Malcolm Gladwell

In short

Podcast Summary: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Episode with Malcolm Gladwell

Overview In this episode of *Tetragrammaton*, host Rick Rubin engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author known for his explorations of human behavior and societal trends. The discussion covers Gladwell's reflections on his writing career, the evolution of his work, societal issues, and the impact of environment and culture on personal and communal behavior.

Key Themes and Discussions

Creative Process and Reflection

Rereading Past Works:
Gladwell discusses his reluctance to revisit his own writings, noting that upon rereading *The Tipping Point*, he felt disconnected from his past self and his writing style.
He reflects on the changes in his creative perspective after 25 years, aligning it with the evolution of artists like Paul Simon.

Persistence in Creativity:
Gladwell emphasizes the importance of persistence in creative endeavors, suggesting that continuous engagement in creativity leads to growth and deeper understanding.

The Evolution of *The Tipping Point*

Revisiting Themes:
Gladwell initially intended to update *The Tipping Point* for its 25th anniversary but ultimately decided to write a new book due to the significant societal changes that have occurred since its original release.
He notes that concepts like using epidemics as metaphors have become common, thus necessitating a fresh approach.

Judgment and Anger:
In his new work, he admits to a more judgmental tone, particularly regarding elite institutions like Harvard, influenced by societal issues such as the opioid crisis.

Society and Culture

Opioid Crisis:
Gladwell discusses the role of elite institutions and corporate interests in the opioid crisis, highlighting the moral implications of decisions made by influential stakeholders like the Sacklers.
He argues that the problem isn't simply addiction but the systemic exploitation of vulnerabilities within society.

Environmental Impact on Behavior:
The conversation transitions to the impact of environments on human behavior, using the example of how different regions in the U.S. exhibit varied medical practices and societal behaviors.
Gladwell shares research findings that show how doctors' practices can drastically differ based on their geographical location.

Storytelling Techniques

Narrative Structure:
Gladwell describes his storytelling techniques, emphasizing the importance of withholding information to enhance engagement and interest.
He draws parallels between narrative construction in writing and comedic storytelling, highlighting the significance of timing and structure.

Education and Higher Learning

Higher Education Critique:
The discussion touches on the state of higher education and the importance of fostering environments that encourage intellectual exploration and conflict.
Gladwell expresses concern over the current culture of fear in conflict resolution and the importance of engaging in meaningful debates.

Monoculture in Schools:
He discusses the dangers of monoculture in educational environments, where uniform values can lead to increased pressure and a lack of diversity in thought, negatively affecting students' mental health.

Personal Insights and Philosophy

Spirituality and Belief:
Gladwell shares reflections on spirituality, emphasizing his respect for religious practices despite not adhering to any particular dogma.

Optimism vs. Gloom:
He contrasts his earlier works' optimistic tones with a more somber outlook in his latest writings, reflecting broader societal trends.

Key Takeaways

Transformation Through Persistence: Gladwell's creative evolution emphasizes that persistent engagement in one's craft can lead to profound transformation.
Environment Influences Behavior: The discussion highlights the crucial role that environments play in shaping individual and societal behaviors.
Value of Conflict in Education: Engaging in conflict and diverse viewpoints is necessary for growth and understanding in educational settings.
Cultural Narratives Shape Perception: The way stories are told, both in literature and media, has a significant impact on cultural understanding and societal issues.

Conclusion This episode of *Tetragrammaton* with Malcolm Gladwell presents a rich exploration of creativity, societal norms, and the intricate interplay between individual experiences and broader cultural contexts. Gladwell's insights challenge listeners to reconsider how they engage with their past selves and the world around them, making the conversation both enlightening and poignant.

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Transcript

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0:05Tetragramatism Tetragramatism I never reread anything that I've ever, or listened to any podcast I do. I don't know whether that, I never know whether that's unusual. You know, it's different. If you, in the world of music, you know, people will turn constantly to the music they've already made, right? They have to live with the feeling of playing the same song over and over and over again. We have the option of doing the opposite in writing, of completely ignoring everything. So, I've been in that ignoring world, and I literally had forgotten about many of the things I wrote. And it was so long ago, I realized 25 years is a really long time.

1:08I wrote the first tipping point when I was in my 30s, which seems an incredibly long time ago. Now, and I suddenly I was transported back to the apartment I was living in, to the close I was wearing, the music I was listening to, you know, like, I don't remember the call letters, but there was this radio station in New Jersey, which paid a lot of all to find it, so it made me happy. I remember I would listen to it the background as I worked on my book, and I still have like, that's the strongest memory I have when I went back and revisited. It was a very strange, profoundly strange experience.

1:51I won't do it again. I wonder if it was Seaton Hall University radio station. That was a good alternative music station about 25 years ago, if I remember correctly. Yeah. I think it was, it came in, the signal was surprisingly weak for something that was in New Jersey, so it sounds like a college radio station. It doesn't sound like a professional one. In reading the words, what was your reaction? Like the content? How did that hit you? It seemed like a different person. It didn't seem like me. It didn't seem like me at all. That's interesting. You know, I thought a lot about this, because I had done that big, and you know, I did that big audio book with Paul Simon.

2:33And I realized, the more I think about that project, I did a couple years ago with Bruce Hadlam, where we sat down with him for, I think we got 40 hours of tape with him. It was one of the most transformative, creative experiences of my life. And I think about it constantly. And one of the things that I think about there is that, you know, he's had this preposterously long career, where he was relevant in the, from the early 60s into the Auts, which is absurd. I mean, absurd, right? And there are many people who believe the music he made in the Auts is his best music, which is also kind of absurd.

3:17But he must have this. And I think about his music, and I listen to his music, it does seem like I'm listening to someone different. You know, the Paul Simon of I Am a Rock is not the Paul Simon of the Seven Songs. It's just not, I mean, the voice has changed and deepened and become more, but the sensibility is like a million times more interesting. And I had a sort of appreciation of this idea that, oh, wow, like something really does happen to you. If you persist in a creative endeavor, okay, many people don't persist. Yeah, they give up. So it never happens. But if you persist, something happens.

4:03And I feel like I have persisted. And so something happened in something happens that I really like. I did not like the tipping point when I re -read it again. That's interesting. I found it weird and it seemed, it seemed, you know, Paul to come back to Paul. I had that very, he would never say it, but I had that feeling of Paul from Paul that he did not, he no longer liked the stuff he was doing in his early 20s. He said he was embarrassed by, you know, the sound of silence. I would never guess that. And I understood that, I can say, I just customized it by and I would never, I wouldn't put those words in his mouth, but I just got that feeling that he was, it seemed really distant to him.

4:50And I understand, I understand why I know. Did you originally set out to write a new book or did you set out to spruce up a 25 -year -old book at the beginning? Spruce up a 25 -year -old book on a Santaversary. Yeah. And then I just realized I couldn't, that was absurd. You know, it was like, so much has happened and so much has happened around the very themes I was exploring that when I was writing the book, the idea that you would think about, you know, use the epidemic as a model for the transmission of ideas and behaviors was a novel concept. Now it's commonplace. So the first book was commonplace because of the book.

5:29People liked the book. Well, a lot of other things, but yeah. But now, so the task has changed. In fact, then it was convincing you this is a useful metaphor. Now it's, you know, deepening a metaphor that you have implicitly accepted. Just a totally different enterprise. Was there any part of when you were reading it that felt like, oh, this is a part of me that I remember? Or is there some part of you that is the same as the person who wrote the tipping point 25 years ago or nothing? There's very little, you know, the problem is I'm not someone who is very, I don't think about the past much at all.

