Rodents and Red Wine with Maria Konnikova - Transcripts

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statement credit. Terms apply. We once did an episode of Revisionist History on the importance of cooking French fries in beef tallow. And now I can't take my fries any other way. And why? Because I don't like to settle for second best. And that's also the reason I love T-Mobile. T-Mobile's award-winning 5G coverage is bigger than AT&T and Verizon's combined, and their plans are packed full of incredible extras. Customers can get a value of over $225 in benefits every single month on their Max family plans. With T-Mobile, you get a great network and a great value. Find out more at t-mobile.com-slash-cy. Qualifying service and capable device required $225 based on retail value of available monthly benefits with Max.

I love that you're wearing a t-shirt that says Canada just so that we have no ambiguity

whatsoever.

Where? Where are you right now? Are you in Las Vegas? I'm in Vegas right now, yeah. Just got back here two days ago.

Nice. Very nice. Did I tell you, you know, that I was in Las Vegas and I had an afternoon and I sat in this coffee shop and there were three people next to me having the most interesting conversation. And one of the guys started talking and I realized he was talking about you. Really? Yeah. He was a lawyer of some kind who like was a writer, lawyer or something. I don't know what I couldn't figure it out. And I was eavesdropping on a conversation for like

forever and it was like the most interesting conversation.

I love that story. No, you did not tell me and I have no idea who you're talking about. Allow me to introduce a new voice to this podcast, Maria Konikova. In basketball, they call people like Maria Swiss Army Knives, people who do everything. Maria got a PhD at the famous Walter Michelle, the guy who invented the marshmallow test. She's written a bunch of brilliant New York Times bestsellers. She decided at one point that she was interested in poker, taught herself poker, became a poker champion, made some enormous sum of money. She's the kind of person that random strangers talk about in coffee shops, which is to say my kind of person. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. And I have the pleasure in this episode to bring you the fabulous Maria Konikova, who has agreed to become the first ever Revisionist History ombudsman or rather ombudsman. She is joining the show to be the advocate for you, dear listener, to call me on my nonsense, to be a voice of reason, to participate in the kind of whimsical meandering flights of intellectual fancy that is our trademark here at Pushkin Headquarters.

truth to the power that is Revisionist History. Thanks so much for having me on the show, Malcolm. I'm very excited about this. Maybe you'll change my mind. Maybe I'll change yours. But I think that the conversation is going

to be very entertaining no matter what.

Wonderful. Let's have at it. I am putty in your hands. Is that correct?

Nice putty that's responsive and that talks back.

You're driving this train. All right. Perfect. So one of the fascinating episodes of this season of Revisionist History was about the lack of iodine in people's diets and how this was discovered and how it was actually then addressed. And I actually did not know the story at all. It's such a fascinating question. How do we think about these things in the present day? Would we be able to do something like this today? Especially after COVID, after all of these things, add iodine to their salt or their water and see what happens. What do you think the response to

something like that would be? Well, it's interesting that there is a line, there's a common line of either complaint or congratulation among scientists where they say that experiment could never be done today. The Stanford prison experiment could never be done today, then the Tuskegee syphilis experiment could never be done. There's a whole long list of things. They look at that and they say, and that's because we are much more mindful of people's autonomy, much better about obtaining consent. You totally today could not go to Akron and dose up a bunch of school girls with a ton of iodine. However, my reaction to that argument is always the same, which is, yeah, but we simultaneously conduct consentless experiments on human beings in the present day that are probably way more consequential, and we don't think twice about it. You know, think about the way we have disrupted the lives of, I don't know, children over the last 25 years with all of these new technologies. How is that not a massive experiment done without the consent of those who were experimented on? How is the Facebook algorithm which, you know, shows you only the things that are likely to evoke a deeply emotional response in you? How's it not an experiment? I mean, there's a part of me that just wants to throw up my hands and say, you know, however, let's not even bother making these distinctions.

