Blocks w/ Neal Brennan - Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Neal Brennan interviews Malcolm Gladwell (Revisionist History, Broken Record, Blink, Outliers The Tipping Point) about the moral dilemmas of responsible journalism, why he doesn't believe in complaining or introspection, playing Monopoly standing up, money anxiety, his lack of jealousy, the attention Gawker gave him, his interview techniques, dinner party conversations, Elvis Presley's mom's toes, Zootopia 2, Derek Chauvin, Trump, Kevin Hart, Trevor Noah, and much more. Listen to Revisionist History: https://lnk.to/RHBlocks 00:00 Why Malcolm isn't introspective 18:49 Sponsor: BetterHelp 20:46 Sponsor: Superpower 23:58 Fame, money, competitiveness & anxiety 31:37 The Gawker Era 35:57 Trevor Noah, Chris Rock and Kevin Hart 44:32 Interview techniques 57:26 Sponsor: Harry's 59:45 Sponsor: BUBs 1:02:21 Zootopia 2 1:04:26 Irv Gotti 1:06:00 Responsible Journalism 1:11:10 Elvis Presley 1:13:15 Derek Chauvin 1:22:09 Trump Thanks to our sponsors! Sign up and get 10% off at https://www.BetterHelp.com/NEAL Head to Superpower.com and use code NEAL at checkout for $20 off your membership. Unlock your new health intelligence. 100+ biomarkers. Every year. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod Our listeners get the Harry's Plus Trial Set for only $10 at https://www.Harrys.com/NEAL #Harryspod Live Better Longer with BUBS Naturals. For a limited time get 20% Off your entire order with code NEAL at https://www.Bubsnaturals.com Follow Neal Brennan: https://www.instagram.com/nealbrennan https://twitter.com/nealbrennan https://www.tiktok.com/@mrnealbrennan Watch Neal Brennan: Crazy Good on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81728557 Watch Neal Brennan: Blocks on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81036234 Theme music by Electric Guest (unreleased). Edited by Will Hagle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guys, he wrote blank, he wrote tipping point. He's got, he does the Broken Record podcast. He does the revisionist history podcast, which I didn't realize I probably listened to, I was going through the list last night, 60 of them. Wow. The seasons are a little inconsistent. You jump genres. Yeah. He's a genre jump.

It's Malcolm Gladwell, ladies gentlemen. The King of the Dinner Party conversation. The dinner party. Starter, would you say? You were, you were, you're inescapable at a dinner party. Your notions. Oh, that's very, you're not, probably not, probably not at the ones you're at as much,

but for, I don't know, 15, 20, I don't know if it's still happening, I haven't been to a dinner party a long time, but, but this guy. Guys, you remember the, that's funny, you heard the term, I did my 10,000 hours? This fucking guy. Anyhow. Not introspective. Not introspective and you said this is interesting.

Because you are a, you're an analyst and a journalist, and all I know about you from listening to the podcast, the family, the cinematic universe, is that you run? Here's what I know by you. You run? Your father was Jamaican? No, mother.

That's how close a listener you are. Somebody was Jamaican. Something Jamaican happened. You are now married. You have children. Yeah. I know you have a place upstate because I've seen you interviewed there. You have a sunroom that I've seen you interviewed in.

Yeah. Is that true? Okay. Canadian? Correct. And you used to write for the Washington Post. Correct. All those, with the exception of you botching the ethnicity of my father.

Horrible. Off by several thousand miles and several degrees of skin tone. Sure. Okay. And so obviously that's not intention. I don't think you think you think you're a boring person. I think you're a confident person. I think you, just by merit of your output,

do you think that why is it, and I also don't think you're ducking anything. Tell me what's happening. You want me to be introspective about my lack of introspection? Yeah, about your lack of introspection. Isn't that by definition, that's the thing I can't do? No, but I think you can. You think I can.

Yeah, I believe in you. You have a lot of, faith in me. I do. Interesting. Well, you know, I didn't know what you mean by the word. I was blocked on the word blocked. Sure. Okay. So, not a word that's in my vocabulary. Not to say that I'm, not to say that I'm, that this never happens to me. I just don't use that word and I'm not around people who use that word. I don't really limit self-limiting beliefs. How about that? Is that one? You might not be new agey enough for the terms self-limiting believe. There is a great, I'm going to change your subject slightly, which is what we do,

those of those who are blocked. There was a great Jesse Jackson speech back in the day. There was a moment in my life when I was obsessed with Jesse Jackson because I saw Jesse Jackson at the, what I knew of him was when he ran for president and the speeches he gave. And won South Carolina, correct? Exactly. That's the thing that people forget. He won. The thing that turned Joe Biden's campaign into a winner. Jesse Jackson won, and then I kind of don't know what happened.

