Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so
much for your support. Alrighty, So I came across an
interesting story. It was from a podcast, and I'm on location,
so I don't have the audio to play for you.
But it's a guy by the name of Malcolm Gladwell.
And I confess I did not know this man's name,
but I do know one of his pieces of work,
which was the Tipping Point. Do you remember that the
tipping Point? This guy apparently has coined a couple of
phrases that are now in sort of the popular vernacular,
particularly with like the crossover of culture and politics. So
this is a guy who is I think he's described
by Jim Garrity at National Review as being well ensconced
in the cultural elite. And he doesn't mean that as
an insult. This is a guy who is literally like
a taste maker, trendsetter, kind of a dude. Okay, And
that's just the background, and you'll see why it's important
in a moment. So he goes onto a podcast called
The Real Science of Sport. I confess I had never
heard of that either, and it is hosted by a
sports scientist, professor, and I confess I had never heard
of that line of work ever before either, this sports
scientist professor Ross Tucker, as well as a sports journalist
Mike Finch, but he doesn't really play a role in
this back and forth. So you've got Raw Tucker and
this guy Malcolm Gladwell. Okay, So Ross Tucker and Gladwell
have done a number of things together over the years.
And one of the things that they did back in
either they weren't really clear on the date. It was
somewhere around twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two, but
try to imagine, like, you know, where we were as
a society and culture in twenty one twenty two, right
we were we were still you know, coming out of
the pandemic. A lot of the mask mandates were still
in place. If you were North Carolina. In free er states,
they had dropped long ago, if they were ever implemented
at all. But you know, there were fights over whether
the school should reopen. People were still freaked out about
you know, standing five feet away from somebody or six
feet away from somebody, and all of that. There was
also the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful protests and
rioting and looting, and so we still had a lot
of that stuff going on. We had cancel culture running
full bore, and at the time we also were having
the rise of woke, right. We were seeing these presentations
in corporate settings and in school settings right with the
privileged walks and all of that stuff. So this was
like sort of peak crazy. Okay, So they go on
to a panel discussion. It was at something called the
Sloan Conference. And I confess I have never heard of
the Sloan Conference either. It's held every year at MIT
in Boston. I have heard of them. But they were
on a panel together Ross Tucker, the sports scientist professor,
and Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.
And so I believe let me see here. Tucker was
a panelist and Gladwell was the moderator, Okay, And what
Gladwell tells Tucker is that the organizers stacked the panel discussion.
They stacked it against you, Ross, That's what he says.
They put a trans athlete and a trans advocate and
you on the panel. And Gladwell was the moderator, and
he says it was one of those strange situations where
he said, my suspicion was that ninety percent of the
people in the audience were actually on Tucker's side, but
five percent of the audience was willing to admit it.
So a ninety percent support in an audience, but only
five percent of them willing to voice that support. Because
Tucker was saying things like men and women are different
and men have an inherent physiological biological advantage when playing
against female in sports, and whenever he would say these things,
dead silence in the audience. Nobody would clap, nobody would
signal approval or agreement. But when the two trans panelists
would say no, no, if a dude wants to play
against the women, that's totally fine, and the audience would
erupt in cheers. And Gladwell says it was a particular
moment which has now passed in our society. He means,
if we did a replay of that exact panel at
the Sloan Conference this year, he says, it runs in
the exact opposite direction. In other words, now the people
are applauding. When Tucker would say what he was saying,
he says, I suspect there'd be near unanimity in the
room that trans athletes have no place in the female category.
He says, I'm ashamed of my performance in that panel.
On that panel, he's ashamed of his performance because I
share your position one hundred percent, and I was cowed.
He says, I was in I believe in retrospect in
a dishonest way. I was objective in a dishonest way.
That is not for me. I'm still feeling fine. It'll
pass here. It goes Charlotte Fire Department. That's the ladder.
I missed it. It's a ladder truck though heading in Touptown.
I missed the number on it. Godspeed Ben. So what's
interesting here is that this guy Gladwell, who is you
know among the cultural elite, acknowledging what I and probably
you had long suspected during the peak crazy of twenty
one and twenty two, that these people didn't really believe
this stuff. They didn't they just went along. And it's
one of the things that I've said for years, and
I forget who I first heard say it. It's not
my brilliance that conjured this up, but I do believe
it to be true that most people think that they
would be the family that hid and Frank and her
family in their attic from the Nazis, when in fact
most people would not. Most people would turn them in right.
