Malcolm Gladwell’s theories on podcasting, America, and Joe Rogan

22:00So I stopped taking it. It wasn't that I don't take it seriously. It's that I stopped thinking that they were consequences. Wait, that's really interesting. So not a single one of your books has gotten a positive review. The only book that got a positive review was the Bomber Mafia, which sold fewer copies than any other book I've ever told. So I now take it as a, I'm much more concerned if I get a rave than I am, because I feel like the empirical evidence suggests that the New York Times review is negatively correlated with sales. Amazing. Well, we have to take a short break, but we'll be right back with more from Malcolm Gladwell right after this.

22:51Ben Smith:Let's move on to the company that you co-founded, Pushkin, which is, you're the voice of it. Revisionist History is one of the shows. And you guys are really zigging where everybody else is zagging. Because we are in a universe of chat shows like this, of basically inexpensively produced conversations, long form, you know, lightly edited. And you are very intensely focused on scripted narrative audio shows like Revisionist History, like Deep Cover, like Jill Lepore's very kind of like elaborate historical conversations. What are you seeing that other people don't in this space that we're in right now in podcasting?

23:29Well, what we do, I would argue, is more fun, more intellectually demanding, engaging, allows us to get deeper, allows us to be more thoughtful. The shelf life of what we do is much, much longer. You know, chat shows measure their half-life in hours. We measure the half-life of our work in years. I did a thing, an audiobook with Paul Simon, two years ago, three years ago now. It will be as relevant 10 years from now as it was when it came out. I'm much more interested in that. I was sitting having lunch on the street in Hudson today, and someone came up to me and was talking to me about my book Blink, which I wrote 21 years ago.

24:10And they were talking about it as if I'd written it yesterday. That's what I'm interested in. We also think that people have turned away from narrative under the false belief that it does not offer a real economic model for podcasting. And I think that's wrong. So we have what we call a Zellig strategy, which is that if you think of a narrative podcast as simply the first in a series of stages, of narrative stages, then it makes perfect economic sense. You test an idea in a six-part podcast. You then take the same augmented reporting and you create an audio book, which might be 30 % longer and have some new twists and turns and which opens up the same material to a very different audience.

24:55Remember, a very, very, very successful narrative podcast might have a million downloads an episode. The potential audience for that is in the hundreds of millions. The idea that you've exhausted your audience with a podcast is absurd. So there's a whole different group of people who want to consume audiobooks. They want to consume, so you do a version for them. And then you say, take the audiobook and you say, is there a print book in this? Which there usually is. And then you do a print book. And you've done three bites of the apple. And the marginal cost of the second and third bite is quite small.

25:34And the marginal value of the second and third bite is quite large. So thought of that way, this is a business model that I think makes a huge amount of sense. And you're not stuck doing 200 shows a year, right? Yeah. One of those stages that you didn't mention, but I think is part of it, is licensing these stories, giving them to a big streamer or a Hollywood studio. Yeah. You're betting on these licensing deals with the streaming platforms and the studios at a moment when a lot of them have contracted, right? Peak streaming bubble ended in 2022, 2023. Now it's a much smaller business. Why do you think that that can still work?

26:15Well, there's a reason I omitted the fourth stage. we don't need it. It's just gravy. I mean, we actually get a lot of interest and have an ongoing interest from Hollywood for a number of our projects. But to me, that's icing on the cake. It's like for our model to work, that is the most variable portion of the content cascade. And I don't even expect it. It's just, if it comes along, fine. And by the way, if you look at the economics, those hollywood deals are when you actually look at i've done a million of them and not a million many of them in the course of my career they make you absolutely nothing even when even when they are quote-unquote successful compared to what you make in the other stages so it's like let it it can go away it can come back even stronger it doesn't change the real story is inside the podcast audiobook print book sequence that's that's so interesting to hear because i mean i

27:12Ben Smith:always find like whenever you have like a media company and kind of nast among others when they they start telling investors that, well, like, a core of our strategy is the studio business. It's just like the reddest of red flags. Because as you say, it's very unpredictable, and the actual revenue never quite matches the headline, and it's in 15 years, maybe. Yeah. A really interesting case study, and I've never asked him this, is have Michael Lewis on the show. And Michael Lewis has sold more to Hollywood than maybe any other nonfiction writer of his generation, right? Asking what percentage of his net worth comes from his Hollywood sales.

27:46I'm going to guess it's 5 % to 10%, if that. I just don't think it's material.

