Talking to strangers what is the premise of this book . Were not very good at talking to strangers. I was looking at the contemporary high profile controversies that come down to the same problem people had conversations with bernie made off and never understood who he was or at penn state the Sexual Assault case at stanford a few years back. And communications and the one that the book starts and ends with is the signature case im concerned with is the sandra bland cast on case which is a high profile in counter of africanamericans of Law Enforcement. Which was a conversation between a young black man and a Police Officer composer over and the conversation goes off the rails and i wondered why is it we fail in these conversations with strangers . Why is it important to you . Nobody loves the transcript more than me. Have people express themselves and if someone is articulate and one of and to be interviewed by the actor wesley brand. And then he starts to talk and then realize to be the astonishingly articulate people and how is it he is so commanded my attention that was a brilliant way he faced on no space that so starting with her story this is video people went to watch its a small clip and then we will talk more about it. You seem very irritated. I am. I moved over and you stopped me. Please put your cigarette. You can step out. I have to step. Step out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. You are under arrest. What are my under arrest for . I will drag you out of here. Get out of the car. Now. Get out of the car. All of this for what . Cspan that ended in tragedy how . Three days later she is in prison for resisting arrest and then two days later she hangs herself in her cell. A tragic and unexpected result. But the whole exchange that we saw goes on and on and on and on we just saw a snippet of it. When i first saw that online thats what i wanted to write about. Because if you break down that exchange moment by moment you can see multiple failures of understanding of empathy, a million things. Just for example and what we just saw, she lights a cigarette and now we know that sandra bland had struggled with emotional problems. She had a failed Suicide Attempt a few months earlier. She is upset and has several thousand dollars in outstanding dollars of traffic signs. That is consequential for her. This is happened before and shes deeply in debt because of it. And then to calm her nerves so shes trying to stay under control and unconsciously i think to signal to the Police Officer i dont want this to go awry. Im trying to calm down but he wont let her. He sees her light the cigarette as an act of defiance. If you watch the entire videotape you can see the two of them are talking entirely past each other he is reading her distress as evidence of something sinister or dangerous. Or malicious it is an epic misunderstanding and by reference to other stories of how it is very straightforward conversation can and in tragedy. Cspan you been thinking about these concepts for a while that you are watching this video many times and find yourself getting angrier. Its been six years since you produced a book so what was it that crystallized this is the topic . So to be drawn to between africanamericans and Police Officers and they all seem to be multilayered. But something went wrong somebody got shot that this is an excellent example there are two reports and thats explains why the officer is it indicted because its clear he didnt do anything that is an obvious violation of the law. The other report which is more important talks about the Ferguson Police department and essentially was a predatory force on the Africanamerican Community of ferguson. Using that power of authority to levy fines on as many different people to fill the coffers. The city was running itself and tickets. So cops are encouraged to write tickets for everything. When you see the things that they were engaged in the previous couple of years your draw on dash job drops this is where the Africanamerican Community was so completely alienated because they are behaving. So if you only look at the encounter the real story is what happened before and using them like the atm like no police force is supposed to do. And it was so scope a tory and a devastating critique. And that is incredibly interesting we have a tendency looking at these encounters to only do the personal look at the interaction between the cop and we can settle the issue if we can figure out what happened with that interaction. But to say this is the beginning of your job you have to take a step back and say what it is that environmental condition to predate that encounter . I wanted to do that was sandra bland only go even broader to pull in made off and all the other cases. Cspan you spent three years on this project if you look at the notes you have in the back youve never met a transcript you dont like and a lot of travel and interviews. So if people who follow you it is limitless and case studies how do you and up selecting those that say yes . There is no procedure. Its an art and then just to remind people if every story i told in this book was the story of the encounter of a young africanamerican and a Police Officer than people with think hes just talking about interactions between Police Officers and black people. I dont want that. I dont want this word to give people reason to pigeonhole this i am trying to Say Something that is broad for all of us talking to strangers. And to be incompetent or biased and those who were jumping to conclusions that he didnt and of those Police Officers so what is the consequence . Know when his dad. And then to make us complicit in these tragedies. Cspan one of the concepts you say we assault the truth . And then to understand why are a human being so bad at detecting deception . This has been studied a million different ways but basically my