0:15

Pushkin. Yes,

0:18

I am a sophomore high school and that

0:21

high school you started there in ninth grade.

0:23

No, it's my first year. This is your first year.

0:26

Yeah yeah, will you challenge in your old school?

0:29

No? No, not really. Welcome

0:41

to Revisionist History, where every week we

0:43

re examine something from the past that's been

0:45

forgotten or misunderstood. I'm

0:47

Malcolm Gladwow. This

0:58

episode is about a young man named

1:00

Carlos, which is not his real name.

1:02

I've changed it for reasons that will become obvious.

1:11

Were you bored most of the timing? What were

1:13

you doing when you're sitting in class? Well,

1:16

I usually finished my classwork

1:19

a lot earlier than some of

1:21

the other kids, and I

1:23

guess I was a little boared.

1:26

Carlos is slight, a little short for

1:28

his age, braces, thick head

1:30

of black hair. A good looking kid,

1:32

but normal. He wouldn't stand

1:34

out if you saw him on a school bus. It's

1:37

his manner that's distinctive for

1:39

a teenager. He's really deliberate, thoughtful,

1:42

a little guarded in a way that makes him seem

1:44

much older. He lives in Los Angeles.

1:47

He's just transferred from a massive public high

1:49

school to an elite private school. I really

1:51

enjoy math. Math is

1:54

just it's not easy, but

1:56

it just makes the most sense. When he talks

1:59

about math, Carlos relaxes. He

2:01

looks happy, like math is the

2:03

warmest and safest place. He knows. Some

2:06

people just say they hate math because they don't understand

2:08

it. But I just like learning about

2:11

like the concepts of math, and when

2:13

I can understand something, I feel it

2:16

just makes it. Everything's very

2:19

precise, you know, it's not a lot

2:21

of room for error. That's

2:23

I guess that's why I like math. Is that the subject

2:25

that you'd get the best grades in. Well,

2:28

I do get pretty good grades all

2:30

my classes. What's the last time

2:32

in school you ever felt that you didn't understand

2:34

something or couldn't do something or I'm

2:39

going to sound kind of arrogant, I think,

2:41

but most concepts that you know

2:44

I'm taught, I catch

2:46

on them pretty quickly. Carlos

2:52

is a smart kid. He's gotten a scholarship

2:55

to a really good private school. He's

2:58

excelling. It's not hard to imagine

3:00

that one day he'll go to a college of his choice.

3:03

He's going places. This

3:06

is what civilized societies are supposed

3:08

to do. To provide opportunities

3:10

for people to make the most of their ability,

3:13

so that if you're born poor, you can move

3:16

up. If you work hard, you can improve

3:18

your lot. There's even a term

3:20

for this, capitalization. A

3:23

society's capitalization rate is

3:26

the percentage of people in any group

3:28

who are able to reach their potential capitalize

3:32

on their potential. I think the

3:34

capitalization rate is one of the single

3:36

best ways we have to capture how

3:38

successful and just a society

3:41

is. If I know that number,

3:43

I think I have a better handle on how well

3:45

a country is doing than if I know it's GDP

3:48

or its growth rate or its per capita

3:50

income. And right from the

3:53

beginning, Americans have told themselves

3:55

that they're really good at capitalization,

3:58

really good at social mobility. Any

4:01

kid can grow up to be president. That's

4:04

what's supposed to set America apart

4:06

from everywhere else. Over

4:11

the course of the next three episodes

4:14

of Revisionist History, I want to

4:16

reevaluate this idea, go

4:18

back and ask the question, is

4:20

it true that we're good at capitalization.

4:23

In one upcoming show, we're going to talk

4:25

about where the money goes in American higher

4:28

ed. I'm going to take you to

4:30

a small college in South Jersey and

4:32

ask the question is the system geared

4:34

to serve the poor smart kid or the

4:37

rich smart kid. In

4:39

another episode, I'm going to compare two

4:41

liberal arts colleges and ask what

4:43

happens when a school really tries

4:45

to help someone like Carlos. But

4:48

this episode is about Carlos himself, because

4:51

his story is a little more complicated than it

4:53

seems, actually a lot

4:55

more complicated. I

5:00

met Carlos through a man named Eric Eisner,

5:04

And what was your first impression of it? Miss

5:07

Eisner? You can speak freely

5:10

even though he's in the room. What was rising?

