July 6, 2016 • 33 mins
Of the tens of thousands of talented, low-income students who graduate from high school every year in the United States, most never make it to universities appropriate to their gifts. America leaves an enormous amount of talent on the table every year. “Carlos Doesn’t Remember” explains why.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yes, I am a sophomore high school.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
And that high school you started there in ninth grade.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
No, this is my first year.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
This is your first year.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, Were you challenged in your old school?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Uh? No, no, not really.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Welcome to Revisionist History, where every week we re examined
something from the past that's been forgotten or misunderstood. I'm
Malcolm Gladwell. This episode is about a young man named Carlos,
(01:01):
which is not his real name. I've changed it for
reasons that will become obvious. Were you bored most of
the time and what were you doing when you're sitting
in class?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Well, I usually finished my class work a lot earlier
in some of the other kids, and I guess I
was a little bored.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Carlos is slight, a little short for his age, braces,
thick head of black hair. A good looking kid, but normal.
He wouldn't stand out if you saw him on a
school bus. It's his manner that's distinctive for a teenager.
He's really deliberate, thoughtful, a little guarded in a way
that makes him seem much older. He lives in Los Angeles.
(01:47):
He's just transferred from a massive public high school, to
an elite private school.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I really enjoy math. Math is just is not easy,
but it just makes the most sense.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
When he talks about math, Carlos relaxes. He looks happy,
like math is the warmest and safest place he knows.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Some people just say they hate math because they don't
understand it. But I just like learning about, like the
concepts of math. When I can understand something, I feel,
it just makes it. Everything's very precise, you know, it's
not a lot of room for error. That's I guess
that's why I like math.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Is that the subject that you'd get the best grades in.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, I do get pretty good grades all my classes.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
What's the last time in school you ever felt that
you didn't understand something or couldn't do something.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Or I'm going to sound kind of arrogant, I think,
but most concepts that I'm taught, I catch on to
them pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Carlos is a smart kid. He's gotten a scholarship to
a really good private school. He's excelling. It's not hard
to imagine that one day he'll go to a college
of his choice. He's going places. This is what civilized
societies are supposed to do to provide opportunities for people
to make the most of their ability, so that if
(03:14):
you're born poor, you can move up. If you work hard,
you can improve your lot. There's even a term for this, capitalization.
A society's capitalization rate is the percentage of people in
any group who are able to reach their potential capitalize
on their potential. I think the capitalization rate is one
(03:35):
of the single best ways we have to capture how
successful and just a society is. If I know that number,
I think I have a better handle on how well
a country is doing than if I know it's GDP
or its growth rate or its per capita income. And
right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they're
(03:56):
really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility. Any
kid can grow up to be president. That's what's supposed
to set America apart from everywhere else. Over the course
of the next three episodes of Revisionist History, I want
to reevaluate this idea, go back and ask the question,
(04:20):
is it true that we're good at capitalization. In one
upcoming show, we're going to talk about where the money
goes in American higher ed. I'm going to take you
to a small college in South Jersey and ask the
question is the system geared to serve the poor smart
kid or the rich smart kid. In another episode, I'm
(04:40):
going to compare two liberal arts colleges and ask what
happens when a school really tries to help someone like Carlos.
But this episode is about Carlos himself, because his story
is a little more complicated than it seems, actually a
lot more complicated. I met Carlos through a man named
(05:02):
Eric Eisner, And what was your first impression of it?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Mister Eisner?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
You can speak freely even though he's in the.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Room ostris at caned be intimidating and sometimes.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Eric used to be a big shot entertainment lawyer back
in the day. He worked for David Geffen. He's a
kind of athlete swagger, wears impeccable tom Ford suits. Anyway,
he retired in the early nineteen nineties and a few
years later started a program for gifted public school kids
in Los Angeles. It's called Yes. He talks to a
(05:36):
lot of teachers, looks at test scores, identifies the most
promising kids, tutors them, and uses his connections to get
them into private schools. He's been doing it for nearly
twenty years. A couple hundred students have passed through Yes
and have gone on to graduate from some of the
top universities in the country. Carlos is one of his kids.
(05:58):
When Carlos was in fifth grade, Eric got him into
a fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Now several years later,
Carlos comes to meet me at Eric's house in bel Air,
up one of those winding, gorgeous canyon roads from Sunset Boulevard.
I'm across the table from Carlos. Eric is behind me,
sitting in an armchair. That's why his voice is sometimes
(06:20):
a little faint. Eric asks Carlos to think back to
that fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Did he feel self
conscious going there?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I did, but not because I was Hispanic.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Eric asks whether it was because Carlos was poor and
those kids were rich. Did that make Carlos feel self conscious?
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Well, not a thing about it. I think it kind of,
did you know it? Definitely? I felt like I was
the only one, not the only one the episode with sneakers.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Eric asks about the episode with the sneakers. Did Carlos
remember that? Do you erase this from your memory I have, I.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Can tell me what happened.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Here's what happened. The teachers in Brentwood called Eric to
tell him that Carlos would isn't playing with the other
kids at recess, even though he seemed very engaged with
him in the classroom. Eric then talked with Carlos and
noticed that his sneakers were about three sizes too big.
So he bought him shoes the right size, and that's
solved the problem. Do you remember this.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Well, the being not wanting to play the sports with
the other kids, That does ring a bell, But I
don't remember the sneakers.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Eric says Carlos's sneakers were so big they curled up
like elf shoes. But Carlos says he doesn't remember the sneakers.
This happens to him a lot. I said at the
beginning that the capitalization story for people like Carlos is complicated,
(07:54):
and this is what I mean. Carlos is a really,
really gifted kid. But it's almost impossible to imagine Carlos
making it into the fancy school without Eric. In other words,
in order for the system to work, for the smart
kid to make it up the ladder, he needs an advocate,
and not just an ordinary advocate, a high power guy
(08:15):
with lots of connections who can get you in and
watch over you and make sure you get new sneakers
because the ones you have are curled up like elfshoes.
