Twenty-five years after the success of “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell is back with new insights. The author and co-founder of Pushkin Industries joins host Krys Boyd to discuss new anecdotes from social science that help explain the world around us – and to update the theory of contagion for our modern world. His book is “Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] One of the joys of hosting this show is that I get to talk with very smart people about some of life’s big questions. And while those questions each center around some specific topic or idea, in the end, they usually boil down to a fairly simple idea I’m trying to get at. Why are things the way they are? From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Author Malcolm Gladwell has spent his entire career on a similar kind of quest. I’ve been fortunate to speak with him on a few occasions, and I can assure you his eyes absolutely light up at the thought of reading through a research paper or sociology study. And as someone who’s maybe similarly wired in that regard, I have to say it doesn’t surprise me that he’s still at it. Nearly 25 years after his book, ‘The Tipping Point’ made him a household name. Gladwell’s newest book is written in a similar vein. In fact, it’s called “Revenge of the ‘Tipping Point’: Over Stories Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering.” He joined me recently in front of a live audience to talk about his latest theories and discoveries. And today we’re going to hear that conversation. Welcome to Dallas.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:01:09] Thank you. Thank you.
Krys Boyd [00:01:11] So the original ‘Tipping Point’ was published in 2000. And since then, it’s been such a touchstone that everybody uses that expression, which is not to say we’re using it the way you intended it. So let’s start with that. When you talk about a tipping point, what do you mean?
Malcolm Gladwell [00:01:27] Well, it’s you know, it’s it’s the term that describes the moment when an epidemic changes shape or explodes. So if you remember, in December of 2019, Covid was this mysterious thing somewhere in China. And it was like a, you know, one story on NPR about whether we should be concerned about it. And then there was a day I forgotten. Was it was it March 13th? There was a day in March when suddenly everything shut down. Remember that? Well, that was a tipping point. That was like this thing that we kind of heard about that was like somewhere off in another corner of the world becomes very real and relevant and everywhere that. Change is the hallmark of an epidemic.
Krys Boyd [00:02:19] So now revenge of the tipping point. Are we just in a much more cynical place than we were in 2000?
Malcolm Gladwell [00:02:27] Well, you know. Yes. But I mean, I don’t know. Am I was cynical? I’m not a cynical person. I don’t really believe in cynicism. I’m pretty optimistic. I’m just older. I mean, I wrote the Tipping, the original tipping point when I was in my 30s, and I was a very when I was in my 30s. I was a very young 30s. I did not behave like I was not a grown man. And you know, when you’re a kid, the world is full of possibility and you tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. And when you’re not a kid, maybe you have a little more of a realistic view about things. So this book is is a little bit more concise. You know, it’s a little more clear eyed than the than the first one.
Krys Boyd [00:03:20] So social epidemics can work in very surprising ways. Sometimes good ways, sometimes bad ways. Why did Los Angeles become the bank robbery capital of the United States in the 70s and 80s, when other places that would have a little spate of bank robberies did not?
Malcolm Gladwell [00:03:37] Yeah. Well, this is you know, for those of you who are interested in bank robbery, bank robbery was sort of going out of style and nobody was doing it much. And the FBI was really good at catching bank robbers. So, you know, when they get really good at catching you, the only people who do it are people who aren’t, you know, terribly with it so it’s sort of going away and then it suddenly undergoes this resurgence in the 80s and if you look at if you look at bank robbery in America on a on a graph the curve looks like that in the 70s and 80s rather. And it’s doubling every year. And the center of this is L.A. for reasons that are baffling to people at the time. But a quarter of all bank robberies by the end of the 80s are in Los Angeles. And the there’s a number of explanations. But what seems to be happening is that there are a number of incredibly flamboyant bank robbers in L.A. who kind of they’re making they’re turning this into a contagious they’re infecting other people in L.A. with this desire to rob banks. So there was a guy named the Yankee Bandit who he was called the Yankee Benny, because he would always wear a Yankees cap. And he was a note passer now. And there’s a hierarchy of bank robbing. And the bottom is the note parsers. They’re the ones who stick their finger in the shirt, and then they pass a note and says, I have a gun. Give me your money. That’s like entry level, right? And but the Yankee bandit is really good at this. And he robbed something like, I forget, 40 banks in L.A. It was once 6 in 1 day, which is like still a record. But it’s it’s world record.