5:12

Canvey intimidating and

5:15

sometimes. Eric used to be a big

5:17

shot entertainment lawyer back in

5:19

the day. He worked for David Geffen. He's

5:21

a kind of athletes swagger where

5:23

his impeccable Tom Ford's suits. Anyway,

5:26

he retired in the early nineteen nineties

5:28

and a few years later started a program

5:31

for gifted public school kids in Los Angeles.

5:33

It's called Yes. He talks

5:36

to a lot of teachers, looks at test scores,

5:38

identifies the most promising kids,

5:41

tutors them, and uses his connections

5:43

to get them into private schools. He's

5:46

been doing it for nearly twenty years. A

5:48

couple hundred students have passed through

5:50

Yes and have gone on to graduate from

5:53

some of the top universities in the country.

5:56

Carlos is one of his kids. When

5:58

Carlos was in fifth grade, Eric got him

6:00

into a fancy elementary school in Brentwood.

6:04

Now several years later, Carlos

6:07

comes to meet me at Eric's house in bel

6:09

Air, up one of those winding, gorgeous

6:11

canyon roads from Sunset Boulevard. I'm

6:14

across the table from Carlos. Eric

6:16

is behind me, sitting in an armchair. That's

6:19

why his voice is sometimes a little faint. Eric

6:22

asks Carlos to think back to that

6:24

fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Did

6:26

he feel self conscious going there? I

6:29

did, but not because I was Hispanic. Eric

6:32

asks whether it was because Carlos

6:34

was poor and those kids were rich.

6:37

Did that make Carlos feel self conscious?

6:39

Well, not a thing about it. I

6:42

think he kind of did, you know? Definitely,

6:47

I felt like I was the only one,

6:49

not the only one the

6:52

episode of the scenes. Eric asks

6:54

about the episode with the sneakers.

6:57

Did Carlos remember that your racists

6:59

from your memory? I have?

7:02

I Keith telling

7:04

what happened. Here's what happened. The

7:06

teachers in Brentwood called Eric to tell him that

7:08

Carlos wasn't playing with the other kids at recess,

7:11

even though he seemed very engaged with him in the

7:13

classroom. Eric then talked with

7:15

Carlos and noticed that his sneakers

7:17

were about three sizes too big.

7:20

So he bought him shoes the right size, and that's

7:22

solved the problem. Do you remember this, the

7:25

being not willing to play his forts with

7:28

the other kids. That does ring a bell, But

7:30

I don't, don't I remember the snee years. Eric

7:33

says Carlos's sneakers were so big

7:35

they curled up like elf shoes. But

7:38

Carlos says he doesn't remember the sneakers.

7:41

This happens to him a lot. I

7:49

said at the beginning that the capitalization

7:51

story for people like Carlos is complicated,

7:54

and this is what I mean. Carlos

7:56

is a really, really gifted kid. But

7:59

it's almost impossible to imagine Carlos

8:01

making it into the fancy school without

8:04

Eric. In other words, in order

8:06

for the system to work, for the

8:08

smart kid to make it up the ladder, he

8:10

needs an advocate and not just an

8:12

ordinary advocate, a high powered

8:15

guy with lots of connections who

8:17

can get you in and watch over you

8:19

and make sure you get new sneakers because

8:21

the ones you have are curled up like elf

8:23

shoes. Capitalization

8:26

requires an Eric Eisner. And

8:29

how many Eric Eisner's do you think there are out

8:31

there? Then there's

8:33

the second complication. To

8:36

find opportunity, Carlos had to

8:38

go to Brentwood, forty five minutes

8:40

up the freeway from where he grew up, a

8:43

wealthy, white, leafy green neighborhood.

8:46

The truth is that's where opportunity

8:48

is in America these days. But

8:50

you can't just jump from where Carlos was from

8:53

straight to Brentwood and leave your past

8:55

behind. Your past comes

8:57

with you. What

9:00

were the other students like, Well

9:02

those students, well you actually

9:05

kids aren't going to be kids, and

9:08

so they weren't two

9:10

different. Okay,

9:13

I need to give me a second here, ending

9:18

nervous. A

9:20

few years ago two prominent economists,

9:23

Caroline Hawksby of Stanford and Chris Avery

9:25

of Harvard, published a really important

9:27

paper called The Missing One Offs. Hawksby

9:31

and Avery start out by talking about something

9:33

that happened ten years ago. That's

9:35

when some of the elite US colleges, the

9:38

Harvards and Princetons of the world, announced

9:40

that they'd give free tuition to any deserving

9:43

student who came from the bottom of the economic

9:45

ladder. At the time,

9:47

the cutoff was a family income of forty

9:49

thousand dollars a year. Now it's sixty

9:52

five thousand. In other words, if

9:54

a poor kid is smart enough to get in,

9:56

she can attend for free. And

9:59

what happens after the elite schools make this announcement

10:02

not much. To use Harvard as

10:04

an example, they ended up taking in about

10:06

an additional fifteen or so low

10:08

income student a year after changing their policies.

