Malcolm Gladwell with Robert Krulwich: Science of Success

we would like to remind you that the taking the photograph and the uses recording equipment our certificate in the concert hall in accordance New York City law please good evening and welcome first on behalf of the 92nd Street Y I want to wish you all a very happy and healthy New Year my name is Susan Engle and I have the privilege of being the director of the lecture series here at the 92nd Street Y before beginning tonight I want to let you know about some upcoming programs of interest tomorrow night Madeleine Albright talks to Dan Rather about foreign policy imperatives for the new administration then on January 27th don't miss former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin discussing the economy and then on January 29th there will be a film screening of in search of memory which will be is a documentary based on Nobel laureates Eric handles memoir of that name and following the screening dr. candle and Oliver Sacks will be in conversation as you can see tonight we have a full house so I encourage you to buy your tickets in advance for all these lectures by going to our website ww-why into y org also the ushers have given out cards requesting your email and please hand them to the ushers on your way out a winner will be chosen from these cards tonight for a signed Malcolm Gladwell book and I will announce the winner at the end of the program we encourage you to give us your email so that you can be the first to receive notice of newly added lectures and programs now the format tonight is a discussion followed by your questions and then there will be a book signing in the adjacent art gallery I'm now delighted to introduce our moderator and guest moderator Robert Krulwich is co-host of NPR's Radiolab he is also the correspondent of NPR's science unit and he is ABC news special correspondent he has won numerous awards including two Emmys a George Polk award a DuPont award and the National Cancer Institute's extraordinary communicators award our guest Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has achieved international acclaim with his number one international bestsellers the tipping point and blink and has now ridden outliers the story of success ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to this stage Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Krulwich okay just pull it to your mouth there who are the Medicine Hat Tigers and who are the Vancouver Giants they are there to Canadian junior hockey teams chosen yes choose him chosen at random who to illustrate a point in my book which is this weird fact wait wait wait oh okay flip my thing on how embarrassing there's a musical one embarrassing steve Silverman from San Francisco California I'm so sorry and I was like I can't get it off is the terrible it's one of these fancy news which makes like oh my gosh come on you were sick no don't see you should I am okay show me just to talk for a while and you know I thought the bag I should just hold it then it could be your problem you were saying let me I have a thing I've been wanting to do when I knew I was gonna do this I do it okay so we're in Vancouver it's May 2007 or at the Memorial Cup hockey championship in the crowd is the premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell mr Hockey himself Gordie Howe on page 23 of your book you do a play-by-play in which you describe actually don't mention the athletes my name but instead you you report on the first goal in the game first score I want to read what you wrote March 11 starts around one side of the Tigers net leaving the puck for his teammate January 4th he passes it to January 22 flips it back to March 12th who shoots point-blank at the Tigers goalie April 27th April 27th blocks the shot rebounded by Vancouver's March 6 e shoots Medicine Hat defenseman February 9th and February 14th dive to block the puck January 10th looks on helplessly March 6 scores question is why did you choose this peculiar kind of nomenclature because I wanted to make this point that all an extraordinary of hockey players and are born in the first three or four months of the year and so I I randomly got the videotape of the championship game in the Canadian Junior Hockey Association between those two teams and just substituted in the players birthdays for their names to make to kind of illustrate this extraordinary fact that they're all born in January February March 17 of the 25 players on the medicine head team were born in those first two yeah what because the eligibility cutoff date for 4h class hockey in Canada in the world is January 1st and we start recruiting all-star squads in hockey in Canada when people kids are 9 and 10 years old so you go and you look at a group of 9 year old boys playing hockey and you say those four are the best they're going to be on my all-star team but of course when you're 9 years old the best one is the oldest one right so all you do is you choose the kids who are born closest to the cutoff date and then you give them special coaching and put them on all-star squads until 9 and extra games and extra practice until 8 and 9 years later they really are the best so it's this self-fulfilling prophecy right and I think that's a it's a it's a it would be of little interest if it was just about hockey because obviously not everyone if you're not Canadian you don't share the same but um I think if this wonderful metaphor for the way success works in general that we don't realize it but the kind of rules that we set and the opportunities that we provide have this extraordinarily biasing effect on who succeeds and who doesn't is is it true of for example of non school American baseball the same kind of because it's yeah so you can go through almost all sports and what has to happen for a sport to have these age bias effects is they have to identify so-called gifted players at a very young age and give them preferential treatment to separate them from everyone else put them in a special street and give them access to special opportunities and whenever you do that you will have you will bias your your system towards those born closest to the cutoff date now what is of course interesting about that description of when do you get an age bias in sports is it is the precisely the same mechanism that we use to that we use in public schools right we identified the so called gifted at a very young age 9 and 10 years old pull them out and give them access to preferential opportunities and treatment right I mean so I mean it's a very very short step in other words from looking at this weird fact that all hockey players are born in three months of the year to questioning about whether the kind of extraordinary lavish educational infrastructure that we put in place to reward the gifted isn't subject to the same biases so in both cases we may not be rewarding the gifted at all we may just be rewarding the oldest who look gifted at the beginning of the year I mean I become this huge foe of gifted I'm sure I'm sure I've talked about this before by the way I can never remember what I've talked about but it's ridiculous why do you decide so a gifted program says that we identify a child and call that child gifted because of their performance at the age of whatever 9 or 10 or 11 years old why do we care particularly how well a child performs at nine or ten or eleven years old they're 9 or 10 or 11 there are good 25 years for making any kind of substantial contribution to the world why don't we wait what's the hurry and also how do you know so like what you know so it's one child learns to read it for one child learns to read it two and a half right so what why does it matter are the things that are being read between two and a half and four of such incalculable no it's just a normal parents response to oh if he's reading it two and a half think of the things he'll do and it's just an extrapolation but it's like hair reading reading once you can read we were done I mean it's not like there's a cousin in scale and that so-and-so reads better and better and better and I can say we can say today of Gladwell that he reads so much better than crow which and that this is like what separates the two of us it's reading I mean like well but now the effect for example on because the Czech hockey team was also you know very lopsided ly January February March to a crazy degree in the championship I just from from the athletes point of view that it feels that the lesson here is that success at least as as described by coaches is a kind of con game it's rigged and you use the phrase the Matthew effect what is that Matthew effect is um a phrase coined by Robert K Merton the great genius sociologist of Columbia who by the way he only died about maybe ten years ago if that and if you ever want to read absolutely beautifully written academic work go back and read the works of Robert K Merton he's just a you know my heroes I never actually met him sadly um his son of course is the guy who wins the Nobel and goes on to be a founding partner of long-term capital no I don't know is that an example of the Apple falling close to the tree or five you have never been able to figure that one out it's like anyway he's a guy who says in the verse in Matthew which says that to him who has much more will be given and he uses this to describe the Matthew effect which is this notion that a small initial advantage difference in a small initial difference in the performance of any two people will inevitably grow because the person who's a little bit ahead will get so many more advantages that they will end up being far ahead so a good example there's all kinds of great Matthew effects there's a good example of a Matthew effect is the richer you get in America the lower your taxes are right effectively right the more things we do to help you hold on to your money so that if you if I'm a little bit richer than you the government at least the last one we had is going to be so much nicer to me than you that I'm going to end up even richer or this tons of math effects in learning we know that teachers much prefer teaching soup their best students right so they are pay more attention to their best students and give they're better students a better learning environment and as a result those best students get even better so the initial gap becomes larger so tons of these and this hockey thing is a beautiful example of a matthew effect what though this is a neat one because there is probably a way out of this have you thought about I mean essentially what's going on here is that if the January February and March athletes get all those rewards on their matthew effect that means if you're born in July in Canada I guess you just are you just can check it at checkout yeah December if you're born in and by the way the eligibility cutoff date for soccer is exactly