590: Choosing Wrong

Ira Glass

Well, it's June. Weddings everywhere, brides in white, little three-year-old nieces sent waddling down aisles throwing rose petals, vows that go on, perhaps a bit too long.

Ira Glass

Meet Alain de Botton, author of articles with titles like "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person", and "How We End Up Marrying the Wrong Person", and two books about love. I was interested in talking to him because our radio show today is about making wrong choices. And he believes that when it comes to making the single most important decision many of us ever make in our lives, it is incredibly easy to screw it up-- much easier than we generally acknowledge.

Ira Glass

He says the problem is that it is not until we are actually married that we're in a situation where all the ways that we are hard to live with are truly revealed. All of our neuroses and flaws, all the tiny little things that vaguely remind us of our childhoods, and thus trigger peculiar and inappropriate behavior towards those we live with, that's what gets revealed by the marriage itself. Even if you lived together before marriage, he says, it's not the same. It doesn't give you that self-knowledge.

Ira Glass

OK, I'm going to stop the tape right there and come in to say, I know he's going on a little bit here. And by the way, mazel tov to everybody getting married this month. But I'm a married person. And OK, just speaking for myself, I find this tear that he's on to be one of the most accurate descriptions of marriage I've ever heard-- no judging please-- and also, in its own way, kind of hopeful. But we'll get to that. Anyway, back to the tape.

Ira Glass

And so to sum up, he says we choose the wrong spouse because we don't actually understand what marriage is really going to be like. Because we do not know ourselves. And in addition, we idealize our spouse. We make hasty choices about who we'll marry because being single can be so unpleasant. And because, rather than analyzing and thinking all those things through, instead we just follow our feelings. We go on gut. We go on instinct. Which, to Alain's way of thinking, is obviously inadequate to the task at hand.

Ira Glass

Now, I know that we've all heard some of these things, OK? I think every couple now knows that it's not going be great all the time. Every couple is told it's going to be hard. You're going to have to work at it.

But the radical message that Alain de Botton brings is even if you work at it, you're not going to be that successful. It's going to be a mix of unhappiness and happiness with way more unhappiness than you think before you get married. And a good partnership is one where both people have realistic expectations about all that.

A good partnership he writes, "Is not so much between two healthy people. There aren't many of those on the planet. It's one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities." The standard question on an early dinner date he says should be simply, "And how are you crazy?"

Ira Glass

And so he says, we choose wrong in not one, but two of the biggest things we ever decide in our lives. And then we muddle our way through. Today on our show, as some of Alain's countrymen who voted for the Brexit are telling reporters they regret their votes now that they see the reality of what it is, we have stories of people making the wrong choices.

And in the stories we have today, the stakes are high-- like, for instance, the career of one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived, like the outcome of the presidential election. And in every story, it could have gone differently. The right choice was out there, right in front of them. They saw it and they rejected the right choice. Something stopped them. What stops us from choosing the best thing for us? So interesting, right? Answers from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1-- "Swish, Miss". So this first wrong choice we're going to talk about in our show, it was made by an athlete who absolutely knew what the right choice could do for him. This story comes from Malcolm Gladwell, who's best known as the author of books like The Tipping Point. Malcolm has started a new podcast called Revisionist History. And he let us adapt one of his stories to play for you now. Here he is.

Malcolm Gladwell

The greatest game of basketball anyone has ever played was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, March 2nd, 1962.

Malcolm Gladwell

Cold winter night, just over 4,000 people in the stands. Philadelphia Warriors vs. The New York Knicks.

Malcolm Gladwell

The star of the Warriors was a man named Wilt Chamberlain-- no doubt you've heard of him-- 7'1", 275 pounds. For sheer physical presence, there has probably never been anyone like Wilt. There are lots of seven footers who play basketball, who are basically on the court purely because they're seven feet tall. They're clumsy and ungainly.

Chamberlain was not like that. He was as big as an oak tree and as graceful as a ballet dancer. That season, 1961 to 1962, he ended up averaging more than 50 points a game. That record will never be broken.

Malcolm Gladwell

So March 2nd, Wilt was hungover. He'd been out all night with a woman he picked up at a bar. That's classic Wilt, too.

He would later claim to have slept with 20,000 women in his life. And when he said that, lots of people did the math and said, there was no way that was possible, given the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, and Wilt only lived to the age of 63. But even the skeptics were like, well, maybe it's 10,000 or 8,000. It was an argument over whether it was an unbelievably high number, or merely an incredibly high number.

