Latest / Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond / The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic | Malcolm Gladwell's New Audiobook

Transcript

The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic | Malcolm Gladwell's New Audiobook · Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

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  Speaker 1: Pushkin. Malcolm Gladwell here. I'm in your feed today to
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  Speaker 1: bring you a preview of my new book, The American
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  Speaker 1: Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic, where I
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  Speaker 1: try to get to the bottom of America's peculiar problem
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  Speaker 1: with gun violence. Why is the murder rate in the
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  Speaker 1: US nearly three times higher than Canada's and five times
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  Speaker 1: higher than the murder rate in the UK and much
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  Speaker 1: of Western Europe? What's so different about the United States?
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  Speaker 1: If you want to learn why Americans so often misdiagnose
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  Speaker 1: the nature of the violence that plagues their streets, you
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  Speaker 1: can find The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm slash
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  Speaker 1: audiobooks or wherever you get your audiobooks. Pushkin. Pushkin Industries
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  Speaker 1: and Recorded Books, an RB Media audio brand presents... The
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  Speaker 1: American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. Written
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  Speaker 1: and narrated by Malcolm Gladwell. Dedication for my mother. When
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  Speaker 1: I finished the first draft of this book, I sent
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  Speaker 1: it to my friend, the musician Drew Holcomb, and said,
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  Speaker 1: do you have any music that fits the themes of
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  Speaker 1: this book? And he wrote me back and said, I do.
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  Speaker 1: Once after a mass shooting, where a teenager killed 18
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  Speaker 1: students at an elementary school. I dropped my own kids
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  Speaker 1: off at their elementary school and went home and wrote
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  Speaker 1: a song called Troubles. And Drew said I could use
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  Speaker 1: it because there is something in this song that will
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  Speaker 1: help you make sense of everything you're about to hear.
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  Speaker 1: You're going to hear snippets of Troubles throughout this audiobook,
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  Speaker 1: and then at the end, you'll hear the song in full.
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  Speaker 1: By then, I hope you'll understand why I wanted you
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  Speaker 1: to hear it.
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  Speaker 2: I want to float like a bird, slow and low.
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  Speaker 2: I want to follow the river wherever it goes.
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  Speaker 1: Introduction. Fifteen Funerals. On a cold and rainy winter's day
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  Speaker 1: not long ago, I went to see a man named
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  Speaker 1: Abdullah Pratt. Big beard, thick black plastic glasses, built like
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  Speaker 1: a linebacker. He grew up in a struggling neighborhood in Chicago,
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  Speaker 1: the kind that can be found in countless cities across
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  Speaker 1: the United States.
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  Speaker 2: So I think I wanted to be a doctor since
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  Speaker 2: the time that I was a child. I remember having
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  Speaker 2: the Fisher-Price bag at Christmas and, you know, being three,
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  Speaker 2: four years old and stuff.
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  Speaker 1: We sat in a small room in the basement of
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  Speaker 1: the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he now works.
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  Speaker 1: He was wearing scrubs, taking a break from his shift.
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  Speaker 2: I grew up in the museums. I did my first
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  Speaker 2: dissection of a squid at the age of like seven
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  Speaker 2: or eight. Those things fueled a passion for science, a
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  Speaker 2: passion for anatomy. And after growing up in a completely 100%
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  Speaker 2: African-American community, I was in programs where I'd be the
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  Speaker 2: only African-American, but I was winning awards for being the best.
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  Speaker 2: So it taught me that I could compete and that
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  Speaker 2: I could make change.
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  Speaker 1: He went to college, then medical school. He had a
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  Speaker 1: chance to leave his hometown, start a new life somewhere else.
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  Speaker 1: but he chose to come back to Chicago and practice
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  Speaker 1: medicine in the same neighborhood where he grew up. How
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  Speaker 1: many people from growing up do you know who died?
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  Speaker 2: I've got, I rank them by closeness to me, because
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  Speaker 2: if I said everybody, it'd probably be like in the 30s, 40s.
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  Speaker 2: But yeah, seriously, seriously, if everyone that I knew, like knew,
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  Speaker 2: talked with, shared time with at some point, so I
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  Speaker 2: really keep it to close friends, right? So if I
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  Speaker 2: say close friends, people who I still have the text
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  Speaker 2: messages in my phone, people who I know, their family members,
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  Speaker 2: their mothers, their fathers, prior to all of this, 15 friends.