Yeah, he was never going to go much further than that. But he, I saw him speak at the NACCP convention to an entirely black audience, which I'd never seen him do that. And he was a different Jesse Jackson. He was hilarious. And once he was freed of the constraints

of kind of translating his message to an audience outside his community, he was just like, I mean, he was, he did a whole thing on the story of Shadrek, Mishak, and Abendigo as a kind of allegory for affirmative action that was so brilliant and funny, it could have been a stand-up routine. I mean, he was, anyway, I got very in love with him, and he had a speech he used to give at the height of the whole,

there was a time when one of the central racist tropes in America was that black people were lazy, right? They were on welfare. And he had a whole speech where he refuted this notion about how all the black people he knew were the hardest working people, two and three jobs. And the refrain, he always had a refrain. The refrain of his speech was they go to work every day.

And after a while, the crowd would start saying along. His whole point was that's what they, all this is nonsense. And as much as it is preposterous for me to identify with working class African Americans, I can't get that phrase on my head. had never been able to. That's my mantra. You've got to go to work every day. Like, you don't, there's no, you can't stay in bed and you can't daydream. And I realized my parents had pitifies this. My father went to work every day. The dominant image of my life is, without fail,

he would, he worked a lot at home, get up from the breakfast table, go into his study, and he wouldn't move until he had tea with my mother at 11 o'clock. A.m. or P.m.? A. And then you go back to work. and then he worked until like whatever, and then he'd take a dog for a walk. But like, that was the routine. And he wasn't daydream and he wasn't on a phone with friends and he wasn't doodling.

He was a math professor. But like the idea was that there was a certain amount of, there was dignity in that kind of regularity, that kind of routine. And there was no room for excuses, right? Nobody wanted, my dad never said, I don't feel like working today. Were you a good student?

Yeah. I mean, I went to very, I went to schools where the majority of kids would not have gone to college, so it wasn't difficult to be in the... You were in the top five or whatever. Yeah, but yeah, when I put my mind, sure. And did you go to a good university? Well, I'm Canadian.

We have a very small number of universities where they take everybody. You went to McGill? No. You're in Toronto. This is the American default when you... Yeah. I thought I was being key.

I was like, I got it. But I mean, Canadian universities are, University of Toronto has like 80,000 people. It's not a selective school. Got it. But then you started writing the Washington Post, which I would assume is a difficult job to get. Yeah, although when I got it, it wasn't difficult

because they were flush. You know, it was the heyday of newspapers and they were taking lots of chance. I was one of those people that took a chance on. But so, yeah, I happened to come along at the right time. But wait a second. I'm not done with my introspection. My point is, if you have that attitude,

you just have to go to work every day and that there's not a lot of, there's no appetite for complaint, then you can't, I don't think you can get to introspection unless you pass through the portal of complaint. I don't pass through the portal of complaint. Interspection is definitely a, it's a luxury item.

It's a luxury item. But also a life unexamined is not worth living. I read two books this week. Okay. This is very much on point. Book number one was a book by a woman named Mary Kane, who for a time was the greatest young middle distance runner, female distance runner in American history.

She was a prodigy. She's written a memoir about her life as a runner. She's now 30. The second book I wrote was a book written by my wife's cousin, a woman named by the name of Kedisha. Mary Kane grew up in Bronxville. Her dad was a doctor. She went to fancy schools.

She's a straight-day student, grew up in a life of privilege. Kadeja grew up in the projects in Harlem, Manhattanville. Her father was in prison for most of her life. Mother was never there because she was working two jobs. She tells this incredible story. She gets into Columbia, and she puts her belongings into a shopping cart

and pushes the shopping cart down the hill to Columbia from Harlem. And then when she's at, a sample of the story, When she's at Columbia, at one point her mom gets very sick and her two younger siblings are basically alone who are like seven and nine are alone in the apartment in like the one-bedroom apartment in the project. And she goes and fetches them and brings them to her dorm room

in the shopping cart? At Columbia and she has a roommate who she identifies as Erica from Connecticut who she's now living with three people from the projects, right? It's a hilarious story. Anyway, she goes through, at one point, works herself so hard in college that she has to check herself into the psych ward at Columbia Hospital, and they quickly realize there's nothing wrong with her. And they so quickly realize there's nothing wrong with her that they start giving her jobs to do in the psych ward.

Will you go and help out? My point is, objectively, this woman has had an incredibly difficult life, right? Abusive father, blah, blah, blah. There is in this entire book not a single note of self-pity. your complaint. Not a single, it's all like, I dealt with that. She's now, runs business affairs for ABC News. The other book I read about this woman who was born into privilege and was this extraordinarily gifted, incredible, precocious, whatever, is nothing but complaints. Nothing. The whole book is one long complaint about the way she was treated. My point is like,

I don't, many of her complaints were, by the way, legitimate, but I don't have any, I just don't have any time for that. I don't, I don't, I don't, at a certain point, like, do we need to know that you felt hurt by this or, no, like, you're, you're born into, you're born into the 99th percent, you're smart, she's now in Stanford Law School. This is a brilliant, talented, privileged young woman. Why are you endlessly introspecting to the point of right of, right? a memoir about it. I used to be like Mary Kane and now I'm more of a Khadija. Yeah. And here's what I want to, what I would push back on you. You're, what narratives are you telling though?