Krys Boyd [00:05:31] Lot of driving.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:05:33] No, he’s actually mostly walking around. But no, that is a lot of driving. And but he’s like literally is just crossing the street and just doing another one. And he was pretty brazen. But he people start hearing about the Yankee bandit. And then there’s this crucial moment in the history of bank robbing where he said, FYI, if you are a manager of a bank in your bank, it’s robbed. The one thing you should never do is tell people how much money was taken. That’s like the no, no. Like when they give you the briefing, the first thing they say is, do you not tell him, Well, there’s a bank robbed in the valley, Wells Fargo. And the manager inadvertently tells the press how much was taken. It was $500,000. And what happens is throughout L.A., every like wannabe criminal, like here’s that was like, wait a second, why am I selling crack? It’s so much more lucrative. And these two guys, these two brilliant guys in their early 20s who are Crips member of the Crips of the Rolling Sixty’s branch of the Crips, a guy named Casper and a guy named C dog who parenthetically. Got out of prison this summer, and my little podcast company has been in contact with them. They hear this and they’re like, my God, this is fantastic. And they do this thing, which is really interesting, which is. They’re really smart. Casper and C dog, I feel like 21 at the time. If you remember in the early 90s, the big trend in corporate America was outsourcing. Like corporations were like sending their manufacturing overseas, having someone else do them. Well. Casper and C dog were like we should not only become bank robbers, we should outsource the bank robbing. So they go to these high schools and they convince teenagers to do their dirty work for them. They give them semiautomatic weapons and they send the drive into banks and they just send them in. They show them what you should do, wave your gun around, say everyone on the floor, you know, whatever you do. And they end up robbing 175 banks in a year and a half, which is no one’s even comfortable. I mean, no one’s even. They’re like the LeBron James of no one’s going to break that record ever. And it’s it’s an unbelievable achievement. And they if you’re living in a town where two dudes rob 175 banks in a year and a half, you know, word gets around, right? So they become kind of they spread the the virus all around L.A. But what was interesting to me about that was that it doesn’t travel beyond L.A. So in order to be to pick up this bank robbing virus, you have to be local. And I spend as you know, if you read the book, I spend a lot of time in the book trying to figure out why are epidemics of ideas so so local, so regional, so specific to place. Right. Because we think of a virus is something that spreads everywhere. But that’s the that’s true of real viruses. But it’s not true of ideas, epidemics of ideas and behavior.
Krys Boyd [00:08:51] So stay with us here, because we’re going to hop from bank robberies to health care. Talk about small area variation.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:08:59] Yeah. So this is this thing which I got obsessed with, which is. There’s a guy named John Wennberg. And John just comes out of a lot of medical school in the 60s. And he is working for the federal government and he gets sent to Vermont to study. How health care is delivered in Vermont. Right. And so he goes around and he goes to one little town after another and collecting statistics, and he finds out something doesn’t make any sense, which is that you could have two adjoining towns in Vermont. He famously looked at Stowe and Waterbury, which if you’re driving around Vermont, they’re look, they’re the same right there and they’re not that far apart. He was looking at things like how often do people get their tonsils out? How women how often do women get a hysterectomy? How often do you know? Just you name the kind of prosaic surgical procedure There is a massive difference between. Stow and Waterbury. And he lives. He’s living right on the Stow Waterbury line. And he realizes he sends his kids to stow high school. And he realized that if he did Waterbury instead, that his the chances that his kids would get their tonsils out would go from, like practically nonexistent to 100%. That’s how different these two towns were. And he couldn’t figure out why would this be the case? There’s no rational reason why doctors would behave one way here. And when we’re there, he then replicates this. And it’s become this huge movement in medical research that shows that the care you receive from your doctor varies dramatically by place. And I give the example of cardiologists in Buffalo behave dramatically differently than cardiologists in Boulder, Colorado. They’re all educated. The top medical schools are all reading the same journals. They have the same patient mix. They all read this. You know, they’re all using the same technology, but it’s just different. And that led me into thinking that this must be true outside of medicine as well, that in ways that may not be apparent to us. Where you live has a powerful impact on how you behave. And that led me to this strange conundrum of Miami. So I try to explain why Miami is a weird place using the example of Medicare fraud, which no one commits more Medicare fraud in America than the residents of Miami. It’s their specialty.
