SPEAKER_08: 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_10: 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 your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits.
SPEAKER_10: Pushkin. Hello, hello, revisionist history listeners. I'm excited to announce that this season, I'm offering a bunch of perks from my most loyal listeners, the ones who subscribe to Pushkin Plus. For those who just can't get enough, we're giving every episode to our subscribers one week early. Plus, we've created many episodes released weekly, and I'm calling them tangents. And of course, you'll never hear any ads.
SPEAKER_10: Subscribe to Pushkin Plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. So as a condition of our experiment, I'm giving you the ability to access every bit of data you want from everyone in the experiment. Yes, I would like that. And I know that sounds crazy, but I'm going pie in the sky, like you said.
SPEAKER_11: Yes, no, you get that. Requests granted. I'm the czar of the magic wand. I've granted you that request.
SPEAKER_10: Experiments come in many forms. There are natural experiments, experiments based on observations from the real world,
SPEAKER_10: thought experiments, where we game out a problem and its potential solution in our heads, and formal experiments, the ones that scientists design and perform in the laboratory. But there's another type of experiment. I found that the experiment was a very interesting experiment. There's another type of experiment, my favorite kind of experiment, the magic wand experiment. Where I call up the smartest people I know and ask them to think big, to give me the experiment of their dreams.
SPEAKER_11: Because remember, we are changing this environment because you're giving me all this money. Yeah, I'm giving you unlimited money.
SPEAKER_10: Unlimited money. I'm giving you the Musk money. I'm letting you go nuts. I'm letting you... This is a magic wand.
SPEAKER_10: The poet Homer invented the magic wand in his Greek epics, The Iliad and the Odyssey. The god Hermes used a magic wand to make people sleep. Athena used it to make Odysseus old and then young again. Circe used a wand to turn the crew of Odysseus into pigs. Then, for a few thousand years, not much magic wand action. Until now. When all of us at Revisionist History have decided to revive the magic wand for the greatest of all forbidden pleasures. Nerdy experiments. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome back to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. To kick off this season, we've asked scientists what if you could design an experiment without considering any financial, logistical, ethical, practical constraints. The experiment that allows you to answer the question that could never otherwise be answered. The experiment so far-fetched, so fantastical, so offensive that you don't usually even admit that you want to do it. Unless someone calls you up and says, oh, come on. How many do you want in each in this experiment?
SPEAKER_02: 100 males and 100 females. Dream big! You can go more than 100. Okay, sure. I'll give you a thousand.
SPEAKER_10: I'll give you a thousand. The idea for this season of Revisionist History was born in frustration. I've always believed that those of us alive in the 21st century are all modern and smarty pants. But over and again, I get into a serious discussion with some brilliant person. And after that person had dropped all of their expert bluster, they would say, oh, but we don't really know the answer to that. Or, I wish we knew, but we don't. It took me back because I suddenly remembered that's what my dad used to always say whenever I pestered him with a question. Big sigh, hand to his forehead, slight shake of the head, and then no idea. No idea! Which I thought was just Graham Gladwell. But now I realize is everyone. The great sobering discovery of my middle age is that the list of things we don't know is a lot longer than the list of things we do know. Which suggested to me that we really need to get cracking. Hence, this season of Revisionist History. A season devoted entirely to experiments, starting with the special category of magic wands.
SPEAKER_10: I got lots of suggestions about magic wand experiments on the physical world. Suggestions like that of my friend David Epstein, author of the wonderful book Range, why generalists triumph in a specialized world. David wrote me the following email, which I asked him to read out loud.
SPEAKER_07: It might be really fun to talk to a string theorist. I haven't kept up with this in years, but I remember at one point hearing that if you wanted to directly test string theory, you'd need a particle collider the size of the solar system. And then I seem to recall that there was some writing about the feasibility of a collider wrapping around the entire solar system. Come to think of it, if you had a particle collider that big, maybe we could basically recreate the big bang. Maybe finally figure out why gravity is such a weird weak force and what dark matter is. So yeah, okay, I vote for solar system size particle collider.
