Malcolm Gladwell

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin
Episode: Malcolm Gladwell
Date: March 19, 2025
Host: Rick Rubin
Guest: Malcolm Gladwell

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Episode Overview

This episode features journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell in conversation with Rick Rubin, offering a deep reflection on creative growth, the lasting influence of place and environment, the pitfalls of nostalgia, and the evolution of Gladwell's thinking over the past 25 years. The discussion pivots from Gladwell’s experience revisiting his classic book The Tipping Point to wider meditations on storytelling, higher education, the opioid epidemic, American exceptionalism, and the value of conflict in intellectual life. Throughout, Gladwell shares stories, personal anecdotes, and thought-provoking takes on society and culture, with an emphasis on rigor, self-examination, and the unseen factors that shape human behavior.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Revisiting the Past and Creative Evolution

• Gladwell’s Disconnection from His Early Work

  • Gladwell shares that he never rereads his earlier writing or podcasts, feeling detached from his past self.
    • “I never reread anything that I've written or re-listened to any podcast I do.” (00:24)
  • He describes revisiting The Tipping Point as "a profoundly strange experience," likening it to encountering the work of a different person.
    • “It seemed like a different person. It didn't seem like me at all.” (02:18)

• Comparing Writers and Musicians on Revisiting Past Work

  • Writers can ignore their past; musicians must perform their old songs, which influences creative self-relationship.

• On Persistence in Creative Fields

  • Gladwell reflects on longevity, drawing from his time interviewing Paul Simon.
    • “If you persist in a creative endeavor...something happens.” (03:09)
  • He notes the “Darwinian” winnowing of journalists and creators who don’t evolve or survive the pressures of retrospection and creative stasis.
    • “I associate that kind of focusing on the past with creative stasis.” (06:02)

2. The New vs. Old Tipping Point

• Abandoning the Idea of Revising Rather than Rewriting

  • Gladwell admits he could not simply update his book for its anniversary—the world and context had shifted too much.
    • “I just realized I couldn't. That was absurd...So the task has changed.” (05:03)
  • The metaphor of epidemics as models for idea transmission is now mainstream, partly due to The Tipping Point.

• Judgment, Anger, and Corruption in the New Book

  • The newer Tipping Point has a more judgmental tone, especially on institutions like Harvard and the opioid crisis.
    • “It's very hard to write about that and not be angry at what we allowed to happen…” (07:19)
  • On the Sacklers and opioid profiteering:
    • “All you needed to sell a drug that should not be sold...was 1% of the physician population on your side...an extraordinarily ingenious, Machiavellian insight.” (08:36)
  • The role of consultants (e.g., McKinsey) and social “forgetting” in allowing systemic harms.

• Trade-offs and Unintended Consequences

  • Gladwell emphasizes society’s failure to consider trade-offs, especially regarding drugs and crisis management:
    • “If there's anything that's absent from a lot of our discourse right now, it is this kind of thoughtful consideration of trade offs.” (10:00)

3. Differences in Creative Mediums & Approaches

• Writing Books, Journalism, and Podcasting

  • The mechanics feel similar, but the podcast allows for greater playfulness and the exploration of stories (e.g., Paw Patrol) that wouldn’t work in book form.
    • “The form of journalism that you choose has an impact...but it all fundamentally feels the same.” (11:32)

• Storytelling Techniques & The Mystery Influence

  • Gladwell attributes his narrative approach—using disorder and withholding information—to reading mysteries and spy novels.
    • “The best way to tell you a story is A, not to tell it in order, and B, not to tell you everything, or at least not to tell you everything all at once.” (21:39)
  • Comedians as masters of information order and timing; applies to his work as well.

4. Societal Change, Memory, and Art’s Role

• The Holocaust, Social Silence, and Art as Catalyst

  • Gladwell describes how the topic of the Holocaust was virtually absent from American discourse until a 1978 TV miniseries.
    • “It’s as if the Holocaust actually happened culturally in 1978.” (30:59)
  • The importance of art and media choices in shaping cultural memory:
    • "If I know who writes your songs, I care not who writes your laws." (34:46)

• Environmental Effects on Behavior and Place

  • Whether in medicine, policing, or culture, behavior and trends are powerfully shaped by environment (“overstory”).
    • “What that tells us is that you...living in Malibu...if you moved to Indianapolis, you would make different music.” (43:09)

• Geographically Specific Phenomena

  • Stories of LA’s unique bank robbery epidemic—rooted in specific places and sparked by a few influential "super-spreaders" (e.g., Casper, Sea Dog, and the Yankee Bandit). (46:06–50:57)

5. Reflections on Education, Monoculture, and Conflict

• The Dangers of Monoculture in Elite Schools

  • Gladwell recounts a school plagued by suicides because of a single-track, achievement-obsessed culture:
    • “Everyone had the same set of values about high achieving...There was nowhere to hide.” (71:23)
  • He advocates for random lotteries in selective admissions, emphasizing the value of community diversity and "weirdness."

• Conflict as Essential to Growth

  • Gladwell defends conflict, debate, and even “failing grades” as formative, lamenting the modern university’s aversion to intellectual confrontation.
    • “[College is] a time in your life to explore what's beautiful in the world, to find out about how to find beauty and meaning and all those kinds of things...to engage in conflict.” (66:12)
    • “If it takes you 20 years to make sense of it, fine. We're not in a hurry. Why are we in a hurry?” (70:40)

• AI and the Future of Higher Education

  • Ambivalence about whether AI will save or destroy what higher education should be.

6. The Role of Editors and Feedback

• On Editing and the Table Read
  • Gladwell values editors who highlight problems but let the creator find solutions. For podcasts, he uses table reads with a wide range of participants (including children and outsiders) for honest feedback.
    • “Anyone can identify a problem…An 8 year old can tell you what's wrong...but if you notice them nodding off...they're telling you something incredibly useful.” (74:47)

7. Music, Community, and Personal Tastes

• Aesthetic Tastes Mediated by Others
  • Personal musical and cultural preferences often derive from admired friends, lovers, or mentors—our own aesthetic “mavens.”
    • “[Music] was about participating in [someone else’s] world, which seemed really interesting to me...” (77:21)

8. Personal Passions and Reflections

• Running as Self-Actualization

  • Running remains Gladwell’s “thing I do best”—a lifelong, almost spiritual activity giving him immense joy. (83:18–85:53)

• Obsession with Cars

  • Since childhood, Gladwell has loved cars for their beauty and evolution. (86:33)

• Spiritual Life

  • Raised religious, Gladwell respects religious practices and is deeply moved by the sincerity of believers, even from backgrounds he doesn’t share. (87:43)

• Life’s Trajectory

  • Gladwell notes that, contrary to earlier assumptions, life gets better with age.
    • “So much better.” (88:58)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|-------|---------| | 00:24 | “I never reread anything that I've written or re-listened to any podcast I do.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 03:09 | “If you persist in a creative endeavor...something happens.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 05:03 | “I just realized I couldn't. That was absurd.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 07:19 | “It's very hard to write about that and not be angry at what we allowed to happen...” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 08:36 | “All you needed...was 1% of the physician population on your side...an extraordinarily ingenious, Machiavellian insight.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 10:00 | “If there's anything that's absent...it is this kind of thoughtful consideration of trade offs.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 21:39 | “The best way to tell you a story is A, not to tell it in order, and B, not to tell you everything, or at least not to tell you everything all at once.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 30:59 | “It’s as if the Holocaust actually happened culturally in 1978.” | Rick Rubin | | 34:46 | “If I know who writes your songs, I care not who writes your laws.” | Scottish proverb, cited by Gladwell | | 43:09 | “If you moved to Indianapolis, you would make different music.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 53:29 | “Stop being so precious. We're just making, you know, TV programming here.” | TV Executive to Lorne Michaels, told by Malcolm Gladwell | | 66:12 | “A time in your life to explore what's beautiful in the world...to engage in conflict.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 70:40 | “If it takes you 20 years to make sense of it, fine. We're not in a hurry. Why are we in a hurry?” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 71:23 | “Everyone had the same set of values about high achieving...There was nowhere to hide.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 74:47 | “Anyone can identify a problem…An 8 year old can tell you what's wrong.” | Malcolm Gladwell | | 88:58 | “So much better.” (On aging) | Malcolm Gladwell |

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:24 – 05:46: Revisiting The Tipping Point, creative persistence, the challenge of retrospection.
• 07:19 – 11:29: Opioid crisis, institutional failure, metaphor evolution.
• 21:39 – 25:46: Mystery storytelling, narrative techniques, comedy parallels.
• 30:59 – 35:15: The Holocaust, art and cultural memory.
• 40:53 – 43:38: Medical practice, place, and the concept of “overstory.”
• 46:06 – 50:57: LA’s bank robbery epidemic, “super-spreaders” and place.
• 66:12 – 71:11: Higher education, conflict, monoculture, and the value of weirdness in schools.
• 83:18 – 85:53: Running and its lifelong significance.
• 86:33 – 88:49: Car obsession, spirituality, awe in religious practice.
• 88:54 – 89:00: Life getting better with age.

