Way to Go, Ohio

SPEAKER_12: 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_14: 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_11: 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_11: 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_11: Subscribe to Pushkin Plus on the Revisionist History Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. Deep into the preparation of season seven of Revisionist History, one bitterly cold day, I sent my producers, Lehman Gistu and Eloise Linton on special assignment. Fly to Detroit. Rent a car. Go north on I-94 for a stretch. Then turn right off the freeway on the Fred Moore Highway and drive all the way to the banks of the St. Clair River, where they will come upon a factory. This is a dumb question. Is it like high security? SPEAKER_04: Oh, no. Well, it's not high security, but we did have to really put on a lot of gear to get it in there. For food safety reasons. You're wearing like hard hats, reflective jackets. SPEAKER_11: Were you wearing like industrial footwear? Not footwear, but we had to wear gloves. We were wearing gloves, caps for our hair. SPEAKER_04: That didn't really work for either of us. Not at all. SPEAKER_11: I wanted to understand an experiment. One of the most important experiments of our modern era. One that's been all but forgotten. And crucially, for my own selfish purposes, I wanted them to take a taste test. SPEAKER_03: I'm going to close my eyes. So we had a couple of paper plates in front of us. And then a spoon. And then we would spoon a little bit of it into our hands. And then taste it from there. I will say that I took way too much. It was overwhelming, for sure. Okay. SPEAKER_04: Guess I'll put two little... Okay. This one first? Oh, um... That's strong, yeah. Wow. Yeah, right. SPEAKER_11: You weren't blinded. But you didn't know which was which. So you have two little plates in front of you. Could they tell the difference? Yes. The insiders at the factory know the difference. The rest of us, not so much. My name is Malcolm Bladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History. A series of things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part two of our investigation of magic wand experiments. Impossible experiments that could only be done if we waved a magic wand. In this episode, you'll hear my magic wand. By way of a journey from the banks of the St. Clair River to the tallest mountains in Europe, on to India, and then Ohio. This episode is going to require a fair amount of digression. Patience, Grasshopper. We begin our story over a century ago. A time when you could go many places in the world and find some portion of the local population severely disfigured. If I'm walking around a remote village in the Swiss Alps in... What do I see? High up in the Swiss Alps in the mid-1800s, you probably, probably about half the population would have a visible goiter. SPEAKER_10: I'm talking with Michael Zimmerman, University of Zurich, about goiters. A swelling on the neck right in front of the larynx. SPEAKER_11: Describe these goiters. How large could they be? Well, I mean, in a child, it's about a foot and a half. Describe these goiters. How large could they be? SPEAKER_10: Well, I mean, in a child, it's about the size of maybe a lemon. But the older women, particularly the ones who'd had repeated pregnancies, you know, and would have large, multinodular goiters, they can be the size of a volleyball. I mean, they can... A volleyball? Yeah, sure. They can compress the trachea, make it difficult to breathe or swallow. They can really be massive. Some portion of the population with goiters SPEAKER_11: had a related condition, what used to be called cretinism. So, in children, for example, they don't grow normally, SPEAKER_10: so they're very short. They have characteristic facial features. They have very dry skin, very dry hair. They move very slowly. Their temperature regulation is very poor. They become cold very easily. And then classically, it's associated with, you know, cognitive impairment and also deaf mutism. SPEAKER_11: And it's not reversible? SPEAKER_10: It's not. SPEAKER_11: For the longest time, no one knew the explanation for cretinism, or for goiters. It would be one thing if they appeared everywhere. Then you could say, this is just what human beings look like. But this wasn't everywhere. It was confined to very specific regions of the world. SPEAKER_10: I mean, it was famous back in the 1800s for British and American tourists to go up in the Swiss Alps, not only to see the beautiful alpine scenery, but also to see goiter and cretinism. I mean, Mark Twain, very famous quote, I've seen the two things I wanted to see in Switzerland, Mont Blanc and the goiter, and now I'm going home. SPEAKER_11: It wasn't until the 19th century that scientists started to figure out what might be the culprit, iodine, or rather, a lack of iodine in