27:53Ben Smith:All right, we're going to send this to him, and you can help him get us on here. Speaking of really dark things that I don't know if they're really going to be adapted by Hollywood, can you tell us a little about your next project, which is essentially a murder mystery? It's called Alabama Murders. Yeah. We wanted to do a—I wanted to do true crime, but I wanted to do true crime our way. So we wanted to do a kind of inverted true crime. Not inverted, but a kind of... So it's a story about a murder that takes place in the Shoals, northwestern Alabama, involving a preacher's wife. And it begins very conventionally with this kind of gothic southern crime.

28:34And then the story, over the course of seven episodes, the story grows and grows and grows. the crime takes place in 88. The story doesn't really end until last year. So we end up with almost 35 years and we go in a million directions. And I think it's one of the best things we've ever done at Revisionist History. It is so, in a way that I didn't anticipate, so incredibly emotional and moving that when we were doing the table reads on two or three occasions, the whole room was crying by the time we were. I mean, like, it is sort of a bananas. Because I really, really, really, really can't wait for the world to hear it.

29:13It was just, but it's to my point, it's like, if I were to do, if we were to go the route that everyone else route, and I could do an always-on show, right? But I wouldn't be able to do stuff like that, which for me personally is so much more meaningful. and, you know, wrestling with telling a complicated story over an extended period, you know, it's just like it's a challenge, a kind of intellectual challenge that I need to feel fulfilled. That's different from just talking to people.

29:45Ben Smith:And how do you think about building a business around that kind of work? Because Pushkin has made a lot of stuff that I listen to and love. But also, I think, you know, in 2023, you guys laid off a third-year staff, and one of your colleagues, Mia Lobel, wrote a piece basically saying that in her view, you'd gotten obsessed with growth. You tried to grow too fast. You tried to scale something that kind of fundamentally couldn't scale. And I'm curious what you, I don't know what you learned from that, what you'd make of that. I think Mia was right. Absolutely right. I don't think what we do is scalable.

30:18And I don't think we want it. I think the mistake we made is that not only did we think it was possible, but we thought that's what we wanted. We thought that that would be more fun and interesting. And it wasn't more fun and interesting. And I think so. I think, yeah, she's 100 % right. I think we're happier now. I think there's now a match between our organizational form and the task we're trying to tackle. You know, we're never going to be call your daddy, right? It's not happening. I'm not even sure call your daddy is call your daddy at this point. I don't know. But like, that's fine. Like, you know, we forget there's a thing.

30:59There are lots and lots and lots of businesses that exist because the people involved in those businesses want to do cool things. I want to have their mind engaged. My father was an academic who I'm guessing could have made several times more money in the private sector. He's a very, very, very, very, very, very smart man. Didn't want that. He wanted to sit and think big thoughts. And that made him insanely happy. That's the world I grew up in. I didn't grow up in a world that said that the marker of success in the world is how much money you make. The sacrifice, my father made those kinds of sacrifices willingly because he had the enormous pleasure of looking forward to sitting down and working every day.

31:43I don't think he ever didn't enjoy what he did. And that was my model. And that's, so that's what we're doing. So then have you been discouraged by, I guess, you know, this conventional wisdom that's emerged in podcasting since, I guess, Gimlet shuttered that, you know, it's like, oh, these podcasts, we spent way too much money on them. And they, you know, we paid everybody who worked at them way too much. And we just got to really lean into just the chat show format. And that's what that's that's what it's going to be. Have you been discouraged that the podcasting business has really moved in that direction?

32:15Nope. Massively encouraged. The more people go in that direction, the more special we are. No, I don't want the world to do what we're doing. I want the world to go off and do one more chat show. No, we want to be different. right uh this is this is by the way another separate thing that i i do not understand and maybe this is an incredibly naive point but i never understood the the very human disinclination to differentiate so i remember when i first came to the united states and i would like see go visit college campuses and i was like why do they all look the same it didn't make any sense to me like You would have thought that in a country this big with thousands of colleges, what they would really try to do is to be as different as possible from everybody else.

33:02But instead, there's like St. John's decides to do the great books. One tiny ass place in Annapolis decides to differentiate. And everyone else is trying to be Yale on a budget. Like, why? And it baffles me. Like, no, be different. like why don't the i i was chatting with this um i did a couple of shows on the jesuits a couple years ago i love the jesuits and i was i ran into the guy who's the headmaster or whatever they call them of the big jesuit school in manhattan we were chatting about georgetown and all that's like they kind of get it like there is something fundamentally different about georgetown and boston college the difference between boston college and boston university is actually measurable and appreciable, right?