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  Speaker 2: You know, my older brother, you know, is the one
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  Speaker 2: family member.
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  Speaker 1: Abdullah's brother's name was Rashad. He was Abdullah's best friend
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  Speaker 1: and protector. He was killed when he tried to stop
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  Speaker 1: some kids from stealing a car.
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  Speaker 2: My closest friend in the world, the day that my
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  Speaker 2: brother died and I said, hey, you know, I lost
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  Speaker 2: my brother and you're the closest thing I got to brother,
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  Speaker 2: that person was murdered. Right. And all of them are
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  Speaker 2: leaving behind children. All of them were great fathers who
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  Speaker 2: I literally I think many of them. Our last conversations
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  Speaker 2: were about parenting and fatherhood, close teammates.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 2: So I've had three close teammates just from my one
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  Speaker 2: high school team all be murdered. I've had youth that
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  Speaker 2: I mentored with some of the teams that I coached
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  Speaker 2: that were murdered. Many of them pronounced dead right in
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  Speaker 2: this trauma bay once we were finally able to get
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  Speaker 2: a trauma center.
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  Speaker 1: Take out your phone. Make a list of 15 people
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  Speaker 1: you have texted with on a regular basis over the
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  Speaker 1: last few years.
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  Speaker 2: Of your life.
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  Speaker 1: Now imagine that every one of them was shot dead
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  Speaker 1: and that you attended every one of their funerals.
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  Speaker 2: Some of these close friends I had to pronounce dead myself.
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  Speaker 2: I had to tell their own family members that their
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  Speaker 2: loved one was no longer here. And as you can imagine,
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  Speaker 2: just to paint the picture for you, imagine, you know,
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  Speaker 2: walking into a room, you prepare yourself to tell this
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  Speaker 2: family member, of your close friend, that they're no longer here.
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  Speaker 2: And the first thing that family member says, they see
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  Speaker 2: you and they light up. They forget why they're there
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  Speaker 2: for a second. They say, oh, my goodness, Abdullah. Hey, Abdullah.
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  Speaker 2: You know, hey, we were just talking about you. How
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  Speaker 2: are you? They forget that their son or daughter was shot.
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  Speaker 2: And then now the first words out of my mouth,
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  Speaker 2: which is the evidence based way to do it, is
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  Speaker 2: to say they did not make it. They unfortunately, so
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  Speaker 2: now they go from the highest to highest to the
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  Speaker 2: lowest of lows. I've had to do that about five
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  Speaker 2: times in the last three years. Only one time have
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  Speaker 2: I been forced to stop working the shift. But usually
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  Speaker 2: I finish these usually early in my shifts and I
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  Speaker 2: keep working because if I stop, then you think about
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  Speaker 2: it all. And you prepare yourself for the worst walking
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  Speaker 2: into any shift, especially when you grow up in a neighborhood.
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  Speaker 1: When I was a child growing up in rural Canada
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  Speaker 1: in the 1970s, The only real knowledge I had of
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  Speaker 1: the giant country to the south was Life, a big,
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  Speaker 1: glossy American news magazine that came in the mail every week.
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  Speaker 1: I would read every page and look at every picture
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  Speaker 1: and cut out articles and advertisements that caught my attention.
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  Speaker 1: America was rich. America was enormous. But crucially, America was dangerous.
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  Speaker 1: That was the overwhelming lesson from thumbing through the pages
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  Speaker 1: of Life magazine. In 1975, when I was 12 years old,
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  Speaker 1: there were 701 recorded murders in all of Canada, a
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  Speaker 1: country at that time of 23 million people stretching from
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  Speaker 1: the Atlantic to the Pacific and all the way up
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  Speaker 1: to the Arctic Ocean. In that same year, just in
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  Speaker 1: New York City, there were 1,645 homicides. That was more
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  Speaker 1: than half a century ago, but little has changed. Today,
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  Speaker 1: the murder rate in the United States remains nearly three
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  Speaker 1: times higher than Canada's and five times higher than the
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  Speaker 1: United Kingdom and much of Western Europe. I've never lost
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  Speaker 1: my puzzlement over this fact about America, not even after
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  Speaker 1: living in the United States for most of my adult life.
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  Speaker 1: My first book, The Tipping Point, was inspired by the
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  Speaker 1: sudden and seemingly inexplicable drop in crime in New York
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  Speaker 1: City in the 1990s. My second book, Blink, told the
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  Speaker 1: story of the tragic death of a young man named
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  Speaker 1: Amadou Diallo at the hands of New York City police officers.