10:11

That's out of a freshman class of more than sixteen

10:14

hundred. It's a drop in the bucket.

10:17

Let me quote directly from the paper now,

10:19

because this is a crucial point. Interestingly,

10:23

this very modest effect was not a surprise

10:26

to many college admission staff. They

10:29

explained that there was a small pool of low income,

10:31

high achieving students who were already

10:33

fully tapped, so that additional

10:36

aid and recruiting could do little

10:38

except shift them among institutions

10:40

that were fairly similar. In

10:42

other words, the admissions officers

10:45

felt they had gone out of their way

10:47

to look for these kinds of kids. They'd

10:49

made special visits to high schools with lots

10:51

of poor students, that sent out letters

10:53

to kids with high test scores living in bad neighborhoods.

10:56

They had built a network of guidance counselors.

10:59

They sponsored free campus visits

11:01

for low income students, and they made a tuition

11:03

free. But if you do all those things

11:06

and you only get an extra fifteen

11:08

smart poor kids a year at Harvard, that

11:10

must mean that there aren't a lot of poor, smart kids

11:13

out there. They're talking about

11:15

Carlos. They're saying that kids

11:17

like Carlos are pretty rare. Hucksby

11:27

and Avery decide to fact check this is

11:29

it true. They go to the College

11:31

Board and get the entire database of college

11:34

test scores SAT and

11:36

ACT. Then they take those

11:38

scores and match each score to a

11:40

high school and a neighborhood and a zip

11:42

code, and to all that they could find about

11:44

where the student comes from.

11:46

And they end up with a giant map of every

11:49

high achieving, low income high school

11:51

senior in the country. And here's

11:53

what Hucksby and Avery discover. The

11:56

admissions officers are totally wrong.

11:59

Actually, there are a huge number

12:01

of poor smart kids in the United States. There's

12:03

probably thirty five thousand

12:06

students a year who score in the ninetieth

12:08

percent or above on their SATs,

12:11

and who also come from families living

12:13

on less than forty thousand dollars a year.

12:16

Now, keep in mind, these are kids who don't have tutors,

12:19

who don't go to high schools with a million advanced

12:21

placement courses, and who probably took

12:24

the test once, not two or three times

12:26

like upper middle class kids. So these

12:28

scores are on the low side. These

12:30

are kids who could ace a test in one shot.

12:38

Eric Eisner started yes almost twenty

12:40

years ago at an LA Middle School

12:42

in a place called Lennox, which

12:44

is this small, heavily Hispanic community

12:47

of about twenty thousand people hollowed

12:50

out in the middle of Los Angeles, right

12:52

across the four or five Freeway from Lax.

12:55

I mean right across you

12:57

can practically touch the planes as they

12:59

take off in land. The

13:03

median household income in Lennox is

13:05

thirty seven thousand dollars a year. It's

13:08

not a good name hood. Lennox

13:19

Middle School has six hundred kids per

13:21

grade. The classrooms are

13:23

these standalone wooden and cinder block huts,

13:26

row upon row of them. They only

13:29

put in windows in the huts last year, tiny

13:31

little windows high on the wall. There's

13:34

a big fence around the outside, a

13:36

guard in a hut at the gate. I

13:38

don't want this to come across the wrong way, but

13:40

Lennox looks like a concentration gam

13:44

When I was there, a police cruiser drove

13:46

slowly back and forth between the long

13:49

rows of huts. Oh, and next to the principal's

13:51

office, they are what looked like six narrow

13:53

closets, solitary confinement

13:56

cells with a stash a kid until

13:58

the cops come. Remember this

14:00

is a middle school. You go to

14:02

a place like Lennox and you can't help

14:04

feeling hopeless. This is as

14:06

bad as La gets. But from

14:09

the beginning, when he came there looking for bright

14:11

kids, Eric Eisner hit paydirt.

