Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - "Who would you dine with? Scott or Amundsen?" Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Harford in Discussion.

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

Malcolm Gladwell joins Tim Harford to discuss our recent three-part tale about the race to reach the South Pole. There's talk of imperial decline; the power of the underdog; why getting everything you want is actually a handicap; and limes... lots and lots of limes.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin Wait, beware! Ahead of you lie, yawning crevasses, rampaging killer whales, and Malcolm Gladwell, bearing spoilers. You are about to hear a conversation about our epic race to the South Pole trilogy. So before you do, please have a listen to the trilogy itself, which should have arrived in your cautionary tales podcast feed over the past few weeks. I'll wait, don't worry.

Right, as you will now know, the trilogy makes reference to Malcolm Gladwell's work. Malcolm is of course the author of David and Goliath, the bomber mafia, and other best-sellers, and the creator of the revisionist history podcast. I was so excited when he agreed to come and talk about the South Pole trilogy, why Captain Scott's access to money and patrons turned out to be more recurstant of blessing, what it cost rolled Amonson to rip up the conventional rules of behavior, and the astonishing subplot in which absolutely everybody seemed to forget the scientific evidence and come down with scurvy.

Now I had assumed I'd be asking Malcolm about David and Goliath, but that is not how it went down. Malcolm had questions for me. So many questions, and I just loved trying to keep up with him. I think you're going to enjoy the conversation as much as I did. So now, cautionary tales presents, conversation between me, Tim Haafid, and Malcolm Gladwell himself. Tim, I've listened to all three of your episodes, and I must say, I liked him very much. I thought it was fascinating. I actually knew none of this. None at all.

I couldn't, yeah, it was all kind of a blur to me. All of these explorers from long ago. And there were all these dimensions that I didn't understand. But I wanted to start with this contrast between Scott and Amidson. The complex thing, and the thing that makes it really fascinating is that Scott is really

the innovator, isn't he? Yeah, he sees himself as the scientific innovator. He wants to break ground in terms of exploring, measuring magnetic fields, discovering new aspects of the flora and fungi of Antarctica. There's this crazy side quest they do when they're trying to get a penguin egg, which is described as the worst journey in the world because they have to travel in the Antarctic to cover this crazy side quest they do when they're trying to get a penguin egg which is described as the worst journey in the world because they have to travel in the Antarctic winter. I mean it's crazy he's doing technological innovation. He has these three motorized sleds which

I think partly paved the way for tanks in the first world war and people who think that Scott is awesome emphasize all of this ambition, all of the things he was trying to do. But of course, Amundsen just wanted to use the best possible way to get to the South Pole first. And actually that was innovative in some small ways that the precise design of the sled and the kind of containers that won't leak.

But it was basically using techniques that had been used in Greenland by indigenous people for, well, I mean, we don't know how long, a very long time. This is actually what I loved about the story is it, it's so incredibly contemporary, because Scott is really the kind of, he's the Silicon Valley startup who gets an enormous amount of venture funding and proceeds to blow it all on a series of ideas and solving problems

that aren't problems. And Aminthson is the kind of bootstrap entrepreneur in the middle of the country that no one's paying attention to, who's forced to use the tried and true. The original sin sounds like is the fact that Scott was given everything he wanted. Everything he wanted plus a lot of baggage he didn't want. Yeah. Like all kinds of interference and all kinds of people telling him they want to do this, and they want to do that, and they want to achieve all of these great things,

which means he can't focus. He's got too much money, he's got too many people. His ship nearly sinks simply because it's so overlaid. There's just so much on it. Yeah. That it's nearly capsized by a storm on the way to the Antarctic. But Amundsen meanwhile is,

we not only is no one paying attention to him, he's actively engaging in disinformation, he's lying to, he's even lying to his own crew about where he's going, he's telling people he's going north, and he's actually going south. I love the way that you've phrased this as he's a Silicon Valley startup, because for me, I'm thinking he's a he's a British Navy guy, he's kind of a government man, he's a military man, he's very bureaucratic, but you're seeing some different quality in him and a different problem that he's facing. He's given everything he wants, and then as a result he has lots of things he doesn't want.