You're clearly you're analyzing things for you're getting at something. Are you not? Do you not know where you're getting out at the beginning of these books or the beginning of these podcasts or is it simple? Well, yeah. Yeah, like you're, what are you, you're not complaining. Yeah. You're certainly painting pictures of some, they're not neutral.

No. Right? They're, they're, I'd say there's a bend toward justice or something, right? Or righteousness, whatever you want to say. I'm very happy articulating other people's complaints if I think they're legitimate. That's where I'm, if I feel you've been wronged, I feel very comfortable finding a way to express that to the world. But none of your problems.

What problems do I? This is the other thing. I have no patience. I have no patience for people in my position who claim to have problems. I agree. But you weren't always in your position, I guess. I was so much closer to you.

But at a certain point, it became in your life, it's like, you must have been like, well, this is a farce how well these books are doing. Like, this is crazy. Yeah. No. I don't, I don't know. The broader question is, there is no point in my life when I could legitimately have had complaints.

My parents loved each other. In Southern Ontario in the 70s, like the most kind of absurdly, I mean, it's like Switzerland on steroids. It's like there's no crime. There's no social dysfunction. The one. social dysfunctional my high school was there were a handful of kids who smoked cigarettes. That was it. That was the...

Yeah, a couple stolen bikes here and there. I didn't even know if there was that. Yeah. There was... So I don't, like, I can't... This is my point. Like, you don't... I have no license.

And I was acutely aware as a child, even from a young age of... I always knew that I was in a special position. Because I knew we would go to Jamaica where my mom's from. and I would see people who didn't have any money. Yeah. And I was, we used to, this is going to sound corny,

but we would, we subscribed to Life magazine and Time magazine when I read them to cover to cover from as early as I can remember. And those, you know, I was just reading about, like, you know, those magazines were, particularly life in those years,

very much interested in kind of social justice issues. You were aware that, like, there were people in the world, who had a rough time of it. And my mom, who was a therapist, people would come to our house in rural Canada, and they would, from all around, people who knew my mom

or even known, and they would talk to my mother about their problems, and I would listen in. And I was aware, like, oh my God, you know, like, this is somebody who's life is a mess, who is this, you know, I knew it was different from my own life. Like, my point is like it's no room. And I, this, I'll have one that's a point about this. This whole thing about complaint has gotten so unmoored that,

to me, the most striking fact about American public life right now is the freedom that wealthy people feel to express their complaints. This is the thing that I find obscene. Like, what are they, what are they complaining about? Like, they're, you know, they are using the political system to kind of get their grievances addressed. What grievances? I know, they're tiny. It's the narcissism of small differences.

It really is like these are really, really, really, you're really splitting hairs. Yeah. So, like, my point is, in that context, I can't, I am, what I'm saying in a very, very roundabout way is, to my mind, I'm almost afraid to introspect. Because I don't want to come up with, I don't want to unearth my grievances because I know the real. legitimate. Great. I admire that. I admire that in that because it is just a trap. It's fucking endless. And if you, if you, if you, and you at no point can you say like, nah, this isn't real problem. Yeah. Once you start. So we got like 50 minutes left? Probably. You know, we're not doing no, I got, we got to talk about your, oh, you know what? I wrote down this, he's not a block free.

I wrote down one of your blocks that you said on a podcast a long time ago, you were a pointlessly provocative self-denier. Oh, yeah, maybe, yeah. What is that? Well, that I kind of, they are, that was that in the context of how I only drink five liquids? Yes, it might have been. Yes. I like to fill my life with arbitrary rules, just for the sake of arbitrary rules.

And because I believe that, you know how Obama would always say that he would, eat three almonds, that thing? No, no, no, no. He had a limited wardrobe and he would lay out someone to lay out. He didn't want too many decisions. Didn't want too many decisions. I read that, I was like, oh yeah, that sounds great. That's exactly what I believe that.

I think you should, you know, the amount of mental energy, I'm standing in a, I do this all time, spend a lot of time in coffee shops. You're standing in line and there's someone in front of you and they get to the head of the line and the prison says, what do you want? And they go, um...

Yeah. This just drives me and say, first of all, they were online for 10 minutes. They could have figured that out. But secondly, how do you not know what you... It's almost as if they look at the full menu of options

on the wall and everything's in play. How can everything be in play? How could you, in that moment, standing at the register, feel that there is a strong possibility you might have. I could get anything.