Krys Boyd [00:11:28] And the person you write about was a transplant and by all accounts, was a pretty decent guy before he arrived in Miami.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:11:35] Yes. I tell the story of the great Philip as forms. This guy’s bizarre. And he lives in Chicago, where he runs the nursing home operation, which is relatively on the street. And he moves to Miami and he ends up at the center of one of the largest Medicare frauds in the history of Medicare fraud. And the question is why? Why would he go from being law abiding to And at his sentencing, his rabbi stands up and says, Philip was a great guy in Chicago. And then he moved here and he got ruined by Miami. And I thought I should write a whole chapter on taking the rabbi seriously. I think the rabbi was correct. I think the finger of blame should be pointed at the city of Miami. Miami corrupted Philip as forms. All of this is about Miami, because it turns out that in Miami, like, if you look at the levels of Medicare fraud around the country, in most places, it’s really low. Even though it’s really easy to engage in Medicare fraud. I could teach you all, I’m not going to do it because you’re law abiding citizens. But if you want to if you want to, I mean, I could if you want to kind of come up to me afterwards and give you some pointers. Point is, it’s really easy to rip off the government if you want. And they but they do it in Miami at a level with a level of audacity and with a certain exuberance and flamboyance that is not present anywhere else in the United States. Anyway, the king of this is this guy Philip. So what I wanted to figure out was why is Miami a place where people are so extravagantly pursuing Medicare fraud? And it comes back to this thing that I was describing, which was there are these massive differences from town to town and city to city in America about in the ways that people behave.
Krys Boyd [00:13:20] So this narrative, this this is how we do things here. That’s what you call the overstory.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:13:25] Yes. Yes. The argument I make in the book is that when you move to a town that has a very distinctive approach, a way of doing things, you get infected by that story, by that narrative. So it is like in Miami. The when you move there. There are so many people who are behaving in a way that would otherwise seem untoward that you can’t help but kind of get swept along.
