Malcolm Gladwell on revisiting history, religion, and Trump

on larry king now he's made millions of us look at the world a little differently it's malcolm gladwell why a podcast why not a podcast it's the new exciting thing what a chance to kind of reinvent myself at my old age but aren't you late to the game oh and of course i'm always late to the game right that's the story of my life dumb critics say malcolm gladwell is prone to oversimplification i'd say they're absolutely right i'm a journalist if you want me to not simplify then go and read the american journal of social psychology see how far you get someone who seems revisionist every other day is trump yes he has achieved something i never thought a human being could achieve which is he's unfact-checkable plus what do americans get wrong about canada they think canada is boring in their right but the thing they get wrong is that's a good thing i mean i could use a little dose of boring in the united states right now all next on larry king now welcome to larry king now we're in new york city and our special guest is malcolm gladwell author of five new york times best-selling books the tipping point blink outliers what the dog saw and david and goliath he's a long-time new yorker contributor malcolm has been named one of the magazine's hundred most influential people his new podcast is called revisionist history about how the passing of time changes our understanding of the world around us why a podcast why not a podcast it's the new exciting thing and it's a chance to explore a medium that i've i've never i've never done anything i've never done radio i've never done so i was like wow what a chance to kind of reinvent myself at my old age aren't you late to the game oh and of course i'm always late to the game right that's the story of my life what do you make of this whole social media outburst podcasting and twittering and the whole world of communications uh i'm not the i'm i'm too old to be the kind of place of old i'm half joking but i have 52. i mean i'm you know the people who are running the social media revolution are in their 20s not not in their 50s um so i'm sort of an outsider looking at it but um i kind of think on balance you know i look at i grew up in the newspaper business and that world the internet world has destroyed the newspaper business that's the downside but there's an upside as well which is that it's made it possible for lots and lots and lots of voices to be heard and that i mean you know if we think about it just a generation ago she had something to say you had to go through a whole lot of hurdles to get the world to see it you know it's just in a space of 15 years that's been completely turned upside down and that's kind of amazing your best bet was letter to the editor yes and you're lucky if it got printed right yeah that's right all right tell me the the concept of revisionist history we're talking about stories that weren't true and are now true stories that are true we now discover are untrue or both well i'm more interested in both and i'm also interested and most interested in things that are misunderstood or or unjustly forgotten so for example the first episode is all about a painting um painted in in the 1870s and was bought by queen victoria and it's hanging today in james palace and in its day in 1874 it was the most famous painting in all of england um and then and and the story behind the painting is completely fascinating and it's not something anyone outside of a few art historians have thought about for 400 years uh more than 100 years 140 years but it has the details of that story have enormous relevance for today and that's what the whole episode is about it so you know you're halfway through and you realize wait a minute he's talking about hillary clinton this because the painting is a painting by a woman and she's the first woman to kind of break into the all-male world of art in england and this the podcast episode is what happens to her what does it mean to be the first outsider so in a certain sense she's the jackie robinson of painting but there's many ways jackie robinson is a particular trajectory i call that the pioneer trajectory he opens the door and within you know this a couple of years there are dozens of african-american ballplayers in the major leagues so the pioneer is the person who breaks the yeah down the barriers but there's another phenomenon which is the one i'm exploring in this story which is the token and the token is you open the door for one person and then you close it behind them and you say to the world look i opened the door to the to the one outsider you can't you know no one can fault my generosity that is revisionist because that story you think that story is just about painting and it's not it is about how we treat outsiders even today and the various complicated psychological mechanisms that people in positions of power use to keep people in from minority or outside groups down i mean i this is in many ways the story of anti-semitism in europe for centuries jewish which is that you would let anti-semitism in germany it's a it's a really fascinating topic in the 19th and 18th century it wasn't that they hated all jews if they hated most jews they would always let a handful in so they could say to the world we're not anti-semitic look moses mendelssohn is our most famous philosopher or bertolt auerbach is our most famous author or you know in the royal best friends are exactly that is exactly now that