The Great American Elevator Tragedy | The Mistakes Series

A single line of a building code proposal filled out by a fire inspector in Glendale, Arizona has had a devastating impact on the way housing is built across the entire United States. Malcolm enlists Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the Center for Building in North America, to investigate. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at GetHumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Bushkin.

• 1:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  I am, I am proud to say, a Yimby. Yes, in my backyard. I have come to my Yimby-ness recently, so I have all the zeal of the recently converted. Yimby stands for building as much housing as is humanly possible. Reforming stupid zoning laws, outdated building codes. Yimby hates minimum lot sizes, setback zoning, mandatory parking requirements, rent control, anything that makes building new things more expensive. Yimby thinks that when it comes to cities, America peaked around 1910, and we should just roll back the zoning clock 100 years. Yimby walks through one of those absurdly picturesque New England villages, or some breezy Southern California beach town.

• 2:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  And by the way, Yimby only ever walks, or maybe cycles. Yimby never drives, and asks, where are the multifamily apartment buildings? My social media feed is basically just other Yimby's. Shout out to Alicia, courtyard urbanist from Chicago, who posts something about how building European-style courtyard apartment buildings will save the American republic every day. And I am so down for every one of those tweets. Yimby stands at the intersection of righteous indignation and nerdiness, a street corner where I have lived my entire adult life. I am Yimby. Hear me roar.

• 3:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  So, deep into this ever-expanding series on mistakes, I asked myself, what would Yimby's idea of a mistake be? What error, what miscalculation would most enrage the universe of Yimby? And upon consultations with my Yimby comrades, I found it. A single line on a building code proposal filled out by a fire inspector in Glendale, Arizona, named Gregory A. Victor. Concerning, wait for it, elevators. This is the story of the great American elevator tragedy.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I could not find a high-income country that had fewer elevators per capita than the United States.

• 4:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  Meet one of the crown princes of YIMBY, my new best friend, Stephen Smith, director of the Center for Building in North America. He will guide us through the tangled history leading up to Mr. Victor's massive error.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Greece has about half the elevators that the United States does, which is pretty surprising, since Greece has a population of around 10 million and the US is, I don't know, 340 million.

• 4:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's incredible. That's incredible.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, a lot of, a lot of people in Greece live in a little four-story, four-unit apartment building with a tiny little elevator.

• 4:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Some of you may be thinking, "I'm not seriously going to listen to half an hour on elevators, am I?" And my answer to you is, "Oh, yes, you are." And at the end, you will turn to your loved ones and you will say, "I too am now YIMBY. Hear me roar."

• 5:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  What do your friends say about your elevator?

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Code and talk about building codes to friends.

• 5:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Do you?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  It's a good way to not have friends, you know?

• 5:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wait, are you, you cannot be serious. You don't, you don't have long conversations with elevators with your friends?

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Of course I do. I drive them nuts about it. Elevators, you know, sometimes they'll ask a question about something, like a little fun fact for them, but it's not a good way to keep friends to talk about elevator standards.

• 5:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Stephen, I am that exception. Should I ever be at a party with you?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  You can be friends.

• 5:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Should I ever be at a party with you, you have, you have carte blanche to trap me in a corner and talk about elevators for two hours.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm going to talk about something way more, we're going to talk about like handrails or windows or, you know, pushing it beyond elevators.

• 5:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  My producer is laughing in the background. The modern elevator is an American invention. The earliest elevators were made in the mid 19th century by Elisha Otis of Vermont, whose startup Otis Elevators remains one of the world's largest elevator companies. Otis installed the world's first commercial elevator in the Howard Building on the corner of Broadway and Broom Street in Manhattan Soho, which still stands. The vertical city in New York that grew up around the Howard Building was made possible by Otis's invention. But at some point between then and now, the era of American elevator dominance began to sputter.