Krys Boyd [00:13:58] So I have a particular fascination with unintended consequences when people try to do the right thing and everything falls apart. I was really drawn to the pretty tragic chapter about the real city that you give the fictional name Poplar Grove.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:14:14] Yeah. So this is a serious chapter. I ran across in. I don’t know why I was interested. I got really interested in reading about teen suicide, and I ran across all of these papers written by these two researchers, Owen and Anna mueller, and a guy named Seth Robertson, who collaborated together on a series of studies of a town they called Poplar Grove. And I have they they won’t tell you what its real name is, although I figured it out and went there. And it’s just it is the perfect town. It is. I was walking around Highland Park. Afternoon. It’s better than Highland Park. It is. It’s like this little suburban enclave where every house is gorgeous. That high is the best high school in the state. The streets are windy, beautiful. There’s an incredible sense of community. There’s every amenity in the world. People love living there. Families never leave. It’s perfect. Except that they have had a suicide epidemic at their high school that’s gone on for 15 years. And these kids have taken their own lives who are not alienated, depressed kids who seem to have everything going for them. And the town cannot could not figure out why they couldn’t shake this, Why here and why won’t it stop when we’re perfect? Right. And so these two researchers go there and they they spend years studying the town. And their conclusion is are. The epidemic is happening here, not in spite of your perfection, but because of it. And that what has happened is that you have so you have identified such a kind of clear and consistent pathway for your kids. If your your kids are if they go to this high school, they are expected to be there’s one way they should be. They have to be athletic, socially popular, attractive, good students headed for an Ivy League school. That’s it, right? One way. And if you don’t meet up to meet all those expectations, then you feel like a failure. And that is, you know, in the normal high school, there are ten different ways for a kid to feel they belong. There are ten different identities they can join. Like if you think about your high school or my high school growing up, you know, like not like a normal high school, My high school, you could there was a group of jocks. There was a group of of kids who watched you play Dungeons and Dragons. There were the art students, the art, the drama, the drama. Kids who were like, you know, dressed up in tights. And there were the, you know, on and on, right? There were the computer club kids who wrote code. And there was a it didn’t matter who you were, there was you could find a group where you belonged. Right. Nobody if you and if you weren’t interested in any of it, there was a group who were just, you know, dropouts. Right. None of that that that diversity was was what made the school resilient. It was it was what made it possible for everyone to feel like they belonged. Poplar Grove was a place that had one social group. Monoculture was a monoculture. And that made the town at the school incredibly vulnerable to an epidemic. Because there if you if if, if if there was some problem that infected one person in that monoculture, it just raced through the whole school. Right. There was no kind of natural barrier preventing an a terrible idea from spreading. And that made them defenseless in the wake of a suicide epidemic. Right. It’s a very and you know what’s interesting about that story is that. The parents created that world for their kids. They were the ones who created that vulnerability and they thought they were doing their kids a favor. Right. And they were not. They were, in fact, creating a situation that put their own children of peril in peril. And I you know, as a parent myself, I think about that a lot. And I wonder how many of the things we do in the name of trying to create a better world for our kids actually have the opposite effect.
Krys Boyd [00:19:02] What is the magic Third?
Malcolm Gladwell [00:19:05] What is the magic third? We’re just racing, Krys. We’re just racing through this book right now.
Krys Boyd [00:19:11] There’s a lot to get to.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:19:14] But they’re good. They’re all getting a copy. We can talk about whatever we want to. We can. We could. We could. We could digress again. Magic third. So I got there’s a woman named Rosa Beth Kantor, who’s a sociologist who wrote an article. She written many brilliant things, but she wrote a paper in the early 70s. And. When I read it for the first time. It’s called. The theory of group. I can’t believe I can’t remember the title. The Theory of Group Proportions. I think it’s called a theory of proportions. And it’s one of these papers where if you read it, like I’ve read it maybe ten times, it’s one of those it will just it will change the way you see the world. And her argument was she was someone she’d been in the early 70s, a Fortune 500 company, comes to her and said, We have a problem. We need your help. And they had been a company that had had all male sales teams. And they decided to hire some women. These were it was a company that sold very, very technical equipment so that a salesperson there had to have a great deal of knowledge and expertise. So they hired all these women and the women were not doing well and they didn’t know why. So they hire Rose Kantor to investigate. So she comes in and she interviews, spends a huge amount of time talking to all these women who’ve been hired and the men who were on these teams. And she her verdict was that. First thing she says to the company was, you did not make a mistake with these women. They’re fantastic at their job. Secondly, she says, there’s nothing wrong with your company. It’s not some noxious culture that, you know, is holding the women back. It’s not you. She said. Your problem is you didn’t hire enough women. Right. And she forms this theory that says we don’t pay nearly enough attention to numbers. When we talk about groups. And she says there is a world of difference between being one woman in a group of 20 men and being one of five