SPEAKER_10: David, I love you. You know that. Don't take this personally. We need to have a few ground rules. Like, we're not doing physics experiments. Or for that matter, anything on space travel, crypto, the bond market, or the ramifications of Supreme Court decisions, etc. etc. I am limiting this set of magic wands to the basics. Human things. Exercise, diet, and babies. I'll let you guess why. My show, my wands. Second ground rule. The reason to do magic wands is to help us think about the things we want to know, but aren't allowed to find out. Magic wands are supposed to make you feel a little uncomfortable. My guess is that you will feel uncomfortable at least once over the next 40 minutes, and that's totally fine. So, here are my top five experiments that can never be done. Drum roll please. We begin with the penis test. This was the idea of Harvard University child psychologist Joyce Beddinson. She's the author of a deeply fascinating book called Warriors and Warriors. Here's what she would do with her magic wand. Okay, so, I'll say it, and that is if we could randomly cut off a bunch of infant babies at birth, boys' penises, and attach them to randomly selected girls,
SPEAKER_02: and have them raised by their parents as the opposite sex from what they were biologically destined to be, because the parents are misinformed, and then look at their activities and interests.
SPEAKER_10: We remove the penises of one group of boy babies, babies born with XY chromosomes. We attach those body parts to a group of newborn girls, the double X chromosome babies. So the parents of the boys assume they're raising girls, and vice versa. Remember, this is all with a magic wand. No one's suffering. Are we socializing them with our controls, with boys with penises and girls without? Okay, well, just to be as clean as possible, I would keep them just with one another. I would isolate them, so there's no other influences.
SPEAKER_02: That, to me, would be just the strongest one. I think it would be a beautiful experiment.
SPEAKER_10: What Berenson wants to test is the impact of parenting on gender identity. It's really hard to untangle nature and nurture. People have been arguing about this for millennia. So Berenson says, let's just wave our magic wand, put together a massive, perfectly designed experiment, and settle this issue once and for all. If your mom and dad are confused about what gender you belong to, does that make any difference to you? Berenson has been researching the behavior of children for more than four decades, and she's pretty sure what the answer is. She thinks that if you take boys and raise them as girls, nothing's going to change. Remove the penises, dress them in pink, none of that will alter their behavior. Those would be the ones engaging in rough and tumble play. Those would be the ones who would be punching each other and competing to show they're the best.
SPEAKER_02: They would be the ones who love transportation vehicles and weapons. As for the girls, Berenson says calling them Johnny and giving them baseball caps isn't going to change anything.
SPEAKER_10: The one with the penises, right, who are actually XX females, they would be much more concerned about their survival.
SPEAKER_02: They're taking care of either the dolls or the actual babies. They're cleaning and making sure hygiene is better. They're cooking, either real or pretend. They're doing the kinds of things that anybody who goes into a preschool sees are not socialized by anyone but naturally occurring. And you would see the division so that the, in this case, the ones with the penises would be crowding around the sink and crowding around the stove and the baby dolls and dressing up. And the ones without the penises would be jumping on top of each other's heads and competing to throw the best arrow or paper airplane or whatever it is. Parenting does not override biology. That's what Berenson already believes. So why do the magic wand if she already knows the answer?
SPEAKER_10: Because we don't just do experiments to learn the truth. We also do experiments to persuade others of the truth. In this case, to persuade the legions of neurotic North American parents who believe that it is their own practice and attitudes that shape their children's fundamental nature. Okay, so most people will say to me nowadays, at least here in the West, that parents are raising their daughters arbitrarily to be a certain way and parents are raising their sons.
SPEAKER_02: And all we have to do is stop that. And then there will be no basic instincts. There will be no divide between males and females. There will be nothing that we are motivated or emotionally attracted to naturally, biologically.
SPEAKER_10: Now, maybe you're one of those parents in the nurture over nature camp. Maybe you think that what Joyce Benson thinks is crazy and offensive. Maybe you're right. Maybe there are children out there who are shaped by their parents careful administrations, like a lump of clay from a potter's wheel. That's why we're doing an experiment.
SPEAKER_10: Wait, so how long do you let this experiment run? At what point do you unblind the parents?
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so now we're talking about ethics, right? Because if I were really... We've waived ethical constraints, but from your purposes, it needs to run for how many years to get a persuasive result?
SPEAKER_10: Well, I mean, obviously, hormones come online and you'd have to do too much to me to run this through puberty, but I would absolutely run it through age five.
