How to Be More Successful Than 99% of People | Malcolm Gladwell

27:35And public stuff is, it's not of the same quality. It's really uneven. Like, presumably the feedback you get from your colleagues and your boss, in most cases, pretty high level, right? Unless you have a terrible boss. But the public stuff is all over the map. Some of it is bullshit. Most of it, in fact, is bullshit. It's people who don't know what they're talking about or whatever. And there's little bits here and there that are, as I said, of really high quality and you should pay attention to. And when it's public, it is really, really easy to feel, to get shamed or to get overwhelmed or to feel.

28:13And that's not for everybody. And I wouldn't wish it on everybody. And if you are someone who can't deal with that kind of public stuff, then you need to be in a field where that's not a part of it. If you're someone who doesn't want that, don't put stuff on social media. Just don't. You don't have to. No one's forcing you to do that kind of public-facing stuff. And so, yeah, that's a very different issue than the first one. It's a really good point. Yeah, I remember the first time I had some controversy online. It surprised me. I was wearing a whoop at the time, which I don't really wear anymore.

28:48Oh, there you go. You and my husband. Love the whoop. Yeah. No, I found myself like leaning on it. And so if it said that I didn't sleep well, I'd think I didn't sleep well. And so I just sort of, I by and large don't really feel like I need it at this stage. But I noticed how much my HRV increased when I was amidst a controversy and reading. And it was like a silly controversy. Like I'm not even sure. It was like maybe, oh my gosh, it was about a very silly thing. I don't like picking people up from the airport. and so I had a group of girlfriends and I and one of them loves it. She really enjoys it and I said I'll happily pay for your Uber but I don't want to pick you up from the airport and people were like you know you're elitist and you're a terrible person and this is what friends do and I said well there's lots of ways to be friends.

29:36I disagree with that but it was a very silly thing and so I was shocked how much it bothered me. I think my favorite comment was no wonder this cantankerous cunt doesn't have any friends. I thought the alliteration was quite nice. I was like, at least if you're going to give me a hard time, use a good word. But it's interesting about the private criticism because it does feel like, I used to be a journalist. We get really used to the red pin. So I'm actually quite hungry for feedback. And I want to hear, like, Cody, please next time don't use the C word in front of Malcolm Gladwell on the podcast.

30:14He might not like that, right? Like I want to hear the feedback. But sometimes I find younger generations are not as open to it. And so have you found there's a good way, if somebody's listening and they're like, you know what, I realize I'm that person. I don't like it. I don't take it well. What do the best people do with feedback, even if it sort of makes them tense up or freak out in the moment? Well, there's two sides. One is that those who give it need to give it thoughtfully. so you can't be particularly when you're dealing with people who are might be more sensitive and I think that the thing about younger people when I was young I was more sensitive I think as we age I think we develop thicker skins so it's always going to be I don't think it's specific to this generation I think it's always been true that when you're starting out in the field you're a little sensitive so I think it's first of all incumbent on the person giving the feedback to be thoughtful in how they do it.

31:15There's a world of difference between saying, I love this, but here's how it can be even better, and this sucks. You could be saying exactly the same thing. There's two ways to say it. When I was starting out, New Yorker, I had an editor, a brilliant editor, who was just really, really, really good at getting me to understand what was wrong with my pieces. and he did it with honey, right? Part of that was he understood who I was and what I needed to motivate me. And it's still the case, if you want to motivate me, just start with a compliment. Tell me what you like about it and then I'll be more than happy to fix what's wrong about it.

32:01But if you don't see anything of value here, then we're sort of wasting. I'm wasting my time. I've produced some crap, right? So reassure me that there's something here and then we'll go forward with our – so people – I think one of the definitions of a good manager or boss is someone who understands how to deliver feedback on a person-by-person basis. Like differentiates. Different people need different things, right? I have a guy I work with named Ben. He's incredibly talented. and Ben has a fundamental flaw, which he has incredible ideas and then he loses faith in them. Not a huge, not an incredible flaw.