Yeah. I'm the kind of person who would order anything. Ice water. You think you go. No, no, no. But that's the, that's your... And they look at the full array of pastries,

the 20 pastries, and they are as open to the oat muffin as they are to the plain croissant. How can you be as open to the oat muffin as you order to the plain croissant? Surely you have a preference

going in. Like, I find this, my kids instantly know, they don't... How old are your kids? Two and a half and four and a half. And they know, because every, they know what they want to eat? Oh, my God. Do you, if you rolled my daughters into a coffee shop and you showed them the pastry case,

they would just point of the one they want. Do they know what, do you guys overrule them? Because a lot of times they want the wrong one. Well, they're so certain. And they tend to have good instincts. I don't know. I tend, I don't like to overrule them. I feel like they should be given their, they should develop preferences.

Yeah, but a lot, they never go like, uh. They don't do that? No, they tend to, but that's fine, too, because they're learning what they like. I don't have... Do you get them another one? No, because I would no longer be in line, would I? No, look, I agree, but now they're crying. I'm not doing the thing where they're trying.

No, I know with that. Now they're crying. I mean, what do you... They're not crying. They're like, generally what they do is... They go, huh, I'm a reasonable young lady. And I've just learned something about it. No, no, my children are the furthest thing from angels.

Got it. But I don't feel, I see them, they'll do as they take a bite, and they'll say, Daddy, will you hold this? Meaning, that's sufficient. That's all I need. I've investigated this particular. Didn't work. Yeah.

But they're quite, they'll go and they'll say they'll want the croissant. They're not going to go. When you guys cook lunch, lunch, breakfast dinner, do they like what you gave them? Do you ask what they want? Ask beforehand. Okay. What are you interested in? They have a limit, but there's a limited, and things are rejected that are.

absurd and they they choose from the from the menu I mean you know do you want broccoli or do you want yes I guess you know how do you feel about vessels breath tonight that kind of right this show is sponsored by Better Help guys you know May is mental health awareness month isn't for me every month is except December and I I don't even think about my mental health it's a reminder of the whatever you're going through you don't have to go through it alone life is a Some days feel good, others feel overwhelming, whatever's keeping you up at night. It's easy to feel like you have to figure it all out on your own.

But the truth is, no one has all the answers and no journey should be alone. Having someone with you to listen to understand and support you can make all the difference. Look, dude, if you're stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, you know what's interesting? The thing that people come up to me on the street more than anything is saying in three mics that I had feel like I was wearing a weighted vest. That's what those are the shit like that's the thing. And that was 10 years ago I said that. And it's still true. Less so because of, you know, the stuff I do and because of therapy.

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You like, you got to wait. You got to call. You just feels powerless. You got to email. You got to email again. You don't really understand the information. They tell you to drink water, take some out. It's pointless.

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our listeners get $20 off to unlock their new health intelligence. Head over to superpower.com and use code NEAL for $20 off your membership. That's code NEAL. And after you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about Superpower. Do us a favor if you could and tell them blocks with Neil Brennan sent you to support the show. I'm very much in love with you. Bye. Okay, so this is what I was going to ask. So what did success due to you. You don't, it seems like you just kept your head down. No? Yeah, I mean, it changes the materials. It changes the things you worry about. Say more. I grew up in a household that was very worried about money. And it relieves that source of anxiety, which is not a trivial thing

at all. So in that sense. Did you find that my experience has been, if you have a, you know, just an amount of anxiety your body wants to experience, secrete. whatever you want to say, and then money goes away. Something else, you think. Everybody else just moves up. Death. Oh, death's, you know, just stuff you wouldn't, it's a hierarchy of needs thing where he's just like,

okay, money's off the list, okay, what about people stealing money? Or, you know, what about, you know, like, what have you found? Well, you know, I do, do I wake up at three in the morning with a pit in my stomach less now that I used to. to know, I think I still wake up at three in the morning as much as I ever did, which is to say maybe once every two weeks. Let's say, that's a lot. Yeah, yeah.

Some would complain about that, Malcolm, but not, yeah. No, I'm not complaining. It can be quite productive. The, buddy, I would say, I generally agree with the, what you're talking about is anxiety homoostasis. Yes. I agree with that, but I think money's in its own category. So I think actually, you know, if we do that,

We don't believe that. If we didn't believe was money, money was in its own category, then we would have very, very few reasons to want to do anything about economic and equity in the world. The reason we are motivated to do something about that is we do believe money is its own special category. You can relieve it. You can relieve money worries and leave people better off. They're not just going to backfill it with something else. But other kinds of worries, I do very much think it's, I think when you stop worrying about your kids, you just worry about something else just moves right in. Yeah. So that form of, but there's a big difference between kind of material needs and kind of psychological needs, I think. What are you, I don't want to trick you into some blocks, but what are your psychological needs? Look, I'd far be it from me.