the diet. Iodine is a trace element found largely in seawater. There's a lot of iodine in seaweed and in the livers of fish, like cod. If you live in a coastal area, you'll get iodine in your diet naturally, because the wind and rain blowing off the ocean will deposit iodine in the soil and water. If a cow near the coast drinks water with iodine in it, then that iodine gets into your milk and meat. But go inland, and iodine gets harder to find in nature, for it's not a problem. Fresh water flushes iodine out of the soil. Worst off are places that used to be covered with glaciers, because when the glaciers retreated, they took topsoil and natural iodine with them. No iodine in the soil, no iodine in plants. No iodine in plants, not enough iodine in the people eating those plants. And when people don't get enough iodine in their diets, their thyroid glands have to work overtime to compensate. So the thyroid becomes huge, like an oversized heart. Think about the Swiss Alps, an inland mountain chain with lots of glaciers, no iodine in the soil. And so people living there have historically been afflicted with goiter. Norway also had a huge goiter problem. So did mountainous parts of China, Russia. And goiter was a problem in the United States, of course, because there are plenty of inland areas in America, once home to glaciers. There's a book published in the 1920s called Defects Found in Drafted Men, which is simply a compendium of the physicals conducted by the U.S. Army on draftees during the First World War. So basically, we're looking at the entire reasonably healthy male population young male population of the United States gets examined by a doctor and their health condition is noted in this book. Correct. It must be a massive book. It's a big thick book, yeah. That's the economist Jim Fierherr, who published a study based on that data. SPEAKER_13: This is pre-computerized, shaded maps showing where some diseases were common and where some weren't. And this led to the discovery of what's known as the Goiter Belt, which is the place where goiter was endemic, which is the upper Midwest. SPEAKER_11: The Goiter Belt. Just to give you a sense of the problem, in Houghton County, which is Michigan's upper peninsula, 538 young men were brought before the draft board. A third of those draftees showed a demonstrable enlargement of the thyroid. In some cases, the goiters were so large the men were turned away from the army because they couldn't button up the collars of their uniforms. Fierherr estimates the lack of iodine in places like Houghton County caused significant cognitive impairment, as much as a standard deviation in IQ, which is a lot. A standard deviation can be the difference between being able to handle college and not being able to handle college. So what's so weird about this? There is literally a part of the country where people are not as smart in aggregate as other parts. SPEAKER_13: Certainly they are not as smart as they could have been in the absence of being iodine deficient, yes. I think that's right. SPEAKER_11: So, you have people in various parts of the world who don't get enough iodine. What do you do about it? Michael Zimmerman says some of the earliest attempts to fix the problem were a disaster. The dose of iodine that they were applying SPEAKER_10: in these initial studies was extremely high, a thousand-fold higher than what was needed to eliminate goiter. And iodine, like any nutrient, is poisonous at high doses. So a lot of people developed hyperthyroidism and actually cardiac arrhythmias and died from excess iodine ingestion. So it was seen kind of as a double-edged sword and people thought it was a poison as well as a potential remedy. SPEAKER_11: There was an iodine backlash and a lot of confusion. Like, was iodine a treatment for goiter, the way aspirin is a treatment for headache, something you gave once and it solved the problem? Or was it a supplement? Was iodine something that people with goiter needed on a continuous basis? And if so, how much iodine would you need to give to people? How often? Starting at what age? And how would you give it to them? Did it matter? What the world needed was a proper experiment. Careful, rigorous, controlled. And where did salvation finally come from? Akron, Ohio. Surely, at least if you are as old as I am, you remember the classic 1983 hit from Chrissy Hynde and the pretenders, My City Was Gone? SPEAKER_07: I went back to Ohio SPEAKER_09: But my city was gone SPEAKER_06: What city is she talking about? SPEAKER_11: Not Cleveland. Not swanky Columbus. Not stuffy, well-fed Cincinnati. Akron. Because Chrissy Hynde grew up in Akron. SPEAKER_11: South Howard is the historic center of old Akron. It got gutted in the 70s for an empty urban plaza. SPEAKER_02: SPEAKER_11: How many cities get dissed at such a high level by one of their favorite daughters? My friends, we're finally getting close to revealing my magic wand. Very close. And let me make one more promise. My magic wand will give Akron a shot at redemption. SPEAKER_12: People are excited about what AI will do for them. At IBM, we're excited about what AI will do for business. Your business. Introducing Watson X, a platform designed to multiply output by training AI with your data. When you Watson X your business, you can build AI to help coders code faster. Customer service respond quicker, and employees handle repetitive tasks in less time. Let's create AI that transforms business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash watsonx. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_11: 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, on 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_14: 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. SPEAKER_06: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a virus. SPEAKER_07: 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_14: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting SPEAKER_09: everywhere, wherever it exists. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_11: Before we go any further, a few words about my magic wand experiment. In the last episode, I gave several scientists a chance to wave a magic wand to create any experiment they wanted, without regard for the laws of nature or ethics. And then, I pounded my chest and said that my magic wand would be the best of all. Why did I say that? Well, I'll tell you. Because all of the other magic wanders I spoke to were trying to solve big, weighty questions. Existential questions. Global questions. Me? I'm being super practical. Mine is news you can use. Mine is a subtle tweak on an experiment that already happened. An experiment conducted early in the 20th century by a brilliant young physician named David Marine. David Marine was born in Maryland and studied at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Then he went to do his residency at Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland in 1905. Cleveland. On the banks of Lake Erie. Freshwater Lake Erie. One of the great lakes created by the Laurentide Ice Sheet 20,000 years ago. Cleveland. Built on a landscape shaped by glaciers which stripped away the iodine as they retreated. Goiter Country. According to the legend, he was walking to his first day of work and noticed that many of the women in the neighborhood and all of the dogs had a big goiter. SPEAKER_10: That's Michael Zimmerman again. He studied David Marine's career. SPEAKER_11: So when he went to work and he was asked, like, what would you like to work on in terms of your research focus here? SPEAKER_10: He said, well, maybe I should work on the thyroid because it seems like there's a lot of thyroid disease around. SPEAKER_11: In 1909, Marine gets called in by a local trout hatchery that's convinced their fish are suffering from a strange outbreak of cancer. All of the farmed fish have a big bulge right near their thyroid. Marine tells them that's not cancer. Your problem is you're feeding your fish chopped up pigs' hearts and livers. And the pigs of Ohio, which eat the iodine deficient feedstocks of Ohio, have no iodine in them. Marine tells them, feed the fish chopped up sea fish. The hatcheries follow his advice and the fish goiters go away. In Ohio, David Marine is Dr. Goiter. He spends a decade gathering evidence in the laboratory. Then, in 1917, Marine goes to the Cleveland school board and says, I'd like to do an experiment. Let me feed some iodine to your school children to see if I can get rid of Goiter. And Cleveland says, no. Of course they say no. I mean, can you imagine this scenario? Iodine is, at this point, still considered a poison. The Food and Drug Administration wanted manufacturers of iodine to put a skull and crossbones on the package. And Marine decides he only wants to dose girls with iodine, fifth grade and up, which surely must have seemed a little shady at the time. Imagine that your 12-year-old daughter comes home from school one day with a note from the teacher, asking for your permission to let little Janie take part in an experiment involving repeated doses of something widely considered a poison. But no worries, because it'll be done under the supervision of some guy from out east who's done a lot of work with trout. Let me just read to you from the instructions Marine wrote out to teachers. Quote, a few of the pupils after two or three days may get what seems to be a slight cold in the head, with nasal discharge and possibly, more rarely, the appearance of pimples or a slight rash on the body. It is nothing serious. End quote. So little Janie's going to come back home with a head cold and covered in pimples and a rash after being fed generous doses of a mysterious liquid. I mean, what would you say? You would say no thanks. Cleveland says no thanks. But Dr. Goiter