the one they want to be a part of. I think there's something to that, especially because, you know, at least with the iodine, right, there was scientific evidence for the test, right? There was a reason why they did it. There was a huge body of evidence behind this, and the study was run as a study, and so there were scientific controls in place. You know, they actually could gather data, whereas with a lot of these other things, you know, it becomes a natural experiment, which is obviously, Massey has a lot of unintended consequences, and I mean, there are a lot of different questions there. I'm actually curious about flipping it around, where you have something like fluoride, right, which is another additive that's put in our water, and last year, I don't know if you were following this, but in a town in Vermont, it turned out that a town official for over a decade had been lowering fluoride levels below the accepted minimums because he thought that it was a government conspiracy, you know, fluoride in your water, bad, and he resigned, and it was a big outrage, and everyone was outraged that their water wasn't being properly fluoridated, that they actually weren't getting the numbers that they needed for dental health, cavities, et cetera. I just did think that it was such an interesting counterpoint because normally, it's, oh, don't add anything, right? I don't want anything added that I don't know about. I want natural salt. I want natural water. I want, I don't want you adding anything, you know, big pharma, big government, big, big, et cetera. And here the town was actually horrified, which I think they should have been.

of people disagree. Well, I wonder if that... Are they responding to the Florida, they're responding to what they see as the official abusing his position. Maybe it's a bit of both, or you could see people who might ordinarily be indifferent to fluoride just getting pissed off over this issue. This guy's like, you're not allowed to do that, sir. Hold on, hold on. It's time for a short break. When we come back, we'll talk more about how salt and revisionist history are changing lives, and also the infamous Minnesota Starvation study. Whether you need it for work, school, or a special project, it's important to have the right printer. The Epson EcoTank is a new type of printer that doesn't use cartridges. Stop buying expensive ink cartridges and save yourself the frustration of replacing ink cartridges ever again. The Epson EcoTank printers have supersized, easy to fill ink tanks and come with a ridiculous amount of ink.

exclusions apply. So let's read a letter about someone from someone who I actually I love this letter. I just saw it today. And it is a very positive take on additions to food. And someone who says that the salt episode actually really changed their life. So this is from Mary P. And she writes that it was a crazy awesome coincidence that I was listening to this episode around the same time my doctor felt a nodule on my thyroid. He told me to go get an ultrasound and my thyroid and nodule both were large enough and suspicious enough that it was recommended automatically that I get a biopsy. So she went for her first biopsy and the results came back and conclusive. And I'm going to continue reading her letter. They sent another slide for genetic testing. Meanwhile, I bought some iodized salt and started cooking with it.

a great letter. For all of those who doubt the healing power of revisionist history, I present you this letter. We don't just rile up our listeners. We save lives. This is

a resounding endorsement of eight years of revisionist history. Those types of coincidences are great that you hear something and it actually has such an impact. That would have been a life-changing thing for her to have no thyroid function, half her thyroid function for the rest

of her life. That's a huge thing. Yeah. It's a reminder. This is one of these weird things. A hundred years ago, what she's describing was commonplace. In fact, this is a little fact in that episode that I can never get over my head is if you went to parts of the world that were iodine deficient, some extraordinarily high percentage of the population had these massive goiters on their neck. That was just part of the experience of going to the Swiss Alps or part of the experience of going to somewhere around the Great Lakes, was you'd walk into a small town and whatever, a quarter of the people had big grapefruit-sized commonplace masses on their necks.

Hex. Hex. It's just so strange. It's crazy how little we still know about nutrition. Nutrition is complicated. I think that's one of the reasons why people still have so many questions, so many issues, why we go back and forth with nutritional advice because the body is a complex thing. It's a complex machine. It's very difficult oftentimes to know this is the

recommendation and it will always be the recommendation. Also, it's hard. This is sort of what brings us to the MESA starvation experiment, which I'm sure we're going to talk about, but one of the big impedances for that is that one of the reasons we know so little about nutrition is that it's impossible to test hypotheses about nutrition because how do you do it? If you think about something as simple as, does drinking alcohol harm or help your health? That's a question that's been irrelevant for as long as human beings have drunk alcohol, so thousands and thousands and thousands of years. We're still arguing about that, and the reason we're still arguing about it is it's virtually impossible to design a study which would satisfactorily answer that question. There have been studies which say people who drink wine in moderation seem to live long, healthy lives, but the problem is that people who drink wine in moderation are people who otherwise live moderate, healthy lives, right? They're like, they're villagers in the south of Italy who are getting an enormous amount of exercise and living in bucolic surroundings. So you just don't know, are they living long, happy lives in spite of their wine consumption or because of it, right? Someone's saying, you know, you see these, so you can read, it's just incredibly, I just read the other day, like there's a new line of thinking which says, you know, all alcohol is basically like really bad for you and should be avoided. I saw that. I have no idea what to make of that.

