Malcolm Gladwell Returns

24:33You describe how doctors, there was a rule put in place that if you write someone a prescription for a drug this powerful, an opioid, it's on a triplicate form, so there's three copies. And because of that, it keeps everyone in line. There's three copies of it. There's a real record, a lot of dissemination of what I'm doing. okay, so everyone is going to be good. But then these drug companies found out there are some places where that law doesn't apply. Yeah. And that's where they feasted on. And that's where they feasted. And then you talk about what's really disturbing is reading the testimony later on where people are being asked, members of the family, the Sackler family, they're being asked, do you feel any kind of responsibility?

25:19And it's all passive language. Well, the kind of famous Nixon quote is mistakes were made about Watergate. Well, mistakes were made. None of them went to jail. If you think about it, like, you know, Sam Bankman freed who, you know, I guess committed a fraud and went, you know, although none of the, very few of the people who he apparently defrauded actually lost money. He's in jail for how many years? Eight years. So you can mislead rich people and you're in jail for eight years, but you can kill a couple hundred thousand Americans and you're fine. I find that very curious. I don't really understand how.

25:57I mean, I realize it was a legal settlement and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But still, it's kind of shocking. It is shocking. And then you're talking about when they testified before Congress, they talked as if this whole epidemic had been started by someone else. It wasn't even, it was, or this company, Purdue Pharma, that their family had started and created and run for two generations was a kind of third party off by the side that they had no connection to. I mean, I just find the whole, everything about the opioid crisis is astonishing to me. I remember it being shocked. Very recently, one of my children came home from school.

26:36Someone came to their school and told them, showed them how to use Narcan. That's how prevalent this is, that the way we were shown a fire exit and had a fire alarm practice, now kids are being shown how to, you know, young adults are being shown how to use Narcan because, and thank God they are because that's saving a lot of lives. But that's where we are now. Yeah. It's just standard training for kids. Yeah. One more welcome to the world of parenting, one more thing I have to worry about. Well, it's something I never thought about, obviously, when I was growing up and didn't have to worry about.

27:22And there's so many things that kids have to worry about today. It does make me profoundly sad that even fairly innocuous things that a kid may experiment with can have been tampered with and kill them. So, you know, that's the world we're in. And I'm gonna end the podcast right there. Oh no! No, no, no. Conan, you're just bringing us down. I know. What happened to your famous Joie de Vivre? Guess what happened? Guess what happened? You came in and you shit on my hair. Is your mood contingent on your hair? Yes! Yes! Yes! And now I'm spiraling. My hair is flat against my big Irish skull, which is loaded with alcohol.

28:09Jameson's. Jameson's. And I'm primed for a fight.

28:18But you know what? There's so much, it's really funny. Like there's on an upbeat note because there's so many fun puzzles in this book and intriguing things. There's one thing that you brought up in the book and I'm jumping around here because I don't know a better way to discuss it. But you talk about how we all know World War II ends, 1945. There's the revelation, Nuremberg trials about concentration camps. Sorry, upbeat note? You'll see. We're getting there. We're getting there. This does not end well. No, this is, if I have a sense. No, no, no, no. This was, not that it's upbeat, but it was fascinating to me that the Holocaust was very little discussed in the late 40s, the 1950s, the 60s.

29:04Through the end of the 70s. Through the end of the 70s. And then there's, was it a movie? It's a television movie. Four-part miniseries. So if you go back and you look at, when I got interested in this, I got all the textbooks you would read in freshman year European history in the 60s and the 70s. And if you read them, and you're reading, they got like four chapters on the Second World War. You read all four chapters, and you're looking for when they discuss the Holocaust. And you look and you look and you look, and there's nothing there. There's like two sentences. There's like, and then the Germans created camps where they put displaced persons, gypsies, communists, and Jews, period.

29:44And then they go on to something else. You're like, wait, how is this? These are serious textbooks. And then you look, you can keep going. And there's actually been a whole scholarship about how they weren't denying the Holocaust. They just weren't mentioning it. It wasn't discussed. It just wasn't. There is no, there's only one Holocaust museum in this country prior to the 1980s. and that's actually here in LA. And that was one that was created almost by accident. A bunch of, I tell that story in the book, a bunch of survivors are at Hollywood High learning English together and they want a place to put their stuff.