the same so you have the exact same effect in soccer so if you're born if you're a young boy born in October November or December who has designs on being a professional soccer or hockey player the deck is stacked against you there's not much you can do you you um you should probably give up but now but there's a probably a way to fix this no is there some way that Riggs is a very easy way to fix it which is just to have two or three parallel hockey leagues and soccer leagues for in the age class realm you have one one league for the kids January to April 1 for May September and one for October December and by the way we see exactly the same effects in school systems right the kid the the relatively youngest kids in the class underperform the relatively oldest kids and that under performance lasts into the college years the kid born the young kid born the last you know three months of the youngest three months of their age cohort in school or something like I forget the exact number nine or ten percent less likely to go to college than those born in the are the three oldest months and we can fix it really easily you've got three classes in an elementary school right typical elementary schools go divide them up by birthday right well doesn't that mean though that you have to get you added like a half dozen soccer moms to work out the logistical problems because you've now got four leagues we used to have one and someone has to be in the Seward Park on Mondays and Wednesdays but who's gonna be on sweep rock on Thursdays and prizes that kind so you would just for the sake of efficiency you know I wasn't saying no I know what I'm saying no but you're this is exactly I brought this up with I had a conversation with this hockey guy in Canada big deal hockey mocker I don't know whether they call them mockers you can go on matheus here but absolutely are quite sure as a matter of fact the phrase hockey marker those two words have never before appeared together but yeah you have to work on your clip a little bit all right no no well I'm not Jewish sorry I know this advant I well how do I say it marker marker marker for hockey as well only during Hanukkah actually yeah so anyway so this mother I'm talking to him about hockey hockey and she says and I say to him look you're Canada you want to be the best hockey country in the world why don't you have the three parallel leagues how hard is that every single town in Canada has like 25 different hockey teams just divide them up how hard is this he's like oh it's too difficult let me give you a harder one because because just another success puzzle from the book this off to set up for you it's it's about the Janklow family yeah so there's too dang close we're gonna talk about Maurice and Mort but since those are names or so so the quote one daddy Janklow and one sunny agent yeah so daddy goes to Brooklyn Law School class of 1919 sets up a practice in Brooklyn elegant fellow dresses in a Hamburg Bruce brothers clothes drives a big car mr. Queens marries the right girl works hard hard hard hard sets of a business goes nowhere yeah the Sun baby Jenko 130 years later gets a law degree marries nicely - works hard to put together a cable franchise the Cox broadcasting makes a fortune creates a literary agency Jenko and Nesbitt signs you now he lives on Park Avenue he has an end zone key for painting at his own airplane so a question is is the son succeeds the father fails why is this a quote that talent or that part of book I'm really interested in generational effects so there's all these cool games you can play with people's birthdays so when you look for example at the list of the 75 richest people of all time something like 22% of them this is all time so Cleopatra to the present day i-22 who's counting by the way that would include know some people these lists always come from Forbes magazine I've always been fascinated by somewhere in Forbes magazine there's been people dreaming up like they're trying to come up with the net worth of Cleopatra how do you mean do they have access to some kind of database do they call it like anyway and then the less I'm gonna take it for granted that they can figure out the net worth of Cleopatra and you know King Alfred or you know all has everything so they do these calculations and it turns out that 22 percent of the 75 richest people of all time are white American males born between 1830 and 1839 22 percent are born in the same nine-year stretch clearly to be rich is about having a great idea having the Oh blah blah it's also about being born at the right time right that's the greatest time in human history to be born if you want to become super super wealthy but in fact even more specifically we can say the single greatest year in human history to be born if you want to be rich is 1835 and that's Andrew Carnegie's birthday by the way second richest man of all time and that's because those people came of age during the American post-civil war industrial revolution when there was a fortune to be made around every corner well the Gen close same deal the worst year to be born in the 20th century is you can all kind of sociologists figure these things out it's between nineteen hundred and nineteen or maybe 1900 1910 that decade because you get out of college and just as you're getting going the depression hits yeah you have nine years of depression and just as you're emerging out the depression trying to make a go of it if you're shipped off to war for six years right and so by the time you come back I want to start your business you're in your late 40s right this is really really hard for where is the best year to be born in the 20th century if you live in grow up in New York City actually I think anywhere but particularly New York City is 1935 because because it's perfect because you it's the smallest birth year of the 20th century you always want to be part of a really small birth cohort because no one's competing with you right think about it so the difference between being a part of the smallest both guard and the largest one the differences between the smallest is enormous it's like per-capita twice as many babies are born in you know 1920 is 1935 so if you're in 1935 there's this huge generation before you so what do they do for that generation they build big huge shiny schools and hire tons of teachers right then there's no more kids so you sail in and all of a sudden you're older you know brother had 35 kids in this class you have 18 your older brother competed against a zillion people to get into City College you competed against no one you wanted to join the debate team no one went out for the debate team you were captain of a team like I always you know it's funny you always talk to people in this boring age small cohorts and they always think you're talking to some guy accomplished old guy grow up in the Bronx white hair and he'll tell you about his extraordinary has to experiencing so you know I always captain of the basketball team and you look at this guy he's five foot two and you say to yourself this is a man who belong to a small generation right nobody was going out for basketball like imagine the you know the Bronx basketball championships of what would that be 1946 these midgets running I mean like slowly so these guys they haven't made in the shade and then they come into the workforce no they go to law Harvard Law School of course they go to Harvard Law School right no one's applying to Harvard Law School and they get out in the workforce do they get a job of course they do everyone's desperate for work because there's no one out there and then what's behind them the biggest generation of 20th century so they sail into positions of authority and they have in front of them this enormous market to serve right it's just genius you can even go more specifically there's this great thing that happens great in quotation marks in New York City in the depression which is that a whole bunch of very very very able people can't get jobs in the private sector there are no jobs in private sectors so what do they do they become teachers right and you talk to this generation born in 35 about their high school experience and I lost count and the number of people of that generation who went to public schools in New York who told me for example that their math teacher had a PhD in math how many math PhDs are there right now in the near public school system I mean not a lot right because you can do so many things with the math PhD today you can get a job could get a job on Wall Street for example back then you couldn't do anything right except get that was the best job you had and so here's a generation who not only could they be kept on the basketball team but their teachers were these extraordinary people who you know were by virtue of a lack of opportunity ended up in the public school system so is that the difference then between Janklow dan and Jenko son that is just the explanation I mean I never met Janko I mean you could only go so far with this but yeah it helps you to sort of set the stage to understand if you you've got these two very capable people one of whom achieved extraordinary success and one didn't and you I you know I think you have to go beyond the individual to make sense of them there is also among your you you you get fascinated by Jewish lawyers in New York so Joe Flom and Marty Lipton who are among the most famous and richest and most successful who are on the of this cohort the you know they arrive and they get the extra benefit of anti-semitism of all things ya know it's this really fascinating thing that they we forget about this it always it always amazes me this is this sort of parenthetical fact it amazes me how short our memories are so you go when you talk to a Jewish lawyer in New York in his and I say his because they're almost all men in his 70s and he will remind you that when he came out of Law School in the late fifties in their late 40s or early 50s that if he got a job at all at the big downtown the major of serious downtown law firms if he got a job at all they would be very clear to him that he would ever make partner no way a Jew a Jewish guy could not make partner at yeah at Cravath or Sullivan and Cromwell in the 40s and 50s not gonna happen this is in this is this is 4050 years ago I mean it's a two generations it was extraordinary how kind of collapsed so as a result what happened those guys they went they couldn't go and work for a crevasse so they went and they set up shop on their own right and this is what people like Joe Flom did so Skadden Arps is in the beginning this little tiny law firm of founded by guys who couldn't get jobs at Cravath and Sullivan a Croma and who did and what did they what kind of law did they do well they did the law that crevasse and Sullivan Cromwell didn't want to do right they took the scraps now what