Q&A: Malcolm Gladwell

this week on cue a best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell his newest book is called what the dog saw his previous bestsellers include the tipping point blink and outliers Malcolm Gladwell has written for The New Yorker magazine since 1996 Malcolm Gladwell author of the new book what the dog saw and three others will talk about what does it mean now that be Gladwell Ian I have no idea I mean I hear that people use that phrase which I suspect it was invented by one of the publicist of my publishing company I think to describe something which I think has been going on for years which is just intellectually engaged narrative nonfiction but I didn't invent that that that was around many hundreds of years before I came along so like I said I think it's a an example of corporate self-promotion by yeah by my publisher if you look on the New York Times bestseller list as I'm sure you know and I'm not sure how often this has happened in history you have four of your books either on the paperback bestseller or the hardback bestseller and let me just go down briefly and just explain give us half a minute you are number eight on the hardback well I'm gonna get myself a mess no you're never 8 on this the paper back with tipping point which came out in 2000 what's 30 seconds of what tipping point was tipping point is it was a book about using the idea of the epidemic to explain how ideas spread through a population so it took all the language in metaphor of Epidemiology and applied it to behavior to things we think about the things close we where the was a kind of primer on how change happens do you have a total of how many books men sold by now oh I don't know no idea we talked to me in the last time here 3 yeah it must be more but it's I I don't there's no it's a curiously difficult to find that question do you pay any attention to numbers not really I mean I I'm one of people who once I've written something I never go back and reread it so I think it's very important to always be looking forward and if you go back and you dwell too much on what you've done you start to fall into bad habits and repeat yourself and get trapped I think a little bit so you don't go back and ever reread something you've written no I haven't read the tipping point since it was published nine years ago does it worry you might forget some of it oh I'm sure I have i fact people periodically will tell me about something that I've written and I'll say did I write that really III might a horrified or I'm you know so quietly pleased to learn to learn that I wrote that these numbers by the way or early December when we're recording this number seven on the paperback list for a hundred and nine weeks is blink blink is about rapid cognition it's about the decisions we make in an instant and when they're good and when they're bad and how to make them better and just it's really a kind of exploration of this fact that an enormous amount of what we do is governed by things that we you know it isn't big like that right I found that really interesting I wanted to kind of devote a book to explore that phenomenon that was done in 2005 and then 52 weeks on the hardback bestseller list is outliers which is done in 2008 then number 10 the week we're talking about this what's that about outliers is a investigation of success it's a an attempt to understand what are the reasons why certain individuals are outliers why they lie outside normal experience what sets them apart and so it looks at culture and luck and generation and all the kinds of other things I think feed into success and the current one what the dog saw where that title come from by the way that is the that is borrowed the current book is a collection of essays from The New Yorker that I've published over the last 10 years and that what the dog saw is the title of one of the essays which was a profile of Cesar Millan the the dog whisperer on National Geographic and I wanted to write an essay about I spending all his time with Cesar and my first thought was to write an essay about what what does Cesar see when he sees a dog because he has this extraordinary ability to calm dogs I mean you see it on TV but I saw it I followed him around for quite some time I would see it's incredible he would walk into a room and as a dog misbehaving and the dog literally looks at Cesar and just kind of so then I realize no no no halfway through I was like I don't know the interesting question is not what does Cesar's see when he looks at a dog it's what does the dog see when he looks at Cesar and so that was the title of the essay and I thought it if the job I don't know any time you can put dog in the title of a book I think you're doing well so did you pick the essay The New Yorker pieces for that or did with ya with some suggestions from my editors I wanted to get a sense sometimes your favorite pieces are not actually the best pieces you know because writers we often writers have various idiosyncratic reasons for liking things that aren't shared by the rest of the world and so you have to kind of you have to check your preferences against more objective sources I read you tell me if tell me what you want that you got as much as four million dollars for this book oh no that's not even way way way way with us does that drive you crazy when you see stuff like that it is printed somewhere well yeah no I mean I mean I think people know well enough that if if that number doesn't come from me or my publisher then chances are it might not be true so I think you know I don't really I think most readers are fairly are you appropriately skeptical about the things they read 1996 you went to work at The New Yorker spent nine years before that the Washington Post mm-hmm worn in England yes spent some time in Jamaica where your mother was born and grew up in Canada and Elmira in a little tiny town that has since become famous because um down the road is where in Waterloo ten minutes away is where the BlackBerry comes from so wait that's we're now on the map we think the BlackBerry the device not the fruit some of the stuff we normally talk about on this program can be found on the transcript of book notes when we talk to three and a half years ago that's a total of twelve hundred and ninety-seven pages in book form