30:15The stuff they can't bear to keep in their house, right? The uniform from Auschwitz or whatever. And then what happens, so there's this, and if you look at like, how often is the word Holocaust used in books, magazine articles, newspapers up until 1979? And the answer is it's almost never used. Then there's a four-part miniseries on NBC starring Meryl Streep and James Woods called Holocaust, which half the country has a 50 share. Half the country tunes in to watch it. And boom, after that, that's when we get all the Holocaust museums. That blew my mind that this was not discussed and that this one TV series that I frankly don't remember watching changed everything.

31:01Completely changed the dialogue. I remember the same thing happening with, I mean, this is crazy, but there was a, in the 80s, there was a, the day after. Yes. Yes, that's it. The day after about nuclear war. and there's footage of Ron and Nancy Reagan, President Reagan and Mrs. Reagan watching it and they're gobsmacked. This is the guy who has the nuclear football and saying, what? This would be bad. And so the net cut to him meeting with Gorbachev, you know, at Reykjavik and saying, well, we have to make sure this never, you know, and be based on a TV movie that got maybe, what if that hadn't been greenlit?

31:41I mean, it's, these things turn. on these incredibly... Did Judgment of Nuremberg not land with people? No, I mean, there are these little mentions here. There's Diary of Anne Frank, obviously, which is on Broadway and also a movie. But even that, remember, that's really about Anne Frank's story in Holland. It's not really about what's going on in the camps in Central Europe. Also, Judgment of Nuremberg is not all... It does not focus on the Holocaust. that it do you know what i mean it it in a way that you would expect it today it's very much yeah it's it's very much about the the prosecution of evil and the the these these bad bad nazis um but it's discussed and there's a famous scene i think with judy garland but it's and they show footage remember they show it in the courtroom they show like but it's not it's not highlighted that way.

32:39The average American, when they finally run that miniseries, most Americans had, if they were dimly aware that there had been, the term that was used back then was that there had been atrocities. But the idea that there was this kind of systematic destruction of European Jewry at the scale that it was and what that meant on a kind of, it was not, was sort of absent from discussion. It's kind of And then they take the miniseries, then gets resold to German television. And the same thing happens only times 10, because the Germans had just not mentioned the Holocaust at all. And all of these Germans discover for the first time what their country did.

33:24And there's a whole literature about what happened when the Germans finally watched this NBC. I mean, the country was in an uproar. I mean, you cannot imagine, there's almost no analogous media event to what happened when the Germans watched this. It was on late night cable, and the whole country tunes in. And it just kind of, there was, you know, all the major newspapers ran these huge sections discussing what had happened. And people were like, wait. And that's when, now you have in Germany a real heightened awareness of their responsibility for the Holocaust. It's very, very, it's moving and it's very impressive too that when you go to Berlin, there is, they've not only acknowledged it, but there's a sense that they're going to great lengths to make sure that everyone is aware.

34:16and I mean all the plaques outside of homes that say these people were taken from this home and they were taken to this camp and they were murdered and it's just, there are a lot of countries in the world, I don't know if there's any such thing as an innocent country, but many countries have things to own up to and don't and it's impressive how much Germany has. The whole thing goes to this question of that there can be, I mean, what interested me was that there can be a moment when public opinion or acknowledgement or knowledge of an event can kind of shift overnight. I mean, that was what attracted me to that story.

35:00Well, there is a lighter version of this, which is really got me thinking. You talk about Will and Grace. Oh, yeah, yeah. There are these very perceived rules about if you're going to talk about, let's say you're going to talk about homosexuality or gay couples uh on a television here are the rules and there was this way in which that has to be done responsibly and and will and grace didn't follow any of those rules yeah so there this is all this work of i've ran across this really wonderful tv scholar named bonnie dow who does this analysis first she starts with uh the way that hollywood talked about women's issues so remember that wave of kind of feminist show starting in the 70s.