32:48It's just a flaw, just a flaw. And he doesn't realize how good his idea is. And so then what he does is he overly complicates or he tries to compensate or he goes off on a tan. He just gets, and my job is to say, Ben, Ben, this is genius. and I'm not making this up. It is, there is a, he always is genius. But it's like, Ben, you don't need to do this other stuff. You already, you've hit your home run. You don't have to go back up to the plate, right? Like that's what he needs because that's his, he's someone, he is a self-doubting genius, right? The self-doubting genius needs a very different kind of feedback from, you know, I mean, I could give, We could come up with 10 different types of worker.

33:36My mom was writing a eulogy for her sister. And in that context, she wanted feedback from me. My mom is a writer. She knows I'm a writer. We have a great deal of mutual respect. And she gave it to me and said, wanted feedback. Well, the kind of feedback you give to your mom writing a eulogy for her sister is very different from the feedback you give to someone in the workplace doing a project for a client, right? It's a whole different. I would hope so, yeah. That could go sideways. Yeah. And knowing my mom as I do, you know, I just thought, it's not that she's fragile, she's the furthest thing from fragile.

34:14But she didn't need feedback on the kind of quality of the words. She wanted to make sure that she was, was she representing the memory of her sister? Because it was her twin sister. Oh, super close to her sister. And at that moment in the eulogy, she needed to have, she was explaining her sister to people who did not know her sister the way she knew her sister, right? That's the challenge. She needed someone to tell her, have I taken enough distance from this? Have I explained my, am I rushing because I know all this stuff and I think everyone knows this stuff about my sister. That's what she wanted.

34:54So I had to think before I gave feedback, I had to think, okay, what does she mean by wanting feedback here? And I said to her, it's too short. You get to do the longest eulogy at this funeral, right? You don't need to. My mom was like, there's going to be 15 people giving talks at this giving eulogy. It's like, fine. You're the one who gets to go for as long as you want, right? That's what you needed to hear in that moment. It's beautiful. It's actually, it's interesting. You know, I have a lot of thoughts that I wanted to pull from you on leadership. So I'm glad we went here because, you know, you have a line that I really like about, you know, two types of failures that leaders have about choking and panicking.

35:40And I'm just curious, can you tell me about those and how leaders fail in those two ways? Yeah, well, the broader context for that is the difference between failures of overconfidence and failures of incompetence. And failures of incompetence are where we don't know enough, right? We didn't do our homework. We weren't skilled. We didn't have experience. We were over our heads. And failures of overconfidence are we actually – we were at – they're failures of expertise. I am an expert. I knew all there was to be known. And because of my very expertise, I made an error. I thought I knew more than I did.

36:22I overreached. I wasn't, you know, my humility left me. And I think that for most leaders, when we confront failure, our first assumption is it's a failure of incompetence, and it rarely is. Most failures at a high level are failures of overconfidence. People just, they're just way too sure of themselves.

36:51They overestimate the certainty with which they know certain facts. They minimize the downside risk because there are people who don't face a lot of downside risks. You know, I could go on. They've had a long track record of success. They can't imagine failure. Yeah. It's not even in the back of their mind. And so they're unprepared for it when it happens. And, you know, when you're, like I said, when professionals fail, I think it's far more often overconfidence than incompetence. What do you think makes a good leader versus a bad leader? Well, I'm going to cheat and say it depends. It really depends on the nature of the leadership challenge.

37:41So I did this episode of my podcast with the former chief of staff of the Air Force and the former secretary of the Air Force. And they were talking about a mistake they made when they were working together in the Air Force. And they had written a book about leadership, which is where I read the story. and their notion of what effective leadership was was servant leadership, that they had to put the institution first and themselves second. But there's a reason they say that, and that is that they were leaders in the Air Force, which is an institution with an 80-year history with an extraordinary amount of talent working for them, a very, very large organization doing a million different things where there's no way the chief executive can be expert in all the things the Air Force is doing or even know what all things the Air Force is doing.