phrase we use that phrase you know as a joke it's not a joke that people use that logic to justify all kinds of discrimination you know how can i be a bad person i'm friends with you know fill in the blank um so it's a it is an examination you that phrase is exactly what that first episode is this is tough research was it tough or was it fun it it's only fun if it's tough so uh so i guess it must have been tough because it was fun you write about social science a lot but you're not a scientist i know i might i'm you're a writer a journalist who investigates things a lot of people don't investigate right yeah that's a good way to describe your curiosity takes you many areas yeah i mean is that that's the great freedom of being a journalist is there's you're it's the one profession that gives you license to go anywhere it's like that's why it's the greatest profession in the world it's like what other job is there where it's written into the description you can do whatever you want i mean it's kind of amazing red smith the great sports writer said writing is easy you put the paper in typewriter bring it up and then you bleed is your writing painstaking no i was it used to be and then i went to work at uh when i was 24 years old in 2013 23 for the washington post and uh you cannot writing if if writing is difficult for you you can't survive at a daily newspaper i mean for too long i mean red smith clearly survived but um in the main if you had to write every day you've after a while you just learn how to you work for my friend ben bradley i did ben bradley hired me the best a man so much charisma oh the best no one i've ever met has had that much charisma i mean he would he was a rock star i mean change the room yeah absolutely our guest is author and now podcast host malcolm gladwell coming up we'll look at the election maybe look at it the wrong way we'll talk about that next we're back with malcolm gladwell his new podcast is called revisionist history he's a great writer you got a new book coming i'm going to start working on one i hope shortly that's the idea you're not going to talk i can't tell you that i that's top secret when a writer such as yourself replied a reporter sees in orlando does he want to write about it well you know i did do a piece for the new yorker school shooting school shootings um the kind of writing that i do is best done at a certain distance so a malcolm gladwell might approach this story in a month right and go down and give us another angle or 10 years i mean i i don't think i mean one of the reasons that i wanted to do this podcast on historical events so every show is about a different thing that person thing event idea one episode about a song that happened in the past and the reason is um one is that you get a special kind of a special kind of insight comes from distance which is the first thing and the second thing is that we're i think we're really reluctant to re-examine our conclusions about the past there's so much to be learned simply by going back and saying we made up our mind about this that happened boom the day after it happened and then we just let it sit there and never went back to say well was i right what you know think about there are all kinds of things you can learn years later that can fundamentally change your understanding of of history and of how you reach your own conclusions in lincoln's time there was a proposal in the senate to close the patent office on the concept that everything has already been invented yeah is there a famous story that we've revived everything about it we've we've res the recession has changed there's a new book out about benedict donald it's always been i haven't read it yet yeah and in this book apparently he paints benedict donald as kind of a hero villain he was led astray disappointed in others washington liked him he never set out to be a traitor that's revision is history yeah yeah well you know it brings to mind that um famous epogram history is written by the victors and that's true so the account that you get in the first go-round is written by the guy you won right so one of the reasons it's so important to go back and look at history again is you have to give other people a chance to speak and you know i don't know whether the benedict arnold case is a good one or not although as a canadian i'm fully prepared to accept the fact that he's a hero but you know the there are also people are willing to be honest with the passage of time so one of the one of my shows is about a song by elvis costello that came out in 1984 which i think is his greatest song but it wasn't great at the time it was only great when he went back and did another version many years later and in reporting that story it's about an event a song that was released 30 years ago right after 30 years people are willing to say things they would never say in in a moment so i talked to all these the guy who produced the song was incredibly honest and interesting and funny and provocative about the song if i'd interviewed him in 1984 he wouldn't have said any of those things and why do things change so quickly now for example it took blacks forever and they're still working on getting equal treatment but gay marriage is the law yeah and that seems swift yeah how did that happen so fast the gay marriage story is an incredibly unusual one because you would have thought that of all of the social issues facing america that would be one that we would wrestle with as long as abortion right but it turns