this last book has already been up to as high as number three I think and it's number five the week we're talking of all the books you've done the four mm when you go out and speak which book do people ask you the most about oh that's interesting well a tipping point has probably been read by the most people it's been out the longest and it has an idea that naturally applies itself to many many different domains and realms and so that's always a kind of occasion for much discussion but I don't know I mean outliers is a topic that everyone sort of interested in one way or another and so there's always some little piece that people are curious about I want to know more about so so far to say what the which one has provoked the most responses but I will probably be tipping point it's also reported that you are paid as much as eighty thousand dollars to give a speech yeah I don't talk about money I do get I it's a all of us who do this speech business know that it's a it could be a very good living that's that's true okay let's just say that it's anywhere from forty to eighty thousand dollars to give a speech what what's that experience like when you've all a sudden been contracted somebody to make a lot of money to stand up for ninety minutes well are you worried about it not really I'm not a um I don't get nervous before public speaking I used to it's for a very simple reason I'm actually I'm I am a kind of a nervous person but years ago used to be a competitive Runner and I would get insanely nervous before big races so much so that I wouldn't be able to sleep for weeks beforehand and ever since then everything else I've ever had to do which seems scary I just think is it as scary as running a race I think no it's not so I so everything else in my life has been so I never get nervous I liked I really like giving talks because I think that the discipline of being forced to tell a story in front of a group of people and explain yourself through spoken word as opposed to written it's very important for a writer their skills that beautifully translate to to the task of writing on paper and I think that I've become since I started to do my speaking I think I've become a much better storyteller and the other thing that's crucial about it is that it forces you to get outside your world and that's hugely important if you are going to do as I do a lot of this nonfiction journalism I am by nature somewhat reserved and reclusive but I need by virtue of my job to meet people hear about new ideas hear stories get different perspectives and so what speaking is allowed me to do is to is to I meet people I would never in a million years I've met before and it's fascinating it's sort of constantly replenishes my store of information about the world how often do people come up to you and say here's an idea for a story well they do that more often they don't phrase it that way more often is you start to chat with somebody who who does something totally different from you and they tell you something that's incredibly interesting and they don't realize it's interesting because it's in it's something that's familiar to them right so it doesn't have to be as formal as that the amazing thing is that I arrived this is one of my kind of rules of conduct I think everyone's interesting I really honestly seriously believe that that when people are talking about the things that they know well and well they are almost always interesting and it's if they're not it's generally your fault because you're not asking the right questions or you haven't made them comfortable or you haven't and not their fault and I once I learned that lesson my journalism came became a lot easier you said to a group recently in times of crisis this was November 19th 2009 in times of crisis we want our leaders to be smart but we want but what we want is our leader to be humble yeah we this is um comes from a I wrote a talk after the financial crisis I wrote a talk part of it which is in The New Yorker but part of it was new it was all about the Battle of Chancellorsville which is civil war a civil war robert e lee and fighting Joe hooker and Lee beats hooker and he shouldn't have beat up hooker had him outnumbered two to one I mean hooker had him dead to rights and Lee pulled it out and it's this incredibly interesting battle and there's all kinds of reasons why hooker blew it but at the core of it was that he was arrogant he was overconfident he he thought he had least so completely outgunned that he no longer had to take Lee seriously as an opponent and I thought that there was some truly extraordinary fascinating lesson in that because a whole conference turns out to be psychologists tell us anything the most common kind of flaw of experts you know if incompetence is the disease of the novice overconfidence is the disease of the expert and what I what I believe have one of the things one of the ways to explain what happened on Wall Street two years ago is precisely this that they these titans of the financial industry began to behave as hooker did on the eve of the Battle of Chancellorsville they believed themselves to be in such command of their world and their environment and their decisions that they were no longer capable of failure and so I think this notion that our experts and their leaders need to be humble more than they need to be good is really important not to say that they don't need to be good of course to do it is that as we get better and better at what we do we run an ever increasing risk of overconfidence in arrogance and we need to keep that the task of the leader or the expert is to keep that psychological problem in check and they need our help to do that when you think of leaders can you name a leader that you think showed some humility Oh interesting I thought you're gonna ask me the opposite question um a leader who did not that's much easier question to answer well you know it's funny there is a wonderful book written a couple years ago called overconfidence and war by man who tragically whose name I've forgotten at the moment in which he walks through virtually every major conflict of the last 200 years trying to find the humble military leader and he can't find one hurt he can rarely find one in fact the overwhelming preponderance of the leaders he looks at suffered