• 6:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  If you were an ordinary working American who lives in a split level out in the suburbs and works in an office park, maybe you didn't notice. But you know who did? YIMBY noticed. In particular, Stephen Smith. This goes back a few years, just after Smith had started a small YIMBY think tank, Center for Building in North America. He'd been a journalist, then real estate, but his true passion, he realized, lay elsewhere: building codes.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  I mean, academia doesn't study building codes. The more prestigious you are as an academic architect, you know, the more esoteric you're getting and, you know, degrowth theory and, you know, things that are kind of divorced from the actual practice of putting one brick on another and nail in a piece of wood. So, you know, academia didn't cover it. I don't know who else was going to get into it. And you don't really get into construction because you love reading and writing. So there's just not a whole lot written about it. So I decided to do it myself.

• 7:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  He raised money, set up shop, and right away, something caught his eye.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  There was some, it was a post on, went back when it was called Twitter. It was still good for this kind of thing that went viral with some developer who had built a little three-story, 12-unit apartment building in Minneapolis and was sort of bragging about, you know, it's pretty affordable. And he was kind of listing, he was talking about the simplicity of the project, you know, it doesn't have any parking, great, doesn't have an elevator. And it kicked up sort of like a firestorm on Twitter. Elevator, what about disabled, you know, I guess disabled people can just go and die, whatever. And I remember thinking like, well, three-story building in America, I mean, they never had elevators, that's not that unusual. But at the time, I happened to be in France.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  I was thinking, well, wait a minute, a new three-story building in France generally does have an elevator. So why is that? And I asked my friend who's the architect, you know, how much does an elevator cost in Italy for a three-story building? He was like, I don't know, 20, 30,000 euros. I said, well, there must be some misunderstanding, there's no way an elevator costs 20 or 30,000 euros in Italy, that doesn't make any sense, that's a small fraction, you know, in the US, that would be, I don't know, 120, 150,000 dollars.

• 8:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why on earth would an elevator be five times the cost in America as it is in Europe? He went back home, moved apartments, and suddenly the question was all he could think about. So you live in Brooklyn?

• 9:07Speaker 04

  I live in Brooklyn, I live in a five-story building, there are two units on each floor. It's on a very small lot, it's on a lot that's roughly, the footprint of the building is about 1,200 square feet, and there are five stories, seven apartments over a very popular vintage store.

• 9:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  What floor are you on?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  I'm on the third floor. And in Europe, it would have been hard to stick an elevator in the building, but you could have done it. I've seen, I've seen floor plans from France especially, they're very good at sticking a, you know, a little spiral staircase and a very small elevator. You could have gotten an elevator in the building. There is no way in hell you could have gotten an elevator in the building with anything even conceivably close to our current rules. But in France, they would have done it. In France, this building would have an elevator, I believe.

• 9:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  And for Stephen, this was a problem. And with the result that when you, you had a period of your life, as I read in the elevator report, where you were effectively disabled.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  Yes, I had a mysterious virus in 2017. Turned out to be the sort of long COVID-like illness, obviously not from COVID because it was 2017. And yeah, I had, I still do have a disease called POTS, where you stand up and your heart rate goes wild, a lot of fatigue, probably an autoimmune disease that has not really been understood very well yet. And yeah, it was difficult. You know, there were definitely days where what happens is when you exert yourself, you pay for it physically in kind of intense ways. You get sort of brain fog and extreme fatigue, you know, I might sleep 12, 13 hours a day. And so, yeah, there were days when like, I think it would have been nice to go for a walk and I didn't because I was on the third floor.

• 10:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. In one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the wealthiest city, in the premier country in the world, there is a brand new apartment building that is effectively off limits, segregated from anyone who is not fit enough to walk up multiple flights of stairs. And why? Because the United States has somehow given up on the widespread adoption of a technology that it invented 150 years ago. But your building, no old person could ever move into your building.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  I think I'm the oldest person who lives in the building.

• 11:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  How old are you?

• 11:25Speaker 04

  37.

• 11:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  I mean, this is...

• 11:28Speaker 04

  I think I'm the oldest.

