Malcolm Gladwell on Running, Writing, and Storytelling

one of the blessings of of experience is you know you stop paying attention to dumb criticism and you realize it just doesn't matter hey it's ryan holiday my guest today is one of the goats of non-fiction greatest of all time journalists writers public speakers podcast two i mean is is an incredible i want to say renaissance man because they feel like it's all about the same core skill but just an incredible storyteller and thinker and someone i've very much looked up to for a long time i remember i first read the tipping point that i read blink then outliers then david and goliath which is also very good but then when i read talking with strangers last year i read it actually before last year i read it when i was on my book tour for stillness is the key i remember i shot him an email and i said malcolm this book is like the definition of mastery it's like watching a master at work he took this subject matter that should have been so difficult and frankly not interesting and it's fascinating and and his new book i would argue is a much more interesting subject matter than any of the other books the bombing campaign the final days of the second world war in the pacific theater and again manages to find a very counter-intuitive read on it and if that weren't enough if you haven't listened to the revisionist history podcast so good listen to his one about golf courses just a mind-blowing episode he always finds like the story inside the story or where you didn't even think there was a story and that's why he's malcolm gladwell that's why people describe things as gladwellian because he's in a class of his own it's a distinctive style tone approach and as i say at the end of this episode he also has a lovely fascinating voice and uh it's just a pleasure to listen to so today my guest is the one and only malcolm gladwell the tipping point blink outliers david and goliath talking with strangers and now his new book the bomber mafia and of course if you haven't listened to revisionist history you absolutely must here's my interview talking about history philosophy endurance sports uh critical infrastructure like infrastructure that criticizes art culture etc and then we get into a fascinating discussion about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy at the end i loved this episode i loved talking to malcolm gladwell enjoy first question do you run in the morning or do you run in the afternoons i i run in the afternoon always have never in the morning never not even like when you're traveling never so should you write first and then run yes right morning is thinking time and um so it's uh it's creative time and seems crazy to put a run in the middle the most cognitively valuable stretch of the day i agree except if i think it's unlikely i'll be able to run in the afternoon because the day is not sort of mine to control sometimes i'll get it done early and then i've crossed it off the list but do you find that when you go for a run like so let's say you spent all morning writing whether it went well or it went poorly do you find that running unlocks things for you creatively that that takes you back to writing or or helps you the next day are they totally unrelated pursuits for you well you know i imagine it does unlock things but not in a conscious way sure i mean it has to help right but um i just don't know whether you can you can ever know how it's helping any kind of extended time like i typically run by myself and i run without music or any accompaniment really yeah never so it's you know i feel like it's just a it's like it's like meta a form of meditation it's just letting my mind wander is that what you is that what you're doing is your mind wandering or are you thinking about very specific things like are you in control or is is it nothing no i'm usually daydreaming um or if i'm doing a really hard like a track workout then i'm a little more locked in but if i'm just going um just for a kind of easy run i'm letting my mind wander or i'm just thinking about various random things it's very similar to the kind of thinking i do before i go to sleep it's that that's the analogy i think and do you why don't you listen to music or you know some people i'm sure you hear from people all the time that say you know i listen to your audiobooks when i'm running i i am baffled by people's ability to consume this podcast episode or any sort of conversation while they're running yeah i i'm with you i've never figured out the logistics of it i don't like where would i put my it's on my phone am i really gonna carry my phone on a 10 mile run that seems nuts um but also i don't even know it's never going to do it on the apple watch i think that's what a lot of people do i just never even encouraged me to to i mean it's just like there's so little time like when even when i'm driving i only ever listen to something on the car in the car at the end of the day never in the morning yeah i think it's precious time you have with your own thoughts yeah and i think for a writer that's when your sharpest you know is sort of in the morning before the crap of the day has entered your world and so to to willingly like mainline other people's thoughts or information strikes me as uh a bad idea yeah yeah it's just disruptive um although i i read that you write in coffee shops probably not during covet but i i can't be around i don't want anyone in the space i want kind of like a sacred quiet space so it's interesting i love the i love the company and the noise but remember i began my career as a newspaper reporter in at the washington post in a big loud crowded newsroom and that's what i associate with right you know i love that energy i fell in love with that energy and so i try i can i recreate it as best as i can in um in in coffee shops so i like having and also i like variety so i'll move around over the course of the day and write in four different places you know my desk being one of them but then i need that kind of to change it up a little bit well it's like i imagine maybe it's a little bit like ambient noise like someone who grew up in the city listening to sort of city noises on a white noise machine or someone who grew up near the ocean needs to hear waves yeah yeah i think it's that that kind of um uh and i i i i've never had the thing is when i'm actually writing so little of my life is actually writing sure that's what people don't understand about writers which is that you know our writing takes up a tiny fraction of and i find that i'm very unconflicted about the writing part of my um so i don't you know it's i know i really never get writer's block or it's very kind of um it's just so uh so pleasurable to construct something for me that um you know it's fine if there's things going on around me i'm i'm locked in i don't it doesn't sort of affect my process so let's say for scheduling reasons or you're sick or whether or whatever i'm curious for you what's more painful like what leaves you more blocked up not being able to write research build stuff for a few days or not being able to get out and physically exercise like run or work out which one if you had to to sort of deprive yourself of one which which would you choose oh uh that's easy um depriving myself of physical activity is way more painful than depriving myself of um because i you know if i i was just on took a little three-day holiday i did some work but mostly just read books that was like totally i don't i could have read books the entire time i could not have not gone for a run in that time that would have been painful so what is that isn't it an addiction because i suffer the same thing it's i was talking to do you know who dean carnazis is uh that it's hard we were talking about it's harder for me to not go for a run because i'm sick because i'm hurt because it's somebody's birthday or something it's harder to not run than to run like it takes more willpower to not do it than to do it at this point yeah although it's funny does it take i mean i enjoy my day so i i because i'm old i i run you know two days on at most sweet days on and then one day off so i'm i