Those two things are linked. That's what happens when you get everything you want. It's the careful what you wish for problem, right? The things you don't want are a consequence of getting everything you want in the beginning. He has so many people who are pitching in to quote unquote, help him that he ends up being burdened by all of their expectations, which is another, another Silicon Valley kind of conundrum. The venture capitalist gives you $50 million and then has a seat at the table and complicates your

vision with all their sense of where you should be going. The funder, the venture capitalist in this particular case is a guy called Sir Clements Markham, who is just this incredibly British, incredibly intimidating fellow. I've got this portrait of him and it looks to me like the expression on his face is like the photographer has just broken wind and he just looks so unhappy that someone is daring to point a camera at him and he was just pulling the strings at the Royal Geographical Society in London for decades. He's so tight with Scott and Scott's family that Scott names his son Peter after Sir Clements. And Scott is clearly terrified of him, and it's one of these, you know, he puts Scott where he is, and he can put him right back again

if he wants to. And Sir Clements, who's never been to the Antarctic, who's got no idea what it's like down there, just has these views. Obviously, there should be no dogs. Everybody who knows anything about Arctic exploration knows you should use dogs for any number of reasons I explain in the episode, but Cyclamins is sitting there in London going, no, no, no, no, no dogs. Yeah. And Scots kind of got to do what he says. It's so funny that any story about English life in this period always boils down to the stupidity of the British rule in class. Cycl Clements is such a familiar figure. This kind of arrogant pigheaded authority figure who thinks that who has a kind of abstract notion

of the way things ought to be. Yes, absolutely. Which so try and sow the way things actually are. But the interesting thing for me about Amundsen is that he also has these certain bureaucratic constraints. So the king is the patron of his expedition and he's got funding from the Norwegian government and all this kind of stuff, but he just doesn't care. So he lies to the king, he lies to Parliament, he's borrowed all this money and then he basically runs away. One of the things he's doing going to Antarctica

is getting out of reach of his creditors and it's only when they can't impound his ship that he actually tells people exactly what he's doing. So yes, it is partly this kind of this hide-bound British bureaucracy, but it is also Scott's deference to it in a way that Amundsen was not interested for a second in any of that. Yeah. To bring up the second Silicon Valley analogy, there's a little bit of Elizabeth Holmes in Amundsen. It's fake it to you make it kind of thing. Yeah, because I've made it. Yeah, he's said to be made it. But that idea that for someone who's attempting something incredibly difficult, that it may be necessary at some

time to engage in acts of deception at the outset. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that the kind of person who is focused in singular enough to pull off a feat like this is willing to engage in deception. It doesn't have any kind of moral qualm. Nothing trumps the goal of reaching the South Pole. Yeah. Everything else is secondary, including the truth. Yeah, and he doesn't seem to have lost any sleep over that. And I think Amonson had this very clear vision that it would all be forgiven if he succeeded.

And which I suspect to the extent that Elizabeth Holmes that Theranos had a vision of what was going on, but there's the same thing. They'll forgive me once it all works. Oh, I think she very clearly had that, Tim. I think that's absolutely much driving the whole train. There is a I can lie and cheat and deceive because if I pull this off, I'm a hero. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your personal feelings, feelings about the two men. I mean, it's clear to your partial to Amundsen,

if you eat a choice between dining with two of them, who's your first choice for dinner tonight? Oh, actually, I think they would both be, well, they'd both be interesting, but they'd be pretty awkward both ways, because I think they both had these huge egos. I don't really like either of them as people. Amundsen is this anti-hero.

I'm excited by Amerson's daring and his willingness to get things done and he makes sacrifices and he succeeds in the end and Scott just seems like this tragic blunderer. But I'm not sure I'd really want to have dinner with either of them if I'm honest. Who would you rather? Scott. Yeah. I came away from listening to your your episodes liking Amerson and I felt very sorry for him because the world doesn't reward him in the way that he ought to have been rewarded. He's the hero. He made it look too easy. That's a problem. Yeah. He made it look too easy. But Scott would just be fascinating and he's so British, he's so of that period. I mean, and you would dine out on