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Tone & Language

• Gladwell is reflective, conversational, sometimes self-deprecating, and deeply analytical.
• Rubin’s tone is inquisitive, appreciative, teasing out both the personal and the philosophical in Gladwell’s answers.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers an expansive conversation touching on the personal evolution of an iconic writer, the vital importance of place, the hazards and value of dissent and diversity, and the invisible “overstory” shaping everything from crime trends to creativity. Gladwell advocates for embracing conflict, seeking out diversity (of thought, background, and interest), and approaching even the seemingly trivial with seriousness and care—qualities both foundational and radical in our present era. This exchange leaves listeners with fresh metaphors, new questions, and a reminder: everything is, in the end, about people, place, and the stories we choose to tell.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Tetragrammaton.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I never reread anything that I've written or re. Listened to any podcast I do. I don't know whether that. I never know whether that's unusual. You know, it's. It's different if you. In the world of music, you know, people return constantly to the music they've already made. Right. They. They have to live with the feeling of playing the same song over and over and over and over again. We have the option of doing the opposite in writing.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Of completely ignoring everything. So I. I've been in that ignoring world, and I literally had forgotten about many of the things I wrote. And it was so long ago. I realized 25 years is a really long time. I wrote the first Tipping Point when I was in my 30s, which seems an incredibly long time ago now, and I suddenly. I was, you know, transported back to the apartment I was living in, to the clothes I was wearing, the music I was listening to. I don't remember the call letters, but there was this radio station in New Jersey which played a lot of alternative rock. It was the only radio station I could find that sort of made me happy. I remember I would listen to it in the background as I worked on my book. And I still have. That's the strongest memory I have. When I went back and revisited. Anyway, it was a very strange. A profoundly strange experience. I won't do it again.

[Interviewer]

I wonder if it was Seton Hall University radio station. That was a good alternative music station about 25 years ago, if I remember correctly.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, I think it was. It came in. The signal was surprisingly weak for something that was in New Jersey. So it sounds like a college radio station. It doesn't sound like a professional one.

[Interviewer]

In reading the words, what was your reaction like, the content? How did that hit you?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It seemed like a different person. It didn't seem like me. Yeah, it didn't seem like me at all.

[Interviewer]

That's interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You know, I thought a lot about this because I had done that big. And as you know, I did that big audiobook with Paul Simon. And I realized the more I think about that project I did a couple years ago with Bruce Hadlam, where we sat down with him for. I think we got 40 hours of tape with him. It was one of the most transformative, creative experiences of my life. And I think about it constantly. And one of the things that I think about there is that, you know, he's had this preposterously long career where he was relevant in the. From the early 60s into the aughts. Which is absurd. I mean. Absurd, right.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And there are many people who believe the music he made in the arts is his best music.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Which is also kind of absurd. But he must have this. When I think about his music and I listen to his music, it does seem like I'm listening to someone different. You know, the Paul Simon of I Am a Rock is not the Paul Simon of the seven songs. It's just not. I mean, the voice has changed and deepened and become more. But the sensibility is like a million times more interesting. And I had a sort of appreciation of this idea that, oh, wow, like something really does happen to you if you persist in a creative endeavor. Many people don't persist. Yeah, they give up. So it never happens. But if you persist, something happens. And I feel like I have persisted. And so something happened. And something happened that I really like. I did not like the Tipping point when I reread it again.

[Interviewer]

That's interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I found it weird. And it seemed. It seemed, you know, Paul to come back to Paul. I had that very. He would never say it, but I had that feeling of Paul, from Paul, that he did not. He no longer liked the stuff he was doing in his early 20s that he was embarrassed by, you know, the sound of silence.

[Interviewer]

I would never guess that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I. I understood that. I. Like I said that's a surmise of mine. I would never. Yeah, I wouldn't put those words in his mouth. But I just got that feeling that he was. It seemed really distant to him. And I understand. I understand why. Now.

[Interviewer]

Did you originally set out to write a new book or did you set out to spruce up a 25 year old book at the beginning?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Spruce up a 25 year old book on its anniversary?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And then I just realized I couldn't. That was absurd. You know, it was like too much has happened. And so much had happened around the very themes. I was exploring that when I was writing the book. The idea that you would think about use the epidemic as a model for the transmission of ideas and behaviors was a novel concept. Now it's commonplace. So the first book was.

[Interviewer]

It's commonplace because of the book.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

People like the book, among other things. But now. So the task has changed. Back then it was convincing you this is a useful metaphor. Now it's deepening. A metaphor that you have implicitly accepted. Just a totally different enterprise.

[Interviewer]

Was there any part of when you were reading it that felt like, oh, this is a part of me that I remember? Or is there some part of you that is the same as the person who wrote the tipping point 25 years ago or nothing.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's very little. You know, the problem is I'm not someone who is very. I don't think about the past much at all. Not really that interested in my own past. I'm interested in other people's past, but I'm. I'm spectacularly uninterested in my own for reasons I don't really understand. Part I have a bad memory for one. But also I associate that kind of focusing on the past with creative stasis. I've become obsessed with this idea that the number of men I know in creative fields, women too, but it seems to be largely men in their 50s and 60s who disappeared. And I, I find that a terrifying thing. Like the journalists I ran with in the 90s are almost all no longer practicing journalism.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And at that winnowing is this kind of Darwinian, brutal Darwinian thing that happens to people in middle age. And I sort of, I associate too much kind of retrospection with, with that kind of. You do that when it's over.

[Interviewer]

Would you say that the, the new tipping point is more judgmental than the old tipping point?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, yes, I do vent a little bit in my treatment of, for example, Harvard University. I've had a long standing irritation with elite schools in this country that kind of boil over. And when you're writing about, you know, I had that the book is very much about the opioid crisis. And it's very hard to write about that and not be angry at what we allowed to happen or what the way a kind of honorable system was corrupted by a very small group of people. I don't even know what, whether there's a lesson, a broader lesson of what you do about that in the future, except that, you know, so much of the way society works is by a set of kind of like an unwritten code about how you're supposed to behave. And when people decide to abandon that code, there's not much we can do. You know, in an open society, you're vulnerable to that. And that's what the Sacklers did, is they decided, they decided to say fuck it, right? I don't care. I would like to make as much money as possible selling a dangerous drug. So it's very hard to write about that and not get wound up.

[Interviewer]

Would you say that's a story about corruption or is that not the right word?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's a story about a diabolical insight that they had that you could bring down an entire profession by targeting A tiny number that all you needed to sell a drug that should not be sold in the way that it was sold was 1%, the physician population on your side, 1%. You didn't need a big salesforce. You didn't need to convince everyone you needed to corrupt 1% of doctors. And like that is an extraordinarily ingenious, Machiavellian insight. No one had had it as pure and clear away as they had had, and no one chose to exploit it with as much kind of energy and determination as they did.

[Interviewer]

And do you remember how they came to it?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, it was strategy that was presented to them by McKinsey. They hired corporate consultants who again, were paid to look at the world and figure out a smart strategy. I mean, everyone sort of lost sight of the implications of what they were doing in a way that just was really kind of terrifying in retrospect.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I wonder about that. When I read the part about McKinsey, it's like, is all of the weight of the bad decision on the Sacklers or on the experts who were directing them?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's so many people who I think bear responsibility that, I mean, it's those two, but it's more. It's like, you know, as I point out, there were some states, California, Texas, New York, Illinois, that escaped the brunt of the opioid crisis because they had some very simple laws in the books which triplicate. Triplicate prescriptions which just reminded doctors when they were prescribing opioids that somebody was keeping a record of what they were doing. And that was sufficient to avoid the worst of the crisis. And then there's a kind of social forgetting. We all fell prey, not all of us, but many of us, to the kind of this false promise that there is such a thing as a drug without side effects. Even the greatest drugs in the world have side effects. And you can't. You can't pretend otherwise. Even if the good massively outweighs the bad, you have to realize that there's a trade off and think deeply about the trade off. If there's anything that's absent from a lot of our discourse right now, it is this kind of thoughtful consideration of trade offs. Right. You want to do that? Okay, I like that idea. But let's just pause for a moment and ask the question, what's the downside? What's the inevitable trade off that comes with this choice? Right. Do we know what it is? Are we prepared for it? Do we accept that the trade off is smaller than the gain how is.