out no it sort of went away and we're still fighting about abortion i think maybe it's a couple of things one is that gays and lesbians wanting to join the rest of society right to do that they want to do the same thing that um the rest of society has gone on for millennia and that at the end of the day is good news it's it ought you know people finally woke up to say wait a minute that's a fantastic thing and a beautiful thing so maybe that's the difference it it seemed like it was a really threatening challenging issue and then people thought about it for about five minutes and they realized actually no it's a it's a very life-affirming someone who seems revisionist every other day is trump yes how do you explain it well he revises his own history that's right how do you explain it to yourself yeah he has achieved something i never thought a human being could achieve which is he's unfact-checkable i mean he i mean he the man was for gun control like 10 years ago he was a democrat for gun control uh pro-choice i mean i could go down the list of everything and then now he's done somehow magically morphed into something entirely different i think he is uh testing the limits of our uh of our kind of social generosity in this country in this country but um i don't you know he's a case this is a great aphorism that lawyers use difficult cases make bad law donald trump is a difficult case and he makes bad law you can't i don't think you can abstract general principles about how society works from this one guy who was like i mean you must know him he's a one in a million 30 years yeah but can we say people say there's never been an election like this and then we hear that tyler's election was crazy and martin van buren had a war right yeah there's never been a recent election like this although you know all kinds of things this election could get it could get a lot crazier or it could get a lot more normal in a hurry i don't know i bet on the crazy yeah up next malcolm on his upbringing and his sense of faith we'll be right back we're back with malcolm gladwell his latest venture is a podcast it's revisionist history and i can't wait to hear them all as 10 right yes you want to do more i'll do a second season if this one works yeah you grew up in canada yeah what brought you to the states well i'm the classic immigrant i was there i was in canada i was legal i was briefly illegal i will admit that for like six months when i in my early twenties i was between visas that was easier back then before homeland security but uh no i grew up outside of toronto um and i graduated from college and canada had was in the midst of its deep one of the deepest recessions in its uh in recent history and so i said where is what's the land of opportunity and the answer is the land of opportunity is the united states so i gave this i had the same answer to that question that hundreds of millions of people before me have had um so i came down and i worked first in indiana and then in washington dc finally got a job at the washington post um and you know that's all she wrote what took you to the new yorker i moved from the washington post to the i became the new york bureau chief in here in new york and then i didn't want to go back to washington so i um cast around for things to keep me in new york and i had started doing some freelancing for the new yorker and so i finagled my way to getting a job with him is that a very demanding place the new yorker the fact checks the story on me and they fact checked it with the world yes yeah the fact checkers are invariably smarter than the writer work harder than the writer and learn much more about the subject than the writer does it is a demanding place and the quality of the quality of the editing you get at the new yorker is unlike the edit the quality getting anywhere else i mean it's a is it a whole different stratosphere truth or revisionist did you have religion lose religion get it back well interesting question well i come from a very uh religious part of canada a very religious community and my parents family what religion uh well my parents were kind of uh mainstream protestants presbyterian but now my whole family is are mennonites yeah modern mennonites they're not um old older men and nights not riding around in buggies but um and so i suppose i have um i don't think i ever lost it but i have i have a renewed appreciation for um its role in my life now were you an atheist for a time no i was never i i like i said i don't think it was anything dramatic it was really during the writing of my last book that i kind of began to take my own faith seriously what was your last book david and goliath because so much of david and glass dealt with in the course of reporting that book i became uh i spent so much time thinking about religion talking to very religious people and i sort of witnessed the kind of gifts that faith brings people and i was like you know this is just about the most powerful thing someone told me the other day if you started religion today no one would buy it oh really i i don't agree with you yeah but look so much of what people believe in cannot be proved i mean uh i don't think there's any shortage of i mean what i one way of interpreting to my mind the way people behave in the modern world is there it is this endless largely fruitless search for substitutes for religion that when you remove faith from people's lives there's a void and they they try desperately to fill it with something else you know