Malcolm the premise of this latest book is that were not very good at talking to strangers. I was struck by how many of the kind of contemporary highprofile controversies that we find ourselves in come down to the same problem, that two people who didnt know each other very well attempt to communicate and fail or attempt to understand each other and fail. Bernie madoff, people had conversations with Bernie Madoff and never understood who he was. The Jerry Sandusky case at penn state. Brock turner Sexual Assault case at stanford a few years back, these are failed communications. And the one that really, the book starts and ends with, the signature case im concerned with is the sandra bland case, which is one of those high profile encounters between African Americans and Law Enforcement that was, excuse me, so much in the news a few years ago, which was a conversation between a young black man, black woman and a Police Officer who pulls her over, and the conversation goes off the rails. And i wondered why is it, why is it that were, that we fail in these conversations with strangers . Thats where the book comes from. Susan each one of your books has explored an aspect of human communication. What is it about this topic that you keep coming back to . Why is it so important to you . Malcolm i dont know. I just think it is endlessly no one loves a transcript more than me. I am keenly interested in how people express themselves and how they succeed and fail at that. Im one of those people who, if someone is articulate, im all in. I find myself so one of the people who interviewed me on my did a little press tour of england. And i was interviewed by the actor russell brand, who has a podcast, a big, popular podcast in england. And i had never met him before. Only knew him from the movies, and he starts to talk, and i realize he is one of those astonishingly articulate people, and i was just kind of so in awe, and the whole im trying to figure out how, how is it this man has so commanded my attention and his choice of words i was having difficulty answering his questions, because i was so focused on like thinking about, oh, my goodness, i cant believe the brilliant way he phrased that, oh, i have to answer. So i dont know. Im just drawn to that, that whole aspect of human nature. Susan for our conversation, we have actually pulled some clips that helped to illustrate some of the things you talk about in the book. We want to start with the sandra bland story. This is very available video if people want to watch the entire video. Well watch a small clip. Lets watch and talk a little bit more about it. [video clip] officer encinia are you ok . Sandra you you, this is your job. I am waiting on you. Officer encinia you seem very irritated. Sandra i am, i really am. Im getting out of your way. I move over and you stopped me. Officer encinia you mind putting out your cigarette, please. Sandra im in my car, i dont have to put out my cigarette. Officer encinia you can step out now. Sandra i dont have to step out. Officer encinia step out of the car. Step out of the car. Step out of the car. Get out of the car. Sandra dont touch me. Officer encinia get out of the car. Sandra dont touch me, im not under arrest, you dont have officer encinia you are under arrest. Sandra im under arrest for what, for what . Officer encinia im going to drag you out of here. Sandra so you are fixing to drag me out of my own car. Officer encinia get out of the car. Get out of the car. I will light you up. Get out now sandra wow, wow officer encinia get out of the car. Sandra for failure to signal, youre doing all of this officer encinia get over there. Susan that interaction ended in tragedy how . Malcom three days later, she is imprisoned for resisting arrest, and then three days later, she hangs herself in her cell, you know, a tragic and unexpected result, but the whole, that exchange that we saw, which by the way, goes on and on and on and on. We saw a small snippet of it, that was the kind of when i first saw that online, thats when i realized what i wanted to write about, because if you break that exchange down moment by moment, you see multiple failures of understanding, of empathy, of a million things. So just, for example, in the segment we just saw, she lights a cigarette, and we now know that sandra bland was someone who had struggled with emotional problems. She had a failed Suicide Attempt a few months earlier. She is upset and she also has several thousands of dollars in outstanding traffic fines. So being pulled over by a Police Officer is consequential for her. This has happened before. She is deeply in debt because of it. And so she is upset when she gets pulled over. And she lights a cigarette to calm her nerves, the way that many smokers will tell you thats why they smoke, right, to kind of calm down. So she is trying to stay under control, and unconsciously, i think, trying to signal to the Police Officer, i dont want this to go awry. I am trying to calm down. And he will not let her. He sees her lighting a cigarette as an act of defiance. If you watch the entire videotape, constantly you see that the two of them are talking entirely past each other and that he is reading her disquiet and distress as evidence of something sinister, as evidence of her being dangerous or malicious or criminal in some way. Its this kind of epic misunderstanding. And i wanted to kind of so over the course of the book, i sort of try to break it down, and then by reference to other stories, come to an understanding of how it is a very, very straightforward conversation can end in tragedy. Susan so you write of this, you have been thinking about these concepts for a while, and that you watch this video countless times, and you kept finding yourself getting angrier and angrier. Mine is a process question. It has been six years since you produced a book, you have ideas germinating in your head. What about this