35:43Mary Tyler Moore show. Rhoda. Rhoda. Yeah. Cagney and Lacey? Yes, I think that's part of that. And she points out that you would think watching those that those were shows that were kind of pro-women's liberation or whatever, feminist. But they follow a very implicit set of rules about how a woman is allowed to proceed. She says that in every case, the woman was only allowed to succeed if she was succeeding in a man's world and all of those heroes were childless and not in a relationship. So the real message of that, of those shows were, yes, you can get ahead if you're a woman, but only if you give up any chance of having a family.

36:25Right, there's no domesticity. There's no domesticity. So it's like, so it's not really, are those shows pro-feminist? Or when you watch them, do you think, oh, wow, that's the price I have to pay if I want to participate? Then she says, there's a similar set of rules about the way Hollywood dealt with gay topics. And the rule was homosexuality was always a problem to be solved. In other words, the plot surrounding the gay person had to turn on the fact that everyone else in that person's life was trying to fix all of the crisis that had been caused by this person's sexuality. The gay character was only ever seen in isolation.

37:03So they didn't have a community. They weren't in a relationship. They didn't have, they were just off by themselves. It was like the typical one would be you find out your 16-year-old son is gay, right? And so the whole family is left to deal with this intense problem. Another rule was no sex. So you can't ever see what this thing is about. It's always an abstraction. and the oh and then the last one was that the the gay character cannot be the center of the narrative they have to be peripheral to the narrative so you know you you add these up and you get you could watch a made for TV movie that might be on its face might be quite sensitive and sympathetic to the gay character but all these rules are telling the audience that this guy's off in the margins.

37:58He's on the fringes. He's incapable of participating fully in modern life. And there's a wonderful book, this film scholar does a book where he looks at every single film from 1940 to 1975 that had a gay character and he just shows every single one of them meets a bad end. They either are killed, commit suicide, end up in prison, or every single one. There's like 48 characters and like every one of them and what happens with Will and Grace is that Will and Grace comes along and breaks every one of those rules so Will's gayness is not a problem to be solved right never it's never perceived to be a problem he's never he's not seen a nice he's also it's Will and Grace so he's number one on McCall's sheet he's not peripheral he's not peripheral he has Jack and he has boyfriends he's part of a community you know go on and on and on he's a he's a center of the show he's not a he's not and the effect of that So if you're someone who's watched TV your whole life, and all you've seen is gay characters in this very specific context where there's something deeply problematic about them.

39:06And all of a sudden you're exposed to a show where there's a gay character and there's nothing. I mean, he has problems, but they're not problems related to his sexuality. He's just a neurotic, just another neurotic. He's like the rest of us. He's got problems we all have. Living in an apartment in New York, which is what all sitcoms are about in those years, right? Right. So there's something with that show that kind of, that is a revolutionary show. It completely rewrites the rules. I think, you know, it's always a fun experiment to say what are the five most important television shows of the last 50 years.

39:42I think Will and Grace is like, I would put it, I don't know, second, third. I think it's, I don't think it's. I think. I think it's ahead of Archie Bunker. I think it's, you know, they always say 60 Minutes is one. and like I usually get three I'm usually three your show? Late Night with Conan O 'Brien is usually three are we in the real world or in my reality? because I like my reality and in my reality I think Mermaid is perfect I should not have laughed so heartily at your suggestion I don't know what you find so funny I'm always like three or four but I know what you're saying I think you're top ten yeah thank you can I make a peripheral point about Late Night and the decline what Late Night just meant?

40:21oh sure So for several generations, this is not related to my book, all of America, not all of America, a huge chunk of America every night watches some version of either Jimmy, Johnny Carson or someone else interview somebody, engage in a conversation with somebody. And it's highly entertaining. But also what they're seeing is a masterful interviewer interview someone. right? So you're getting, it's kind of like interviewing class conducted on a national basis for everyone in America. That goes away. And my, I have become convinced that no one knows how to interview anyone anymore or even have really what Johnny Carson is having is conversations, right?