whether it's drugs or yoga or you know i mean you name it there's only a number of of religious substitutes people have doesn't all deal with death no death no religion it's all death it's a promise yeah you be good you're going somewhere it sounds like it was invented by rich people um uh you know i but then i i will you're probably right no death know a lot of things i mean you know uh do creative people create without the fear of death i mean i don't know i don't think so what do you think happens when you die it has to be what you think it can't be what you know yes i i think i go i'll express it as a hope i hope i go somewhere better i hope you're right yes who would malcolm like to swap places with for a day we'll find out in the game of if you only knew after the break back with malcolm gladwell you write about success and outliers is there one thing all successful people have in common uh oh that's a good question i think it's i mean i'm gonna kind of cheat and give the obvious answer which is that all successful people like what they do it is impossible to be good at something unless you love it there's just no way to fake it driven love has to come before drive because the only reason you would be driven is if you liked it so i people put that first a lot of times but no no no that's second you got to find what you like some critics say malcolm gladwell is prone to oversimplification i'd say they're absolutely right you try to break it down right you got to break it down you know it's otherwise i'm not doing my job you know that's i'm a journalist if you want me to not simplify then go and read the american journal of social psychology see how far you get right okay we play a little game of if you only knew these questions just throw them out okay who were your role models growing up you know who i was uh obsessed with growing up william f buckley i was like i i read all i had read every one of his books by the age of probably 15. did you become a conservative i just wanted to be like him i just thought he was hilarious and brilliant and a great writer and i loved his way of looking at the world that kind of he just took so much delight in i mean if you knew him you knew this well but he was wrong about a lot of times oh of course yeah i mean so why what's a guilty pleasure well i like to drive cars very fast perhaps that's a guilty pleasure what's the last great book you read i just read a uh a book by diana mitford uh she's the woman who married the british fascist during the second world war she wrote this autobiography that is so appalling but it was fascinating i mean she's the worst human being a nazi she was more than that she was she wasn't a nazi she was in a she was an apologist for nazis but the book is so appalling it's just fascinating you just can't she's a whole chapter comparing how she knew both churchill and hitler and she was like they're a lot alike it's like what like you read anyway it was just like it was unreal experience reading this book what podcast do you never miss bill simmons's uh sports podcast tell me the last time you were surprised i think i'm surprised every day me too how would you describe your job to a five-year-old i would say that i walk around all day i sit in coffee shops and i write up my thoughts who would you most like to trade places with for a day there's a i'm a big runner there's a the greatest miler in the world is a man named asheville kiprop eyes kenyan i would like to be asheville kipp rockford i would like to know what it means to be able to run a mile in three minutes and 45 seconds i meant when i was a kid there'd never be a four minute mile yeah you know ash bug is a lot faster than that a mindless activity you enjoy is running mindless i guess going for a 12 mile run is pretty mindless yeah and i get a big kick at it what makes you angry i don't think i get angry if you weren't a writer what would you be this is sort of crazy but i think i would like to be a real estate developer the idea of building buildings is making money no no no i don't care about the money i care about the buildings i looked at a point of that building over there and say i built it that would be great that's what an architect told me once he loves being an architect because you can drive on the street and say i did that i created that that's why ayan rand chose an architect for the fountainhead what's on your bucket list i went to japan very briefly for the first time this year and i would like to go back and spend a huge amount of time there what do americans get wrong about canada well actually most of the things americans think about canada are true um they think canadian canada is boring in their right but the thing they get wrong is that's a good thing can you imagine i mean i could use a little dose of boring in the united states right now i mean boring would be nice best piece of advice you ever got i read it from in a uh in a book about john wooden the great basketball coach and he said be quick but never hurry i think about that almost every day i just think it's so interesting wow malcolm so enjoyable yeah thank you fascinating malcolm gladwell so happy to have him her vision is history is available on itunes and at revisionisthistory.com as always you can find me on twitter at king's things and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Larry King

Views: 205,874

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Id: nH2UUePGIbw

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2017