But if you were going to write down some psychological issues, you have, what would those be? Are you an over-rege, are you competitive? Do you run? I would like to, by the way, I looked at, I did the math on how fast the guy, the marathon guy the other day? Oh, yeah, yeah.

How fast he ran? Sebastian saw, yeah. 13.4 miles an hour for 26 miles. Yeah, phenomenal. Run at, put your treadmill on 10. You're going to think you're... Way faster than 10. 10 is 16 miles.

Right. So he was running 13.6 miles now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And I'm telling the list of, go on your treadmill and go on and just run at 10, and everyone's going to think that you're in trouble at the gym. You're going to look like the biggest, what we used to call spas. Yeah.

Yeah, he's awfully fast. Yeah. Anyway, so are you competitive? Do you check your numbers? Do you check your book sales? Do you check your hits? Do you check? I think I did it in the beginning.

I don't really much. anymore. I mean, I'm, my competitive, my friends would say I'm, I'm competitive about, like, board games. Like, if you want to play Monopoly with me, I, I stand up when I play Monopoly. I don't even, I can't even sit. Where is everybody sitting on the floor? Where is everyone? I play a lot of Monopoly as a kid, and we, we deregulated Monopoly. The problem with Monopoly is that it's a kind of, it's a game conceived during the Depression. And so there's all these regulations. Well, you know that you watched the documentary about it.

I'm assuming you made the documentary about it. I've never watched the documentary. Oh, it's, it was made, it was like socialists. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they rewrote the whole thing. Yeah. Parker brothers have it. Yeah.

So my friends and I'm growing up in high school, we deregulated the game. So we think you should start with $1. Because there's no strategy if you start with $1,500. You just buy everything. You land on, right? Right. That doesn't make any sense. That's not real.

What it should be, you should have to earn money, and you borrow from the bang. And your games would take months, correct? No, our games took, well, we were all standing. So our games would take like an hour. We would do like three in an afternoon. How does starting with a dollar speed the game up? Well, it depends how quickly you play.

And also, so you're not making... Do you guys have the timer? No, there's fewer transactions. The problem with the traditional manipulative games is too many transactions. Yeah. So like we slim, you only have to think long. and hard, I land on Park Place, and my buying Park Place early in the game. No, I'm not. Makes no sense. Would you buy a luxury condo at, you know, 21 years old? No, you wouldn't. If you buy it at all,

you buy it at the end of your life and your kids are gone and you actually money saved up, right? So like, we've stripped the game down to its essence, which is serious, consequential, difficult economic decisions. And when you could finance and you could, we created what I realize now were derivatives, you would create these highly structured deals with your friends about who got the rights to a property if you landed on it, how many, you know, free, we call them free soaks, how many freebies would you give if you land on a property? I could grant you in exchange for some money, you could land on my property three times and never pay any rent, that kind of thing. Anyway, we created this whole elaborate. Was I competitive at that? Totally, massively. Are you jealous?

No. I've actually, that's the one thing I've never, I've never, I don't, that's the one thing I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I've never understood it. Why do you want something someone else has? Because it makes you feel insecure. It's just a resource reaction. But you know, my friend Bruce once said brilliantly that the cure for jealousy is you can't, you can't be jealous of an aspect of someone's life. You have to be jealous of their whole life. And once you do that, you're like, well, I don't want... Yeah. I'm jealous.

Generally speaking, don't want any of it besides the one thing. Yeah, yeah, no, like, so... I don't want my life. Like, do I wish I was as... Could create music as brilliant as Jay-Z? Yes. Do I want J-Z's life?

No. Not for a second. I don't want to be, like, trapped in... Go to sleep with Beyonce? Blah. No, but he's trapped. He'd be trapped in an escalate about entire life. Yeah.

You can't go anywhere. Yeah. Like, they didn't go somewhere. He had the Mayback at one point. I'm sure he hasn't Maynock. I'm sure he still does. No, he drives to school. He would drive Blue Ivy to school.

Really? Yeah. In LA. It's easier in LA. Yeah, yes. What are we doing here? We gotta get out of here. Well, okay, well, that's my next.

Okay. What are you... So, did you chase success once you had it? So it seems like you have pretty good hygiene in terms of... It's just about the work and not about the result. Yeah. you didn't, you didn't, blank, typically, you weren't like, oh, I like being a good source of money

for myself and for the publisher and the nothing. Well, there was, I knew, there was a moment long, happily long past, there was a moment where I was sort of zeitgeist, in the zeitgeist. I didn't like it. Oh, interesting, tell me about that, because that's what I was talking about the king of the dinner party. That's when. Yeah, that I did.

I found that, that was uncomfortable. I didn't want, that was, remember the, you know, in the age of Gawker? I was in Gawker a lot. Yeah, you'd be having dinner in the West Village, I remember that. Yeah, oh, they'd say something snarky about me. And I don't, so I had, I achieved a level of celebrity such that I could make Gawker. In other words, it's not real celebrity. Yeah.