• 11:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  See, this is, the whole, this whole thing is just nuts. Yes, it is nuts. Smith spent two years trying to answer the question of why Americans gave up on the elevator. The result, entitled Elevators, is maybe the most comprehensive and, and I'm not just saying this because I'm imby, fascinating exploration of a topic that I'm guessing few of you have ever thought about. 122 pages, beginning with a sentence right out of some 19th century novel. In late 2020, tired of my old Brooklyn apartment, historic and charming, but loud and full

• 12:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  of maintenance hassles, I put my co-op unit on the market and set out to buy a new condo.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  This is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla sedan with the latest features and tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 14:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  Some of the reasons why American elevators are so expensive are not surprising. Chapter four of Smith's magnum opus is entitled "Labor." "Labor is the elephant in the room of the elevator industry," he writes. "The workforce that builds and maintains elevators is small and specialized and highly unionized, and nowhere are those things more true than in the United States." "The most cost-effective way to build an elevator is to assemble the whole thing in a factory, then ship it to the building site and drop it in with a crane." That's what they do in Europe. But in the United States, the elevator union insists on assembling the elevators themselves.

• 14:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  So everything is assembled in the factory, shipped to the building site, then disassembled and put back together in the cramped confines of the elevator shaft.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Where it's really bad is the sort of sister industry of the elevators, which is the escalators. I mean, an escalator truly is almost fully assembled in a factory abroad and then craned onto site. And in North America, you're taking it apart. There was this, I found a sort of newsletter from the I U E C, the, you know, the North American Union, where the guy who runs it, or, you know, one of the, I know the general president or something, is sort of bragging to his membership, you know, who's trying to promote his leadership. And he says, you know, "You don't know how hard it is to convince an arbitrator that, you know, you got to take apart this escalator."

• 15:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  At that point, we were interrupted.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  I apologize. Somebody's ringing my doorbell. One second. Okay. I don't know whether that package was for me, but they're going to leave in the lobby because I don't have an elevator in my building.

• 15:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  Where were we? This is like my kids with their, with their, with their magnet tiles, their Lego. Like, they, at the end of the day, they take whatever they built and they smush it.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  And then they rebuild it the next day. Yes. Exactly like my kids with their magnet tiles.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  There are parts of the elevator I've seen in settlement agreements or lawsuits. You know, most of this stuff happens behind closed doors or literally in a tight shaft. And you don't get a lot of insight into it, but you see it in court cases and in settlement agreements that should not be posted online, but are sometimes. And there's this one, I don't know, arbitration case or legal case, I don't know what it was, where they're saying something like, you know, it's common practice for us to take something apart and put it all together, but you need to prove that you took it apart. Because otherwise, what's to say you didn't just hang out playing on your cellphone in the shaft? And so, you know, the practice is for you to sign your name on the part. So if you take it apart, the manager can see, oh, you really took it apart.

• 16:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Now, as crazy as this is, it doesn't really answer the question. Yes, the elevator unions are stronger in the US than Europe. Elevator technicians get paid more. American elevator workers insist on doing dumb things like taking apart already-built elevators like small children with their magnet tiles. But none of these things explain why an American elevator would be five times more expensive than its European counterpart. There has to be an even more important reason. And oh, yes, there is.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  European cabins are roughly half. For, let's say, for a new six-story apartment building with a couple of units per floor, the cabin size in Europe is about half the size, really the whole rest of the world, is about half the size that it is in the US and Canada. And that's because, number one, they don't require space for, I mean, it's for accessibility, but exactly what it is is never really written down, but probably something like a turning radius for a wheelchair. The European one will accommodate a wheelchair, and in fact, that's what it's designed for. But you'll probably have to either back in or back out, one or the other.

• 18:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  In Europe, Stephen Smith Building would have an elevator because Europeans are willing to live with pint-sized elevators. In America, we aren't. Which seems to make good sense, right? Because what if you had a heart attack and you're on a stretcher? You'd want your exit from your fifth-floor apartment to be as speedy and efficient as possible. Except that in insisting that elevators be really large, for those very rare occasions when a large elevator would be really convenient, you make the elevator so bulky that it can't fit in a lot of smaller buildings. And so expensive that no one trying to build affordable housing has the means to put an elevator in their building. With the result that if you're in a wheelchair, you simply can't live in Stephen Smith's building.