SPEAKER_10: Just think if Benson's right. Nature triumphs over nurture. So you're lying on your shrink's couch and the shrink is making you think it's all your mother's fault, which is what they do, of course. Only now you get to say, actually, there was this cool experiment where they chopped off the penises of little boys and found out mom doesn't matter that much.
SPEAKER_01: Have I shocked your delicate sensibilities? Just wait, we've got four more experiments to go. After the break.
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SPEAKER_10: 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. Three hundred and seventy one 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. Zip Recruiter. New hires cost, on average, forty seven hundred dollars 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? Zip Recruiter. See for yourself. Right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value Zip Recruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, Zip Recruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. Zip Recruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive Web address to try Zip Recruiter for free before you commit ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G L A D W E L L. Zip Recruiter. 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 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. There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine.
SPEAKER_01: Until now. Until now. We'll celebrate the victories like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_06: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists.
SPEAKER_12: Listen to Incubation on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_10: OK, we're back on to our next impossible, possibly unethical, but super interesting and useful experiment. The magic wand of New York University psychologist Adam Alter. I had a lot of internal debate about whether to include this one because Adam happens to be a very good friend of mine. So I worried it would look like favoritism. But then I thought back to the first six seasons of revisionist history and decided it's a little late in the day to be raising journalistic standards. Kidding. OK, so what I want to do is I want to go to every hospital in the country, every maternity ward.
SPEAKER_09: And when every baby is born, some person randomly walks around and puts a little sticker on the baby's forehead and the sticker determines which condition the child will be in for the first, let's say, 50 years of life. OK. Yeah. No, you have a magic wand. Let's be modest about it. You have a magic wand. You're allowed to. 50. OK, 50.
SPEAKER_10: It's a 50 year experiment. And what we're going to do is based on the color of the sticker, we're going to assign kids to different conditions of exposure to screens and social media, and we're going to track their progress across the lifespan, across those 50 years or even longer.
SPEAKER_09: Alter wants to do this because he points out that we basically have no idea what the long term effects of screen time and social media are. Hence the Alter screen test.
SPEAKER_09: There are two camps right now. There's a camp that thinks that social media screens, all the concerns about those are moral panic. There's nothing to be concerned about. And then there's another camp that thinks this is really a serious concern. What are all the things we're looking for?
SPEAKER_09: The thing that I want to know, number one is, is it bad for your well-being? Are you less happy? Do you have a less meaningful life? Are you less connected to other people if you have access to screens throughout your life? And how much is a problem? Is one hour a day OK? Is three hours OK? Is five? I'm sure there's a point at which it becomes problematic. There's some evidence that your ability to distinguish subtle facial cues that show, say the difference between fear and sadness comes from spending a lot of time as a kid, as a very young kid, looking at people face to face. So I would like to know, do kids who spend a huge amount of time in front of screens never develop those capacities? Is there a critical period where if you don't develop them young, it becomes very hard to develop them later on? And I think there's some evidence to suggest that. The ability to tell, for example, to get a sense of the effects of your actions on other people seems really important. So as a little kid, you take another kid's toy, that kid bops you on the head and says, don't do that. That's really important to learn. And I think to the extent you're spending a huge amount of time on screens, the feedback you get when you do social things is low fidelity. It's slow to arrive. It's not physical. And so I think these kids are going to learn social things less quickly. And I think that might be problematic as well. So that's the early part of life. As we get older, you just have to talk to parents of teens, and even to the teens themselves, and they'll tell you, I am less happy because I have access to social media. A lot of teens will tell you this and their parents will say the same. And so I'd like a sort of harder-edged way to measure that. What does that exactly mean? And is it because you're exposed to the best 1% of everyone else's life that you become less happy? Or is there something else going on? So those are the kinds of questions that I'd want to know about teens in particular.