was the scraps in 1950 the scraps was litigation bankruptcy and takeover law which with a which would that was dirty law right no one none of the pie watts big eyes downtown one detection they were gonna take over a company you're kidding me put one of their pals from you know choked out of work I mean this wasn't gonna happen so know why I picked on Choate I mean at that moment you have the full range but Joe I love it comes off the tail yeah so you're not gonna put them out of you know so you don't do that right so these guys can't get jobs the big firms start their own little firms and they do litigation bankruptcy and take over for 20 years when it's this forgotten corner of the law and then the seventies roll around and all of a sudden that's what corporate law becomes and they're the experts they've been doing it so this thing which was at the time the worst thing that could have happened to them right the guy downtown looks at this wonderful story I found of when that the famous that of course forgot his name the famous legal scholar Jewish guy from the Brooklyn at this point went to law school he goes for his interview it was preserved that he's in new public library they had these archives the American Jewish Committee did all of these oral histories back in the 70s of a whole series of people basically immigrants kids situation with those kids just sat down with them and had them talk for the fascinating was tons of them anyway so I went I found one from this guy he just to said he describes this is in the 70s he describes coming down from Law School to Wall Street and going for his job interview at one of these / Posterous for Friedman no not Friedman okay it'll come to me he goes for it and the guy looks at him and he says at the end of the interview he says you know I know you're very very smart but I hope you understand that we have no place at our firm for someone of your antecedents meaning you can't have you can't be Jewish and had that accident work here simple as that and mind you this guy was the goes on to become the greatest constitutional legal scholar of his generation right he's not like some bum I mean he's yeah they don't wanna so the lesson here is like I don't quite know if we're talking here about being exceptional how should you think about this it you know success is a con game if you're an athlete this time there's no way out of this you you can't change your birth date or or choose it you can't choose your parents you can't choose your cultural inheritance you can't know in advance when the next bloom will be or when the next bus will be so you can't fix your problems so it seems that this is the part of the book where you essentially say well for a lot of people this is just you know this is like you the fault lies not in yourselves but in our starts of Julius Caesar kind of thing is that it for a lot of people excellences just is just something that you know the second half the book is supposed to then turn around and say okay there's a whole series of things that we can't do anything about what can we do something about I'll get to that so that's but I by design the first half of the book is supposed to be a downer and it's supposed to be a downer because I'm just sick of all of this kind of I'm sick of very successful people engaging in this kind of triumphal narcissism about their own greatness and how they did it all themselves you know the if I have to there's that little moment my book the fit my absolute favorite thing in the whole book is that quote from Jeb Bush son of a president brother of a president grandson of a u.s. senator you know when he says he when he is - when he's running for governor of Florida and he describes himself with a straight face as a self-made man at that point you know I practically burned my green card and went back to Canada you know it's like well maybe I just I mean you could argue with the premise a little bit that you know you have the Pritzker's in Chicago and you have Larry Wien in New York these are very Jewish leaders who grew up in the wrong time and still came out okay but I'm just thinking maybe thinking beyond time II I'm just thinking about you like you were a really good runner when you were kid in Canada how good were you you like ranked I was briefly and briefly is the operative word I briefly for about eight months held a Canadian record actually in the 1500 meters for 13 year olds which is I mean you know blown up roughly once y'all come on he was 13 somebody once described who's the guy who wrote the other America of Michael Harrington my version I remember once as a kid I was a big fan of looking at Buckley somebody once wrote a calm just reacting to the description of Michael Harrington as the greatest living American socialist which Buckley said was a distinction on the order of celebrating the tallest building in Wichita Kansas so holding the Canadian 1,500 meter 13-year old record is a distinction on the order of tallest building which can tell me what is your birth date you're born win well this see I know you were getting it come here so how'd you know I was coming here I don't know I don't think about this well we talked about the running in some other eye well I ran age class track in Canada and the cutoff date for age class track is September 1st again for eligibility in each year right what is my birthday September 3rd so was it in retrospect am i surprised I was the best no I was like within two days of the Ottoman a I was racing against kids who were born you know nine and ten months so you could have spooled together from that little you know that just advantage of being that on September 6 third you could have just you could have gone in you could have kept going but in your case at some point you just bowed out do you remember the moment I do I I wrote about at The New Yorker years ago it was I was at the Canadian Championships and I I went for a run with a guy named Dave Reed one of the greatest Canadian runners of his generation and we're running through Newfoundland in st. John's Newfoundland and we come to that big hill that Marconi sent the signal from signal hill in st. John yeah inside John which goes like this it's the steepest thing you can imagine and Dave Reid turns to me and says let's run it up this hill backwards and I said are you crazy and as I ran home he ran up the hill backwards and as I ran home I was like you know what I'm not gonna make it I I don't I don't have it like there's some what you know what you might have as you you had the muscles you just didn't have the what I understand it was in my kind of you know dim-witted fifteen-year-old way I understood that to be a great runner you have to be willing to run up hills backwards and not only that you have to think that's fun and I did not think it was fun and I'd the writing's on the wall you can't be fifteen and be half-hearted about running I mean you know can you I mean Michael Phelps never had that moment right at no point in that man's life has he ever been half-hearted about swimming well this is a big theme in the book the importance of persistence of sweat of persevering some people to so I'm gonna give you a list Bill Gates Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Tiger Woods yo-yo ma Michael Phelps John von Neumann the mathematician Meryl Streep Stephen Hawking and the Beatles all exceptional people by almost any definition you look at gates top of my list here and you think well how exceptional is this and what's your view what's your thinking about gates why you have a happy accident or actually eleven happy accidents but yeah he's the luckiest guy in the world and he's the first to tell you that he goes to he shows up for eighth grade in nineteen sixty eight or nine at Lakeside Academy and for reasons no one can remember somebody on the parents committee bought a computer for the kids and a little teletype hooked into the main mainframe and Denton's yellow and Gates has essentially now what that allows you is to do real time programming everyone everyone's programming with cards back then right which is incredibly laborious time-consuming and you don't really learn at a program because it just takes too long he can do real-time programming the way we program now on this little teletype and he does that starting in 1968 basically for his entire teenage life you mean that almost literally yeah you tell he told me this one story about after that they quickly of course computer times hugely expensive and they run through the you know have bake sales they run through the cash and he then goes to these whole series of things of finding other computers and at one point Paul Allen his that's pain at this school discovers that there's a mainframe that's free at the University of Washington Medical Center between it's free between 2:00 and 6:00 in the morning on weeknights and he's now 15 years old and it so he sets his alarm for 1:30 in the morning and he crawls out the window right because no one's parents know walks like 2 miles like in the rain right inevitably this is his day Reid running up the hill back yeah yeah - at 2:00 in the morning walks two mouths to the earth Steve Washington programs from 2:00 till 6:00 walks home and goes back to bed and his mom upon discovering this years later says I was wondering why it was so hard to get bill up in the morning but that's like yeah exactly that's his Dave Reid moment so the question is he's clearly a brilliant guy no one's taking that away from him but he has this other thing which he but late what's really remarkable about that but that story to me is when he does that he's 15 so he's a teenage boy and if anyone all of us here know about teenage boys right well what did Tina do I wanted to what does a teenage boy want to do well what is one of the things that teenage boy wants to do sleep right there is a kid here's a teenage boy who was willing to surrender his sleep you know five nights a week to program from to 6:00 in the morning that is what's special about Bill Gates and it accumulates right it gets it's out it's three hours or four hours a day and then five hours a day whenever we can make it six hours a day it's for years and years and years now until we clocks in a lot of hours yeah and Mozart I guess played the piano for long hours and Tiger Woods just these people are all examples of what's called the 10,000 hour rule which is this notion that it's kind of brilliant kind of Erickson a psychologist has kind of formulated this principle that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex discipline it seems almost without exception that in order to be good you must practice at least 10,000 hours and we can't find exceptions to this rule what sort of surprised me have you put the Beatles on this list why are the Beatles because they go to Homburg before they come to America as teenagers they go