14:14

I'm curious about the idea

14:16

you can go to a fairly randomly selected

14:19

middle school in a

14:21

disadvantaged neighborhood in a

14:23

major American city and reliably

14:26

find every year a

14:29

handful of really,

14:31

really really gifted kids. Right,

14:34

I think, yeah, it's It varies

14:37

even within the school. From

14:39

year to year, you never know what kind

14:41

of crop it's going to be. It's a little

14:43

like wine. But some years it's

14:45

very they're very few, and sometimes

14:48

one or none. But then other

14:50

years you'll dey'll be five of them. But

14:52

there is, you know, it's it's it's

14:55

not like you're looking for a needle

14:58

in a haystack. It's not

15:00

like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.

15:03

There's a ton of talent out there, all

15:08

right. If there are so many smart poor

15:10

kids, why aren't they showing up at places

15:13

like Harvard. The researchers

15:15

Avery and Hawksby find that a good chunk of

15:17

the thirty five thousand high achievers don't

15:19

even so much as apply to a good school.

15:22

That's crazy, right, Most

15:24

selective schools are practically free for

15:27

these kids. An elite school is cheaper

15:29

than the local state college down the street. More

15:32

importantly, these are really smart kids.

15:34

We're not talking here about some mediocre student

15:37

who gets into an elite college because he's a great

15:39

football player, or his dad built a new

15:41

dorm and he ends up being way over his

15:43

head. We're talking about kids like Carlos.

15:46

Most concepts that I'm taught. I catch

15:48

Onston pretty quickly. Eric

15:51

thinks that the system can't find kids like Carlos

15:54

because it starts looking much too late. The

15:56

admissions officers are sending out their letters

15:58

to high school juniors seventeen

16:00

year olds kidding me in Lennox.

16:03

Eric says, you have to start finding the smart

16:05

kids in the fourth grade. That's because

16:08

they may not even show up later. It's

16:12

like any muscle, it atrophies, and

16:14

then by the time the boy girl thinn

16:17

happens, if

16:19

that hasn't been encouraged, that

16:21

excitement of being smart, it

16:24

goes away. It goes away

16:26

because when the struggle hits

16:28

them of going to any kind of challenge

16:30

in college, they don't have the cleatsa

16:33

for that anymore. They don't have those hiking

16:35

shoes anymore. They're just

16:37

not accustomed to it. So what

16:39

was happening before

16:43

Yes shows up at this school or

16:45

in schools where there is no one

16:48

looking out for the promising fourth

16:50

grader, what happens to those kids?

16:53

Well, when we came here,

16:55

they discouraged me from waiting

16:58

until the eighth grade to meet with

17:00

the boys, which is what I wanted

17:02

to do. They said, you can't

17:04

wait that long because eighty percent of

17:06

those boys get gang affiliated

17:09

by the eighth grade. Gone

17:13

by the eighth grade then comes

17:15

high school. But there is no high school Lennox.

17:18

The kids from Lennox have to go one town over

17:20

to Hawthorne, and that means crossing

17:22

gang lines. Remember that statistic

17:25

that Hucksby and Avery came up with for

17:27

the total number of smart poor kids.

17:29

It's low. That number

17:31

is based on the pool of high school seniors who

17:33

took either the ACT or the SAT.

17:36

So to show up in their pool of thirty five

17:39

thousand poor smart kids, you had

17:41

to have made it all the way to the end

17:43

of high school and taking one of those

17:45

stanandized tests. Eric's

17:47

point is that a good number of high achievers in places

17:49

like Lennox never even get that far.

17:52

What's the capitalization rate in Lennox if

17:55

you have to cross a gang line to get to high

17:57

school. I

18:05

think we have an ideology about talent that says

18:08

the talent is a tan jible, resilient, hard

18:10

and shiny thing. It will always rise

18:12

to the top. And to find an

18:14

encouraged talent, all you have to do as

18:16

a society is to make sure the right doors

18:18

are open, free campus physics,

18:21

free tuition letters to

18:23

the kids with high scores. That's

18:25

the ideology of the admissions officer. You

18:28

raise your hand and say over here, and

18:30

the talent will come running. But that's

18:33

not true in Lennox. It's not resilient

18:35

and shiny. At Lennox Middle School, talent

18:37

is really really fragile.