Most people don't make the courageous decision, which is why
it's called courageous. So this guy, Malcolm Gladwell now acknowledges
he was one hundred percent on board with Ross Tucker's view,
but he allowed Tucker to stand alone on that stage
and to take all of the slings and arrows and
to be met with death silent stares and allow the
audience to rave with applause for the people that were
saying things that Gladwell knew were one hundred percent incorrect.
And then there's one moment he said that really solidified
it for him. So when I was a kid, my
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and my dad took care of him as he got worse.
Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much
support for caregivers and family. But things are different today
because of the work of so many people, including the
Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with
awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for
twenty five years. This cause means a lot to me.
I participate in the annual Walk to End Alzheimer's and
I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year, and it's
called once again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and
you can join the team and walk with us. It's
on October eighteenth that truest field. Sign up at alz
dot org slash walk and then you could search for
my team name Pete's Pack. There's also a link at
thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description
of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia
Walk on October eleventh, and so you can make a
team and join that one too, or make a donation
and helped me hit my goal of five thousand dollars.
If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a
bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can
go to alz dot org slash walk for all the
dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's.
Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me?
For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments.
This is why we walk, all Righty? So I was
talking about Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, a
credentialed member of the cultural elites. Okay, and he's on
a panel discussion back in twenty one or twenty two.
They couldn't really recall with Ross Tucker who is this
podcast host? And Tucker was a panelist, Gladwell is the
moderator on stage with him. There's a transactivist and a
trans athlete. Tucker is saying that men and women are different.
The audience is giving him the silent treatment. The trans
panelists are like men and aren't different. Men can play
in sports that are women's only sports. It's totally fine.
And the audience goes wild with approval and all of this,
and Gladwell is, like I was cowed, I knew what
Ross Tucker was saying. He tells him, he says, I
knew what you were saying was true. I agreed with you,
But in retrospect he said he was in a dishonest way.
He was objective in a dishonest way because he was
I'm just the moderator, so I don't have to weigh
in on this, okay. But then there came a point.
Gladwell says that the trans athlete that was on the
panel at one point they turned to Ross Tucker and
they said, quote, Ross, you have to let us win.
End quote. And it was at that moment Gladwell says, quote,
I realized this position has gone, This argument has gone
to the furthest extreme. What the trans movement is not
asking for. They're not asking for a place at the table.
They're not asking to be treated with respect and dignity.
What they're asking for is nobody to question the considerable
physical physiological advantage that they bring to the sport, and
no one to question if they're going to win these
races by five seconds, well then just suck it up, right,
That's what they were asking. What they're saying is you
should have to live with that and that when I
heard that, I was like, this is nuts, and yet
I didn't say anything. And this is why at the
very heart of the transactivism is a demand not for equality,
but a demand for conformity, a demand that you abide
by their delusion, that you participate in the fantasy you
are required to say things that you do not believe
to be true. That's what the demand has has always
been at the heart of all of this. And people
there's this belief that when you, you know, rise through the
socioeconomic ranks, you become very well known, like Malcolm Gladwell,
when you become comfortable economically, that now you've got this
perch where you can say whatever you want and you're
not beholden to this stuff. You know, you work from home,
you make your own money, like you don't need somebody
for another job and all of this, and people think
that that insulates you, when in fact, it makes you
less likely to break with the peer pressure and the conformity.
And that's why you saw, as Gladwell surmised, ninety percent
of the people in the audience agreeing with Ross Tucker,
but only five percent of them willing to say they do.
That's why you end up with that the permission structure
once again, right, the permission structure. Once you can say
we saw it all also with Donald Trump, right, there
was that period after Trump was out. J six occurs
and everybody is like, oh my gosh, you icky man,
orange man, you know, and all of this. And then
after he gets well, he gets shot in the first
attempted assassination, after you know, he had been charged, indighted
and dragged through the courts and house raided, right, all
of this stuff, and then he gets shot. And at
that point there becomes this permission structure that it's like
this is not acceptable, no, like and what was it
Mark Zuckerberg who said, like, actually, when you see Trump
stand up and fist in the air, fight fight fight,
like this is pretty cool, you know what I mean?
Like that's pretty cool. And all of a sudden, now
everybody can Elon Musk buying Twitter and coming out for
Donald Trump, and all of a sudden, the floodgates open.
And that's what we call the preference cascade. All of
a sudden, now it's except and then you get the
you know, you get your pioneers, your first followers, and
then you have all the rest of the people that
just you know, crash the gates. So back to Jim
Garritty talking about this at National Review. He points out
that Gladwell is a in demand public speaker. He gets
between two hundred and three hundred thousand dollars per speaking fee,
which is like that, that's Pete calendar money. You have
to look hard to find a guy with a better, higher,
or more stable perch in the American cultural elite, he says.