women in a group of 20 men, that when you’re the only one, when you’re a distinct minority, you’re a token, you’re not taken seriously, you’re you can never be yourself. You never comfortable. You’re you’re both overlooked and also scrutinized. I mean, there are tons of women in this room, and you know exactly what I’m talking about, right? When you’re the first one in, it is really, really hard to be yourself. It’s really, really hard to perform at a top. And the men don’t understand that what you’re going through, they have no no appreciation for it. And I can say the same thing about being the first black person in a room of white people being the first whatever. When you’re an outsider, you know, joining a group of that is otherwise homogeneous. It’s really, really hard at first until your group reaches a critical mass. So her whole argument was we need to pay attention to group proportions. You know, whether you are with the group that you belong to is above or below the moment of critical mass is hugely important in understanding your own performance in that group. She does this really brilliant thing, but she was saying a lot of the stereotypes we hold about women, we hold them because we observe the behavior of women in situations where they do not have critical mass. So there were all these famous studies that were done in the 60s of the way women behaved in juries. And they would say, we look at a jury and the men take these leadership roles, they dominate the conversation, they set the stage. And the women are very reactive. And that’s something that’s maybe powerfully characteristic of the way women behave. And she would say, wait a minute, that’s nonsense. You observed the way women behaved in a condition where the women made up 10% of the group. Right. Come back to me when the women make up 50% of the group and see whether those same observations hold true. Right. And I just thought this was such an incredibly fascinating way of looking at the world. And so I took that idea and talked about this. But basically what she’s describing is that there is a tipping point in groups in the lives of groups when minorities of whatever kind reach a certain point. And I think so the question that she raised was, what’s that point? What’s that point of critical mass? When was that tipping point in a group? And she thought it was somewhere around a quarter to a third. And I so I did all this investigation and talked to women who had been in situations like I have a whole thing when I was talking to women who had been on corporate boards about what was it like when you were the only one on the board? What was it like when there were two of you? What was it like when there were three of you? Right. Did it change? And what they all they all said the same thing, which was when I was the only woman on the board. It was impossible when there are two of us. It was still impossible when there were three of us. It was like, it just changed. And suddenly we were seen right. It was exactly the phenomenon that she was describing. There was this transformation in the way we see somebody when they were numbers. A lot of our discussion about diversity in this country is lacking because we don’t talk enough about numbers and we don’t talk about the fact that bringing in one outsider is not enough. You’re not going to change that dynamic. You got to really start thinking about how many outsiders you bring in if you want to really bring about a chance, a transformation in the way the group operates.
Krys Boyd [00:25:21] So then you looked at the racial achievement gap and the fact that black students don’t perform as well as white students in schools where black students are the minority and white students are the majority. Talk us through that, because a lot of us have heard that there is an achievement gap, but we don’t necessarily know all the nuances behind it.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:25:42] So this is one I should caveat this and I say that I do give a caveat in the book one study. So using one data set so we can’t run we can’t run away and draw a massive conclusion. But it’s very it’s interesting and suggestive. So we’ve observed for a long period of time that there is a gap in test scores between black and white students in America. Right. Gap is maybe half a standard deviation. And there are all kinds of reasons why this might be true. Right. And we know all the what all those reasons might be. But somebody comes along and does a study, a group of researchers, where they say, okay, let’s play with one of the variables. Let’s look at before we when we look at the presence of this gap, let’s also look at how many black students are in the classroom of the classroom, whose test scores we’re looking at. And what they find is that when the number of when you’re when there’s 1 or 2 black students in a classroom, you see this big gap that you always see. But as to when the number of black students in a classroom goes above the tipping point, the test score gap disappears. In other words, maybe what we’re observing when we’re observing the test score gap between black and white students is the particular difficulties black students have when they are tokens, when they are the same thing that Rose Kantor was observing with women years ago in that study, in that in that company. That’s really hard to be if you’re an outsider in a group. It’s really hard to be yourself and perform at a high level. When you’re present. Your group is present only a small as small numbers and that there is something that magical that happens when you’ve got critical mass. And so to my mind, what that suggests to us is that we should really be experimenting with this and we should we should see we should be looking for much more evidence of does the. Performance of black students. Change when they are. When they have sufficient numbers. Should schools who have a small number of black students. Should they experiment with with putting those students. together in one class? Right. So they get to the at least in that class, they get to above a tipping point. I don’t know. I mean, it’s just a very. Once you get into this world of thinking about group dynamics like this, it causes you to come up with all kinds of of different ideas about ways of attacking performance deficits in various groups.