SPEAKER_10: What's interesting about Adam Alter's magic wand is that it runs counter to the penis test. The penis test has the potential to absolve parents of all blame. Alter's experiment has the potential to make you feel really, really bad about a decision you made for your children. There's no middle ground with magic wands. There was only euphoria on the one hand, and a mountain of guilt on the other. This reminds me, oddly enough, of my own childhood because I was the only child in my primary school without, was that the only one? One of the only ones without television. Right. So I was the child who was listening to these conversations about things that I'd never heard of, these television shows which meant nothing to me, who the pattern of my days was completely different from everybody else's. So I sort of get how that works. And just see how I turned out, needlessly provocative, irrationally obsessed with running. A delightful podcast host. You see what I'm saying? Was it because I didn't watch television until I went to college? We just don't know. You know what we need to give them? Our old school Blackberries. Yeah. So it's a phone, it's email, and that's it. Right? Yeah. So we're basically talking about creating a Blackberry generation alongside an iPhone generation. And we're controlling for the nature of their phone and observing the outcome.
SPEAKER_10: Yes. No one is happier, by the way, with an experiment that brings back the Blackberry. Blackberry, as I'm constantly reminding people, was made in my hometown. My tagline on my old Blackberry emails was, there's no school like old school. Oh man, I miss the simple pleasures of driving down the highway, rocking out to the latest Nirvana album on my CD player, while scrolling through my emails on my Blackberry with my free hand.
SPEAKER_09: My son started kindergarten. He's five. And for the first time, he got an iPad to take home. All of his little friends have got these screens, and so they talk about the things they do on the screens at the end of the day. And I think that's a completely different thing, how it's changed the way he's interacting with all these little kids versus what it's like to get him off the screen at the end of the day. I think both are interesting questions. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, I can't believe that in the middle of you imagining this magic wand experiment involving limited access to screens and social media, your own son is being given an iPad.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, well, we had no say. This is what schools do today. They give kids iPads, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, we have the penis test. We have the altar screen test. Next up, Nancy Siegel, who teaches at Cal State Fullerton and studies what she calls scientific treasures. Twins. Twins are catnip for psychologists, and no one loves a twin more than Nancy Siegel, who is also herself a twin. Now, you might say, aren't identical twins, in effect, nature's magic wand? A little bit of genetic wizardry that lets us see things we would never know about otherwise? Absolutely. In fact, and this will require a little digression, Siegel once uncovered a totally bananas real-life twins case study. Two sets of twins, born a day apart in Columbia.
SPEAKER_03: One pair born in the lively capital city of Bogota, the other born 110 miles to the north in the most rural area with no running water, no flush toilets, no nothing. One of the little boys up north was very sick. So at day one or two, his grandmother brought him to the better hospital in Bogota, where he was switched with one of the twins in the other pair. So this is an extraordinary double switch case. So you had two sets of boys who were identical twins to somebody else, but growing up together thinking they were fraternal twins. So you can look at the unrelated pair. This is somebody that person A was raised with, so twin B was unrelated to him. But then, remember, twin B has an identical brother somewhere else that person A was never raised with. So how similar are you to somebody you're unrelated to but raised with, but unrelated to and not raised with? So that was something I addressed in my book, because I had that, and that was completely unique, completely unique.
SPEAKER_10: The Bogota twins, how did they discover the error? Oh, good question. The boys up in the north moved down to Bogota to make a living. They became butchers in a local supermarket.
SPEAKER_03: Actually, Bogota is a big city. It wasn't so local, but a friend of one of the other guys who was raised there went into the butcher shop, and she thought, Jorge, what are you doing here? And he said, my name is William, and she could hardly believe it. So she took a picture of William, showed it to her friend Jorge, and Jorge, of course, is a twin. He thinks he's a twin to this guy, Carlos. And anyway, they sat on it for a while, but then Jorge went online, and he saw himself in clothes he knew he didn't own, and he saw someone next to this guy who looked just like his twin brother, only wasn't his twin brother. And they met, they got together, and of course, they were all in shock, particularly because the one guy who was raised in the city knew that if things had gone right, he would have been raised in a very rural area, and he's someone who enjoyed the city. And the guy up in the north, who should have been raised in Bogota, was desperate for education, wanted to learn, and had no opportunities, never went past the fifth grade.
SPEAKER_03: So there were some tensions in the beginning, but actually, I will say that these four boys are the most gracious and loving of any of the Switched-to-Birth families I've encountered. They call themselves a group of four, they make decisions together, and any differences they had, I mean, it was not their fault. These things just happen sometimes. They get along beautifully now, all combinations of twins. What an incredible story.
SPEAKER_10: Now, could you imagine a magic wand replication of that real-life experiment? Sure. But Siegel has a better idea, a bigger idea. This is a new buzzword in the twin world, biracial twins. What are they? They come about, naturally, when an interracial couple marries and has children.