33:49There's something in the ether that's different. And it's because the Jesuits are not trying to replicate some Calvinist, Quaker, whatever, Protestant model from the 18th century. They're doing their own, like, 17th, 16th century thing, right? So, and I love that, but I don't understand why there's not more of that. Anyway, I'm much more interested in being a Jesuit in a sea of atheists than I am joining the crowd.

34:15Ben Smith:The equivalent, I suppose, of like yell on a budget in the podcast space is Joe Rogan on a budget. Oh, my God. There's a sort of race to – there's a lot of that kind of like super long form, very shaggy, manosphere show. You have a very funny episode about Joe Rogan, which you describe him as a giant, tattooed, tightly muscled possum. And the opossum thing is because in your view, he kind of rolls over. Oh, my God. This is one in which he let RFK Jr. in particular sort of claim that the Spanish flu was not actually a virus because a chiropractor in Florida had written an article saying that. I think we probably don't need to go too deep on the specifics, but people love that show.

35:01Ben Smith:It's way more popular than your show. What is that? What does that tell you? Well, you know, does it bond? I mean, there's no universe in which revisionist history is going to have more listeners than Joe Rogan. So that's not the game we're playing. And he's a charming man. You can get exposure to a corner of, more than a corner of the world, by listening to his show. I listen to his show, not every episode. I wouldn't be able to have a full-time job. I think the only people who can listen to his show in its entirety are people who are incarcerated. A lot of people drive for work. Yeah, but who drives two hours?

35:43Ben Smith:No, I mean like truck drivers, Uber drivers. Oh, I see. Yes, yes, yes. Those people. But no, you get, I've had more fun listening to some of his episodes. I mean, he kind of gets some characters. So it's like you're present at a dinner party with some fascinating guests. I totally get that. I just wish he was better at his job. I wish he just wasn't so passive. and so kind of like, so easily influenced by the arcane enthusiasms of his guests. I mean, I just feel like I would love to play a kind of, do a natural experiment where you pretended to be someone with wacky views you got on Joe Rogan and you just saw how far you could go saying lucid things before he actually woke up from his stupor and challenged you on it, right?

36:31Like, there's a guy, Eric Weinstein. I was listening to an Eric Weinstein. Is it Eric Weinstein? on, look at this name, on Rogan once. And he started saying progressively more insane things. I just kept waiting and waiting and waiting for Rogan. That's why I did the RFK show. It's like RFK gets nuttier and nuttier and nuttier, and you're just waiting for Joe to wake up, and you can't wake up. It's like, that's the problem. But you know, he is entertaining in the main, yeah. Has he ever asked you to go on the show? I feel like you... I was on the show. You were on the show. What did you think when he was on?

37:05Did he let you just kind of walk all over him. We talked a lot about ultimate fighting. I had a blast. I would go back in an instant if he called me.

37:16Ben Smith:I'm not sure he's going to call you. I know. I think I burned that bridge. It's sort of sad. I have no issue with it. I happily do. I don't have any. There are some voices, you know, I think that one of the mistakes liberals make when they look at conservative media is they lump them. There's huge differences between Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, right? Ben Shapiro is actually, I have an enormous amount of respect for him. I think he's thoughtful. I think he's intelligent. I think he engages with the other side. I don't always agree with him, but I can see where, I can see the pattern of his thinking.

37:51And I think he's smart. Like someone like Tucker, I just think is unhinged, like somehow lost the plot. And Rogan's just lazy. There's a world of difference between those three guys.

38:03Ben Smith:Something you find on both Tucker's show, Rogan's show, a lot of social media, the internet right now is, and people call them conspiracy theories, which is sort of, I guess, a shorthand for this, I don't know, beliefs that they're really like unseen forces, whether they are like angels and devils or aliens or Israelis and Jews or whichever, like, would take your pick. but that our universe is shaped by these kind of dark forces that exist just outside of your field of vision and that this podcaster can bring to light for you. But I'm curious, like, what you make of their prevalence and of whether, like, the shifts in our culture, and particularly, like, away from reading and toward talking and listening, are part of that.

38:44Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. We are making this big shift towards an oral culture as opposed to a written culture. and, I mean, a lot of this is there's a kind of moral hazard associated with the fact that a lot of the, when conventional systems work too well, people have the luxury to engage in fantasy. So when vaccines have all but wiped out previously deadly infectious diseases, people have the luxury to engage in crackpot notions about infectious diseases and not vaccinate their kids, right? You can do that. You can't not vaccinate your kid in, you know, 1965 if you're living in a developing world country.