6:09Not really that interesting. In my own past, I'm interested in other people's past. But I'm spectacularly interested in my own for reasons I don't really understand. Part of that memory for one, but also I associate that kind of focusing on the past with creative stasis. I've become obsessed with this idea that the number of men I know in creative fields and women too, but it seems to be the largely men in their 50s and 60s who disappeared. And I find that a terrifying thing. Like the journalists I ran with in the 90s are almost all no longer practicing journalism. Wow. And at that winnowing is this kind of Darwinian brutal Darwinian thing that happens to people in middle age.

7:02And I associate too much kind of retrospection with that kind of, you do that when it's over. Would you say that the new tipping point is more judgmental than the old tipping point? Well, yes, I do that a little bit in my treatment of, for example, Harvard University. I've had a long standing irritation with elite schools in this country. That kind of boil over. And when you're writing about, you know, I have that the book is very much about the opioid crisis. And it's very hard to write about that and not be angry at what we allowed to happen or what the way a kind of honorable system was corrupted by a very small group of people.

7:54I don't even know whether there's a lesson, a broader lesson of what you do about that in the future, except that, you know, so much of the way society works is by a set of kind of like an unwritten code about how you're supposed to behave. And when people decide to abandon that code, there's not much we can do, you know, in an open society, you're vulnerable to that. And that's what the Sacklers did is they decided, they decided to say, fuck it, right? I don't care. I would like to make as much money as possible selling a dangerous drug. So it's very hard to write about that and not get wound up.

8:33Would you say that's a story about corruption or is that not the right word? It's a story about a diabolical insight that they had that you could bring down an entire profession by targeting a tiny number that all you needed to sell a drug that should not be sold in the way that it was sold was 1 % of the physician population on your side, 1%. You didn't need a big Salesforce. You didn't need to convince everyone. You needed to corrupt 1 % of doctors. And like that is an extraordinarily ingenious, macchi of alien insight. No one had had it as pure and clear a way as they had had. And no one chose to exploit it with as much kind of energy and determination as they did.

9:22And do you remember how they came to it? Yeah, it was a strategy that was presented to them by McKinsey. Yeah, they hired corporate consultants who again were, you know, paid to look at the world and figure out a smart strategy. I mean, everyone sort of lost sight of the implications of what they were doing in a way that just was really kind of terrifying in retrospect. Yeah, I wonder about that when I read the part about McKinsey, it's like, is all of the weight of the bad decision on the cyclers or on the experts who were directing them? There's so many people who I think bear responsibility that means those two, but it's more.

10:08It's like, you know, as I point out, there were some states, California, Texas, New York, Illinois, that escaped the brunt of the opioid crisis because they had some very simple laws in the books, which triplicate, triplicate prescriptions, which just reminded doctors when they were prescribing opioids that somebody was keeping a record of what they were doing. And that was sufficient to avoid the worst of the crisis. And then there's a kind of social forgetting, you know, we all fell prey in all of us, but many of us to the kind of false promise that there is such a thing as a drug without side effects, even the greatest drugs in the world have side effects.

10:48And you can't, you can't pretend otherwise, even if the good massively outweighs the bad, you have to realize that there's a trade off and think deeply about the trade off. If the thinning that's absent from a lot of our discourse right now, it is this kind of thoughtful consideration of trade offs, right? You want to do that? Okay, I liked an idea. But let's just pause for a moment and ask the question, what's the downside? What's the inevitable trade off that comes with this choice? Right? Do we know what it is? Are we prepared for it? Do we accept that the trade off is smaller than the gain?

11:29How is writing a book different than doing journalism? It's not different. It seems the same. That part is the same. Doing my part, my part is quite playful. I'm just doing a big episode right now on Paw Patrol. It's a Canadian show. So I thought it would defend it on Canadian grounds. And if you understand it, it's seen all of its flaws start to make sense. It's because it's the kind of it's a fantasy about municipal competence, which is such a Canadian thing to have fantasy about. But like, you know, you can't write a book like that, but you can do a podcast about that. So I mean, in some senses, the form of journalism that you choose has an impact on, you know, how you can express yourself, but it all fundamentally feels the same.

12:21So you read the book from 25 years ago. You don't recognize it. You don't like it and you decide, I'm not going to spruce it up. I'm going to write a new book. Did that happen quick? It took about a month. I realized it's it's hopeless. I got to start over and tell me about that experience of starting over. How do you start? It was the COVID chapter that I started with. And I was. I got obsessed with this super spreading event, very early on at the the Long Wharf Mary on embossed and with this discovery that this was a meeting that ended up spawning an outbreak that affected hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

13:05And it started with one person. And that idea was so fascinating to me. And I began to explore it and began to understand that that's actually how COVID spread. It was one person. A very, very small number of people played this. I was size role and I was so different from the story that we've been told that I thought, oh, here's a story I can kind of anchor my book with. And so it grew from there. I kind of got lost in that world and there's all this stuff I didn't put in the book that I was doing for that chapter. I came obsessed with the fact that, you know, since so much of your of your chances of getting infected with COVID are a function of the environment that you're in.

13:52I then wondered, what is this safest environment to be in if you don't want to catch COVID? So what's the best place to be indoors in New York City? If you want to stay clear infectious respiratory viruses. And the answer is probably the MoMA in one of their newer wings because the places with the cleanest air in New York are our galleries because they have to protect the art. So I called up the MoMA and I said, I'd like to talk to your HVAC engineers. And they said, well, you know, known in the history of MoMA is ever asked to interview the HVAC engineers. So I went there and they took me around and I asked them that question, where's the safest place to be?

14:36And they said, Oh, it's almost certainly in the new wing, where all the with the war halls and the Vazkiats are and they took me to a place on the floor. You know, exactly closest to the, you know, the return vent or whatever. And they said, stand right there. They said right there is the best place to be in Manhattan. If there's another COVID. I thought it was so fantastic. Great answer. Didn't go into book. So cool. But it was, it was just like, you know, it was the, it was this process of understanding that you can go back and look at these events through a different set of eyes. And HVAC engineers have a very, very, very different set of eyes about something like that and the rest of us.

15:24So it's like, it was actually on that trip to MoMA that I got into the book. I was like, OK, I know, this is going to be fun.

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17:12Have you ever been to see the last supper? No. Where is that in Florence? It's in Milan and the entire room is sealed all the time. So you wait outside of a glass door and there's a certain number of people who can go in at the same time for a short window and you get to be there and it's very sparsely filled with people. And the air quality is very good and controlled. Really speaks to your moment story. Do you know Rick, if you go to the modern wing of the mama, you'll notice if you take the elevator that you're skipping over floors. Right? Any questions? What's on the floor? You're skipping over.

17:56I always see it as offices. It's not offices. It's HVAC. Wow. How? Floors. Floors, massive double height floors with these 15 foot like HVAC machines venting out onto 56 feet or 55th street or whatever it is. It's insane. It's like the other year I've ever seen before. Do you remember with the original idea for the original tipping point came from? Yeah. That I remember very well. I'd moved to New York in 93 and I would go out with my friends in the East Village. First of all, we would never go to Brooklyn. Too dangerous. The worst we would do is the East Village and we would never go. Back then you didn't even go to Avenue.

18:43I mean, you you might have gone to Avenue, right? But me and my bougie friends were not going past first Avenue. And at the end of the night, we would call a cab and then we would rule our money. We would form a strategy for how everyone was going to get home. You remember this? Yeah. All the women you had to walk them home or you had to they had to have money that would take them a cab that would take them directly to their front door or like there is no way they could even set foot on the street past 10 o 'clock by themselves. So that was like this ritual that we would go through and that I remember.

