SPEAKER_02: Pushkin.
SPEAKER_11: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create.
SPEAKER_12: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on this show you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02: Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group benefits insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at the Hartford dot com slash benefits.
SPEAKER_02: In C.S. Lewis's famous book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children happen upon the magical land of Narnia, entering through a secret passage in an English country house. When I spoke with Yuna Wong about her own adventures, that story was the first thing she brought up.
SPEAKER_08: Until recently, the path into wargaming is similar to the path to getting to Narnia. You stumble upon it by accident. It's not of your own design. You don't even know it exists.
SPEAKER_02: Narnia, an imaginary world that teaches us something important about the real world. Yuna Wong's Zoom background is a still from Star Wars. R2-D2 standing next to C-3PO, she's part of the group of intellectuals, scholars, PhDs, strategists who spend their careers helping the Pentagon think about how to better wage war and, more importantly, how to better avoid war. And how do they do that? By playing games.
SPEAKER_08: Someone said I should go to the Connections wargaming conference. So that was in 2011. But I walked into this room of middle-aged men in baseball caps, hunched over miniatures, rolling dice. And I suddenly had this sense that I had come home and these were my people. And this is what I was supposed to have been doing all along. And I didn't know it.
SPEAKER_02: Why was it you walk in that room and you say, oh, this is where I belong? Can you explain why you had that feeling?
SPEAKER_08: I think it's the geekdom, right? Geeks recognize each other at a deep level. So I recognize this brand of geek at a deep level that I didn't realize existed.
SPEAKER_02: I'm fascinated by the idea that there's a certain kind of insight that you can only get from a simulation. Can you explain why is that? Why can't I look at a scenario with a bunch of smart people and without a simulation come up with all of the different angles in advance, just on our own? Why do we need a wargame?
SPEAKER_08: I think we will invoke Thomas Schelling as is appropriate for nearly all occasions related to deterrence and wargaming and anything I think truly imaginative.
SPEAKER_02: Thomas Schelling was an economist, a Nobel Prize winner, and the spiritual godfather of the wargaming world.
SPEAKER_09: Wargame theory is merely the study of how rational people interact when they know that their decisions impinge on each other, when people have to anticipate what another will do or what another is already doing, or when people try to influence the choices of others through threats and promises and various devices to change their expectations of how one will behave.
SPEAKER_08: He once wrote that no one, no matter how intelligent, can make a list of the things that would not occur to them.
SPEAKER_02: And if we've learned anything recently, it is surely that there is an ever-expanding list of things that have not occurred to us. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about the idea that the best way to prepare for the unexpected is not to make plans or predictions, but to play games. Not board games, grand theatrical productions, costing many thousands of dollars planned over months, stretching for days, experts and specialists playing each role, each with the passion of an actor on a Broadway stage, with the hope that the rest of us will learn from what they found in their elaborate, imaginary worlds. When I was young, we lived in a house by the highway with a very long, narrow backyard, 150 yards deep, lined with what must have been more than a hundred tall poplar trees. In the fall, when the leaves fell, we all realized that raking the leaves would be an overwhelming task. So my father threw a party. He was a math professor and decided to invite all of his graduate students. In the afternoon, he told them they would deal with the leaves. In the evening, there would be a big dinner and then party games, of the sort that eccentric math professors consider appropriate for their graduate students.
SPEAKER_02: My father's students were all from overseas, from the top colleges of India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Israel. I don't think any of them had ever raked leaves before. But my father believed strongly that a day of yard work and playing games was as good as life got. And his students picked up on his enthusiasm. The leaf raking turned into sport. The games were hilariously convoluted, and the party proved such a success that every year a new crop of students would show up, and the leaf rakers from previous years would invite themselves back until the party became huge. A United Nations of math geeks in our backyard, creating huge piles of leaves, calling out to each other in strange accents. My working definition of smart at the age of eight or nine was knowing things. But when I listened in on the dozens of Africans and Indians in my backyard, it seemed to me that they defined themselves by what they didn't know. They would never say, I just solved such and such problem. That was boring, ancient history. They would say, I'm working on a problem. There is something that I don't understand that I wish I did, and an even larger group of things I don't yet know that I don't know. With a clear implication, the pleasure of finding out the unknown was why they got up in the morning.
SPEAKER_02: I hadn't thought of the leaf raking party for a long time until I started talking to the war gamers when I realized, oh, these people all belong to the same tribe.
SPEAKER_03: I think that what war gaming does is by putting people in these simulated positions, these realistic but unreal realities, it encourages them to and exposes them to things they maybe haven't thought of.