Capitalization requires an Eric Eisner. And how many Eric Eisner's
do you think there are out there? Then there's the
second complication. To find opportunity, Carlos had to go to Brentwood,
(08:39):
forty five minutes up the freeway from where he grew up,
a wealthy, white, leafy green neighborhood. The truth is that's
where opportunity is in America these days. But you can't
just jump from where Carlos was from straight to Brentwood
and leave your past behind. Your past comes with you.
(09:00):
What were the other students.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Like, Well, those students, well, you know, actually kids aren't
going to be kids, and so they weren't two different. Okay,
I need to give me a second here, I'm being nervous.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
A few years ago, two prominent economists, Carolyne Hawkesby of
Stanford and Chris Avery of Harvard published a really important
paper called The Missing One Offs. Hawksby and Avery start
out by talking about something that happened ten years ago.
That's when some of the elite US colleges, the Harvard's
and Princetons of the world, announced that they'd give free
(09:41):
tuition to any deserving student who came from the bottom
of the economic ladder. At the time, the cutoff was
a family income of forty thousand dollars a year. Now
it's sixty five thousand. In other words, if a poor
kid is smart enough to get in, she can attend
for free. And what happens after the elite schools make
this announcement not much. To use Harvard as an example,
(10:04):
they ended up taking in about an additional fifteen or
so low income student year after changing their policies. That's
out of a freshman class of more than sixteen hundred.
It's a drop in the bucket. Let me quote directly
from the paper now, because this is a crucial point. Interestingly,
this very modest effect was not a surprise to many
(10:26):
college admission staff. They explained that there was a small
pool of low income, high achieving students who were already
fully tapped, so that additional aid and recruiting could do
little except shift them among institutions that were fairly similar
In other words, the admissions officers felt they had gone
out of their way to look for these kinds of kids.
(10:49):
They'd made special visits to high schools with lots of
poor students, that sent out letters to kids with high
test coores living in bad neighborhoods. They had built a
network of guidance counselors. They sponsored free campus visits for
low income students, and they made it tuition free. But
if you do all those things and you only get
an extra fifteen smart poor cares a year at Harvard,
(11:10):
that must mean that there aren't a lot of poor
smart kids out there. They're talking about Carlos. They're saying
that kids like Carlos are pretty rare. Hoxby and Avery
decide to fact check this is it true. They go
(11:31):
to the College Board and get the entire database of
college test scores SAT and ACT. Then they take those
scores and match each score to a high school and
a neighborhood and a zip code, and to all they
could find about where the student comes from. And they
end up with a giant map of every high achieving,
low income high school senior in the country. And here's
(11:53):
what Hoxby and Avery discover the admissions officers are totally wrong. Actually,
there are a huge number of poor smart kids in
the United States. There's probably thirty five thousand students a
year who score in the ninetieth percent or above on
their SATs, and who also come from families living on
(12:14):
less than forty thousand dollars a year. Now, keep in mind,
these are kids who don't have tutors, who don't go
to high schools with a million advanced placement courses, and
who probably took the test once, not two or three
times like upper middle class kids. So these scores are
on the low side. These are kids who could ace
a test in one shot. Seven. Eric Eisner started yes
(12:39):
almost twenty years ago at an LA Middle School in
a place called Lenox, which is this small, heavily Hispanic
community of about twenty thousand people hallowed out in the
middle of Los Angeles, right across the four or five
freeway from Lax. I mean, right across you can practically
touch the planes as they take off and land. The
(13:03):
median household income in Lenox is thirty seven thousand dollars
a year. It's not a good name. Lennox Middle School
has six hundred kids per grade. The classrooms are these
(13:24):
standalone wooden and cinderblock huts, row upon row of them.
They only put in windows in the huts last year,
tiny little windows high on the wall. There's a big
fence around the outside, a guard in a hut at
the gate. I don't want this to come across the
wrong way, but Lennox looks like a concentration camp. When
(13:44):
I was there, a police cruiser drove slowly back and
forth between the long rows of huts. Oh, and next
to the principal's office there are what looked like six
narrow closets, solitary confinement cells where they stash a kid
until the cops come. Remember this is a middle school.
You go to a place like Lenox and you can't
help feeling hopeless. This is as bad as La gets.
(14:08):
Right from the beginning when he came there looking for
bright kids. Eric Eisner hit Peter, I'm curious about the
idea you can go to a fairly randomly selected middle
school in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a major American city
and reliably find every year a handful of really, really
(14:31):
really gifted kids, Right.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
I think, yeah, it's it varies even within the school.
From year to year, you never know what kind of
crop it's going to be. It's a little like wine.
But some years it's very very few, and sometimes one
or none. But then other years you'll they'll be five
of them. But there is you know, it's it's it's
(14:55):
not like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
It's not like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
There's a ton of talent out there, all right. If
there are so many smart poor kids, why aren't they
showing up at places like Harvard. The researchers Avery and
Hawsby find that a good chunk of the thirty five
thousand high achievers don't even so much as apply to
(15:21):
a good school. That's crazy, right. Most selective schools are
practically free for these kids. An elite school is cheaper
than the local state college down the street. More importantly,
these are really smart kids. We're not talking here about
some mediocre student who gets into an elite college because
he's a great football player, or his dad built a
new dorm and he ends up being way over his head.
(15:43):
We're talking about kids like Carlos.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Most concepts that I'm taught. I catch on something pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Eric thinks that the system can't find kids like Carlos
because it starts looking much too late. The admissions officers
are sending out their letters to high school juniors seventeen
year olds kidding me in Lenox. Eric says, you have
to start finding the smart kids in the fourth grade.