SPEAKER_03: So let's say you have a Caucasian mother and an African-American father. So the children are really both biracial, but given the way that the genes segregate, one child looks very Caucasian, and one child looks very African-American. Now, these are fraternal twins, so you're not controlling for the genes. What I would like to do, if I could, would be to have a set of identical twins and have them look exactly the same, except that one would look Caucasian and one would look African-American, or one would look Asian and one would look Hispanic. But still raise them together and just see what their different life experiences are like and how that would impact in their development. And I got this idea because I've had fraternal twins in my classes at the university who are these biracial fraternal twins, and they've told me they have very different life experiences. But again, you're not controlling for the genes. So if you had monozygotic or identical twins like this, I think it would really show us in a new way. And this is what information we don't have. So the magic wand we have to wave here is to take identical twins and make them not identical in their skin color.
SPEAKER_10: Exactly.
SPEAKER_10: We have the twins dressed the same, eat the same, go to the same schools, same summer camps, play on the same soccer teams, and do that for hundreds of pairs of twins from thousands of different families, rich, poor, the southern United States, the Midwest, country, city. And after 30 or 40 years, we gather them together in a big convention center and have them go up on stage one pair at a time and talk about all the experiences they shared as almost identical twins. What was the same? What exactly was different? Who wouldn't want to be in the audience for that? Because suddenly we would have a very different conversation about things like discrimination. I have to say, though, that of all these magic wands so far, this one is the hardest, the cruelest. Yes, it would teach us a lot, but I couldn't help thinking of my own mother, who was an identical twin. She and her sister went to college in England from Jamaica in the 1950s. What if my aunt had been white? What would it have meant for their relationship if suddenly the person who my mother had shared everything with for the first 20 years of her life was suddenly on the other side of the racial fence? At a time and a place when the racial fences were really high. It's too much to think about, but that's why a magic wand is sometimes a powerful thing. Siegel had so many ideas. She described a magical wand where identical twins could be born 25 years apart. Same genes, different generations. Think of all the things you could do once you suspend this little law of nature. We could go back to Adam Alter's screen test because the perfect way to do his Blackberry versus iPhone experiment, now that I think about it, is with massive numbers of identical twins. Same genes, different cell phones. Now imagine we place those twins in different technological eras. The first set born in 1980, who grew up without Instagram or Twitter, and another identical set born the year the iPhone came out, 2007, and who grew up under the long, dark shadow of Steve Jobs.
SPEAKER_10: What do we learn from that? We learn everything! I just realized I gave you two, or was it three, magic wand twin studies for the price of one. That's how we roll here at Provision's History. 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 creating a new career.
SPEAKER_08: Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at IBM.com. Let's create.
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. There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine.
SPEAKER_01: 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_06: 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_10: 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. And 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_10: We've done the penis test. iPhone versus Blackberry, multiracial twin studies. And now the magic wand has been passed to Stella Volpe, a nutritionist and exercise physiologist at Virginia Tech University. How did you get to me? Because can I just tell you, I see this email from Malcolm Gladwell in my inbox. And I was at a conference, and I was like, I'm going to go to the doctor.
SPEAKER_11: And I said to my friend, OK, this is real. I think this is the real Malcolm Gladwell. Yes, this is the real Malcolm Gladwell.
SPEAKER_10: And Stella Volpe's experiment was my very favorite. Her premise is this. Americans are getting less and less healthy. We need to try new strategies to change that. So for her magic wand, she divides the United States in half. One half is the control group, which continues life as ever, eating Doritos and watching Netflix. Over the other half of the country, those in the treatment condition, Volpe waves her magic wand and gets to work, making all kinds of subtle and not so subtle changes. Right now, so much of our focus when it comes to getting people to improve their health behaviors is to tell them what to do and instruct them and cajole them and such. But you're talking about a series of interventions in their built environment. Should we just do it and not say anything?
SPEAKER_11: Yes, I did that actually in a dining hall at a university. Oh, really? We changed the portion sizes. We decreased the portion sizes. The students didn't know.
SPEAKER_10: It turns out it worked. The students in Stella Volpe's stealth small portion cafeteria didn't gain the freshman 15. The students in the control group did. And you didn't tell them that you were decreasing the portion size? We didn't. Now, did the students, any of them suspect what was going on?