to Hamburg and play there the house band in the strip club and they play eight-hour sets seven days a week four months at a stretch I mean it's incredible I mean you know parenthetically one cannot imagine a more dismal experience than playing first of all playing in a strip club secondly playing the strip club in Hamburg and thirdly playing in a strip club in Hamburg in the 50s I mean can you imagine it's just again so they learned in those hours and hours and hours of playing every night they learned just to play and play and play and play whatever and somehow because I mean there's in the book you're arguing I think that I mean you could say by the way that the Rolling Stones I don't think went to Hamburg and there probably were other Liverpool bands that did go to Hamburg and played in the same strip clubs and you know not know their names sorry it's a is it necessary not sufficient or sufficient that I sort of forget which way it goes but whatever way it goes it's yeah is that okay but now so what we got here then is you have this talent plus the persistence versus this Matthew effect that is with the Matthew effect you start over these little accidental differences and then coaches and situations magnify them so they get bigger but with persistence what seems to be happening here is the accidental differences that that may have given you advantages get narrowed when you add the practice add the practice add the practice so this is a very unblinking kind of thing if you're making a in blink you were interested in quickie kind of kind of things and in this one it's sort of sweaty and persistent and and give it one thing because Howard Gardner has gotten has come out it come down on you for this he says okay Mozart at 13 you know copying other people's work practice practice practice practice Mozart 17 better Mozart 23 24 oh my god Yeah right so Lennon and McCartney at 15 16 17 but when they make their jumps they make leaps of a genius nature leaves that are not available to other people Isaac Newton goes home for vacation thinks of Aloha Magana measures he invents calculus because he needed a way to measure so the you are being accused of being a genius denier yes are you a genius denier or are you simply a genius dislike er well so there's clearly this thing called talent right and it's this is this it's that it's the it's the magic dust right they get sprinkled on to persistence it turns a lot of hard work into something great and the question is how large a role does it play and what does it consist of so my first point is that I don't I think that intuitively we grant talent far too great a place in the success story so I think that it matters less than we think and secondly a lot of what we call talent I think is is is the desire to persist desire to it's that you love something so much you want to do a lot of it I think that's an awful lot of what talent is I mean they said you know P several years ago for The New Yorker right remember writing about Wayne Gretzky and reading a biography of Wayne Gretzky and he's a he's a great hockey player great hockey player greatest hockey player of all time as a kid but he's two years old his parents would sit up in front of the television he would watch hockey games on Saturday nights and when the game ended he would burst into tears right and it was this little glimpse into his future greatness because here he was at two and he loved this thing he was he couldn't play hockey's to me he could barely walk but he already has understood he loves this thing so much that for it to end is an unconscionable burden right and it just it's like the world is ending and he's he's disconsolate so what is Wayne Gretzky's talent well part of it is his extraordinary you know vision his coordination his whatever is this but a lot of it is this guy loves this game so much that he would do nothing but do it and think about it and engage it and do all those things No is it is this magic dust called talent is that all it is maybe I don't think but is that I don't think that's a that's um denying or hating genius though I think that that definition of genius is far more appealing to me then the notion that it's this it's simply some sky high IQ or some this is the genius which just won't quit and you can't even it won't quit you sort of like break but newly about the two guys on the mountain I mean I'm recasting it sort of like babies rip back break back you know so it is the love of hockey yeah that will not speak its name but they're not to take this thing yes I suppose that's a not a maybe but one of the things that I detect is that it's not that you don't like geniuses is that maybe you don't think we need them that maybe you're rushing why are people so hostile to the notion that what genius is is it an extraordinary love for a particular thing why is the love so we we're we're you know we hear the ability definition of genius the rare ability definition and we think oh that's so plausible totally that's what it is but then we hear the the extraordinary love definition of genius and we say he's a genius denier why why is why are we so hostile to the notion that what separates the genius and the rest of us is the genius loves what he or she does more than we do but we have no problem at all that what separates the genius is that they have some you know so because it misses the point I mean there are like Paul McCartney you host of the notion of love Robert do you know I just want to make an obvious point here that you know Harry Smith no that's a real pretty hairy ex could love writing songs but Paul McCartney the way you say love though is so really have you have you thought about okay you come out to other different your hairy ex could love yeah that's better writing songs I hadn't loves writing songs so much that he can't stop but for lunch and dinner and sometimes not even those but next door is is Richard Rogers little retreat Ricky Rogers he loves writing songs too but for some reason Harry writes and loves writing and Ricky writes and loves writing and Harry Wright's unmemorable song called the babbling book those two and flow and Richard Wright's jaren chanted evening well no so you're there's a difference there no but hold on hold on the love doesn't get you no no the love but the love does so think about this love is not the complete explanation love is the way in because Wayne Gretzky loves hockey so much he thinks about all the time and does more than that he engages the sport in a way that no one else had ever engaged it so this is wonderful that remember in when I was running on that ski there's this thing that he famously did once where he scored a goal from behind the net and he flips the puck over the net like and it kind of does a little thing and goes in and the reason no one had ever done that before was not just that no one could do it what team could do it he did never occurred to anyone else being right no one had engaged the sport on that level so why is Gretzky engaging in that way what is he thinking about it that deeply and creatively because he can't get hockey out of his head right so it's not just when we say that he loves the game we don't mean that he's a great hockey fan what we mean is he loves it in a deep and passionate and um and extraordinary way and that permits him to to explore that thing in a way that no one else explored it Bobby Fischer love chess not in the way the you know my brother loved chess and my brother loved chess but in a way that he couldn't get chess out of his head he was infatuated with chess right and that's what leads Bobby Fischer to be Bobby Fischer but I don't see how you get to a level of engagement without love right I you can't have an abstract in it when I you know if you look at you talked to someone who is really really really good at what you at what they do and you must do this all the time right whenever I encounter someone like that I cannot get past that sense they give off that they have they have they have found their calling that they are in actively in love in almost on a romantic way with this thing that they do know right absent that you can't be a genius I'm sorry Kim are you convinced yet I I am still holding out for some shitty abstract you know Nietzsche and notion of no I'm gonna pull back for a minute here and try another tack all together so he talked about timing talked about practice practice practice now I'd like to talk about class intro and so who is Chris laingen Chris laingen is um the guy with the highest IQ in maybe the world probably America IQ off the charts well you get hits so high you know the IQ test doesn't work when it gets up really high because you kind of run out of cookies all over a certain time you're ceases to discriminate it's like you're because pedometer when you get up to 150 not that I've ever so we think and so they devised so really smart people devised super smart IQ tests for each other it's sort of this Russian doll kind of thing like no you and I have the big doll test and and they have 1 4 and then if you're good at the one inside that you're the one inside anyway he's at the bear you know he's a very so yeah he's way way up there but he's also the oldest of four sons his dad disappeared his mom married he that husband was murdered his mom married again that husband committed suicide his mom married again and the new husband was a journalist yeah with with belts a journalist who would whip you so yeah they're a very poor family mmm he somehow decide so ever to go to Reed College so then what happens he drops out he doesn't he's it's it's a heartbreaking story of this kid he grows up in Montana and he has about as horrible an upbringing as you can imagine and but he is this one in a billion mind and he goes on a skull full scholarship to read and he gets there and he cannot make the cultural adjustment and he ends up there's some kind of snafu involving a scholarship and he ends up just kind of giving up and he never finishes he drops of another college he never finishes and he ends up spent has spent much of his life as a as a bouncer in a bar and and the arguments he gets into it read as my mom didn't send in the financial statement and they said no she didn't and so we've given your money to someone else she'd college exactly maybe his explanation for how he doesn't make it through college is entirely it is both entirely convincing and entirely unconvincing at the same time it ring it is utter it is completely the case that he believes he was thwarted but it makes no sense to someone who grew up in kind of normal middle-class life that he could have failed to kind of stay there now let's compare him to because you do for some reason to G Robert Oppenheimer mm-hmm why did Chris Langdon's problems in college suddenly remind you of Ju Robert Oppenheimer because I read that prometheus Prometheus Unbound