Krys Boyd [00:28:25] It’s a really interesting idea. I can also imagine it would be a very fraught road to travel for the school administrator. That said, I’m going to put all the black kids in one classroom and all the white kids in another class.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:28:35] It shouldn’t be impossible because we’re doing something about playing with group proportions that really kind of freaks us out. Right. It’s, you know. You know, I and I say that as someone who. Has written a lot about racial dynamics in this country. I am come from a racially diverse background myself. For the longest time was very, very. Excuse me. Hostile to the idea of quotas. But doing that chapter made me think. I don’t know, man. There should be times in places where we do where we take good proportion seriously. And if the evidence says that minority students do do better when they have numbers in a classroom, then we shouldn’t let our our qualms about. Thinking in terms of numbers prevent us from helping the performance of those students. Really, all they should matter is what is the condition under which students behave, perform at their to the best, at their best, at the best rate. That should be the only thing that matters. And if that leads us into a place that’s a little bit uncomfortable, so so be it.
Krys Boyd [00:29:55] What did you learn about why so many Ivy League schools invest so much time and treasure in fielding teams of these pretty arcane sports that probably only students at the very most exclusive prep schools have ever played?
Malcolm Gladwell [00:30:12] Well, you should know that my favorite absolute favorite thing to do in the whole world is bash the Ivy League. It’s like I know when if you listen to my podcast, you know that not a season goes by by what? I don’t do a cheap shot. Where did you go to school? I did. I went to a state school. University of Toronto. My tuition was $990 a year.
Krys Boyd [00:30:40] Canadian dollars.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:30:41] And when they raised it to $991, we we protested. We went we we had we had signs. So Right. I remember we had a big signs highway robbery. But we were so incensed by the know. So, you know, I this is not an exercise in self-loathing. This is an exercise of of punching up. Now, I have all kinds of problems, and I, if you like, I could just spend the rest of this time just giving you all the reasons why I lothe them. Can I just say and I can give you one that’s top of mind. So the University of Toronto, which I attended and which I will say is considered by Canadians to be maybe one of the better Canadian universities. You know, many people attend how many students attend undergraduates attend university, Toronto. This is our best school now, Canada. Keep in mind, is a country of what are we, like 35 million people? I think it’s roughly one tenth the size of America. It’s one tenth the size of America. You know, University of Toronto has an undergraduate population of 70,000 students. Wow. 70,000. The undergraduate population of Harvard is what is it, 11,000. Right. So proportionately, if Harvard was the same size as the University of Toronto in proportion to that, you’re right, it would have 700,000 students. So you realize when you look at the size of the Ivy League, it’s like it’s preposterous. They claim to be the greatest and most important education institutions in this country. They don’t educate anybody. Well, they are. Harvard’s got $60 billion in the bank and they educate 11,000 students. Are you kidding me? Like. And they pride themselves on how few people they accept. This is the nuttiest notion I have ever heard in my entire life. If we went to the What is the best hospital in Dallas?
