SPEAKER_03: Pushkin.
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SPEAKER_09: 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_03: Heads up. In this episode, I interview an old school guy from New York who drops a lot of F bombs, so you're aware. Say your name the way an Israeli would say it.
SPEAKER_07: Milia Vital.
SPEAKER_03: And say, my name is Milia Vital in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_07: Shmi Milia Vital.
SPEAKER_03: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. So far in season four, I've talked about grand themes, huge issues. This episode is about something very specific, a word. The word I'm interested in is chutzpah. I decided I would like to examine the phenomenon of chutzpah. Since Milia is my neighbor and an Israeli, she has agreed to help. Let's teach Goetia, Malcolm, how to say this word appropriately. First of all, are we doing that kind of thing in the throat that so many... The guttural... The ch. Do I have to master the ch?
SPEAKER_03: It's a little soft.
SPEAKER_08: I think we have it closer to Arabic. It's deeper in the throat and there's a lot more contact of the soft palate. It's really deeper. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So softer, not a ch, but a chutzpah. No.
SPEAKER_08: Chutzpah. The... The... This... Okay. So the sound is right. Yeah. It is deep. Yeah. But the vowel is not ch. It's hu. Hu. Chutzpah. Chutzpah. Yeah. In Hebrew, there's only a, e, i, o, u. There's no diphthongs and there's no o and there's no book and book, right? There's only bu.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_08: So you understand? I'm talking to myself. For me it's very clear because sadly I worked on it so hard. But, okay, so it's not chutzpah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like it's not milli, it's milli. Milli. I, o, u. So it's hu, t, t, the t.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_08: Hu. Not hu. Hu. Yes, that's better Malek.
SPEAKER_03: Hu. It strikes me that there is a lot of chutzpah in the world at the moment and that maybe it would be useful to find out something more about it. So I started with Milli and the first thing she told me is that there isn't one chutzpah. There's actually two. The American version and the Israeli version. Chutzpah I knew, but not this other one.
SPEAKER_08: Chutzpah. Not bad, but it's not a pa.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: It's pa. Pa. Pa. It's a vowel that doesn't exist actually in Hebrew. Chutzpah. Alright. Now you gotta have the chutzpah to say chutzpah. You gotta say chutzpah. With a certain oomph. Kind of. Yeah. You hit the second syllable.
SPEAKER_05: Chut, chutpah.
SPEAKER_08: Chutzpah. There's a lot of air coming out of the mouth when you say that. Why?
SPEAKER_03: So it when, uh, but in America the accents on the first syllable. Yeah. Chutzpah. Chutzpah. Right. Chutzpah and chutzpah.
SPEAKER_03: And they are worlds apart. And maybe our chutzpah problem is that we've confused the two. When I was in Los Angeles a little while back, I went to see a Hollywood legend named Al Ruddy. Tall guy. Lean. Close to 90. He lives up in the canyons of Beverly Hills. One of those 1960s houses perched on a hillside that looks like something off the set of a James Bond movie. I had a specific reason to go and see Ruddy. But Ruddy is the kind of person that when he starts talking, specific reasons go out the window. I was born in Canada also.
SPEAKER_04: Now that I know everything about you, I was born in Montreal. I know, I saw that. Yeah, I went to Montreal and then my mother, my mother snuck over the border with, she divorced with three kids. We snuck over the border in New York.
SPEAKER_04: My mother said, when they ask you in junior high where you were born, say you don't know. What do you look like a fucking martyr? I don't know where the fuck I'm born, you crazy.
SPEAKER_03: Al Ruddy was the middle child.
SPEAKER_04: So I was the one that worked harder for everything I ever got. Because I had an older sister who was beautiful and my brother who was the baby. I was the schmuck in the middle, right? So I was always working harder. But I decided, and I learned it early on, it was actually a blessing, you know? I said, you know, I better learn how to take care of myself. No one's going to open the fucking doors for me anyway. I got to do it. Al Ruddy way.
SPEAKER_03: The Al Ruddy way meant going to Brooklyn Tech, then bouncing around, working at a gas station, studying architecture at USC, and winding up with a job as a computer programmer at the RAND Corporation think tank in Santa Monica. While he's working at RAND, Ruddy meets an unemployed actor named Bernie Fine. So I tell Bernie, why don't we write something?
