 hours. Like, yeah, okay. There is this sort of threshold. But then as soon
00:18:33.020as you start to think about it, it does actually boil down to just, it depends. It depends on the
00:18:37.780skill. It depends on the person. I'm sure some people do 10,000 hours of a thing and they're
00:18:41.180still bad at it. I'm sure some people do a thousand hours of something and they're super
00:18:44.140good at it. So even if you believe in the 10,000 hours thing, you're still going to have to go on
00:18:48.940a case by case basis to be like, oh, well, is this an interesting standard to apply? And by the time
00:18:53.420you've done that, you're just doing it on a case by case basis anyway. I think that's that's well
00:18:56.920put. I mean, this chapter has like a hallmark of Gladwell's books. They're marketed on the back of
00:19:03.360what sounds like a flashy and compelling thesis. But then when you get into it, there's a lot of
00:19:08.940qualifying and watering down of the thesis, right? Which from a scientific perspective
00:19:13.180is a reasonable thing to do, but at the same time, maybe means that the thesis was a little
00:19:18.780bit overstated to begin with. It's clickbait. Yeah. It creates a situation where there are
00:19:24.020two versions of the book in the public consciousness. One is presented to the
00:19:28.500general public and it's meant to draw in readers with like a punchy headline thesis. And the other
00:19:34.220is like this more holistic and scientifically defensible version of the book, which isn't
00:19:39.120really marketed, but Gladwell can fall back on it when his headline thesis is criticized.
00:19:44.900And so there's often a big gap between what the conclusions of the book are and what the
00:19:48.260average reader thinks the conclusions of the book are.
00:19:51.820There was an interview in 2019 with him where he talked about responding to critics and
00:19:56.300he said, I'm always struck by how the task of responding to critics is more often than
00:20:00.860not, not refuting the critic, but correcting the critic.
00:20:03.860Right. He will often respond to criticism by saying that the criticism oversimplifies his conclusions. And he's not always wrong. But the irony is that like the marketing and presentation of his book is itself predicated on oversimplified conclusions. And that is why it sells. Right. Right. So he claims he's correcting these critics, but those critics are largely reacting to the thesis that Gladwell himself is sort of pitching to the public.
00:20:29.500On some level, I actually feel a little bit of sympathy for Gladwell. I do think that he probably has nuanced beliefs on all of these things. And on some level, you can say that authors are not responsible for how the fucking airport markets their books. But then I also think that the book itself doesn't have the kind of rigor that you can really fall back on.
00:20:51.060Yeah. So there was a 2013 essay published in The New Yorker responding to critics called Complexity and the 10,000 Hour Rule. There were various critics that pointed out that this is a rough average, very imprecise. And Gladwell sort of hastily admits that's true. He just responds by saying like, well, sure, but my real point was that the biggest difference between people who are good at something and people who are great at something is the amount they practice, which like, OK, but if that was your real point, why do you name the chapter the 10,000 Hour Rule?
00:21:21.060Some of his critics pointed to studies showing that people became chess masters and pro basketball
00:21:26.100players in other countries with far less than 10,000 hours of practice. And Gladwell says,
00:21:31.480okay, well, but chess master is a lower rank than chess grandmaster and international basketball
00:21:36.300is easier to get into than the NBA. So they're not really experts. You're starting to see the
00:21:40.900development of like a circular logic, right? Takes 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert.
00:21:44.980And what defines an expert? 10,000 hours of practice.
00:22:16.160The second part is the same basic thesis, but it focuses on the plight of super high IQ guy Chris Langan.
00:22:23.940Gladwell sort of highlights this guy and points out that he lacks a sort of practical intelligence, which from what I can tell is sort of the same thing as emotional intelligence, the way that Gladwell presents it.
00:22:36.120The basic premise of this chapter is that this guy hasn't really done anything with his life and Gladwell is trying to figure out why.
00:22:43.520Why is the smartest guy in the world just sort of fluttering about?
00:22:48.440He sort of cites a single study about parenting styles across different income groups and concludes that wealthier families tend to have more successful kids, which he attributes at least in part to learned behaviors that get passed down from parents who are more capable of navigating various important social situations that he says, you know, someone like Chris Langan can't navigate because he didn't have that instruction or didn't have that model.
00:23:12.140So, you know, basically two chapters to say IQ plateaus, which is cool.
00:23:17.240And then like rich kids do better than poor kids, which, okay.
00:23:40.820These chapters are 40 pages that reference two or three studies and a bunch of cute little anecdotes.
00:23:46.860It's just like, you know, there might be an interesting grain or two in here, but you're way out of your depth.