[Interviewer]

Writing a book different than doing journalism?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's not different. It seems the same. That part is the same. Doing my podcast. My podcast is quite playful. I'm just doing a big episode right now on Paw Patrol. It's a Canadian show, so I thought I would defend it on Canadian grounds. And if you understand it, it's Canadian. All of its flaws start to make sense. It's because it's a kind of. It's a fantasy about municipal competence, which is such a Canadian thing to have fantasy about. But like, you know, you can't write a book like that, but you can do a podcast about that. So, I mean, in some senses, the form of journalism that you choose has an impact on how you can express yourself, but it all fundamentally feels the same.

[Interviewer]

So you read the book from 25 years ago, you don't recognize it, you don't like it, and you decide, I'm not going to spruce it up, I'm going to write a new book. Did that happen quick?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It took about a month. I realized it's hopeless. I gotta start over and tell me.

[Interviewer]

About that experience of starting over. How do you start?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It was the COVID chapter that I started with. And I was. I got obsessed with this super spreading event very early on at the Long Wharf Marriott in Boston, and with this discovery that this was a meeting that ended up spawning an outbreak that affected hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And it started with one person. And that idea was so fascinating to me, and I began to explore it and began to understand that that's actually how Covid spread. It was one person, a very, very small number of people played this outsized role. And it was so different from the story that we'd been told that, that I thought, oh, here's a story I can kind of anchor my book with. And so it grew from there. I. I kind of got lost in that world. And there was all the stuff I didn't put in the book that I was doing for that chapter. I became obsessed with the fact that, you know, since so much of your, of your chances of getting infected with COVID are a function of the environment that you're in. I then wondered, what is this safest environment to be in if you don't want to catch COVID So what's the best place to be indoors in New York City if you want to stay clear of infectious respiratory viruses? And the answer is probably the MoMA in one of their newer wings, because the places with the cleanest air in New York are art Galleries because they have to protect the art. So I called up the MoMA and I said, I'd like to talk to your H Vac engineers. And they said, well, you know, no one in the history of MoMA's ever asked to interview the H Vac engineers. So I went there and they took me around and I asked them that question, where's the safest place to be? And they said, oh, it's almost certainly in the new wing where all the. With the Warhols and the Basquiatsar. And they took me to a place on the floor, you know, exactly. Closest to the, you know, the return vent or whatever. And they said, stand right there. They said, right there is the best place to be in Manhattan if there's another Covid. I thought that was so fantastic.

[Interviewer]

Great answer.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Didn't go in the book.

[Interviewer]

So cool.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But it was, it was just like, you know, it was this process of understanding that you can go back and look at these events through a different set of eyes. And in fact, the engineers have a very, very, very different set of eyes about something like that than the rest of us. So it's like. It was actually on that trip to moma that I got into the book. I was like, okay, I know this is going to.

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[Interviewer]

Have you ever been to see the Last Supper?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No. Where is that? In Florence?

[Interviewer]

It's in Milan. And the entire room is sealed all the time?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So you wait outside of a glass door and there's a certain number of people who can go in at the same time for a short window and you get to be there and it's very sparsely filled with people and the air quality is very Good and controlled really speaks to your MoMA story.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Do you know Rick, if you go to the modern wing of the MoMA, you'll notice if you take the elevator that you're skipping over floors. Right. And the question is, what's on the floors you're skipping over? I always assume it was offices. It's not offices, it's H Vac.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Floors.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Floors. Massive double height floors with these 15 foot like H Vac machines venting out onto 56th street or 55th street or whatever it is. It's insane. It's like nothing you've ever seen before.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Do you remember where the original idea for the original Tipping Point came from?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, that I remember very well. I'd moved to New York in 93 and I would go out with my friends in the East Village. First of all, we would never go to Brooklyn. Too dangerous. The worst we would do is the East Village and we would never go back. Then you didn't even go to Avenue A. I mean you, you might have gone to Avenue A, but me and my bougie friends were not going past First Avenue. And at the end of the night we would call a cab and then we would pool our money. We would form a strategy for how everyone was going to get home. You remember this?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

All the women, you had to walk them home or you had to. They had to have money that would take them a cab that would take them directly to their front door. Or like there is no way they could even set foot on the street past 10 o' clock by themselves. So that was like this ritual that we would go through. And then I remember it was like in 96 or 97 I realized, oh, we haven't done that. We stopped doing that. I was like, what happened? I was obsessed with this. And I went to the library at nyu Bobs library, which you'll remember. Although I don't know how much time you spent in the library when you were at nyu.

[Interviewer]

But it was a beautiful library.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

A beautiful library.

[Interviewer]

It really was a beautiful library.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I love that library. I love that library. I love its kind of chilly modernism. I used to think that it had desecrated Washington Square, but now I think in a weird way it has elevated Washington Square. I had a pass and I would go there and I remember stumbling across in the stacks one day a sociology article called the Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life in which a guy used epidemiological theory from the study of viruses and applied it to social problems. And I was like, oh, this is what happened in New York, we had an epidemic, and the epidemic is over. And that was like this kind of like. That was the launch of my career. Literally sitting in the stacks on the seventh floor of bobst. And that's where I wrote an article for the New Yorker on that idea. And then that was the basis of the book.

[Interviewer]

Amazing. I remember a big part of the original Tipping point were the three categories. The mavens, the connectors, and the salesman. And that's not part of the new book?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No. It didn't make sense to revisit that. And I feel like things have been so scrambled by the Internet. And I felt that what I was more interested in highlighting with this book was these kinds of environmental things, the things in the ether. And I thought it was enough in this book just to talk about this idea of how lopsided epidemics are that super spreaders are. You can't understand any epidemic without understanding the super spreader. That was sort of enough, that kind of elaboration. I thought I had done well in the first time around.

[Interviewer]

In the new book, you start out by telling a story, but take key information out of the story. The subject, I think, is left out, and it helps us hear the story from a more universal place. How do you come to a technique like that?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You know, I read a lot of a huge number of spy novels and mysteries, and a mystery is a disordered narrative. It's a narrative that has been deliberately altered so the key facts are withheld from the reader. And I've always loved that. I've loved the idea that to me, it's deeply paradoxical but so incredibly powerful that the best way to tell you a story is A, not to tell it in order, and B, not to tell you everything, or at least not to tell you everything all at once. Because the impulse I listen to my kids tell stories to the extent they can. And what they do is they tell you everything up front. They tell you the punchline before the joke. They tell you, you know, you tell them, don't tell Mommy. And the first thing they do is tell Mommy. Right. And that is an illogical impulse. They're communicating the most important fact of all, which is that, you know, Daisy hit me. And I'm, you know, I'm upset now. Like, it's only as an adult that you understand. Oh, maybe it's more interesting for me to leave that out for now. And I feel like that's where there's a really strong overlap between what a writer does and what you do, because I'm guessing That's an enormous amount of what a good producer is doing, is figuring out the order of things. Right. And what to withhold and engineering the kind of pleasure that comes from that moment of that unexpected moment when you hear something or learn something that you didn't know was coming.