SPEAKER_04: He says, I'm not a writer. I say, Bernie, what the fuck do you have to write in a half hour show? It's a one-liner. It's the simplest format. One act could break the high point and you resolve it in act two.
SPEAKER_03: So on the side, the two of them start to write a television pilot, a comedy set in a prison. Not just any prison, a Nazi prisoner of war camp. And the comic leads are the head of the prison, Colonel Klink, and a prison guard, Sergeant Schultz, whose signature line is, I know nothing. I see nothing. I hear nothing. Somehow Ruddy gets the script to an agent named Mike Levy. And Levy gets them a pitch meeting with CBS. This was the mid 1960s when CBS was known as a Tiffany network. It was the most prestigious television broadcaster in the world. Intellectual, high class. Its president was the legendary William Paley. I'm sitting opposite William S. Paley, who fucking owns CBS.
SPEAKER_04: The whole row of CBS guys and me and Mike, now he's dead.
SPEAKER_04: Mike's in there discussing a show called Hogan's Hero. Bill Paley was across the table and Mikey says, I find the idea of Nazis doing comedy shows totally reprehensible.
SPEAKER_03: Mike Levy, the agent, looks over at Ruddy. You tell him. He's blown away.
SPEAKER_04: I don't know what to say. He's, oh, I'll have him tell you about it. He points to me. I've never sold a fucking thing, right? I acted out the whole show. Idiotic. I'm jumping up and down. I know nothing with machine guns. And Bill Paley starts laughing. He can't stop laughing. I swear to Christ. Before I know it, the whole room is laughing on the other side.
SPEAKER_04: So he got through. And I thought, Bill Paley stands up. He says, I don't know if I can ever buy that show. But I said, I just want to commend you. That's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
SPEAKER_03: Hogan's Heroes runs for six seasons. From 1965 to 1971, the show wins two Emmys, has a huge following, and makes CBS a fortune. Oh, I see nothing.
SPEAKER_11: I was not here. I did not even get up this morning.
SPEAKER_03: Now, since our topic is chutzpah, let us break this down. A computer programmer named Al Ruddy, who is Jewish, has his agent, who is Jewish, set up a meeting with Bill Paley, who is Jewish, about a comedy starring two Nazis. And Paley says, I'm Jewish. I'm not interested. But then Ruddy, who has never sold a screenplay before in his life, convinces him it's actually a great idea. And by the way, the lead Nazi in Hogan's Heroes, Colonel Klink, is played by Werner Klemperer, Jewish, whose family fled Nazi Germany in 1935. And the prison guard, Sergeant Schultz, is played by John Banner, Jewish, who fled Europe in 1939. The word chutzpah refers to audacity. This is audacious. Ruddy would go on to write The Longest Yard, starring Burt Reynolds, and Walker, Texas Ranger, starring Chuck Norris. He was one of the producers on the 2004 film Million Dollar Baby, which won a handful of Oscars. I could go on. And now, sitting with him in his kitchen, as he wheeled his wheelchair back and forth to emphasize the highlight of each of his stories, I realized what Al Ruddy is. He is chutzpah. But this is a very specific kind of chutzpah, right? Remember, this show is being made only 20 years after the Nazis stopped terrorizing Europe.
SPEAKER_13: This camp, Klink, this camp is a black page in the glorious history of the Third Reich, which I shall report when I get back to Berlin.
SPEAKER_03: Paley admired Ruddy for the way he behaves. He rewarded him. If you and Bernie Fine were not Jewish, could you have gotten away with it?
SPEAKER_04: It didn't even enter my mind in those days. No one asked us, no one knew that. There was never an issue. It was funny.
SPEAKER_03: Ruddy didn't brazenly set out to violate social norms. It didn't occur to him that there was a social norm to violate. In America, this is what is meant by chutzpah. But not in Israel. Chutzpah is a whole different matter.
SPEAKER_07: Chutzpah. Chutzpah.
SPEAKER_03: So you also don't say chutzpah, like with a sort of curl to it, like a cute kind of
SPEAKER_08: chutzpah. It's chutzpah. It's sort of a... You say like, it's a chutzpah. What an insult. It's edgy and bitter. It's not like, she's got so much chutzpah. That's a totally different word. The connotation I would say is like, it's a chutzpah. Someone who has no care about anyone else's life or feelings. Or like if your child is rude to you. If I say to Benjamin, this is as low as it gets. He actually once teared up when I said that. I could see his face, like shocked. Yeah, he knows what it means. No manners or no regard to someone else's feelings or condition. That would be the chutzpah.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_05: The chutzpah.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. One word, two very different meanings. And we've been conflating the two. I'll get into the consequences when we come back.