That's because they may not even show up later.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
It's like any muscle, it atrophies. And then by the
time the boy girl thing happens, if that hasn't been encouraged,
that excitement of being smart, it goes. It goes away
because when the struggle hits them of going to any
kind of challenge in college, they don't have the cleats
(16:33):
for that anymore. They don't have those hiking shoes anymore.
They're just not accustomed to it.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
So what was happening.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Before Yes shows up at this school or in schools
where there is no no one looking out for the
promising fourth grader, what happens to those kids?
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Well, when we came here, they discouraged me from waiting
until the eighth grade to meet with the boys, which
is what I wanted to do. They said, you can't
wait that long because eighty percent of those boys get
gang affiliated by the eighth grade.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Eighty percent gone by the eighth grade. Then comes high school,
but there is no high school in Lenox. The kids
from Lenox have to go one town over to Hawthorne,
and that means crossing gang lines. Remember that statistic that
Husby and Avery came up with for the total number
of smart poor kids. It's low. That number is based
(17:32):
on the pool of high school seniors who took either
the ACT or the SAT. So to show up in
their pool of thirty five thousand poor smart kids, you
had to have made it all the way to the
end of high school and taking one of those standardized tests.
Eric's point is at a good number of high achievers
in places like Lenox never even get that far. What's
(17:53):
the capitalization rate in Lenox if you have to cross
a gang line to get to high school. I think
we have an ideology about talent that says the talent
is a tangible, resilient, hard and shiny thing. It will
always rise to the top. And to find and encourage talent,
(18:15):
all you have to do as a society is to
make sure the right doors are open. Free campus visits
free tuition letters to the kids with high scores. That's
the ideology of the admissions officer. You raise your hand
and say over here, and the talent will come running.
But that's not true in Lenox. It's not resilient and shiny.
(18:35):
At Lennox Middle School, talent is really, really fragile. So
Eric found Carlos and Lenox and used his West Side
LA lawyer savvy to get Carlos into an elite private
elementary school in Brentwood. Every morning, Carlos took a long
bus ride up the four or five from Lenox to
(18:56):
this school. I've known Eric for a long time, and
I always joke with him that the slogan of his
organization YES ought to be that every Los Angeles public
school child deserves his own Jewish entertainment lawyer. He always
laughs because that's what he's been doing for close to
twenty years, cutting deals with private schools for his YES kids.
So Carlos is doing really well. Of course he is.
(19:18):
He's an exceptional student. Eric starts looking for Carlos's next step.
He makes some inquiries. Carlos gets an offer of a
full ride scholarship to one of the most exclusive private
high schools in the country. If he were a kid
from a normal middle class neighborhood and family, you'd say
he's all set. But he's not.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I've really wanted to go to boarding school. Yeah no,
But in the end I didn't get to go.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
The boarding school he's referring to is Choate in Central Connecticut.
It's his ticket out. But remember I said that Carlos's
story gets complicated. Well, here's yet another complication. Carlos has
a little sister. She's also in the room with us,
along with Elena Bereff, who runs Yes. With Eric, we
(20:04):
start talking about why Carlos couldn't go to Choate's.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
The summer after your birthday.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Right, it was the summer before Carlos was supposed to
go to high school. But Eric has to remind him
that there was a lot else going on other than school.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, you won't talk about well, in the eighth it
was eighth grade, right, eighth grade for me, foster care. Yeah,
I forget.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Did you catch that? He set up really quickly under
his breath that phrase again, I forgot.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
In the summer going into the eighth grade, his sister
and I were put into foster homes.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Carlos and his sister were put into foster homes.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
We're living away from from my mother, and I guess
I had a bit of an emotional, you know, toll
on me. And I definitely still tried at school. I
didn't let it, you know, affect my grades like too much.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Maybe by now you can understand the strategic value of
Carlos's selective memory, because there weren't a lot of good
things happening in his life. I'll let you use your imagination.
It was bad, Lennox bad, not Brentwood bad. Then he says,
I definitely still tried at school. I didn't let it
affect my grades too much. Things are falling apart, but
(21:32):
he understands that he has one way out, and that
is to be a great student, not a good one.
Good doesn't get you anywhere a great one. So he
puts everything else in a box. He's got to take
care of his sister and get good grades. I spoke
with Eric about it later.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
He took on this burden that was so above his
skill set of being a father, of being a husband,
being everything. And that's why she wouldn't let him go
to choke when they gave him a full scholars Oh that.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Was the she he's talking about is Carlos's mother.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
You can imagine how frustrating and angering that was for me,
the opportunity of him going to a school like that
and getting away from all that and her understand to
bleed killing it because he was taking care of her
(22:31):
and that's what he was what in the.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Eighth grade he did say I would have liked to
go to boarding school.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Oh, he definitely wanted to go.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
We sort of licked our wounds by convincing ourselves that
at least he would be there for the little sister.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
It's a chaotic time. Carlos's mother tells him not to
go to Choate but stay so he can take care
of her and his sister. Then the two are taken
from their mother. They become wards of Los Angeles County.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
You know, growing up with your parents and being suddenly,
you know, taken away, and you know it can't be good.
But I guess, I guess the hardest part was moving
around house house Like It's not that I moved to
one foster home and then stay there for a year
and a half. I've I think four.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Homes and worse than that. For a time, he was
separated from his little sister. How long were you separated.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
For the first foster home? Didn't that We weren't separated
for too long because we made a point to our
social workers to please, no reunite us.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
He's making it sound like it wasn't that much of
a big deal. It was a big deal. Choke goes away,
their mother goes away. Now his little sister is taken away,
and the two of them start bouncing around the foster
homes of South LA and made a point to our
social workers to please reunite us. It was a war.
(24:02):
This is Eric again from later.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
He didn't tell you how disastrous these first foster homes were.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
When you say disastrous, what do you mean just idiotic?