book mmm and I got you know 78 pages in and I you know he's at that point he grows up down the road I mean on such request goes to ethical culture you know has a Picasso in the bathroom like very wealthy kind of I years ago I have a friend who's very wealthy and they everyone who went to this friend's house they had a Picasso in the bathroom services said that is that's my well um so he's that kind of kid when I'm reading Prometheus Unbound and he's just like brilliant child and I'm reading about how you're reading like he goes to Cambridge to do his PhD and at some point he's unhappy he's being tutored by this guy called Blackburn who later won a Nobel and he's unhappy and he gets all the depressed and he tries to kill his tutor you don't you're not making a joke he tries to poison his tutor yeah he tries to I'm like you think he's at Harvard College she just the poison is it Cambridge Cambridge you know this is his moment when you do this massive you know triple take right you like what yeah try it okay and Cambridge finds out and here's what they do they put him on probation and as penalty they send him he has to go once a week to a psychiatrist on Harley Street in London so the reason that this occurred to me when I was thinking about Chris laingen is here's you you have Chris laingen and often Oppenheimer - brilliant one in a billion Minds right one kid grows up on Central Park West with the Picasso in the bathroom one print grows up in Montana in the worst-possible both of them encounter a problem in their college careers right Chris laingen they miss places the paperwork for his scholarship and as a result never goes finished his college and ends up as a bouncer Oppenheimer tries to kill a scooter right what happens talks his way out of it and ends up having arguably the most important government post of the 20th century now what's that about that's about class this is this is what his brother Jeff says this Chris's brother if Christopher had been born into a wealthy family if he was the son of a doctor who was well-connected in some major market I guarantee you he would be one of those guys you read about kicking back PhDs at 17 it's the culture you find yourself in that determines that apps yeah we you know that the thing that's important about that story is we all know intuitively that there that there are cultural barriers to enhance to advancement but I think we underestimate how powerful they are and this is the thing that I keep coming back to in this book is this how utterly inadequate our kind of lay theories of success are that we come back to the sort of default position that ultimately it's all up to you and you you know if you succeed you do it by your own you know and anyone can pull themselves up if they want to try hard enough wrong but you're not saying that class is the Biot I mean you have your Abraham Lincoln example it's terrible father easy mother's death sentence but it just is it is we are never more foolish than we discount then when we discount the power of class both to accelerate achievement and to defeat it just make me wonder a little bit I mean you're not a genius but you're just good at what you do but but it strikes me sometimes that you are pretty good at keeping your balance somehow and like your friend Bruce said somewhere I've known him thirty-nine years I couldn't tell you what his deep-seated anxieties are I know he cries a Puff the Magic Dragon but that's about as far as I go so I think there might be something to say about somehow there is a deep talent and maybe it is an extraordinarily important talent to somehow to be you know Jack Kennedy one spoon in your mouth and every other bore office and have a horrible father you know add a disease that's sort of slowly killing you and you still keep your sense of humor and you keep you know there is an element here Chris laingen was an exceptional talent with the wrong parents but he also didn't get that other gift know which is available to some yeah which is just I will do this yeah this kind of know I mean it's a this book is intended to me they're on and they're an endless number of contributors to this thing called success and I want to sort of this book sin is an attempt to kind of lengthen the list right the list our list of of contributors was just too short and that causes us I think to to be unduly harsh towards those who don't succeed and unduly deferential towards those who do and I'd like to start up a movement towards adding all kinds of factors onto that list until we are thoroughly disabused of the of this notion of the successful person that Superman let me finish with with this with the remedy you have a bunch of remedies in the book but one of the questions is raises if you have cultural disadvantages like Chris did is there some way you can engineer them engineer benefits in or engineer the problems out and you described something called the Kipp Academy which is here in New York what is it Kipp is one of one of the most successful of the charter school movements in this country which is based on a very simple notion which is that children from disadvantaged backgrounds need to catch up with their middle class peers and the only way they can catch up is to outwork them that's what it is so you live in the South Bronx you you is anyone eligible it's a it's a lottery school so like like like anyone can apply and if you apply and they choose you a lottery than you sign a contract you you and your mom and you and your dad sign a contract at the school what is s s well it's smile here is the school formula slant SS LAN T which stands for smile sit up listen ask questions nod when being spoken to and track with your eyes yeah yeah you say this is a school that is succeeded by taking the idea of cultural legacies seriously yeah what I want to smile sit up what are those things about well what they're I mean they're they're doing this the school is a kind of I mean many people I'm sure in the audience are familiar with kid but um you know Kipp is you get there at 7:30 and you leave it fire or whatever it are you come in on the weekends you you are it is a it is immersion in the world of learning for kids who when they leave school don't have the same opportunities as middle-class kids to and part of what they teach you there is not just what to learn but how to learn and those things are part of this how to learn business that is if you're going to have kids who are there I think they are those kids are in school 40% longer than their public school middle class public school counterparts if you're going to ask for that kind of commitment from children you have to give them the skills to make use of it right and that's part of what they're so it's very long days the school year is is so long and it includes three extra weeks in July so essentially they don't get the traditional summer off mm-hmm it's famous for a math program but you describe that you go to the class and there's some kids that will work on the program on a particular problem for 20 minutes standing up in front of the blackboard in front of the class on one problem yeah do they do well on man they do do very well in math yeah they're they're mad I mean it it's there's many ways to measure it but they are these are kids who are coming into middle school and by the time they leave Kipp are achieving at math had a kind of wealthy suburban level it's it's South Frank's the South Bronx average is 16 percent of middle schoolers usually perform at or above average in this school some accessable is 84 percent mm-hmm of course that I don't know how many dropouts they have I imagine they have a bunch three percent no no it's the very low it's much very low three percent so this business about summer is interesting and it's interesting to you what happens to kids during summer well this is this you know fascinating thing that this a number of scholars have pointed out over the years which is that we look at poor kids and rich kids and we follow their progress through school and what we see is a learning gap opens up over the course of school between rich and poor kids right right but they start out being this far apart and then by the end of high school they're this far apart and it was always said when we observed that that learning gap we explained it by saying well either the poor kids aren't as smart as the rich kids or the schools are failing the poor kids in some way that we don't quite understand right but then they a bunch of scholars said wait a minute let's look at those numbers much more closely and what they did is they separated out your performance on tests during the school year from what happened over the summer months so they measure your reading skills going in in September and then in May they test you and say oh good job rich kid or middle-class kid and good job poor kid and then they spit test you again when you come back in September and what you discover is the gap between rich and poor kids opens up almost entirely during the summer vacation not during the school year in other words during the school year poor kids learn just as much as rich kids but then they go home for the summer and they fall behind in fact poor kids performance over the summer tends they tend to to regress and come back to school in September behind the point that they left in May rich kid middle-class kids over the summer progress and come back to school in September well ahead of the point of they left in May in other words we've been complaining about schools for years and years and years schools aren't the problem right summer vacation is the problem the problem is that we don't have enough school and that's the kind of when you understand that really crucial point he wonders anyway why do we have summer week so why don't we have this preposterous well I got interested in this and I thought there must be someone I thought it was like air conditioning in the Bronx like you didn't have any in 1970 went home no it's because in the 19th century Horace Mann by the way among others came up with this crackpot theory that said that the leading cause of insanity among children was over stimulation of the mind and that if there was too much school kids would go crazy and so as a result they devised this lengthy summer vacation to restore America's school children to proper appropriate mental health and this this is why we have a three-month summer vacation because Horace Mann got this I'd be in his bonnet and ran around and convinced everyone to go for this preposterous ritual and it turns out that in Asia they they don't have nearly the and you say that it's something about rice rice so I so here's you know very dubious here's the thing Asian kids we just family for years they do they do these international math comparison tests right they get the same math test two kids around the world and I look at the results