• 18:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  And if you have a heart attack on the fifth floor, the medics are gonna have to drag you down five flights of stairs. Have you ever heard the expression, "The perfect is the enemy of the good"? This is American elevator policy. This is like saying, "Too many people are dying in car accidents. Let's mandate that everyone has to drive to the store in a tank." Problem solved, right? Well, that problem solved, but now you have a million other bigger problems, like massively congested highways, torn-up roads, no parking, and most of all, since a tank costs $15 million, only super-rich people would be able to drive to the store.

• 19:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the spirit of trying to make the world a fair place, we've made the world, in this one dimension, a much less fair place.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  I would say so. Yes. You know, if you're sort of elderly, maybe you'll go into cardiac arrest, and it'd be helpful to have an elevator that can accommodate a fully flat stretcher so, you know, someone can continue to do chest compressions on you while you go down. But, you know, most people will never be in that situation, or frankly, if they are, they'll die anyway. The out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rate is very low. But, you know, pretty much everyone gets to a point, or at least if you're lucky, in life where you can't really use the stairs, but you could, you know, stand with a walker in a small elevator. So, yeah, we really look for these edge cases, try to solve them, and then kind of throw our hands up when people don't have elevators at all, and say, "Oh, it's just a greedy developer",

• 20:24Speaker 04

  or whatever, and just kind of ignore the underlying economics of the situation, which was that if you make the elevator three to four times expensive, you get a lot fewer elevators.

• 20:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  Trying to get to perfect when good is good enough is a mistake. And the road to mega elevators was lined with 100 mistakes made over many years. But the one that really provoked my yinbiyer was the mistake detailed on page 50 of Stephen Smith's Elevators. Section 3.3.2. Committed in the heedless pursuit of perfection by a certain Gregory A. Victor, Fire Inspector of Glendale, Arizona.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  This is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features and tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shoptoyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 22:34Speaker 02

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• 23:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  You want to design an apartment building in, say, Topeka, Kansas. You can't just put the stairs and windows and the fire exits wherever you want. You have to adhere to a set of common standards. And those standards are found in a very big book, written and maintained and updated by a nonprofit called the International Code Council, based in Washington DC in one of those bland office buildings not far from the Capitol.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  Anytime you see an international in a word in the United States related to construction, it's a lie. It's the US Building Code, but it's called the International Building Code, the IVC. It has international aspirations. Everywhere in the country used to have its own building code, more or less, and then they've sort of become homogenized, harmonized over time. And so now there's a national code called the International Building Code, which forms the basis and really the vast, vast majority of every code.

• 23:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  If you walk down a street and hate the way modern buildings look, or you don't understand why corridors in the hallway of your apartment building are so long, then you have a problem with the International Code Council. The ICC is one of those shadowy groups that no one has ever heard about that writes the rules of the modern world. And the document that they have so grandiosely named the International Building Code is, crucially, not set in stone. Interested parties can propose amendments. Those amendments can be voted on by a special committee or by the general members of the ICC. The International Building Code is not like the Constitution of the United States, which was last amended in 1992, based on a proposal

• 24:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  first made in 1789. You need a war or a couple of centuries to change the US Constitution. Not so the International Building Code. It is a living document. And one of those people who set out to take advantage of this fact was Gregory A. Victor of the Glendale Fire Department. Greg Victor had white blond hair, a stash, aviator glasses. He grew up in the Phoenix area, served in the Air Force as an electrician at Bin Hawa Air Force Base during the Vietnam War, came home and became a fire inspector for the Glendale, Arizona Fire Department, retiring as the city's fire marshal in 2007.

• 25:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  Quote, "He was the driving force behind the fire safety codes that are used in Glendale today," his obituary reads. On a national level, he was instrumental in passing fire code to assure firefighters' safety in skyscrapers after 9/11. Let me just say that we of the YIMBY movement have no beef with Greg Victor personally. He served his country, his community, his profession. I am quite sure he was a fine and upstanding man, but he wanted perfection, and he didn't understand that perfection comes with what is sometimes an unbearable cost.