41:02Yeah. Really fun conversations. I think the art of conversation has declined at the same time as the decline of late night. I don't think people, you need a model. No one is a model anymore. they're not it's like you're being incredibly rude right now I'm interviewing you and you said they're all done and you said no one knows how to interview anymore and I would like you to have a big fuck yourself sandwich can you do we have a fuck yourself sandwich that's not a good conversation with a little pastrami on it no that's a bad conversation me make good talk me make good talk not bad talk no but you're no you're part of you grew up on these people yeah right you know what I'm talking about yes You grew up on various versions of that.

41:44All of the different late night hosts offered you a different version of how to do it, right? And when that goes away as a model, who's left? Well, there's a lot of things I could say about it. But I do think that the architecture of a late night show for a long time was kill time. Meaning when the form comes along because in the late 40s, early 50s, someone at NBC realizes, we just go off the air at 11 o 'clock at night. Why do we do that? It's like a family that discovers we've got an attic. Why don't we go up there, finish the attic, and suddenly we've got three more bedrooms. So the early late night shows are people killing time.

42:34and that's what they are for a long time is killing time. And a lot of good conversation comes out of killing time. What happens is there's a lot of money in it. Then there's more competition and television and media in general speeds up and there's more and more pressure on them. And then suddenly it's, well, you can't sit and have a long conversation. There needs to be a lot of energy. There needs to be a lot of, it has to be frenetic. the pace of it. And if you look, if someone ever does a study on late night television, go back and watch Carson and watch early Letterman, even the, you know, earlier versions of my show or early episodes in the early 90s.

43:20There is a slower pace. I mean, to some extent, podcasts such as this have filled that void because we're slowing down, right? We are. We're choosing. We're basically killing time right now, Conan. I mean. Oh, we are killing time. I don't have anywhere to be. Do you have anywhere to be? I don't have anywhere to be. I haven't had anywhere to be in four years.

43:50I've noticed that you, there's a chapter of this book that you have not mentioned at all. Which is? For reasons that I think will become obvious. Okay. It's the chapter where I attack Harvard University. You're on the water. I'm all in favor of it. attacking Harvard University. There is an extended assault. You know that this is a - I was, you know, I wasn't hiding from that chapter. There's so much to talk about, but you talk about how it starts with Harvard has a women's rugby team. Yeah. And you basically say, why? Why? And you go ahead, you take it. And by the way, I was on the women's rugby team.

44:29I got a scholar, that's how I got my scholarship. first of all I should say parenthetically that no one spends more time attacking the Ivy League than me that's why God put me on this earth I feel I've done it so many times on my podcast that whenever I come up with my new attack which I do every year everyone in the room just rolls their eyes we could do a whole put Malcolm on the couch why is he so obsessed with him but put that aside the particular argument here is based on I'm trying to figure out Harvard University where you attended, is... I can't hide from that anymore. You can't hide from that anymore.

45:051981 to 85. Yeah. They plays more Division I sports than any other college in the country. No one else is even close. People don't realize this. You always think the big sports school is like Clemson or something. No, no, no. It's Harvard. They have more student athletes than anyone else. And not only that, they give a massive admissions preference to their recruited athletes. So the easiest way to get into Harvard is not to be the best student in your class. It's to be the best athlete in your class. But also very specific athletic endeavors. So the sports they really, really, really, really care about are, and let's see whether you can detect some kind of common denominator, rowing, fencing, sailing, rugby, tennis.

45:54It's country club sports, right? So I do a whole chapter on why would they bend over backwards to participate in all of these country club sports? And none of that, to give massive, basically to do an affirmative action program for the athletes in the sports. And the answer is because, you know, a sport like tennis, to be a recruited tennis player, you have to play Division I tennis. To play Division I tennis, your parents have to be willing to spend 50 to 100 grand a year in your game. It's enormously expensive. It's almost expensive. So when I say I'm setting aside four admission slots every year for tennis players, what I'm really saying is I'm setting aside four admission slots for the children of people who have enough money to spend$100 ,000 on their kids' ground strokes.

46:37So it's a way of making sure that enough rich kids attend your school. It's really obvious. And this drives me crazy because I'm someone who believes very strongly in the idea of a meritocracy. And I think it's one of the most beautiful things about this country. And the idea that the reigning symbol of meritocracy in this country is essentially going out of its way to reward kids who play rich kid sports. Like, think of an admissions preference for kids who are good at sailing. Like, it's just ridiculous. Well, maybe they're going to grow up to be fishermen, lobstermen. You know, I mean, they're going to probably go to sea and explore the oceans.