I had Gawker celebrity. It's like local New York media. Local New York media celebrity at a time when people cared about in local New York media, which they don't anymore. But by people, you mean local New York media. Local New York Media cared about local media. Yeah. I did not like, that was a moment when I thought that was.

Yeah, I wonder what you thought of that. Because it didn't seem to suit you. Listen, fine. And by the way, it made me, someone passively reading it, resent you for, it seemed like you liked it. But meanwhile, it's like, no, you're just a guy eating. Yeah. But maybe it seemed like something you wanted to be in Gawker or something.

Yeah. No, and it, I don't think, it's uncomfortable. That level of kind of visibility is uncomfortable. And also, it wasn't well-intentioned attention. Right. It was. It was, they were hate watching him. Yeah.

And so that passed, thankfully. And I'm much, ever since the past, I've been like, I feel like I'm back. Back to what? Back to doing, just like doing stuff. No, no, in your, in your everyday life, you're back. You experience it differently? You experience your day-to-day differently. Yeah, I felt like it was more equilibrium.

There's less... There was a member... I remember the worst thing that ever happened was I wrote an article for the New Yorker, and I made an egregious error. I quoted Charles Murray, highly controversial race theorist. And I quoted him as... I know why I'm laughing.

It was such a terrible thing to have done. I quoted him, and in his statement, he had the word not. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I left out the not. I read the statement and assumed that he was saying something horrifically racist. Yeah. In fact, he was in that, although he said many things that are really racist. And I wrote this up in a New Yorker article, and then fact-checking missed it.

So normally, fact-checking would have, they were incredibly, they missed it, got into the magazine, was horribly embarrassing. And then somebody, I don't know who, told Gawker that fact-checking had caught it, and I had shouted them down. Overruled. Ovalrous. No, I want the error in the magazine. And Gawker went to town, and I remember getting, remember Nick Denton used to run it, and I remember

getting a call on my cell phone at like 6.30 in the morning. an angry, a hostile Nick Denton. Why did you do, what did you do this for? We're running a piece. I was like, this is just, first of all, it's wrong. And you had no interest in whether I was, but secondly, it's just harassment. It's just like, why are you calling it 6.30 in the morning?

Like that was just, I was just like, why do I want this? Like, I don't, you know. And that's why you funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit. Okay, so you did, okay, that's, I'm happy to know it. You read, you see, how do you see yourself now? Do you see yourself as a humble, everyday go-to-work writer? Because there's also a lot of performing in your job now. Yeah.

You're like a vocal performer. I like, you know, yeah. I mean, I kind of, I like that. That's the aspect of podcasting that I like. That it is, I like the kind of, I've been giving, you know, I like game. I'm very comfortable. Ever since I was a kid, I was always comfortable public speaking. I was watching, did you work for the Daily Show?

Might remember correct? Yeah, a little bit. For more on this, we turn to my good friend, Neil Brennan, everybody. So I was watching the new Trevor Noah special on Netflix. I wish I really liked. And he does something. I'm a huge fan of his, for many reasons, but one of the reasons is his comedy is a means to an end.

It's not an end in itself. I could be wrong, but that's how I read it. I read that in that latest special, joy in the trenches, He's making a series of actually very serious and moving points, and he's surrounding it with really funny bits so we can get to the serious moving point. That's how it felt to me. And that feels like when I was watching it, I was like,

oh, I've enormous respect for this kind of performance. He's got a very serious and thought-out goal in mind and message he wants to transmit. And he has applied his craft to putting it in a form where, well, you'll accept it and take it seriously. And he surrounded it with all this brilliant, you know. I was like, oh, that, you know, you asked earlier

was I feel jealous. I don't feel jealous, but like, I watched that special and I was like, oh man, if I could do that, that would be awesome. Well, he's got like a spirit. By the way, he had blocks, ADHD. He had real blocks, ADHD, apartheid, which, you know, you would never complain. A little thing called... Yeah, whatever.

So, yeah, he's an incredibly gifted performer. Yeah. Like, you know, like beyond. But making a larger... But it's a very specific... I mean, this is the kind of territory that I'm sure you know far better than me, but... Journalism? Go ahead. Comedy.

There are the people who are sort of effortlessly funny, and then there are the considered comedians. Yeah. So Chris Rock seems to be considered. Dave Chappelle seems to me the other category. He just seems to be funny. Like, I feel like he... You know what's funny?

They're both more of the other than you think. Oh, really? Yeah. That's interesting. It's like any... It's like me and Dave do the show. Everyone thinks I'm structure, and he's madness. and there's that's true yeah but it's nowhere near as true as you'd think like he can

ideate structure look yeah and i can be crazy but people would never believe it because like look at me and look at him yeah he's bugs bunny and i'm fucking elmer fun yeah um but yeah and chris is the same chris you think chris is all chris's best jokes to in my not not they're not jokes he's on camera, but like he said shit to me that's so fucking funny and so, like, wet and loose that you wouldn't, like, you'd go, there's no way that guy, that metered autistic guy said that. Yeah. He seems all autism.