has come too far to give up. So he drives 40 miles south to Akron and proposes the same idea to the Akron school board. And Akron doesn't say no. Akron says yes. And it is in Akron that we get the first definitive proof that if you give iodine to people, Goiter vanishes. How quickly did he see that improvement? SPEAKER_10: He saw it in a matter of weeks. Wow. So Akron is this weirdly open minded place and Cleveland is this weirdly closed minded place when it comes to one of the most significant scientific findings of the 20th century. SPEAKER_11: I think what happened is he went over to Akron because the president of the Akron school district was also an alum of Johns Hopkins and said, SPEAKER_10: What do you think? Should we do this together? And the guy said, Yeah, I trust you. SPEAKER_11: The Akron Iodine Experiment changes the world. It's up there on the list of greatest public health breakthroughs in history. But that was more than a century ago when I said I'd give Akron another shot at redemption. I was talking about now. This whole thing started one day when I was salting my pasta water. A light bulb went off inside my head and I realized I too have a magic wand. First thing I did with my magic wand idea, I call up Sama Sagire, who runs a data analytics nonprofit called Sergo Ventures. Lots of very smart people using data to solve public health problems. SPEAKER_05: What do we not know about vaccine hesitancy? I think one interesting thing that we do not know is whether an injection actually matters. So I looked at a number of studies and none of them actually explored whether the form of the vaccine matters. What she means by form is that there are plenty of ways to deliver a vaccine. SPEAKER_11: One is by needle in a doctor's office, but you can give yourself a flu shot through an inhaler. And the same thing is being developed for a COVID vaccine. If we'd had the choice from day one of the pandemic to go needle or inhaler, which would have made the most sense? We don't know. Does the person who doesn't want to get vaccinated object to the concept of the vaccination or just the form? Sagire said that her firm once did research in India looking at why people were skeptical about certain kinds of medical treatments. And so while this is in India, and I'm not suggesting that this may be true in the U.S., but it's some really interesting results in that in India, for example, anything in the form of a powder is least value from a medicinal perspective, whereas a pill is of higher value, an injection even higher value, and an IV even higher value. SPEAKER_05: Are Westerners like Indians? Do we have an implied hierarchy when it comes to the form a medicine takes? We don't know. SPEAKER_05: So it could be that for some people, a vaccine in the form of an inhaler may not be as, you know, as valuable or perhaps as robust as an injection, for example. It's perception. Like, I don't want to use it because I can't imagine that inhaling a vaccine is going to work. That's the thinking. SPEAKER_11: And I can actually sort of understand that, that intuitively there will be a lot of people, particularly enthusiasts, who will be like, no, no, no, give me the real, I want a little bit of pain. I want the real deal. Who knows where it's going if I'm just sniffing it? SPEAKER_05: I mean, I'll be very honest. That's how I feel personally, despite being a scientist and knowing that inhalers work. I'll be like, I'd rather get an injection because my mental model of vaccinations are injections. Right. That's how vaccines have always been given. So this is what we know. We know that 24 percent of Americans are fearful of needles. That's astonishingly high numbers, Emma. It is. Yeah. SPEAKER_11: So are the hardcore vaccine skeptics, the people jumping up and down and saying COVID doesn't exist, really just scared of needles? Like really scared of needles and don't want to admit it? Maybe. I mean, we see world class athletes giving up millions of dollars in income because they refuse to get vaccinated. How on earth would a macho testosterone driven manly man at the top of their sport admit that they just don't like the needle, even if they're given a lollipop afterwards? And even if the doctor distracts them with a puppet and says, look at the puppet, is this what it's really all about? We don't know. We don't know anything. And when you're faced with this many I don't knows, what do you do? An experiment, that's what. SPEAKER_12: The one thing we can never get more of is time, or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate, A.I. 