[Interviewer]

Creating unexpected dynamics to keep it interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I never would have guessed that it comes from reading mysteries, but it makes perfect sense now that you say it. I never would have thought of it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. And when a mystery violates this, I get very upset. And I. I had been known. I've done this repeatedly in my life. Stopped reading a mystery on, you know, with 10 pages left. Yeah, I just did it last night. I've been reading this new Willie. I love this British writer who likes. Writes lovely books. I've read about six of them. And he wrote this current one. And I gave up with 10 pages to go. Cause I'm like, you've blown it. Like, it's not. It's not working for me. I'm not going to go on. I'm not participating in this. So I do. I get very worked up about. But also, you know, comedians. What's really funny interesting about comedians is they're the masters of this because you're telling a very, very compressed story where you. When you're telling the punchline, where you put the crucial piece of information is essential in engineering a lab. Essential. You know, they spend hours testing out their routines in, like, small clubs, and that's what they're trying to find out. Like, did I order the information correctly? Like, it's just fascinating, though. I love going to. I saw Mike Brabiglia was wrote. Was doing this sort of road testing of a. Of a show in Manhattan, and I went to see it, and halfway through, I realized he's like, take. He literally take. I could see him take, you know, in his head, taking notes.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

About. Oh, did that come at the right time? And then. Oh, it didn't come at the right time. Right time. Or why is this. Why are people laughing now? Like, you could see it on his face, this sort of mystification. Oh, I've blown it. I almost preferred seeing him practice his routine than seeing the finished product.

[Interviewer]

Do you apply that down to the level of sentences? Like, when you're writing a sentence, do you play with the order of the words to get that punchline feeling?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Constantly. You don't want to overdo it, of course, but when you're closing off a thought and you want to communicate, you want to have some kind of emotional response to what you've just written. So you want to kind of wrap it up and you sort of think about what's the right note to land on. That's what you're kind of thinking about.

[Interviewer]

Do you think the new book is as optimistic as the original tipping point?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No, not even remotely. It's the opposite. It's quite gloomy. My writing's gotten really gloomy in recent years.

[Interviewer]

Why is that?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, it's funny because I'm happier now than I was in my 30s much. But my writing has gotten gloomier. I think the world is gloomier. I was quite melancholy at that point in my life, but it's sort of a weird thing to think about. But my writing for the New Yorker, much of it was very kind of frivolous and fun. You know, I did a. Do you remember Ron Popeil?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, of course.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

One of my favorite, greatest pieces I've ever written in my entire life was a long profile for the New Yorker, Ron Popeil, where I took him seriously, and as a result, found so much joy and hilarity in what he did. All because I honored the fact. I decided to honor the fact that he and his family. Because, you know, he comes from a long line of pitchmen, people who created kitchen gadgets. His dad was a legend. S.J. popeil, and his cousins and his, you know, his uncle, they were all the Morris family, and they were all peddlers from Eastern Europe who came to the Jersey shore and were all famous in their own right. Like, he's a long, incredible lineage of pitchman, and he was the greatest of them all. Once you kind of, like, decided that that is a beautiful and powerful thing, that these were men who committed their lives to helping people make sense of their. Of the kitchen, make your life in the kitchen easier. And then not only did that, but then they did the second crucial thing, which was they were not content simply to reinvent the gadget. They were not finished until they'd made sure you bought it right. It's beautiful. Beautiful. And Ron was the apotheosis of that. I remember spent. I spent, like, two weeks in la, in Beverly Hills, going to Nate. Now's with him, and, like, you know.

[Interviewer]

Doing the whole thing sounds amazing.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Buying chickens at Costco. And then we'll test him out on this Showtime rotisserie oven. And. But that's what I was writing about in those years, and I, you know, now I read about darker, much more kind of serious things.

[Interviewer]

Tell me the story of the first.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Holocaust museum I discovered this weird thing when I was doing the book. Someone told me the story. A friend of mine was talking to me about he had these two great aunts who were Holocaust survivors. And he was talking. He's like. He said, oh, you know, but they never talked about the Holocaust, you know, no one did back then. And I was like, you talking about. And he said, yeah, nobody. You know, when I was growing up, no one said anything about the Holocaust. I was like, really? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then I started like poking around and turns out this historian, this is a fantastic history of called the Holocaust in American Life. A famous history book, won a big history prize. So documents this fact that it's just absent. It really was true.

[Interviewer]

How can it be?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I looked at history books about the Second World War of the sort that you would read in freshman year history in college. These are books from the 60s. You flip to the part where they talk about the Second World War. Look for any mention of the Holocaust. You will not find it. It's absent. It's two sentences. The Nazis would have concentration camps where they put displaced persons. Gypsies, Communists and Jews, period. That's it. It's nuts. There's only one Holocaust museum in the United States before 1978, and that is in LA. It was called the. The Martyrs Memorial, and it was a storefront on Wilshire where a bunch of Holocaust survivors basically put their stuff from the war years. They didn't want their house, but they didn't want to throw it either. That's it. That was the Holocaust museum situation in America until there was a miniseries on NBC called the Holocaust in 1978, starring Meryl Streep and James Woods. And literally that is where most Americans learned about the Holocaust. And that miniseries, which attracted a 50 share, half of American households tuned in to watch it. That's what caused everyone to start talking about the Holocaust. It gave permission to the culture to start talking about something that had been buried up to that point.

[Interviewer]

So in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, up until 1978, nothing. Nothing. And then a TV series turned people on to the Holocaust. So it's as if the Holocaust actually happened culturally in 1978.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Exactly. Two executives for NBC, Jewish guys, one of whom had family, many family loss in the Holocaust, basically asked themselves, you think we're ready for this? And they said, yeah. So they made a miniseries on. That's it. That was the turning point.

[Interviewer]

So do you think if that film was not made in 1978, would we still be pre1978?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I feel we would have gotten to a version of where we are now. But I don't know whether there's something about the kind of explosion of interest in the Holocaust that happens after that show that I think permanently transforms our discussion. The American Jewish community had been really wary of talking about the Holocaust because they thought that by talking about it, they would invite antisemitism. And that attitude was slowly changing in the 70s, and that's sort of what the two executives for NBC were picking up on. Our own community is now finally ready to talk about this. So maybe we should talk about it. So I feel that would have happened regardless. But it's like saying, what does rap music look like without Grandmaster Flash? I don't know.

[Interviewer]

You also said that Eli Wiesel wrote in the New York Times about the Holocaust TV show that it was not true and insulting and he was a Holocaust survivor. Is that correct?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

He correctly points out that when you do a TV miniseries about the Holocaust, it's not going to be historically accurate. And he thought that what was important as an activist was to tell the truth about the Holocaust. And when he said the truth, he meant the literal truth. And so his patience for a Hollywood dramatization of the Holocaust was limited. So I think he was both right and wrong. He's right. It was Hollywood version. You can't do a version of the Holocaust with Meryl Streep in it. I expect it to be the way it actually happened. Right?

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Do you think in 1978, if it was two Armenian guys and the TV series was about the Armenian genocide, would we have a different view of the Armenian genocide today, more widespread understanding?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't know. Because I think that a crucial part of what made the Holocaust so powerful was it connected to a large and visible Jewish community within the United States. That it allowed both Jews and non Jews to kind of connect the dots. And there are so few Armenians in America that I feel like that kind of cultural connection would never have happened.

[Interviewer]

You also mentioned that there were discussions of Holocaust monuments. There was going to be one in New York city in the 1960s proposed and it was voted down.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. It was for this reason that people, many people in the Jewish community, were convinced that by highlighting what had happened during the Holocaust, they would be showcasing Jewish weakness. They were of the. Of the view that it was the perception of Jewish weakness that accelerated the rise of antisemitism during the war and that they. They never wanted to project that kind of sense Again, when I heard that.

[Interviewer]

Story, I was listening to the audiobook and I heard that story and the first thought that came to my mind was how many other things from history, important things, do we not know because somebody didn't want to talk about it. Nobody made a TV series about opened the door to thinking we know nothing.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. Also weirdly, how contingent our understanding of who we are is on. On art. Right? I mean, TV is art that when the stories that artists choose to tell us are the stories that end up mattering. You know, the. Is that quote I have in the book somewhere, If I know who writes your songs, I care not who writes your laws. A famous Scottish proverb from like the 18th century.

[Interviewer]

Beautiful.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's beautiful. And I think, I think that's right.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Interviewer]

You talked about the opioid problem in the United States versus other countries and it seems like in most other countries it doesn't exist.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Doesn't exist.

[Interviewer]

So how does that work?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's this weird thing about America's weird, right? You know, there's so many things about the way we live our lives that are unique to us, good and bad. There's a famous book by a criminologist called Crime is Not the Problem, in which he points out that America doesn't have more crime than other countries in the West. In fact, in some cases we have less crime. What we have more of is gun violence. That's what's special is that we shoot each other with gun. But like there's not more rapes or robberies or you know, kidnappings or whatever, that's just part of industrialized life. What's special is that we do this thing and no one else does. Opioids, the same thing. You know, it's not that underlying levels of propensities for addiction are higher in this country than any other country. It's that this particular crisis, because of a whole bunch of things that are specific to us, happened here. It did not happen in Portugal.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So it's not a human problem. It's an America problem.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's an American problem.