from some kind of major overconfidence so that in that realm it's hard to find what I do you know I but does not say there isn't humility in at all kinds of levels I had a conversation a couple weeks ago I was out of giving a talk and I was seated next to a guy who ran a regional bank in Akron Ohio and I said to him I was talking his business how's your business your banking business he says oh we're fine in fact we're more than fine we're about to Bank by a big bank in Chicago I said why are you fine and no one else's and he he was an older man who's probably in his late 60s and he said I've been through this three times before and what I suspect we've talked a bit and I suspect that he got humbled 25 years ago or in the early 70s or late 70s and never forgot that lesson and it's that kind of it is in times like that that we we understand why experience and learning from experience is so important you know it's more than simply that word is not a kind of meaningless triviality experience matters because there's certain kinds of things that you only learn when you when you've been humbled right you can't just explain to a 28 year old things are going to get bad they're not it's not going to sink in but to this man I was speaking to who you know saw it firsthand and dealt with it and I'm I'm sure went through all manner of crises before it's a lesson that he kept with him you know : Powell before the Iraq war was the he was the in-house skeptic why because he'd been through Vietnam you know you know in a very first-hand way in a way that man of the other decision-makers had not and had never forgotten those lessons so there's a there's another sort of case of someone who appropriately was humbled and learned from from experience and you've got to have people like that around right I've got a stack of stuff here that includes praise and criticism what did what about your own humility after for enormous successes yeah candy this is in ten years it hasn't happened that many times in history yeah I mean what's that do to your head what's that do to your own yeah humility well it's a good question because I have thought about this it does there's no denying that it changes you changes the way your life is changes how quickly people return your phone calls it changes how much money you have in the bank and these are all kinds of things that have both positive and negative consequences I am lucky in a number of ways one is that writers we have built in kind of support systems that do keep us humble I have an editor at The New Yorker Henry fender who you know is not dazzled by any of my book sales and that is if anything more willing today to tell me when what I've written is nonsense than he was ten years ago you know I have a mother who is resolutely unswayed by the opinion of the outside world and who said it actually of outliers she said I've you know in a way that only a mother can I really liked this book meaning I think that she didn't like the first two so much so you know when you have people in your life who kind of keep you in check it's easier and luckily I don't have any kind of real power right I'm not running a major country or investment bank so the kind of damage I can do if I were to get overconfident is limited thankfully has anything directly happened causing effect from one of your articles one of your books stories that come back to you and say this change because of yeah you know the nature of influence that a writer has is very specific we don't change the world what we do is we start conversations and maybe if we're lucky those conversations well down the road are developed and enhanced and some idea gets in the hand of someone who couldn't actually affect change there is a piece in what the dog saw one of my favorite pieces in the whole collection called million dollar Murray about homelessness and it is it describes the work of a guy named Phil Mangano who is and it was an extraordinary public servant in the Bush administration he ran their kind of homelessness policy and he was responsible for dramatically changing the way we treat the homeless in City after City after City he was he was the Paul Revere of this new policy went traveled incessantly for four years making the argument that it is cheaper to solve homelessness than to treat homelessness that the homeless person who stays on the streets costs us all far more money than if we simply were to go and give that person a an apartment you know a someone to watch over them and finally a job and I wrote a piece about his ideas his crusade and also the kind of larger intellectual context in which he was operating I didn't create that movement but I publicized what he was doing and many people in the in that world tell me that it made their work a lot easier to have an argument I kind of fully fleshed-out I went in a national magazine making a case of what they were doing it helped to overcome some of the skepticism that's the way in which writing of the sort that I do is I think valuable and that it helps people who are when I bring when I shed light on something it helps those people who are interested in creating change to make their life a little bit easier there is a woman by the name of Maureen Cassatt mm-hm who writes for the nation and you you know mmm about her she why is Malcolm Gladwell so successful as the title of her piece back in November 23rd of 2009 she says that success is in the I had the unsuccessful would seem to be the great unspoken dilemma dogging critics you need to re-emphasize doggin critics asked to consider the work of the rich and famous author and inspirational speaker Malcolm Gladwell no matter how well-intentioned or intellectually honest their attempts to assess his ideas the subtext of Gladwell's perceived success and its implications for their own aspirations in the competitive thought generation business obscures their judgment and sinks their morale I try I read that I said and his many has many interesting parts and I think she's a very smart person I have to say I have no idea what those two sentences mean so it is a little bit of loss about how to respond to them I don't know what it means that success lies in the eyes of the unsuccesful whatever I mean I've struggled with that a little bit I I said there is a in people who