Scott's stories for the rest of your life. But if you had dinner with him, get him drunk. He was a brilliant storyteller. The story was of the tragic hero, and he was writing the story of the tragic hero who's going to fail all the way along. It's almost like he knew how it was going to end. Yeah. There's this myth-making that goes on afterwards as well, of course, around Scott. The British establishment, at first, he's an inspiration for the soldiers who are going over the top in World War One. And this is a man

who knows how to die with dignity as a hero for his country. Then later that parallel is maintained, but the moral flips, which is who's just so stupid and incompetent, and so with the generals in World War One. So the whole narrative that the British are telling about themselves throughout the 20th century, the ebbs and flows, Scott seems to be the exemplar, no matter what story you want to tell, he's there in the middle of it. That was something that thought that I was thinking about when I was listening, this old idea of the parallels with the First World War, which is, you know, this kind of epic example of the ability of the English to romanticize

failure and stupidity and just kind of tragedy. I mean just like that idea that dying nobly in pursuit of some futile stupid cause we think of that as being the highest of all. There's nothing that can stop the myth-making machinery of early 20th century England or of kind of late British Empire, England. I just find it endlessly fascinating the way the kind of the minds of these people work. Yeah, when they finally find Scott, I mean, and it was never guaranteed that they would

find him, and he could have just been buried under the snow forever. when they finally find Scott, I mean, and it was never guaranteed that they would find him and he could have just been buried under the snow forever. When they finally find him and this terrible scene of him and the last two men he's with and they're trying to recover his diaries and they move his arm and his arm just shatters because it's it's ice, it's just it's horrific horrific. And they're dragging with them about 20 or 30 pounds worth of fossils. And then they haven't got any strength more and any, any strength to go any further and they all die and they've still got the fossils with them. And there was one commentator who, who said, I think they could have saved themselves

the weight. But the British were just, isn't it air pick? They were still trying to do the science even up to the last moment. And, you just, isn't it epic? They were still trying to do the science, even up to the last moment, and the sensible response is, well, maybe they should have stopped doing the science at the point at which they were all clearly about to die. It's all part of the story, all part of the myth. It's a mixture of a suicidal impulse and imperialism. You know, it's like, what happens when grandiose national dreams coincide with psychological neuroses, you end up dragging the fossils with you? And it's really this weird kind of turning point in the British Empire as well.

And the British Empire is last another half a century really until after the Second World War, but the glory days, or if you prefer the terrible days of moral outrage. They're all in the past, all the conquering, the exploitation, the stealing other people's land, the telling other people what to do, the slave trade in the earlier centuries. That's all happened. And Scott and his crew are just trying to race

to be the first person to this arbitrary point on this icy desert. There's nothing there, there's no resources, there's nothing, there are no people, and yet it still matters to them. It's that last gasp of empire. Yeah. Malcolm Gladwell and I will be back in a moment to discuss how Scott and Amundsen viewed their own chances. Why Amundsen didn't seem to get the recognition he deserves, and what we can learn from imperfect experiments. viewed their own chances. Why Amerson didn't seem to get the recognition he deserves and what we can learn from imperfect experiments.

I'm back with Malcolm Gladwell. I was curious about who do you think, at the moment, both men get off their boats and strike out on this expedition? Who do you think is more confident in their heart of pulling it off? Just Scott think he has a realistic chance? I think without Adelaide Amanson. Scott is worried about Amanson from the start. He knows Amanson has started closer to the pole. He knows that because Amanson is traveling with dogs, which have certain advantages, that Amundsen is going to start earlier in the spring.

So for those two reasons alone, he knows Amundsen has this fantastic advantage. Scott is very confused in the way he expresses this because he will sometimes say, well, I'm not really a big fan of dogs, they don't really work. And then in the same letter, he'll say, well, Am Amanson has a big advantage because he's using dogs. And you go, well, how can you, how can you write those two paragraphs on the same page? Amanson is always concerned that maybe Scott will, will beat him. But I think he's, he's very confident. He know, he has a plan. He knows exactly how it's going to go. The main risk to Amanson is that he's so eager, he starts too early, he hits bad weather.

And so he, there's a false start, but once he really gets going, there's never really any down. Yeah, yeah. The whole thing's so Norwegian with the skiers going out ahead, and it's just like, it's crazy. The diaries, you've got these diaries from Scott saying, oh, it's terrible. The ice is falling on the nostrils of the ponies. They're sinking through the ice. This is our spirit is very low. This is really hard.