47:20I mean, I think most of those kids are going to end up, right? Hauling crab. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, that's why they're doing it. Yeah, I think so. Well, there's another, okay, this brings up another point, which is that, because when I read that, I thought, shit, I should have done some fencing. I worked way too hard in high school. That would have been much easier. Yeah, I should have been a champion beekeeper. But the bigger point is that people can eventually game anything. That's the way I feel about it is that because the other point is, okay, let's set all the rich kids who are playing those sports aside and say, okay, we really want it to be a meritocracy.

48:03So we're going to have it be about the SAT. People can game that because parents hire SAT tutors. There's billions of dollars spent a year making sure that kids are very familiar with that test. I think it still does test people who are off the charts. But what I'm saying is that no matter what you do, I mean, we've seen this on Wall Street a million times, you set up these rules, someone will find a small crack. Someone will say, hey, wait a minute, no one ever said anything about mortgage-backed securities, bang. Yeah. Everybody's doing it. And then the whole system collapses. And we wonder, wait a minute, why did that guy who works on a garbage truck own nine properties?

48:50You know, what is going on? I once, you know, speaking of the SAT, I once challenged my assistant to the LSAT. I thought it was really fun. I got a tutor. I went through that whole process. And the hilarious thing, of course, about the true tutor was the first thing he said, I had to learn to, quote, process without understanding which meaning which I thought was hilarious because it's a test designed to measure your aptitude for being a lawyer and the test for being a lawyer can only be you can only do well as if you learn how to process without understanding if my lawyer came to me and said I processed your case without understanding it I think I'd be a little bit alarmed but so that it was like sounds like a good lawyer though and I have a lot to say about the little mermaid that's not contract No, but it does.

49:38I was part. I never, because in Canada, we don't have, I'm Canadian. We don't have standardized tests. I knew nothing about this. I moved to America after college, and I hear people talk about the SAT, and it sounds like some kind of strange holy right. Yeah, yeah. And I was so kind of curious that at a certain point in my life, I decided I had to do it. And I went, and I sat in that big room with hundreds of other people. I was the only person over the age of, like, 25. and I ended up tying my assistant. Oh, okay. Which I thought was good. The money was on her because she's 24 and the general consensus around the office is I didn't stand a chance because I've obviously lost so many brain cells.

50:18What was your score? I don't remember. It was not impressive. Basically, I was headed for a mediocre law school, which that's fine. Someone's got to be a mediocre law school. Well, here's the other thing too. I mean, I've said this to everybody I've ever encountered in this business is that I have had the privilege of working with so many talented, amazing, funny people who are great at what they do. And often I don't know where they went to college because the amount of pressure we put on that is insane. And you talk a lot about resilience and people who are not from a monoculture, but people who are forced to be resilient and the great benefits that that has.

51:06And I don't know. I just, I'm always - I thought you were going to tell us your SAT score. I thought that's where you were headed. I intentionally forgot my SAT score. I intentionally, if you could, I selected which brain cells I could forget. And I forgot those. No, I had that chapter, another chapter of the book where I read and I ran across a bunch of articles by these two sociologists, Anna Muller and Seth Arbutton, and they were talking about a town they would only call Poplar Grove. And they had been working there, studying it for years, and it was, they described it, and I later figured out what town it was and went there for myself and confirmed it.

51:46It's the perfect, it literally is the perfect community. If you went there, you would say, it's like upper income, on the water, incredibly tight-knit. It's like Gilmore Girls or something. Well, I'm sorry. Lights in the trees at night. I did not expect you to say Gilmore Girls. My neuron misfired and you laughed. Those are some rich literary illusions that you're working with, Conan. My favorite Bronte novel is Gilmore Girls. No, no. So it's... So Poplar Grove, yes. You're talking about how... High school best in the state. Yeah. You know, every amenity under the sun. And they had had a suicide epidemic at their high school that had gone on way, way, way, way longer.