[Interviewer]

There's a part I didn't understand in the book where you write it's better for people to die from drugs prescribed by doctors than from street drugs. And I didn't understand how you thought.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That because we can address the pattern much more easily if it's under our control. So if I have someone who is addicted to opioids and they have two choices, Oxycontin, which they're getting from a doctor, or fentanyl laced heroin, which they're buying on the street, which is going to kill them quicker. The latter, which can we control more easily. The former, you know, you just go on and on down the line. It is in a hundred ways worse to be addicted to street drugs than it is to be addicted to prescription drugs. And we see that, we have voluminous evidence of how much worse the opioid crisis got when it moved on from OxyContin into heroin, fentanyl. And so that's what I mean. Like, there's a crucial moment in the history of the opioid crisis where we made it really, really, really hard to abuse OxyContin. And in retrospect, almost everyone agrees we should never have done that because it just moved people from moxie to heroin.

[Interviewer]

That would be an argument, though, for any time we think there's a way to make things better, we might well make it worse.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, it's an argument for considering the trade offs of things. Yeah. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. There's no question about that. We get pushed in directions that are not always the ones that make the most sense.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. The difference that I thought of, why it didn't compute to me is that if you're buying drugs on the street, there's a certain feeling of taking a risk. Whereas if a doctor is prescribing you a drug, he's wearing a lab coat and he's an authority figure. So if you're getting it from him, you're trusting. This is a good thing for me to Do.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. I think maybe the feeling of risk associated with buying drugs in the street has become diminished because people are just getting it in the mail, ordering online. You know, it's like. I don't know. That's a good. That's a good. That may be a kind of countervailing point, but I think once the kind of logic of addiction takes over, I don't know whether those differences amount to much.

[Interviewer]

Tell me the story about Boulder and Buffalo.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Love this one. So I was trying to figure out to what extent is the environment in which you live a factor in who you are and how you behave?

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Obviously, we know that our environment has an impact, but it's very difficult to measure. And so I stumble across this really, really lovely research that looks at the fact that physicians behave very differently depending where they live. Famous research was done in Vermont in the 60s which showed that you could look at neighboring towns in Vermont that were otherwise identical, but they would have. In one town, all the kids were getting their tonsils out. And in town over. One town over, none of them were. In one town, women are getting hysterectomies. In the other town, they're not. It's like this crazy. And you see this.

[Interviewer]

How can it be?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is one of the tritest and truest observations about medicine in particularly in America, that there is this astonishing regional variation. We've seen this for 50 years now. The range is extraordinary. The difference between the 90th and 10th percentile. So, for example, the way in which a heart attack gets treated in Buffalo historically is insanely different from the way you get treated in Boulder, Colorado. Buffalo's at one end, Boulder's at the other end. So right away that says, okay, there's something in the air that affects cardiologists in Buffalo that's different from whatever affects cardiologists in Boulder. Second question is, what happens if you're a cardiologist and you move from Buffalo to Boulder? Right. Do you take your Buffalo ness with you or do you become a Boulderite? And the answer is, you become a Boulderite almost overnight.

[Interviewer]

How does that happen?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's. I. I don't have a good explanation. It's just. It's stuff's in the air. It's like what that tells us is that you, Rick Rubin, living in Malibu. Malibu influences you in a way that you don't understand. And if you moved to Indianapolis, you would make different music.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You just would.

[Interviewer]

I know that to be true. And I know that when I moved from New York to California, I Had a whole new understanding of certain kinds of music that when I was in New Yorker, I did not like. Yeah, it just felt right in the environment.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So what we have to accept is that that's true for everyone, right? And we're not, we don't expect it to happen. We may not even be consciously aware that it's happening.

[Interviewer]

Does that also tell us that one's not better than the other? They're just two different ways of looking at it. And it doesn't matter which version you choose.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It may be the case that sometimes one is better than the other. I know that in the case of Boulder and Buffalo, it's not that one's worse than the other. Boulder is behind on some things and ahead on some things and reverses to a Buffalo. Buffalo. There are certain techniques that were pioneered in Buffalo. And Buffalo turns out to be weird because it's next to Canada. So any innovation that comes out of Canada, Buffalo gets in some cases years before other American cities because there's so much cross border movement in terms of positions. And I was thinking about this, I don't go into this in the book, but I've been doing this long series looking back at George Floyd and I'm getting really interested in policing and you realizing that policing cultures are incredibly specific to place and that some cities have these incredibly healthy policing cultures and some cities do not. And the reasons why that's the case are really, really hard to understand. They're very, very complicated. You know, Indiana seeing this thing about Indiana versus Illinois, they're side by side, their economies are very similar, similar industries, exactly the same kind of demographic profile, on and on and on. Indiana is one of the most functional states in the union. Illinois is one of the most dysfunctional. You figure it out, you cross the border and it's like you moved from like, you know, Haiti to the Dominican Republic. Like it's that kind of like, are the laws different? It's you know, like, I don't know what it is. Like Purdue is famously like the most, one of the most amazing state universities in the, like, incredibly well run, you know, great bang for the buck, blah, blah, blah. You know, they had to shut down Illinois State because it was like a financial disaster. I mean, it's, it's just like repeatedly, Illinois is carrying this massive, overwhelming debt from public service pensions. Indiana's in, you know, insanely good fiscal shape. I could just go on and on and on, right? It's, who knows, wild.

[Interviewer]

In the new book, you have incredible stories about bank robberies.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh yeah.

[Interviewer]

How'd you get into that subject?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I got fascinated by the fact that I did not know this, but LA in the early 90s was the bank robbery capital of the world. And they were an astonishing. Something like a quarter or a third of all bank robberies in the country took place in Los Angeles in the early 90s. And there were these legendary bank robberies, including these two Crips called Casper and Sea Dog, who between them in the space of a year and a half robbed 175 banks. Hilarious. And their genius was that they outsourced it. They looked at what was going on in American industry and they're like, oh, that can work for us. So they would recruit kids from high the local high schools, give them weapons, send them into banks and furnisher getaway car, sometimes a school bus, and they would just wait down the street in their car. So it made them really, really. It made it very, very hard to bring a case against them because they weren't actually committing the robberies themselves. But it was. It's a classic epidemic because all everyone else began to see this and realized it was way more money in robbing banks than it was in selling drugs. And realized that most banks were powerless against, you know, they had. Banks had moved into this kind of model of trying to be open and, you know, couches and they wanted people to come and linger and chat with the. So like they were. They were badly defended spaces. But what I was fascinating to me about that going to the point we were just talking about was how geographically specific it was. This didn't happen in Santa Barbara and didn't happen in Long beach and didn't happen in, you know, San Diego or Riverside or happened in la. So like the. This idea that somehow these cultures are rooted not in a region but really in a specific place or even in.

[Interviewer]

A couple of people. In this case, it sounds like it's just a couple of people. Really.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. Who are the core. Yes. Who are the kind of super spreaders of the phenomenon. I just love that idea. I find that idea such a kind of tantalizing one. I really did get very deeply obsessed with place in this book and why the kind of magic powers that places have.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about the Yankee Bandit.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, he's the precursor to Caspar and Sedawg. He was called the Yankee Bandit because he always wear a Yankees cap. And he was the first. So the first level of bank robbery is called a notepasser. Note passer. They just pass a note saying they have a gun and they pass it to the teller. The teller gives the robber whatever she or he has in their till and the guy walks out. That's like Bank Robbery 101. And so there was one guy in the indie 80s in LA called the Yankee Bandit who at one point, I think he robbed six banks in one day. He does dozens and dozens of banks that way. He starts the first wave. People see him doing this and like, oh, that's really easy. Because it is easy. And then what happens is that the epidemic, as epidemics do, it mutates and it moves from notepassers to people coming in with guns, actual guns, and then eventually to people who jump over the, the teller window and ask for the bank vault to be emptied. That's Wild West Butch Cassidy level robbing. The epidemic starts slow and calm with these kind of low key practitioners and kind of ramps up with Casper and cdoc.