19:22It was like in 96 and 97. I realized, oh, we haven't done that. We stopped doing that. I was like, what happened? I was obsessed with this. Yeah. And I went to the library at NYU. Oops, library, but you remember. I don't know how much time you spent in the library when you were at NYU, but it was a beautiful library. It really was a beautiful library. I love that library. I love that library. I love this kind of chilly modernism. I used to think that it had a desecrated Washington Square, but now I think in a weird way, it is elevated Washington Square. I had a pass and I would go there and I remember stumbling across in the stacks one day, a sociological called the epidemic theory of ghetto life, in which a guy used epidemiological theory from the study of viruses and applied it to social problems.

20:13And I was like, oh, this is what happened in New York. We had an epidemic and the epidemic is over. And I was like this kind of like, that was the launch of my career, literally sitting in the stacks on the seventh floor of bobs. And that's where I wrote an article for the New Yorker on that idea and then that was the basis of the book. Amazing. I remember a big part of the original tipping point where the three categories, the mavens, the connectors and the salesman. Yeah. And that's not part of the new book. No, it didn't make sense to revisit that. And I feel like things have been so scrambled by the internet.

20:51And I felt that what I was more interested in highlighting with this book was these kinds of environmental things, the things in the ether. And I thought it was enough in this book just to talk about this idea of how lopsided epidemics are that superspreaders are. You can't understand any epidemic of that understanding the superspreader. That was sort of enough. That kind of elaboration. I thought I had done well in the first time around. In the new book, you start out by telling a story, but take key information out of the story. The subject, I think, is left out. And it helps us hear the story from a more universal place.

21:37How do you come to a technique like that? You know, I read a lot of a huge number of spy novels and mysteries and a mystery is a disorder narrative. It's a narrative that has been deliberately altered so that key facts are withheld from the reader. And I've always loved that. I've loved the idea that to me, it's always, it's deeply paradoxical, but so incredibly powerful. The best way to tell you a story is a not to tell it in order and be not to tell you everything, or at least not tell you everything all at once. Because the impulse, I listen to my kids tell stories to the extent they can. And what they do is they tell you everything up front.

22:21They tell you the punchline before the joke. They tell you, you know, you tell them, don't tell mommy. And the first thing you do is tell mommy, right? And that is a logical impulse. They're communicated the most important fact of all, which is that, you know, Daisy hit me. And I'm, you know, I'm upset now. It's only as a natal that you understand, oh, maybe it's more interesting for me to leave that out for now. And I feel like that's where there's a really strong overlap between what a writer does and what you do. Because I'm guessing that's an enormous amount of what a good producer is doing is figuring out the order of things, right?

23:05And what to withhold. And engineering, that kind of pleasure that comes from that moment of that unexpected moment when you hear something or learn something. Yes. That you didn't know is coming. Yes. Creating unexpected dynamics to keep it interesting. Yeah. I would never would have guessed that it comes from reading mysteries, but it makes perfect sense how that he said I never would have thought of it. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. And when a mystery violates this, I get very upset. And I had been known. I've done this repeatedly in my life, stopped reading a mystery on, you know, with 10 pages left.

23:45I just did it last night. I've been reading this new, I love this British writer who likes, writes lovely books. I've read about six of them. And he wrote this current one. And I gave up with 10 pages to go because I'm like, you've blown it. Like, it's not, it's not working for me. I'm not going to go on. I'm not participating in this. So I do, I get very worked up about. But also, you know, comedians. What's really funny, interesting about comedians is they're the masses of this because they're telling a very, very compressed story. Where you, when you're telling the punchline, where you put the crucial piece of information is essential in engineering a lab.

24:27Essential, you know, they spend hours testing out their routines in like small clubs. And that's what they're trying to find out. Like, did I order the information correctly? Like, it's just fascinating. I love going to, I saw, um, Mike Breglia was, was doing this sort of road testing of a, of a show. I went out and I went to see it. And halfway through, I realized he's like, take, you literally take, I could see him take you in his head, taking notes. Yeah. But oh, did that come in the right time? And then, oh, it didn't come in the right time. Or why is this, why have people laughing now? Like, you could see on his face, this sort of mystification.

25:03Oh, I've blown it. I almost preferred seeing. In practice, it's routine and seeing the finished product. Do you apply that down to the level of sentences? Like, when you're writing a sentence, do you play with the order of the words to get that punchline feeling constantly? You don't want to overdo it, of course, but. When you're closing off a thought and you want to communicate, you would have some kind of emotional response to what you've just written. So you, you want to kind of wrap it up and you sort of think about what's the right note to land on. That's what you're kind of think about. Do you think the new book is as optimistic as the original tipping point?

25:52No, not even remotely. It's the opposite. It's quite gloomy. My writing's gotten really gloomy in recent years. Why is that? It was funny because I'm happier now than I was in my 30s much. But my writing has gotten gloomier. I think the world is gloomier. I was quite malencoly at that point in my life, but it's sort of a weird thing to think about. But, you know, my writing for the New Yorker much of it was very kind of frivolous and fun. You know, I did a, do you remember Ron Papille? Yeah, of course. One of the favorite greatest pieces I've ever written in my entire life was a long profile for the New Yorker Ron Papille.

26:32Where I took him seriously. And as a result, found so much joy and hilarity in what he did. All because I honored the fact. I decided to honor the fact that he and his family, because you know, he comes from a long line of pitchmen. People who create a kitchen gadgets, his dad was a legend, S .J. Papille. And his cousins and his, you know, his uncles, they were all the Morris family. And they were all peddlers from Eastern Europe who came to the Jersey Shore. And we're all famous in their own right. Like he's the one incredible lineage of pitchmen. And he was the greatest to them all. Once you kind of like decided that that is a beautiful and powerful thing.

27:16But these were men who committed their lives to helping people make sense of their, of the kitchen. Make your life in the kitchen easier. And then, not only did that, but then they did the second crucial thing, which was they were not content simply to reinvent the gadget. They were not finished until they made sure you bought it. Right? It's beautiful. Beautiful. And Ron was the apotheosis of that. I remember spent, I spent like two weeks in LA in Beverly Hills going to Nate Nails with him and like, you know, doing the whole thing. Sounds amazing. Buying chickens at Costco and I will test them out on the showtime rotisserie oven.

27:58But that's what I was writing about in those years. And I, you know, now I read about darker, much more kind of serious things. Tell me the story of the first Holocaust Museum. I discovered this weird thing when I was doing the book. Someone told me this story. A friend of mine was talking to me about he had these two great aunts who were Holocaust survivors. And he was talking, he's like, oh, you know, but they never talked about the Holocaust. You know, no one did back then. And I was like, what are you talking about? And he said, yeah, nobody. You know, when I was growing up, no one said anything about the Holocaust.

28:41It's like, really? He said, yeah, yeah. So then I started like poking around and turns out this story. And this is a fantastic history of called the Holocaust and American life. A famous history book, one of the history prize. So documents, it's fact, it's just absent. It really was true. How can it be? And I looked at history books about the Second World War of the sort that you would read in freshman year. History in college. These are books in the 60s. You flip to the part where they talk about the Second World War. Look for any mention of the Holocaust. You will not find it. It's absent. It's two sentences.

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29:25The Nazis would have concentration camps where they put displaced persons, gypsies, communists, and Jews. Period. That's it. It's nuts. There's only one Holocaust museum in the States before 1978. And that is in LA. It was called the Mars Memorial. And it was a storefront on Wilshire, where a bunch of Holocaust survivors basically put their stuff from the Warriors. They didn't want their house, but they didn't want to throw it out either. That's it. That was the Holocaust museum situation in America until. There was a mini series on NBC called the Holocaust in 1978, starring Maral Streep and James Woods.

30:14And literally that is where most Americans learned about the Holocaust. And that mini series was attracted a 50 share, half of American households tuned in to watch it. That's what caused everyone to start talking about the Holocaust. It gave permission to the culture to start talking about something that had been buried up to that point. So in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, up until 1978, nothing. Nothing. And then a TV series turned people on to the Holocaust. So as if the Holocaust actually happened culturally in 1978. Exactly. Two executives for NBC, Jewish guys, one of whom had family, many family lost some Holocaust.