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SPEAKER_03: 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 space flight 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_03: I'm looking for a sofa, a pursuit by the way, which has consumed far too many hours of my life. And I found article, and I'll tell you what I'm getting, a Svengrast sectional in green velvet, which will be in my living room by the end of the month for a fraction of what the other fancy sofa makers are charging. And this is my favorite part from the product description. Some assembly required approximately five minutes. Five minutes. Article has a curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal industrial Scandian boho designs that make furniture shopping simple. And article offers fast, affordable shipping across the US and Canada. Plus they don't leave you waiting around. You pick delivery time and they'll send you updates every step of the way. Article is offering our listeners $50 off their first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash Gladwell, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash Gladwell for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. Let's do a second Hutzpah case study involving an exact contemporary of Al Ruddy's.
SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure how to introduce my next guest. He's a businessman who leads a most colorful life. His name has been in the papers a great deal lately. And I just met him backstage. I'm anxious to meet him further. Will you welcome please, Mr. Joseph Colombo.
SPEAKER_03: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Colombo began making the rounds of talk shows and news programs in New York City. Invariably, the interview would begin with the question of what Joseph Colombo did for a living. And invariably his answer would be the same. Here he is on the Dick Cavett show in April of 1971.
SPEAKER_02: Explain what you do for a living, as if I had never met you.
SPEAKER_14: Well, I'm a real estate salesman and I own a piece of a funeral home. And that wasn't meant to be so funny, Dick.
SPEAKER_03: You may have noticed, by the way, there's a lot of Dick Cavett in this season of Revisionist History. I love Dick Cavett.
SPEAKER_14: Anything I can do to earn a living honestly and sincerely, I help sell cars and a florist and I own a piece of a cut room in New York that we cut material for dresses. It's a cut room. And with all these things put together, I earn a living.
SPEAKER_14: And I work very hard at it, very honest and sincerely.
SPEAKER_03: Colombo's media tour was to promote an organization he had started called the Italian American Civil Rights League.
SPEAKER_14: Well, we believe that we are the scapegoats. We have been labeled and stigmatized and I maintain and I'll keep saying that it's each and every Italian American through the United States that there is a conspiracy against.
SPEAKER_03: I asked the writer Nick Pileggi about him. Maybe you remember Pileggi from our 4th of July episode earlier this season. And what was he like?
SPEAKER_10: From everything I hear, and I've seen him speak on occasion, I've been in rooms with him. He was as mild and calm and relaxed as you can imagine. He was like a dry goods salesman.
SPEAKER_03: Pileggi grew up with Colombo in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
SPEAKER_10: He came up with this idea of the Italian American Civil Rights League. Their premise was that Italians were being stigmatized by the mafia, that there was really no such thing as the mafia. But the media was going after Italian Americans and denying us our right place in the world and we would be prejudiced against getting good jobs all because the New York Times couldn't stop writing the word mafia.
SPEAKER_03: Now, what was Joe Colombo's real job, aside from running a funeral home and a cut shop and selling real estate? He was a big-time mafia don, the Profaci family. Old man Giuseppe Profaci dies in 1962. Colombo takes over the organization. African Jews had the Anti-Defamation League, formed in 1913 to combat the long history of anti-Semitism around the world. African Americans start the NAACP in 1909 because black people were being openly and ruthlessly denied their civil rights. The Italian American Civil Rights League was started by a mobster upset that the media was calling him a mobster. In April of 1970, Colombo and a group of his associates started picketing the Manhattan headquarters of the FBI. That protest eventually grows to 5,000 people. They come up with a logo invoking Christopher Columbus, the greatest Italian immigrant of them all. By the summer of 1970, they have 45,000 dues paying members. They throw themselves a big benefit concert in Madison Square Garden starring, of course, Frank Sinatra. They go after Alka-Seltzer for their most famous TV commercial in which an Italian man, overseen by his doting wife, eats one too many spicy meatballs.
SPEAKER_03: Italians eating meatballs, according to Joe Colombo, perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Italians.