38:40You know, I could go on, a very, very strong culture that they inherited, they did not create. Right? So all those circumstances mean you don't want some fiery, charismatic, you know, authoritarian leader. You actually, the organization and the culture is so strong. What you want is someone who knows how to run the team, right? And who puts their institution first and their own ego and self second. Now, not all contexts are like that, right? There are other times where the strong, you know, in an organization where there is no strong culture, where there isn't that base of expertise, where the challenges are very different, where you're under-resourced, not over-resourced.

39:31In the Air Force, you're over-resourced, right? You don't lack for resources in any instance. Then there needs to be someone very different. The leader of someone who's leading kids, a coach of a group of high school athletes. There, first of all, you're conditioned by the fact that you're – they're kids, right? That's condition number one. Condition number two is your kids change every year. So you have to change every year, right? One year you're coaching a young Kobe Bryant, right? The next year you're coaching a bunch of kids who the best of them will play D3 for two years before like going on to get a physics degree, right?

40:18You cannot be the same coach to the young Kobe Bryant as you are to the kid who's going to play two years of walk on D3, right? Right. So like you have to, in that instance, you got to change. So one thing Malcolm and I keep circling on is that the obvious path is not always the best path. That in fact, you want to go for something off the beaten path in order to be excellent in a smaller pond. And if you do that, you can actually move forward faster. That's exactly the idea behind Main Street Millionaire Live. So if you are looking to get off the beaten path at Main Street Millionaire Live, we are walking through exactly how to find, evaluate, and buy cash flowing businesses that nobody else is looking at.

41:00I'm going to help you figure out the way to find your unique small pond that has cash flow and customers geared towards you. This is where you'll learn the information that actually matters that colleges didn't teach us because they were too obsessed with status. We're going to figure out how can you creatively finance a deal. We'll do real deal breakdowns. We'll do live deal analysis, Q &A with my team to help figure out how to use technology today to buy boring businesses that aren't so boring because they make us a lot of capital. This is for people like you who are tired of watching from the sidelines and want a practical first look at ownership.

41:34If you've ever even considered being an owner or buying a business, this is my annual event for you. Tickets start at about 40 bucks. Just go to msm.live. You can join me from anywhere in the world. It's a virtual event, three days, me and you. Welcome back, Malcolm Gladwell. So the best leaders are really a chameleon to what the team and the problem set needs. Yeah, that's actually a very nuanced, intelligent answer as opposed to like a lot of days, times these days. I think we model maybe off of the most charismatic leaders that we see out there. Yeah. But it's very true. It's so very hard to do as well.

42:17Even the customized feedback you were talking about, I think, is underrated, difficult. You know, I think about how fast in this era of Slack and email I communicate with my team and will say, oh, I hate that. That's an absolute tragedy. You know, this is incredible. Great job. And for some people, this statement could make them cry, especially coming from the CEO. And I'm just not really thinking about it and typing away. And so it is really important to sort of probably just take the pause before you give the feedback as a leader. You have another term. I think it's maybe a Cliff Asnes analogy about pulling the goalie.

42:53That's from him. Yeah, it's from him. Yeah. And that's funny. How do you know Cliff? I don't. I mean, I read his paper on pulling the goalie and I called him up. How funny. And he was so – I should say – I should give him a little shout out. But I showed up. I mean, he's an insanely busy guy, you know, running this massive organization. And I show up to meet him, and he carves out time in his schedule to give me, like, whatever. I meet him in, like, a conference room in a hotel because he happens to be in Manhattan that day. And I didn't. I screwed up, and my tape recorder didn't have a sound file.

43:29Oh, no. And I had to run out and get a sound file, and I, like, I didn't get back for another half an hour. And he was so, he was like, I'm fine. I'll just work here. Come back whenever you want to. It was like, I've never met him. I was like so flustered and like, you know. And the fact that he was just so kind of calm and gracious. So he's, I'll be forever. And he was so charming to talk to. I'll forever be in his debt. Explain what he does a little bit in his background for people. I mean, he runs a very, very large, what do they call it? Is it a macro trading? And a hedge fund. Hedge fund.