SPEAKER_11: You know, they didn't because that, and I really give credit to the food service employees. Students didn't quite know that the pizza was cut a little bit smaller or that the cake was cut in like, instead of 84 slices, there were 96. So this is what we had to work with the food service folks to do, and they were amazing. So Volpe's magic wand experiment is also a stealth operation.
SPEAKER_10: If you're in the experimental half of the country, you wake up one morning and you find a lot of the elevators are gone. What's your elevator threshold? So I can, if I live in Manhattan in a 20-store building, you're not going to make me walk up. But what's the point at which I get to use an elevator if I'm otherwise unencumbered? Right.
SPEAKER_11: Three stories? Four?
SPEAKER_10: I would say, I'm going to say six stories.
SPEAKER_11: She wants to swap out hard chairs in offices for bouncy balls.
SPEAKER_10: Give kids standing desks in the classroom. Put a quarter mile between a parking lot and the building it serves. Give grocery stores a makeover. Yeah. Wait, um, Stella, I just had a good idea. This is going to, my idea is going to, uh, is going to link two of your things. Okay. Your grocery store and your stairs idea. What about this? In the treatment condition, grocery stores can still carry whatever they want to carry. But everything that Stella deems to be unhealthy is now on the third floor of the grocery store. If you want a chocolate bar, if you want Cheerios, you're going to walk up two flights to get them. Okay. That is so brilliant. Thank you. I love that. So we can do that, right?
SPEAKER_11: We can do that. Oh yeah, we can wave our magic wand.
SPEAKER_10: Now think about how much we could learn from Stella Volpe's idea. Maybe the people without the elevators and with the parking lots down the street rise up in protest. Maybe they would all move to the other half of the country in a huff. That would tell us something, tell us to give up. But maybe they'd just shrug and get used to it. Or maybe Stella Volpe's treatment half of the country gets so fit and happy and tough minded that the slacker half gets envious and competitive and starts making the same changes in their world. Or maybe nobody wants to hire the slacker half. And all of a sudden there's a wave of workforce discrimination suits against the slacker half for being slackers and the Supreme Court has to weigh in in slacker v Volpe. The point is, right now, we're getting nowhere, insisting on trying to educate and persuade and create awareness. Maybe it's time for us to admit that all this talking does nothing. We just need to do stuff. I realize my school in Canada did a version of this. It's a slightly cruel version of this, but this is Canada in the 70s. So the bus would drop me off at my school and all the other kids from my bus route at 8.35 in the morning. Okay. School starts at 9 in my little town. From 8.35 to 9, the doors to the school were locked. So you had 25 minutes of enforced playtime. Now I will point to you, it's Canada. It's like 20 below. To this day, I remember, you know, I'm skinny. I'm a little skinny. Like the only way to stay warm is to run around like a madman for 25 minutes. It was like, it's basically put a gun to our head and said, you know, if you want to, you can just stand there, but you'll get frostbite. This belongs in the, in the treatment condition. Do you know how long winter lasts in Ontario? Like four months. For four months, I froze to death every single morning.
SPEAKER_11: And look, and look, look at the character it built in you. Right? Good character. Absolutely. I have, am I complaining now?
SPEAKER_10: The penis swap, iPhone versus Blackberry, biracial twins, slacker v. Volpe. How is the world not a better place if we could learn from those four experiments? But wait, I know what you're thinking. Malcolm, you promised us five magic wands. Where's the fifth? The fifth, my friends, is so massive and wonky and random that I felt it deserved an episode all to itself. We did have to really put on a lot of gear to get it in there for food safety reasons, I think.
SPEAKER_01: That's in our next episode. Our experiment of a season is just getting started. You wearing like hard hats?
SPEAKER_10: Gloves, hard hats, jackets, oh, caps for our hair. That didn't really work for either of us.
SPEAKER_10: Revisionist History is produced by Eloise Linton, Leemon Gistu and Jacob Smith, with Tali Emlin and Harrison Vijay Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia Lobel. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flon Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Fact checking by Keisha Williams. I'm Malcolm Glavo. Welcome. Malcolm Glavo 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 your back. Learn more at the Hartford.com slash benefits.
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