ability to tell if you are lying to me is scarcely better than chance. We are terrible at it. Almost all of us and its puzzling because you think we would be good at it. And then with those who are willing to believe because if you do that if you default the truth he can send your kids off to school and not worry and believe what people tell you. You can go to a Grocery Store and buy 100 items and be satisfied the bill that they give you is accurate. There 100 opportunities in your shopping cart for someone to cheat you but how often do you see seven in the Grocery Store say i dont believe its 119 . Ive only seen anyone do that is my father who is a mathematician and has a gift wed count along with the checkout person and only if they under charged him with a correct him. Remember just watching him as a kid. He would say i owe you an extra 75 cents for him it was a power trip. There is a cost to that we are not good at spotting a scam artist thats why made off exist. And is some kind of genius because if you systematically lie to people and thats the way we operate. And with those Video Archives is listen to what he has to say to the sec after bernie made off. I give them the largest thing in history they cannot be bothered to have a thorough improper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority if a 59dollar ponzi scheme does not make the list and i want to know who set their priorities. He is the guy almost the only person who saw the truth of bernie made off ten years earlier he was running a massive ponzi scheme and nobody would listen to him. He is example of someone who does not default to truth i refer to him as a person like a holy fool is a russian term to describe access to the truth that none of us see and then to be appointed by the social convention to say the emperor has no clothes thats fascinating because do we want to be like mark coppolas . He could see the father rest of us could not see and had insight we did not have would society be better if there are more of him . Know. You dont want to be like him and he will tell you this he is extraordinarily suspicious and paranoid he thinks there is a scandal under every rock he is filled with a great fear he is being scammed and and then says dont do this to me im aware of all of your tracks and is so paranoid after made Office Finally busted mark coppolas and then became convinced he would have a squad of attackers you dont want to live like that. There is a cost to that insight. It is too high. You are much better off being gullible were defaulting to truth because liars like made off are rare think thats profoundly wise. Should be be better at listening is somebody says the sky is falling . It depends so how many times does he say after announcing that he was engaged in one of the largest accounting scams of all time and the story hasnt played out yet but he just shrugged and said you are off the mark on this case. So i know certainly we would do well. We should ignore them but the difference in the way most of us are calibrated and its probably a good thing to be trustworthy or one should not take the conclusion that they need to be even more heavily regulated if you reduce everyone to a state of suspicion and paranoia it can destroy the thing you try to save. With ed jerrys sandusky scandal we will come back and talk about that. That is a concern because somebody had talked to him about inappropriate behaviors. And you told him . I told him it didnt happen. In my mind it was and inappropriate behaviors. Now he serving a long prison sentence what shed we take away from this and the Michigan State situation . I have a chapter on the sandusky case that is not sandusky himself but rather what the prosecutors did after they convicted him they went after the leadership of penn state for failure to act earlier to prevent his misbehavior which i think is absurd i say go through chapter and verse by the prosecution was asking people in positions of leadership to do things they should not d do, essentially which is the president of penn state still ten years later fighting a legal battle to stay out of jail. The Vice President were both convicted and sent to jail they did absolutely nothing wrong except they did what human beings do except that they were presented with incredibly vague questions about jerrys sandusky and they chose to interpret them in the way was most favorable to the sandusky when it came to this man they said i dont know if this says maybe hes engaging and mildly appropriate behavior or boundary issues you cannot take showers anymore at penn state. But that decision on the verge of going to prison to examine the case closely but what you discover a classic example of the kind of thing we are inclined to shrug off when you default to truth at the truthfulness of what you are told rising to a level so high you cant continue to abide by that position so you see that with made off lots of people with Bernie Madoff a lot of people had doubts but it didnt reach the point where they were willing to concede to make the step to say its a ponzi scheme. With sandusky there were whispers he was seen showering with young boys but either and the football coach who spotted sandusky in the shower went home and told a medical doctor who is a friend of his family even the doctor who had a legal duty to report child abuse did not report it. He couldnt figure out what he saw. It looked weird. Than the same coach waited six weeks and then tells the leadership the next day in and says this is so pressing why did you wait so long to tell us he said it wasnt a sexual act but it made him feel weird so what do we do with that . That is what we do as human beings. And the absolute last thing you want to do two major learning institutions they should be paranoid about their employees. You cannot run the effective intellectual community if you are deeply suspicious of every