comment on what I do I think there is a sense sometimes that a dissatisfaction not so much with me but with my audience that is the kind of feeling that that they can't believe so many people would so happily kind of collect a what we're going to turn that mic up so you can put it back on it if you can fit it on your oh and I'll read some more here while you're doing that because otherwise it makes a lot of noise anyway in this piece Maureen tacit writes Gladwell maybe merely quote a slickster trickster unquote who markets marketing as James Wolcott put it or a clever idea packager who cannot conceal the fetchers nests of his core conclusions science writer John Horgan he might even be an idiot Liyana weasel tear from The New Republic but one thing is clear Gladwell is no fad he is a brand a guru a fixture at New York publishing parties and in the fields of literary agents hoping to steer writers toward concepts that will strike publishers as Gladwell Ian there's another you got a lot of publishing parties actually if I almost never go to poaching boys that's I'm somewhat reclusive so I think this when you're making a list of when you're setting someone up one of the things you do is you you pretend that they are fixtures of publishing parties I don't I haven't been doing probably in about three years but what about somebody calling you an idiot I mean did you actually see him do that I just see it in oh it was in that's that was Leon Wiesel here of the New Republic who I used to write for I wrote many articles for him years ago he had some of which he put on the cover of The New Yorker of the of the new problem of the New Republic so it's very odd that he would now call me an idiot I don't think I think he meant that probably a little bit Steven Pinker you answered him in a recent picked up this New York Times Sunday Review of Books and you take off by saying it is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Steven Pinker even if in his comments on what the dog saw and he had written a review he is unhappy with my spelling and then you put in parentheses rightly and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism all right what are you getting well he I just wanted to make the point at night and I should say that I genuinely have a lot of respect for Steven Pinker I've read all of his books I thought the language instinct is a classic but some of his criticisms of my writing come from a very particular scientific and ideological perspective that you know all kinds of people who think about intelligence and I do as well you know we're somewhere along this continuum how much of a nature guy are you how much of a nursery guy are you and he's over here he thinks that IQ matters a great deal and it's highly heritable and I'm a big my books are all about the power of culture and environment so I'm over here and I just wanted to say you know when he criticizes me he's doing so not because I'm violating the rules of scientific understanding of what have you just because we're different points on the continuum that's all and it doesn't it's not right or wrong or legitimate or illegitimate it's just a difference of scientific perspective he's a Harvard professor and and you guys go back and forth and emails and you actually write I have enormous respect for Pinker in this New York Times piece and his description of me as a minor genius made even my mother blush but maybe on the question of subjects like quarterbacks we should agree that our differences oh less to what can be found in scientific literature and they do to what can be found on Google yes explain it um one of the things that he had a quibble with in his review was a an essay I wrote about quarterbacks and teachers and it just made this point I was talking about what does it mean to teachers are the single most important variable in education teacher quality explains more of student outcome than almost any other factor you can deal with so the question was how can we get better teachers in the classroom and I talked about how it's really really difficult to predict whether someone's going to be a good teacher until they actually teach right so you can get someone with really great grades and you can get someone who's got all manner of degrees and you can get someone but none of those things are terribly useful in figuring out who's gonna be the all-star teacher and who isn't and so saying the only way you can tell is to have people start teaching and then pick the ones who can do it well and keep them and tell the rest the people to do something else I said this is marvelously analogous to what happens with quarterbacks because if you look at the history of NFL's NFL team's decisions in drafting college quarterbacks you'll see they don't do a very good job of predicting who's going to be a good pro quarterback or not and the reason for that is not that they're stupid or not that they're not trying hard enough but just because the college game is so dramatically different from the pro game that doing well at one doesn't help you predict what's what you're gonna do with the other he had a problem with this and so I I emailed him and I said why did why don't you think why did why are you so sure that NFL teams actually do do a good job of of predicting who's gonna be a good quarterback can you give me your scientific sources because I had a scientific source I had an article in the Journal of of what an article in an economics journal of so he may be back and his sources weren't from the scientific literature at all they were like a blogger and some other bloggers and so I was like why are you attacking me when all your sources are abroad but it was it was meant in it was meant in good fun but it's always you know and there's nothing wrong with having a little bit of a dust-up every now and again going back to your first book the tipping point when was the Malcolm Gladwell tipping point well it was it was getting the job at the New Yorker the minute you start at that magazine and you start getting your audience grows dramatically you start getting read in a way you've never been read before you start getting taken seriously in the way you've never been taken seriously before and you have an opportunity to write about things at a length and a leisure that you never had before