have plenty of off days and i don't they don't they're not painful for me i'm quite happy i mean tomorrow i'm not running um i don't have a problem with that that doesn't make me i'll just so it's not it's not that it's just like um i don't know it's hard to describe the place i had a the son of a friend of mine came was passing through and stayed around my house uh yesterday and i we went for a run in the afternoon i've never run with it before typically like because i boy upstate i run do my most running by myself it was a beautiful day and we went on this kind of there's this new trail near where i live this beautiful you know crushed stone trailer goes for miles and you know we started really easy and then we just decided to pick it up on the way back it was just like so great i mean just no other sure you know we went from started just over eight minute mile pace ended up at six minute mile pace and it was just like i don't know there's just nothing beats that i don't i just i was just happy for the rest of the day it was just so satisfying i think it connects to something very primal it's like you're sort of like this is what uh the body was meant to do yes and for some reason i'm aware as i've she's i was going to say it's always been this case i've been and maybe i have no idea what this is true of all runners maybe it is i my running is incredibly variable so i can have days where i'm on fire and i have days where it it's a real slug i don't i can't point to a rational reason why in both those instances i may have had a full night's sleep i may be perfectly happy in my life i may but you know sometimes it's a struggle and yesterday was those days where it was not a struggle it was just i could have run forever i mean it was um when i was a kid there was a period where uh when i was 15 years old which was the best my i stopped running competitively at 15. um but uh right before i stopped i was in there was a stretch of about two weeks where i was in the greatest shape i'd ever been up to that point i've never been in that kind of shape again and i had that feeling every day that i nothing i could just run forever as fast as i wanted i've always remembered that it was like the most magical period of my entire life i think back on some of the workouts i was doing in that window it's just incredible like it just was just in a state of physical flow what's weird is that writing and running are kind of on opposite trajectories so running you kind of get worse at it as you get older to some degree and that the body is rebelling and breaking down as you get older but writing is unique i would imagine i would i would argue unique among the artistic or cultural pursuits in that you not only do you tend to get better at it the longer you do it but also society and the market accepts the output of your work longer so a musician you know you start you hit your mid-30s musicians start to be irrelevant culturally the they're moving on to the younger person but but a writer could hit their stride at 40 or 50 or 60. i was just reading about janet malcolm uh who who died yesterday it's like her first book was published at like 40 or 45 or something um it's it's they're kind of opposite pursuits i like that writing you know you could be you could be at your absolute peak at robert carro's age and uh it's a it's a very forgiving pursuit in that sense yeah no it's um it's that's the i didn't realize that when i started and now i realize oh my goodness the best possible profession to age to aging um although writing running i would quibble with your i find running to be far more pleasurable now [Music] um now the only the that i did when i was a kid the only problem is you i guess you're more likely to get injured when you're older although i was injured all the time when i was young so i'm not even sure that's true um it's more forgiving than basketball i just mean yeah it's it's probably more pleasurable as you get older but it's not you can do it as and and even some of the best runners in the world are competing at an elite level later than a lot of the other sports but yeah yeah um so yeah i think it's i mean i hope still to be shuffling around when i'm 80 i mean assuming that my you know joints all hold up um i think i i think i should be able to do this for a long time do you feel that with writing as far as aging into the profession i mean i i think i messaged you this when i read talking with strangers and it just felt like this was watching a master at work and not not that the other books weren't good they were very very good but i would argue that the subject matter of talking with strangers and then also with the bomber mafia these are much the other subject matter it was easier to make a great book out of you were you were dealing with harder material so for it to be at the malcolm gladwell level or to just be at the readability level that they were with the raw materials you were working on on these harder books it struck me as as really watching the culmination of uh a person who'd done this a very long time yeah i do feel like i've gotten i do feel that i do feel like there's some cumulative benefit of my experience now that i can see i have a lot i i have a lot of confidence now um particularly the podcast you know in i'm in my s uh sixth season we're just finishing up our sixth season now so that's ten episodes of season that's 60 episodes in six years each episode is roughly let's say 7 000 words that's like a lot of words yeah um i feel like and i feel like that kind of has has sped up the process of of mastery interesting and i've i just have a lot of confidence now that i can find and also because i'm in the podcast world you have more help so i just you know the company is now much more of a team activity and that and in combination with my own kind of experience it's it feels a lot different and it feels a lot easier sure and uh i'm not you know i enter these seasons and i'll have i have to be done by the end of june and in january february i'll have no ideas like i couldn't have handled that at 30. um i can sort of handle that now i've raved about athletic greens before with all the things we've all got going on trying to to work stay healthy stay strong work out it's hard to get the right mix of nutrients in your diet and athletic greens is a great product i actually first heard of athletic greens almost 10 years ago from chris the kiwi the founder he and i met through tim ferriss he's a great dude athletic greens has more than 75 vitamins minerals and other whole foods sourced ingredients to make it easier for you to maintain nutrition without taking a whole lot of pills you just mix a scoop of athletic greens into some water and you're good to go they're offering my audience a free one year supply of vitamin d plus you'll get five free travel packs with your first purchase simply visit athleticgreens.com stoic join us in making this commitment to your health just go to athleticgreens.com stoic and get your free year supply of vitamin d plus five free travel packs today even though you're not interacting with the audience the same way i think there's also something empowering and educational about working at scale like i think this podcast has done 50 million downloads i i could write my whole life and not reach 50 million people i mean that's like an insane number and so you you do learn something also by like putting stuff out hearing from the audience seeing what's working not working but like even like a book that sells a million copies is like you know an album that sells 15 or 20 million copies right it's so rare to reach that scale and so books have always been this kind of i don't want to say a ghetto but it's a it's a smaller niche um that you don't you don't get the sense of what's working for large amounts of people the same way i feel like you do an audio yeah yeah yeah i think that's true or at least they're very um they're so i i had thought when i started that what a podcast was was simply a book that you read like my kinds of pockets narrative yes but now i i realize it's a completely different animal that's experienced in a different way that um [Music] it's a different kind of storytelling it's remembered differently it's you know it's much um i don't know i can't i'm still kind of fumbling with my appreciation of of how different it is but the more i do revisions history the more i i just think this is like a this is a whole different animal than i was doing before all that all that thing has in common is that i'm doing it but that's it other than that it's like it's like i mean i i feel like i'm i'm a uh you know a a guitar player who who took up the trombone at 50. it's a unique medium too in that it's long form and yet not viral so you're not worried about how it spreads in the same way that you are with an article even a book you want sort of word of mouth there is something special about like you have an audience they subscribe you push it out to them so it really can kind of be whatever you want there's a large audience but you're not subject to the pressures of the internet or even like the the the best seller market and and i think that's why such good content comes out of podcasts for the most part is that it kind of exists in one chunk as opposed even like talk radios like sort of live and and if you're not holding the attention they turn off or switch to a different channel it's kind of immune from these wicked incentives that i think have ruined some other mediums yeah and also uh it's this wonderful so there's no critical infrastructure for a podcast right there's no uh there's not even a really a best seller list i mean it kind of is but not really right there's no nobody knows what it means what what the ranks mean how many downloads it is nobody knows they're not podcast critics who publish regular things that everyone reads there's no and what we're getting is a kind of a little case study in what happens to creativity in the absence of criticism and the results suggest to my mind as well at least that um the the um the contribution of the critical infrastructure to writing to publishing may be greatly overstated that the world would actually be if there were no movie reviewers maybe movies would be better if there were no book reviewers maybe would be people would take more chances i'm not what the kind of creative flowering you see in the in this new medium um in the absence of some kind of institutional reviewing function suggest to me that maybe these reviewers were screwing things up they weren't helping i mean i would totally argue that they are even to go back to publishing this is always something i've i've noticed about your books um your books appear on the new york times non-fiction list whereas almost all of the rest of us operating in very similar spaces get jammed in the advice how to non-fiction ghetto where we're competing with the uh guinness book of world records and uh you know the the no belly fat diet books and and all this other stuff and like what is that distinction who decided that you know what malcolm gladwell writes is is high brow enough to be uh non-fiction and then basically anyone else writing non-fiction that that has you know even a sliver of advice in it you know gets put in the in the miscellaneous bucket and yet that determines so many other things and and it's just like some random person probably made this decision all these years ago and the the the downstream consequences of that is it sort of has to do with rankings and all this other stuff it's it is interesting even even the bestseller lists i i always find it funny like if you look at the fine print of the the new york times bestseller list it excludes like books that are assigned in school it is it excludes like um uh perennial sellers and it excludes things that should be on the list every week or every month and so people end up inevitably trying to gain incentives right uh and i think your point about there not really being anything to game with podcasts means all that energy gets focused on just making stuff that people want to make yeah yeah i i yeah i agree i mean this kind of like um the the the inf the existing publishing infrastructure is super creaky it's just like it hasn't people even something as dumb as i mean we're sort of getting the reads here but the new york times list is a list of print books and then they also have a list of ebooks they don't fold in your audio books right audiobooks out in many in my in my case i sell more audiobooks and print books it's like 30 or 40 percent of sales of most books in my case it's 60 of sales so like what i don't understand like why does the new york times think that they should count my print book but not my audiobook i mean i just don't i mean it's just like dumb or or uh why is amazon weighted dis underweighted but independent bookstores are overweighted meanwhile i think you know independent book sales and i have an independent bookstore is like one or two percent of my total sales so so yes somebody decided that because they love indie bookstores that's going to be disproportionately weighted on the list you haven't you have an indie books right yeah i have a small bookstore uh in this small town here in texas really yeah so i was i'm talking to you from my office which is above the bookstore i needed like an office space to write and so i i bought this small building and beneath it is a storefront and i opened a bookstore what town in texas do you live in uh bastrop texas which is right outside austin oh yeah oh yeah i know bastrop yeah wow i go to austin all the time i should come and uh you should i should come and check out your bookstore we have all we have all your books they're very popular yeah yeah oh that's funny but yeah it's it it's strange how you know again this sort of arbitrary criteria which is i guess kind of the the um the through line of a lot of your books what is the underlying hidden logic of how a lot of systems or people or assumptions operate and it's not usually what people think there's usually something going on yeah yeah yeah i know it's it's funny yeah i am that that kind of um side of it always has um fascinated me i'm doing a the next big project i'm doing is on the um lapd it's a kind of history of the lapd but it's an a different kind of history of the lapd is i'm trying to describe how did one of the great american institutions go wrong and it's really at the you know when we talk about police um problematic police behavior in this country we often talk not always we often talk about it in terms of bad people you know like uh like the guy in minneapolis you know um uh you know who's just a bad actor and we think we need to get rid of the bad actors but the focus of my book is not on bad people but on bad systems sure and how if you look very closely at the history of the lapd you realize that there's a kind of an original sin in the way the the institution was set up in the 30s and the results the consequences of that um warped the way the city was policed for two generations and it took in a heroic effort to change that and it's like it's such a kind of like and people almost no one talked about this for 60 years i mean it just never came up and they were always talking about well is there something wrong with the cops is there something wrong with that are the people just who complain about the cops just complainers are they you know there was a million maybe this problem doesn't exist there was a million explanations given for what was for the to try and identify the dysfunction in los angeles and the the truth was like there in plain sight but it just was in a form that no one no one wanted to think about it's all about this the way the city charter is written it's like the nerdiest thing but that that's it that's at the core it's set up a system which perpetuated itself for 50 years that that was my favorite part of the new michael lewis book the the premonition where um i don't know if you if you remember this part but like they were trying to find out some something about droplets and what size droplets were uh and and there had always been this assumption in epidemiology that had come from a very specific thing and someone was like well let's go find what study that's based on and nobody could they found it