44:02Yeah. Very successful. Yeah, it's interesting. My husband's gotten to be friends with Cliff, and I met him and his wife a couple times that a group were a part of. And I found the same thing. Usually when you meet, like, the just, you know, they're kind of titans of the world. They're in all the rooms that you'd want to be in if you want to, you know, sort of control the world. They're not typically so humble and nice. He's the most untitant titan. Right. That's a good way to say it. And also because he's interested. You could tell that he's interested intellectually in his job. Interesting. Right.

44:34I mean, that's why he's intellectual. He's like, this is in a series of, he's interested in cool problems, and it's just a series of cool problems. Yeah, that's true. I also find that they're always the smart ones like that are so sneaky. They end up asking you all the questions, but you really want to ask them the questions. Does that ever happen to you when you go interview, like, some of the great minds, like a Warren Buffett or a Cliff, and all of a sudden you find yourself talking more than they are? Well, I try and, yeah, if I'm doing the interview, I try and stop that before it goes too far.

45:06It's hard to do. Well, let's talk about pulling the goalie and what that means as a leader, you know, and doing sort of the reputationally risky thing even when you don't want to. Yeah, well, pulling the goalie. So Cliff Asus wrote this brilliant paper in which he was talking about the phenomenon of in hockey, there is a tactic that's used. If you're losing late in a tight game, one strategy available to coaches is take the goalie out, put in an extra offensive player, and that will increase your chances of scoring a goal. but also increase your chances of being scored upon. And if the other team scores an additional goal, your chances of winning become quickly go to zero.

45:59But if you didn't pull the goalie, your chances of winning were pretty close to zero. So the only way you can actually give yourself a decent chance of winning is to take this dangerous step, this risky step. and Cliff's point is that people wait way too long to pull the goalie they wait until the game's almost over when the payout of the strategy is minimal the real opportunity with pulling the goalie is if you do it with 5 minutes left in the game, not 30 seconds left in the game, or a minute left in the game I forgot what his exact, he actually kind of calculated, if you're down 2 goals you know how many minutes you should before the end of the game you should pull.

46:45He did a hole. But his finding was consistent, which was that people who know hockey really well, coaches, consistently misuse this strategy, render it useless by being far too timid. And they're timid because they're scared of looking bad. That if you pull the goalie and it blows up in your face and the other team scores an additional goal, then everybody says, you should never have pulled the goalie, right? And you look like a foolhardy decision maker. And he says, you need to get over that. I thought his point is brilliant and that generalizing from that makes a lot of sense. And that I do think that we're way too slow to recognize when we're in a no-win situation and where the only option available to us is to take a real risk.

47:34How do you remedy that? How do you figure out when you should take more risks and if you're not taking enough? Well, you have to lower the cost of failure. So you can't fire the coach if they pull the goalie early and it blows up in their face. You actually have to sit down with them afterwards and say that was the right decision. You have to understand the difference between a good mistake and a bad mistake and build a culture that recognizes that. Like we're doing a Sky Ben that I was talking about. He's in the middle of doing a very ambitious project on Staten Island. That's so funny. It's genius.

48:12we don't really have enough time. And I've been trying to get him more time. We all have been trying to get him more time. And he's working around the clock. Everyone's working around it. He tackled something really, really, really ambitious. It's five, six episodes. It's trying to thread the needle in a really, really interesting way. But this is the kind of, is there a chance it will fail? Yeah. There's a chance it won't work. Small, but there's a chance. If it doesn't work, all of us need to sit down with Ben and say, it was the right move. You swung for the fences. Like, that's absolute, we had to reward that.

48:48And this time it didn't work, but like, it's going to work the next time. You got to keep doing it. The lesson from this experience should not be that you should shy away from ambitious stories. Now, as it turns out, I'm almost certain it will work. I think we turned a corner on it, and he's good, really good. But you need to have a culture that, I mean, it doesn't work. You got to, and for a good reason, you had to reward that. Have you ever tried something really ambitious and had it fail miserably? Yeah. There are books I've written that I think didn't work, where I tried something that in retrospect was probably a mistake, but I'm kind of glad it was an interesting experiment.