Malcolm Gladwell

So back to the game in question. Chamberlain makes his first five shots and has 23 points at the end of the first quarter. At halftime, he has 41 points. No one's thinking history just yet. But then, by the end of the third quarter, he has 69 points. And he keeps going and going and going.

Malcolm Gladwell

100 points, the most anyone has ever scored in a professional basketball game. And here is the most incredible thing about it-- he shot brilliantly from the foul line, made 87.5% of his shots. The reason that's incredible is that Chamberlain was a horrendous free throw shooter, the worst.

He was a man who could score at will with two and sometimes three defenders draped all over his body. But put him all alone, 15 feet from the basket, and he was hopeless. There were seasons in his career where he shot 40% from the free throw line. That's terrible.

But this season, Chamberlain changes tactics. He starts to shoot his foul shots underhanded. He doesn't release the ball up by his forehead.

He holds the ball between his knees and flicks it towards the basket from a slight crouch. Some people call that a granny shot. And all of a sudden, he's a pretty good free throw shooter.

He gets up to more than 60%. And that special night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he's an incredible free throw shooter.

Malcolm Gladwell

He makes 28 free throws, the most anyone has ever made in a regular season game in NBA history.

Malcolm Gladwell

That's Rick Barry speaking. He played in the NBA at the same time as Chamberlain, also a Hall of Famer, an absolutely unstoppable scorer from almost anywhere on the court, especially the foul line. I met him at his condo in South Carolina earlier this year.

He was living there so he could follow his son, Canyon, who was playing basketball for the College of Charleston at the time. Barry is 72, 6'8" tall, barrel chest, legs that look like he had special extensions put on them. And that thing that great athletes have and never seem to lose, which is that they kind of glide across the floor, like they have wheels on. What Rick Barry will tell you is that shooting underhanded is simply a better way to make foul shots. And he knows that because he was one of the greatest foul shooters of all time.

Malcolm Gladwell

To put that in perspective, if LeBron James-- who may be the greatest player of his generation-- if he was as good from the foul line as Rick Barry, he would have scored hundreds-- in fact-- over 1,000 more points over the course of his career.

Malcolm Gladwell

And Rick Barry only shot underhanded.

Malcolm Gladwell

Barry put his hands up in the air, holding an imaginary ball, mimicking the way everyone else shoots free throws.

Malcolm Gladwell

So Wilt Chamberlain switches to a better shooting technique. It pays off in the greatest basketball game ever played. He's playing the way that Rick Barry proved basketball players ought to play.

Then, inexplicably, Wilt Chamberlain stops shooting underhanded. And what happens? He goes back to being a terrible foul shooter.

Let's think about what he did for a moment. Chamberlain had a problem. He tested out a possible solution.

The solution worked. And all of a sudden, he's fixed his biggest weakness as a player. This is not a trivial matter.

If you're a basketball player and you can't hit your free throws, you're an incredible liability to your team, particularly at the end of close games. The other side simply fouls you every time you touch the ball because they know you'll miss your free throw and they'll get the ball back. If you can't hit your foul shots, it means you can't be used in a tight game.

You know what Chamberlain's coach said to him about his free throws? "If you were a 90% shooter, we might never lose." They didn't play on the same team, but Rick Barry got to know Chamberlain pretty well.

Malcolm Gladwell

Chamberlain had every incentive in the world to keep shooting free throws underhanded, and he didn't. I think when people don't do the thing they ought to do, we assume it's because of ignorance. This is not that. This is doing something dumb even though you're fully aware that you're doing something dumb.

By the way, there had been countless players like Chamberlain, players who could have been transcendent, devastating, if only they had been open to taking foul shots a different way. Take Shaquille O'Neal, up there with Wilt Chamberlain as one of the greatest NBA centers of all time, but an absolutely horrendous free throw shooter. Shaq even inspired a term, Hack-a-Shaq, which means intentionally fouling Shaquille O'Neal-- or any other terrible free throw shooter-- in order to put them on the foul line, where they're likely to miss their shots. Shaq's inability to shoot free throws drove Rick Barry nuts. Barry tried to reason with him.

Malcolm Gladwell

No one shoots underhanded. Not even Barry's teammates followed his lead, people who saw him shoot that way every day and never miss.

Malcolm Gladwell

It's actually more dramatic than Barry said. Johnson was once a 40% free throw shooter. And he ended up over 80%-- twice as good.