SPEAKER_13: Here's my favorite story involving Joe Colombo.
SPEAKER_03: In the late 1960s, Johnny Carson was the king of late night TV and one of the most famous television personalities in the country. According to his former attorney, Henry Bushkin, Carson was out drinking one night at Jilly's, a bar in Manhattan run by a close friend of Frank Sinatra's, Jilly Rizzo. This is Bushkin telling the story on the Artie Lange Show a few years ago.
SPEAKER_18: It was on, I think, 52nd and 8th, a famous watering hole, and Johnny was in there one night with McMahon.
SPEAKER_03: Johnny being Johnny Carson, McMahon being his sidekick, Ed McMahon.
SPEAKER_18: And they try to pick up the wrong girls. Happened to be the wife and sister of a well-known mafioso type of character. Who was not sensitive about stuff like that. Not happy, not happy. Irritated, you might say.
SPEAKER_03: Carson ends up being thrown down the stairs at Jilly's. He's so banged up, there's no way he can go on television. Then he learns that the mobster in question has put out a contract on his life.
SPEAKER_18: What happened was they went looking for Johnny. Johnny holed up in the apartment at UN Plaza.
SPEAKER_03: He's hiding out. He takes the week off work. He's petrified. So what happens? Joe Colombo makes a deal with Carson's network, NBC. The Columbus Day Parade was about to come up.
SPEAKER_18: It was like three weeks away. And no network would agree to cover it then. Because they knew it was the five families of New York that were sponsoring this parade to make the Italian-Americans look, you know. So Carson's hiding out, and a deal was struck. If NBC covers the parade, they'll let Carson go. So that year, NBC is the only network that covered the parade. Carson gets off.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, and what happens the following year? 1971, when Joe Colombo stages the second, even more elaborate Columbus Day event intended to show the world that the Italian-American community of New York is peaceful and law-abiding? Someone shoots him.
SPEAKER_10: That's right. They had the first one at Columbus Circle and the second one they shot Joe Colombo. I mean, it's just insane.
SPEAKER_03: But you couldn't make this up. Like at the rally? No, it could have been Grant's too.
SPEAKER_10: They could have done it any location in the city besides Columbus Circle. But in the middle of a...
SPEAKER_03: A rally. Of a rally intended to whitewash the Italian-American community, somebody offs the guy trying to whitewash the... What I mean is, this is chutzpah all over the place. But it's not Al Ruddy's kind of chutzpah, is it? Running a Jewish actor, play a Nazi prison guard, who runs around saying, in the middle of the Holocaust, I know nothing, I hear nothing, I see nothing, in a prime time television sitcom is, well, it's kind of amazing. But Joe Colombo, mob boss, starting the Italian-American Civil Rights League? This is chutzpah on a whole other level. For goodness sake, at the time he was shot, Colombo was under federal indictment on charges of controlling a $10 million a year gambling syndicate. This is not audacity. This is shamelessness. The other kind of chutzpah. Chutzpah! In the Book of Genesis, there is a famous passage where the prophet Abraham speaks to God about the moral outrages in Sodom and Gomorrah. God wants to destroy both cities, but Abraham says, wait, what if there are 50 righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah? Will you really sweep those cities away and not spare them for the sake of those 50 righteous people? So the Lord says, okay, if you can find 50 righteous men, I will spare the cities. Abraham then says, what if there are only 45 righteous men? You wouldn't want to kill 45 perfectly innocent men for the sake of five at the margin. And God says, you're right, let's make it 45. To which Abraham responds, why not 30? I mean, same logic. God says, okay, they keep going. In the end, Abraham gets them down to 10. Abraham is being very Israeli here. Israel is what is called a low power distance culture, meaning that it's a place where there is very little respect for hierarchy or formality in social interaction. France is the opposite kind of place, a high power distance culture. Nobody just calls up God directly in France. In France, Abraham would have had to file an application with the Department of Divine Communication, wait three months for an appointment, then present some kind of formal legal writ on behalf of the righteous of Gomorrah. Not in Israel. Here's another example of low power distance at work in Israel. It's the word new, N-U. New is what linguists call a reactive token, meaning a word used in conversation by the party that's doing the listening. Aha is a reactive token. So is really. The point of a reactive token is to signal involvement without claiming the floor from the speaker. I understand. I'm interested. Keep going. But new is an unusual reactive token because it's not neutral. It's not I'm listening. It means hurry up. Get to the point. New. New. Now, is new polite? In virtually all cultures in the world, of course, the answer would be no. New is not some gentle conversational nudge. It's a hijacking. The listener is interrupting the speaker in order to control the pace of the narrative. But in Israel, this is not necessarily true. The Israeli linguist Yael Mashler has written extensively on new. She says, quote, by exhibiting their impatience with the movement towards the climax of a story to the point of taking the liberty of controlling the flow of another's discourse, hearers can show maximal involvement in the narrative. Meaning we in Israel have no need to beat around the bush with neutral reactive tokens. We're a tiny country with zero power distance. What happens? Tell me. I can't wait any longer. In Abraham's argument with God, Abraham talks God down very methodically. Fifty righteous men to forty five to forty to thirty to twenty and then ten and surely right around the forty mark. When it would have been obvious to any omniscient entity where Abraham was going, God must have interrupted. No, I love you Abraham. You know that there is no need to drag this out. My friend Millie says that since coming to America, she has struggled with the transition to a land of excessive social nicety. Like this past winter when she was dealing with her children's school.