answering these questions with any degree of accuracy is fascinating to me. I have no idea what to make of that. Yeah, it's totally crazy. It's so funny that you, that you mentioned red wine, which is, you know, or alcohol in general, the first one of the first studies I ever worked on as a journalist who kind of is interested in these questions forever ago was on resveratrol. When it first came out, like the data that, oh my God, resveratrol makes you live longer. And everyone was saying, great, drink red wine. It's amazing. Then a few years later, we find out that the quantity of resveratrol you need is just so much higher than you would ever get. And it goes back and forth. And I've seen that one question just go in circles for, you know,

almost 20 years now. And we, we just have no idea. Do you remember? Was it, was it, were they,

were they giving rats large doses of? Yes. Oh, that was the thing. Yes. Oh, that was the thing.

Exactly. That was exactly it. It was rodents. Rodents said red wine. So the only, the only thing we can say for certain is that within the rat population, those who enjoy a good bottle

of wine every night are going to live a little longer. So I think that this is a good, a good segue point. You know, people who were not drinking any wine were taking part in the starvation study that was part of this, this season of revisionist history. So, I mean, first of all, that study, let's just kind of recap it very quickly. I mean, we're talking actual starvation, like the number of calories that these men, so it was all men, right? It was all young, relatively healthy men who were, for one reason or another, not in the military, not serving abroad during World War II. And they were all, you know, brought to this place to try to control, because as we've just talked about, it's really difficult to control food intake, to try to control it as much as possible, to try to do their part for the war effort, to see how starvation affects the body. Is that a fair summary?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly. Because the only thing I want to add is the impetus was, this was in the middle of the war, and the feeling was that by the end of the war, one of the biggest problems the world was going to face was that millions of people around the world were, had suffered prolonged malnutrition throughout the conflict, and we didn't know how to help them. We honestly had no idea, if someone has been malnourished for a year and a half, what is the best way to nurse them back to health? And literally, people at the time didn't emphasize a clue, right? So they were trying to answer that question with some, or at least get some information about that. So the stakes here were huge. That's what gives

the study its kind of moral force. So that's an interesting question, right? Does the study have the necessary moral force to do something like this? Because back in the day, back when this study was done, World War II, we didn't have the sort of reviews on studies that we have today. So these days, you need to go through an IRB, which is an institutional review board, when you're doing any sort of human research, and you need to have every single subject give informed consent. And, and this is crucial, the benefits of this specific study have to outweigh any potential harm to the participants in the study. And so to me, when I listened to kind of the details of the starvation experiment, I knew that it existed, but I actually didn't, I'd never actually kind of gone deep into it. This was the most I'd learned about it was from you. And as I was listening, I was trying to think, you know, first of all, benefits versus harm, you know, how do we think about that? And I think that's actually changed over the years. The second part of it is, how do you actually give informed consent of all the potential downsides to something like this, when you're researching something where you don't

actually know what the potential downsides are? Well, it's like space flight. You're sending an astronaut to the moon. Presumably you pull the astronaut aside beforehand and you say, the benefit here is mankind will be able to say we went to the moon. But you know, in that situation, the first astronaut in space, we don't know what it's like to be out for a couple weeks in zero gravity. So I don't know, how did they do consent? I guess they said, you're taking a risk of unknown quantity. You might be damaged by what you're doing. Are you fine with that? And I think the answer they were fine with it is that many of those astronauts came out of the military. And so they were used to the idea that they were called to do something on behalf of their country, which carried with it a significant risk of illness and death.

I think that's an interesting example, but it's not a complete analogy because this was their profession, right? This was their career. This is what they had signed up for. They became astronauts with the knowledge that they would hopefully be able to go into space one day. Whereas these study participants were just ordinary men who were called upon by their patriotic feelings and said, do you want to do your patriotic duty? That's a lot of pressure and that's not your life. This is not something that's your career. You're being asked to do

something that's just totally out of the ordinary. Wait, are you a Minnesota starvation experiment

skeptic? Do you not think it should have been done? No, I'm someone who wants to push back though, and to question how it was done and whether they could potentially have ever given informed consent to something like this, especially given what we know now about the longitudinal long-term effects about starvation. Back then, the term epigenetic, I don't think even existed. People did not know kind of what the interaction of genes and environment is. Today, we actually know that starvation has lifelong consequences. They actually change the methylation patterns of your genes, of your genome, and that there's actually a lot of damage that is going to be done for your entire life. The funny thing is a lot of the data, the best data that we have on this didn't come from the starvation experiment, but actually happened from a natural experiment that came at the exact same time more or less contemporaneous, which was basically the Dutch hunger winter. This was also during World War II, and there was a huge famine in the Netherlands because there was a blockade by the Nazis, and thousands of people died. I think something like 20,000 people ended up dying. But at the same time, there were a bunch of women who were pregnant, and doctors were taking all of the measurements that you would normally take during pregnancy, but these women happened to be starving. Then they ended up following the women and the babies for their lives and actually got an amazing amount of data on what starvation does to the body.