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 dot com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_14: 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_07: 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_09: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_14: Listen to Incubation on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_11: 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 3000 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 promise 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 two hundred dollars on a thousand dollars or more at Saatva.com slash Gladwell. That's S double A TVA dot com slash Gladwell. SPEAKER_11: When David Marine did his experiment on the schoolgirls of Akron, he made them drink a little iodine suspended in solution. But that obviously isn't practical. If your goal is to give iodine to everyone in Akron on a continuous basis. Besides, there were lots of iodine skeptics around. Were they going to drink iodine straight up day in, day out? Probably not. He needed a better solution. Why does everyone settle on salt as the appropriate agent for delivering iodine to the population? Yeah, well, salt is, you know, in a way, it's a very good food fortification vehicle, period. SPEAKER_10: I mean, it's it's consumed by everybody in the population. Michael Zimmerman again. SPEAKER_11: It's consumed in moderation. I mean, we eat too much salt, but no one can eat like 20 or 30 grams of salt in a day. SPEAKER_10: Right. It's it's it's a good vehicle for iodine because iodine is such a trace essential element where we just need micrograms per day. You can easily add it into a few grams of salt. So it just disappears in there and it's very stable. So if added to reasonable quality salt, it's stable as well. And it's very cheap. Right. So most places, salt is a very cheap commodity and even the poor can afford it. SPEAKER_11: Marine has a colleague, David Cowie, who starts writing letters to the big salt companies of the Midwest, pitching the iodine idea. I'm desirous of getting in communication with the proper person in your company with whom to take up the question of the iodization of all salt used as food in Michigan. SPEAKER_00: He writes to Morton Salt in Chicago, owned by Mr. Morton. He writes to Diamond Crystal Salt in St. Claire, just up the river from Detroit. SPEAKER_00: Before carrying our work any further, we are anxious to counsel with the salt manufacturers and distributors in Michigan, acquaint them with our plan, give them all the information we have and get their ideas on the question, particularly as to whether there would be any objection from their viewpoint. SPEAKER_11: It works. And soon enough, every salt company in the country has agreed to add a dash of iodine to their salt. And that's why there's no goiter to speak of in Cleveland or Akron or anywhere else in the goiter belt. Why the IQs of the people in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are no longer a standard deviation lower than everyone else's. Why the salt you buy in the supermarket today has a label on the bottom, iodized salt. That's why I sent my producers, Lee and Eloise, to Michigan on a cold winter's day, to the St. Claire facility of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, the company that said yes to David Cowie and David Marine a century ago, a big, rugged, ancient, iconic factory shimmering in white dust. Salt. Salt everywhere. A temple of salt. SPEAKER_03: So it looks, iodine looks very similar to salt. It looks almost identical to salt. I had no idea. Lee and Eloise saw the sacks of iodine waiting to be added to mountains of salt. SPEAKER_11: And then they went to a small conference room to answer the crucial question. Is salt the kind of miraculous substance where you can sneak all kinds of stuff into it and no one will be the wiser? Wait, so you, where did the taste test take place? You're in what, what kind of room? SPEAKER_03: Just a general like meeting room in the back. We had lunch all together. We had burgers and fries. And then we did the taste test after that. SPEAKER_04: And did the fries come salted or did you salt them? SPEAKER_03: It came catered, so neither. They didn't need salt, but there was salt on the table. SPEAKER_04: Of course there was. They were in the bosom of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company, one of the nation's premier salt making facilities. SPEAKER_11: The entree is going to be perfectly salted. So, the real taste test. Diamond Crystal flew in its top salt specialists for the occasion. Lee and Eloise were presented with two paper plates of salt. One pure, one adulterated. Eloise and Lee each take a big breath, then a quick drink of water to cleanse the palate. I'm going to guess this one's iodine. SPEAKER_04: The first one? SPEAKER_03: What do you think? No, no, I have no idea. They taste exactly the same. Extremely salty. I still taste it. It's extremely salty, both of them. Well, this one looks like it's a different density and maybe they added more stuff to it. SPEAKER_04: Oh, they're so tiny though. How can you even see what's bigger? SPEAKER_02: I'd say this looks bigger. Oh, this is smaller. Oh, I need glasses. That's what