Malcolm Gladwell

I don't want to say his name. It's not fair to him, like it's some kind of dark, shameful secret. College basketball is no different.

Out of the thousands of college basketball players last season, there were-- as far as I can tell-- just two who shot underhanded. One is a Nigerian-American who played for Louisville, named Chinanu Onuaku. The other, is Canyon Barry, who played for the College of Charleston, and who-- in case you missed this earlier-- happens to be Rick Barry's son. In other words, there are only two conditions under which people will try the underhanded free throw. One, if their family is from another continent, and two, if they're an offspring of Rick Barry.

Here's why I went all the way to South Carolina to talk to Rick Barry-- not because I'm obsessed with basketball, although I am-- but because the strange story of the underhanded free throw is a really good way of thinking about something that has always puzzled me. Why do some good ideas spread and others go nowhere? We like to think that good ideas will spread because they're good, because their advantages are obvious.

But that's plainly not true. So why don't they? Or to put it another way, what is it about Rick Barry that allowed him to shoot this way? And what is it about Wilt Chamberlain and all the others that made them resist?

Let me try out a theory on you. It's from a sociologist named Mark Granovetter. Granovetter is one of the greatest social theorists of his generation. If you're an academic groupie like I am, Granovetter is like James Dean.

So Granovetter came up with something called the Threshold Model of Collective Behavior. He was trying to answer the question of why people do things out of character. He used riots as his big example.

Why do otherwise law-abiding citizens suddenly throw rocks through windows? Before Granovetter came along, sociologists tried to explain that kind of puzzling behavior in terms of beliefs. So the thinking went-- you and I have a set of beliefs. But when you throw the rock through the window, something powerful must have happened in the moment to change your beliefs. Something about the crowd transforms the way you think. Here's Granovetter explaining that idea.

Malcolm Gladwell

But Granovetter doesn't buy it. He doesn't think that being part of the mob casts some kind of spell that makes everyone irrational. He says, it's all about thresholds.

Now, what does Granovetter mean by that word, "threshold"? A belief is an internal thing. It's a position we've taken in our head or in our heart.

But unlike beliefs, thresholds are external. They're about peer pressure. Your threshold is the number of people who have to do something before you join in.

Granovetter makes two crucial arguments. The first is that thresholds and beliefs sometimes overlap. But a lot of the time, they don't.

When your teenage son is driving 100 miles an hour at midnight with three of his friends in your Toyota Camry, it's not because he believes that driving 100 miles per hour is a good idea. In that moment, his beliefs are irrelevant. His behavior is guided by his threshold.

An 18-year-old may be drunk at midnight in a car with three of his friends. That person has a really, really low threshold. It doesn't take a lot of encouragement to get him to do something stupid.

Granovetter's second point is just as important. Everyone's threshold is different. There are plenty of radicals and troublemakers who might need only slight encouragement to throw that rock. Their threshold is really low.

But think about your grandmother. She might well need her sister, her grandchildren, her neighbors, her friends from church, all of them to be throwing rocks before she would even dream of joining in. She's got a high threshold. The riot has to be going on for a very long time and has to involve a whole lot of people before grandma will join in. But there are times when even grandmothers might throw rocks through windows.

Granovetter's theory explained a lot of things that had been puzzling to me. So here's a good example-- it's from an interview I did at the 92nd Street Y in New York, with the economist, Richard Thaler, who is one of the leading lights in what's called Behavioral Economics. He had a book coming out called Misbehaving. And I really liked it. And we thought it would be fun if we did an event together.

[APPLAUSE]

Malcolm Gladwell

Thaler's the kind of guy who's interested in everything, including sports. And there was a point in our conversation when he started to talk about the fact that the owners of professional football teams do things on occasion that are really stupid and inexplicable. Take the professional football draft.

For those of you who are not football fans, let me explain. Every year, all the draft-eligible college football players are thrown into a big pool. And the 32 professional football teams pick the players they want, one by one.

The first player taken is the one that people think will be the best professional player. That person gets the biggest salary. The second player taken is the one predicted to be the second-best professional player, and so on. And after every team has picked one player each, they all start again and do another round.

Because the players selected in the first round are considered the most valuable, all the teams fight over them. They pay enormous sums of money and construct elaborate deals to try and acquire those high draft picks.

Malcolm Gladwell

Thaler and a colleague named Cade Massey decide to analyze this assumption. Was it really true that a first-round pick was worth half a dozen second-round picks?