where a bunch of men said, okay, starve me, and let's see what happens this time with me. So imagine that we were doing a version of the Dutch starvation thing involving pregnant women,

but it was an experiment, right? All right, magic wand.

This is definitely a magic wand. This is definitely a magic wand. And what we learned from that is that actually starving people when they're pregnant has incredible, unanticipated long-term consequences, not just for the mother, but for the child. And would even maybe for the child's children? Child's children. Yeah. Child's children. Yeah, absolutely. So in other words, and we had no idea of this before, so this is a earth-shattering, huge bit of understanding about human beings. Why wouldn't this be an argument, why wouldn't the magnitude of what we learned from that such an experiment be an argument for doing the experiment? It's so important that hundreds, thousands, millions more people could be helped from the knowledge gleaned from that experiment than those who were harmed by it. And if the people who signed up for that experiment had at least a kind of reasonable suspicion that what was learned from them putting themselves at risk might help many, many, many, many, many more people, then to my mind, that settles it.

a lot more people, and I'm fine with that. Yeah. So like I said, when you asked me, am I a skeptic of this? I said, I'm not necessarily someone who said this shouldn't have happened. I just think that there are lots of issues to consider. So yeah, there is this. There's definitely an argument to be made that what we learned from Dutch famine shows that studies like this are incredibly important. But in this particular case, I think in the pregnancy case, you're also giving consent for your fetus. So it's one of these things where that's, even if you're an altruist, I think that that would be a very strange definition of altruism, because you're being altruistic for the world, but not for this one specific human who has no

say in this whatsoever. But I would say this, like, so for much of human history, continuing to the present day, a large percentage of the world's population suffers from prolonged malnutrition, right? Absolutely. So one really important historical question is, what can we do to convince the wealthier parts of the world that this is such an urgent problem that it needs to be addressed immediately, right? Wouldn't it make sense to try an extreme experiment of this sort to try and bring the world around?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a very valid point. And you actually had a letter from a listener, Robert A., who asked a question that kind of circles around what we've been talking about. He asks, who is responsible for a system which both restricts voluntary breakthrough research like that conducted by Ansel Keys, and the conscientious objectors, and that which fails to take accountability when mistakes are made? So that's, I think, an interesting question, because you do have those two sides of it. So we do have a system that now does restrict that kind of breakthrough research quite often. I mean, when I was in grad school for psychology, and I needed to do an experiment that had deception, I just, I couldn't get it approved. I had to jump through so many hoops. And eventually, you know, with the support of all the senior faculty in the psychology department, it was just a silly thing. It wasn't even a major deception study, but we needed, we couldn't tell them that we were studying self-control, right? Because that would actually have defeated the purpose of the entire study, and how many studies are not done because of that.

How do we kind of, how do we walk that line? Yeah. Yeah. I will say that there is, there is one area on this where I am, I'm the, you know, I've been talking so far about how I, I would, I tend to be pretty lazy, fair about giving researchers the freedom to do things that are a little bit risky or, um, um, there's another area though, where I'm on the exact opposite side of the fence. And what am I referring to? Patience Grasshopper. When we come back, more from my conversation with Maria Konikova. Whether you need it for work, school, or a special project, it's important to have the right printer. The Epson EcoTank is a new type of printer that doesn't use cartridges. Stop buying expensive ink cartridges and save yourself the frustration of replacing ink cartridges ever again. The Epson EcoTank printers have supersized easy to fill ink tanks and come with a ridiculous amount of ink. With the Epson EcoTank, you don't have to worry about running out of ink, so start printing in color.