49:35or there have been podcast episodes where, you know, I wasn't happy with the outcome, but I was happy with the process. As long as you're happy with the process. I thought it was, you know, it's an interesting idea, but in the end couldn't figure out a way to tell the story properly. Yeah, we had Seth Godin on the other day, and he was kind of talking about the same thing and about how, I'm going to butcher his beautiful words, but something to the tune of you can either want to do a thing because you innately want to do it, or you can want something to be a massive success. But it's really problematic if you want to really want to do the thing and want it to be a massive success at all the time and not realize that there's a word and in between.

50:18And it might also just be but instead. And he talked about how he wrote a book on evolution that was like a massive flop, and it sort of haunted him for a long time. He's like, but I loved writing it, you know, but it still was miserable when it flopped. And so I think sometimes maybe people listening, they think that you always are okay with the failure. And it doesn't mean it's not miserable when you do it, even when you've sold 23 million books or how many books you've sold by now. Yeah, it's fine to be like, life is long. That's the thing you, particularly when you're young, you don't realize how long life is.

50:54Yeah. Like these things, you're inevitably going to have ups and downs and hits and misses. And I did a wonderful project with Paul Simon, fellow Austin, you know, part of the year in Austin. That's cool, by the way. I didn't know that. And, well, he's actually a bad example because he's had very, very, very, very, very few failures despite having an incredibly long career. But, like, you know, his career started in his teens, still going on in his 80s. he's had some insanely great albums. He's had some merely good ones. He said that maybe there's one album or two that he would call a failure.

51:36But like that's the normal arc. The greatest songwriter in American history has had albums that he thinks are a failure. You just have to remember that. Like, you know, there's not, the success does not mean a perfect record. Success just means you win more than you lose. Was it actually hard after you had a few books that sold millions of copies and were massive successes to do the follow-up act to that? I wouldn't say it's hard. Do you set a standard where you're like, well, if it's not tipping point level or outliers level? I'm happy when they sell. I mean, anyone who's in a creative field understands that you have a moment.

52:18If you're successful, you have a moment in the zeitgeist. And then the moment passes for everybody. You can't. I'm not always going to sell as many books as I did with outliers. That was a moment. I was like, probably never going to come back. It's fine. I do cite different things. I still sell a lot of books. You know, just not that level. That was like crazy. Even businesses, you have massive successes. And not every product is a home run. Like, it's fine. It's like, this is the kind of normal. And also, you have, over the course of a lifetime, you develop different metrics for success. You know, my idea of what a kind of meaningful creative experience is is different today than it was 20 years ago or 15 years ago.

53:06Do you believe in the muse or getting struck by inspiration? No, I get ideas, try them, sometimes they work. To me, ideas are cheap. It's all execution. The muse assumes that everything's about that moment of inspiration, Whereas, I mean, there's a hundred things I could write my next book about. It's just, can I pull it off is the question. Yeah. You did a project with Rick Rubin too, didn't you? I'm curious your take on how do you continue to find creative inspiration? And like if somebody is feeling in a dearth, what would you tell somebody who asked you like, Malcolm, I'm stuck. I feel like I can't create anything.

53:51Well, I solved that by just, you got to get out in the world and talk to people who are slightly outside your comfort zone is the wrong word because it can be in your comfort zone. But what happens as you get older is that the worlds in which you inhabit get more and more solidified. and so you end up occupying smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller spaces and you have to counteract that when someone says i'm out of inspiration what they mean is my world's become too small that's what they're saying so you had to broaden your world right and so there's numbers of ways i do that just by i'm constantly talking to people and i interview huge numbers of people, not all of which work sometimes.

54:43One of the reasons I think the podcast is so useful is that it's a mechanism for exposing myself to new ideas and people. And that has kept me fresher than I would have been otherwise. So do you think that literally means get outside, like go walk outside your door, go to a new location, change proximity in order to have creativity? Or does that also mean reading or listening to a podcast? Any of the above. I'm not sure. The further you can get into uncurated territory, the better. The problem with listening to a podcast is the person doing the podcast has already done that kind of editing and sifting.