Malcolm Gladwell

The implication of Thaler and Massey's work is that teams should trade away their first-round picks. They should stockpile players in the second and third rounds, who can be paid a lot less and are nearly as good. This is how you build a winning football team.

So what was the reaction of NFL teams to Thaler's idea? Well, not long after he and Cade Massey did their research, they got a call from the Washington Redskins.

Malcolm Gladwell

And what did they see? The Redskins did the exact opposite of what they should have done if they were rational. And they weren't the only ones. Thaler and Massey have consulted for three NFL franchises now, and no one has ever followed their advice.

It gets worse. There's a very respected economist named David Romer, who famously proved that football teams would win more games if they didn't punt, if they simply used all four downs to try and gain 10 yards, as opposed to giving the ball away to their opponents. So since Romer published his work, are NFL teams less likely to punt on fourth down? You guessed it. No.

Malcolm Gladwell

Two extra wins in a 16-game season, just by acting a little bit differently. Who wouldn't do that? But nobody would!

Now, is that because they're stupid, because they have irrational beliefs? That was my first thought when I was listening to Thaler talk about his football research. Those dumb football owners.

But that can't be right. You don't get to their level by being dumb. Surely this is about thresholds.

Football owners and coaches are a small group of people. They all know each other. They've all done things a certain way for a long time.

And doing things that way has made them a lot of money. They have a high threshold. These are a bunch of grandmothers.

The only way any of them is going to change their behavior is if some radical goes first. And there are no radical owners in the NFL. There's just Richard Thaler, a geeky middle-aged economist from the University of Chicago, with a bunch of equations that you need a PhD to understand.

Malcolm Gladwell

Apparently there aren't a lot of radicals in basketball either. Just the Barrys, and Chinanu Onuaku, the Nigerian-American who played for Louisville. This, I think, gets us a little closer to the puzzle of Wilt Chamberlain. In his autobiography, he has this throwaway comment on the subject of shooting underhanded.

Chamberlain wrote-- "I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now, the best one in the NBA, Rick Barry, shoots underhanded. I just couldn't do it."

Two key things here. First he writes, "I know I was wrong." Just as Granovetter would say, it's not Chamberlain's beliefs that are getting in the way.

He knows it's wrong. Then "I felt silly, like a sissy." His doesn't want to look foolish. He's a high-threshold guy. He needs everyone to be doing something new before he's willing to join in. But Rick Barry? He's different.

Rick Barry's dad comes to him when he's a junior in high school and says, you really ought to shoot underhanded. Rick's a pretty good free throw shooter at that point, maybe 70% or so. But his dad tells him he can do better.

Malcolm Gladwell

What's interesting is that Barry actually has the same initial reaction as Wilt Chamberlain-- I'm going to look like a sissy. But he thinks about it, and he decides it doesn't bother him. Or rather, his drive to be a better shooter is stronger than his worry about what others think of him.

That's exactly what it means to have a low threshold. If you have a threshold of 0, you're someone who doesn't need the support or the approval or the company of others to do what you think is right. Now, here's the catch-- the person who thinks this way is not always easy to be around.

Barry was never embraced by his fellow players. There were a couple of notorious articles about him in the 1980s, full of quotes like this from a former teammate-- "If you'd got to know Rick, you'd realize what a good guy he was. But around the league, they thought of him as the most arrogant guy ever." Half the players disliked Rick. The other half hated him. Here's another quote "He lacks diplomacy. If they sent him to the UN, he'd end up starting World War III."

Malcolm Gladwell

Barry's been out of the game for more than 30 years. But just talking about basketball made him tense. There was a right way to play the game. And when people didn't play it the right way, it drove him crazy.

Malcolm Gladwell

Do you hear what upsets him? The social part of the game. Players paying attention to each other's feelings as opposed to their own performance.

Malcolm Gladwell

Barry wrote an autobiography in 1972, called Confessions of a Basketball Gypsy, which I have to say, is one of the strangest autobiographies I've ever read. There are sections of the book Barry gives over to various people in his life. They each write a few pages. And he seems to care not one iota about what these people say about him.

So here's his mother, comparing Barry to his older brother, Dennis. "Rick has become famous and made a lot of money. But what is that? I think maybe, Dennis leads the better life."

And this is his ex-wife, describing how they first met. "He was awful to me. He was always shoving me in the pool, and I hated him for it.