39:32You sort of can today. Why? Because the system is so, becomes so. So there's this thing that, like, I sort of feel like that's the flip side to the fact that we've gotten really good at lots of things. and that permits a lot of people to be intellectually lazy and to entertain these kinds of absurd theories in a way that people just didn't have the freedom to when there were actual stakes involved.

39:56Ben Smith:But just to elaborate on the point you were making about, like you said, that you think we're moving toward an oral culture. And obviously a lot of your career, probably to a degree that when you were a young Washington Post reporter, you didn't really imagine, is oral rather than written. Can you just sort of play that out? I'm totally fascinated by this too. and Joe Wiesenthal turned me on to Walter Ong, and there's a whole field of research about orality. Where are we headed in a post-text world? Well, I mean, I have not thought deeply about this. I would only say that I am struck by how much more emotional, how much more available emotionality is when people are listening than when they're reading, and how much harder it is to do.

40:39Every now and again when I'm doing my podcast, I try to explain some complicated analytical thing, and you have to take it out almost always. It's just you can't do it. Like, you just it's like I can't I can't talk to you in a compelling way about some complicated feature of tax policy and how the curves work. And it just doesn't work. I got to show you the curve and I can't show you the curve. But can I talk about someone whose heart was broken by? Yes, I can. I can, so it's like, and if you're shifting a lot towards emotional narratives as opposed to analytical narratives, that's going to have a consequence for the culture.

41:19Not necessarily a bad consequence, by the way, but it will have a consequence. I just know that I can see my own storytelling shift. I tell stories profoundly different ways than I would when I was just writing in print.

41:32Ben Smith:I suppose Rogan kind of gets that, right? That's probably why he's not getting into analytical arguments. I get the sense that nobody wants from us on this show, like kind of tough accountability interviews where we're screaming at each other. It's just not what like – it's not what anybody's dialed into this stuff for. Yeah, they hated it when we had, you know, Vivek on and you argued with him relentlessly. And I think that the audiences literally hated that. I liked it. I know, I know. I also enjoyed it. But it was true that it was just like we couldn't do the same thing on cable, you know, that they can do on cable news that people, you know, I guess used to like to watch.

42:04But I guess, Malcolm, to bring this back to what you said earlier about being able to turn a podcast into a book, into an audio book, how are the audiences different for each of those mediums? And what have you noticed are the differences between someone who consumes a podcast version of one of your stories versus somebody who consumed the book version of one of those stories versus somebody who consumed the audiobook version of one of those stories? Or, you know, the fourth stage, someone who watched the movie. The mythological movie? Yes. I don't know. I'm not sure it's a difference of character.

42:44I think it may be just a difference of habit. I have always been impressed by the fact that you can get a book on the bestseller list of the New York Times by selling whatever it is, 5 ,000 copies a week in a country of 380 million people. What that tells you is that our definition of success in the book industry is so insanely modest that, like, you could publish a book, it could be a massive bestseller, and you could be safe in the assumption that 99.9 % of Americans have never heard it. So what does that tell you? That tells you you have infinite possibilities of that same material. You can go and, you know, you can go and sell it 17 different ways and you'll be fine.

43:29I look at a guy like James Clear, who sold an astonishing number of books, and iterates in this really interesting way. And my hat is off to him. He's absolutely right. You can keep going, because there's always more people out there who you're not reaching. And I feel like that too many creators prioritize the creation of new material as a way to further their brand or business, what have you, as opposed to coming up with ways to repurpose their existing material, to reach a broader audience of what they already have. And there's a kind of, there's a kind of late, is it not laziness? I don't know what it is.

44:10Ben Smith:It's the opposite of laziness, isn't it? It's kind of an insistence on. novelty is... You know, doing everything. Yeah. Yeah. And like, weirdly, when I look at the music industry, they have no such compunction. Is that the right use of compunction? Rolling Stones are still playing I Can't Get No Satisfaction. It turns out people are quite happy to listen to that song a hundred thousand times. Like, I don't mean in a disparaging way. That should tell us something. Right? That the pleasures from something that is really, really well done are not a one-time only thing. You know, my kids will read the same book over and over again, and they'll get something different out of it each time.

44:50You know, so I think that there's, in our strategy, we are taking that lesson to heart and saying, let's just take a really great story and go out of our way to reach as many different kinds of people as possible.