Speaker 3 (24:12):
I mean it wasn't like, oh, thank god, they're in
this wonderful home. First of all, they were one of
five foster kids in the You know what I mean,
This is not let us take you into our home.
This is how much are you going to pay us?
How many kids can we write? Meanwhile, the mother is
roaming around the planet like beetlejuice, and we have to,
(24:36):
you know, keep her at babe. It was just you know, it.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Was a mess.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Did you know your father?
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah? Yeah, I still have my father, and I we
he was he was absent for a large part of
my life.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And where is your mother now?
Speaker 2 (24:56):
My mother? My mother is in prison. Oh yeah, yeah
in Texas.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
I'll let you use your imagination again. As to why
it wasn't an easy thing for a kid, two kids
to deal with. Eric's colleague Alna, is sitting quietly in
the room. She tries to put things in perspective. Carlos's mom, Alena, says,
had a difficult time with losing control of her children.
That made it hard for Eric and Alena to stay involved. Finally,
(25:29):
the mother tells Eric and Alena, and this is the
phrase Alena uses to detach themselves. The kids vanish for
a year and a half, and neither Eric nor Alena
know whether they'll ever see them again. That's the difference
(25:53):
between being privileged and being poor in America. It's how
many chances you get if you're wealthy. All kinds of
things can happen and you'll be okay. You can drop
out of school for a year, you can get addicted
to painkillers, you can have a bad car, accident. No
one ever says of the upper middle class high school
kid whose parents get a terrible divorce, I wonder if
(26:14):
she'll ever go to college. She's going to college. Disruption
is not fatal to life chances. A friend of mine
was once stopped by cops speeding on the East River
Drive in Manhattan, drunk with a syringe on the dashboard.
And what happened. Nothing happened. He went on to have
the kind of brilliant career he deserved to have. That's
the point of privilege. It buys you second chances. But
(26:41):
if you're from Lenox, even if you're a kid with
all the talent in the world, you don't get the
same number of chances. That's why there are at least
thirty five thousand really smart, poor high school seniors every
year in his country, and so few of them are
making it to the kinds of colleges they deserve because
too many things get in the way. When I met
(27:08):
Eric again and a few days later, he told me
a second story. He said. It was about another Carlos.
As he put it, he said he got a call
from an elementary school principal in Lennox.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
She says, I want you to come meet a bunch
of fourth graders that I think are outstanding. When I
got to the third boy, I said, so tell me
about yourself.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Eric asks about the little boy's father, Where is he?
It's the standard question he always starts with, because there
are so many absent fathers in that world that that
question narrows things down pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
His answer was so peculiar. It gripped me so fast.
He looked at me and he said there was violence.
Those were the very words that came out of his mouth.
And the minute he said it, I wed, Oh my god,
I had more than a sneaking suspicion. This is the
boy who saw his virtually his entire family murdered by
(28:09):
a crazy neighbor with who got into a beef with
his father. He saw his father killed, his older brother killed.
Guy had a shotgun. He ran into the house, grabbed
his little sister. They hid under a bed, and the
guy burned the house down. He was hiding under the
bed while the house was on fire. His mother finally
(28:30):
came back. He ran outside to see his mother beaten up.
She was in the hospital for months after this, and
the police came and killed the shut gun. It was
so horrendous, and it didn't occur to me that this
was an analytics family. And I'm realized, I am now
talking to this boy because he is one of the
(28:50):
three outstanding boys in the class.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Wait, what was he like?
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Fantastic, he was poised, he was articulate. When he said
there was violence, the needle moved one hundred and eighty.
It went from Wow, what an interesting, remarkable, articulate, confident
kid you are, What a fortunate kid you are? To
oh my god, I now think I know the reality
(29:16):
of you.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Even as an eight year old, this kid was smart
enough to know that meeting Eric was his big chance
and that his job was to put all the bad
stuff aside, to put it in a box. That's what
these kids are like the ones who make it out.
They learn from a very early age where the exits
are and they don't let anything get in their way.
(29:44):
You see your family getting massacred or your mother go
to prison, and you say, like Carlos did, I definitely
still tried at school. I didn't let it affect my
grades too much. So what happens to Carlos? He gets lucky,
lucky because the foster care, situation works itself out, he
(30:06):
forgets all the bad stuff that's happening, He takes care
of his sister, He re establishes contact with Eric and Elena,
and they find him another private school, not joke, not
a boarding school, something closer to home. But whatever you do,
don't call this story inspirational, because it's not. It's depressing
(30:28):
because it says that if you live in Lennox and
things go awry, you have to have an Eric and
an Alena in your corner and be as tough and
single minded and one in a million as Carlos is.
To make it out, that's why the capitalization of talent
is such an issue, because these are really long odds.
(30:53):
Back with Carlos and his sister at Eric Eisner's house,
Eric turns to Carlos and asks, do you remember feeling
pessimistic for the first time you were? Were you ever pessimistic?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I wasn't really pessimistic, as yeah, overwhelmed it is a
great word. I guess it's just a lot happening at
the time, and I was, and then I was back
in the public school. You know, it was like it
was like I started right back, you know, right from
square one.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Eric turns to Carlos's sister and asks whether she ever
worried that her brother had had enough? What would you
do if he gave up?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
You remember a time when you looked at him and
were concerned that he was card What would you do
if you give up?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Oh, he was a very optimistic person. He was a
very optimistic person, she says. I feel like he was
strong for the both of us. A lot of the times.
Carlos is looking straight ahead as she's speaking, like he
doesn't want to cry. Then she says it again, I
(32:08):
said thanks.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
I never thought of him.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
As honestly, I never thought of him as someone who
gives up.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
I was never worried about it.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
She was never worried about it. You've been listening to
(32:53):
Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, do us
a favor and rate us on iTunes it helps. You
can get more information about this and other episodes at
Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
show is produced by me LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith.