SPEAKER_08: Like if I say, for example, you know, can we have less snow days? Like even if there's a snow day, like can't you just leave the school open? I'm just asking. My husband says that's like you don't think about what their point of view is. You don't think about what the teachers have to do to get to school. You don't think about their safety. You don't think of the other kids. I'm like, truth. But I just want to know the like, why can't I just ask the question? So that's, you know, yes.
SPEAKER_03: Let's say you were in Israel and the same scenario. I mean, I realize there's no snow days in Israel, but suppose you're making the same request of the school and I am the principal of the school and you're asked, I would like you to ask me as an Israeli, ask me why the school can't stay open more.
SPEAKER_08: Say, excuse me. You know, my kids are at home. I don't have the time to take care of them. They need to be inside the school. You need to keep the school open so I can leave my kids there and everybody else agrees with me. You want me to ask? I'm going to get 20 people who agree with me. Do you want to? This is, would be like not good spot at all. This would be very nice, by the way. And the principal in Israel would respond how?
SPEAKER_08: Excuse me. I'm not working for you. I'm running a school. I have a long way to come from home. Driving in the snow is not easy. So please, and also there's also insurance and all things that you don't think about. So please, you know what? Call me later after I put my own kids down and we'll talk on the phone. Okay? This would be the conversation. She wouldn't hate me. She would just like continue arguing with me and then she'll tell me to shut up. But she wouldn't like, here they don't even like answer my email. It's so embarrassing.
SPEAKER_03: So we have two very different scenarios here. chutzpah, that's Al Ruddy convincing Bill Paley to greenlight Hogan's heroes. An Israeli would look at that and say, Al Ruddy's just being direct. So what? But Joe Colombo starting the Italian American civil rights league? That is not Abraham arguing with God to save the righteous of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is not new. That is not why can't the schools stay open on a snow day. That is an affront. It's not the, I do something and I'm, you know, a dog has no chutzpah. A dog does... That's good. That was not bad.
SPEAKER_08: Very close, very close.
SPEAKER_03: But the thing that's distinctive about this is the person who is completely unencumbered by shame.
SPEAKER_08: Exactly. Well, shame has nothing to do with it. They're so beyond shame. They don't even see. They don't even see you to feel shame. It's their point of view without any regard to anyone else's life.
SPEAKER_03: Without regard to anyone else's life. Remember that.
SPEAKER_19: 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_03: This episode is brought to you by choice ology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choice ology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into questions like can we learn to make smarter decisions or what is the power of negative thinking? The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School and author of the best selling book, How to Change. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates and more about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones. Choice ology is out now. Listen and subscribe at Schwab dot com slash podcast or find it wherever you listen.
SPEAKER_09: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at I Heart Media, 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_16: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine.
SPEAKER_09: Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_17: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists.
SPEAKER_09: Listen to Incubation on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_03: Not long after I spoke with Millie Avital, there was a hearing in front of three federal judges at a courthouse in San Francisco. It was about the treatment of migrant children detained at the border. At issue was whether the conditions under which the children were being held violated a previous legal commitment made by the government to provide safe and sanitary conditions in detention centers. The Department of Justice sent an attorney, Sarah Fabian, to make the case that the government was in compliance with the safe and sanitary standard. Her principal argument was that the term safe and sanitary didn't have an explicit definition.