31:08Basically asked themselves, you think we're ready for this? And they said, yeah, so they made a mini series on that. That's it. That was the turning point. So do you think if that film was not made in 1978, would we still be pre 1978? I feel we would have gotten to a version of where we are now, but I don't know whether there's something about the kind of explosion of interest in the Holocaust. And it happens after that show that I think permanently transforms our discussion. The American Jewish community had been really wary of talking about the Holocaust because they thought that by talking about it, they would invite anti -Semitism.

31:52And that out to was slowly changing in the 70s. And that's sort of what the two executives for NBC were picking up on. Our own community is now finding ready to talk about this. So maybe we should talk about it. So I feel that would have happened regardless. But it's like saying, you know, what does rap music look like with that grandmaster flash? Yeah. I don't know. You also said that Eli Weissel wrote in the New York Times about the Holocaust TV show that it was not true and insulting. And he was a Holocaust survivor. Is that correct? He correctly points out that when you do a TV mini series about the Holocaust, it's not going to be historically accurate.

32:35And he thought that what was important as an activist was to tell the truth about the Holocaust. And when he said the truth, he meant the literal truth. And so his patients were a Hollywood dramatization of the Holocaust was limited. So I think he was both right and wrong. He's right. He was Hollywood version. He can't do a version of the Holocaust's military in it and expect it to be the way it actually happened. Yeah. Do you think in 1978, if it was to Armenian guys and the TV series was about the Armenian genocide, would we have a different view of the Armenian genocide today, more widespread understanding?

33:20I don't know because I think that a crucial part of what made the Holocaust so powerful was it connected to a large and visible Jewish community within the United States. That it allowed both Jews and non -Jews to kind of connect the dots. And there are so few Armenians in America that I feel like that kind of cultural connection would never have happened. You also mentioned that there were discussions of Holocaust monuments. There was going to be one in New York City in the 1960s proposed and it was voted down. Yeah. It was for this reason that many people in Jewish community were convinced that by highlighting what had happened during the Holocaust, they would be showcasing Jewish weakness.

34:07They were of the view that it was the perception of Jewish weakness that accelerated the rise of anti -Semitism during the war. And that they never wanted to project that kind of sense again. When I heard that story, I was listening to the audio book and I heard that story. And the first thought that came to my mind was how many other things from history, important things do we not know because somebody didn't want to talk about it and nobody made a TV series about it. It opened the door to thinking we know nothing. Yeah. I don't know weirdly how contingent our understanding of who we are is on art.

34:54Right? I mean, TV is art. That when the stories that artists choose to tell us are the stories that end up mattering. You know, the, is that quote I have in the book somewhere? If I know who writes your songs, I care not who writes your laws. A famous Scottish proverb from like the 18th century. Beautiful. It's beautiful. And I think that's right. In a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants, there is something different. Something clean. Something precise. Athletic nicotine. Not the primitive products found behind convenience store counters. Not the aggressive buzz that leaves you jittery, but a careful calibration of clean energy and focused clarity.

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36:56You talked about the opioid problem in the United States. Versus other countries. And it seems like in most other countries, it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. So how does that work? It's this weird thing about America's weird. Right? You know, there's so many things about the way we live our lives that are unique to us. Good and bad. It's a famous book by criminologist called crime is not the problem in which he points out that. America doesn't have more crime than other countries in the West. In fact, in the 70s, we have less crime. What we had more of is gun vows. That's what's special is that we shoot each other with gun.

37:39But like there's not more rapes or robberies or. You know, kidnappings or whatever. That's just part of industrialized life. What's special is that we do this thing and no one else does. Opioids the same thing, you know, it's not that underlying levels of propensities for addiction are higher. In this country than any other country. It's that this particular crisis, because of a whole bunch of things that are specific to us, happened here. It did not happen in, you know, Portugal. Yeah, so it's not a human problem. It's an America problem. It's an American problem. There's a part I didn't understand in the book where you write, it's better for people to die from drugs prescribed by doctors than from street drugs.

38:29And I didn't understand how you thought that. Because we can address the pattern much more easily if it's under our control. So if I have someone who is addicted to opioids and they have two choices, oxycontin, which are getting from a doctor or fentanyl laced heroin, which is relying on the street, which is going to kill them quicker. The latter, which can be control more easily. The former, you know, you just go on and on down the line. It is in a hundred ways worse to be addicted to street drugs and it is to be addicted to prescription drugs. And we see that we have voluminous evidence of how much worse the opioid crisis got when it moved on from oxycontin into heroin fentanyl.

39:27And so that's what I mean. Like there's a crucial moment in the history of the opioid crisis where we made it really, really, really hard to abuse oxycontin. And in retrospect, almost everyone agrees we should never have done that because it just moved people from oxy to heroin. That would be an argument go for any time we think there's a way to make things better. We might well make it worse. Well, it's an argument for considering the trade -offs of things. Sometimes the cure is worse than a disease. There's no question about that. You know, we get pushed in directions that are not always the ones that make the most sense.

40:04Yeah. The difference that I thought of when light didn't compute to me is that if you're buying drugs on the street, there's a certain feeling of taking a risk. Whereas if a doctor is prescribing you a drug, he's wearing a lab coat and he's an authority figure. So if you're getting it from him, you're trusting this is a good thing for me to do. Yeah. I think maybe the feeling of risk associated with buying drugs in the street has become diminished because people are just getting it in the mail. They're working online. You know, it's like, I don't know. That's a good, that's a good, that may be a kind of countervailing only, but I think once the kind of logic of addiction takes over, I don't know whether those differences amount to much.

40:50Tell me the story about Boulder and Buffalo. Love this one. So I was trying to figure out what to what extent is the environment in which you live, a factor in who you are. Now you behave right? Obviously, we know that our environment has an impact, but it's very difficult to measure. And so I stumble across this really, really lovely research that looks at the fact that physicians behave very differently depending where they live. Famous research was done in Vermont in the 60s, which showed that you could look at neighboring towns in Vermont that were otherwise identical. But they would have in one town, all the kids were getting their tonsils out and town over one town over none of them were in one town.

41:40Women are getting his direct amazed in the end of town. They're not. It's like he's crazy and you see this. How can it be? It is one of the. The tritest and truest observations about medicine in particularly in America that there is this astonishing regional variation. We've seen this for 50 years now. The range is extraordinary like the difference between the 90th and 10th percent out. So for example, the way in which a heart attack gets treated in Buffalo. Historically is insanely different from the way you get treated in Boulder, Colorado. Buffalo is at one end, boulders of the other end. So right away that says, okay, there's something in the air that affects cardiologists in Buffalo.

42:29That's different from whatever affects cardiologists in Boulder. Second question is, what happens if you're a cardiologist and you move from Buffalo to Boulder? Right. Do you take your Buffaloness with you or do you become a Boulderite? And the answer is you become a Boulderite almost overnight. How does that happen? I don't have an explanation. It's just, it's stuff in the air. It's like what that tells us is that you Rick Rubin living in Malibu. Malibu influences you in a way that you don't understand. And if you move to Indianapolis, you would make different music. Yeah. You just would. I know that to be true.

43:12And I know that when I moved from New York to California, I had a whole new understanding of certain kinds of music that when I was in New York, I did not like. Yeah. It just felt right in the environment. So what we have to accept is that that's true for everyone. Right? And we're not, we don't expect it to happen. We may not even be consciously aware that it's happening. Does that also tell us that. One's not better than the other. They're just two different ways of looking at it. And it doesn't matter which version you choose. It may be the case that sometimes one is better than the other. I know that in the case of Boulder and Buffalo, it's not the ones worse than the other.