the inexplicable behavior by your employees. You cant do that you cant run the Regulatory Agency even a mild digression from the straight and narrow what you do you act with an overwhelming amount of evidence there wasnt in that case and its very easy in hindsight i think to get on your high horse to say these people should have been truth tout on Truth Tellers but guess what . Pedophiles go to Great Lengths to hide whats in their heart. With those improper sexual relationships how to the into your thinking . Thats interesting. So the problem with a good analogy just to make reference to the other case you talk about which is much more straightforward than jerrys sandusky where he was a doctor at Michigan State treating young gymnasts and sexually abusing them repeatedly over and over again in the presence of their parents. And it took 15 years for him to be brought to justice. In the case of Michigan State unlike penn state they were being told quite explicitly that wrongdoing was happening and they chose to either disbelieve it and shrug or look away so this was met in the case of Michigan State. In the context of metoo even parents who are those are being abused could take the charge seriously and then to accept the fact something as heinous that has occurred and that is the same lesson that this kind of behavior has been going on for millennia. So a better example them bill cosby but be harvey weinstein. I live in new york. I know people in the film industry. It has been an open secret for years and years that he was doing unconscionable things. I would hear people talk about it ten years ago. The New York Times seven years ago tried to do a story on it but couldnt get people to speak on the record. This isnt something that popped up in 2018. This was an open secret over a decade or more that takes a long time for people to come to grips with the enormity of the crime and to find a way to do something about it. And to me that is the intriguing lesson another person and the news right now Khalid Shaikh mohammed they just set the trial date january 2021. Lets watch the video and help us understand what youre talking about here. 13 and 14 are the worst ones. And none of them which is to identify so we were looking because they wont stop the attacks. It stops the attacks is actionable intelligence and the way you get that dealt with is to get through the enhanced interrogations to use social influence after that to get the information that you want. Those that i talk to you at length as well and genuinely interested has to do an extraordinarily difficult job. What he was doing his that he had to talk to strangers that enhanced interrogation post 9 11 is a textbook example of what my book is about which is seeing the truth and truly understanding is doing her telling him but in his case hes quite open about it and resorted to extreme measures to facilitate that communication with a stranger and the question i raised in the chapter is what happens when you do that . Faced with the same problems you have someone you dont fully understand and tasked with getting the truth out of them. We see how the Police Officer botches it was tangible and misinterprets what she is about and then we see that any other examples so in this case the added element is there was physical coercion to be added into the mix to enhance the discovery process. And the point is to say that is not without its cost either. The issue of using physical coercion to get somebody to talk is that you change their memories and affect the information you are getting. So the crucial question and this is impossible to answer with certainty but there is a cost of coercion with its benefits so that would make you talk if i water board you but in the act of waterboarding do i affect your ability to remember what you did do i harm the conversation in the process to facilitate so there is a tradeoff and there is a good one but the proponents of the enhanced interrogation answer that very differently than the opponents. And my feeling in my conclusion in the book is a tend to believe the cost of coercion is high and higher than we realize and a talk at length and i studied this very question and he is quite convincing were and unchartered territory we dont know what to make of that information through physical coercion because it so compromised. So just skimming the surface of your case studies , bring it full circle what do you want leaders to understand about your thinking and what they should be thinking about and conversations with strangers . And to i want people to slow down and understand the task of getting to know a stranger is very difficult. It cannot be done quickly or easily and to speed up to make the problem worse and we need to devise systems that account for that weakness the last quote in the book is about policing and Law Enforcement strategies and what is the task of taking strangers seriously and they are far more effective and how not to say that the Police Officer needs to be a better conversationalist but he shouldnt have stopped her but you should only stop them when theres no reason to believe and he did nothing he just drove up behind her and she did not use a turn signal and a black woman that is in a sufficient reason to set in motion a potentially dangerous conversation. Cspan why didnt you exclude from your book from social medi media . I have no interest because i use it but does the world need another book on social media . So of course thats important and there are a lot of books to talk about and its unnecessary for me to weigh end but you have to ask where can i best contribute and i dont think ill those books that have been written about twitter in the last year and a half. Many of the conventional media critics and when they were polarized to examine the ways to interpret they could not feel more necessary the graphic and the New York Times