Oh, I could take it. But there's always someone who goes too far, who does it more than the others, beyond endurance. And for me, that was Rick." I would not let my parents and my wife say these things about me in my own autobiography.

Malcolm Gladwell

He doesn't care. The kind of person who would let bad things be said about him in his own autobiography is the kind of person who would shoot a free throw that other people think looks ridiculous. I spent an afternoon with Barry at his condo.

And I'd read all that stuff about him-- half the players disliked him, the other half hated him. And I kind of braced myself before I met him. But I liked him.

Or maybe it makes more sense to say, that I really admired him. Because I finally understood what someone like Rick Barry stands for. It's perfectionism.

And what is a perfectionist? Someone who puts the responsibility of mastering the task at hand ahead of all social considerations, who would rather be right than liked. And how can you be good at something complex, how can you reach your potential if you don't have a little bit of that inside you?

I know we've really only been talking about basketball, which is just a game in the end. But the lesson here is much bigger than that. It takes courage to be good, social courage, to be honest with yourself, to do things the right way. I think Barry understands the price he's paid for being the way he is. It kept coming up.

Malcolm Gladwell

He's not describing an easy life. But think of what he gained. Rick Barry was the best basketball player he could possibly have been. And Wilt Chamberlain could never say that.

Malcolm Gladwell

Barry says that years after the two of them stopped playing, he used to go to Wilt Chamberlain, and tell him, you should have come to me. I could have helped you.

Ira Glass

Malcolm Gladwell, he's the host of the brand new podcast, Revisionist History. It's produced by Panoply. It's free, and you can subscribe at www.revisionisthistory.com. Coming up-- those who don't pump Trump, hit a bump, get stumped, now chumps. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme. Today's show, choosing wrong, the stories of people looking at the right choice, considering the right choice, and then rejecting the right choice.

So coincidentally, the week that we were making this show, there was this big vote in Britain. And now people in Britain are fretting over the choices. Some of them are, anyway. Tom, for example, is 23.

He voted to leave the European Union, and then woke up the next day to see Britain's currency plunge to the lowest level in 30 years. The stock market crashed. The prime minister resigned-- because of his vote and people like him.

Ira Glass

People did predict that British stocks and currency would drop if they left the EU. Tom says he didn't totally understand the pros and cons of Brexit. So in the end, he just voted his feelings.

Ira Glass

Which brings us to Act 2, in which people in our country-- political experts, in fact-- second guess their own political judgments with the benefit of hindsight. Anybody can get this stuff wrong. Act 2 of our show is called "Poll Dance".

So when Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, the media was surprised. Well, to be more precise, what happened over the course of a few months, there was this slow dawning realization, like, oh, this is really happening? Oh, how did we not see this?

But the funny thing is now, when you look back on the polling data, you can see, actually, the evidence was there, ready to be seen, that Trump was going to win. And it had been there for months. And most of the media whose job it is to read the polls and the politics correctly and predict what would happen, they just got it wrong.

Perhaps the most epic of these failures came with the website FiveThirtyEight, which is a journalistic outfit whose entire reason for existence is to predict outcomes, and not in the vague imprecise way that political pundits have always in the past, by interpreting insider gossip and reporting about the candidates. FiveThirtyEight is backed up by data. It's entirely about numbers and using statistical analysis.

FiveThirtyEight called every single state correctly in the last presidential election. They are just spectacular at political prediction, totally bungled it on this one. Zoe Chace went to talk to them about how exactly they got it wrong.

Zoe Chace

FiveThirtyEight is the first to say they screwed this up. And at FiveThirtyEight, if you get something wrong, you go back into the data and you figure out why what happened happened, and why you got it wrong. And then explain that with more data. I talked with one of their senior writers, Harry Enten.

Zoe Chace

He wrote that a year ago, just before Trump entered the race. When I first heard Harry talk, I assumed he was about 60 years old, because he says stuff like this--

Zoe Chace

In fact, he's a 28-year-old stats nerd. He describes his job like this--

Zoe Chace

And at the end of every year he does a piece about what he got wrong. In 2015, it was Trump. And let me say, you do a story on what you got wrong if you get most things right. Harry's usually very on point. So what did he miss?

Zoe Chace

No respectable analyst takes the horse race polls too seriously. One minute you're up, the next you're down. No context, no long-term meaning. Harry ignored them. Instead, he wanted to look at something that has a history of being right, not a history of being inflated by the media coverage of the moment.