SPEAKER_02: David Schlepeck was one of the founding directors of the center for gaming at the Rand Corporation. Rand is the big think tank out in Santa Monica that's been running war games for years. Yuna Wong worked at Rand, so did Thomas Schelling, author of the War Gamers Creed. One of the things Schlepeck started doing in his war games was to make the element of chance tangible. You have one army against another, you make a list of the 10 different things that could conceivably happen, and then you roll the dice.
SPEAKER_03: And the first time we did that, I was terrified. I was thinking, when we go in front of a bunch of people who have experienced combat, who have actually been fighting real wars for the last 15 years, and we show them that we're going to use dice, they're just going to laugh us out of the room. And we had all sorts of arguments prepared about why that was legitimate.
SPEAKER_02: He was going to play the war game with senior military officers, and he didn't know how they would react. We were ready to defend it, and nobody batted an eyelash.
SPEAKER_02: The military guys playing Schlepeck's games didn't want things to be predictable, predictable they could do on their own. What they wanted was to be forced off the narrow path that logic and prior experience would have them follow. Schlepeck was once involved in a game to test what would happen if the Russians invaded the Baltics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, three small countries right next to Russia, all members of NATO. If Russia attacked, it would face the wrath of Western Europe plus the United States. On paper, the war game seemed to be based on a dumb question. Who would win? We would.
SPEAKER_03: NATO has 35 times Russia's GDP. Russia is just emerging from this demographic crisis that is more severe than any that's ever been inflicted on an advanced nation. Their military has been on the downslope for 25 years. This is a no brainer. Of course, NATO is going to win.
SPEAKER_02: But the first time they played it, NATO didn't win. Russia did. Now, did that mean Russia would actually win in a battle against the Baltics? No, this was a game, an act of imagination. But it did show everyone involved that an absurdly remote possibility had to be taken seriously. Schlepeck ran the game again. And again, Russia always won.
SPEAKER_03: Russia's always winning. And in fact, we eventually started telling people, look, we've done everything except go out on the street and grab random individuals and ask them to play. And no one's done better than X. Can you do better than X?
SPEAKER_02: The expectations and predictions of experts are useful, but only up to a point. The war game is where you put those expectations to the test.
SPEAKER_11: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate, AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs and managing schedules and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate IBM let's create.
SPEAKER_02: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this, there's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year, 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA, and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly, eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts, if you're NASA is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us, oh yes, there is. ZipRecruiter, new hires cost an average $4,700 for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter, see for yourself. Right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there, believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job.
SPEAKER_12: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses.
SPEAKER_06: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped.
SPEAKER_07: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. Until now.
SPEAKER_12: Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_10: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists.
SPEAKER_12: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02: A few years ago, I was invited to join RAND's board of trustees. It requires two meetings a year, one at RAND headquarters in Santa Monica, the other at their office near the Pentagon in Northern Virginia. Half of every board meeting is devoted to the kinds of things that nonprofits worry about. Budgets, fundraising, hiring. The other half is research presentations from RAND staffers, like, the electricity grid in Puerto Rico has just been wiped out by Hurricane Maria. How much would it take to fix it? Or do American school children get enough sleep? But my favorite presentations are always the war games. Like this one. The Army comes to RAND with a question.
SPEAKER_05: They asked us to do a war game type of analysis to understand what it would take to secure loose nuclear weapons in a failed North Korean state.
SPEAKER_02: That's Colonel John Gentile, retired Army, former tank commander. He did two tours in Iraq. He has a doctorate from Stanford and taught history at West Point. He's now a senior historian at RAND, and he gave a presentation to the board about his North Korean game. War games always start with a path to war. An imaginary but plausible scenario that explains why a conflict might start. In this case, the scenario was a sudden spike in tensions between North Korea and the United States.
SPEAKER_05: That led to a number of other events where the U.S. starts to mobilize forces in the U.S., ground forces, starts putting them on ships in the ports of Texas and California. North Korea is aware of all of this, tells the U.S. to stop, and it doesn't. And I think at some point in that road to war scenario, we had the North Koreans firing a small nuclear round. It was a conventional missile that hit the U.S. island of Guam.