(33:14):
Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
Quira and Taka Yasuzawa Flon Williams is our engineer and
our fact checker is Michelle Sarraka Penalty management team Laura Mayer,
Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yes, I am a sophomore high school.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
And that high school you started there in ninth grade.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
No, this is my first year.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
This is your first year.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, Were you challenged in your old school?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Uh? No, no, not really.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Welcome to Revisionist History, where every week we re examined
something from the past that's been forgotten or misunderstood. I'm
Malcolm Gladwell. This episode is about a young man named Carlos,
(01:01):
which is not his real name. I've changed it for
reasons that will become obvious. Were you bored most of
the time and what were you doing when you're sitting
in class?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Well, I usually finished my class work a lot earlier
in some of the other kids, and I guess I
was a little bored.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Carlos is slight, a little short for his age, braces,
thick head of black hair. A good looking kid, but normal.
He wouldn't stand out if you saw him on a
school bus. It's his manner that's distinctive for a teenager.
He's really deliberate, thoughtful, a little guarded in a way
that makes him seem much older. He lives in Los Angeles.
(01:47):
He's just transferred from a massive public high school, to
an elite private school.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I really enjoy math. Math is just is not easy,
but it just makes the most sense.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
When he talks about math, Carlos relaxes. He looks happy,
like math is the warmest and safest place he knows.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Some people just say they hate math because they don't
understand it. But I just like learning about, like the
concepts of math. When I can understand something, I feel,
it just makes it. Everything's very precise, you know, it's
not a lot of room for error. That's I guess
that's why I like math.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Is that the subject that you'd get the best grades in.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, I do get pretty good grades all my classes.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
What's the last time in school you ever felt that
you didn't understand something or couldn't do something.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Or I'm going to sound kind of arrogant, I think,
but most concepts that I'm taught, I catch on to
them pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Carlos is a smart kid. He's gotten a scholarship to
a really good private school. He's excelling. It's not hard
to imagine that one day he'll go to a college
of his choice. He's going places. This is what civilized
societies are supposed to do to provide opportunities for people
to make the most of their ability, so that if
(03:14):
you're born poor, you can move up. If you work hard,
you can improve your lot. There's even a term for this, capitalization.
A society's capitalization rate is the percentage of people in
any group who are able to reach their potential capitalize
on their potential. I think the capitalization rate is one
(03:35):
of the single best ways we have to capture how
successful and just a society is. If I know that number,
I think I have a better handle on how well
a country is doing than if I know it's GDP
or its growth rate or its per capita income. And
right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they're
(03:56):
really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility. Any
kid can grow up to be president. That's what's supposed
to set America apart from everywhere else. Over the course
of the next three episodes of Revisionist History, I want
to reevaluate this idea, go back and ask the question,
(04:20):
is it true that we're good at capitalization. In one
upcoming show, we're going to talk about where the money
goes in American higher ed. I'm going to take you
to a small college in South Jersey and ask the
question is the system geared to serve the poor smart
kid or the rich smart kid. In another episode, I'm
(04:40):
going to compare two liberal arts colleges and ask what
happens when a school really tries to help someone like Carlos.
But this episode is about Carlos himself, because his story
is a little more complicated than it seems, actually a
lot more complicated. I met Carlos through a man named
(05:02):
Eric Eisner, And what was your first impression of it?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Mister Eisner?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
You can speak freely even though he's in the.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Room ostris at caned be intimidating and sometimes.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Eric used to be a big shot entertainment lawyer back
in the day. He worked for David Geffen. He's a
kind of athlete swagger, wears impeccable tom Ford suits. Anyway,
he retired in the early nineteen nineties and a few
years later started a program for gifted public school kids
in Los Angeles. It's called Yes. He talks to a
(05:36):
lot of teachers, looks at test scores, identifies the most
promising kids, tutors them, and uses his connections to get
them into private schools. He's been doing it for nearly
twenty years. A couple hundred students have passed through Yes
and have gone on to graduate from some of the
top universities in the country. Carlos is one of his kids.
(05:58):
When Carlos was in fifth grade, Eric got him into
a fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Now several years later,
Carlos comes to meet me at Eric's house in bel Air,
up one of those winding, gorgeous canyon roads from Sunset Boulevard.
I'm across the table from Carlos. Eric is behind me,
sitting in an armchair. That's why his voice is sometimes
(06:20):
a little faint. Eric asks Carlos to think back to
that fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Did he feel self
conscious going there?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I did, but not because I was Hispanic.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Eric asks whether it was because Carlos was poor and
those kids were rich. Did that make Carlos feel self conscious?
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Well, not a thing about it. I think it kind of,
did you know it? Definitely? I felt like I was
the only one, not the only one the episode with sneakers.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Eric asks about the episode with the sneakers. Did Carlos
remember that? Do you erase this from your memory I have, I.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Can tell me what happened.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Here's what happened. The teachers in Brentwood called Eric to
tell him that Carlos would isn't playing with the other
kids at recess, even though he seemed very engaged with
him in the classroom. Eric then talked with Carlos and
noticed that his sneakers were about three sizes too big.
So he bought him shoes the right size, and that's
solved the problem. Do you remember this.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Well, the being not wanting to play the sports with
the other kids, That does ring a bell, But I
don't remember the sneakers.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Eric says Carlos's sneakers were so big they curled up
like elf shoes. But Carlos says he doesn't remember the sneakers.
This happens to him a lot. I said at the
beginning that the capitalization story for people like Carlos is complicated,
(07:54):
and this is what I mean. Carlos is a really,
really gifted kid. But it's almost impossible to imagine Carlos
making it into the fancy school without Eric. In other words,
in order for the system to work, for the smart
kid to make it up the ladder, he needs an advocate,
and not just an ordinary advocate, a high power guy
(08:15):
with lots of connections who can get you in and
watch over you and make sure you get new sneakers
because the ones you have are curled up like elfshoes.