And Almondson's diary is, he's telling stories about racing with this world champion skier and trying to do these sharp turns and falling over. And it isn't it fun. And, you know, he's... Telemarking. Yeah, he's doing these telemarked turns. And he's joking that, oh, I don't, he at least this guy pretended

not to see me fall over. And they're just having fun on fresh powder. And it could not be more different, the impression that they're painting of themselves in their diaries. Now, maybe their experiences were more similar than their diaries described, although I kind of suspect not.

This is a massive hypothetical, but there was something in Scott's attempt that seems very late Empire, but there was a moment when the British Empire's kind of ability to pull off these kinds of feats would have looked a lot more like Adminson. I'm wondering if the British Empire is beginning in the late 19th century as opposed to ending. Does Scott work? In other words, is he a victim of the kind of encroaching bureaucratization and sclerosis that attends to a country and decline, an empire and decline? My sense is that a lot of it is the conservatism that comes from having something to defend, the feeling that you should

be winning every battle, that you got loads to lose, and not much extra stuff to gain, and then that conservatism sets in. That's a guess. And earlier on in the British Empire, they're the plucky underdogs. I mean, you can object the morality of it, and I think we do now, from the 21st century, object the morality of it. But this tiny country that is just conquering vast sues of the world, and it is incredible how they're managing to pull it off, and it's much more entrepreneurial, much more dynamic, much more improvisational, much cleverer than Scott and his cohorts, his contemporaries seem to be able to pull off. Maybe another way of saying it is that Amerson sounds, he sounds like an 18th century English explorer.

He does, and Amerson is from a very young country. I mean, Norway is only, only just got its independence, so it's very aware of its need to establish itself and to show the big boys that it can do something. So that, I think, comes across very much in what Amerson is doing. And he's like that as well. He's got that scrappy underdog mentality. But this brings up my last puzzle about the story,

which is that the British should have readjust their expectations and turn them into a hero. And Amincent does not. Even when his own country, he isn't the conquering hero that he expected to be, which makes no sense to me. I grew up in Canada. Canada is psychologically a lot like Norway. You know, we're too small.

And if you win a bronze medal in the Olympics for Canada, you treat it as if you won the gold. Bronze is considered to be, I'm unbelievable. All bronze, you know what I mean? So Norway, it's tiny. It's like, they They get nothing going on. And this guy, one of their own, goes and defeats the English at one of the great adventure prizes of the era. And yet they come back and they're like, yeah, they're excited at the time. I mean, it's huge at the time. But then the question is,

well, what's the what's the second act? And actually, in the end, Amundsen gets tied up with the same kinds of obligations that that wrapped around Scott's neck. And he has to do these, this scientific experiment, because he owes somebody a fave, he has to do all this stuff, and he hates it, he doesn't want to do it, but he feels that he has to do it. And there's this slow, slow decline, and this, this feeling of the one-hit wonder rock star wonder rock star is not fair to describe him as a one hit wonder because he did several other amazing things that no one had ever done before. But this sense of fading glory and 10 years later after the First World War and people are saying

I'm anson. Oh yeah, he's still alive. He's still doing it and he becomes this slightly ridiculous figure who's striving for relevance, he needs money, and people who wants sort of a Mr. Hero now think of him as a bit of a, you know, a husband. Yeah. And it's a very sad end. Yeah. If you make a list of most famous Norwegians of all time, if you ask Norwegians for their

list, you know, Magnus Carlson, Jacob Ingebritzin, is where is Adminson on that list? Is he, as he recovered his reputation with the passage of time? He must have. He must have. And the fun fact, Rold Dal, the great children's author, and not just children's author, was named after Rold Aminson. Oh, yeah, so I mean, Rold Aminson,

he was big news for a time. At a certain moment, he was one of the first, he was one of the most famous people around, but then the First World War, people had other things to worry about. One question that I wanted to ask you, having worked on this. One of the subplots of this epic race between these two men is Skurvy. And what's weird about Skurvy is we're told that James Lind, a Royal Navy surgeon, proved how to cure and indeed had to prevent scurvy in 1747.