SPEAKER_02: Just imagine that this had actually happened. A North Korean attack on American soil. The world will be in crisis. The U.S. would have to respond. But the problem is that North Korea is a country with an expanding nuclear program. And if a war broke out, a whole lot of exceedingly dangerous nuclear material would suddenly be floating around in the midst of a whole lot of chaos. The army wanted to know what would happen next. What would it take to round up all those stray nukes? Rand spent months planning the game. Then Jantil and his team flew to South Korea to play it out for the army. A big conference room. A map of the Korean peninsula on the table.
SPEAKER_05: In that game we did use counters, like the little square war game. This is a tank brigade, this is an artillery battalion or whatever with numbers on them. Do you have one person playing each actor? I think we had two separate teams and we may have run two different games. But we had the army colonels play the blue military forces.
SPEAKER_02: The blue team, in wargamespeak, is the home team. The United States and its allies. The colonels were playing themselves. One of Rand's top East Asia specialists, Mike Mazar, played North Korea.
SPEAKER_02: Jantil and some of his fellow Rand staffers served as referees. In the first run, the U.S. and South Korean forces attacked across the demilitarized zone. The border that separates North and South Korea may be the most dangerous border in the world. Landmines everywhere. The result was catastrophic losses. In the next version of the game, the U.S. and South Korea imagined that they could broker a deal with a faction of the North Korean army to let them across. Which got them to the other side, but now they had an even bigger challenge. I mean, it's freaking hard as hell.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, a failed North Korean state with nuclear weapons writ large, you know, parts of a nuclear device, delivery systems, records, documents of scientists, all those kinds of things, to track those down in the chaos of a North Korean state, it was pretty clear. What was your conclusion? Was it possible? Oh, yes. But it won't take weeks. It won't take months. It's going to take years.
SPEAKER_02: In the game, it took thousands of soldiers to secure even a single North Korea installation.
SPEAKER_05: It took that long because you just, you have to secure the outside of it, which requires forces to do that. Then you have to move inside of it. Potentially there could be North Korean forces that still wanted to fight to protect it. How many sites do we think they have?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, more than one.
SPEAKER_05: Let's not even take into account the chemical weapons, potential biological weapons that North Korea has, but we're talking scores and scores and scores of nuclear sites. You remember from my board of trustees talk, I made the point that core nuclear components to one of those nuclear warheads, you could put it in the size of your backpack. So then you could scurry it off on a road with a civilian carrying it. So it just presents all kinds of problems.
SPEAKER_02: In his talk to the Rand board about the game, Gentile also spent a surprising amount of time on traffic jams. Because armies aren't the only factor in a military crisis. North Korean refugees would start streaming across the border. South Koreans would start fleeing their capital, Seoul. The US and Japanese governments would order their citizens to leave the country at the same time as a huge army is trying to head towards the border, which adds up to the mother of all traffic jams.
SPEAKER_02: As I listened to Gentile that day at Rand, I remember thinking, traffic jams? As a factor in any war with North Korea, that had not occurred to me. And I assumed that was because I'm not a military expert. But then I looked around the room at the people who were, particularly Harold Brown, the gray eminence of the American defense establishment. Big Leonine head, thick black-rimmed glasses, even in his 90s, the smartest person in any room he walked into. He had a look in his eyes and I realized, oh, traffic jams had not occurred to him either. Now, what did the war game teach the army? They already knew it would be hard to secure nuclear weapons in a failed North Korea. The war game just told them how hard it would be.
SPEAKER_05: There's people on the roads, if you're passing through the DMZ, chemical weapons may have been used. So the military forces have to put on protective gear to move through a chemically contaminated area.
SPEAKER_02: Everyone in the tanks has to be in full chemical protection gear. Bodysuit, mask, rubber gloves, boots, what the U.S. military calls MOP-4 protection.
SPEAKER_05: Can you imagine what it's like trying to move through this kind of terrain where a Bradley commander or a tank commander is buttoned up and in MOP-4 and can only look out through the little sites on the top of the turret or even through the optics and then bring in the fact that potentially there's combat action where U.S. tanks, North Korean tanks, infantry are being destroyed, killed, cries for help, blood, anger, all these kinds of things. There's the anguish of seeing people on the road freezing to death, can't do anything about it. And then there's just the anger and the hatred, the desire for revenge to kill. And then you're trying to manage all of that and still carry out the mission. It would be easy for the North Koreans to build an atomic IED and to plot that in a choke point going through a steep valley and to set that off. Then you have that and then the whole larger operational political context of now a nuclear weapon has been used, what will be the U.S. response, all those kinds of things.
SPEAKER_02: The war game added detail, color, emotion to the Army's understanding. And the Army ordered up the war game because they knew enough to know that many of those details would be on the long list of things that had never occurred to them. These are the details that clear your mind of wishful thinking, of comforting delusions, of the false reassurance of overconfidence.