43:57Boulder is behind and some things and I had on some things and up and the reverse is to a Buffalo. Buffalo, there's certain techniques that were pioneered in Buffalo. And Buffalo turns out to be weird because it's next to Canada. So any innovation that comes out of Canada, Buffalo gets in some cases years before other American cities. Because there's so much cross -border movement in terms of positions and. I don't know you know, I was thinking about this. I don't go in with this in the book, but I've been doing this long series looking back at George Floyd. And I'm getting really interested in policing.

44:29And you realizing that policing cultures are incredibly specific. To place and that some cities have these incredibly healthy policing cultures and some cities do not. And the reasons why that's the case are really, really hard to understand. They're very, very complicated. You know, Indiana, I've seen this thing about Indiana versus Illinois. They're side by side. Their economies are very similar, similar industries, exactly the same kind of demographic profile. Oh, no, no, no. Indiana is one of the most functional states in the union. Illinois is one of the most dysfunctional. You figured out you cross the border.

45:15And it's like you moved from like, you know, Haiti to the Dominican Republic. Like it's that kind of like are the laws different. It's, you know, like, I don't know what it is. Like her do is famously like the most one of the most amazing state universities in the kind of like incredibly well run. You know, great bank for the buck blah, blah, blah. You know, they had to shut down Illinois state because it was like a financial disaster. I mean, it's just like repeatedly. Illinois is carrying this massive, overwhelming debt from public service pensions. Indiana's in, you know, insanely good fiscal shape.

45:58I could just go on and on and on. Right? Who knows? Well, in the new book, you have incredible stories about bank robberies. Oh, yeah. How did you get into that subject? I got fascinated by the fact that I did not know this. But L .A. in the early 90s was the bank robbery capital of the world. And they were like an astonishing something like a quarter or a third of all bank robberies in the country took base in Los Angeles in the early 90s. And they were these legendary bank robbers, including these two crypts, Casper and C dog, who were between them in the space of a year and a half robbed 175 banks.

46:43All areas. And their genius was that they outsourced it. They looked at what was going on in American industry and they're like, oh, that can work for us. So they would recruit kids from high school, give them weapons, send them into banks and furnish or get away cars. Sometimes a school bus. And they would just wait down the street and their car. So it made them really, really. It made it very, very hard to bring a case against them because they weren't actually committing the robberies themselves. But it was it's a classic epidemic because all everyone else began to see this and realized it was way more money and robbing banks than it was in selling drugs.

47:25And realized that most banks were powerless against, you know, they had banks had moved into this kind of model of trying to be open and, you know, couches and they wanted people to come and linger and chat with the so like they were they were about to defend its basis. But what I was passing them to me about that going to the point we were just talking about was how geographically specific it was. This didn't happen in Santa Barbara and didn't happen in Long Beach and didn't happen in, you know, San Diego or Riverside or happening LA. So like the, this idea that somehow these cultures are rooted not in a region, but really in a specific place.

48:12Or even in a couple of people in this case, it sounds like it's just a couple of people really. Yeah, who are the core? Yes, who are the kind of superspeters of the phenomenon? I just love that idea. I think that it is such a kind of tantalizing one. I really did get very deeply obsessed with place in this book and why the kind of magic powers that places have. Tell me about the Yankee band. Well, he is the precursor to Casper and Cedog. He was a called the Yankee band because he always wore Yankees cap and he was the first. So the first level of band robbers called a note passer. The note passer.

48:50They just pass a note saying to have a gun and they pass it to the teller, the teller gives. The robber, whatever she or he has in there till. And the guy walks out that's like bank robbery 101. And so there was one guy in the Indie 80s in LA called the Yankee bandit who at one point I think he robbed six banks in one day. He does dozens and dozens of banks that way. He starts the first wave. People see him doing this and I go, that's really easy because it is easy. And then what happens is that the epidemic as epidemics do, it butates and it moves from. Notepassers to people coming in with guns, actual guns and then eventually to people who jump over the.

49:41The teller window and ask for the bank vault to be emptied. That's Wild West, which Cassidy level robbing the epidemic. Start slow and calm with these kind of low key practitioners and kind of ramps up with Casper and C dog. And I think you said that the Yankee bandit became like an underworld hero. He does. Yeah, he becomes. He's just a guy trying to feed his drug habit, but he's so good at what he does. And the FBI just, you know, they can't catch him. And they finally do get him a knee and then he serves all the time gets out and then robs another like 20 banks. He was like a, he was pretty dedicated to his craft.

50:28You know, the problem with L .A. with catching bank robbers is because of traffic. If you get a jump on your pursuer, it's really hard for them to catch you because they're always stuck in traffic. Like, you know, the FBI is always having you dispatch cars, you know, down, will share it like two in the afternoon. Well, what's will share it to any afternoon? Like it's just a mess, right? So if you're even a five that it had started, it's really meaningful in L .A. traffic. How many concepts do you go through before getting to like bank robberies and then going deep on that? Like, are there many starts of potential avenues for chapters that end up not going anywhere?

51:14Well, I mean, I wouldn't recognize it as such. There are ideas that end up landing somewhere else. So there's a store of ideas that are getting kind of dealt. Some get dealt to the podcast, some get held for the next book. So I'm kind of like going through the deck. I see. There's very few, if I'm interested in something, I usually find a way to do something with it because I don't lose my interest. Yeah. It's because I can't find a home for it.

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53:16It is a story you told where a TV executive is telling the guys who are making TV shows. Our job is to light cheat and steal. If you want to make a good TV show, that's your neurotic issue. He's telling that to Lauren Michaels. That's the TV executive at NBC. Lauren Michaels wants to quit Saturday Night Live after one season. He goes to see this executive. He says, you guys are making it impossible for me to do a funny show. I want to do this anymore. He gets this famous lecture. That's why Saturday Night Live exists today. This guy says, look, stop being so precious. We're just making TV programming here.

54:03It's hilarious. The monologue that Lauren Michaels gets that convinces him to stay at Saturday Night Live has entered into pop culture lore as a famous statement of network cynicism. Amazing. How is writing for the podcast different than writing for a book? The idea can... this doesn't have to be as wady. It's easier to have fun. And it's also easier to explore a motion in the podcast. And so that opens up kind of avenues for you that you wouldn't really do. Like I think of some of the episodes I've done on, for example, music. I would never have written articles about them. I did one on the saddest, it's called The King of Tears.

54:53It was about Bobby Brattac, who co -robe. He stopped loving her today, which I argue is the saddest song of all time. And then I did one on Elvis. The one song Elvis couldn't sing. There's a song that Elvis always lost his way in the middle. And they were really fun to do. But the joy that was all enlisting to people, play those songs, hearing the music, reacting to the music. You can't write that. It doesn't work. It could work, but it's just not as good. You know, I had Jack White, one point play, a version of The Elvis Song. I had several people play for it, but he started and he played it.

55:36And he explained what's hard about the song emotionally. And why you would have issues with it. But talking about it wouldn't have the same effect as hearing it demonstrated. Exactly. I see. You've got to hear Jack White play it. Yeah. And also the fun is that Jack White, because he's Jack White, he took it seriously. You know, I called him up until the what I wanted. And he could have blown me up and said, no, or he could have said, come and not prepared. Just like whatever showed up. Or he could have done what Jack White did, which is he actually spent some time before I showed up thinking, carefully about what he wanted to say.