crystallized, yes, this is a topic i want to explore . Malcolm well, i had been kind of drawn to all of those encounters, problematic encounters between African Americans and Police Officers, you know, beginning with ferguson, because they all seem to me to be extraordinarily multilayered. On one hand, they were deeply personal. They were about Police Officers confronting someone, and something going, you know, something going wrong, someone getting shot. But on the other hand, ferguson is a really excellent example. You know, when the department of justice report comes out on ferguson, theres two reports. One report is about the actual conduct of the Police Officer and what happened between the officer and michael brown, and that report explains why the officer is not being indicted on civil rights charges, because its unclear that he did anything that was in sort of obvious violation of the law. The other, Second Department of justice report, which is perhaps more important, was the one about the Ferguson Police department and pointed out that the Police Department had been essentially a predatory force on the Africanamerican Community of ferguson. They had been essentially using their power and authority to levy fines on as many different people as they could in order to fill the citys coffers. The city was running itself on tickets. And so cops were encouraged to write tickets for everything. When you see the things that the police force had been engaged in the previous couple of years, your jaw drops. This is a town where the Africanamerican Community was so completely alienated from the police force because of the way the police force was behaving, and thats the context for ferguson. So really you have a if you only look at the encounter, you miss the real story, the real story is what happened before, years and years and years of the police force essentially using the black Community Like an a. T. M. In the way that no police force is supposed to do. It is funny, so one of the d. O. J. Reports that was exculpatory, and the other was so, was such a devastating kind of critique of what happened in ferguson, and they sat side by side. In order to understand ferguson, you have to read both. That struck me as incredibly interesting that, because i think we have a tendency sometimes, when we look at these kinds of encounters, to only do the first look, the personal look, to look at the interaction between the cop and think we can settle the issue if we can figure out exactly what happened in that interaction. But that ferguson reminds us that no, no, no, that just is the beginning of your job. You then have to take a step back and say, well, what was what were the environmental conditions that surrounded and predated that encounter. And i wanted to do Something Like that with sandra bland, only go even broader and start pulling in, you know, madoff and amanda knox and all of the other cases i talk about as a way of shedding light on that encounter. Susan you spent three years, you write on this project. If you look at the extensive notes that you have on the back, lots of documents you read, you never met a transcript you didnt like, lots of travel and lots of interviews. I guess people wonder who follow you with the really limitless vignettes, or examples, case studies that you can bring on a topic, how do you pick the right one . Malcolm there is no procedure. Its an art. Sometimes youre successful at it. Sometimes youre not successful at it. You look for i like to tell a variety of stories just to remind people that what the stakes are. If you if every story i told in this book was a story of an encounter between a Young African american and a Police Officer, then people would think, oh, malcolm is just talking about, when he says he writes a book about talking to strangers, he is talking about interactions between Police Officers and black people. I dont want that. I dont this to be i dont want to give people reason to pigeonhole this. Im trying to Say Something that is actually quite broad about the way all of us talk to strangers. Its funny that i honestly dont believe, i think that many of us could have made the same mistakes that that Police Officer in that video made, that Brian Encinia made. I dont think he is an unusually inept or incompetent or biased or i think he is a Police Officer who is inexperienced and over his head and jumped to some conclusions he didnt. But, you know, we all do that. Thats the point of the book. Were making our mistakes in far lower stakes situations. Were not Police Officers with guns stopping people on the street, right. When i screw up in my understanding of a stranger, whats the consequence . Someone doesnt like me or i feel uncomfortable. No one is dead. Thats an important thing to keep in mind that this book is really meant to be, to make us all complicit in some of these tragedies. Susan one of the concepts that you say that we all do is that we default to truth. What does that mean . Malcolm so this is an idea that comes from a psychologist named tim levine, whose work i rely on a lot in talking to strangers. He was trying to understand why, it is a puzzle that has obsessed psychologists for a long time, why are human beings so bad at detecting deception. This has been studied a million different ways, but basically my ability to tell whether youre lying to me is scarcely better than chance. Were terrible at it, almost all of us, with a few small exceptions. Thats puzzling because you would think we were good at it. You would think that that would be something that evolution would have selected for. And his explanation is that evolution does not select for the ability to detect lies. It selects for the opposite. It selects for people who are willing to believe, implicitly believe what theyre told, because if you do that, if you trust, if you default to truth, as he says, then your life is so much easier. You can start companies. You