45:04Ben Smith:Well, on that note, Malcolm, we're going to package this up for the newsletter, slice it up for social media, put it on YouTube and audio feeds. Excellent. And thank you so much for spending the time with us.

45:32Ben Smith:The fun thing about Malcolm and about talking to me, he's got a theory about everything. Like whenever you ask him about anything, it's not like he has an answer. It's like he has a whole theory. You know, he's got a theory about Rogan. And so, it is always interesting and fun. And obviously, the theories are kind of up for challenge. And I think he kind of may have changed the Rogan theory halfway through. But I do think his theory about media, you know, I mean, it's something obviously just keeps coming up on the show that the people who are doing the best work are kind of obsessed with the work, interested in it.

46:00Ben Smith:Surprisingly, like he's in that category of people, not that interested in the audience, doesn't really know who's reading it where, but fundamentally, like the kind of point of his work is just getting obsessed with something, exploring it, and kind of hooking people onto these somewhat contagious ideas. See, I thought it was actually the opposite. I thought that he knew his audience so well that he was like, the podcast could make nothing, but it's essentially marketing for all of the other stuff that does well, whether that's the speaking or the books or the audiobooks or maybe the TV show or movie down the line, it seems like he knew his audience so well that he could do that.

46:40Ben Smith:I did like his theory of podcasts, that they are the sort of base layer of media and that you should just make them because, and I actually think that to a degree that I'm only starting to realize this is true in the sort of right-wing podcast space. The podcast is actually where you meet and talk to people. It's like the base layer of your politics and of your relationships. I've run into people who say, oh yeah, I talked to so-and-so, I talked to so-and-so, And then you realize, oh, you didn't ever meet them socially. You've only talked to them on camera. But you've done it for seven hours, so you feel like you're friends.

47:08Ben Smith:And I think, you know, which is a slightly different space, but I think similarly, there's this idea that right now, at least, and for him, audio is where you explore and play with ideas and you can build it all into something else. Also, apparently, it extends your life. You're totally right, though, Ben, in the sense that the podcast being the base layer for kind of other stuff. I mean, you obviously see this in politics with—it's the reason why I think so many candidates who want to be president are active podcasters, right? They are using it as a way to work through ideas, as you said, and also kind of introduce themselves and connect with their audience and with their listeners.

47:46And it is clearly a really powerful medium and tool for achieving your other goals, whether that's, you know, selling a book or becoming elected to something. Clearly, the podcast is, it is marketing for a lot of people.

48:01Ben Smith:He is also, and maybe I think this may be a reason that his work, which sometimes is hyper relevant, is right now a little kind of niche and quiet, is like, have we talked to anybody who is less worried about America? Yeah, you know, I thought that that was, to be honest, I thought that that was kind of a slate pitch, right? I thought that was kind of a contrarian take, right? To a certain degree. I do think that, obviously, based on a lot of the things that he's written and the way He talks about Trump and people like Rick Scott. You know, in his new book, he obviously is not a fan of these people.

48:33I think it's a little bit of a – I think it's a provocative stance from someone who obviously has kind of different political views. But also maybe not. He seems to be a guy who wants to chart a different course from everybody else, and that clearly defines his perspective.

48:48Ben Smith:Well, he is Canadian. Yeah, maybe so. He has lower – the stakes are lower for him. Well, Ben, anyway, thanks for inviting Malcolm on. It was really fun. Although, wait, it was me who invited Malcolm on, actually. Oh, actually, you're right. Thank you, Max, for inviting Malcolm on. I'm sorry. You're welcome. I'm sorry that I screwed up our recording in Cannes through some logistical blunders, but I'm glad we were able to get it back. That's true. Instead of doing this recording in several rooms in our office, we could have done it over a spritz in the beaches in Breezy Cannes. Some tight-fisted executive refused to authorize the budget.

49:21Ben Smith:As soon as I figure out who that person is, I'm going to— Yes, yes, yes. Please get to the bottom of that. But anyway, thanks. Thanks again, Ben. Thank you. Well, that is it for us this week. Thanks so much again for listening to the Mixed Signals podcast, particularly if you got this far. Mixed Signals is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Josh Billinson, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Coor. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is David Remnick. David, what did you think about our interview with your correspondent writer, Malcolm Gladwell?

50:04Let us know. Who files at least once every few years. It's a decent cadence. Yeah.

50:08Ben Smith:Please do subscribe to Mixed Signals wherever you're listening to your podcast. And feel free to leave us a five-star review, but only if it's five stars. And if you still want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter out every Sunday night.