56:19And that I had the same thing for the Paul Simon book. I call up a lot of Paul's peers and ask them to reflect on Paul Simon's work. And one of the people I talked to, I called up a sting. And sting gives this fucking genius. So good. Ten minutes of like insane. I mean, he does a saliliquia about Paul Simon about coming to America with the police for the first time. And how the song America is their song, a theme song on their first trip to America. And what it meant to them. And it's told so beautifully. And he's so insanely articulate as is Jack White. But the thing that's beautiful about it is that halfway through both of their stories, you realize that they had rehearsed.

57:13And that makes it not worse, but better. And you realize that's their genius that these guys, even the smallest things, they're not rehearsing it perfectly. But they take the time to prepare in advance and to be thoughtful and intentional about where they're going. And that's why, that's why stings are superstar, right? That's why, that's why Jack White, why do we come back to his music? Because we understand there's thought behind it. And then you'll keep listening to his music for years and years and years. Because you always know there's a reward. There's like a prize, right? And you can find the prize if you listen carefully.

57:55Whereas other musicians, there's no prize. So like, why would you listen to more than one two songs? Like there's nothing there. It relates to what you said before about the Ron Colpille. You took it seriously. Yeah. Something that many people would look at as trivial. And I imagine Ron took it really seriously. Ron took it really seriously. And understood instantly when I shoot up that I was taking it seriously. And suddenly it was, okay, we're not talking for an hour. We're going to do this for two weeks, whatever it was. It was a week or something. I kept coming back to his house every day.

58:27I ran out of tape. I remember. This is back in the days of cassettes. And like those little mini cassettes. Yeah. And Ron, we got like three hours in. And I was like, Ron, I stopped. I don't have enough cassettes. I got to go to CVS and he's the way I've been to Hills. You know, I had to go for like 45 minutes to CVS like. On, you know, can and drive. To go back and, you know, so yeah, that was the difference. Yeah. My takeaway from that would be. Nothing is really trivial. If you take everything seriously, regardless of how inconsequential it seems, you get to something really serious. Yeah. And that's what, you know, that was another of the revelations with Paul Simon.

59:17Paul's serious. Yeah. A very serious guy. I don't mean boring. Yeah. I mean, serious. Yes, yes. He is an intellectual because he, you know, it's very freeing. To meet some people like this because you understand there's no shame in applying that level of dedication to even the smallest things. Yeah. Right. That's not geeky or nerdy or stupid. That's beautiful. How has the New Yorker changed from the time that you were hired till now? I don't know. I don't read it as closely as I once did. I find there's more politics in it than I remember. I'm at mixed feelings about. I feel like the quality of the reporting that was gotten better.

1:00:09That there was a kind of historical New Yorker. There was a kind of lack of rigor in the report. There was plenty of reporting, but it was. It seems sprawling and ill -disciplined. And now I feel like there's real discipline there. So it's both, it's different and it's both better, both better and worse in some senses. What is the empty chair? Conceptually, it's the idea that the very best stories have a kind of invisible third party. Someone who offers kind of perspective and distance and irony. And that good stories are informed by this kind of invisible presence. Is that too kind of mystical?

1:01:00I like mystical. Yeah. Did you like mystical? You know, there is a there is a third chair. In our conversation now. There should be. We're not just talking to each other. In both of our work. We've been doing what we're doing for long enough that there are lots in a positive way, lots and lots of ghosts in our rooms. And I think we're also addressing the ghosts, you know, in some way. Would you imagine that the inhabiter of the empty chair would be someone like Groucho Marx, kind of like making light of everything or is it different than that? I think it's different than that. And it differs, you know, for me sometimes the person in the empty chairs.

1:01:41I'm imagining what my father would say about something or I'm imagining what my editor would say or I'm imagining about what. I need to keep coming back to Paul, but it was such a transformative experience. When you were talking to him. He was never comfortable unless he had a guitar in his hand. That's interesting. And when he had a guitar, he changed. And his empty chair is his instrument. The same thing that happened. Kenya Barrow and I have been doing this interview show. And we went and we interviewed Dr. Dre. And it was a very difficult interview to do because he's not. He has anxiety and he's he's a genius and he's.

1:02:27He's hard to reach and read sometimes. And as the end he said, Do you want to come down to my church? I love his use of that word. I didn't know what he was referring to. And I said, sure. And so he said, we went downstairs and he that was where his studio was. I had a mixing board that was. You know, half the length of a football field. Yeah. And he sit down and. He was suddenly a different person. He just was transformed. And that was his. We had an empty chair in the room upstairs. And it was his mixing board. Right. And when he filled the chair. And then I realized, oh, we blew it. Why didn't we do the interview in his studio?

1:03:10What we do? What we thinking. It's insane. You go interview Dre. You're in his living room. Like, it's like nuts. Yeah. We were one staircase away from his studio. Like, Dui. You know, like. And it goes back to your new book. It's about place. Everything's about place. Everything's about place. Yeah. And there was a moment. It's a hilarious moment where Kenya who grew up in a not very good neighborhood on the west side, Velae. And Dre who grows up. I guess outside of Compton or in Compton, I forgot exactly where. They start talking about a neighborhood. The specific neighborhood that Dre grew up in.

1:03:55And that Kenya knew very well. And that I had no experience of. And. The two of them had this moment, this sort of share moment. They were like, oh, man, that place. Oh, God, that place. I was like, what was it like? All that it says, like, basically. We knew this place back then. It was it was something that was imprinted on us. We can't explain it. It's gone. Yeah. It's part of our unconscious now. You missed it. I sort of keenly felt that. Lost experience. In the new book, you used the word over story. Can you explain to me what that is? Yes. It's what's in the air in Buffalo that makes a different the Boulder.

1:04:37It's what was in the air in LA that. Problems all these people start robbing banks. It's just. It's the name I gave. I don't have a better name for it. It's just like in the forest floor. Are you. The forest canopy affects everything on the floor. Nobody ever looks up at the canopy. But it transforms the lives of every plant and animal. Every insect, every whatever. Down beneath. And. That's true of the world we live in now. And maybe we should pay more attention to the kind of canopy. That's sort of the point of all that discussion. I think when you give it a name, it helps us relate to it more.

1:05:21Like you said, it was the best word you can use to describe it. Most people wouldn't come up with that word. But now that we have that word, it can change our relationship to it. I think so. Yeah. I think about a lot about. You know, I'm about to send my choose a school for my kids. And I've always been baffled by when people talk about such and such a place is a good school. For what? Such a place is not a good school. And I have no idea what they're talking about. What does that mean? Yeah. And I think what they're saying is they sense that these schools have particular or over stories. And some of those stories make sense.

1:06:01And cohere into something. And some schools don't have that. And that's what we're responding to. What do you think about the future of higher education? There's a version where AI saves it. And there's a version where AI kills it. I'm trouble a little bit. When I listen to people, trumpeting AI is. By the feeling that what we can do is to. Turn higher education into an intellectual transaction. I go. I receive certain information. And I go on my way. And that's already happened to some extent. And I understand that. That's what business school is. It's just a transaction, right? I go. I get a.

1:06:45A couple of useful skills. I meet people who will help me. And I get a piece of paper that says, I've passed this test. But you know, there's another side of what higher education was supposed to be. And do. That I worry about getting lose. Which is. Is the time in your life to explore. What's beautiful in the world to find out about how to find beauty. And meaning and all those kinds of things. And to relate to people who are different from yourself. And to challenge yourself. And to a safe place. To engage in conflict. Like we've gotten so terrified of conflict in higher education. I'm like, why that's the point.

1:07:29You're. 20 years old. You'll never be in a better position. To engage in conflict. The stakes are super low. You're in a protected environment. You're surrounded by adults. You get three meals a day. And you know, like what? What is perfect. Engaging conflict. Your heart's content. Think and say crazy things. And find out what happens when you do. Right? Like. Explore when I was in college. I took all these classes with Marxists. And I was back then like a total conservative. And I got one feeling great after another. And it was fantastic. Fantastic. Right? You handed it to conservative paper.