Capitalization requires an Eric Eisner. And how many Eric Eisner's
do you think there are out there? Then there's the
second complication. To find opportunity, Carlos had to go to Brentwood,
(08:39):
forty five minutes up the freeway from where he grew up,
a wealthy, white, leafy green neighborhood. The truth is that's
where opportunity is in America these days. But you can't
just jump from where Carlos was from straight to Brentwood
and leave your past behind. Your past comes with you.
(09:00):
What were the other students.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Like, Well, those students, well, you know, actually kids aren't
going to be kids, and so they weren't two different. Okay,
I need to give me a second here, I'm being nervous.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
A few years ago, two prominent economists, Carolyne Hawkesby of
Stanford and Chris Avery of Harvard published a really important
paper called The Missing One Offs. Hawksby and Avery start
out by talking about something that happened ten years ago.
That's when some of the elite US colleges, the Harvard's
and Princetons of the world, announced that they'd give free
(09:41):
tuition to any deserving student who came from the bottom
of the economic ladder. At the time, the cutoff was
a family income of forty thousand dollars a year. Now
it's sixty five thousand. In other words, if a poor
kid is smart enough to get in, she can attend
for free. And what happens after the elite schools make
this announcement not much. To use Harvard as an example,
(10:04):
they ended up taking in about an additional fifteen or
so low income student year after changing their policies. That's
out of a freshman class of more than sixteen hundred.
It's a drop in the bucket. Let me quote directly
from the paper now, because this is a crucial point. Interestingly,
this very modest effect was not a surprise to many
(10:26):
college admission staff. They explained that there was a small
pool of low income, high achieving students who were already
fully tapped, so that additional aid and recruiting could do
little except shift them among institutions that were fairly similar
In other words, the admissions officers felt they had gone
out of their way to look for these kinds of kids.
(10:49):
They'd made special visits to high schools with lots of
poor students, that sent out letters to kids with high
test coores living in bad neighborhoods. They had built a
network of guidance counselors. They sponsored free campus visits for
low income students, and they made it tuition free. But
if you do all those things and you only get
an extra fifteen smart poor cares a year at Harvard,
(11:10):
that must mean that there aren't a lot of poor
smart kids out there. They're talking about Carlos. They're saying
that kids like Carlos are pretty rare. Hoxby and Avery
decide to fact check this is it true. They go
(11:31):
to the College Board and get the entire database of
college test scores SAT and ACT. Then they take those
scores and match each score to a high school and
a neighborhood and a zip code, and to all they
could find about where the student comes from. And they
end up with a giant map of every high achieving,
low income high school senior in the country. And here's
(11:53):
what Hoxby and Avery discover the admissions officers are totally wrong. Actually,
there are a huge number of poor smart kids in
the United States. There's probably thirty five thousand students a
year who score in the ninetieth percent or above on
their SATs, and who also come from families living on
(12:14):
less than forty thousand dollars a year. Now, keep in mind,
these are kids who don't have tutors, who don't go
to high schools with a million advanced placement courses, and
who probably took the test once, not two or three
times like upper middle class kids. So these scores are
on the low side. These are kids who could ace
a test in one shot. Seven. Eric Eisner started yes
(12:39):
almost twenty years ago at an LA Middle School in
a place called Lenox, which is this small, heavily Hispanic
community of about twenty thousand people hallowed out in the
middle of Los Angeles, right across the four or five
freeway from Lax. I mean, right across you can practically
touch the planes as they take off and land. The
(13:03):
median household income in Lenox is thirty seven thousand dollars
a year. It's not a good name. Lennox Middle School
has six hundred kids per grade. The classrooms are these
(13:24):
standalone wooden and cinderblock huts, row upon row of them.
They only put in windows in the huts last year,
tiny little windows high on the wall. There's a big
fence around the outside, a guard in a hut at
the gate. I don't want this to come across the
wrong way, but Lennox looks like a concentration camp. When
(13:44):
I was there, a police cruiser drove slowly back and
forth between the long rows of huts. Oh, and next
to the principal's office there are what looked like six
narrow closets, solitary confinement cells where they stash a kid
until the cops come. Remember this is a middle school.
You go to a place like Lenox and you can't
help feeling hopeless. This is as bad as La gets.
(14:08):
Right from the beginning when he came there looking for
bright kids. Eric Eisner hit Peter, I'm curious about the
idea you can go to a fairly randomly selected middle
school in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a major American city
and reliably find every year a handful of really, really
(14:31):
really gifted kids, Right.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
I think, yeah, it's it varies even within the school.
From year to year, you never know what kind of
crop it's going to be. It's a little like wine.
But some years it's very very few, and sometimes one
or none. But then other years you'll they'll be five
of them. But there is you know, it's it's it's
(14:55):
not like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
It's not like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
There's a ton of talent out there, all right. If
there are so many smart poor kids, why aren't they
showing up at places like Harvard. The researchers Avery and
Hawsby find that a good chunk of the thirty five
thousand high achievers don't even so much as apply to
(15:21):
a good school. That's crazy, right. Most selective schools are
practically free for these kids. An elite school is cheaper
than the local state college down the street. More importantly,
these are really smart kids. We're not talking here about
some mediocre student who gets into an elite college because
he's a great football player, or his dad built a
new dorm and he ends up being way over his head.
(15:43):
We're talking about kids like Carlos.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Most concepts that I'm taught. I catch on something pretty quickly.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Eric thinks that the system can't find kids like Carlos
because it starts looking much too late. The admissions officers
are sending out their letters to high school juniors seventeen
year olds kidding me in Lenox. Eric says, you have
to start finding the smart kids in the fourth grade.
That's because they may not even show up later.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
It's like any muscle, it atrophies. And then by the
time the boy girl thing happens, if that hasn't been encouraged,
that excitement of being smart, it goes. It goes away
because when the struggle hits them of going to any
kind of challenge in college, they don't have the cleats
(16:33):
for that anymore. They don't have those hiking shoes anymore.