so that was it that was clearly I was just I was a I was one of many Washington Post reporters I was anonymous I wasn't you know much of anything and then I got that job and everything changed but at some point along the way I mean tipping point sold a tremendous number of couple million at least beyond that then blink came along and it sold a couple million and then outliers and I don't do you have any idea maybe that's the debt sells well as blinking something happened there that all of a sudden people are quite anxious to get that next bookie right yeah well you get um there is a thing where you know people get comfortable with the way you look at the world so I think of I love that book Freakonomics and what was interesting about that book Freakonomics was that it was a very particular and distinctive way of looking at the world right it was an economist and a journalist who combined storytelling and kind of academic rigor to shed light on stuff that you would never have thought economically an economist had had an interesting thing to think to say about right and so that book I read that book I love that book the new one comes along I see it as a super for economics what do I do I buy it why because that way of looking at the world has they've already lived won me over to their particular perspective on things and it's so unusual and now I know I'm not going to get it anywhere else and so I'm delighted to kind of have another go with them go for another ride with them and I think some part of that is probably what's happening with me is that people read tipping point read tipping point and even if they didn't agree with everything I said I think that they they found something exhilarating or exciting about the way in which I approach topics have you had any analysis done about where your book sell in the country no I never I I never have no I've never you know like to Thursday American people live on this side of the Mississippi and well yeah you know I don't think you know I I don't think of my readers as being defined by geography or class or income I think of them being as defined defined by an attitude I think of them as just being kind of curious open-minded people look I run into them and that's the suit I just get that vibe over when you're invited to speak we're more often than not will you be traveling to what part of the country well all over but you know in in if you do a lot of conventions and company meetings you do them in warm weather places and they're winter so so it's sort of hard that people come from all over to San Diego or something so you're in San Diego but but so no it's a pretty when you think about where they're coming from to hear me it's from all over the country I'm going back to Steven Pinker's original analysis review in the New York Times back in the middle of November the common thread in Gladwell's writing is kind of populist mm-hmm agree hmm pretty much it seeks to undermine the ideals of talent intelligence and analytical prowess and favor of luck opportunity experience and intuition that's a little strong but I wouldn't go quite that far but for an apolitical writer are you an apolitical writer mildly I'm a Canadian like like professor Pinker so our Canadians a political are we just different for an a political rider like Gladwell this has the advantage of appealing both to the horatio alger right and to the egalitarian left mm-hmm you sense that when you're out there at those conventions and speaking of those groups yeah I don't I mean I don't he's right in the sense that I do not I am not explicitly political I'm not interested in playing those kind of familiar ideological games I'm interested in giving providing a kind of different view of things and so I don't it never comes up when I'm talking to an audience political matters and so it's there's no kind of opportunity for people to divide themselves along ideological lines when they're listening to me or reading me because I'm just not we're not touching on those issues you know by the way what the dog saw the current book is a nineteen articles from The New Yorker are you working on another book for the future already no I'm working on articles for The New Yorker I'm not I my day I my day job is my New Yorker reading and I'll I do that in the in the years between book writing but my next book is I'm sure many years away many years now you need an idea a good one you know if I don't have if I never have another good idea for a book I'll never read another book I mean I don't you I don't think you decide to write a book then look for an idea I think you have to have an idea that's good enough for a book and then you go and do it now I'm not gonna put words in your mouth but if you just do a simple arithmetic and you save so six million books and you get $3 a copy that's 18 million dollars hmm you don't have to agree with that but you've made a lot of money what's money Dundee I mean none that my I mean I'm not a very I mean she's often the bank somewhere so I don't really I'm not a big spender I mean I I rent my apartment I have Drive a Volkswagen I'm not a kind of I don't have a kind of extravagant lifestyle but I didn't grow I grew up in a very kind of my family was fundamentally kind of agnostic and its feelings towards money my parents weren't we didn't lack but we weren't terribly concerned with it you know didn't sort of wasn't meaningful and I sort of have the same attitude towards it it's sort of it's fine I mean it's better than not having it but I thought something that makes a great deal difference in how I live my life at one point in one of your books you say that Judith rich Harris author of the nurture assumption changed the way I thought about the world who is she do you know her when did she write the book and what was it she Judith rich Harris is a psychologist who who I wrote about years ago when she wrote a book called the nurture assumption which was an extremely interesting book and what I would I she makes a number of very sophisticated arguments in the book one of which is that when we talk about what we mean by environmental influence so all of us are shaped in part by our genes and in part by our the world we go up in and she wanted to argue and I think she convincingly did so that what we mean by that is really peers