• 26:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  So this guy, let's just, so we have a, we have a, someone who cares, who is passionate about elevators.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. He proposes, he says, you know, at the time, elevators were made to accommodate stretchers that are six feet, four inches long. And he says, well, they're building a stadium in my jurisdiction.

• 26:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  He files an amendment with the International Building Code.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  At the time, I don't believe Glendale had any apartment buildings with elevators. Maybe it had one or two. It had very few, if any. It still has very few, if any. And he said, the elevator's not going to accommodate our stretchers. And I don't think, I mean, I think that's maybe true in some sense, like when it's fully flat and extended, I find it difficult to believe that it did not accommodate a stretcher in any sense. I mean, stretchers do sort of prop up a bit. Sometimes they're a bit collapsible, but in any case, he did not feel it adequately accommodated the stretcher. So he said, you know, the code should just say that the elevator must accommodate whatever structure the jurisdiction's got. And This is not in the report, and I want to say don't quote me, but I'm saying it in

• 27:19Speaker 04

  a public forum, so whatever, I'll just say it. What I was told was at the time, the elevator industry, this was in the early 2000s, the elevator industry had their own event, and so there weren't a lot of people from the elevator industry to push back. So there was some committee, some technical committee that's supposed to review this proposal, that's, I think, the most informed people in the process generally. And they said, well, there's two things wrong with this. Number one, we can't just say it's got to accommodate the biggest stretcher you've got. I mean, they didn't say this, but you know, what if someone orders a 20-foot stretcher? I mean, the lack of standardization is going to drive everyone crazy. But secondly, you didn't really prove anything exactly, like, you know, what is

• 27:59Speaker 04

  the harm? You know, can you try to weigh the costs and benefits? That wasn't done. So he comes back in another round when it's a little more, this is sort of a quasi-democratic body, so all the building officials can vote. And he said, okay, well, the technical committee said no, but I come to you, the membership, and say, you know, I'll fix it. So, okay, it's not going to be any size, it's just going to be seven feet. I mean, ours are, I think he said, theirs are, I don't remember, six foot seven, six foot eight. You know, seven feet will be big enough to, I don't know, have an oxygen tank on the end or something like that. And it passed.

• 28:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  The United States already had the biggest elevators in the world, the most expensive elevators in the world. Elevators so big and so expensive that whenever someone was putting up a small apartment building or an affordable apartment building, they look at the numbers and shrug and say, F it, we'll just go with stairs. And along comes Greg Victor of Glendale, Arizona, and proposes to the most powerful body in the whole world of building codes, let's make them even bigger and even more expensive. Let's make them seven feet long. So he comes back and with an amendment saying, okay, just make it seven feet. And he takes that to the

• 29:18Speaker 04

  The sort of the broader membership, but he kind of makes this, he makes this emotional case. Imagine if it was you. And there's always an emotional appeal in building codes and standards. I mean, sometimes it's about fire. In this case, it wasn't fire. In this case, it was, you know, being, you know, having, going into cardiac arrest and someone couldn't form compressions on you, or you get some sort of musculoskeletal injury from falling in a bathtub, whatever, you know, something could happen. So it's an emotional appeal. And the issue with emotional appeals is they don't weigh things very well.

• 29:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  You can look it up. International Building Code Code Change Number G143-0304, Section 3002.4. The International Building Code Amendment Form is divided into three parts. Part one is where you write a paragraph explaining your change. Part two is where you give your reasons. And part three is cost impact. And you know what Greg Victor answers to the cost impact question? None. N-O-N-E. Oh, Greg. No.

• 30:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf Hafry. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Angelie Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 31:19Speaker 06

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• 31:47Speaker 07

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a deal today and great value tomorrow. ShopToyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places. Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multisensory feature

• 32:30Speaker 07

  in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford and its affiliates. All rights reserved.