SPEAKER_05: Sherman said war is hell and you cannot refine it. And I've said this before, look, I mean, for the U.S. Army, U.S. military, Iraq and Afghanistan was not easy, right? And it was especially not easy for the populations of those two countries. I mean, devastating in a lot of ways. But this kind of conflict, war on the Korean Peninsula would make what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan look very, very simple in comparison.
SPEAKER_02: A war game is a reality check. And I think we're willing to test our illusions with reality checks only if we practice, if we make it a habit, if we keep reminding ourselves that the world outside our imagination is much larger than the world inside it. This is what the leaf reikers stood for all those years ago in my family's backyard. They took a chance on an afternoon of doing something that they had never done before and which did not, at least in the abstract, sound like fun. And then afterwards, a 20-something advanced math doctoral student from Bangalore would sit down with another math whiz from Legos and a third from the West Bank and they would play charades on a team together. Charades is a game that depends on shared cultural understanding. But here it was being played by three people with no shared cultural understanding, which is what made it fun. The experience of figuring it out, of learning what figuring it out felt like, was so intoxicatingly unpredictable that they would all come back the next year and the year after that, even after they had gotten their PhDs and moved far away, only to discover when they returned, of course, that charades had been replaced by some brand new and fiendishly impossible game of my father's invention. All the leaf reikers knew is that they wouldn't know what would happen after the leaves were raked. And that was enough.
SPEAKER_11: from Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about
SPEAKER_12: the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses.
SPEAKER_06: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped.
SPEAKER_07: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. Until now.
SPEAKER_12: Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_10: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists.
SPEAKER_12: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contained special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to 3,000 years later, and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promised something special inside, but in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box, and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you, and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. Right now, you'll save $200 on $1,000 or more at saatva.com slash gladwell. That's S-A-A-T-V-A dot com slash gladwell.
SPEAKER_02: One final war game, one that I still can't stop thinking about, designed by Yuna Wong.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so the war game began with sort of China trying to exert greater control and signal that they were in control of the region and more dominant now in the region, and the United States and Japan were really resisting that.
SPEAKER_02: Yuna Wong's scenario was set in the future, at a time when the world's major militaries have gone all in on artificial intelligence.
SPEAKER_08: There was this premise that AI is going to fundamentally change warfare. I proposed the idea because I was like, well, what happens if all your dreams come true, right? There's a lot of work asking whether or not the Pentagon can really integrate AI in the way they hope to. But I'm like, well, what if you got everything you wanted?
SPEAKER_02: The game was held in a conference room at Rand's Washington, D.C. office. Someone playing China, another person playing Japan, the U.S., North Korea. A senior information scientist from Rand's California office, Ashanti Shaba, flew in to represent the commercial AI sector. Yuna Wong was part of what's called White Team, part referee, part instigator. The road to war was deceptively simple. Lots of muscle flexing between the U.S. and China, leading to Japan and the United States launching a cyber attack on a Chinese aircraft carrier. The Chinese responded with a flyby near U.S. vessels. And with that, the game was off and running.
SPEAKER_08: The United States and Japan then went off and then consulted with each other and came back, announced they were holding a large joint military exercise around the Senkaku Islands.
SPEAKER_02: The U.S. and Japan put their missile defense on full auto, meaning they programmed the artificial intelligence systems running the missiles to respond automatically and immediately to any hostile act. They did that to send a message to China, don't do anything rash. But then, out of the blue, North Korea decided to join in by firing off a missile on its own aimed at a major Japanese city.
SPEAKER_02: Luckily, the missile was intercepted before it could do any damage. What are they doing? They're signaling that they're standing with China.
SPEAKER_08: Yes. So sometimes I say China has one ally and it's the worst ally in the world and it's North Korea. So that is a very complicated relationship. But in the game, they did not pressure them. This was just North Korea decided they would try to be helpful and this was the result. But remember, in this war game scenario, the U.S. and Japan had their defense systems on
SPEAKER_02: full auto, programmed to respond automatically and immediately to any provocation. Did the U.S. and China in the game, it just never occurred to them that if North Korea weighed in and they were on full auto, we might end up dragging North Korea into the conflict? Correct.
SPEAKER_08: The focus was on signaling to China and nobody thought about potential North Korean behavior. So, North Korea does this thing.
SPEAKER_02: The AI fires back at North Korea. Yes.