ultimately it was traced back to like this obscure book and it might have been a typo you know it's always interesting that it was like one guy because it's usually unfortunately a guy some guy laid down a rule or a law as you said like 60 years ago and everything is descended from that it's all fruit from the poison tree but it doesn't feel like that because nobody even remembers who that person was and that they would have had so much power at that time yeah yeah yeah no that's fascinating yeah so uh you mentioned upstate earlier i meant to thank you i i i believe your neighbor up there charles randolph is uh you he told me that you were the one that recommended that he do the screenplay about one of my books uh i wrote a book about peter thiel and gawker oh yeah and he said it was you that recommended it um he may be being overly generous but uh i um he charles is one of my best friends yeah he he he lives a hundred yards for me he's a um uh that was yeah that was a that was a really really interesting book yeah and they're they're um uh i don't know where the what the status of the movie is at uh i have no idea either yeah yeah no charles is a genius very brilliant guy yeah no the screenplay he did was amazing hopefully hopefully it ultimately gets made but um all right so a couple more questions so uh the knock against you uh when when usually sort of jealous academics are are mad at malcolm gladwell uh you get something that i get as well which is is to go oh he's just a popularizer um this strikes me as a preposterously complimentary insult uh why do people think that that would be a bad thing isn't that the whole job of writing yeah i've never understood that um it's it's like uh well you know it's funny i think that that there is something else going on here which is in part legitimate which is and i'll use a running example every now and again there'll be an article about running written for a popular audience by someone who you realize happened through the articles not themselves or runner and there's always a moment when i read an article like that when i get so angry how did they what are they talking about how could they possibly say that what and then i stop and i say oh no no malcolm don't get angry because this is a um a structural feature of journalism that is the insider is always going to be unhappy with the account of their world written by the outsider necessarily one because the outsider can never get all the nuance but also the outsider who's writing about your world is not writing for you i should remember this lesson if there's an article about running in the you know new york times magazine don't read it malcolm it's not for you you're happy it's not for you like if they're writing about i think there was maybe some article years ago about mary kane that there was just so much stuff that annoyed me about it but then i realized it's for people who don't know about mary kane or there was an article about um one that i always remembered drove me so crazy there's an article about um uh uh whether trans uh it was uh that whole argument a thing about whether trans athletes should be um allowed to compete alongside um you know in conventional gender categories and at one point they were talking about well what role what is the added benefit of um having higher male levels of testosterone and the person wrote in the article said you know it's trivial it's only about like two percent or three percent you know as a runner so then i was like oh my god three percent is everything it's the whole difference between being first and last it's between making the olympic team and not even making the final that could be several minutes in a marathon yeah it's like huge but i you know that is an egregious mistake but at the same time um the same rule applies it's not to the kind of person it was otherwise a very intelligent article trying to introduce people who've never thought about this issue to this issue and it's fine if not everything is perfect it's not the point you know the people reading it are not going to be the ones passing judgment on this very complicated issue this article is simply saying here's your introduction if you're and if you're interested in this you'll read more yeah right and you'll correct you'll understand eventually the three percent is a lot right you'll get there but like so i think of what's happening with you people like you and i is that the same thing the insider's reading it and of course they're going to see a nuance that we didn't see but they should just like chill yes not for them well you'll you'll see it someone will go like don't read ryan go read the original stoics and to me that would be the equivalent like don't read malcolm gladwell go read hundreds of scientific journal articles nothing could make you or i happier than millions of people deciding to be as nerdy and dedicated and uh and detailed about their what they read as that yeah also realistically that's never going to happen if if if everyone loved journal articles we wouldn't have books we just all read journal articles like there i think people struggle with the idea that not everyone has the time or energy or for frankly the ability to go as in-depth as a topic and they have to start somewhere just as you didn't start with journal entries and and i you know everyone has to start with a general introduction to something and why would like i always i always get mad too not mad people go like uh you know uh people in silicon valley are reading ryan holiday's uh you know books about stoicism and it's like of all the things they could be reading that you would be upset about it seems like an ancient philosophy would be like the least bad thing for them to be consuming like for of all the things that you could be popularizing it's not like you're popularizing q anon or or or you know the law of attraction you're you're popularizing science and and research this is a good thing why be upset about that yeah yeah i mean i don't i kind of stop paying attention one of the blessings of of of uh of experience is you know you stop paying attention to dumb criticism and you realize it just doesn't matter it's not like the but the rule i always have is if you if you look if you imagine um as a hypothetical scenario that let's stipulate that 90 of the people who read your books love your books and 10 hate them that's a very very generous i'm going to give you that sure yeah so if you sell 10 books then you have one critic and nine people who love your books no one's even going to notice that one critic right right if you sell a million books you're going to have a hundred thousand critics right all we're going to be inundated with the critics of ryan holiday but you sold a million books and you have 900 000 people who love them now which of those two which which which of those two scenarios do you want right do you want to sell one do you have one critic or a hundred thousand critics i want to have a hundred thousand critics right the other feature of that is that the haters always hate more than the people who are fans of the 90 who like you most of them were like oh it was okay or you know i read that i i you know outliers that's the one with the 10 000 hours that's what i took away from the book right but the hater is the one who's obsessed that on page 62 you made an you know you made an assumption that they don't agree with and therefore you know you are the devil and they were going to spend all their time on the internet letting everyone know i tried a couple years ago i realized this i realized that i was like everyone far more free with my criticism than my praise and i decided to make a concerted effort to be to equalize that so to and so i started you know janet you just mentioned janet malcolm died yesterday jenna malcolm was she was the most important influence of my own writing i read every one of her books some of them more than once i was obsessed with jenna malcolm and i realized oh you know i need to start telling the world this so starting about five years ago maybe even longer whenever i was had an opportunity i would say and my favorite writer is janet malcolm and