00:23:52.380There's also some like IQ stuff that is just sitting there ready to be debunked, like this bright flashing red light.
00:23:59.160It's not clear to me that it's actually all that much of a paradox that somebody with a very high IQ would not necessarily be, quote unquote, successful in this societally defined way.
00:24:08.560If you think of IQ as being really good at taking tests, it's supposed to be this like generalized intelligence.
00:24:16.420But if you're then cutting out emotional intelligence from it and like social intelligence from it, then in what way is it generalized?0.95
00:24:22.980We don't live in a world where we're all doing fucking calculus all day.
00:24:26.560What you're really talking about is there are certain kinds of tests that he does very well on, but that's not the same as saying that he's smart in like in the way that that term is used colloquially.0.90
00:24:37.700To me, it says more about the concept of IQ than it says about this this dude.
00:24:42.560Yeah. I mean, so what Gladwell is debunking is like the idea that if someone has a very high IQ, they would be automatically successful, both both financially and like socially. Right.
00:24:54.720And that's just not something that I think that intelligent people think about IQ.
00:24:58.560Yeah, I don't think anyone believes that.
00:25:00.520You know, that's something that might annoy IQ purists, but who cares?
00:25:21.340The next chapter is called Harlan, Kentucky, and it's about the tendencies toward violence in so-called cultures of honor.
00:25:28.400Gladwell basically says that, you know, this accounts for many regional differences in violence and that Southerners are more violent than other people in certain circumstances.
00:25:38.440And that's the entire point of the chapter.
00:25:40.520Essentially, if you sort of trigger their sense of honor, Southerners are much more violent.
00:25:45.820In other situations, they're less violent.
00:30:07.440So, all in all, Gladwell identifies seven significant Korean air crashes between 1978 and 1997, and that is sort of the basis of his thesis here.
00:30:21.280But three of them were the results of terrorists or military attacks.
00:30:25.700I mean, frankly, this should be enough to just write off this fucking chapter entirely, but I want to mention one more thing.0.80
00:30:31.020Gladwell uses the National Transportation Safety Board's crash report for Korean Air Flight 801 throughout the chapter and misquotes it several times.0.89
00:30:40.800And as Korean speakers have pointed out, grossly mistranslates the Korean.
00:30:45.960The upshot is that Gladwell wants you to believe that the first officer sensed some danger due to the weather but was so deferential to the captain that he didn't properly communicate it.
00:30:55.160In reality, Korean speakers who analyzed it said he very plainly told the captain that the weather was bad.
00:30:59.700I don't want to get into every little detail here, but a Korean-American blogger put it like this.0.97
00:31:04.920This so-called interpretation of the pilot's true intentions is pure garbage.0.97
00:31:09.280It is so ludicrously wrong that I cannot think of enough superlatives to describe how wrong this is.0.93
00:31:13.900Gladwell's exposition on Korean language is completely, definitely, utterly, entirely 120% laughable to anyone who has spoken Korean in a professional setting.
00:31:23.440So what actually, what's the actual explanation for how the plane went down?
00:31:26.300It's just like straightforward pilot error.
00:31:28.040He had the information and he crashed anyway.
00:31:29.700I think that the bottom line with that one, and I looked into the other ones a bit, and it seems like if you look at the reports on the crashes, it was a combination of events, but, you know, circling around bad weather and a couple of poor decisions.
00:31:46.240You know, it's not much more complicated than that.
00:31:48.580It's also a bigger problem, I think, existentially, too, because if it actually was the case that the co-pilot knew this thing and didn't say anything because of deferentialness, even that is not necessarily a cultural explanation.
00:32:02.020That could also just be that individual happens to be very deferential.
00:32:05.860Like, let's put behind us the fact that this is unbelievably dishonest and that he full on lies about half of these crashes or at least gets them grossly wrong.
00:32:13.740He said the single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it's not the maintenance, it's not the weather, it's the culture the pilot comes from.
00:32:23.820And he uses Korean culture as his case study.
00:32:26.540But all he has as evidence is a single flight transcript and a handful of plane crashes, again, half of which were either shot down or blown up.
00:32:34.540There's no analysis of data from other Korean airlines, no data about other airlines with
00:32:40.740higher crash rates than average, nor from what I can tell, did he consult with a single
00:40:41.000Now, rice farming is still happening, of course.
00:40:42.680But, like, 100 years ago, all of our ancestors were struggling a lot more, right?