and we just got the results for 2007 like three weeks ago and what you discover is the same thing you discover every time we do these tests which is that Singapore South Korea Japan Hong Kong are up here and we are down here and when I say this this is a lot of space like it's astonishing how much further ahead they are then we are and so you have to come up with some explanation for why that's it's such a big difference that it demands an explanation and no one has a good one so I thought you know let's do the end of the book well venture my own so and my this idea comes from James Flynn very very brilliant psychologist who it has this line is this book written about asian-american overachievement it's his genius book which is full of more like zany ideas and extraordinary insights anyway at the very in assess he's talking about this he says oh he's he's Irish and he's comparing Asians and Irish people and he points out you know said my ancestors were drunk the whole time and all they did was grow potatoes and when you you know growing potatoes is really easy you plan the potato in the spring and you dig it up in the fall and the rest of the time you know I'm not saying this he is this just be clear okay his name Flint by the way so and he says by comparison if you're growing up in the Pearl River Delta in China and you're growing rice you you're working nonstop the year-round right so that's so fasting so turns out if you go back and you I started all this stuff about agricultural practices turns out it's true you know my father's great-great great-great-great-great grandfather who was a peasant farmer in northern England probably worked a thousand hours a year and during this winter just drank and slept he is equivalent in South China in Middle Ages worked 3,000 hours a year three times harder because rice farming is just so extraordinarily time intensive so the argument is if you're doing rice farming for a thousand years right you have you developed as a culture a very different idea about what a day's work is then if you are like my great great great great grandfather sleeping off a hangover for the winter months and so what happens when you take that cultural attitude and you're confronted with a calculus problem in high school I think it makes a difference and we have all kinds of really good even if it weren't rice I mean there's I read another explanation it's ice instead of rice so the north eastern part of Asia was very very cold and it was very very empty it was very very white and they were lots of the white hairs running around so people who were Asian would look at the white field and the unde at the white landscape and look at the white hairs and they had to be extraordinarily good at their spatial audio whatever it is in order to see the rabbit so whether it's rice or rice or whatever it is the thing I wanted this thing say at the end of the day is that the Kipp Academy if it's trying to sort of turn Bronx kids into a rice culture and Asians it's it's in the nature of things that that if you want a real rice country you're not gonna get J robert Oppenheimer they're the kids at Kipp at least initially will be in a very rote very highly disciplined very very even situation and an ain't Fieldston and it ain't J robert Oppenheimer thinking beautiful thoughts about the Picasso in the bathroom there in middle school right I mean this goes back to what I said in the beginning let's not worry while they're in medical middle in in middle school about their potential to do path-breaking work in quantum physics at the age of 35 let's just get them into college and then they can make those choices for themselves right does Kip get kids into good absolutely as kids in the college I mean but we can't keep putting the cart before the horse here before you do J robert Oppenheimer sure did all kinds of marvelous things when he was an adult and was educated the very finest institutions but at some point in his life he sat down and was taught the basics of mathematics and everything else I'm in a very highly structured formal and disciplined environment by a teacher who knew what he or she was doing right all we're saying is can we extend that same privilege to kids who grew up in the South Bronx or East Memphis or where have you that's what the argument of Kipp is and to you know we can get into these elaborate explanations or arguments about about rote learning and you go and think later but not now let's just give them a foundation to learn from so let me finish up with I'm gonna give you four propositions to try to describe what you did in this book and tell me which you agree with it maybe some maybe none we don't like geniuses we can do better as a society enlarging our population of above-average folks so enough about geniuses or there's no such thing as a genius every so-called genius owes an enormous debt to his or her family mentors good timing good fortune cultural accidents nobody absolutely nobody not Mozart not Einstein not nobody does it alone or genius is a bad way to think about achievement it kills potential and other people it allows us to ignore policies that would help lots and lots of non geniuses genius that phrase is the enemy of broad-based social progress or finally genius is a fancy way of saying we need less government more reliance on self-made men and women it looks like a descriptive word but really genius is a conservative propaganda I like all of them can I have all of them um you could have all of them I guess I mean the it occurred to me after at the book that there's a very elegant way of describing what I was trying to get at of course you know the most elegant way of describing what you're getting at only comes to you after you how's the book but um this is this guy flaming I was talking about who I love so much Flynn has this marvelous he talks a lot about capitalization and what he means by capitalization is he uses that phrase to describe what is the percentage of people who are capable of doing X who end up doing X right so he's very interested in how different ethnic groups have different capitalization rates so for example he says you need to have a certain level of intellectual ability to be a professional a doctor or a lawyer so what percentage of people in a given ethnic group who have reached that have that level of intellectual fitness become professionals he calls that the cap what's that what's the professional capitalization rate and so for the highest-ever is among Chinese American immigrants to America their capitalization rate is something like 78 percent Kappa which means the representing money they are producing knowledge or talent or some services or goods are at a higher rate than yeah they are making use of they are exploiting the available human potential to a much greater extent than anyone else the equivalent figure for sort of a white America my reference would be I think 60% or 58% I forgot about the exact numbers but it's how much of our talent are we actually putting to putting to use so you can ask all kinds of questions cool questions like so what is the capitalization rate for basketball players in Harlem so what percentage of players who are capable of playing professional basketball in Harlem end up playing professional basketball what's the cap rate cap position rate you'd think it was really high in fact it's really low in fact if you look in throughout American society at capitalization rates in any field what you will discover is that they are way way lower than you think we actually we pat ourselves in the back all the time about how good we are at finding and exploiting ability in this country we're not it we're actually really bad at it and the only people who are really good at it are these kinds of highly specialized in immigrant groups who come here and basically show it's how show us how it's done for a couple of generations and I sort of think you know instead of the reason I object so much to all of this obsession with genius and ability is it's the wrong question right who cares about you know whether someone's got this much ability or this much ability what we really should care about is are we capitalizing on it are we giving everyone who has at least enough a you know a reasonable amount of ability the chance to make good use of it and we're not doing that right and until we get capitalization rates where they should be any kind of discussion or emphasis on genius is a waste of our time right and that's where I want to that's the kind of point of the book is is let's start with this much more fundamental question before we engage in these very fun and esoteric but ultimately useless discussions about genius all right so that's what I'd like to do is let's turn on the house lights and if you have a question just raise your hand as high as you can and then if people have to leave for babysitter's or dinner or other more pressing biological reasons this is a good I'll give you like 30 seconds so that people can get through the aisle and stuff and for those of you want to stay and ask questions why don't free and a-two and oh you can't leave with my lemonade yeah okay all right hands up for questions if you have any I'll need a little more is balcony got questions because it's a little hard - all right that's how about you in the second row because you're near yeah question is you can love your talent Marlon Brando for example seem to be enjoy being an actor but didn't seem to enjoy me he hated being an actor so if love is in the air what about self loathing and talent well you know we are within several blocks of many of the greatest psychoanalysts in America and they would have much to say on this I am sure that if you were really gifted in that area and you poked deeply into Marlon Brando's psyche you would discover that beneath his apparent loathing of acting was or maybe his loathing caused him to engage with acting in a way that many other people couldn't or wouldn't maybe it was a kind of curious form of of love in the end I don't know I don't know enough about all the better to to be able to answer that question intelligently I suppose yes you would yes you based on your research where do you come out on affirmative action well it's based on race gender and why well once you understand how utterly arbitrary the advantages that successful people have great once you understand how utterly arbitrary many of the advantages successful people have are then why not have affirmative action like so you know Jeb Bush gets to be governor of Florida because daddy's president and baby brothers president and granddaddy was senator you know what that's a series of advantages that he didn't earn he was just given to them are but given those advantages arbitrarily so how why do they get so upset about affirmative ly giving out a series of advantages I mean that the problem with