And I say that because even this guy was afraid
to say what he really thought for fear of getting canceled.
Are there other issues where ninety percent of the public
feels a certain way but only five percent are willing
to say so for fear of social ostracization and dire
professional consequences. Of course there are, right why wouldn't there be?
And then he talks about what's happening over on Blue Sky,
which was the Twitter competitor. All the lefties were like, oh,
I can't stand elon, and so they all fled to
Blue Sky and like, if you're a conservative, you set
up an account over there, and you'll get banned like
within a minute. They do not countenance any disagreement whatsoever
on blue sky. And it's a microcosm, writes Noah Smith,
for all of the American liberalism right now, the entire
left of center became defined by cancel culture, and now
the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack.
But everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking
spaces because they say, there was a big idea that
social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a
small number of progressives to shame a huge number of
Americans into accepting their values, and for a decade it
seemed to be working, but it overreached and collapsed, And
so now you've got a shrinking pool of leftists in
these spaces, and they're just canceling each other because there's
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Tickets Slash terms Limited time offer. All Right, So this
Malcolm Gladwell, you know, this credentialed member of the cultural elite,
admits he was cowed, he was dishonest when he refused
to express any kind of opposition to the demands of
transgender activists to allow men to play in women's sports.
And by the way, we saw this also right here
in North Carolina Lo those many years ago, with the
fight over HB two. I keep bringing this up because
it's very relevant now that the tide has turned, the
vibe has shifted. And our former governor who ran on
this issue to let men into women's bathrooms and locker
rooms and showers and such, he ran on a campaign
to win the governor's mansion to beat Pat McCrory by
oh so few votes. On the HB to issue, and
now he is running for US Senate and Roy Cooper
should not be able to dodge these questions about whether
or not he was wrong about HB two, which he was,
so that's part of it. Let me get to this email.
It's from Ron down in Rockhill to Pete at vptecleanershow
dot com. It's a Pete meal and Ron says, uh,
he's actually thankfully says for all of the transgender insanity
sort of, it seems to have been the bridge too
far that enabled the pendulum to swing back to some
semblance of rational thinking. Dee I nonsense, defund the police,
COVID insanity, social justice riots, all of it didn't do it,
but the transgenderism thing came to the rescue. So yeah,
I mean there that's the thing, Like, you never know
what the reaction to these things are going is going
to be. People can make predictions and such, but nobody knows.
So yes, more cow bell, Thank you, Bob. And this
is from South Carolina number who says, tell that guy
admitting it now after the danger of being canceled has passed,
it only means that he was a coward for not
admitting it then. Well and look to his credit, it
sounds like that's what he was admitting to, right, he
was acknowledging that he folded. We saw it during COVID
as well, right when everybody was running around saying, get vaccinated,
get vaccinated, And I mean I got vaccinated, but I
never told anybody else to do so. I had co
morbidities and I was like way overweight, sedentary, like I'm
probably a high blood pressure and all this. I was like,
I'm probably in the elevated risk category. I said, but
everybody could make their own decision. And I was against
all of the mandates, against the lockdowns and the masking rules,
all of Roy Cooper's eds. We had a lot of them,
his executive directives. So so yeah, like I think that that.
You know, that also showed how many people are willing
to simply fall into line when you know, the experts
say something, and that has eroded a lot of the
trust that we have now in our institutions and the
quote unquote experts. Okay, this is a very long text.
I'm not going to be able to read it yet.
I will come back to that. That's from Baine. I'll
have to come back to that. But speaking of the
great cancelation culture collapse. Have you heard the news about
Barry Weiss. You know who she is. She was a columnist.
She may have been like the youngest columnist at the
New York Times or something like that. She was very young,
and you may recall how her cancelation occurred. It was
over the crazy idea that a sitting US Senator should
be able to offer an op ed about rioting in
our cities. Tom Cotton US Senator Tom Cotton submitted an
op ed to the New York Times, and in it
he said, Hey, maybe we shouldn't allow all of the
rioting and looting to occur, and maybe we should actually
be sending in National guardsmen to quell the riots and
maintain the peace. And the leftists inside the New York
Times newsroom had to complete and utter meltdown. They forced
out the editor that ran the op ed, and then
Barry Weiss was collateral damage in that because I believe
she came to the defense of the editor who said
we should run this. It's a sitting US senator and
the point is for a newspaper like this is to
have these discussions. And the leftists were like, no, we
don't want any discussions, because that's how leftists roll, right.