[Interviewer]

And I think you said that the Yankee Bandit became like an underworld hero.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

He does, yeah, he becomes, he's just a guy trying to feed his drug habit, but he's so good at what he does. And the FBI just, you know, they can't catch him. And they finally do get him and they, and then he serves all the time, gets out and then robs another like 20 banks. He was like a, he was pretty, pretty dedicated to his craft. You know the problem with LA with catching bank robbers is because of traffic. If you get a jump on your pursuer, it's really hard for them to catch you because they're always stuck in traffic. You know, the FBI is always having to dispatch cars, you know, down Wilshire at like 2 in the afternoon. Well, what's Wilshire at 2 in the afternoon? Like it's just a mess. Right. So if you're even a five minute head start is really meaningful in LA traffic. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

How many concepts do you go through before getting to like bank robberies and then going deep on that? Like, are there many starts of potential avenues for chapters that end up not going anywhere?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I mean, I wouldn't recognize it as such. There are ideas that end up landing somewhere else. So there's a store of ideas that are getting kind of dealt. Some get dealt to the podcast, some get held for the next book. So I'm kind of like going through the deck. I see there's very few. If I'm interested in something, I usually find a way to do something with it because I don't lose my interest just because I can't find a home for it.

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[Interviewer]

There'S a story you told where a TV executive is telling the guys who are making TV shows, our job is to lie, cheat and steal. If you want to make a good TV show, that's your neurotic issue.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

He's telling that to Lorne Michaels. That's the TV executive at NBC. Lorne Michaels wants to quit Saturday Night Live after one season. And he goes to see this executive, his boss, and says, you guys are making it impossible for me to do a funny show. I don't want to do this anymore. And he gets this lecture, famous lecture. And that's why Saturday Night Live exists today, because this guy says, look, stop being so precious. We're just making, you know, TV programming here. It's hilarious. The monologue that Lorne Michaels gets that convinces him to stay at Saturday Night Live has kind of entered into pop culture lore as a kind of famous statement of network cynicism.

[Interviewer]

Amazing. How's writing for the podcast different than writing for a book?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The idea doesn't have to be as weighty. It's easier to have fun, and it's also easier to explore emotion in the podcast. And so that opens up kind of avenues for you that you, you wouldn't really do. Like I think of some of the episodes I've done on, for example, music, I would never have written articles about them. I did one on the saddest. It's called the King of Tears. It was all about Bobby Braddock, who co wrote He Stopped Loving Her Today, which I argue is the saddest song of all time. Yeah, and then I did one on Elvis. The one song Elvis couldn't sing. There's a song that Elvis always lost his way in the middle. And they were really fun to do, but the joy of it was all in listening to people play those songs, hearing the music, reacting to the music. You can't write that. It doesn't work. Like it could work, but it's just not as good. I had Jack White at one point play a version of the Elvis Son. I had several people play for it, but he started and he played it, and he explained what's hard about the song emotionally and why you would have.

[Interviewer]

Issues with it, but talking about it wouldn't have the same effect as hearing it demonstrated.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Exactly. I see. You've got to hear Jack White play it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And also the fun is that Jack White, because he's Jack White, he took it seriously. You know, I called him up and told him what I wanted, and he could have blown me up and said no. Or he could have said, come and not prepared, just like, whatever, showed up. Or he could have done what Jack White did, which is he actually spent some time before I showed up thinking carefully about what he wanted to say. And that I had the same thing for the. For Paul Simon book. I call up a lot of Paul's peers and ask them to reflect on Paul Simon's work. And one of the people I talked to, I called up was Sting. And Sting gives this fucking genius so good 10 minutes of, like, insane. And he does a soliloquy about Paul Simon, about coming to America with the police for the first time, and how the song America is their song, their theme song on their first trip to America, and what it meant to them. And it's told so beautifully. And he's so insanely articulate, as is Jack White. But the thing that's beautiful about it is that halfway through both of their stories, you realize that they had rehearsed, and that makes it not worse, but better. And you realize that's their genius, that these guys, even the smallest things, they're not rehearsing it perfectly, but they take the time to prepare in advance and to be thoughtful and intentional about where they're going. And that's why. That's why Sting's a superstar, right? That's why. That's why Jack White. Why did he come back to his music? Because we understand there's thought behind it and that you'll keep listening to his music for years and years and years. Because you always know there's a reward. There's like a prize, right?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And you can find the prize if you listen carefully, whereas Other musicians. There's no prize.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So, like, why would you listen to more than one, two songs?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Like, there's nothing there.

[Interviewer]

It relates to what you said before about the Ron Popil. You took it seriously. Something that many people would look at as trivial. And I imagine Ron took it really seriously.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Ron took it really seriously and understood instantly when I shoot up that I was taking it seriously. And suddenly it was, okay, we're not talking for an hour. We're gonna do this for two weeks or whatever it was. It was a week or something. I kept coming back to his house every day. I ran out of tape. I remember this is back in the days of cassettes and, like, those little mini cassettes. Yeah. And Ron. We got like three hours in, and I was like, ron, I stop. I don't have enough cassettes. I gotta go to cvs. And he's way up in the hills, you know, I. I had to go for, like, 45 minutes to the CVS, like on, you know, Canon Drive to go back and, you know. So, yeah, that was the difference.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. My takeaway from that would be nothing is really trivial if you take everything seriously, regardless of how inconsequential it seems, you get to something really serious.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah. And that's what, you know, that was another of the revelations with Paul Simon. Is Paul's serious.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

A very serious guy. I don't mean boring.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I mean serious. Yes.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

He is an intellectual because, you know, it's very freeing to meet some people like this because you understand there's no shame in applying that level of dedication to even the smallest things. Right. That's not geeky or nerdy or stupid. That's beautiful.

[Interviewer]

How has the New Yorker changed from the time that you were hired till now?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't know. I don't read it as closely as I once did. I find there's more politics in it than I remember, which I'm. I have mixed feelings about. I feel like the quality of the reporting, though, has gotten better, that there was a kind of. In the historical New Yorker, there was a kind of lack of rigor in the report. There was plenty of reporting, but it was. It seems, sprawling and ill disciplined. And now I feel like there's real discipline there. So it's both. It's different and it's both better. Both better and worse, in some senses.

[Interviewer]

What is the empty chair?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Conceptually, it's the idea that the very best stories have a kind of an invisible third party. Someone who offers kind of perspective and distance and irony. And that good stories are informed by this kind of invisible presence. Is that too kind of mystical?

[Interviewer]

I like mystical.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, you do like mystical. You know, there is a. There is a third chair in our conversation now. There should be. We're not just talking to each other. In both of our work. We've been doing what we're doing for long enough that there are lots, in a positive way, lots and lots of ghosts in our rooms. And I think we're also addressing the ghosts, you know, in some way.

[Interviewer]

Would you imagine that the inhabit of the empty chair would be someone like Groucho Marx, kind of like making light of everything? Or is it different than that?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I think it's different than that, and it differs. You know, for me, sometimes the person in the empty chair is. I'm imagining what my father would say about something, or I'm imagining what my editor would say, or I'm imagining about what. I hate to keep coming back to Paul, but it was such a transformative experience. When you were talking to him.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

He.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Was never comfortable unless he had a guitar in his hand.

[Interviewer]

That's interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And when he had a guitar, he changed. And his empty chair is his instrument. I had the same thing that happened. Kenya Barris and I have been doing this interview show, and we went and we interviewed Dr. Dre, and it was a very difficult interview to do because he's not. He has anxiety, and he's. He's a genius, and he's. He's hard to reach and read sometimes. And at the end, he said, do you want to come down to my church? I love his use of that word. I didn't know what he was referring to. And I said, sure. And so he said. We went downstairs, and he. That was where his studio is. He had a mixing board that was, you know, half the length of a football field.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And he'd sit down, and he was suddenly a different person. He just transformed. And that was his. We had an empty chair in the room upstairs, and it was his mixing board. Right. And when he filled the chair. And then I realized, oh, we blew it. Why didn't we do the interview in the. In his studio? What would we do? What were we thinking?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's insane. You go interview Dre, you're in his living room. Like, it's like nuts.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We were one staircase away from his studio, like, d. You know, like.

[Interviewer]

And it goes back to your new book. It's about place. Everything's about place.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Everything's about place. Yeah. And there was a moment. It's A hilarious moment where Kenya, who grew up in a not very good neighborhood on the west side. Valet. And Dre, who grows up, I guess, outside of Compton or in kind of forgotten. Exactly where they start talking about a neighborhood, this specific neighborhood that Dre grew up in and that Kenya knew very well and that I had no experience of. And the two of them had this moment, this sort of shared moment. They were like, oh, man, that place. Oh, God, that place. I was like, well, what was it like? All they could say is, like, basically, we knew this place back then. It was something that was imprinted on us. We can't explain it. It's gone. It's part of our unconscious now. You missed it. I sort of keenly felt that lost experience.