SPEAKER_08: China then responded with a limited blockade of Japan. So they announced the blockade and the AI sent a single destroyer to a single Japanese port to enforce this blockade. This is where the players for South Korea and Japan said, well, that was a failure. But the United States team was really extremely confused and said, wait, like, I don't understand what's going on here. I don't understand what their AI is doing.
SPEAKER_02: God knows what the North Koreans will do next. The U.S. is running around trying to figure out what the Chinese artificial intelligence systems are up to. Japan is under a partial blockade. Oh, and there's a cargo ship at the bottom of the sea. The Chinese blew you up, right? The Chinese blew me up because they were trying to enforce a blockade on Japan, I believe.
SPEAKER_02: That's RAND specialist Ashanti Ashaba, who flew in to play the role of a commercial AI system running container shipping. So you just kept sailing into port. You didn't stop and turn away.
SPEAKER_04: No, no, no. I was trying to keep my market open, like, serve everybody as much as possible. That was the idea there. And I figured by being compliant, I could keep both sides happy. Every one of these war games that people talk to me about, it's always a mess.
SPEAKER_02: The art is to draw strategic insight from the mess.
SPEAKER_04: And some people do it better than others. It's always a mess. Everything is a mess.
SPEAKER_02: At the end, the RAND team put out a report on the game, with the following lesson in conclusion. Current planning efforts have not kept pace with how to handle the potentially destabilizing or escalatory issues associated with these new technologies. End quote. The war game said, don't fool yourself. There's going to be chaos. But with luck, we can learn from the chaos. When you made your remark about how everything's a mess and yet we continue on, that's like the most Nigerian thing you could possibly...
SPEAKER_04: I grew up in the heart of chaos. Lagos is the most chaotic place on earth. I was going to say, you're well prepared for this.
SPEAKER_04: I have Lagos to thank for a lot of things that I've done in my life, basically.
SPEAKER_02: One last moment from Yuna Wong's war game. Several days in, the United States and Japan began hunting the sea of Japan for Chinese submarines to figure out which ports the Chinese were planning to blockade next. Emotions were running high.
SPEAKER_08: The player for China said he couldn't tell whether the US and Japanese anti-submarine warfare assets were looking for his submarines to just track them or destroy them. So he ordered a submarine to destroy an autonomous anti-submarine warfare plane. Then the player for Japan felt that they had shown restraint so far, but they could no longer show restraint if the player for China was going to take kinetic action. So the United States and Japan at this point respond, and they sink a manned Chinese submarine. So these are the first human casualties of the game. At this point, it escalates significantly. So the players for Japan and the United States go off to a separate room, and then they're trying to figure out a way of offering the Chinese off-ramps. They seriously wanted to de-escalate at this point. The player for China at this point says, no, they got one of mine. I'm going to get one of theirs. And launches missiles at the combined US and Japanese fleet, and we end the game there, but we believe that there would have been human casualties aboard the US and Japanese fleet. Wait, why do you guys call the game just at the moment when China is launching missiles at the US and Japanese fleet?
SPEAKER_02: It's like stopping the movie with 10 minutes left. Don't you want to know what happens after that point?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, some of it was we ran out of time. We only had the conference room for a week, and we only had people in town for a week. So that is sometimes the unfortunate nature of these things.
SPEAKER_02: It was only a game after all, not real life. People had to leave Narnia and go home. And the game had done its work, hadn't it? Raised a possibility that might not have occurred to anyone otherwise. A warning that might come in handy one day. Or who knows, maybe already has. Yuna, you would have loved the leaf-raking party.
SPEAKER_02: Revisionist History is produced by Mia Labelle, Lee Mengistu and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton and Anu Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton, original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flon Williams, and engineering by Martine Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines, and special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Heather Fain, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Daniella Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Marano, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
SPEAKER_02: Don't forget my latest book, The Bomber Mafia, which is an expansion of several episodes from the last season of Revisionist History. You can find it wherever books are sold, but buy the audiobook at bombermafia.com, and you'll get a bonus listener's guide, and you can listen in the podcast app you're using now. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze, while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits.
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SPEAKER_01: With millions of books on Amazon, there's a reading feeling for everyone. For example, Juan's. Ahhh. As he drifts away to Nirvana after only the first chapter. Is different to Maya's. Ahh. When she discovered the narrator was, in fact, the evil twin. Which is also different to Noah's. Aww. Anytime the cute cyberpunk is mentioned, even though in reality he'd be totally out of his league. From. Ahhh. Two. Ahhh. Two. Aww.