18:42

So Eric found Carlos and Lennox and

18:45

used his Westside LA lawyer savvy

18:47

to get Carlos into an elite private elementary

18:50

school in Brentwood. Every

18:52

morning, Carlos took a long bust ride

18:54

up the four or five from Lennox to this school.

18:57

I've known Eric for a long time, and I always

18:59

joke with him that the slogan of his organization

19:02

YES ought to be that every Los Angeles

19:04

public school child deserves his own Jewish

19:06

entertainment lawyer. He always laughs

19:09

because that's what he's been doing for close to twenty years,

19:12

cutting deals with private schools for his YES

19:14

kids. So Carlos is doing

19:16

really well. Of course he is. He's an

19:18

exceptional student. Eric starts

19:20

looking for Carlos's next step. He

19:22

makes some inquiries. Carlos

19:25

gets an offer of a full ride scholarship

19:27

to one of the most exclusive private high schools

19:29

in the country. If he were a kid

19:31

from a normal middle class neighborhood and family,

19:34

you'd say he's all set. But

19:36

he's not. I really

19:39

wanted to go to boarding school. Yeah no,

19:41

but in the end I didn't get to

19:43

go. The boarding school he's referring to is

19:46

Chod in Central Connecticut.

19:48

It's his ticket out. But remember

19:50

I said that Carlos's story gets

19:52

complicated. Well, here's

19:54

yet another complication. Carlos

19:57

has a little sister. She's also

19:59

in the room with us, along with Elina Bereff,

20:02

who runs Yes. With Eric, we

20:04

start talking about why Carlos couldn't

20:06

go to Choate birthday

20:10

right. It was the summer before Carlos

20:12

was supposed to go to high school. But Eric

20:15

has to remind him that there was a lot

20:17

else going on other than school. Yeah.

20:22

Um, well, in the eighth

20:25

was the eighth grade? Right? Eighth grade

20:28

for me? Foster care, Yeah,

20:30

I forgot. Did you catch that?

20:33

He set it really quickly under his

20:35

breath. That phrase again, I

20:37

forgot. In the summer going

20:40

into the eighth grade, my sister

20:43

and I were put into um

20:45

Foster homes. Carlos and his

20:47

sister were put into foster homes.

20:50

We're leaving away from from

20:52

our mother, and I guessed I had

20:55

a bit of an emotional, you

20:57

know, toll on me. And

21:00

I definitely still tried at

21:02

school. I didn't let

21:04

it, you know, affect my grades like

21:07

too much. Maybe by now

21:09

you can understand the strategic value

21:11

of Carlos's selective memory, because

21:14

there weren't a lot of good things happening in

21:16

his life. I'll let you use your imagination.

21:19

It was bad, Lennox bad,

21:21

not Brentwood bad. Then he says,

21:24

I definitely still tried at school.

21:26

I didn't let it affect my grades too

21:28

much. Things are falling

21:31

apart, but he understands that

21:33

he has one way out, and that

21:35

is to be a great student, not a good

21:37

one. Good doesn't get you anywhere

21:40

a great one. So he puts

21:42

everything else in a box. He's

21:45

got to take care of his sister and

21:47

get good grades. I

21:50

spoke with Eric about it later. He

21:53

took on this burden that

21:55

was so above his skill set

21:57

of being a father, being a

21:59

husband, being everything. And that's

22:02

why she wouldn't let him go to choke when they

22:04

gave him a full scholars Oh that was

22:07

the she he's talking about, Carlos's

22:09

mother. You can imagine

22:12

how frustrating and

22:15

angering that was for me, The

22:18

opportunity of him going to a school

22:20

like that and getting away from all that,

22:23

and her understandably

22:27

killing it because he was

22:29

taking care of her and that's what he

22:31

was what in the eighth grade he

22:34

did say I would have liked to go to boarding school. Oh,

22:36

he definitely wanted to go. We

22:39

sort of licked our wounds

22:41

by convincing ourselves that at

22:44

least he would be there for the little sister.

22:47

It's a chaotic time. Carlos's

22:50

mother tells him not to go to Choke, but

22:52

stay so he can take care of

22:54

her and his sister. Then

22:56

the two are taken from their mother. They become

22:59

wards of Los Angeles County. You know,

23:01

growing up with your parents and being

23:03

suddenly, you know, taken away,

23:06

and you know it can't be good. And

23:10

but I guess, I guess the hardest part was moving

23:14

around house house. It's not that

23:16

I moved to one foster home and

23:18

then stay there for a year and a half. I've

23:21

I think four four

23:24

homes and worse than that for

23:26

a time he was separated from his little sister.