[Interviewer]

In the new book, you used the word overstory. Can you explain to me what that is?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yes. It's what's in the air in Buffalo that makes it different than Boulder. It's what was in the air in LA that prompts all these people to start robbing banks. It's just. It's the name I gave. I don't have a better name for it. It's just like in the forest floor, you. The forest canopy affects everything on the floor. Nobody ever looks up at the canopy, but it transforms the lives of every plant and animal, every insect, every whatever down beneath. And that's true of the world we live in now. And maybe we should pay more attention to the kind of canopy. That's sort of the point of all that discussion.

[Interviewer]

I think when you give it a name, it helps us relate to it more. Like you said, it was the best word you can use to describe it. Most people wouldn't come up with that word, but now that we have that word, it can change our relationship to it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Think so? Yeah. I think about a lot. About. You know, I'm about to send my. Choose a school for my kids, and I've always been baffled by when people talk about such and such a place is a good school for what Such and such a place is not a good school. And I have no idea what they're talking about. What does that mean? Yeah, And I think what they're. Part of what they're saying is they sense that these schools have particular overstories, and some of those stories make sense and cohere into something, and some schools don't have that, and that's what we're responding to.

[Interviewer]

What do you think about the future of higher education?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's a version where AI saves it, and there's a version Where AI kills it. I'm trouble a little bit when I listen to people trumpeting. AI is by this feeling that what we can do is to turn higher education into an intellectual transaction. I go, I receive certain information and I go on my way. And that's already happened to some extent, and I understand that that's what business school is. It's just a transaction, right? I go, I get a couple of useful skills, I meet people who will help me, and I get a piece of paper that says I've passed this test, but, you know, there's another side of what higher education was supposed to be and do that I worried we're going to lose, which is a time in your life to explore what's beautiful in the world, to find out about how to find beauty and meaning and all those kinds of things, and to relate to people who are different from yourself, and to challenge yourself into a safe place to engage in conflict. Like, we've gotten so terrified of conflict in higher education. I'm like, why? That's the point. You're 20 years old. You'll never be in a better position to engage in conflict. The stakes are super low. You're in a protected environment, you're surrounded by adults, you get three meals a day and you know, like, what. What is perfect? Engaging conflict to your heart's content. Think and say crazy things and find out what happens when you do. Right? Like, explore. When I was in college, I took all these classes with Marxists and I was back then, like, a total conservative. And I got one failing grade after another. And it was fantastic. Fantastic, right? You hand in a conservative paper to a Marxist professor, you're not going to do better than a B minus. You're just not, Right? They're not. And I knew that. But I love the idea of, like, fucking with them and getting fucked with. That was like, the point, right?

[Interviewer]

It's like you were speaking truth to.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Power and they would tell you they had a view of the world that was really weird and really interesting and by the way, has proven really useful to me as I've gotten older. They saw some things really clearly. They said their view of how things were about economic interests was really, really useful to me. Right? Because I was lost in the cultural, you know, clouds. And they were like, you knew this is about money. This is about, like, oh, okay. Actually, that's actually really. No. Did I like their conclusion? Did I? No, I didn't believe in their conclusions. They had their own screwed up, like, whatevers, but, like, that was a kind of the arguments I had in those classes with people after those classes, you know, like they were meaningful. That was conflict, Great conflict.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And I have, I've never met any Marxist since. Yeah, like what am I really, Was I really going to go through my entire life without ever meeting a dyed in the bull Marxist? Like, what's the fucking point of living in the world of ideas if you can't engage with what was the most problematic, devastating, meaningful, powerful ideology of the 20th century? So for the kids today, what is it? It's Gaza. That's their moment where they engage with something really hard. What do we do? We got terrified. What the fuck is the matter with us? We got terrified. As opposed to saying, let's have the argument, we let them turn it into some weird, you know, anti Semitic, whatever. Like instead of, instead of saying, our job as adults is to keep this on track, let's fight it out in a principle, deep, interesting, upsetting way. I looked at that and like you're killing higher education. You really are.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. It seems like in conflict one of two things happens. Either you get new insights that you didn't know from the person who thinks something differently or you better understand your position because you're challenged. So either way it's only good.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, it's only good. Learn how to defend yourself. Learn how someone else is defending themselves. And by the way, no one is asking you to make sense of it in that moment. If it takes you 20 years to make sense of it, fine. We're not in a hurry. Why are we in a hurry? What's the hurry here? An 18 year old today is going to live till they're 120. If in their hundredth year they look back on what they were doing in college and said, oh, I get it now, then we've won, right?

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Okay, I'm going to read to you this, see what happens. A monoculture of high achievement. A monoculture. Our top universities are filled with high, high achievement obsessed students.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I did this chapter on this school in this kind of beautiful, affluent community, Poplar Grove. Incredible place by the way. Gorgeous. A place you would live in a heartbeat. That has had for a generation an out of control suicide problem at their high school and they couldn't figure out why. And they brought in these sociologists to help them understand. And the sociologists spent years there and concluded that the problem was that the school was a monoculture. That everyone had the same set of values about high achieving and going to an Ivy League school and being a champion athlete. And that made it incredibly treacherous for any kid who didn't measure up to those standards. There was. There was nowhere to hide. Whereas in a typical high school that has all these different, you know, clicks, there's many places to hide. I had never thought about. I'd always thought that the fact that my high school would, you know, had, you know, the kids in the smoking area and the druggies and the. And the this and the, you know, the jocks. And I always thought that that was somehow a kind of weakness that we had so few kids who were kind of ruthlessly academically focused. But they made me realize, no, that's in some ways a strength, that when you have that level of kind of diversity in a community, it means that the community is not susceptible to these kinds of infections. You know, an idea virus can't spread throughout the whole school because it's not going to spread from the geeks to the, you know, Dungeons and Dragons crew. You know what I mean? And that school didn't have any of that. Even the kind of rebels at the school weren't remotely rebellious. I mean, they wouldn't. We wouldn't recognize them as rebels and that, you know, I really think a lot about that because that's another part of what I find troubling about elite schools is they have turned themselves into monocultures. The diversity they've created is kind of fake diversity in some senses, that there isn't enough weirdness. And I think weirdness. When I was in school, it was the weirdos that were the prize. They were the people I learned from. They were the ones that made it interesting. And they weren't necessarily the ones who got the best grades or who would have gotten in under a stricter system. And it made me think that. I've long argued that the proper admission strategy for selective schools should be some kind of selective lottery where you just establish a cutoff of kids who can handle your school and you just pick randomly, and that would be great. So you would go there knowing that you were picked by lottery, and you would get a genuinely random cross section of people, and that would be really fun.

[Interviewer]

Both Tipping Point books cover suicide. There's suicide in both books, which is interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I don't. There's no suicide in my family or any kind of. I've never known anyone who's committed suicide, but I have always found it an incredibly compelling, emotional subject. I'm just drawn to it. I don't really know why, but I am.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your relationship with editors. How does that work?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I've always taken very well editing. I love it. And I had a fantastic editor at the New Yorker, one of the great editors of all time, Henry Vendor, who was a minimalist. He would tell you what was wrong, he would not tell you how to fix it. Which I resented at first because I was like, what's your point of having you if you're not going to tell me? And then I realized, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I will never learn to be better unless if he fixes it for me. And that's liberated me because now for my podcast, we have these table reads which are essentially editing sessions. And I invite 10 people or whatever, we read through the episode and everyone gets to chime in. And I realize what I'm interested in is not their solutions. I'm interested in their identification of problems. And anyone can identify a problem.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

An 8 year old can tell you what's wrong. It may not be. They may not be right, but they have a view.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

An eight year old can't really tell you the solution, but if you notice them nodding off or getting bored or distracted, at a certain point, they're telling you something incredibly useful. And so that I love table reads. I love the free for all. I love someone telling me that this doesn't work. Why is that there?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What? That goes on too long.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What are you doing with that tape? I love all that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Have you been doing those from the very beginning?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

That's great. I never heard of this before.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, everything. I don't do anything now without a table read. I read everything out loud. Everything. Wow. And get responses from as wide a variety of group of people. I had a guy come by, I was doing these two episodes on George Floyd, and I had a friend, Lee Camp, who's a theologian from a Church of Christ school in Nashville, Lipscomb University. And he was in town because we were talking about something and I said, come to my table read. And there's never been anyone like that at a table read of mine. And he had such interesting things to say. Like just. Just like stuff I would never have gotten anywhere else that was so useful to me. So it's like I love that process.