They're just not accustomed to it.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
So what was happening.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Before Yes shows up at this school or in schools
where there is no no one looking out for the
promising fourth grader, what happens to those kids?
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Well, when we came here, they discouraged me from waiting
until the eighth grade to meet with the boys, which
is what I wanted to do. They said, you can't
wait that long because eighty percent of those boys get
gang affiliated by the eighth grade.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Eighty percent gone by the eighth grade. Then comes high school,
but there is no high school in Lenox. The kids
from Lenox have to go one town over to Hawthorne,
and that means crossing gang lines. Remember that statistic that
Husby and Avery came up with for the total number
of smart poor kids. It's low. That number is based
(17:32):
on the pool of high school seniors who took either
the ACT or the SAT. So to show up in
their pool of thirty five thousand poor smart kids, you
had to have made it all the way to the
end of high school and taking one of those standardized tests.
Eric's point is at a good number of high achievers
in places like Lenox never even get that far. What's
(17:53):
the capitalization rate in Lenox if you have to cross
a gang line to get to high school. I think
we have an ideology about talent that says the talent
is a tangible, resilient, hard and shiny thing. It will
always rise to the top. And to find and encourage talent,
(18:15):
all you have to do as a society is to
make sure the right doors are open. Free campus visits
free tuition letters to the kids with high scores. That's
the ideology of the admissions officer. You raise your hand
and say over here, and the talent will come running.
But that's not true in Lenox. It's not resilient and shiny.
(18:35):
At Lennox Middle School, talent is really, really fragile. So
Eric found Carlos and Lenox and used his West Side
LA lawyer savvy to get Carlos into an elite private
elementary school in Brentwood. Every morning, Carlos took a long
bus ride up the four or five from Lenox to
(18:56):
this school. I've known Eric for a long time, and
I always joke with him that the slogan of his
organization YES ought to be that every Los Angeles public
school child deserves his own Jewish entertainment lawyer. He always
laughs because that's what he's been doing for close to
twenty years, cutting deals with private schools for his YES kids.
So Carlos is doing really well. Of course he is.
(19:18):
He's an exceptional student. Eric starts looking for Carlos's next step.
He makes some inquiries. Carlos gets an offer of a
full ride scholarship to one of the most exclusive private
high schools in the country. If he were a kid
from a normal middle class neighborhood and family, you'd say
he's all set. But he's not.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
I've really wanted to go to boarding school. Yeah no,
But in the end I didn't get to go.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
The boarding school he's referring to is Choate in Central Connecticut.
It's his ticket out. But remember I said that Carlos's
story gets complicated. Well, here's yet another complication. Carlos has
a little sister. She's also in the room with us,
along with Elena Bereff, who runs Yes. With Eric, we
(20:04):
start talking about why Carlos couldn't go to Choate's.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
The summer after your birthday.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Right, it was the summer before Carlos was supposed to
go to high school. But Eric has to remind him
that there was a lot else going on other than school.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, you won't talk about well, in the eighth it
was eighth grade, right, eighth grade for me, foster care. Yeah,
I forget.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Did you catch that? He set up really quickly under
his breath that phrase again, I forgot.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
In the summer going into the eighth grade, his sister
and I were put into foster homes.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Carlos and his sister were put into foster homes.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
We're living away from from my mother, and I guess
I had a bit of an emotional, you know, toll
on me. And I definitely still tried at school. I
didn't let it, you know, affect my grades like too much.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Maybe by now you can understand the strategic value of
Carlos's selective memory, because there weren't a lot of good
things happening in his life. I'll let you use your imagination.
It was bad, Lennox bad, not Brentwood bad. Then he says,
I definitely still tried at school. I didn't let it
affect my grades too much. Things are falling apart, but
(21:32):
he understands that he has one way out, and that
is to be a great student, not a good one.
Good doesn't get you anywhere a great one. So he
puts everything else in a box. He's got to take
care of his sister and get good grades. I spoke
with Eric about it later.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
He took on this burden that was so above his
skill set of being a father, of being a husband,
being everything. And that's why she wouldn't let him go
to choke when they gave him a full scholars Oh that.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Was the she he's talking about is Carlos's mother.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
You can imagine how frustrating and angering that was for me,
the opportunity of him going to a school like that
and getting away from all that and her understand to
bleed killing it because he was taking care of her
(22:31):
and that's what he was what in the.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
Eighth grade he did say I would have liked to
go to boarding school.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Oh, he definitely wanted to go.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
We sort of licked our wounds by convincing ourselves that
at least he would be there for the little sister.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
It's a chaotic time. Carlos's mother tells him not to
go to Choate but stay so he can take care
of her and his sister. Then the two are taken
from their mother. They become wards of Los Angeles County.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
You know, growing up with your parents and being suddenly,
you know, taken away, and you know it can't be good.
But I guess, I guess the hardest part was moving
around house house Like It's not that I moved to
one foster home and then stay there for a year
and a half. I've I think four.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Homes and worse than that. For a time, he was
separated from his little sister. How long were you separated.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
For the first foster home? Didn't that We weren't separated
for too long because we made a point to our
social workers to please, no reunite us.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
He's making it sound like it wasn't that much of
a big deal. It was a big deal. Choke goes away,
their mother goes away. Now his little sister is taken away,
and the two of them start bouncing around the foster
homes of South LA and made a point to our
social workers to please reunite us. It was a war.
(24:02):
This is Eric again from later.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
He didn't tell you how disastrous these first foster homes were.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
When you say disastrous, what do you mean just idiotic?
Speaker 3 (24:12):
I mean it wasn't like, oh, thank god, they're in
this wonderful home. First of all, they were one of
five foster kids in the You know what I mean,
This is not let us take you into our home.