Krys Boyd [00:32:46] I’m not going there.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:32:52] Whatever it is. SMU Medical Center, we. I don’t know what it is. Imagine if the best hospital in Dallas said. Not only are we the best hospital in Dallas, but here’s why we’re the best hospital. We turn down 95% of the patients who come here. We are we are so exclusive that we will only know the measure of a good hospital is is how many people it treats for good that you try and treat as many people as you can. So somehow with schools, we have the reverse where we somehow think that school so good, it educates virtually no one. Bananas and the like. And they also they have all the money like they could if they wanted to. They could be ten times bigger. They have 60. Whatever it is. I forgot the last thing and they lost a little bit of money recently. They may be down to their last 45 billion, I’m not sure. But like, you know, if you look at I think all of the Ivy League combined educates fewer students than the University of Toronto. I mean, that’s just bananas. And I could go on. Yeah. I once calculated Sorry I once calculated that, you know, endowments work. The school with the biggest endowment is Princeton on a per capita basis. Their endowment is so large. You know, the way it works is you take 5% of your earnings from your endowment every year and you use that to offset your operating expenses, right? That’s the way it works. 5% When when Princeton takes 5% from its endowment every year, that number is so large that it is more than the total amount of its operating budget. Right. So, for example, last year, if they just they’re the 5% they took out of their endowment, earnings was so large that they could cover their entire budget and still return a billion to the endowment. In other words, they could tell every student it’s free now. They could say to the government, We don’t need your grants anymore. They could have free parking on Nassau Street in downtown Princeton. They could make the whole thing a freebie and still have money left over. Right. And yet. And yet. Alumni of Princeton still give money every year to Princeton. Why would you give money to an institution that not only doesn’t need your money, but could exist in perpetuity if no one ever gave money to it? There could be a nuclear conflict that wipes out the entire state of New Jersey, and Princeton would still keep going because it’s a perpetual motion machine. It’s just like they’re just spinning off so much cash. And yet graduates of Princeton who pay. Claim because they went to Princeton that they’re intelligent, thoughtful people and still give money to their institution. I just find this I was once.
Krys Boyd [00:36:04] We got to get back to field hockey at sorry.
Malcolm Gladwell [00:36:06] I guess it was a dinner party sitting next to someone who went to Princeton who and I said, You give money? Yeah. Okay, buddy. I spent. I ruined the dinner party, as you can imagine. Anyway, what was the question? The question is, is it here? So I couldn’t write a book and not bash the Ivy League because that’s what I do. That’s just. That’s why that’s why God put me on this earth. Someone has to do it. So I decided. I got really interested in the fact that a couple of years ago, Harvard decided to add women’s rugby to its list of D1 sports. Now, the reason this is interesting. Is that Harvard already? Participates in more Division one sports than any other school in the country. No one’s even close. Everyone thinks that it’s the big state schools that are the most. Sports, crazy athletics. Crazy university in the entire country is Harvard University. Harvard University has more student athletes in any school in the country they spend more money on. It’s unbelievable how obsessed the I was. And not only that, but if you are a D1 athlete, they you get a massive preference at admissions. There’s a back door. You know this they have the front door, which is for smart kids who score really high and it’s really hard to get in the front door. Then in the back door, the back door is for children of rich people, legacies and athletes and athletes. Of those three groups, athletes will actually start. If you give 20 million someone to me, I try to figure out how much do you need to give to Harvard and they’ll just let you in like it’s 20 million apparently at the moment, although might be going down, which I thought is really low. Shouldn’t it be higher? Why are they give you the way that you’re so you can give 20 million. That’s what will get you in. If you’re a legacy, you get a break. But the athlete break is massive. The preference. Right. So my question is why? Why? I understand why you would want to have athletes in your school. That makes sense. I was a college athlete. It’s a good thing. But I didn’t get a. I didn’t get a break in admissions because I was a good runner and I don’t understand why. And Harvard gives these things out like they give it out to people who are good sailors. So why would you do it? Why would you give. Do you like your sailing in like a yacht somewhere? And a person is really good at it and you’re like, wow, did you go to Harvard University? Like, why? Why? So I find this very puzzling. So. I There’s a great court case that happened a couple years ago. This is a case that ended up before the Supreme Court. But in the