52:34And it was incredibly heartbreaking. And these two, Muller and Arbiton, sort of do all this analysis. And their conclusion is that one of the big problems with the town, the reason this has happened is that it was a high school that only had one culture. So it, you know, I'm sure your high school's too. My high school, like a normal high school, it had like 10 different cliques you could join, you know, the jocks and the nerds and the whatever. And the point of that is it's powerfully protective that any child coming into that high school, no matter how dysfunctional they may feel, can find a home.

53:07There was a place you could go if you were, you know, we called them stoners but in my high school which is rural canada that meant you smoked cigarettes yeah quaint yeah but um if you wanted to be a quote-unquote stoner and smoke marble lights there was a place for you right how'd you make it out of there yeah no no yeah exactly i um the um my high school was so tame in retrospect i don't even know it's just it's it seems like a kind of fantasy that it even existed. Well, I was, yeah, in the same way, I went to a very large public high school. There were kids who weren't going to go to college.

53:45Do you know what I mean? Their dads worked for the town. There were kids whose parents were, you know, professionals who wanted to go to an Ivy League school. There were, I mean, there was just this large swath of almost every kind of kid you could imagine. There was something called school within a school where there are very artistic and kids that could have set their own schedule. And then there was a large immigrant population. This is the late 70s. We had some students whose parents had fled Iran. We had students who were from China. And so it was great in that it sounds like the exact opposite of this Poplar Grove.

54:27And the thing you understand is, yeah, so imagine what Poplar Grove is, is a city, a town at a high school where there's only one of those groups, where every child is required to conform to the super sporty, socially successful on their way to Ivy League model. And so if you don't fit and work in that incredibly narrow description, there's nowhere for you to go. There's only one culture. And the epidemic they had was the result of, was the consequences of that kind of narrowness. And it made me, it's interesting because it made me realize, you know, in all of our discussions about diversity, we sometimes make diverse, achieving a diverse environment make it seem like it's medicine, like it's the right thing to do, but it's hard.

55:11Eat your vegetables. But in fact, in this example, diversity is what makes a community resilient. It means that any problem that one group has isn't necessarily going to spread to other groups because they're different, right? there. And I just thought that was really, you know, and the idea that the parents of this town, this is the community they wanted for their kids. They moved there because it was perfect. They are the ones who supported the notion that we should have this incredibly strong, unified set of values about what it means to be a successful student at the school. And then they were somehow baffled by the fact that everything went sideways.

55:45And I, you know, this, as a, coming back to my new parenthood. This is what the only observation I will make about parenting is that this confusion between what we want and what our children need seems to be the principle. That's the principle conflict of, I always catch myself thinking, and I'll very confidently say to Kate, my partner, I'll say, you know, I think Edie should do this, right? And in fact, what I'm saying is, I would like to do this, and I'm using her as a kind of front to - You want a cigarette. I want a cigarette. Edie, come on, go down and get a pack. Maybe a donor. But this was the worst.

56:25This was the kind of, this was the biggest version of that problem that like parents are just, like there's this woman who wrote a book, a woman named Linda Flanagan wrote a book called Taking Back the Game, which is all about what's wrong with youth sports. And she's always, she was a coach for many years. It's a really brilliant book. And she has this moment when she talks about like possible fixes. And one of her fixes is that parents need to stop going to games. And it's the same idea that, because what happens, of course, it's pleasurable for the parent to go to the game. There's no one's denying that.

56:57But the parent is confusing what's pleasurable for them and what's pleasurable for their kids. And the question is, does your child want you there really like deep down? And, you know, by what we're doing when we show up for those games is we are we are intruding on what should be this kind of, this time for kids to play with other kids without the scrutiny of, and the pressure that comes from parents watching. Like, that's the perfect, you know, example of this. And I just maybe wonder, how many times do we, is this what, you know, I'm a young parent, is this what parenting turns into, this constant conflict?

57:32Look, we talked about this, I think, we had a guest here the other day, I think it was Josh Brolin, and we were talking about his upbringing. And I was saying, what I would always say to my wife when the kids were little was, remember it's important that they're bored. Because I think one of the things that's come along with super parenting in this age is that a child needs to be activated and engaged and entertained at all times. And I swear to God, I'm one of six and there was a lot of, you know, I say this, a lot of benign neglect, meaning no one on my ass, not being helicopter, just because my parents worked.