the argument about affirmative action is it assumes the world is this beautifully clean meritocracy and so there's there's something offensive about sullying those pristine waters with a quota right but there's nothing pristine about these waters these waters couldn't be murkier I say throw more stuff in it yes you on the aisle are you aware of a study of Harvard graduates which discovered that that class or going to Harvard didn't matter as much as this one had some had presumed well I wonder whether a study of Harvard graduates is really a good way of looking at the problem of class in America but that aside know I do know that study it's a very interesting one and I wouldn't dispute any of its findings but I would in but a lot of our in the book I talk a lot about this the work of a sociologist Annette Lareau and then of some very kind of recent really interesting work that looks at differences in parenting strategies by class and one of the implications of her work is that some of these class-based parenting differences may have emerged relatively recently so these are differences like Terry if you're going to see the doctor tell you tell the doctor what's wrong with you you tell that don't be quiet put yourself forward whereas the the poorer household there's a shut up and just listen to the authority don't make him shut up and they both could work the two kids could work very hard but one one presumes to be heard and the other is told to be invisible yeah that's a and what her argument is that these are that what we are seeing is these profound differences in parenting styles that have that make that have enormous consequences for the ability of children to navigate the world once they become students and adults and I would think that I would argue that's a very important addition to the kind of insights that came from the valiance study hasn't it occur to you though that at the Kip schools admittedly for a term there is a tendency to shut up and learn your sixes time sixes and shut up and lose your long division and it is it is very much like the Asian or the or the in her case the do the deed and we'll talk about your prison we'll talk about you about you standing up and making the busy dog with a bone okay that's as far as we're gonna give on that one all right well in the back solitary hand yeah let's talk about the 10,000 hour rule how come film directors he believes do most of often do their best work early on yeah well that's interesting so what that says is so that you're right that's of an interesting exception and we can look at other ones we can also say that there are a number of because there's a you know many great mathematicians have extraordinary insight so late in life you know that kind of so the series of these kind of precocious fields and one way of answering that question is to say that perhaps there are 10,000 hours of preparation we're not immediately specific to their discipline that is to say part of what the way in which I prepare myself for being a great director it might be for example to read lots of fiction to to engage with literature in some way to write short stories to you know I mean there may be a whole series of or part of the what if part of the preparation 10,000 hour preparation for being a great director is some kind of managerial experience in some fields right because being a director is in part a managerial tasks but organizing all kinds of moving parts so we don't know until we have a complete definition of what preparation means for a particular discipline we don't really know how to answer that question and I would my suspicion is that there are all kinds of disparate things that add up to this weird thing called being a good director and they may be they may some of them may lie outside the field of film I'd go upstairs and I could see maybe if someone upstairs wants to show there's a waving hand there thank you I think jab boom rods in the audience somewhere do we know what month Wayne Gretzky was well I think it's February its January February I think no it's you know her she was said yes we like to talk about gender and achievement in physics and a success in physics and engineering and gender yeah so we had this remember the Larry Summers think up years ago we always have these ongoing arguments about why is it that women are underrepresented in various fields right and there is always a position taken by a certain cohort that says look it's some it's an eight there's there are certain things that are uniquely suited to the male mind and they bring out their you know pet scans and they show that man you know this lights up in a man here and this lights up and they all this kind of incredibly elaborate theories it and to which I would say look once again what do we know about success it's a function of rules that we create of opportunities that are initially small but mushroom over time of random acts that you know have all kinds of unintended consequences once you have that kind of much broader and more realistic once you understand how deeply socially constructed achievement is then you can say to all of those who want to wave these fancy studies about inherent differences between the male and female mind you can say nonsense right is there a you know this is clearly a situation where we have socially constructed male success in certain kinds of fields and have shut out women when once we equalize those opportunities if we continue to see a difference in male and female success then we can have the conversation about your PET scans until then put them away and start attending to the real social barriers that continue to exist for half the population up there's any any any waivers he's not the kind of wave okay waiver up that oh I see so all right I'll get to the but first we'll do left stage left waivers yes mr. Gladwell what credence do you give to emotional intelligence well when we were talking about just now about Annette Lareau and these class differences in parenting styles what she's getting at is I think she's getting at the kind of social precursors of emotional intelligence so what we mean by emotional challenges essentially is how good are you at decoding the meaning of social situations and getting your way right that's essentially what I mean in part but I'm essentially what is and what and that Laura is saying is when you look closely at parenting styles by class what you discover is that upper middle middle and upper middle class parents are very deliberately and persistently teaching their children the skills necessary to decode social situations and get their way so she's taken the mystery out of EQ she said it's not something that magically occurs in some and not in others it is a it is a it is a consoling constructed phenomenon that arises out of a very particular ideological position taken by a set of privileged parents in this country and so she I think she has these two phenomena are intricately linked they're all part of the same extremely important story now we'll go to the right side of the balcony so okay the very race yeah so there's a there in the book there is a description of an intelligence test notes your creativity test okay well they seem to be like they were two so one is a kind of test where you take it and you learn to narrow your focus and logically to go down to some kind of subset of the whole and then there's this kind of wonderful test which says okay I'm gonna give you a brick and a blanket what can you do with the brick write it down and what can you do with a blanket yeah so these are these are early forms of creativity tests where you simply measure its uses of a brick and you give this and you have people write down as many different uses of AB records they can come up with and what you find is that what you're looking for is just can someone come up with like 25 or 30 I mean how crazy can out creative are they I mean it was really astonished it's really really fun when you see someone who's very good at it yeah and the idea is that what that test is measuring is something profoundly different than what an IQ test is measuring an IQ test measures your ability to decode to to to narrow to take a list of six possibilities and correctly identify the correct one this one is measuring your ability to take to create something from nothing right which is a profoundly different skill cognitive it was so say it was my saddest moment in reading the book because I thought okay I'm not going to do to Italy well on the IQ one because but I thought with the bricks I just be fabulous and then I read mr. brick there's one guy it was just I felt so bad yeah that was as I said the down in the downer section yeah the book so how does this relate to 10,000 hours you know I don't know I mean the yeah I mean that little test you know what I was talking about magic dust about that element of talent that is this indefinable magical thing that brick that brick question is getting at magic dust it's um it's it's measuring just kind of sheer a whimsical inventiveness and if I was if pressed I would say that that is I do believe in that in that in that as a if that I do if I have if pressed I would say that's what talent is is that little you know if when I saw that I give the example of the kid who came up with those ten amazing uses of a brick I would be very comfortable saying that that kid is is talented I'm has some some magical thing that most of us don't have yeah and that's what and I would be very comfortable who's saying that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had that and when they added that to the 10,000 hours in Hamburg they got something fantastic but you couldn't have gone anywhere without any of those two steps okay that's not looked have a how much oh yeah what's your take on parents who try to work really hard to get their kids into the best pre-k than the best K than the best yeah K one and two and then so on well there's this I my plans that I love in the book there's this notion in statistics called restriction of range which is that when you get to the top of a distribution the differences between different data points are no longer meaningful so we know this is true of IQ right IQ works up to about 120 and after 120 it doesn't matter anymore someone who is if if Robert over here has an IQ of 180 and I have an IQ of 120 although he is technically smarter than me in fact for all intents and purposes the extra 60 points that he has on me are meaningless it just doesn't at that point I'm smart enough if I have an IQ of under 20 thank you that's what we mean by a restriction of range that at the very very top of the distribution the top one percent when you try to distinguish between people it's just you're not distinguishing between them meaningfully anymore and I talk about us in the context of of you could talk about us in the context of school