So this is nearly two centuries before this race, which is in the early 1900s. You just need lemons or oranges, it's fine. And he's a British Navy surgeon. So the British Navy, among all the institutions, should understand this. And Robert Scott is also a British Navy officer. and yet somehow by the time we get to the age of Arctic exploration people have either forgotten or they no longer believe the result of James Lins experiment and that's a puzzle that I

that I wrestle with in the in the episode but your most recent season of revisionist history is all about experiments and what we learn from them or what we don't learn from them. And are you surprised to hear of this great experiment that proved this wonderful thing and then everyone somehow managed to ignore it? Well, I thought the way you talked this through to me was very in the episode, was very convincing, which was, Lynn does an experiment, but he doesn't finish the experiment, or he can't. He can't tell you why it works.

He's made a general observation, and you put it all the ways in which lemons aren't as good as oranges. If you boil the orange juice, it did vitamin C disappear. If you use copper, that leaches out the assorbic acid, which is what you need for scurvy. Lin discovers something, but you realize that a piece of knowledge has to exist within an ecosystem to be useful. And there's no ecosystem. Lin discovers a stray fact.

And a stray fact is of limited use, we really, in the real world. And without that fact being anchored, you know, you end up with these paradoxes of two and a years later, Scott is like, his men are dying of scurvy. Like, you know, you're left baffled. I'm curious. So is that a tendency that you see more often? You've been thinking about all these experiments. You've told all these stories about these different experiments that have happened, that have been deliberately designed, that have accidentally occurred.

Do we often conduct experiments and then not realize what it is that we've actually found because we've got nowhere to take advantage of the knowledge or to plug the knowledge into to some wider theory of the world? Well I would say, you know, the most interesting point you make in that episode is that they didn't understand that there was a kind of, for a long time, that there was a window that you could go without vitamin C for a while and be fine and then boom, the hammer comes down. Which is an incredibly, first of all, a difficult thing to, as you point out, to find out. And the implications of that is you can think you've solved the problem

and you haven't. I guess what this is saying is that the thing that people often misunderstand, I guess, about modern science is the value of having a vast number of academics out there who are treading over the same territory. We sometimes roll our eyes about, oh my God, do we really need to have a hundred research facilities funded by the whatever. But we do. This is what was the problem with scurvy, right? Yeah.

You need to have 25 different labs around England doing work on scurvy in the 19th century, so we could have teased out all of these little qualifying facts and so we could have populated the kind of ecosystem. Yeah, and it wasn't, and it actually wasn't just Linde. I mean, there was somebody before Linde, there were people after Linde, but there weren't enough of them.

Not only was this discovered and then forgotten or misunderstood, it was discovered and then misunderstood and then forgotten multiple times. Then we went through this whole cycle of people believing in this thing and then not believing in this thing, because they just didn't have enough of that extra work to attach it to their understanding of how the world works. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because reporters and scientists I think learned the same lesson over the course of their careers, which is, you think you're done and you're not. You know, all those qualifying facts you lay out about Scurvy that were misunderstood,

there's more to Scurvy than Lemons. Then don't oranges, right? I mean, just the Lem- I thought just the Lemmon distinction. I was thinking, who on earth would have thought there was a difference between lemons and oranges in their ability to kind of deliver the Crucial ingredient for stopping scurvy. Yeah, well, it's the limes the limes is the reals because they're just they're just green lemons right? Limes are just green lemons except Tent out they're not and the brits are falsely called limies. They should be called oranges. Yeah, well

they're they're they are correctly called limies because they're drinking lime juice and that's their problem because they, they wrongly think that limes are just like oranges and lemons. Yeah. When I'm cooking, if a recipe calls for lemon juice or lime juice, it's like, yeah, it's the same. It's not the same. It's not the same, but it, but since you don't know what vitamin C is. Oh, right. I misspoke. It's the difference between oranges and lemons on the one hand and limes on the other. Yes, the crucial. You see it's so subtle, it's so easy to lose track, a commission in the British Navy awaits

Malcolm. You're failure to fully internalize the distinction between different citrus fruits. This was so much fun. Thank you so much. Thank you Tim. It's a wonderful series. Thank you to Malcolm Gladwell and if you've not done so, subscribe and listen to the latest season of his podcast Revisionist History.