1:08:13Don Marxist professor. You're not going to do better than it be minus. You just not. Right? Do not. And I knew that. But I love the idea of like. Fucking with them and getting fucked with that was like the point. Right? Yeah. You were speaking truth to power. And they would tell you they had a view of the world that was really weird. Yeah. And really interesting. And by the way, has proven really useful to me as I've gotten older. They saw some things really clearly. They said their view of how things were about economic interest was really, really useful to me. Right? Because I was lost in the cultural, you know, clowns.

1:08:54And they were like, you know, this is about money. This is about like, like, oh, okay. Actually, that's actually really. No, did I like their conclude? Did I know and believe in their conclusions? They had their own screwed up like whatever's. But like, that was a kind of. The arguments I had in those classes with people after those. You know, like they were meaningful. That was conflict. Right? Conflict. Yeah. And I have never met any Marxist sense. Yeah. Like, look, what? Am I really, was I really going to go through my entire life without ever meeting a try, a dynamo Marxist? Like, what's the fucking point of living in the world of ideas?

1:09:33If you can't engage with what was the most problematic, devastating, meaningful, powerful ideology of the 20th century. So for the kids today, what is it? It's Gaza. That's their moment where they engage with something really hard. What do we do? We got terrified. What the fuck does the matter with us? We got terrified. As opposed to like saying, let's have the argument. We let them turn it into some weird, you know, anti -Semitic, whatever. Like instead of so saying our job as adults is to keep this on track. Let's bite it out in a. Yeah. Principal deep, interesting, upsetting way. I look at that and like you're killing my education.

1:10:22You really are. Yeah. It seems like in conflict, one of two things happens. Either you get new insights that you didn't know from the person who thinks something differently. Or you better understand your position because you're challenged. Yeah. So either way, it's only good. Yeah. It's only good. Yeah. Learn how to defend yourself. Learn how someone else is defending themselves. And by the way, no one is asking you to make sense of it in that moment. If it takes you 20 years to make sense of it, fine. We're not in a hurry. Why are we in a hurry? What's the hurry here? Are they teen year old today is going to live to their 120?

1:11:02If in their hundreds year, they look back on what they were doing in college and say, oh, I get it now. Then we've won. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to read to you this see what happens. A monoculture of high achievement. A monoculture. Our copy universities are filled with high achievement obsessed students. I did this chapter on this school in this kind of beautiful afternoon community. Popular growth. Incredible place. By the way, gorgeous. A place you would live in a heartbeat that has had for a generation and out of control, suicide problem at their high school. And they couldn't feel why.

1:11:41And they brought in these sociologists to help them understand. And the sociologists spent years there and concluded that the problem was that the school was a monoculture. That everyone at the same set of values about high achievement and going to a night league school and being a champion athlete. And that made it incredibly treacherous for any kid who didn't measure up to those standards. There was there was nowhere to hide. Where's in a typical high school that has all these different, you know, clicks. There's many places to hide. I had never thought about. I never thought that my high school would, you know, had.

1:12:22The kids in the smoking area and the drug ease and the. And the this and the, you know, the jocks. I always thought that that was somehow a kind of weakness that we had so few kids who were kind of. Ruthlessly academically focused. But they maybe realized, no, that's in some ways of strength that. When you have that level of kind of diversity in a community, it means that the community is not susceptible to these kinds of. Infections. You know, an idea virus can't spread throughout the whole school because it's not going to spread from the geeks to the. You know, Dungeons and Dragons crew, you know what I mean?

1:13:01And that school didn't have any of that. Even the kind of. Rebels at the school. We're remotely rebellious. I mean, they wouldn't we wouldn't recognize the Miss rebels. And that, you know, I really think a lot about that because. That's another. Part of what I find troubling about elite schools is. They have turned themselves into monocultures. The diversity they've created is kind of fake diversity in some senses. That there isn't enough weirdness. And I think weirdness. When I was in school, it was the weirdos that were. The prize. They were the people I learned from. They were the ones that made it interesting.

1:13:44And they weren't. They weren't necessarily the ones who got the best grades or who would have gotten in an under a strict system. And I. It may be think that. You know, I've long argued that. The proper admission strategy for. Selective schools should be some kind of selective lottery. We just established a cutoff of kids you can handle your school. And you just pick randomly. And that would be great. And so you would go there knowing that you were picked by lottery. And you would get a genuine a random cross section of people. And that would be. Really fun. Both tipping point books. Cover suicide.

1:14:23Your suicide in both books. Just interesting. I know there's no suicide in my family or any kind of never known anyone is committed suicide. But I have always found it. An incredibly compelling. Emotional subject. I'm just drawn to it. I don't really know why. But I am coming about your relationship with editors. How does that work? Well, I've always taken very well. The editing. I love it. And. I had a fantastic editor to New Yorker, one of the great editors of all time, Henry Fender. Who was a minimalist. He would tell you what was wrong. He would not tell you how to fix it. Which I resented at first.

1:15:08Because I was like, what's your point of having you if you're not going to tell me. And then I realized, oh, no, no, no, no. I will never learn to be better unless if he fixes it for me. Yeah. And that's liberating me because now for my podcast, we have these table reads, which are essentially editing sessions. And I invite 10 people or whatever we read through the episode. And everyone gets to chime in. And I realized what I'm interested in is not their solutions. I'm interested in. There are tenification of problems. Yeah. And anyone can identify a problem. An eight -year -old can tell you what's wrong.

1:15:45It may not be. It may not be right, but they have a view. Yes. An eight -year -old can't really tell you a solution. But if you noticed them nodding off or getting bored or distracted at a certain point, they're telling you something incredibly useful. And so that I love table reads. I love the free for all. I love to someone telling me that this doesn't work. Why is that there? Yeah. That goes on too long. Yeah. What are you doing with that tape? I love all that. Yeah. Have you been doing those from the very beginning? Yeah. That's great. I've never heard of this before. Oh, everything. I don't do anything now without a table read.

1:16:21I read everything out loud, everything. Wow. And get responses from as wide a variety of group of people. I had a guy come by. I was doing these two episodes on George Floyd. And I had a friend, Lee Camp, who's a theologian from a church of Christ school in Nashville, Lipscomb University. And he was in town because we're talking about something. And I said, come to my table read. And just never been anyone liked out of the table read of mine. And he's such interesting things to say. Like just into like stuff I would never have gotten anywhere else that was so useful to me. So it's like, I love that process.

1:17:05I read somewhere that you had a friend named Ariel who recommended restaurants to you. And you think that she had an outsized impact on restaurant success in Manhattan because other people in the restaurants were people. There were friends of hers that you knew that she also recommended. Yeah. That was in my first book. In the tipping point, I was explaining this concept of the Maven that people with specialized knowledge played these outside social roles. So what was it about Ariel's recommendation that you would follow versus institutional recommendations? Well, I wonder about this because I don't know.

1:17:40I think that a lot of what we want when we're making aesthetic or market choices is simply some degree of reassurance. It's not that we are incredibly demanding about the choice that we're making. It's not that we are have a rigorous selection criteria for a restaurant. We want the thing that takes all the boxes. What we want to be is free of the anxiety that we are making a bad choice. And we want the comfort of of an endorsement from someone in our world. When I think about the way I was consuming music in my 20s and 30s, it's all mediated to other people. I would meet someone who had a kind of cluster of interests.

1:18:35I would realize that I liked that person and I would adopt some version of that cluster. And then I move on to the next person. It began when I was in high school in the first girl I ever fell in love with was. A girl named Marina and Marina was incredibly cool and she went to this super cool high school in Toronto. This is in the 80s. They were listening to actually late 70s. They were listening to Eno, Brian Ferry, Peter Gabriel. You know, that kind of cluster of musicians, John Kale. And when I started dating her, I adopted all that music as a way to kind of like win her over or kind of participate in a new world.

