Welcome back to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien. And in yesterday's

episode, we learned about Jane Cheney Spock, who helped her husband, Dr. Benjamin Spock,

craft his landmark child care book, but whose life was essentially undone by its success.

To talk more about the influence of media and medical experts on American culture,

I'm thrilled to welcome bestselling author and host of the delightful podcast revisionist

history, Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, thank you so much for joining us. The reason I thought

to reach out to you about this episode is because I heard an episode of your podcast,

revisionist history, that talked about Will and Grace, the TV show, and how subversively

influential it was. Oh, yeah. Everyone should take a listen to that episode because it's

really great. But to summarize, Will and Grace was not what we might think of as serious media

because it was just a network sitcom, but it had a profound and measurable effect on politics

in our country. You give a statistic that public support of gay marriage more than doubled

from the beginning of the show's run until the end. In a similar way, Dr. Spock introduced

Freudian developmental concepts to much of the world under the cover sort of advice for new moms

and over time for dads too. Are there other examples like this that come to mind for you in terms

of a person who had a vast impact on the culture in a way that was kind of under the radar?

Well, it's funny when I was reading the script you guys sent me about Dr. Spock,

I thought of this guy, John Rock, who I had, I should did a podcast on John Rock,

but also wrote about him for the New Yorker. He's the guy who did all the clinical work around the

birth control pill. He's really the father of the birth control pill. Wow. And he was this

Catholic doctor in Boston, who developed a Catholic, who believed what he was doing in his

work developing the pill was in keeping with his Catholic faith. But more than that,

...