the issue is. SPEAKER_04: So, which was, which is which? SPEAKER_06: This one was the iodized. Oh! Great. SPEAKER_04: Got it! They taste exactly the same. SPEAKER_11: Turns out you can put just about whatever you want in salt and no one's going to notice. I think you can see where I'm going with this. My magic wand. Well, you know my idea. The reason I called you is that I was curious about putting it in salt along with iodine. By it, I mean the COVID vaccine. Now, I realize that given the present limits of science, that's an impossibility. SPEAKER_11: We don't know how to make a vaccine so stable that you could stick it in a condiment. Maybe someday, not today. But that's why this is a magic wand experiment. The things that we would love to do but can't because of the laws of nature. But I have explained the rules of the game to Sema Sagire and she has agreed to play. I put it in salt and I call it something different. I say it's the anti-COVID supplement that I'm sticking in your salt. So we've now, we're not using the word vaccine at all. Because vaccine for most people is associated with the thing that you get in a needle. So now we're saying actually no, no, no. It's just like iodine. Or the niacin in your weed or whatever. Is it niacin in your weed? I forget. It's a nutritional supplement that we're putting in salt which we think will help fight COVID. My question is, does moving the COVID vaccine from the vaccine category to the nutritional supplement category help us with the skeptic? SPEAKER_05: So you're not calling it a vaccine. You're still tricking them in some ways, right? Because you're not giving them the full information. Yeah, let's take it for granted here. There's going to be some trickery. SPEAKER_11: But I'm calling it, I'm just saying it's a supplement and it just helps you fight COVID. Accurate, right? Sure, you've reframed, you've essentially reframed the product in a way that doesn't play into their beliefs that, you know, the vaccine has microchips that are following them, is doing X. Yeah, I think it could. SPEAKER_11: So in other words, the threshold of resistance for something that you eat as part of your regular diet. We would, this is what we'd like to find out. Is that lower than your threshold of resistance for something that is framed as a medical intervention? Is there a category of person who is a COVID skeptic who would then, whose skepticism would translate as indifference to some kind of intervention? So it's hard to be indifferent about a shot, particularly when you have to go to the doctor, register, wait in line, blah, blah, blah. But maybe it's so easy to be indifferent to, I'm in McDonald's and it's on my fries. So it's like, and if I don't believe it, COVID exists in the first place, what I would do is roll my eyes at the people who think that by eating fries, they're protecting themselves. But I'm not going to not eat the fries. Right, because I care about the fries. I care about the fries. That's my hope. Listeners may remember one of my favorite all-time revisionist history episodes, season two. McDonald's broke my heart. We take fries very seriously here. Fries can change the world. SPEAKER_05: No, it's true. I mean, you don't always have to change someone's belief or their mental model to get them to do a behavior. Yeah. Right. You can make it very easy. SPEAKER_05: You can make the thing that you want them to do an impediment for something they really care about, as you said, like eating the fries. On the other hand, maybe this whole COVID fighting salt idea might be a bust. SPEAKER_11: Remember the whole brouhaha over fluoride? The powers that be put fluoride in the water supply back in the 1950s as a simple way to fight tooth decay. And some people are still upset about it. To this day, Portland, Oregon refuses to fluoridate its water. Go to Portland. Ask people there how many cavities they have. They would rather sit in a dentist chair, all numbed up, and get drilled for an hour, than have the government slip something harmless in their drinking water. To paraphrase the old cliché, the people of Portland will cut off their teeth, despite their mouths. There's a scenario where putting the vaccine in salt is every bit as insidious, or maybe even more insidious, than putting it in a vaccine. In the same way that fluoride was considered to be insidious, by virtue of the fact that it was ubiquitous, it was unavoidable, and everywhere. We're still going to get a skeptic group with the salt. The question is whether the skeptic group with the salt is smaller than the skeptic group with the needle. SPEAKER_05: Or now you get another skeptic on top of the existing skeptic. You know, I mean, yes, this will be like a massive government intervention, right? People who really don't want the government interfering in their lives. This is that, right? This is like the government now telling me I can't avoid