SPEAKER_00: And that's any number of things might fall under those categories.
SPEAKER_03: That's Fabian. And this is one of the judges, Marsha Berzon.
SPEAKER_15: Yes, but sleep surely does, right? You can't be safe and sanitary or safe as a human being if you can't sleep. And you said in your briefs it doesn't say anything about sleeping, so therefore there's nothing in here about being able to sleep.
SPEAKER_03: The children, it turned out, didn't have beds or blankets, or in some cases, even room to lie down. So Berzon wonders, how is that not a violation of the agreement to provide decent living conditions? And Fabian answers.
SPEAKER_00: I think the concern there is, Your Honor, the court, finding that sleep, for example, falls under, is relevant to a finding of no safe and sanitary conditions is one thing. But the ultimate conclusion is safe and sanitary is a singular category in the agreement.
SPEAKER_03: You probably need to be a lawyer to understand what Fabian is saying. And I'm not a lawyer. So I'm going to have to guess the government's argument goes like this. Sleep is one thing, safe and sanitary are another. If the agreement had meant for sleep to fall under the requirement of safe and sanitary, it would have said so. Then Judge William Fletcher chimes in. Maybe sleep wasn't explicitly part of the safe and sanitary definition because it's too obvious.
SPEAKER_20: It may be that they don't get super thread counts Egyptian linens. I get that. But the testimony that the district judge believed was, it's really cold. In fact, it gets colder when we complain about it as being cold. We're forced to sleep crowded with the lights on all night long. And all you do put us on is the concrete floor with an aluminum blanket. No one would argue that this is secure and sanitary.
SPEAKER_00: Your Honor, I think what I'm arguing is that the way that the district court reached the conclusion was to say these specific items. And I think I will acknowledge, I think sleep is the more difficult end of what I'm arguing.
SPEAKER_03: Sleep is the more difficult end of what I'm arguing. You think?
SPEAKER_20: It's cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleep on the concrete and you get an aluminum foil blanket. I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.
SPEAKER_03: From sleep in blankets, the discussion moved on to toothpaste, toothbrushes and soap.
SPEAKER_20: It wasn't high class milled soap, it was soap. And that sounds, that's part of safe and sanitary. Are you disagreeing with that?
SPEAKER_00: What I'm disagreeing with is that the court ultimately concluded these things would fall
SPEAKER_03: Yes, she was disagreeing with that.
SPEAKER_03: All of this went on for some time. I would encourage you to listen to the full hearing for yourself since, if you are an American, it was your government, paid for by your tax dollars, that was doing the arguing. And ask yourself, how did it come to this? There are a thousand answers, obviously. But maybe one of them is that over the years our moral vocabulary has become impoverished. Which is a problem, because you cannot make sense of things that you cannot describe. And lumping together audacity and shamelessness creates a loophole large enough to drive a tank through. One last question. What happens when chutzpah and hutzpah go head to head? When they meet each other in the field of battle? Well, it happened. Famously. In 1970, Al Ruddy at that point was working at Paramount Pictures. That was the era when Robert Evans was the head of production at Paramount. And the studio was on maybe the greatest run of any studio ever. Love Story, Three Days of the Condor, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown. On and on, Al Ruddy, in typical Al Ruddy fashion, had just talked himself into a big job there as a producer. A reporter comes to do a piece on him. He asks Ruddy, after you did Hogan's Heroes, what did you do next?
SPEAKER_04: No, no, that's all I did. That's it. He puts it by the... Can I go off the record for a second with you? He said, how the fuck did you get in here? I know guys who can't get in that gate who've been here 20 years. And I say, listen, now that we're off the record, I had no idea what the fuck I'm doing. I never developed a screenplay. I did one half hour show, okay? I'm the dumbest guy on the slot at the moment. I won't be for long, but just don't write it the art of it.