And he's, he is, but he's more. Yeah. Maybe what I'm saying is the kind of that I'm projecting. The kind of comedy that I feel I understand is the metered considered part. That's, I don't understand. Well, that's the writing part.

Yeah, that's the part. Yeah, that's the writing. Yeah, that's the writing. Yeah, that's the writing, which is, both Dave and Chris can both really write. And, like, I pitched to Chris one time when he goes, too many words. Like, that, you just talk about, like,

Huh? Like, grid. Too many words. Where it's Dave would be like, I don't know, man. Yeah. He wouldn't. Well, how about this as an example of the years ago, I did a television commercial for Audible with Kevin Hart. Hey, Malgum, you know that Audible's got a lot more than audiobooks? Of course.

Basically, two days. It's two days. And Kevin Hart arrived five minutes before. I had never read the script. Never a script. but he committed it to memory, I guess, with he said he has a... With the teleprompter? Go ahead.

No, no, no. But he was so funny, he was funny for... It was two 10-hour days, whatever it was, two 10-hour days. He was funny for 16 consecutive hours or over the question of days. So funny that at the end,

I was exaught, like my entire body just ached. And this was true of everyone on the set. He just... It was an endless stream of... And it built. It was almost like, It was all jokes from, it's all material that he could have created out of the situation. We were in and the things we were doing.

And it built over the course. And by the end of the second day, it was just, it was almost unbearably funny. And I was just like, this is, gee, what I'm witnessing. I don't understand it. It was, he couldn't have, he didn't prepare anything. He just showed up five minutes so he started and just manufactured. And he created these fake antagonisms of people on the set. And like, the whole thing was just masterful.

But it was all, it seemed to be, like, jazz improvisation of a sort I'd never seen before. Yeah. I mean, that's genius. Yeah, Kevin's really funny. Like, he's just really funny. But there are things where, like, I would say, if you're good at writing, if you can write and perform,

you can get a billion dollars. from comedy. Yeah. And certain people can really write, and you can get, you can make a great living. Just, I perform to, but like, mostly, my performances are basically

reading, reading things I've written. Do you know what I mean? And like, whereas Chris, Dave, Kevin, Trevor, Malaney, you know, I could, you know, Jerry, these guys are, it's, but Seinfeld complain on this podcast, He's like, do you ever hear this on stage while you're performing?

Why are you doing this? You shouldn't even be on stage. You should just be a writer. You're obviously just a writer who is performing these things. And I was like, are you talking about me? He's like, no, I'm talking about myself. Even he thinks he's just a writer. Yeah.

So when you see someone that's like Kevin, who's like charisma, where you, when you see someone as charismatic as Kevin, you go, oh, I've never seen charisma before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never even been around. around charisma. It's like there's a lantern to my right. Yeah. Like I direct some of the Chase commercials with Kevin, and it's like, Hey, Neil, you can earn 3% of drug stores.

Buddy, I'm right here. Why are you yelling? I know how much he makes, and I go, this, he's worth it. You cut to him and it's sunshine. Yeah, it was worth it. He's whatever, whatever he was making for the audible ads. I would have, if I had been them, I would just have filmed the two days, edited them lightly, and just put that out. Why wouldn't they Just put it on YouTube. It was the biggest advertisement for Audible ever seen. Just run six hours of it. I mean, it's hilarious.

Because, well, because, you know, ad buys. But I'm with you. I completely agree. I mean, so you are, you admire good performers. But I will say you're a good performer for what you do, for what you're trying to do. Yeah, but I'm only doing, my point is in this, making this distinction is I'm on that.

The only kind I can understand it, intellectually is what I perceived Trevor to be nowhere to be doing in joining the trenches. Yeah. That I can make sense of. The Kevin Hart thing, in a million years, could never do that. And I'm just, it's a, it's a, he's a kind of a category that I, just am overwhelmed by. I just find, like, I don't understand where that comes from, the magic of it. It, like, doesn't, the writing doesn't matter.

Yeah. No, there's something. And he's made movie after movie proving that. I'm going to cut this out, I'm pretty sure. Kevin, God bless you. Kevin's an avid listener, I'm sure. Okay, so you, so you, what made you, do you feel like you've switched to podcasting? What's your time allotment now?

I'm assuming 20 years ago you write 95% of the time and then you do press. 5%, and now it's, or media, and now it's, how much are you just sitting, writing to be read? Oh, it was never, writing to read, it was never a large portion of my day. No? Because I do, there's so much, the largest portion is simply the reporting. Oh, okay. Are you still, okay, break it down for it. So it doesn't, in that sense, it's unchanged.