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  Speaker 1: I then went on to write about police and crime
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  Speaker 1: in my fourth book and my fifth book and in
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  Speaker 1: countless episodes of my podcast Revisionist History. I am drawn
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  Speaker 1: to stories about criminals and criminality because I think issues
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  Speaker 1: of life and death, deviance and punishment, reveal something important
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  Speaker 1: about the values a society lives by. But I'm particularly
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  Speaker 1: drawn to to American stories of criminals and criminality. Because
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  Speaker 1: you cannot cross between the United States and Canada, as
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  Speaker 1: I have done six or seven times a year for
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  Speaker 1: nearly half a century, and not be struck by how
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  Speaker 1: peculiar America is. The people on both sides of the
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  Speaker 1: border drive the same cars, watch the same television shows,
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  Speaker 1: listen to the same music, eat the same food, and
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  Speaker 1: worship the same God. If I dropped you in the
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  Speaker 1: middle of Buffalo or Toronto, Seattle or Vancouver, it would
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  Speaker 1: take you more than a beat to figure out where
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  Speaker 1: you were. And yet, in one of those places, a
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  Speaker 1: young boy like me can grow up without any first-hand
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  Speaker 1: experience of lethal violence at all. And in another, a
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  Speaker 1: young man can bury more than a dozen of his
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  Speaker 1: closest friends by his 30th birthday.
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  Speaker 2: Why?
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  Speaker 1: What's so different about the United States? That's what the
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  Speaker 1: American way of killing is all about. This book is
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  Speaker 1: divided into three parts. Part one is about the fundamentally
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  Speaker 1: dishonest way that Americans talk about gun violence. Part two
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  Speaker 1: is about how Americans misdiagnose the nature of the violence
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  Speaker 1: that plagues their streets. Part three is about the moral
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  Speaker 1: recklessness of the course the country has chosen. There is
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  Speaker 1: nothing technical or academic in what follows. This will not
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  Speaker 1: be a criminology textbook. Instead, The American Way of Killing
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  Speaker 1: is will approach these questions through a series of stories
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  Speaker 1: about people and places and moments. From the miracle of
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  Speaker 1: a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C., to the legal
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  Speaker 1: travails of a 17th century English knight, from a professor
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  Speaker 1: in Alabama with a terrible secret to a famous town
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  Speaker 1: in Kansas that Americans have been lying about to each
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  Speaker 1: other for 100 years. From the slave plantations of the
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  Speaker 1: South Carolina Low Country to a prison in Germany that
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  Speaker 1: would be unrecognizable to any American. In the famous parable
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  Speaker 1: of the blind man and the elephant, Each man touches
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  Speaker 1: a different part of the animal and draws a different conclusion.
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  Speaker 1: One touches the trunk and decides the elephant is like
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  Speaker 1: a snake. One touches the animal's leg and concludes the
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  Speaker 1: elephant is a tree. One touches the tusk and says
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  Speaker 1: the elephant is like a spear, and so on. This
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  Speaker 1: is the American problem, the source of the conflict and
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  Speaker 1: misunderstanding that marks so much of the ongoing argument over
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  Speaker 1: what to do about the country's violence. everyone looks at
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  Speaker 1: a different set of statistics or zeroes in on one
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  Speaker 1: particular fact. The American Way of Killing has chapters on
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  Speaker 1: the trunk and the leg and the tusk. And at
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  Speaker 1: the end, my hope is that by seeing all the
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  Speaker 1: parts in one place, you will finally get a sense
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  Speaker 1: of the whole elephant and understand that what seems from
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  Speaker 1: the outside like an intractable problem need not be intractable
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  Speaker 1: at all. But before we get to any of that,
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  Speaker 1: let's go back to Abdullah Pratt and see what the
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  Speaker 1: elephant looks like through his eyes. As we talked, he
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  Speaker 1: was about to leave for a community training session at
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  Speaker 1: what he called the most notorious housing project in the city.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yes. It's in the heart of Parkway Gardens, a.k.a. DeWick, a.k.a. O'Block.
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  Speaker 2: We'll be there. We're going to teach them actually how
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  Speaker 2: to deal with gunshot wounds and do CPR.
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  Speaker 1: His audience, a group of fourth graders at an elementary school.
