Revisionist History
An insight to Malcolm Gladwell’s Mind
Malcolm Gladwell is the genius behind the Revisionist History Podcast. The main premise of the podcast is to get you — the listener — to evaluate the way you view a topic.
His episode topics range from how colleges/universities appropriate money, to the Toyota uncontrolled acceleration recall and even political satire. Every time you think you know about something, Gladwell will approach that same belief from an alternative viewpoint. At the end of every episode you leave forced to confront a new version of a story.
For example, my favorite episode is called Food Fight. In this episode Gladwell explores how colleges/universities appropriate their money and what it has to do with helping poor smart kids attend college.
As someone who is fascinated by the behind the scenes look at how things work this was an amazing episode.
He begins by comparing two similar schools called Bowdoin College and Vassar College. On the surface these schools are very similar, but when you examine how they spend their money they are very different. Gladwell compares these two schools using a strange variable: their food.
Gladwell boils the episode down to, Bowdoin College spends more money on their food and less on helping poor smart students attend their school. As opposed to Vassar College who spends less on food and more on poor students. The episode even provoked a response from Bowdin.
The other issue Gladwell discovers is that even though Vassar College spends less money on amenities — like food — they still need to attract wealthy students in order to balance the budget. The problem is wealthy students want to go to a school with nicer amenities, which creates the problem of college only being obtainable for wealthy kids.
Food Fight is one of my favorite episodes, but an episode called Blame Game was the most eye opening episode. It detailed the 2009 Toyota recall of several cars for the sudden acceleration problems. Gladwell brought to light the real — unpublicized — reason why the cars got out of control: people never pushed on the break.
If you want to stop what you’re doing right now and listen to that episode click here. (You wont be disappointed)
I hope you are inspired to subscribe to Revisionist History and being to binge listen to all his recent episodes.
Come back next week for another podcast or check out last week’s podcast.