and not parents in other words that in parents provide less of an environmental influence on their lives on the lives of their children then do children's siblings friends cohort and she works us out and what appealed to me about that idea was that almost all of my a lot of my writing is about trying to understand the nature of the environment the influence of the environment that's really what I come back to again and again and again outliers is trying to understand success in a context of the world's people are born into generation culture blink is trying to understand what does what's going on around you how does that affect the kind of snap decision you make right so I I keep coming back to this issue and what she did very brilliantly and very early on in my kind of thinking was that she clarified what that means what the environment means and she said even more powerfully that we have only the dimmest understanding of what the environment means right we've been operating on all kinds of using all kinds of of myths that are untested and untried and we need to rethink that really important word and that was a sort of a crucial motivation for me to write some of the books I've written a fellow named Paul Greenberg he writes editorials in his column at the Arkansas democrat-gazette it's conservative papers you can serve your writer he probably has his harshest criticism as I've seen he says Malcolm Gladwell's specialty is the kind of pseudo-intellectual tea designed for the carriage trade and delivered with an air of insight and only the air pretentious ponderous and mostly when it's not just plain wrong headed it's the print version of the most pompous talk-show you can think of it doesn't sound very happy does he he does it I wondered if is that you get a lot of that well I mean your attention you feel pretentious I don't think I am I mean I try not to be I'm from Honduras but I don't know I mean people will read you how they read you and you know you have to a long time ago when I started of writing being a journalist isof had a I I had to kind of sit down and think about how am I going to deal with criticism because criticism as a writer is absolutely inevitable right there's you're always going to have to Paul Greenberg's there's nothing you do about them and the question is what do you how do you want to respond to them and I decided very early on that AI was never going to make it my sign of my own success or feeling that I had succeeded that I that I silence critics I don't sign them I'm not out to convert the world no interest in so doing I just simply want people to engage with my ideas and if they disagree fine the other thing that I just did I decided early on that I was I would I would I would be happy if the people that I cared about people closest to me thought what I was doing was meaningful if my mom likes it if my editor likes it if my best friend Bruce likes it I'm happy and that those are important rules and I think if you if you if you could have some version of that some kind of system for making sense of criticism it's a lot easier to function he goes on in his own piece to quote Joseph Epstein from the Weekly Standard quote so much the Gladwell writes that is true seems not new and so much he writes that his news seems untrue mm-hmm preponderantly what he reports feels more like half and quarter truths because they do not pass the final truth test about human nature they rarely that is honor the complexity of life in prose that never lingers over complication he explains that life is fairly simple no great mystery about it nothing cannot be explained nothing cannot be changed nothing not improved mm-hmm well that's the nod I remember I think I remember reading that you know outliers is for example is I would have thought an example of the opposite phenomenon right I mean I was trying to confront what I thought was a simplistic idea about success and say success is actually far more mysterious and more complex than that it's not simply about talent it's about it matters what you're you're born it matters the particulars of the culture you grew into it matters you know the particular I mean I it's the book is one long attempt to kind of complexify this thing so that's of odd and then we were just talking about quarterbacks and teachers and how the impetus for that article which is in what the dog saw was all about the fact that we cannot predict who's going to be good and we've been trying over and over again to simplify this and make it make it out make out that if you simply have a teacher's degree and a BA and this kind of certification you will be a good teacher and my whole point in that article was actually no you can't predict it you've it's messy you got to let lots of people try and pick the ones that are good and say sadly goodbye to the rest so I feel like I spent a lot of time in my writing doing the opposite to what he's saying University of Toronto yes Canadian history major yes an English history okay well what's the difference between studying Canadian history and studying American history so much how could you say that well what did he mean I'm yeah but what is what what is it that the Canadian history professors are teaching that oh I see that that's the difference in that well we're you know we're a very very minor player in the world so when you learn Canadian history you're really learning the history of everybody else because because everything we do is so hopelessly you influenced by our larger neighbors and larger allies so you learn a lot about England and you learn a lot about France and you learn a lot about America and you learn a lot about all kinds of other places which is useful I think you know I remember as a kid listening to the radio they really listened to the news on the CBC radio every night at 6 o'clock and the thing about the news at 6 o'clock on the radio in Canada is it's all about the rest of the world because it hasn't you Canada you can't you can't give a kind of sophisticated account of what happened that day and confine yourself to a country of 18 million not enough happened of consequence so I grew up as a little kid hearing about Africa and South America in the news every night right all of these places and then you know it's very different though when you're in a