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  Speaker 1: It wasn't his first visit to that school. And he
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  Speaker 1: said he would always start his presentation with the same question.
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  Speaker 2: How many of you all have lost a loved one,
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  Speaker 2: a father, mother, brother to gun violence? When we've asked
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  Speaker 2: that school before, 100% of the hands go up, and
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  Speaker 2: that's rare. So for these fourth graders, they're going to
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  Speaker 2: be asked that. These hands go up. I'll show you
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  Speaker 2: the pictures and videos of it happening. Usually we get
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  Speaker 2: like 50%, 60%, and that's high. That's extremely high. But
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  Speaker 2: when it's 100%, of the hands that go up and
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  Speaker 2: they can name, oh, it was my brother, it was
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  Speaker 2: my sister, it was my father, it was both my uncles.
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  Speaker 2: When it's like that, now we're going to say, well,
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  Speaker 2: we're here today to help you all know what to
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  Speaker 2: do in that situation. How many of you all, if
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  Speaker 2: you knew something about how to help them, would have helped?
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  Speaker 2: And then 100% of those hands go up.
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  Speaker 1: He was going to teach the kids how to be
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  Speaker 1: first responders, broken down in a way that a fourth
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  Speaker 1: grader can understand. A, B, C.
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  Speaker 2: A means alert 911. Call 911. Tell them you need
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  Speaker 2: an ambulance. What's happened? Where you are? And importantly, that
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  Speaker 2: the shooter has left the scene. So that's A. B
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  Speaker 2: stands for bleeding. Find the bleeding. So now you have
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  Speaker 2: to see what's injured. So if that means ripping open
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  Speaker 2: a pants leg or a shirt or something like that
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  Speaker 2: to find the hole, it's important because if you start
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  Speaker 2: putting tourniquets or holding pressure on a hole and that's
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  Speaker 2: not where the hole actually is, you're actually not even
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  Speaker 2: helping them and you could be creating more harm for
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  Speaker 2: the person.
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  Speaker 1: C is for compress the wound. You're probably not going
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  Speaker 1: to have gauze available, but be practical. Does someone have
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  Speaker 1: a tampon handy? Use it.
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  Speaker 2: Maxi pads and absorptive pads are going to be at
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  Speaker 2: your fingertips. That's what you need. You need to be
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  Speaker 2: able to pack these wounds to help absorb, to give
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  Speaker 2: this person time.
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  Speaker 1: Then he hands out trauma kits to everyone.
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  Speaker 2: We try to keep it simple. We're not trying to
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  Speaker 2: teach them how to be a trauma surgeon. We're trying
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  Speaker 2: to get them to feel confident enough to act. Do something.
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  Speaker 2: Call 911 early. Sit there with the person. And then
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  Speaker 2: 911 will actually walk you through these things. This past summer,
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  Speaker 2: we actually had a young lady, a young Latina lady who,
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  Speaker 2: one of my best students, and she came to me
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  Speaker 2: week two and she's like, Dr. Pratt, I need a
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  Speaker 2: new kit. I'm like, girl, you lost your kit already?
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  Speaker 2: I'm like, okay, I'll go get you a new kit.
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  Speaker 2: She's like, no, I didn't lose it. I promise, I promise.
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  Speaker 2: I didn't lose it. I said, what happened? She said,
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  Speaker 2: I had to use it. And I was like, what
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  Speaker 2: do you mean you had to use it? She was like,
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  Speaker 2: oh man, they shot someone right in front of my house.
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  Speaker 2: She said, I got it on video. It shows me
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  Speaker 2: the video. She did everything right. Literally, she has the
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  Speaker 2: pictures and videos of them using everything in that kit,
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  Speaker 2: the tourniquets, the gauze, the everything, strung out, used. And so,
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  Speaker 2: of course, she got her another kit. And I was
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  Speaker 2: so proud of her for being a judge. This young
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  Speaker 2: lady was either 16 or 17. She wasn't even a
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  Speaker 2: senior yet. So this was like a sophomore, junior. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: An American ER doctor. who has lost 15 close friends
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  Speaker 1: and his older brother to gun violence, is going out
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  Speaker 1: to local elementary schools on his afternoon off and teaching
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  Speaker 1: fourth graders how to stabilize a gunshot wound. This does
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  Speaker 1: not happen anywhere else in the developed world. I want
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  Speaker 1: to figure out why.