58:15There was a lot going on. What number were you? A third. Oh, you're right smack on the bat. Yeah, and so I just remembered having a lot of time with my brain and it was nightmares. But - I was bored for the first eight years of my life. And I would complain to my mother and she would say exactly that. She would say, it's good for you to be bored. Yeah. And look at us here. Yeah, here we are. Here we are, having the greatest conversation. Well, I have to wrap this up because we've gone. You've solved it. Well, first of all, I think we've solved the engineering of humanity. And you and I, if we're just put in charge, can fix everything.

58:53It's a testament to your book that I read it and it's got me thinking about 700 different things in different ways. And so - Thank you. And that is the power that you seem to have is just raising these issues. And also it goes back to that concept that I was talking about earlier, which is we can all be tricked. We can all be conned. We can all be manipulated. It's really fascinating. The more you think about it, I think the more you build up some sort of resilience towards it and a little bit of immunity where you can think, wait a minute, is this what I want? or do I want this because this is the way everything has been engineered by somebody?

59:36And it probably has. I have a confession to make, which is that the entire time we've been talking, I've been, you have your notebook open. I've been trying to read upside down. Because I want to know, like, were your notes, when you made notes to yourself, were they different from the things? Were you like, book's terrible? Oh, I can read it to you right now. Oh, fuck. Gladwell's coming. This is gonna be another shit show. Hair not up to Gladwell standards. He's probably gonna go after the Irish, parentheses did last time. That's right. He seems to have a real thing. Let's hope he doesn't bring up Harvard.

1:00:12I love my time on women's rugby. It was my only way in. Why the fuck has he got such a bone to pick with my favorite sport? That's where I met Tracy. I mean, I don't know. Hey Tracy Yeah You shouldn't do that Why do you leave it out like that? It's distracting Oh I'm sorry Look I've got drawings Oh I see Yeah yeah 1963 That's the year I was born That's the year I was born I did a drawing of Senator Abe Rybakov Oh my God What the fuck? Why? I'm a strange man Why? That is so fantastic Rybakov The senator from New York State Was he New York State or was he I want to say he was Connecticut Connecticut.

1:00:56He was the one in the 1968 convention. Why did I draw Senator Abe Ribicoff? Wait, Conan, we're born in the same year. When's your birthday? April 18th. Okay. I was just checking to make sure we weren't, in fact, born in the very same day. We were born in the same hospital and switched at birth. That's why we both have crazy hair. Turns out you're the Jamaican. Against all of us. Yes. And you're a terrible alcoholic. Oh, Gladwell. I love talking to you. And clearly, I mean, this could go on for seven hours, but even podcasts have sped up. And, but I do hope you'll come back and I hope you'll come back, even if there isn't a book, if we can just chat.

1:01:44I love, I really enjoy it. I really enjoy it. And if the art of conversation is dead, I don't know what this was because I really thoroughly had a great time. As did I. Thank you, Conan. I will, next time I'll be nicer about the, I feel, I'm going to say, I'm going to come up with something really, I'll think, spend the next couple years coming up with just the right word. You know? You know what? I think you nailed it the first time. Hey, thank you so much, sir. Yes. Conan O 'Brien Needs a Friend. With Conan O 'Brien, Sonam of Sessian, and Matt Gourley. Produced by me, Matt Gourley. Executive produced by Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Nick Liao Theme song by The White Stripes Incidental music by Jimmy Vivino Take it away, Jimmy

1:02:33Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair And our associate talent producer is Jennifer Samples Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Brendan Burns Additional production support by Mars Melnick Talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Batista, and Britt Kahn You can rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts, and you might find your review read on a future episode. Got a question for Conan? Call the Team Coco hotline at 669-587-2847 and leave a message. It too could be featured on a future episode. You can also get three free months of SiriusXM when you sign up at SiriusXM.com slash Conan. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to Conan O 'Brien Needs a Friend wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.

1:03:18Thank you.