SPEAKER_03: Still with the chutzpah. Around this time, Paramount, almost by accident, got the film rights to a novel by a writer named Mario Puzo. The novel was The Godfather. No one had high hopes for the movie since the mobster genre scene played out. So they gave it to the new guy, Ruddy, to produce, in hopes he could bring it in on time and under budget. Almost immediately, trouble began with The Godfather Project. Trouble from Joe Colombo. Because Colombo was not at all happy about the movie. There were death threats, union problems. Shady guys followed Ruddy around. The window of his car was smashed. The corporate headquarters of the company that owned Paramount had to be evacuated twice because of bomb threats. And then the Italian-American Civil Rights League called up Ruddy's boss, Robert Evans. The League called Bob Evans out and threatened him.
SPEAKER_04: We don't want that movie made. If that movie made, someone's gonna get hurt. So Bob called me and said, well, you go see this guy, Joe Colombo. These guys, people are crazy.
SPEAKER_03: Ruddy calls up The Godfather's author, Mario Puzo, says, come with me to meet Joe Colombo. He said, now, are you crazy?
SPEAKER_04: You don't understand. I write about those people. I never want to be involved with them. And you be very careful getting involved because these are not people you can toy with in bullshit. You're gonna get in a lot of trouble. So to answer your question, I am not like not gonna go to town if you don't even know me.
SPEAKER_03: So Ruddy says, OK, I'll do it myself. He goes to the offices of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, meets up with Colombo and his guys, Brooklyn to Brooklyn. Looks like half of them are on parole, you know, with a lump under their jacket.
SPEAKER_03: They tell him they don't want the movie made. It's bad for the Italians. Ruddy responds, you know what? I'll let you read the script. Come to the Paramount office in New York. Colombo shows up with three henchmen. Ruddy hands them the script. It's 155 pages long. He puts on his red flanket glasses.
SPEAKER_04: Goes to page 26, it looks at for about five minutes. What does this mean, fade in? I saw the screen is black in the front. I realize there's no way the guy's going to page two. It's hundred pages. He's, oh, I can't read with these glasses.
SPEAKER_03: A mafia boss is not going to work his way through a 155-page script. The whole point of being a mafia boss is that you don't have to read things that are 155 pages. Mafia bosses do not have to do the fine print, the letter of the law, or chapter and verse. Those are for the people who have chosen not to live a life of crime. Colombo hands the script to one of his henchmen, a guy named Caesar. But Caesar's not going to read it either, is he? Caesar's not in the business of giving notes. Caesar's muscle. Here's why me.
SPEAKER_04: Give it to me. They threw my script over my desk. Finally, Joe gets pissed off. He grabs the script. Slid them on my desk. Wait a second. Do we like this guy? Yeah, I like him. Whatever.
SPEAKER_05: That's not the reading fault gets read for. So I said, well, what do you want? What do you live?
SPEAKER_04: He said, would you take the word mafia out of the movie?
SPEAKER_03: What Colombo doesn't realize, because he hasn't read the script, is that the word mafia is barely in the script. It only appears once. So I cross the word mafia.
SPEAKER_04: I said, Joe, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take this out of the movie. He didn't know how many times it was in. He said, you promise? Shook his hand. I made a deal that nobody could have made, because no one read this screenplay.
SPEAKER_03: From that moment on, all trouble with the movie ceased. It's why The Godfather got made. Hutzpah is a bunch of violent mobsters threatening to shut down a movie because it depicts them as violent mobsters. Hutzpah is tricking them because they're too lazy to read the script.
SPEAKER_08: It's so difficult, Malcolm. I bite my tongue all the time. It's not easy.
SPEAKER_03: It's not easy for you to be over here in this land of faux politeness.
SPEAKER_08: I'm basically living 10% of my personality because I have to be. I mean, it's tough.
SPEAKER_03: Milly wants to be direct. She's not a bully. And I wonder, can we even tell the difference anymore?
SPEAKER_17: It's not good.
SPEAKER_03: It's not good. It's extreme.
SPEAKER_08: I'm a desert person having to deal with snow.
SPEAKER_03: Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carly Migliori, Heder Fain, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. ["The Pushkin Industries Theme Song"] So wait, say it again. Milly. Milly.
SPEAKER_07: Milly. It's a flat L.
SPEAKER_08: Okay. And then- The tongue is flat. There's no curl. L. L. L. L. Milly. So that's Milly and it's not Avital. Yeah. It's Avital. Avital. Avital. There's the other difference is also the T. It doesn't have a sort of air to it. So it's not t, t. It's t, t.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_05: Ah. So- Do you hear the difference or is it just me?
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