country like America where you actually can give the news every night I don't talk about America and not I'm not saying that's a bad thing America is so large and complex and so sits at the center of so much that happens in the world you really can't have a sophisticated conversation about this world that is about America right it's just a matter of where you are and so in Canada we were forced to look out outwards and that's that was a a really wonderful experience for someone who wanted to go into the business of being professionally curious I won't stay on this very long but in this country you hear about George Washington Thomas Jefferson John Adams and on and on who do you hear about in Canada well sir Johnny and McDonald is the man who found his ire who's the the man who made brought independence again Canadian Confederation but you hear about lots of other you know you hear about English kings and you hear about you know it's a it's a my all my memories of of childhood history are just completely I would hear about Michael Manley you know the the founder of Jamaican independence and does your mom cuz of my mom or you know there was just a kind of my father would talk about Henry the eighth to us and you know it was a so it was always out there since we last talked a man named Barack Obama came president on States and and he is like you as a biracial biracial yeah any impact and did did you instinctively like him because he was like you well um and what do you think of him now well I haven't I will confess to being a huge fan of his I would hope not just because he and I are both biracial but um but I you know like many Americans my initial I was initially from fascinated by him bite he's exotic right I mean in a few really is I mean and he has that kind of princely air about him he's really quite a extraordinary you know we had a he reminded me the man he reminded me of was Pierre Trudeau who was you know the great Canadian Prime Minister of the late 60s early 70s who was cosmopolitan and regal in that same kind of way and a little bit aloof you know kind of their their how they have end but charismatic I mean there's really quite some similarities between the two of them but uh unlike many people I was profoundly hopeful that his election represented some kind of turning point in the way we think about race I'm less convinced of that now actually but I was hopeful of that at the time are you very political I'm not I'm like I said it's there's a reason I don't rarely ever talk about politics in my pieces I just don't you know I'm like I say I'm Canadian so I don't really kind of I've never quite wrapped my mind around American politics of all the stories that you've done since 1996 which one did you spend the most time on a very easy one to answer as a piece spin what the dogs are called late bloomers which I took three years to get into the magazine it went through so many drafts I cannot even count how many and it ooze because I had this really interesting idea which was there was a work I read his book by an economist at Chicago named David Gill Anson in which I thought was so fascinating in which he talked about how genius comes in two very different forms he talked about the conceptual innovator who was the person who is the big bold idea and he talks about the experimental innovator who is the person who succeeds creates through trial and error and the conceptual innovator is the is the is the prodigy right and the person who works through trial and error is the late bloomer and I loved this idea so much because he was dignifying the late bloomer which I thought was a there was something wonderful in there but I I had that I had a devil of a time finding the right stories to illustrate that point because I like when I have an academic argument I'd like to find narratives to complete it and just was really hard to find the right ones but sometimes you have to be persistent and you focused on two people I ended up choosing this novelist from Dallas named Ben fountain who wrote a book called a collection of short stories called brief encounters with Che Guevara which is magical and he was my late bloomer he published that book in his late 40s after spending 20 years sitting at his kitchen table in Dallas writing and being rejected and writing and being rejected and my prodigy was Jonathan Safran for you know who you know the the the brightest of the young novelists and who's on the bestseller arrest with unions on the best but I'm non fiction nonfiction yeah yeah what a really interesting book about about vegetarianism and they were they're such fascinating contrasts and they beautifully illustrate what I think David Galen was talking about when he I don't know why don't know why it took me so long to find but sometimes you know that finding the right story is really difficult and you can't you if you rush into print with something that doesn't quite work you throw away a good idea and that's something you should never do one of the people critiquing you suggests that you feel closest to and correct the pronunciation Nassim Taleb yes is that tell us who he is and do ya I wrote a piece about the same maybe four five years ago maybe longer than that 2002 2002 and he didn't a book called fooled by randomness and he was a Wall Street trader who was making the argument that we greatly underestimate the frequency of catastrophic events in our life and we also greatly overestimate our ability to control events the role of we we underestimate the role of luck and overestimate our own kind of efficacy and Nasim is a brilliant man one of the most gregarious and charming and hilarious people I've ever met so I wrote this I you know as one does sometimes when you write a profile I fell in love with a guy I mean who wouldn't he's just so fascinating I wrote a piece about him and then he subsequently wrote a book called the Black Swan which was a huge bestseller and his by the way his ideas so brilliantly kind of predicted anticipated the events of last year on Wall Street I mean he called it I mean he was saying this four or five years ago that the models these traders were using that were they were using to justify these enormous multi-million dollar risks were based on a fiction I mean the seem to said this in 2002 and I do feel I do feel an