then finally last year i got a little note a little handwritten note from janet malcolm saying i heard you say on some some friend of mine alerted me to some you know interview you gave well you said you i was your favorite right i'm so touched i was like you know that i wish i'd started doing that 30 years ago yes that you know she has been trapped in a world she was in her 70s or 80s by that point she'd been in this world where her haters were much louder than her than her supporters and the only way that's ever going to reverse is if people like me who like her work speak up right and and better that you speak out while she's alive and she could actually hear about it yeah it was the sweetest little note i was like i meant i think i brightened today like it was like i was so i was so um uh thrilled to get that little note from her no that's a great rule okay back to the insider thing and then i want to talk about about the new book um well i think one of the things you you kind of just described there and i might be pronouncing it wrong but uh what is it the gal amnesia effect or the gel amnesia effect do you know about this no i actually heard about it from michael lewis but it's basically that whenever you read an article about something that you are in fact an art an expert about you immediately see that the journalists or journalists in general have no idea what they're talking about and that you can't trust it and so you read this about running or or or you know something in the market because you run a hedge fund or whatever it is that you're an expert about you read it and you're just disgusted with how inaccurate it is and then you turn to the next page or you click the next article and they tell you about an upcoming ruling of the supreme court and what it means or what's going on in the middle east or the latest news about this scientific breakthrough and you absorb it and trust it completely as if it is not uh just as inaccurate to the insiders but you are unaware of your own ignorance yeah oh that's fascinating yeah that's so true that's exactly what i'm talking about because you know i will eagerly con you know i'll be throwing my hands up over the mary kane article and then i'll you know eagerly read every other article in the magazine yes yes that's true um well i so i thought the new book was fascinating uh again it seems like maybe you're trying to challenge yourself to to write about something that you must have known the vast majority of people were going to be upset about you for daring to talk about and for not sort of taking i don't want to call it the party line but but the sort of let's call it the the sort of liberal consensus about you know uh this part of the second world war were you trying to challenge yourself or were you just you just compelled to tell this story i mean i was i didn't think it's funny i from my perspective i have never gotten such positive reviews on a book in my life i'm used to getting i have on many of my books run the table and got not a single major positive view so that's my baseline so this one you know i had i've just been flabbergasted by how positive the response has been um i wasn't trying to do anything controversial at all i was but i was trying to stretch myself in this in the kind of story that i was telling i wanted to tell a single narrative which i've never done before at book length i always have a book that has multiple narratives um and i was like you know what can i why can't i tell a story from beginning to end because i've always been in awe of someone like michael lewis who does that and i don't understand how he could do it um so that was the first thing and i wanted to write a book that didn't that withheld a conclusion i wanted people to make up their own mind about um what we should have done at the end of the second world war or whether what curtis lemay did over japan in the summer of 45 is a good or a bad thing because i'm not sure i know how to what to make of it um and so i just thought i would lay out the two sides and let people um interpret it as they may um and i i i think that in binaries that's what people have done is they've just accepted the fact that war presents you with a series of impossible choices and they're no less impossible with the passage of time i mean it's not any easier to make sense of what was doing what they were doing in 45 today than it was in 45. um so that's that was what i was trying to get at is you know i feel like this is the thing i've actually begun to feel quite strongly about in many um the this idea of degree of difficulty is the thing we have the hardest time with and you know the i've seen this you know in all i've done a ton of writing about police and law enforcement in my life and the thing i always come back to is most people who are not in law enforcement underestimate how difficult that job is similarly uh you know i think the same is true of teaching i think most non-teachers underestimate how difficult it is to be a good teacher it's really hard um you know i had a brother who was an elementary school principal for many years and so i had i got a kind of insight into that world man like you you know that to do to do to walk into a classroom of eight-year-olds and keep them interested and entertained and learning day in day out for nine months that's like there is nothing i do that that's that's that that's that hard um so that sort of that appreciate and i wanted to give that same appreciation for people who fight wars it's just like it's really easy to judge after the fact that men walk a mile in their shoes um and that's really what the bomber mafia was an attempt to do i have i have a theory that you know you study something like the civil war or you study something like uh the second world war we have these very simple historical narratives right the civil war is about slavery you know we dropped the atomic bomb on japan to save millions of casualties from the invasion and then you know then you do a little bit more research you actually you realize oh wow this is very complicated there's all these factors there's a bunch of stuff you weren't told about um you know it turns out hey lincoln you know wasn't was opposed to slavery but not really opposed to slavery and look at all these horrible quotes and then you go yeah but actually maybe it wasn't going to be a million people who died in the invasion and actually japan was almost going to surrender you start to hear that stuff it gets really complicated but then you research you do another level of research and you really get into the minds of the people who are there at the time you read the primary sources weirdly it kind of becomes simple again you're like oh the civil war really just entirely was about slavery and really they were looking at the horrendous human costs of invading japan after all of these island invasions and that's why they made the decision again so it's this weird thing where it's simple then hopelessly complex and then weirdly what comes out of it is a kind of simplicity but it's a different kind of simplicity it's not the patriotic propagandistic simplicity but you do kind of end up getting to roughly the same place yeah yeah yeah that's interesting there it's the layers it's funny how different levels of kind of experience and expertise give you dramatically different perspectives on um the tasks that you're and you have this it's like a what you're describing is uh a u-shaped curve right that um and you start out in at baseline some somewhere you the curve goes up and you're moving on and then you just come back to baseline it's like there's a lot of i i was one of one of my books where i talked a lot about u-shaped curves and how how um how commonly they describe our experience and how infrequently we understand that we're just rotting this curve and it's going to be confusing um you know the the classic u-shaped curve is um uh i remember that's right i was talking about this with respect to class size and education large classes are bad we all know that then you make the class as you make the class smaller the task of learning gets easier and easier and easier but