of individuals you can also talk about this in the context of schools right if in Manhattan in the array of private schools there was the full range of schools that is to say you could find a private school on the Upper East Side that was equivalent to a school in the slums of Bangladesh and if you could also simultaneously find a private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was as good as school as has ever existed in the world then I would say yes as a parent you should spend an enormous amount of time worrying about where your kids school kid goes to school because there's a real difference but in fact that's not true right if you took all of the private schools of Madinah and put them all together you discover they're all really good in fact and some might be a little bit better than the other but that's the same difference as the difference between an IQ of 160 and an IQ of 158 it is a distinction without a difference right we have a restriction of rain change problem in the private school marketplace in new in New York so how do you choose what school you send your kid to I don't know throw a dart I mean it just doesn't matter okay we'll do three more and then we're done three more so how about rate second row when white males if white males are so fine and they come up with definitions of fine yeah why are there others who are finer if they're so good at being fine and so right about fine then how come they're fine is not fine enough as the white male up here Robert do an answer no I don't know that I I don't know that I would subscribe to the notion that that I would be that I might my kind would be better at at predicting success or even identifying successor well people you know the thing that keeps the world going it makes the world a good place is that people in positions of power constantly screw up as we had been reminded so elegantly in recent months and so there's a you know the people the top turnover because and why don't so this is a really good question so why do people at the top if they're at the top screw-up further proof that we don't live in a meritocracy right because the reason they're at the top is not because they're good but because they had all kinds of magical advantages bestowed on them as they when they were you know by their generation and family and culture that's a kind of dangerous answer to the question because then you're just gonna be chasing your butt all the time and you'll never ever come up with anything wise surely there must be some philosopher king of the good who like Pooh Bear if he thought long enough would come up with a really good definition of how we should think about excellence that would be in fact excellent I like these nosedives you do like sometimes like these are questions you know you can make a sound I you know I can't answer everything how about right there in the middle with his hand up wondering whether I mean you yeah Oh question is since you are so such a half the thing about Bill Gates and you can figure him out how do you figure out to others they are the president-elect of the United States and yourself well let's skip me and let's talk about Barack Obama he's a um I mean there are many many things that go into him but what I was very abused of the day rooting around on the web to uncover some letter that he wrote to Harvard Law School about fifteen years ago in defense of the affirmative action program at Harvard Law School pointing out that he was a beneficiary and I love that the system works we've been whining about affirmative action for years and years and years now we have a truly what looks like a truly great guy who is the president we've wanted and desperately needed and what is he he's the Prezi is the product of affirmative action programs he's like you know can we stop arguing about this now this is what they were supposed to do is find talented young people and give them a chance right um so mean well you describe yourself as a parasite a very successful parasite a parasite I I'm the I'm the little bird on the back of the elephant and that's a good thing to be and the element bird on the back of the who picks member the bird that takes the pics the little gnats off the elephant know something else that little bit at the buffy's on an alligator or the alligator he's that he cleans the teeth there I was being all grandiose and assuming it was an elephant and in fact it's some lesser mammal it's not even the mammal I mean if it's an alligator I'm the I'm the little bird on the back of the mouse all right well last question is I guess it should be anyone else way way up there all right how about that how did you find Chris Langdon well there are all these organizations for people who do really really well on IQ tests right there's Mensa of course Mensa if you really have a really really high IQ score you think that Mensa is like you know so de classe so then there's the group for people who are too smart for Mensa and then there's the group for people who are too smart for the group too smart for many goes on it's like the Russian dolls right and so you go all the way up to the top and you just you go from one to the next and you talk to people you say you know there's always a splinter group right and they come up with their own test and you have to score above me it's actually it's it's quite fascinating the it is the and in the last room was Chris Langham however it's so the most beautiful example of the narcissism of small differences you know they are parsing you know smaller and smaller and least less consequential pen thetic ly friend of mine once said in describing the phenomenon that when you're meeting someone for dinner the person who was closest to the restaurant is always the last to arrive which he referred to as the narcissism of small distances anyway you if you follow if you follow the chain all the way up to the top you there's basically two guys that's it and they're both quarreling over who's did smarter a bit more on better on this this one really really really really hard test and one of these guys lives in Hell's Kitchen and I went to see him and he thinks that Chris laingen cheated competence and so he he divides it's called the mega test and it's like 30 questions that are so insanely hard and like the guy who devised the mega test you know thinks it's impossible to get all three right and II think Chris got 29 out of there right and the guy is guy hustling who devised it Kathlyn thinks he cheated and that they had a falling out and they haven't talked in my 15 years so that's how it was actually quite fun to kind of to do that I don't understand your answer to Jeep so you were walking down 43rd Street and 10th Avenue and somebody was doing it and he was pointing at a window and that's how you met Chris Langdon I mean how did you meet it wasn't that the question how did he meet you find it oh no yeah so once I discovered that he was at that he's at the absolute end of this chain then I called him up what is that like oh maybe you invited into a restaurant that he was near and he came late and then you know what to see if he lives in he lives in Missouri and I went to see him on his farm and he subsequent to me meeting him he was on I write about the book he was on that one nurses 100 TV show he's you know he's really he's an extraordinary man I mean do you talk to someone who has an IQ of 200 and you know you're talking to so I was like I mean you know you don't meet people like that every day of the year I mean there's it's quite amazing to be confronted with you can feel it's weird the only analogous thing I could remember is years ago for the Washington Post I went and I covered a space shuttle launch and you should always if you've got a chance to go to one you should go to one for one reason you sit in this kind of platform like miles away I don't you know how far three miles away the boomers look yeah and in the distance you see the shuttle go you know it goes boom and then it goes it goes up and it hits you you're three miles away and you're hit by the neck yeah but a force and the heat it's like palpable this is strange you've never experienced anything like it in your life this is weird physical sensation that you only get when NASA for no apparently good reason spends hundreds of millions of your taxpayers dollars sending like a big aluminum can into space I've never understood this anyway the only analogous thing meeting Chris laingen was like it's like oh my god I'm back at Cape Canaveral or Kenan whatever they call it now it's that same thing it's like when he talks to you it's like you know it's like whoa it's really what would you say they would be Bui like a it's I can't I can't explain it it's like so think about someone who has never forgotten anything never been baffled anything and who for whom the act of finding something to engage his mind is hard work right so that's the death the tricky one you and I like you know all of us in this room not that hard to find something that knocks us over right so our minds are like you know we're sort of used to being kind of we're like those you know those some kids punching balloons you may punch them when they come back up okay that's what we're like well he's like no he's like the heavy bag right and that's what you're confronted with this you know kind of heavy bag thing and it's an extraordinary thing and that's why it was so unbelievably poignant to for him to describe how basically he got drummed out of college because he lost his scholarship and you think back and you think oh my god what must have happened for some some teacher thirty years ago sat across a desk from this kid and felt the force of this kid's intellect and sent them home that read college which doesn't make sense recall like it's just a kind of it's just unbelievably heartbreaking well it's unbelievably heartbreaking but it's also like close to midnight so thank you all very very much Thank You Malcolm thank you Robert for this very enlightening discussion what a great start to the new year I want to announce that the winner of the email raffle for a signed Malcolm Gladwell book is Rebecca Graham so to come to the art gallery and we'll give your book thanks

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 155,626

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: malcolm, gladwell, robert, krulwich, outliers

Id: QHxf68nb_-o

Length: 101min 23sec (6083 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 08 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/AyeMatey]

From 2007, I think. Soon after the publication of Outliers.

[u/wtfbbqftl]

Im a big fan of this guy, he has some interesting books. I was even lucky enough to see him speak when he came to the uni i was attending.

[u/moomba1]

Malcom Gladwell is a fool. He usually gets facts wrong in his articles and has sophomoric ideas.