They don't want a free flowing debate. They want compliance
to what they want. So Barry Weiss oh, also she
was pro Israel, and so the leftist did not like
her for that either, and that was even before October seventh.
So she gets forced out. She leaves The New York Times,
and she talked about this when she launched her sub
stack publication called The Free Press. And over the last
five years she has built The Free Press into this
stable of all of these different voices and journalists doing
a lot of good work. And now somebody has come
along and said, we would like to buy you. You
know who it is, ce BS News. All right, you
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Visit incentive tripkit dot com because great trips deserve even
better returns. From the text line, did get to read
through Bain's text here, it says Years ago, doctor Scott Peck,
author of the well known The road Less Traveled, wrote
a lesser known book called The People of the Lie
a Clinical Look at Evil. His focus was on the
mass murder of twenty two unarmed South Vietnamese civilians called
the Myli Massacre, led by the US Lieutenant William Cally
in March of nineteen sixty eight. The questions raised was
how in the world could a group of soldiers do this?
And how no one within the platoons spoke up during
the atrocity, begging them to stop during it, during and
after the killings. The gist of a very detailed book
is that we as humans will do things as a
group we would never dream of doing as individuals. As
Malcolm Gladwell suggested, there is a group dynamic that I
dare say is demonic that overtakes people, as Jesus experienced
with the crowd yell and crucify him. The and Frank
example that I gave earlier is also another example of that. Yeah,
this is this is why they say courage is contagious, right,
once one person steps forward, then it emboldens somebody else.
I've talked about the how riots begin. There was a
sociologist that looked at riots in the sixties and talked
about how everybody has a number basically, and you know,
if your number is zero, that means you don't need
to see anybody else pick up a brick and throw
it through a window. But if your number is two,
after you see two people do that, then you join in,
and then somebody whose number was three sees you, and
then they join in someone who's numbers four and so
as you can imagine it just starts. That's again, that's
a cascading effect, right, just sort of lemming, like just money,
just kind of rushes where everybody is going. All right,
let me go over here and talk to Ray. Hello, Ray,
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Hey Pete, how you doing?
Speaker 1: I'm all right? How are you all right?
Speaker 2: I had a couple quick questions maybe you could answer
it for me. First off, we're saturated via WBT radio
here in this area with getting the new conservative news
points out. I was just wondering if that holds true
across the whole country or are we kind of few
and far between. And the second question is do you
think we're making having a better fight of it fighting
the left like now versus the days of water cron
Cot and Dan rather. Those are my two questions.
Speaker 1: So on the first, I am not aware of another
radio station that has hosts from uh five am until
nine pm. I'm not aware of that. I think every
station either starts later or ends much earlier. So we
are unique, I think in that regard. But there are other,
you know, conservative news talk radio stations throughout the country.
There are a bunch of them in all different markets.
So I don't know if that answers your question or not,
but I think, yeah, we are. We are unique in
that regard, Yes, based on the abount of local coverage. Yeah.
And then what was the second one, that are we
making any kind of a difference.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, we are making a better fight of
it this day, getting our conservative points out and making
it known better than we did, say in the days
of Walter Cronkott and Dan Rather.
Speaker 1: Well. Yeah, I mean I think so. I mean there's
you know, it's just like h. Thomas Soul always says that,
you know, there are no solutions, there were only trade offs.
And so on the one hand, we lost a lot
of national unity by having a lot of different media
sources because now people can get different they can get
different coverage, they get different opinions and even different news stories. Right,
so we don't all believe that, you know, this is
the one big story that America is following, and so
there's more disunity now in that regard. But on the
other hand, that's a good thing because if the big three,
you know, networks didn't cover a story, or the Washington
Post and the New York Times didn't cover a story,
then people literally would not know about it. So I think,
you know, there are trade offs to the disintegration of
that model. All right, Ray, I appreciate the call. Yeah,
I mean, there are trade offs to the disintegration of
that old model. And now you've got social media and
you've got people that are now being exposed to all
sorts of different ideas that they otherwise might not have been.
So yeah, I mean for some people it's been very good.
And you know, maybe for other people that just kind
of descend into the algorithm rabbit hole and they only
follow the stories they want to follow and they live
in an echo chamber, then you know, for them, there's
probably no difference, you know, because they're just still not
interested in breaking free of that echo chamber. So I think,
like I said, it's there's just a lot of trade
offs there. The media ecosystem as it is now. I
think it will serve whatever purpose you want it to
serve for yourself, but you have to be your own
aggregator now versus in the past. All Right, that'll do
it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
I could not do the show without your support and
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patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.