1:19:20And it became music to this day. Another green world is one of my favorite albums of all time. I hear no Peter Gabriel. If I hear Biko or something, I kind of perk up or John Ferry, Roxy music is like. Will always have a place in my heart. So it was it's the association with Marina who was very, very meaningful in that period. And then you know, the kind of moves on to someone else. It wasn't almost romantic, you know, then it was this phenomenon can. It was lived on the hall in my dorm in college. You had was really into the clash and all that world. Yeah. Do you remember a band called the members?

1:20:01I do. And I, the members, I loved the members would play them at incredibly high volumes on my college stereo. But that was about it, you know, just spending in his world, which seemed really interesting to me and was very different. I grew up in, in high school, I listened to country music. I mean, I wasn't listening to any of this stuff. A little bit of new wave at the end of high school, like a little bit of Elvis Costello. But it was really was country, country, country. It was more like a record. It was great. So all this stuff was like, yeah, very man. I encountered all this stuff in college.

1:20:36And it was like, wow, this is what it means to expand my worldview. Like I feel like that's a version of what we are always doing. We associate so many of our aesthetic choices. We mediate so many of our aesthetic choices through a person even about realizing it. Yeah. That's my point. It sounds like what you learned in school had less to do with the classes and more to do with the community of being in a new place with people your age. Yeah. I grew up in a pretty rural shelter, part of Southern Ontario. And so my kind of my exposure to kind of sophisticated city kids was limited. Although I soon realized, it's a retrospect I realized in some ways I was just as if not more sophisticated than those kids, but just in very different ways.

1:21:29They knew something I didn't know and I knew something they didn't know. So there was this kind of lovely cross pollination. What does the time revisionist history mean? Well, it's usually a pejorative term to mean someone is doing a kind of highly subjective version of past events to justify some contemporary position. It was perfect for me because I thought the idea of taking a pejorative term and using it free of ranker was a was a fun. It establishes the tone that we're not taking ourselves all that seriously. Yeah, it's a great title. It's a great podcast. I love it. What do you think went into the success of your books besides the information in the book?

1:22:16I spent a lot of time on the road promoting it. I mean, in particularly, my first couple of books I would go for on the road for months. I mean, I promoted those books like musicians from out there. For Blink, I think I left my house in early January and didn't come back to the end of April. Nobody does it anymore. There's a point where you just got to like, if you would like to be a known, you got to hit the road and profound their professions, you know, like I said, musicians understand this. Comedians understand this, but writers, I may be used to, but I feel like this is kind of people pretend that there's something magic that can be done in the absence of kind of face -to -face encounters.

1:23:10And I don't think there is. I think you got to like, you got to get out there. Tell me about your relationship to running. Running, I always think of running is the thing I do best with that question. I was a very, very good house grew runner. I was a national record holder and, so the injury is a little bit derailed by college career. But when I say it best, I don't mean I could have been a Olympian. I mean, it comes so naturally to me. And even today, I'm 61. I, when I go for a run, it's like, it's just easy. I mean, I can't describe it. And so it brings me so much joy and the harder the better.

1:23:57And last weekend, I went out for nine miles with my 24 -year -olds. The son of a good friend of mine, who, you know, that's like the idea that I can participate with someone who is not quite a third of my age, but... Yeah. ...lose to it. It just makes me so happy, you know, charging up and down hills and like... When you're doing that with a friend, do you talk on the run or no? A little bit. That's how fast we're running. When we're running in the slow bits, we do. We chat a little bit. I don't need to chat on runs. I like the company. And... There's just something really beautiful about it. And I never discovered running.

1:24:41I would be a lesser person in some really considerable way. Do you listen to music when you run? No. Do you listen to anything when you run? Sometimes when I'm on the treadmill, I will listen to like classical music. But that's it. I'll listen like some Bach on the treadmill, but never when I'm outside running. And does it come completely natural to you? Do you ever think about your form or your breathing? I think a little bit about my breathing. My form at this point is... I've been running for 50 years. So... But I do, you know, you do adjust your form. I'm a little more conscious. It spins on the shoes you're wearing and the terrain you're running on.

1:25:31And so you do kind of... It's part of the fun. You... There is a process of adaptation to your environment that you go through. But when you get into... When you settle into it, you're settling into something that's a very kind of limo rhythm where you no longer kind of consciously governing it. Are you trying to go fast or far or both? It depends. Sometimes I'm trying to go far. Sometimes I... I'm doing speed workouts where I'm... Yesterday I was on... It was at the gym because it's freezing here and I was doing three times, three minutes, three times, two minutes, three times, 90 seconds, three times, one minute, with one minute recovery.

1:26:17And then each interval, I increased the speed. So I start medium -fast and flat out. But the day before that, I was running really slowly. Do you have any other interests that would be surprising to me? Obsessed with cars. Has it always been the case? Oh, always. Even before I was runner, I was a carna. In the 1970s, 1975, I collected when I was 12, I collected a brochure for every car made in the world with the exception of the Russian Zil. And I still have them all. They're just over in the corner of my office room. I could take them out and show you like, you know, what a rose rose looked like in 1975 or what a...

1:27:06I'll for a may I look like in 1975. Have you ever analyzed what it is? What's the pull? I really like driving. I'm not mechanical anyway, but I like the idea that someone has created this contraption and that it's in a constant state of evolution. And has been for a hundred and twenty years. And I find cars incredibly beautiful. I react to them, you know, the way I react to it. We add to people who react to a painting or a piece of gorgeous music. I have a kind of visceral reaction to them. Do you think of yourself as spiritual? I do. In what way? Describe it. Well, they grew up in a very religious household and have an enormous amount of respect for religious practice.

1:27:58Huge amount of respect for it. In fact, in the story that I'm working on now, which involves the protagonist was a minister in a southern denomination, a Protestant denomination called the Church of Christ. And I've been interviewing all these people, very conservative denomination. I've been interviewing all these people who belong to the Church of Christ in Alabama. And I find talking to them incredibly moving, really powerful. They're not people whose politics, necessarily I share. They live in a world I could never live in. They have a relationship with God. I don't have. But I find their testimony to be so moving, so powerful.

1:28:41And the same as true. My, you know, my family's religious practice is something that I am in awe of. Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young. That life gets better now worse since you get older. Probably that's the main thing. That's a great one. That's a much better one.

1:29:27Tetra Grammatine is a podcast. Tetra Grammatine is a website. Tetra Grammatine is a whole world of knowledge.

1:29:42What may fall within the sphere of tetra Grammatine? Counterculture, tetra Grammatine, sacred geometry, tetra Grammatine, the avant -garde tetra Grammatine, generative art, tetra Grammatine, the tarot, tetra Grammatine, out -of -print music, tetra Grammatine, biodynamics, tetra Grammatine, graphic design, tetra Grammatine, mythology, and magic, tetra Grammatine, obscure film, tetra Grammatine, beach, culture, tetra Grammatine, esoteric lectures, tetra Grammatine, off -the -grid living, tetra Grammatine, old spirituality, tetra Grammatine, the canon of fine objects, tetra Grammatine, muscle cars, tetra Grammatine, ancient wisdom for a new age.

1:30:29Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day, take a breath, and see where you are drawn.

From the publisher

Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist, author, and speaker, best known for digging into the quirks of human behavior and the hidden forces behind everyday life. He is the bestselling author of eight books, including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and his latest release, Revenge of the Tipping Point, which explore everything from snap judgments to why some people succeed more than others. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Gladwell now brings his curiosity to audio with his podcast Revisionist History, where he reexamines ideas, people, and events that he thinks deserve a second look.

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