then when the class gets too small learning gets harder again and people don't understand this they think they think it's just a straight line that and you'll hear fancy schools say we have you know one teacher for every eight kids well i'm sorry a class full of eight kids is a bad learning environment you're only learning from seven other kids that's crazy why would you cut yourself off in a class of 25 kids you learn from 24 other kids what's better learning from seven or learning from 24 right how do you have a meaningful discussion around about anything with seven kids seven other kids you can't like i could go on teachers hate teaching i talked to all these teachers so fascinating i was like what's your ideal class size i never met a single teacher who thought an ideal class size was less than about 18. really they were they were just like particularly when they were teaching hard subjects they were like you you try and teach history to to seven kids and man you will have a lot of and they also talked about how hard discipline is in which i thought was so counterintuitive this one's really hard with 35 kids but it's also really hard with seven right because one kid can just dominate and you cannot get away from that one kid and there's no way to cancel out the effect it's like the three kids in the back seat of the station where i could drive you cross country you're screwed if they don't get along i kind of feel like your books actually kind of apply to this too where it's like you know uh here's the theory behind the tipping point or here's the theory behind you know it takes 10 000 hours to become a master of something and then people are like but look at all this research that says it's much more complicated than that and then you keep researching and then maybe you try it yourself and you're like sure but it does take thousands of hours to be good at something like it it's it's you get back to the same place and i think people often hear this that sort of conclusion and they assume that you have disregarded all this information and it's like no that was integrated into the conclusion and of course there's edge cases and exceptions that prove the rule but generally this is a pretty good hypothesis or theory for going through the world and by saying no no no it's more complicated you're not actually proposing anything different or arguing against it you're just pointing out what what actually exists like my i have this book ego is the enemy and and people go but but sometimes ego is a good thing and you're like you think i didn't think about that once writing you know a 300 page book about this topic of course but generally as a rule this is something that i feel strongly enough about to have tattooed on my arm okay like i i i i did the work yeah yeah yeah that's fascinating yeah i feel like with the the bombing of japan this is probably very politically incorrect but i've the more i've read about world war ii the more i've read about like macarthur for instance and just how brutal a lot of these campaigns were i almost wonder if there's kind of a perverse racism at play where it's it's like nobody feels as strongly about the bombings of europe right because we have this sense of who the nazis were how real and threatening that was and i think there's also just like the the the image we have of the nazis is one thing and and then when we think about japan we have trouble getting ourself into the headspace of where the world was in regards to imperial japan in 1940 we have trouble conceiving of people being very scared and taking the threat of the japanese army as seriously as the people who actually fought it in those jungles came to take it do you know what i mean yeah i mean there well there's two there's there's a whole series of things that are playing into this one is that there was legitimately a very very wide swath of racism in our attitudes towards the japanese in during the second world war so did if you just read you know the letters and statements of military leaders during the second world war about the japanese they didn't think of them as human now simultaneously there is an observation that is accurate which was the fighting between the japanese and the americans was far more vicious than the kind of fighting that was taking place in europe that that you know if you just read about like the pacific theater and what was going on i mean insane casualties and a complete unwillingness on a part of the japanese to surrender even when all was lost i mean so that's the mindset heading into the 1945 is that these guys never give up and if you are fighting an enemy who has shown no sign that they will ever give up even in the face of overwhelming odds you have a very different problem on your hands right right i mean the germans they were factions of the german army that tried to remember that broke away from hitler and tried to make an independent approach to the allies 40 i don't know it was 42 or 43. you know um so it's like the german you know a whole bunch of germans wanted to give up you know years nobody on the japanese side was trying to break away and petition for peace in 1943. so you've got these two problems one is that we do have a genuinely racist attitude and two we have this this really difficult experience in fighting in that theater and those two things come to a head in 45 um and um again it's just a yeah that's part of that's sort of the backdrop for the story i was trying to tell in bomber mafia this leads to this just impossible set of decisions and what i'm saying is there's almost a soft bigotry today where we have the inability to conceive of japan as a dire uh existential threat that people legitimately felt it necessary to drop an atomic bomb it seems like we see ourselves as america now japan today and we go how could truman have been so so cruel how could he have been so awful because we we we can't conceive of what the dynamic was in 1945 yeah yeah yeah i think that's that i think that's true i mean this is why this is why we read history you know you um it's just insanely valuable to get a kind of course in um how differently people thought about whatever the subject of the history is um in the period you're under like you can't you cannot extrapolate back from 2021 to 1945. you just can't right there's i feel like there's also an analogy to the u.s civil war where sort of the the breakthrough of the u.s civil war is sherman realizing that the backbone of the southern army is the southern people that that there is this war machine that's being sustained by an entire culture that is in line with the aims of its army now there's certainly an element of that in germany but there's also a degree to which germany is sort of captured by the nazis which were always a very small minority and sort of they take hold of the levers of the state and use them for these horrible aims so the population is guilty in that they don't rise up against it but but it's not it's not quite the same as japan which seemed to a certain degree to be a culture in line with an entire maybe i'm generalizing a little bit but there there was a there was a need to take the war to the enemy in the pacific theater that for whatever reason was not quite as necessary in the european theater or am i incorrect uh well yeah i don't think you're incorrect at all i mean i think that you know the at the heart of the bomber mafia is the argument that logistically the war also you're trying to fight an enemy who is who is on an island thousands of miles away and like that's you know my story is all about these pilots and who are given this assignment to bring japan to its knees and it's an assignment very different from the assignment given the air force or the army um in europe it's you know you're just in it when you're bombing berlin and you're flying from airfields in southern uh england you're you know it's you crossing english channel and it's a couple of hours in you turn around and come home japan it's like we couldn't even touch it until we until we took guam um in uh the summer of 44 we couldn't even get there like it's just too far away i mean we forget now you can go