federal trial, when someone was, you know, the remember, this was the group representing Asian students sued Harvard over their discriminatory admissions practices. And during the trial, all of the Harvard admissions people were basically testifying. And at one point in the trial, the head of admissions at Harvard is asked this question, Why are you guys so nuts about sports? What’s going on? Why would you do this? And this guy cannot answer the question. Can’t answer. He’s one of them. He goes, well. We think that kids who are involved in sports bring something very valuable to the college experience? No. No, they don’t. Like some rower who is getting up at 5 a.m. to row in the Charles for like three hours. What are they adding to the college experience there? They have to go to bed at like 9 a.m. because they’re getting up at four. They’re exhausted all day. And no one. Do people go to regattas? No, they don’t. They’re not adding anything there. They’re never there. They’re always going to regattas everywhere. So that doesn’t make any sense. Then they say, then he goes. Well, you know, we recruit a lot of students from Texas, Texas and Florida. And students from those states expect to have a strong sports athletic presence after school. So he basically throws everyone from your state under the bus and says the only reason someone from Texas would want to go to Harvard is if they have great sports people. That’s nonsense. Anyway, anyone who goes to Harvard for the sports should go to our high school. So basically, it doesn’t make any sense. So I tried to figure out, okay, what’s really going on here? And my conclusion is that the sports they really love are sports that are really expensive. Country club sports. Right. This we’re not talking about running here. We’re not talking about basketball. We’re talking about football. We’re talking about what the sport they really, really go crazy about are like tennis, golf. Fencing. Rugby. You know, I do get. Do you see where I’m going? Sailing right there. Sports that cost a lot of money to play and that only a very, very small fraction of kids can ever be good at. If you say we’re going to give a special break to kids who play rugby well, who plays rugby in America? Well, kids do go to private schools. You’re basically saying we’re giving a special admissions preference to it. We’re making sure that we have a large number of private school kids in our school, even if they couldn’t get in the front door. Right. Even if they’re not smart enough to get in, we’re reserving a spot for how do you if you’re going to play D1 tennis, I go along on tennis chapter. The only way to play D1 tennis is if you play junior tennis. In order to be good at junior tennis is if your parents are prepared to spend at least $100,000 a year on your game. Right. Otherwise, you’re not playing D1 tennis. Right. Not happening. Well, I mean, how many parents in this country can afford to spend $100,000 on their kids groundstrokes? Right. Very, very small number. If you set aside six slots a year for tennis players. You’re setting aside six six slots a year for kids whose parents are rich enough to spend a hundred grand on your ground game. It’s a really naked exercise in class dynamics. They’re trying to make sure that they have sufficient numbers of privileged kids at their school. Right. It’s about nothing other than that. And that offends me. I’m sorry. It offends me. You call yourself a meritocratic institution that stands for everything that’s wonderful and beautiful about higher learning. And you’re playing this double game where you’re letting in jocks and rich kids in the back door. No. That’s like, nonsense. Stop it. Right. It offends me. I’m, you know. So anyway, there’s a a very delightful, angry chapter in the book where Malcolm unveils yet another argument against elite education. And you had states, by the way. The finest one I ever did. If I might be self regarding for a moment is the podcast episode I did that was attacking Bowdoin College because. Because, because their food was really good in the dining hall. And it was a it was an episode that contrasted the dining hall food at Vassar with the food’s terrible and Bowdoin, where the food’s great. And my point was. Don’t quote a poet. The whole problem with elite education right now is that schools are competing over amenities. That’s why your tuition goes up every year. That’s why tuition is like 60 grand. It’s not about the education, about the history professor or the chemistry class. No, it’s about the amenities. And if parents and students expect to get lobster bisque at dinner in the dining hall, then schools are going to have to compete on this crazy level. The only way to bring sanity back to elite education in this country is for the food in the dining hall to be terrible again.
Krys Boyd [00:44:26] Malcolm, thank you so much. That was my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. He’s the author of eight books. His most recent is called “Revenge of the Tipping Point.” Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast for free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Kera Think. Our website is think.kera.org. While you’re there, you can find out about upcoming shows and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Once again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