so maybe we can show it to our audience to say that gladwell is turning to dark topics wondering whether or not the readers will respond. Are you turning darker thinking about the world . No. It isnt dark in the sense it is trying to make the world a better place and ask the question what can we do different that people dont have the same fate they had to have a chapter on the Brock Stanford case those are dark topics and is trying to make the world work a little better and people are perfectly unhappy to talk about spies and police shootings. Were you surprised on the statistics of alcohol abuse on american campuses . Yes. I wanted to write about sexual abuse and they dont follow that trajectory but literally only to talk about alcohol and too many people who study the problem that they are doing with drinking and the consequences and that you cant talk about sexual abuse. So they came to convince me of that in the story is about two very drunk people who are on the dance floor and in the case of brock turner his drunkenness contributes very heavily to contribute to criminal behavior and her drunkenness contributes greatly to the fact that she was victimized and its impossible to talk about how do you prevent this in the future without asking the question how do you prevent people from being so drunk on the one hand it increases the chance to be a criminal and on the other hand to be a victim . I want to but some statistics on man National Institute of abuse to say drinking by College Students contributes to an estimated 1500 student us every year and in addition 696,000 assaults have been drinking and 97 annual cases of Sexual Assault. The numbers are astonishing. Many people of our generation but we forget because and we were of collegeage its quite different the amount of hard alcohol is way up of course hard liquor get you quicker and farmer seriously and binge drinking is up and and drinking by women is way up. In my generation would be unheard of to match a mantra drinking in a social setting now its more closer to the norm. And that has consequences for a variety of reasons women do not process alcohol as efficiently as men do in a get much stronger on the same amount. So those numbers that you told me are astonishing and i am struck by that meaningful conversation in this country about how dangerous drinking patterns are. And am struck by the fact that way and you talk to young people in college they dont see the link between sexual abuse and their drinking they see it as being disconnected and that is madness. Absolute madness. This is now in the fourth season. I want to play a clip from your podcast. Lets listen to how you get a sense of how you do that. Tensions rose coming to a head for every 24, 1996 that afternoon three planes took off for the florida straits and those make fighter jets shot down two planes out of the sky killing all four people aboard the response to the attack was immediate the Security Council passed a resolution to denounce the cuban government president clinton held the press conference. Ladies and gentlemen i have just been briefed by the National Security advisor the shooting down today and broad daylight to american civilian airplanes by cuban military aircraft. Cspan so this is also your audiobook. To put that into the subject matter how does that enhance the experience for your intended audience . Speaking first to the audiobook ive been doing a podcast for four years ive learned a lot about how different storytelling is in the podcast form. It is more emotionally immediate. The idea you can hear someones voice in your ears its in a more visceral way than reading about them on the page. I think thats the way it would be but with the podcast it is hard to do on the page its much harder to do in print. Those who are so emotionally connected to the things that come in the channel. So when it came time to doing the audiobook because the material is so emotional we decided to make it like a podcast so we just listen to what is a clip of one of the chapters of my audiobook. You are the little clip from bill clinton but throughout the book you are the person i am interviewing. And i describe what here on about sandra bland you hear the tape you just saw. When brian does his deposition when i come back to the case and walk through his deposition and you can hear it in his voice. All of that means the experience is more powerful. And people who have listened to the audiobook and have read the book tell me it almost feels like two different books because youre drawn to Different Things and its different. Cspan do you have more fun with a podcast . Yes. You can do goofy things. I do goofy things that i have a podcast episode and there is a place that comes in the podcast format and there are 30 million episodes they can avail themselves. How do you see this market shaking out over time . The vast majority of those podcast dont earn any income for the creator and dont have that many listeners and to have the long tail but only because the cost of producing a podcast is smaller than the cost of producing a book if you have an industry where the cost of entry is zero you will have a very long failure that doesnt have to shake out but its like people do podcast for all kinds of reasons maybe thats not central to those who are wrong. The issue is the small number of podcasts that command a decent amount of viewers so will those numbers grow the podcast like joe rogan i will say 5 million downloads per episode come in the next 20 years will there be five times as many podcast or he go from 5 million to 20 million thats what happens at the far end. The sheer number is it meaningful. As a sidebar to mentioned that he was a game changer. Can you talk about your relationship with him . When i first moved to washington dc in 1985, he was a roommate in my house. He took a break between his junior and senior years