enormous intellectual kinship I mean we talked about drew three chairs before if I had to list you know the people whose thinking has powerfully influenced mine I would put Missy very high on that list as well he he I think he's right he we we wanna it's part of this desire we have as humans to pretend we are far more in control of things than we actually are we're not respecting the mystery and the complexity of the world we operate in explain though how he made his money with the options oh the same had a had a contrary trading strategy so what he would do is he would basically by what are called out of the money options he would buy a series of options on the stock market which would pay off only if stocks either went up extraordinarily or more importantly dropped extraordinarily in other words he had an investment strategy where 99 days out of a hundred or more actually 499 days out of 500 he lost a little bit of money but then he was just waiting for a crash and when the crash happens he would make you know depending on the size of his position tens hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions in fact I I think the trading firm which he's involved with made year last year made a other fortune but it takes he makes history interesting argument you know it's really hard to do that he wakes up every day knowing that there's a 99.9% chance he will lose money that day right and he's just banking on something with no one he doesn't know when it's gonna happen he's just saying at some point there's gonna be a big catastrophe could be seven years away right which means he will lose money every day for seven years and then make it all back and more on that and that's nobody does that right and what's one of these is so fascinated about him is he tries to get at this question of why don't more people do that I mean it's painful and difficult but it's actually it's a rational it's a very rational way of approaching of hedging your risk in the marketplace right being prepared for Kentucky from arisen as CMAs Lebanese and buddies move he's a American now but his family's Lebanese and he he's you still seem do you know him oh yeah I mean I really know him not long ago and I email him with him sometime and yeah you you know what are the great wonderful things about writing these pieces for The New Yorker is that you me you get to meet these extraordinary people who you would never meet otherwise write and spend time with them and get to know them and keep in touch with them and you know that when I make there's a idea to piece a couple months ago for the New York Roberta this brilliant software mogul in Silicon Valley named Vivek Ranadive who it's all about how he he's Indian and how he what happened when he began to coach his daughter's basketball team and began to coach them as an Indian not as an American he doesn't know anything about basketball so it's all about what happens when someone from outside of our culture discovers one of our when a very very thoughtful person from outside of our culture encounters one of our little close cultural worlds well what does happen is he took this team of 12 year old girls to the national championship but there's another guy who you know when would I have gotten to meet him otherwise I mean you you write a started like that and you you you get to know these people which story did you write that was the easiest you got to it quickly and it just fell on your lap was that the opening piece in the volume is a profile of Ron Popeil the great kitchen gadget entrepreneur and king of late-night infomercials and it was it's one of my favorite pieces I've ever written and it was far and away the most interesting because he excuse me is so effortlessly interesting it was every time you guys are as a journalist it happens once every decade you turn on the tape recorder the person you're writing about starts talking and as they talk you realize I have to do nothing else I just have to go home and transcribe the tape and it's done literally was that way with Ron he just started talking and then I went talk to his cousin and his you know the guy he worked with and one other guy and I just transcribed the tapes and literally just put blocks of text to Helen it was done it was it's amazing sometimes happens it's a it's a miracle what that happens and it's you'll never forget it what are you doing with all those tapes yeah yeah GQ there's somewhere I don't I'm not very organized and so I don't know where they are but there are somewhere box so you're not thinking of the future of a Malcolm Gladwell collection in some library somewhere oh no no I doubt I doubt I'm sure I'll be forgotten long before anyone collects my my belongings one of the things that comes through is that you you know you couldn't go to grad school you say cuz you didn't have gonna upgrade yeah I know I I wasn't I wasn't a superb student so if there was a person you could thank for your writing ability who would that be or did you just come to it well my mom is a writer my mom is old it's a it's a lovely writer living in Canada living in Canada and your dad's still what my dad is my father is a mathematician but he also has a both my parents have a an extraordinary clear and simple way of expressing themselves both in speaking and and and in print and that was always that's my always been my model that if you can express yourself complicated ideas in a clear and simple manner you will people will reach you I know you live in New York City West Village still and intend to live in the United States for the rest your life I don't know I am I like it here I love this country and I have all my friends are here but I if I ended up in Europe one day or back in Canada I wouldn't be terribly surprised here they are there four of them all on the New York Times bestseller list over a period still on after 10 years yeah tipping point blank outliers and what the dog saw now from Gladwell thank you for joining us thank you for a DVD copy of this program call one eight seven seven six six to seven seven to six for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at QA or QA programs are also available as c-span podcasts

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Length: 58min 2sec (3482 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2009