because I have to have the salt with the vaccine. SPEAKER_11: What if the geniuses at Moderna came up with COVID vaccine 2.0, which was so incredibly ingenious that we could just throw it in with the iodine in our table salt? Well, we have no idea whether that would help our struggle to get everyone vaccinated. Hence, my magic wand. Akron versus Cleveland. Just like old times, Akron gets COVID salt, Cleveland gets the needle. I'll let Sama wave the magic wand. So tell me what the experiment should look like. Okay, so I would actually have three arms of the experiment. SPEAKER_05: So I'd have obviously one arm of the experiment, which is like people have to go and get their needle, the regular, today. I would have one arm of the experiment where all the salt that a group of people in this place are consuming actually already has the vaccine, right? They cannot choose. And then I would have another arm where the packages that you call in the supermarket are actually labeled. You know, some of them have the COVID. What did you call it? It's the anti-COVID supplement. SPEAKER_11: Anti-COVID supplement. So some of the packages would have the anti-COVID supplement and some won't. So you give them a choice, essentially. SPEAKER_11: No choice salt. Choice salt. Needle. That's our magic wand experiment. Cleveland gets it in the arm. Akron gets it in the salt. And someone else has to choose between salts. Let's make that, I don't know, Toledo. Three arms. Three arms. SPEAKER_11: We run the experiment for six months. An experiment in how the form of a vaccine affects hesitancy. We kind of know what happens in Cleveland. Most people get their vaccine shots, but there'll still be a big group who don't. But what about Toledo? Where you get to choose whether or not you want anti-COVID salt supplement. We don't know. But the bigger unknown is Akron. You can't live in Akron and not get vaccinated unless you systematically remove all salt from your diet. Never eat out. Consume flavorless pasta and soup. Suffer. SPEAKER_11: So do people leave Akron in a panic? Or do they say, I'm an Akronite, inheritor of a grand tradition of using my salt shaker to solve the greater problems of the world. F it, I'm in. In which case, within days, Akron is the shining city on a hill. Masks come off, the hospitals empty, strangers give each other hugs and big sloppy kisses. A convoy of angry long haul truckers chanting, my body, my choice, starts out in Cincinnati and heads for Akron, only to turn back in frustration. When they stop for lunch in McDonald's in downtown Akron and inadvertently vaccinate themselves. And soon people across this great country, from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters, would rise up and say with one voice. I'll have Akron salt with my fries. Salt that tastes like freedom. Like freedom. SPEAKER_15: Salt shakers everywhere. Reducing hospital cases. A-O, way to go Ohio. A-O, way to go Ohio. A-O, way to go Ohio. Revisionist history is produced by Eloise Linton, Lee Mengistu, and Jacob Smith with Talley Amlin and Harrison Vijay Choi. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Our voice actor was David Glover. Thanks also to the University Hospitals of Cleveland archive and the folks who make diamond crystal salt at the Cargill Salt Plant. SPEAKER_11: Our voice actor was David Glover. Thanks also to the University Hospitals of Cleveland archive and the folks who make diamond crystal salt at the Cargill Salt Plant. Our voice actor was David Glover. Thanks also to the University Hospitals of Cleveland archive and the folks who make diamond crystal salt at the Cargill Salt Plant. SPEAKER_15: I'm Malcolm Glover. Music I went back to Ohio and the goiter was gone. There were no unsightly masses on people's necks downtown. A-O, way to go Ohio. SPEAKER_11: A-O, way to go Ohio. Music Malcolm Glover 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_01: An email address is a direct digital path to the mind, the machine, and the data of every person in your organization. That means your M365 accounts are at risk of cyber attacks. But you can put your mind at ease with Mimecast. They've developed an integrated, frictionless solution that fortifies your existing email security and reduces risk, cost, and complexity, allowing your organization to work protected. Visit mimecast.com today to start your free 30-day trial. That's M-I-M-E-C-A-S-T dot com to learn how you can work protected with Mimecast. Nice buns. Soft, fluffy, and ultra-low net carbs. Discover Hero Bread, the delicious, ultra-low net carb bread with incredible taste and texture. SPEAKER_08: Hero Bread has zero grams of sugar and is under 100 calories per serving, plus high in fiber and up to 10 grams of protein per serving. Available on Amazon dot com, Walmart dot com, and Hero dot co. That's Hero dot co. Order from Hero dot co now and get 10% off your purchase with promo code IHM10.