[Interviewer]

I read somewhere that you had a friend named Ariel who recommended restaurants to you and you think that she had an outsized impact on restaurant success in Manhattan because other people in the restaurants were people that were friends of hers that you knew that she also recommended.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, that was in my first book, in the Tipping Point. I was explaining this concept of the maven that People with specialized knowledge play these outside social roles.

[Interviewer]

So what was it about Ariel's recommendation that you would follow versus institutional recommendations?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I wonder about this because I don't know. I think that a lot of what we want when we're making aesthetic or market choices is simply some degree of reassurance. It's not that we are incredibly demanding about the choice that we're making. It's not that we are have a rigorous selection criteria for a restaurant. We want the thing that takes all the boxes. What we want to be is free of the anxiety that we are making a bad choice. And we want the comfort of an endorsement from someone in our world. When I think about the way I was consuming music in my 20s and 30s, it was all mediated through other people. It was. I would meet someone who had a kind of cluster of interests. I would realize that I liked that person and I would adopt some version of that cluster. And then I would move on to the next person. It began when I was in high college and the first girl I ever fell in love with was this girl named Marina. And Marina was incredibly cool. And she went to this super cool high school in Toronto. This is in the 80s. They were listening to actually late 70s. They were listening to Eno, Brian Ferry, Peter Gabriel, you know, that kind of cluster of musicians, John Cale. And when I started dating her, I adopted all that music as a way to kind of like win her over or kind of participate in her world. And it became music. To this day. Another Green World is one of my favorite albums of all time. If I hear an old Peter Gabriel, if I hear Biko or something, I kind of perk up. Or John Ferry. Roxy Music is like. Will always have a place in my heart. So like it was. It's the association with Marina who was very, very meaningful to me that period. And then, you know, the kind of moves on to someone else. It wasn't almost romantic, you know, then it was this friend of mine, Ken, who was. Lived down the hall in. In my dorm in college, who had. Was really into the Clash and all that world.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Do you remember a band called the Members? I do love them and I. The Members, I loved the Members would play them at incredibly high volumes on my college stereo. But that was about a. You know, participating in his world, which seemed really interesting to me and was very different. I grew up in. In high school, I listened to country music. I mean, I wasn't listening to any of this stuff. A little bit of new A. At the end of high school, like A little bit of Elvis Costello, but it was really, it was country, country, country. It was Merle Haggard. It was great. So all this stuff was like, yeah, very narrow. I encountered all this stuff in, in college and it was like, wow, this is what it means to expand my worldview. Like, I feel like that's a version of what we are always doing. We associate so many of our aesthetic choices, we mediate so many of our aesthetic choices through a person even without realizing it. That's my point.

[Interviewer]

It sounds like what you learned in school had less to do with the classes and more to do with the community of being in a new place with people your age.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, I grew up in a pretty rural, sheltered part of southern Ontario. And so my kind of. My exposure to kind of sophisticated city kids was limited. Although I soon realized, in retrospect, I realized in some ways I was just as, if not more sophisticated than those kids, but just in very different ways. They knew something I didn't know and I knew something they didn't know. So there was this kind of lovely cross pollination.

[Interviewer]

What does the term revisionist history mean?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, it's usually a pejorative term to mean someone is doing a kind of highly subjective version of past events to justify some contemporary position. It was perfect for me because I thought the idea of taking a pejorative term and using it free of rancor was a fun. It establishes the tone that we're not taking ourselves all that seriously.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's a great title and it's a great podcast. I love it. What do you think went into the success of your books, besides the information in the book?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I spent a lot of time on the road promoting it. I mean, in particularly with my first couple of books I would go for on the road for months. I mean I. I promoted those books like musicians promote their albums for Blink. I think I left my house in early January and didn't come back to the end of April. Nobody does it anymore. There's a point where you just gotta like, if you would like to be a known, you gotta hit the road and their professions. You know, like I said, musicians understand this, comedians understand this, but writers, I may be used to, but I feel like this is kind of. People pretend that there's something magic that can be done in the absence of kind of face to face encounters. And I don't think there is. I think you gotta like, you gotta get out there.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your relationship to running.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Running. I always think of running as the. It is the thing I do best that question. I was a very, very good high school runner. I was a national record holder and sort of injuries a little bit derailed my college career. But when I say best, I don't mean I could have been a Olympian. I mean it comes so naturally to me. And Even today I'm 61. When I go for a run, it's like, it's just easy. I mean, I can't describe it and so brings me so much joy and the harder the better. And last weekend I went out for nine miles with my 24 year old, the son of a good friend of mine who, you know, that's like the idea that I can participate with someone who is not quite a third my age but close to it. It just makes me so happy, you know, charging up and down hills and.

[Interviewer]

Like when you're doing that with a friend, do you talk on the run or no?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

A little bit. Depends how fast we're running. When we're running in the sluggish we do, we chat a little bit. I don't need to chat on runs. I like the company and there's just something really beautiful about it. Had I never discovered running, I would be a lesser person in some really considerable way.

[Interviewer]

Do you listen to music when you run?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No.

[Interviewer]

Do you listen to anything when you run?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Sometimes when I'm on the treadmill, I will listen to like classical music, but that's it. I'll listen to like some Bach on the treadmill, but never when I'm out outside running.

[Interviewer]

And does it come completely natural to you? Do you ever think about your form or your breathing?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I think a little bit about my breathing. My form at this point is. I mean, I've been running for 50 years, so. But I do, you know, you do adjust your form. I'm a little more conscious. Depends on the shoes you're wearing and the terrain you're running on. And so you do kind of. That's part of the fun. You. There is a process of adaptation to your environment that you go through, but when you get into. You settle into it, you're settling into something that's a very kind of primal rhythm where you no longer kind of consciously governing it.

[Interviewer]

Are you trying to go fast or far or both?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Depends. Sometimes I'm trying to go far. Sometimes I'm doing speed workouts where I'm. Yesterday I was on. I was at the gym because it's freezing here and I was doing 3 times 3 minutes, 3 times 2 minutes, 3 times 90 seconds, 3 times 1 minute with 1 minute recovery and Then each interval, I increase the speed. So I start medium fast and end flat out. But the day before that, I was running really slowly.

[Interviewer]

Do you have any other interests? That would be surprising to me.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Obsessed with cars.

[Interviewer]

Has it always been the case?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Always, always. Even before I was runner, I was a car nut in the 1970s. 1975, I collected. When I was 12, I collected a brochure for every car made in the world, with the exception of the Russian Zill. And I still have them all. They're just over in the corner of my office. I could take them out and show you, like, you know, what a Rolls Royce looked like in 1975 or what a Alfa Romeo looked like in 1975.

[Interviewer]

Have you ever analyzed what it is? What's the pull?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I really like driving. I'm not mechanical in any way, but I like the idea that someone has created this contraption and that it's in a constant state of evolution and has been for 120 years. And I find cars incredibly beautiful. I react to them, you know, the way I react to what other people react to a painting or a piece of gorgeous music. I have a kind of visceral reaction to them.

[Interviewer]

Do you think of yourself as spiritual?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I do.

[Interviewer]

In what way? Describe it.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I grew up in a very religious household, and I have an enormous amount of respect for religious practice, huge amount of respect for it. In fact, in the story that I'm working on now, which involves, the protagonist was a minister in a Southern denomination, Protestant denomination, called the Church of Christ. And I'd been interviewing all these people, very conservative denomination. I've been interviewing all these people who belong to the Church of Christ in Alabama. And I find talking to them incredibly moving, really powerful. They're not people whose politics necessarily I share. They live in a world I could never live in. They have a relationship with God I don't have. But I find their testimony to be so moving, so powerful. And the same is true. My family's religious practice is something that I am in awe of.

[Interviewer]

Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That life gets better, not worse, as you get older. Probably. That's the main thing.

[Interviewer]

That's a great one.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So much better.

[Interviewer]

Tetragrammaton is a podcast.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Tetragrammaton is a website.

[Interviewer]

Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.

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