This is how much are you going to pay us?
How many kids can we write? Meanwhile, the mother is
roaming around the planet like beetlejuice, and we have to,
(24:36):
you know, keep her at babe. It was just you know, it.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Was a mess.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Did you know your father?
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah? Yeah, I still have my father, and I we
he was he was absent for a large part of
my life.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And where is your mother now?
Speaker 2 (24:56):
My mother? My mother is in prison. Oh yeah, yeah
in Texas.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
I'll let you use your imagination again. As to why
it wasn't an easy thing for a kid, two kids
to deal with. Eric's colleague Alna, is sitting quietly in
the room. She tries to put things in perspective. Carlos's mom, Alena, says,
had a difficult time with losing control of her children.
That made it hard for Eric and Alena to stay involved. Finally,
(25:29):
the mother tells Eric and Alena, and this is the
phrase Alena uses to detach themselves. The kids vanish for
a year and a half, and neither Eric nor Alena
know whether they'll ever see them again. That's the difference
(25:53):
between being privileged and being poor in America. It's how
many chances you get if you're wealthy. All kinds of
things can happen and you'll be okay. You can drop
out of school for a year, you can get addicted
to painkillers, you can have a bad car, accident. No
one ever says of the upper middle class high school
kid whose parents get a terrible divorce, I wonder if
(26:14):
she'll ever go to college. She's going to college. Disruption
is not fatal to life chances. A friend of mine
was once stopped by cops speeding on the East River
Drive in Manhattan, drunk with a syringe on the dashboard.
And what happened. Nothing happened. He went on to have
the kind of brilliant career he deserved to have. That's
the point of privilege. It buys you second chances. But
(26:41):
if you're from Lenox, even if you're a kid with
all the talent in the world, you don't get the
same number of chances. That's why there are at least
thirty five thousand really smart, poor high school seniors every
year in his country, and so few of them are
making it to the kinds of colleges they deserve because
too many things get in the way. When I met
(27:08):
Eric again and a few days later, he told me
a second story. He said. It was about another Carlos.
As he put it, he said he got a call
from an elementary school principal in Lennox.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
She says, I want you to come meet a bunch
of fourth graders that I think are outstanding. When I
got to the third boy, I said, so tell me
about yourself.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Eric asks about the little boy's father, Where is he?
It's the standard question he always starts with, because there
are so many absent fathers in that world that that
question narrows things down pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
His answer was so peculiar. It gripped me so fast.
He looked at me and he said there was violence.
Those were the very words that came out of his mouth.
And the minute he said it, I wed, Oh my god,
I had more than a sneaking suspicion. This is the
boy who saw his virtually his entire family murdered by
(28:09):
a crazy neighbor with who got into a beef with
his father. He saw his father killed, his older brother killed.
Guy had a shotgun. He ran into the house, grabbed
his little sister. They hid under a bed, and the
guy burned the house down. He was hiding under the
bed while the house was on fire. His mother finally
(28:30):
came back. He ran outside to see his mother beaten up.
She was in the hospital for months after this, and
the police came and killed the shut gun. It was
so horrendous, and it didn't occur to me that this
was an analytics family. And I'm realized, I am now
talking to this boy because he is one of the
(28:50):
three outstanding boys in the class.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Wait, what was he like?
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Fantastic, he was poised, he was articulate. When he said
there was violence, the needle moved one hundred and eighty.
It went from Wow, what an interesting, remarkable, articulate, confident
kid you are, What a fortunate kid you are? To
oh my god, I now think I know the reality
(29:16):
of you.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Even as an eight year old, this kid was smart
enough to know that meeting Eric was his big chance
and that his job was to put all the bad
stuff aside, to put it in a box. That's what
these kids are like the ones who make it out.
They learn from a very early age where the exits
are and they don't let anything get in their way.
(29:44):
You see your family getting massacred or your mother go
to prison, and you say, like Carlos did, I definitely
still tried at school. I didn't let it affect my
grades too much. So what happens to Carlos? He gets lucky,
lucky because the foster care, situation works itself out, he
(30:06):
forgets all the bad stuff that's happening, He takes care
of his sister, He re establishes contact with Eric and Elena,
and they find him another private school, not joke, not
a boarding school, something closer to home. But whatever you do,
don't call this story inspirational, because it's not. It's depressing
(30:28):
because it says that if you live in Lennox and
things go awry, you have to have an Eric and
an Alena in your corner and be as tough and
single minded and one in a million as Carlos is.
To make it out, that's why the capitalization of talent
is such an issue, because these are really long odds.
(30:53):
Back with Carlos and his sister at Eric Eisner's house,
Eric turns to Carlos and asks, do you remember feeling
pessimistic for the first time you were? Were you ever pessimistic?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I wasn't really pessimistic, as yeah, overwhelmed it is a
great word. I guess it's just a lot happening at
the time, and I was, and then I was back
in the public school. You know, it was like it
was like I started right back, you know, right from
square one.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Eric turns to Carlos's sister and asks whether she ever
worried that her brother had had enough? What would you
do if he gave up?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
You remember a time when you looked at him and
were concerned that he was card What would you do
if you give up?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Oh, he was a very optimistic person. He was a
very optimistic person, she says. I feel like he was
strong for the both of us. A lot of the times.
Carlos is looking straight ahead as she's speaking, like he
doesn't want to cry. Then she says it again, I
(32:08):
said thanks.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
I never thought of him.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
As honestly, I never thought of him as someone who
gives up.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
I was never worried about it.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
She was never worried about it. You've been listening to
(32:53):
Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, do us
a favor and rate us on iTunes it helps. You
can get more information about this and other episodes at
Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
show is produced by me LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith.
(33:14):
Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
Quira and Taka Yasuzawa Flon Williams is our engineer and
our fact checker is Michelle Sarraka Penalty management team Laura Mayer,
Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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