00:40:47.340And if you felt like building a narrative around the struggles of, like, your immigrant ancestors in New York City in the 1880s or whatever and saying that that helped sort of instill a work ethic into you or whatever, you could do it, right?0.97
00:41:02.900You could do it with any fucking culture.0.76
00:41:05.300Everyone has a history of sort of working hard and persevering and whatever.0.99
00:41:10.560That's a large chunk of why we're all alive.
00:41:13.540So I truly don't understand why he latched on to rice paddies.
00:41:18.680I really feel like he was just like, and here's the Asian section of my book.
00:41:23.280I'm going to explain what they're up to.
00:41:25.560What's the first thing I know about Asia?
00:42:39.480I mean, I was kind of struck here because sometimes he weaves the research and the story together in a way where your initial instinct is that makes sense.
00:42:51.640And then you think for a second and you're sometimes like, maybe not.
00:43:04.560I like couldn't fucking believe this chapter. And if you're going to make a chapter built entirely around one of the most common stereotypes that is promulgated in Western society, maybe be careful. Right? I couldn't believe it. Even after the ethnic theory of plane crashes thing, I was like jolted by this chapter.0.92
00:43:26.720This is when I write a pop science book, one of the chapters is going to be called Women Be Shopping. Sorry, it's just science. I also think thematically because I've read a million of these fucking pop science books for various projects. And one thing that I've found in especially with this tranche of journalists that are really into counterintuitive explanations, right? It's always about like, you think it's this, but it's actually this, right?0.92
00:43:49.780The problem with those explanations is that they elevate cultural explanations for things that are really straightforwardly just policy outcomes.
00:43:59.540Like I think if you want to understand why Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore do really good on math, you know, these international math scores, it's probably related to their educational policies.
00:44:09.660It's probably related to something that is like really fucking obvious, like their per capita GDP and their spending on education and like these specific structures of their specific education systems.
00:44:20.060Interesting you bring this up because the last chapter is about a Bronx school that succeeds with poor inner city students basically by having very long school days because they figured out that a lot of why poor students tend to fall behind.
00:44:34.520So they aren't learning as much as richer kids when they're at home or over the summer.
00:44:38.640so they made the school day longer and they helped mitigate that one thing that gladwell notes in
00:44:44.120this chapter is that school kids in asia in those successful countries are in school a lot more yes
00:44:52.660and he he just kind of throws that out there and he's like you know so obviously that's why they're0.96
00:44:58.020doing great and you're like i thought it was the fucking rice patties dude what happened0.98
00:45:01.600Which is it? He ends that Bronx chapter by saying that the school is, quote, bringing the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city.0.98
00:45:16.140That's a little kicker. He had the kicker ready for to write the whole chapter around.
00:45:23.380So that's the end of the book. There's an epilogue and it's called A Jamaica Story, which made me nervous.
00:45:29.340But it turns out it's just about his his ancestors or whatever and like his family history.
00:45:33.940And he's essentially talking about his own family and the advantages that they had that paved the way for his success.
00:45:40.540It seemed like a relatively humble sort of I have been very successful over the past decade and I realized that I got a bit lucky.
00:45:50.540Yeah, that sounds fine. Yeah, it was totally fine.
00:45:52.440I would have preferred if right before it, he wasn't talking in really overstated generalizations
00:47:32.240This is how this book is bullshit in a way that the academics that were complaining about0.99
00:47:36.380his books earlier were probably just like doing it at a cafeteria table with themselves0.99
00:47:40.740and not it wasn't really getting noticed.
00:47:43.000Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. I also wonder, you know, I was having a conversation with some Zoomers about some of like the mid-aughts racial comedy.0.95
00:47:54.820And I think we were talking about an episode of The Office, like Diversity Day, which I think like is no longer on Peacock, right?
00:48:01.340And I was like, I think that there was a time after the 90s in this sort of end of history era when most of us sort of had this agreement that racism had largely been solved and that it was because of that something that we could now joke about because we're all on the same page.
00:48:20.920And as we sort of witnessed the Obama era, the rise of the Tea Party, the rise of the Trump wing of the Republican Party, it became very obvious that we actually have very different ideas about what racism is, why it's significant, whether it's behind us, etc.
00:48:37.440And that stuff became less acceptable.0.58
00:48:40.080And I see bits of that in Gladwell's discussions of like Asians being good at math.
00:48:46.140You probably wouldn't get away with this now because some editor would be like, Jesus, dude, is this sort of stereotyping necessary?
00:49:06.700We can now admit that a lot of these stereotypes are true rather than dismantling the stereotypes you're thinking about, why we believe they're true.
00:49:12.700Or actually even like doing basic work to investigate them because it doesn't sound like he even did that.
00:49:17.220Well, I mean, injecting a little bit of nuance into it, right?1.00