wherever you want i mean now the b2 takes off from kansas and bombs kosovo and then comes home and the pilot has dinner right right that night yeah it was you couldn't do that back then so you have this in the whole um that whole part of the war is consumed with this logistical question of how do i get close enough to japan to do damage to their war making machinery right and it's just like getting i mean i just found getting into those questions and into that world to be so fascinating i mean it's just like the um the insane amount of effort that went into that war is just it's just mind-blowing is so is lemay a genius or is he a hammer and a nail as i i wrote about the cuban missile crisis a lot in my last book and it was fascinating you can listen to the they recorded a lot of the discussions between kennedy and the joint chiefs and you listen to lemay and you're like has this guy lost his mind like he thinks we're just going to bomb cuba off the map and russia's not going to respond and then you sort of go where was this guy's head you know 10 15 years earlier was he did he lose his mind did he did you learn the wrong lesson from japan or was he crazy the whole time and it just lined up with what the horrible job that needed to be done there's a one of the pilots one of the um uh air force historians i talked to uh talking about lemay said um he's like uh curtis lemay did not stick his landing meaning he the second half of his career is pretty bizarre and i think it's pretty clear that he goes i talk about in the book lemay goes rogue in the summer of 45 you know he has he starts out with this the firebombing of tokyo in in the in the spring and then he keeps going and he firebombs basically every big city in japan with the with the exception of of uh hiroshima and nagasaki of course which are being reserved for another kind of bombing and it's really i heard this fascinating paper by a historian who points out like he's not he's on his own he's not he's not carrying out orders from washington he just kind of goes rogue and just starts burning napalming everything he can um and he never something happens to him earlier in the war he is this brilliant tactician who is largely responsible for the effective bombing of europe and um in 43 and 44 by the time he gets to japan something happens and then his career after the war takes off and he becomes head of the strategic command and ultimately he becomes chief of staff of the air force and he i think you're right i think he's nuts by the end i really do i wonder if it goes back to the the distance thing you were talking about is it have you read the william manchester biography of of macarthur no i haven't it's incredible but he basically argues that never before in american history and maybe going back not until the romans do you get like an analogy where macarthur is basically a pro console of the empire he just rules the pacific theater because it's so far away like truman go has to go and visit him but it's like truman is visiting another head of state like macarthur just has his own universe over there because it's so inconceivably far away so far from our preconceptions of of you know our shared culture with europe for instance that that the guys just kind of were on their own and they did i don't want to say lose their minds but they just it it's like um you know they were so far upriver that they just they just went uh it went crazy so apocalypse now yeah yes yes um all right so so last last question for you this is going to touch the third rail i think because i love the new book uh but go back to what we were talking about with athletes i am fascinated by sports you have these athletes who are always who are willing to do anything that will give them the slightest edge they'll put if they can get away with it they'll put the most obscene things in their body you know they'll do anything for an edge and then also they're always into like nonsense you know like whether it's those those cups or you know they'll do the most experimental treatments you can imagine even if the results are not there how does one explain vaccine hesitancy in professional sports i think it's it's the if we can unlock this it might help explain vaccine hesitancy in the rest of the world well so are you talking about john rom i'm talking about john rom uh cole beasley who who uh who plays for the bills just came out with a big thing he was like you know the odds of me getting covered are lower than the odds of me making the nfl i'm gonna you know i'm just gonna continue my street there's a bunch of players who are opposed either to vaccines or or protocols only like uh two-thirds of of um major league baseball is at 85 percent uh you know vaccinated so so what's interesting for sports is not just the individual advantage like for john ron like he loses two million dollars but like a team that's fully vaccinated can relax protocols and then function more effectively as a team they can have meetings together they can travel together they can go out and tap you know there's so many incentives lining up to get athletes to vaccinate aside from your sort of basic civic duty as a human being i would argue and yet it's it's it's perhaps less widespread in sports than other other domains well you're you're going up against the um the you're dealing with young men in the almost entirely here who are have been raised to feel physically not just superior to all those around them but also invulnerable sure if you're playing football and you're worried about the riskiness of what you're doing you can't play football right so i don't you know it's a difficult thing for them to grapple with an unseen threat particularly when they're you know their whole identity is wrapped around their their physical prowess john rahm is a harder one for me to understand because it's like you knew the rules like yeah dude i mean he even could have run out and gotten vaccinated after he was up by three shots after the first day like you know it doesn't really make a lot i agree with you it makes no sense whatsoever but um there is this kind of macho thing too that like you know effort man i can deal with this um i'm you know i'm a tough guy i'll be fine and by the way you know they probably will be fine probably will be offended only people i worry about football i mean i do think that lineman and football are precisely the kind of people who are very vulnerable to sure sure um if i'm a big right tackle and i'm not vaccinated man am i taking a risk and then i and also what also adding to your point um the you look at the nba players who had covet like jason tatum was on the sideline taking oxygen like it seemed like months after he had covered i mean you have to look around you see like jason tatum is as you know spectacular and and um an athlete as exists in the world i mean if you talk about an invulnerable perfect physical specimen that's jason tatum and that guy was laid low by covid like so i don't understand why they wouldn't look at tatum and just say oh okay i thought i was thought i was going to be fine but man like i don't want to i don't want that to happen to me this i mean maybe maybe if tatum had stood up and been really really really vocal about it and said to all of his fellow basketball players and fellow athletes guys this is crazy don't go don't do this um maybe that would have made a difference but there is also a level of wimpiness here that i don't understand i everyone i know in the business world has had this problem that some portion of uh their employees haven't gotten vaccinated and they've all just laid down the law they just said right sorry you have to get it and it works people just go right this i don't understand why you know why and the nba just doesn't give a deadline and say you're vaccinated by this deadline or you you're you know that's it like it it's also kind of revealed our insane attitude towards illness generally i i was talking to someone uh with the yankees who you know they were talking about the cove the vaccine breakthrough cases that they had there and so obviously most of the players had been vaccinated they reached the level but he was