can form groups. You can send your kids off to school and not worry. There are a million things you can do if you believe what people tell you. You can go into a store and you can buy go to a Grocery Store and buy 100 items and be satisfied that the bill they give you at the end is accurate, right. Its an extraordinary thing. There are 100 opportunities in your shopping cart for someone to cheat you, but how often do you see someone in the Grocery Store say wait a minute, i dont believe its 119, right. The only time i have ever seen anyone do this is actually my tangent, my father, who is a mathematician, had a gift for doing sums in his head, would count along with the checkout person, and only if they undercharged him would he correct them. This is in the days before the bar code scanners. I remember being a little kid and see him, and then he would say actually i owe you an extra 75 cents. He would fish it out. He wasnt doing it because he mistrusted them. He was doing it because it was a power trick. The point is the reason were able to do this as human beings, build these fabulous working societies, is that we trust, right, implicitly and automatically. So if you understand that, you realize that there is a cost of that, and this is his argument, the cost is that we will be we will occasionally be deceived. Were not good at spotting the scam artist. And that is, you know, thats why madoff exists. Its not because madoff is some kind of genius. Its because if you set out to systematically lie to people, youll get away with it, at least in the short term. Theyre not going to catch you. Right . Were not thinking, is this guy lying to me . Were thinking no, he has great returns, heres 1 million. Thats the way we operate. Susan speaking of Bernie Madoff, dipping into cspan video archives, we have a video of someone who is also in your book, henry markopolos. Lets listen to what he has to say to the s. E. C. Of Bernie Madoff. [video clip] henry i gift wrapped and delivered the hugest ponzi to them, and they couldnt conduct a proper investigation, because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a 50 billion ponzi scheme doesnt make the list, who sets their priorities . [end of video clip] susan you call him holy fool. Malcolm yes, markopolos isnt the only person, but he saw the truth in Bernie Madoff 10 years before he was busted. He is going to the s. E. C. Saying he is running a massive ponzi scheme, no one would listen to him. He is someone who does not default to truth. I refer to people like him as holy fool, which is a term, a russian term to describe the kind of the crazy person who nonetheless has access to truth that none of us see, so the child who is not constrained by social convention in pointing out the truth, but the kid who says the emperor has no clothes, he is a holy fool. And markopolos is fascinating, because the question arises, do we want to be like him, he could see a fraud that the rest of us could not see. He had insight that the rest of us did not have. Do we want to be like him, would our society be better if there were more markopoloses . I say no, that you dont want to be like him. He will tell you this, i sat down with him, we talked about it, he is someone who is extraordinarily suspicious and paranoid. He thinks there is a scandal under every rock. He goes around the world every day of his life, is filled with the great fear that he is being scammed. He goes to the doctor, and he lectures the doctor on, you know, all the ways, dont do this to me and dont do this to me, im aware of all of your tricks. He, in fact, was so paranoid that after he after madoff was finally busted, markopolos came to believe that madoff was going to send hitmen to kill him, and then he became convinced that the s. E. C. Was going to send a squad of attackers to break into his house and steal all his files. He stayed up all night with a gun trained on the door of his house. You dont want to live like that. There is a cost with having that kind of insight. That is levines point, that insight cost is too high. You were much better off being gullible, or at least being believed, defaulting to truth, being people who implicitly believe, because liars like madoff are rare. Although we will be cheated once in a while, it is not the end of the world. And i actually think that is profoundly wise. Susan should we be better at listening when someone is saying the sky is falling . Malcolm that depends. The unknown question is how many times does markopolos say there is a fraud and there isnt one . So he just a few weeks ago actually came with an announcement that he thought that General Electric was engaged in one of the largest accounting scandals of all time. It seems, i dont know yet, the story hasnt played out yet, but lots of people shrugged and said no, i think you are off the mark in this case. So i dont know. Certainly we would do well to we shouldnt ignore them, but we have to understand the difference in the way that most of us are calibrated, and its a good its probably a good thing to be trustworthy, or certainly one should not take from the madoff scandal, i think, the conclusion that the financial engine needs to be even more heavily regulated. If you reduce everyone in a complex industry to a state of suspicion and paranoia, then you destroy the thing youre trying to save, right. Susan our next example from your book is a very different kind. Its from Michigan State and penn state, the Jerry Sandusky scandal and dr. Nassar. Lets watch the video, and well come back and talk about that. [video clip] jerry he was coming to me with a concern about, you know, i guess in his words, somebody had talked to him about inappropriate behavior in the shower. And you told him jerry i told him that it didnt happen, and there wasnt, in my mind, it wasnt inappropriate behavior. [end of video clip] susan the court said differently, and he is now serving a long prison s