and he introduced me people want to people and i began to fit in and he got me my start in journalism and he has been running for many years with the state group and then all of the digital arm. So he is, we both have a sterner determination but also he likes on he also knows how to run the business. So we started this Podcast Company and he is ceo and i am arm candy. He does a serious heavy lifting and i am happy to produce my podcast for it i am a name on the masthead. But there was no when im happier to defer to than jacob. I had a dog when i was growing up with that name and so then we named all of our dogs after russians like tolstoy. And then yes, i used to name my apartment. Cspan it had a name . [laughter] yes im english so in england on the side of englishman who names everything in their life the dogs and road killer, cars it is Second Nature to give things names. They love the name so much they petitioned we call the new company pushkin. May be the famous famous in history he said late 19th century poet, writer and intellectual and he was part black as i am so he was a wonderful role model. This is the earliest clip we have a view from 1996 and a personal history what is this about . And it talks about what does the success mean and tell us about racism. Cspan i wanted to show that because times have changed. [laughter] but to talk about your parents a little bit more because in your acknowledgment you tell us that your mother taught you how to write and you lost your father while it was being produced. Talk about the contributions they have each made to you as a person. My parents on the surface are very different, a mathematician physically fearless gogetter and my mother was a family therapist and a much more soulful type. But in some ways they are very similar in both very independentminded and selfsufficient my father had a great sense of mischief. And i have inherited that. He never took anything that seriously and he was playful in a way. I think at my best with those ideas so that is my fathers principal contribution and thats what i admired as long as i understood speech. So they both help me to be who i am. Is that listening to how she does things versus what she say says . She doesnt say much. So i do marvel but. Cspan so one thing that has changed is your celebrity. You have six books long time best sellers you always go on a speaking tour top ten podcast so when you travel people must recognize you so how is celebrity and what has changed your life . I dont worry about money anymore so i suppose, although i never really did. Celebrity is an odd word but i am not a celebrity if hitler walked down the street people would model him and i dont get mobbed back to me and somebody who would say i love your podcast and keep walking or they will say at the most somebody would say can i get your picture but its not that celebrity are but i am familiar to them. And then to appear i have heard you on your podcast its almost like you are in my life and they call me malcolm and they act like theyve known me forever. And a half. Doesnt feel like same that familiarity if that makes sense. Cspan a good life . I cant complain. Cspan so all the people that you reach what do you want your body afford to do for society . Just encourage people to look at things differently. I am not trying and trying to encourage them to step out of their mindset for a moment and consider the problem for this perspective. But just pause for a moment while you read this chapter or listen to the podcast imagining it would it would be like and a different way. That that is something i try to do my own life any kind of art if that encourages people to adopt different perspectives if even only fleetingly. That makes us better human beings. Cspan thank you for spending an hour with us today we appreciate your time. Spent thank you for being with us this saturday evening from the archives again he has appeared on cspan over 20 times you can watch any of those appearances on the website at any time on book tv. Org type the name in the search box at the top of the page. Next saturday we are featuring books written by former president s. We will see you then. It once had a spark of kindness. One of the unforgivable things my grandfather did was severely restricted the range of Human Emotion accessible to him that means certain feelings were not allowed like sadness the impulse to be kinder or generous the things that my grandfather found superfluous and unmanly. You get a call from your grandfather. I remember that conversation verbatim. My grandfather got on the phone and he said your dad is sick. They said seriously . He is in the hospital but its not serious. Then why am i calling you at 10 00 oclock on a saturday nice on a so denied if is not serious . I said is a his heart because he had open heart surgery three years earlier at the age of 39. He said yes its his heart and i said will then it is serious. He said yes but dont worry about it call your mother in the morning and as i found out two minutes later when i called my mother, my father had died two hours earlier. Completely alone. Obviously with strangers around him but no family. You wrote that his brother went to the movies . Yes. That shocked even me when i heard about it. It was probably worth honestly that they sat in the house waiting for a phone call i will never know why they didnt go to the hospital to be with her son who was clearly dying. So maybe it isnt surprising that donald didnt thank you needed to be there. Maybe that would have booked bad to his father. May be sitting around waiting for the phone call was too burdensome. I dont know. But i have often wondered what movie did he go to see that seemed more compelling than sitting with his dying brother . But i will never know. This presentation will likely run about 40 minutes
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.