55:23What you want is something unedited and unsifted. You want the kind of, what you really want is, like when I would read books, I often spend as much time on the footnotes as I do on the book itself. What I really want to know is, if I like the book, I really want to know, well, what did the person who wrote this book read? Where did they get their ideas? That's what's interesting, right? So I go back and then I read those things. You don't want to consume only finished products. That's where you get stuck because then you're consuming what everyone else is consuming. You want to consume unfinished products.

55:58that's brilliant I've never thought about that it's almost just like first principles thinking and you're finding the source material as opposed to just the end that's so interesting yeah it's it's and you're right that this we've seen it with young people I think too you know things like and with much love because Sean Radd is a buddy but like tinder kind of you self-select based on people that are like you now to date you know you can be in friends group friend groups where everybody's sort of the same. Socioeconomically, you can stay in similar groups. So I think maybe the calcification used to be when we were older, but now it can even be when we're younger because all of the people around us are in echo chamber and we don't have a lot of people pushing on our ideas.

56:37And so I think this idea works really well if you're a young person too. You actually have to get around people that you might go, ha, I totally disagree with you. And that's interesting. Yeah. I do that with my, I'm constantly switching up my Twitter feed. I follow a very small number people, but I keep changing who I follow. Do you follow people ever that you're like, God, I just hate everything that's being said here? Oh, yeah, yeah, all the time. Really? I think that's really healthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, I just... Do you comment? Do you ever troll them? No, no, no, I don't. I just...

57:07I mostly... Twitter for me is for exposing myself to people I wouldn't ordinarily meet. And then fun. It's a place to pursue very super nerdy kind of interests. I agree with that. That's what's really good. Twitter, for all of the crap it takes, it is really good at certain very, very specific things. It's an idea-finding mechanism. It's really good. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, it's interesting. I was in D.C. yesterday, and typically I don't really like going to that kind of stuff. But every once in a while, getting completely outside of your sphere and listening to people in this instance who are super involved in politics, You pick up a few things that you're like, whoa, my world is actually by no means the only world that is existing.

57:52It is one in one million. And so I like that pushing outside of the comfort zone. Maybe one other thing I want to talk about before I have like two more questions and we start thinking about rapping. But you tell this story that I really loved about Rob Pompil. Is that the right? Ron Pompil. Pompil. Ron Pompil. Okay. And as an incredible showman. And I love it because we talk a lot about show, don't tell. There's such a low trust society we have today. I'm like, we got to stop as a company only yapping at people all the time. Let's show them what we're doing. But I was wondering if you could tell that story.

58:28You call him, I think, one of the greatest showmen of all time. He's the guy, if you're old enough, you'll remember those late night TV commercials, infomercials. He was the guy who had the Showtime rotisserie and a million other kitchen gadgets. He was from a family of kitchen gadget salesmen, a legendary family. His dad was a guy who was an inventor and a salesman of kitchen gadgets as well. They're all out of Chicago originally. I just know years ago for The New Yorker, I hung out with him for a week and wrote a story. Actually, it was the only time I ever won an award. I won a National Magazine Award for that piece.

59:10just kind of celebrating somebody who I was all about the piece was largely about the Showtime rotisserie oven which was a legendary rotisserie oven that he had invented and that he pitched. And I was really interested in the kind of simplicity and elegance of the way he had married the process of invention and the process of explanation and the process of sale. He designed an oven not just to work well, but also to sell well. I got into that idea that he had conceived of. He didn't separate out these functions that he was thinking about when he was inventing something. He was also thinking about how to market it.

1:00:01It was a wonderful illustration of high-end entrepreneurial thinking. In this case, it was a Showtime rotisserie oven that sold for like$49.99. I loved it. I'll link the article because what I love about it is now, you know, sort of we think about modern day entrepreneurs, like whether you like him or hate him, you know, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, Elon Musk, and how he thinks about inventing. Like, no, no, it'd be really cool if the light shut down off of, you know, the rear window, because I bet people would take pictures of that. And so it was, but if you go back to the infomercials, there's some of the greats like Billy Mays, Bobby Mays, Billy Mays, whatever.