23:28

How long will you separated from the

23:31

first foster home? Didn't like, we weren't

23:33

separated for too long because we made

23:35

a point to our social workers

23:38

to please, you know, reunite

23:40

us. He's making it sound like it wasn't

23:42

that much of a big deal. It

23:44

was a big deal. Choke

23:47

goes away, their mother goes away.

23:49

Now his little sister is taken away,

23:52

and the two of them start bouncing around the

23:54

foster homes of South LA and

23:57

made a point to our social workers to please

23:59

reunite us. It was a war. This

24:02

is Eric again from later. He didn't

24:05

tell you how disastrous these

24:07

first foster homes were. When you say

24:09

disastrous, what do you mean just idiotic?

24:12

I mean, it wasn't like, oh, thank god,

24:14

they're in this wonderful home. First

24:17

of all, they were one of five foster kids

24:19

in the You know what I mean, this is not let

24:21

us take you into our home. This

24:23

is how much are you going to pay us? How many kids can

24:25

we write? Meanwhile,

24:28

the mother is roaming

24:31

around the planet like beetlejuice,

24:34

and we have to, you

24:36

know, keep her at bay. It was just

24:38

you know it was. It was a mess. Did

24:41

you know your father? Yeah? Yeah,

24:44

I still have my father, and I

24:46

we he was he

24:48

was absent for a large part of my

24:50

life. And where

24:53

is your mother now? My

24:57

mother, my

24:59

mother is is in prison. Oh

25:02

yeah, yeah, in Texas.

25:05

I'll let you use your imagination again as

25:07

to why it wasn't an easy

25:10

thing for a kid, two kids to deal with.

25:13

Eric's Collegelna, is sitting quietly in the

25:15

room. She tries to put things

25:17

in perspective. Carlos's

25:19

mum, Alina, says, had a difficult

25:21

time with losing control of her children.

25:24

That made it hard for Eric and Elina

25:27

to stay involved. Finally,

25:29

the mother tells Eric and Elina, and

25:31

this is the phrase Elina uses to

25:34

detach themselves. The

25:38

kids vanish for a year and a half,

25:41

and neither Eric nor Elena know whether

25:43

they'll ever see them again. That's

25:53

the difference between being privileged and being

25:55

poor in America. It's how many chances

25:57

you get if you're wealthy.

26:00

All kinds of things can happen and you'll be okay.

26:03

You can drop out of school for a year, you

26:05

can get addicted to painkillers, you

26:07

can have a bad car, accident. No one

26:09

ever says of the upper middle class high school

26:11

kid whose parents get a terrible divorce,

26:14

I wonder if she'll ever go to college. She's

26:16

going to college. Disruption is

26:18

not fatal to life chances. A

26:20

friend of mine was once stopped by cops

26:23

speeding on the East River Drive in Manhattan,

26:25

drunk with a syringe on the dashboard.

26:28

And what happened. Nothing happened. He

26:31

went on to have a kind of brilliant career he deserved

26:33

to have. That's the point of privilege.

26:36

It buys you second chances. But

26:41

if you're from Lennox, even if

26:43

you're a kid with all the talent in the world,

26:46

you don't get the same number of chances. That's

26:49

why there are at least thirty five thousand

26:51

really smart, poor high school seniors every

26:53

year in this country, and so few

26:55

of them are making it to the kinds of colleges they

26:57

deserve because too many

26:59

things get in the way. When

27:08

I'm at Erica, and a few days later,

27:10

he told me a second story. He

27:12

said it was about another Carlos. As

27:15

he put it, he said, he got a call from

27:17

an elementary school principle in Lennox. She

27:19

says, I want you to come meet a bunch

27:22

of fourth graders that I think are

27:24

outstanding. When I got

27:26

to the third boy, I said, so tell

27:29

me about yourself. Eric asks

27:31

about the little boy's father, Where

27:33

is he? It's the standard question he always

27:36

starts with, because there are so many absent

27:38

fathers in that world that that question narrows

27:41

things down pretty quickly. His answer

27:43

was so peculiar. It gripped

27:45

me so fast. He

27:48

looked at me and he said there was

27:50

violence. Those were the very words

27:53

that came out of his mouth. And the minute

27:55

he said it, I wed, Oh my god,

27:58

I had more than the sneaking suspicion.

