How to Convince the World of Bulls**t & Evil - Malcolm Gladwell - #1029

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Talk to me about the history of the death penalty, fettered past that I didn't realize existed.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (0:06)
Oh my goodness. In what country? In America? Yes. Well, this is a subject we dig into in this new series we've done on Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders. And the history of the death penalty in the United States, is not a, in other countries, there's a, the battle is essentially about whether you should have it or not. And in America, the battle is really, we'd like the states to have the right to do it, but they have to do it humanely. It's this absurd position where the, an issue is not the morality of the state taking someone's life. The issue is that the state should take someone's life in a manner that seems consistent with the values of America. So there is this, you know, the, used to be the case, you know, it was the way back when it was, we hung you publicly. Then we moved on from that and there was the firing squad, which was considered to be more humane. And then they moved on from the firing squad and they went to the electric chair. And then from the electric chair, they went to lethal injection.
And then from lethal injection, they have now gone on to nitrogen gas, to asphyxiating you with nitrogen gas.

**Chris Williamson** (1:32)
I didn't know about the most recent, the iPhone 17 Pro Max that came out.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (1:36)
This is the latest wrinkle, right? So they've been, and at each stage, the intention was, formally, the intention was to make the death more humane and certain for the person being executed. But in fact, the intention was to make the process of execution more acceptable to the public. So they're looking for the way that, the form of executing somebody that is the easiest to watch. So you can imagine how hanging would be quite a spectacle, a disturbance, but you wouldn't take your child to a hanging.
The execution by firing squad might be a little less dramatic. But certainly, the big jump was the electric chair was gruesome. I mean, somebody whose brains were literally being fried in front of your eyes, and their eyes were popping out and things. So it really was, that was up until the 1970s. And the move to a lethal injection was the idea was that we can put people down the way we put down horses. And that's really quite calm and it appears at least to be kind of calm and humane and stunned by medical people. And it's all very kind of, so that's the kind of like, it's a very curious, peculiarly American approach to this subject.

**Chris Williamson** (3:06)
And what is the, what's the current status of that?

**Malcolm Gladwell** (3:13)
Well, a guy, we get into this in the podcast, a very brilliant Canadian like me, a guy named Joel Zivet, who's an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist with a kind of side interest in the death penalty. People have been using lethal injection for 40 years, since the late 70s. It's become the standard for if you wanted to kill somebody in your state government in the US, you inject them with three drugs. The first is a sedative.
The second is, it calms you down. The second is a paralytic, which just kind of like keeps you in one place. And the third is potassium chloride, which stops your heart. And the idea was that you got calmed down, you were buckled in, and the paralytic just kept you still. And then we stopped your heart with potassium chloride. And what Joel Zivett discovers is that's not how you die during lethal injection. You die because the first thing you get, which is typically some kind of barbiturate, the sedative, so alters the pH, the acidity of your blood, that essentially your lungs are on fire and burn up, and you can't cry out in pain because you've been given a paralytic. And so you spend a few minutes in exquisite agony as you're, imagine pouring acid, imagine forcing somebody to drink a cup of acid. That's essentially what we're doing. And then I give you another drug, which makes it impossible for you to be heard as you silently scream. That's lethal injection. And so ever since he showed the world that, there's been this idea that, oh, maybe we should move to asphyxiating people with nitrogen.

**Chris Williamson** (5:18)
Sounds humane comparatively.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (5:22)
Honestly, when I was doing this, our podcast is all about this murder that took place in Alabama. And all of these issues come up in the course of, as the state tries to figure out what to do with the killers. And it is the most, not only are the details of these things just so bizarrely macabre. I don't know. How do you pronounce that word? I never know. Macabre.