This drives me nuts. Behavior. Yeah. I know that there's a lot to be said for that. It's like we've never outlived the instinct for public executions, right? Where everyone would come to the town square. That instinct is still alive and well. It's an important tangent to go on. And it is kind of related to everything we've been talking about, about how do you study this? You know, what are the benefits? What are the harms? And there's, you know, so kind of coming full circle back to the starvation experiment, there is one thing that we haven't talked about, which was an important point that one of the listeners brought up.

people who need them and how generalizable is it? If you're trying to develop actionable policies and guidelines and approaches to effective populations, it absolutely does matter. And, you know, we went through this with, I think, with our understanding of heart attacks, right? Where we started off testing a lot of these hypotheses in men, white men, and that's how we got our baseline knowledge. But then we tried to use that information to kind of understand how to deal with women without realizing that the biology of a lot of these problems, physiology of a lot of these problems in women is very different. So I think it depends where you are in the kind of stage that you're at. And the mistake we make, I think, is we don't honor this distinction between kind of basic understanding and actionable research. If you talk to somebody who works for a pharmaceutical company and is involved in drug trials, you know, they will talk your ear off on this. And what they will say is, do you know how hard it is to put together a study population? It's insanely difficult to find someone. I actually thought of, I was going to volunteer for a trial about Lyme disease vaccine. And then I had that I, the first thing to do is you have a half an hour conversation with someone, and they detail that I would have to go drive to Albany an hour away, seven times, and have to set aside half a day on each of those occasions.

Yeah, sure. No, I think there's a lot of truth to that. That said, I do think that even baseline knowledge studies these days should at least include women because, you know, if you're omitting more than half the population and the basic biology is different, then-

But you couldn't have done the starvation experiment with women.

With women. So that's the other thing, right? What are we proposing in the starvation case? Do we want women there and Hispanic and Black, where it's much more difficult to actually obtain consent, because especially back then, but even to this day, you know, these are populations that have had a lot of negative research done without consent. And it's actually much more difficult, I would say, and the burden of proof is much higher to ask for consent from vulnerable population. Yeah. Yeah. Population.

But you can't do a starvation experiment like that in Minnesota on young women, because if it has consequences for their fertility, then you have- Yes. So what are you going to see? And it does. So are we going to use post-menopausal women only? But that brings up a whole different set of issues, because now you have an older population that's going to be less susceptible to whatever risks you're exposing them to. It's tricky. This reminds me, we talk in the season about magic wands, experiments we could do if we could wave a magic wand. This one doesn't actually require a magic wand, although it would be very hard to do in the real world. But- Yes, and it does. You mentioned that natural experiment in Holland, which gave us information that would have been almost impossible to get otherwise in a formal experiment. And it goes to the larger point that this is the great thing about natural experiments, is that when you can find a good one, they almost invariably tell you stuff that you could never find another one. They're incredibly productive kind of experiment.

of Facebook, Apple, Google, and someone else. I meant to ask Malcolm, what is your mother's

maiden name? I just have a few more questions before we wrap up. I know, it's like a ludicrous. And so it's fine for those guys to scour the internet and put together massive dossiers of every fact about me. But somehow if I want to allow someone to peek into my physiological, for the benefit of mankind, that's a problem. It just drives me crazy.

It is a problem, and I didn't know that I had hit a nerve with that one word privacy, but here we are. So that, I think, is a nice place to wrap up our starvation study, except for one final question. One listener was really fascinated by the cinnamon roll recipe from the episode of the starvation study. Tara A., she said, thank you for these episodes, Malcolm. So Malcolm, thank you for these episodes. Any chance you know how we could track down that cinnamon roll recipe? I was thinking it would be nice to make some and share in my community. And for a refresher for listeners who don't love cinnamon rolls as much as I do, so didn't immediately light up at this detail. So there was a character in the episode, Lester Glick, who was part of the study. And one of the things that mentally fortified him, although I think for me it would have probably had the opposite effect, is he carried around a picture of a cinnamon

roll, and he had it with him always, and it was something that kept him going. And then later he would, for the rest of his life, he would make them obsessively for family and friends by the

dozens. It was the defining, one of the defining acts of the rest of his life. Now, I love cinnamon

rolls, so I also wanted to track down that recipe. We will post it online and all those brave souls who want to recreate the famous cinnamon rolls can do that. That was fun. Thank you, Maria. That's really fun. Of course. Thank you. Bye-bye. Maria, Maria, Maria, thank you so much for going to take on the role of revisionist history's inaugural mambas person. Just so all of you know, we hope to make Maria a regular on this show in the future. You may have thought she went easy on me this time. Let me just say I have no expectation that will ever happen again.

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