28:01

This is the boy who

28:05

saw virtually his entire family

28:07

murdered by a

28:10

crazy neighbor with who got

28:12

into a beef with his father. He

28:16

saw his father killed, his older brother killed.

28:19

Guy had a shotgun. He ran into

28:21

the house, grabbed his little sister. They

28:23

hit under a bed, and the guy burned the house down.

28:25

He was hiding under the bed while the house was

28:28

on fire. His mother finally

28:30

came back. He ran outside to see

28:32

his mother beaten up. She was in the hospital

28:34

for months after this, and

28:36

the police came. The shotgun. It

28:39

was so horrendous, and

28:41

it didn't occur to me that this was an

28:44

Olytics family. And I'm realized,

28:46

I am now talking to this boy because

28:49

he is one of the three outstanding

28:52

boys in the class. Wait,

28:54

what was he like? Fantastic,

28:57

he was poised, he was articulate.

29:00

When he said there was violence, the needle

29:02

moved one hundred and eighty. It went from Wow,

29:04

what an interesting, remarkable,

29:07

articulate, confident kid you are,

29:09

What a fortunate kid you are? To oh

29:12

my god, I now

29:14

think I know the reality of you. Even

29:24

as an eight year old, this kid was smart

29:26

enough to know that meeting Eric was

29:28

his big chance and that his job

29:31

was to put all the bad stuff aside,

29:33

to put it in a box. That's

29:36

what these kids are like the ones who make

29:38

it out. They learn from a very early age

29:40

where the exits are and they don't let anything

29:43

get in their way. You see your family

29:45

getting massacred or your mother go to prison,

29:47

and you say, like Carlos did, I

29:50

definitely still tried at school. I

29:53

didn't let it affect my grades too much.

29:58

So what happens to Carlos He

30:01

gets lucky, lucky because

30:03

the foster care, situation works itself

30:05

out. He forgets all the

30:07

bad stuff that's happening, He takes

30:09

care of his sister, He re established

30:12

his contact with Eric and Elena, and they

30:14

find him another private school, not

30:16

shout, not a boarding school, something

30:19

closer to home. But whatever

30:21

you do, don't call this story

30:24

inspirational, because it's

30:26

not. It's depressing because

30:29

it says that if you live in Lennox and things go

30:31

awry, you have to have an Eric

30:33

and Elena in your corner and be

30:35

as tough and single minded and

30:37

one in a million as Carlos is. To

30:39

make it out, that's

30:41

why the capitalization of talent is such

30:43

an issue, because these are

30:46

really long odds. Back

30:53

with Carlos and his sister at

30:55

Eric Eisner's house, Eric

30:57

turns to Carlos and asks, do you

30:59

remember feeling pessimist?

31:03

Were you ever pessimistic? I

31:08

wasn't really pessimistic as

31:12

well. Yeah, overwhelms

31:15

it is a great word. I guess

31:17

it's just a lot happening at

31:19

the time, and I

31:21

was, and then I was back in the public school. You

31:24

know, it was like it was like I started right back,

31:26

you know, right from square one. Eric

31:29

turns to Carlos's sister and asks

31:32

whether she ever worried that her brother

31:34

had had enough. What would

31:36

you do if he gave up? You remember

31:38

the time when you looked at him and we're

31:41

concerned that he was kind

31:43

of what would you do if he gave up? He

31:48

was a very optimistic person. He

31:51

was a very optimistic person, She

31:53

says. I feel like he was

31:55

strong for the both of us a lot of the times.

31:58

A time, Carlos

32:01

is looking straight ahead as she's speaking,

32:04

like he doesn't want to cry.

32:06

Then she says it again,

32:10

and never live. Honestly,

32:14

I never thought of him as someone who

32:17

gives up. That's

32:19

never worried about it. She

32:22

was never worried about it. You've

32:52

been listening to Revisionist History.

32:55

If you like what you've heard, do us a favor

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and rate us on iTunes. It helps. You

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or on your favorite podcast app. Our

33:09

show is produced by Meil LaBelle, Roxanne

33:12

Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our

33:15

editor is Julia Barton. Music

33:17

is composed by Luis Kerra and Taka

33:19

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33:21

is our engineer and Our fact checker

33:24

is Michelle Siroca. Penetly

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Management team Laura Mayer, Andy

33:30

Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg.

33:32

I'm Malcolm Cladwell.