The data he focused on the morning Trump announced his bid was what he'd seen be a good predictor before-- favorability. Do people like this candidate? It's just how people answer this question.

Zoe Chace

But what Harry couldn't see was what was about to happen next in this race. The day Trump announced his candidacy, June 16th of last year, Trump gave a speech, the highlight of which was this--

Zoe Chace

And right after this speech, those favorability numbers turned upside down. Trump went from minus 35 to plus 17. More Republican primary voters had a favorable view of Trump than an unfavorable one. It was a really big turnaround.

Zoe Chace

Harry thinks that of everything Trump said that day, it was probably the wall that pushed his numbers the most. Because other pollings showed that of the voters who said immigration was their number one issue, Trump was far and away their favorite guy.

Zoe Chace

So that data was out there. But still, Harry ignored it. He didn't see the truth. He still thought that Trump couldn't win. Here's Harry back in October, 2015, on the FiveThirtyEight Elections Podcast, which is a great podcast, by the way.

Zoe Chace

A few weeks ago, when Harry went back to dissect what he got wrong, he found something else, something important. In fact, the biggest thing that he'd missed the first time. It was in those favorability numbers.

If you look deeper into those numbers, there was one very significant group of voters. These were the people who told pollsters their view of Trump was not just favorable, it was strongly favorable. These are the diehards. They will not change their minds.

Think of this group as the Deadheads who actually go on tour with the band. Trump had this core group of strongly favorables that he could rely on in every primary. It was solid. It was a superpower that no one else in the field had.

Zoe Chace

Now, Harry saw the 30%. But at the time, he completely misunderstood it. Instead of seeing it as the army that would win primary after primary, instead of seeing it as Trump's super power, he thought it was a problem for Trump.

He thought the 30% was a ceiling, the maximum that Trump could get. I remember at the time, FiveThirtyEight and lots of political writers were saying, this was Trump's Achilles heel. He would never be able to get more than 30% of Republicans to like him. In retrospect, Harry says, it wasn't a ceiling.

Zoe Chace

Which is exactly what happened to Jeb Bush. The longer he was in, the more his numbers fell. Even though he was the early party pick, the establishment favorite, the second heir to the throne. There's a theory in political science called The Party Decides. And most people thought the Republican elite would be the ones to pick the Republican candidate.

Zoe Chace

And when the candidate is not liked, he says, it's the opposite. The party comes together to stop them.

Zoe Chace

Just to show you how different things are this year, the party elite freaked out about Donald Trump. But that didn't stop him. And now, not only has Bob Dole endorsed Trump, but he's advocating for Newt to be Trump's VP, which might mean that Bob Dole actually hates Trump.

The whole purpose of the work that's done by people like Harry-- data journalism-- is to essentially draw conclusions that are free of assumptions. There's this one bias I found though, even in the unflappable Harry Enten. FiveThirtyEight has an allergy to media hype. They have this aversion to frothy, splashy coverage of a person or an event.

Just meaning it's hard for those guys to admit something new is going on that doesn't fit the model, particularly when it's dressed in hysterical cable-news clothing. And that, I believe, is why Harry and all journalists, basically, missed the real phenomenon lurking underneath the hype.

OK, here's my question. Since his statistical models are based on what happened in the past, how can you predict something that's never happened before, like Trump?

Zoe Chace

The last thing Harry pointed out is this is a really small data set to draw conclusions from-- presidential primaries-- it just is. 1972 is when primaries started actually choosing their party's nominee. There have only been 14 presidential primaries since then, without an incumbent president. So really, in order to see Trump coming clearly, we need to see a lot more Trumps. We need a Trump precedent. Precedent, I said.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace, she's one of the producers of our program. She takes no position on whether Donald Trump should be president.

Ira Glass

Act 3, post-it not. So we end our show today with this example of somebody knowingly choosing wrong. In this case, choosing wrong for his own amusement. Comedian Kurt Braunohler tells the story.

Ira Glass

Kurt Braunohler, he's a stand-up comedian and recording his first one-hour special for Comedy Central this September. That clip was courtesy of Comedy Central.

Well, our program was produced today by Dana Chivvis. Our production staff, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Karen Duffin, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robin Semien, Lyra Smith, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney and Nancy Updike. Our editor is Joel Lovell. Editorial help from Julie Snyder and Elna Baker. Music help from Damien Gray, from Rob Gettis.

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS].

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. His reaction to the Brexit vote? No surprise, same as usual.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life.