1:00:40I think Billy Mays was a baseball player. Anyway, there was a guy that started with a B, but he was sort of famous for like the mops and the brooms and whatever the turgeon is that makes things really clean. And it seems like they thought about product as really just what could you show. And that was what you could sell. And so this high correlation to show and sell, I thought, was fascinating. We've talked about all these great entrepreneurs, but I think there is a narrative today that maybe it's harder than ever to become successful. Do you think that's true? No. In any moment of economic disruption, you would think those opportunities would be growing, not shrinking.

1:01:20Why do you think so many people think that then? That's like, it was easier for our parents. Everything was better. It's harder now for us. Well, I think they're talking about something different. Was it easier to have a kind of stable middle-class life in the 60s? Yeah, if you were an educated white person, sure. So we have a very selective memory of these things. It was easier to buy a house if you had a middle-class job in the 60s, but then the house is a lot smaller than the houses we have now. So I don't know. I tend to be – the housing thing is a whole separate conversation, which I'm sort of mildly obsessed with.

1:02:03But we have, as a society, failed in some ways to create markets for things we need, housing being the perfect example. Not in Austin, but in other places in the country. But in general, I'm not a pessimist about the moment we live in. I think it's, you know, particularly once you abstract out from the United States. I mean, if we were having this conversation in Africa, we would not be bringing this up. We would be like, there's never been a better time. Or South America or any place that was historically economically disadvantaged. It's way, way, way, way better now than it's ever been. It's really hard mathematically to support that argument writ large for human society.

1:02:52I'm just curious. Tell me about housing. What are you obsessed with right now? What do you think we're doing wrong? No, we're just not building enough of it. You know, for a million stupid reasons. And we've let existing homeowners close the door to potential homeowners. We treat landlords like enemies. We think the rules of the marketplace don't apply when it comes to housing, even though we agree that they apply in almost every other market. There's a million things that we do wrong. We have crazy zoning rules. Where I live in Columbia County, there's minimum lot sizes. Why are there minimum lot sizes?

1:03:35The minimum lot size for a home that's not on the highway is seven acres. That's, I'm sorry, completely insane. We're basically saying unless you can afford seven acres, you can't build a house. Why? What possible function is that? This is kind of crazy thinking. And then we can walk down the street in New York and there's a million insanely dumb rules about what can and can't be built. So I mean, I find all of that preposterous. Yeah, the nimbyism is pretty wild. Did you ever read Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell? No, I've never. You know, conservative economist. But he does have a section on zoning and housing that I think is so prescient for today.

1:04:23But talks a lot about, he was specifically talking about California's like environmental building and zoning rules. I used to live there. And it is pretty, it's pretty wild how we want to close the door behind us as opposed to like throw down a bridge. And it must just happen. It must be human nature. Like I don't propose that I'm better than anybody else after I've made a little bit of money or whatever. So we have to like fight that somehow. Because sure, it's not as aesthetically pretty to have a 20-home townhome next to you. Well, it could be. I mean, one of the reasons these homes are so ugly is because of the stupid rules we have.

1:04:57I mean, we could go on, like on and on. Like there's no reason why the built environment today should be uglier than the built environment of the 1920s. Those are decisions we made that have perverse outcomes. Yeah, it's true. I was in D.C. and all the buildings are stunning in the downtown area. And you wonder why all of a sudden everything is sleeker and modern and glass and no detail to it as we get older. Well, Malcolm, just an incredible body of work you have. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Yeah, you've made me think about all the ways I need to be a better leader and where I'm fucking up.

1:05:31So thank you for that. And where do you like people to follow you the most? Is it on Twitter? No, just my podcast, Religious History. Yeah, which is incredible. Yeah, a really fun thing that we do and I think is a good way to sample my work. Okay, and maybe a little teaser that there might be a new book coming out. In the fall. In the fall. Called The American Way of Killing. Which, just incredible title. I can't wait to read it. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you.