like what happened is a coach came in who thought he just had the flu or a cold right and and so obviously that's insane to do in the middle of the pandemic but it it's it's interesting to me that a guy who works for a team that has you know elite racehorses essentially like elite you know machines that have to be taken care of was fine just introducing germs that he knew he was carrying into this small space like our attitude of like i i know you travel a lot and stuff where you're just like oh yeah i'm sick several days a year this is just a normal thing that we do and go out in the world i think the pandemic has kind of reminded us like oh hey that's like a really selfish and stupid and self-defeating thing to do that we just go around getting each other sick instead of like taking a day off yeah maybe we have massively undersold this vaccine that's also part of the problem it's magic it's a akin to the moon landing it's it's unbelievable i mean we've just witnessed one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of our lifetime i mean this is i mean it's insane i don't think that story should have been told aggressively instead we were telling all of these kind of like weird like i don't know just like i don't know why we we suddenly got shy about tooting our own horn here like this was this was a chance to stand up and say for the last two generations in america we have invested billions of dollars into building the greatest scientific institution infrastructure institutional infrastructure in the history of mankind guess what it just paid off yes right and it was with these guys in the main i mean there are some obviously some of these people are are not from america but you know there's a in all of these mrna stuff it you know nih and american schools are all complicit you know this is your tax dollars educated these people right this is why we have government like we could have stood up and said guys i know you complain about your paying taxes you complain about government but it dude look just what happened you produced a miracle miracle you produced it you paid for it right and we promised you when you did that that one day it would paid off and guess what it just paid off right why did no one make that argument well and i would also argue is uh after i do this i'm going i volunteer at this vaccine clinic in in the town that i live in like logistically also a miracle like we've given out 160 70 million shots to 300 million people a lot of whom were you know located in extremely rural or you know difficult to reach areas and it wasn't the federal government that did it necessarily it was this massive distributed you know uh interconnected network of giving a you know they're they're injecting a shot that has to be kept at an insane temperature and done just the right way and that how few side effects there have been and how rarely it's gone wrong like also logistically like we did an incredibly hard thing to together yeah yeah no it's been i'm i think we'll you know i think we're gonna get there um i also think that um uh when we come out with patches i mean a lot of problems a lot of people are scared of needles and just don't want to admit it yes yes it's a huge part of this when we start you know these transdermal patches are actually a more effective way of delivering the vaccine and if i just told you can you slap on this patch for a day i feel like we could get up to you know we could that would make a big big difference i was it was i started asking my friends about this um uh you know all people who ended up getting vaccinated and the number of them who said i have a pathological fear of needles it was really hard for me it was it surprised me it's not a trivial thing i think that's why we give them to kids because they don't have a choice so you get it done early and then you can't overthink it yeah yeah to to go back to to your point about there's a wimpyness where we can't just mandate it when you look at like how they solve tough problems in the second world war for instance i struggled to think that they'd be like hey this vaccine is voluntary let's just uh see if like don't you think logistically we would have figured out a way to you know think about how we we um we did mass polio vaccinations in the 60s they the the you know a group of nurses would show up at your school set up shop in the auditorium and they would march every single kid in line through and you would get your shot like there's no kind of consulting with parents and getting to sign forms and taking notes and like considering objections you lined up you got shot and then we got rid of one of the scariest you know uh diseases of that era that's you know for better or worse we're much more cautious these days about it but i just wonder whether the pendulum is swung too far and we just we're overthinking this just just like just go to schools and just do every kid in the afternoon and then go to the next school and do every kid the next morning i mean that's that is the way to do it well it's it's like even voluntary in the military right now and the military only has like a 50 vaccination rate it's it's like it's crazy to me that the one place where the government does have essentially complete control over people it's it's wavering it's just it's a strange it means something i don't know exactly what it means it could mean a good thing but seems like it's probably a bad thing yeah yeah yeah it's troubling well i love the new book it's uh it's amazing i love all the books uh one other complaint i feel like it's unfair both you and david mccullough to be both great writers and then also to have very interesting voices uh it's a it's a it's an unfair it's an unfair advantage uh that uh i very much enjoy listening to revisionist history um ryan when i'm next um in austin we should go for a run although i suspect you're much faster than me i i don't think that that's true uh i think your mile time recently was my mile time in high school so uh that that's pretty impressive but i would love to i would love to run with you or or in new york or if we're both in dc let's run with uh with david epstein yes that'd be really fun have you run with david uh have you run with rich roll no i haven't he's but he's i mean he's serious he's very serious but but uh yeah i would love to i mean i think this kind of the great thing about strava now is that sometimes when i travel i'll post a run and then locals will see it and i was in phoenix and i posted a run videos all these guys like come and join a sunday morning and i joined it was like it was so much fun because you know they knew you know this insane route through the foothills of phoenix passed all these incredible you know houses and down this wonderful trail and it was just like i was like oh this is like this is actually what the internet's for we think the internet is for you know x y and z no it's just not it's what the unit is for is finding people to go for a run on a sunday morning in a city you don't know that's the best part the only downside is you are like telling people exactly where you live because it's like oh conveniently malcolm seems to be leaving and coming back i don't exactly i don't i don't post those runs i don't know okay you so you only do because i only do it when i'm traveling for the same reason i just don't do it for my from my i rarely run through my hands because i have to go so right you know the general area but you you can't figure out where i live for my strava that did you see that study where they found that they were accidentally like revealing the locations of secret military and cia bases through stravas i love that somewhere i know strawberry strawberry is just the best it it totally it totally is uh well malcolm thank you very much can't wait to meet you someday and uh i appreciate all the books good see ya you

Channel: Daily Stoic

Views: 76,983

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, einzelgänger, massimo pigliucci, einzelganger stoicism, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: KPZt819cOSU

Length: 73min 33sec (4413 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021