Although what has changed in podcasting, the volume is greater. So now, and also back in the day, almost all the reporting you did was in person and now you do so much online. So the number of people that I talk to in your interview in the span of a given month is probably 3X what it was 20 years ago. It's just like the volume.

You have a staff now, I would assume, right? I have a team of people who have work with me, but I do almost all my own reporting. I always have. Do they do pre? interviews or reporting or... No, I don't believe in pre-interviews. I think if you, no, I really, I mean,

the reporting is the most fun of all. Like, I don't understand why anyone would want to give that up. Like, that's the interesting thing, is sitting down. And I've gotten much better. I was now, in, early in my career, I don't think I was a very good interviewer. And I think in recent years, I've gotten much better. And I'm now, I'm actually quite, I'm quite proud of my...

How have you gotten better? better, do you think? Just practiced. What's the, what do you practice? I mean, obviously, get reps, but what does reps get you? Well, it's getting a feel for the kind of understanding the, you need to very quickly evaluate who you're talking to and what, for example, are they willing to play?

So are they going to be, do they want to kind of deliver a very straight and narrow message? In which case, what you're doing is you're just setting up the interview so that it flows logically, and they get a chance to put all the pieces that they need to put together enough. I did an interview yesterday with a friend of mine, actually, who is incredibly articulate. That's the way he thinks. It's no digression. He spoke in complete paragraphs. It was kind of like, or I interviewed, you know who I interviewed recently?

He was fascinating with Sebastian Younger. The war reporter? Yeah. Yeah. Who is one of the most articulate people I have ever. And interviewing him was such a delight because you just, you just basically press go. Yeah. And then slightly oriented him in the direction you wanted him to go.

And he just, it was, the last person who was that, I mean, years ago I met Brian Eno. The only person who in memory is articulate as Sebastian Young. as Brian, you know. They both spoke. It was uncanny. At the end of it, I turned to my producer. It was like, Nino, what did we just listen to? This was like, it's perfect paragraphs.

It was like, at this weird choice, it is like. My issue with people that do that, again, I'm probably guilty of it. I have a lot of friends that are guilty of it. Is it feels not, I don't want to say stale, but it feels like this is, this is material. It's a thing we call in, like, he's working a bit. Yeah.

Like, he's working a bit. He's at the, he's at dinner doing a bit, and it's a bit sweaty. Yeah. So what I want to, so Brian Eno, you're sweating. No, but what I'm saying is, are they, are these new thoughts that they're laying out articulate? They're not just rehashes.

So it's not, so with my friend yesterday and. And Sebastian Younger. Sebastian Younger. I don't feel like I was, we were in well-rehearsed territory. Okay. We were doing some things that were, Though my friend yesterday, I hadn't, I don't think he'd had an extended conversation with anyone about. He'd experienced, we was talking about a medical thing he went through.

He'd obviously talked about it with his wife. Right. But he hadn't, he's not, he hadn't kind of put it all together. Yeah. He just put it together really beautifully. But anyway, understanding it, oh, that's what this is. This is a person who thinks this way. But then there's another person, there's another kind of person who has a long continuum. But at the other end of the continuum is the person, the person is the person. who will play, who will digress, who will jump around, who will say something that just popped into their head that's magic, who will, and there, what you don't want to do

is constrain them in any way. You want to kind of like, just keep offering them, like, you know, gold, frankincense and mur, right? Encourage them to like go wherever they want to go. And like, those are decisions that we made really early on. And sometimes I witness an interview, and I'm like, oh my God, God, did you not understand? You've read this person wrong.

Why are you constraining them? They don't need to be in a box. Or, ultimately, why are you pushing this person to play? They don't want to play. They want to, like, lay it out. So those are extreme examples. Do you think that your job as an interviewer is to... Because my thing is always like,

just say something you have... Because everybody gets interviewed so much now. Right? And I'm just, like, longing for people to sit... Like, just sit... What have you not said? Do you know what I mean? Like just say something or I hope to like shake the person enough

to just like knock out some shit that they're... With directing. Sometimes I will make people just do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again. So that they're irritated with me. Yeah. And then the performance will be different. I did this... It's funny.

It's funny you say that because I did... I've been interviewing this guy who runs the ICU at Emory Hospital. And I met him because he was, we interviewed him for the Alabama murders, this podcast series we did. I do this sometime in time. I just asked him if we could just keep talking.

Yeah. I'd like to have one of these keep talking projects going on at all times. I've like done about four or five of them over the years. What does that mean? Do you just see what comes of it? Yeah, I just say. And what's come of it?

Well, I'll tell you. Like once every couple weeks, he gives me two hours. Sometimes he comes to New York. I want us to go to Atlanta. I've done this with a series of people over the years. We started doing this some months ago, and we ended up duplicating a story that he told me when I first met him about his mom.

But the second go-around, and I'm not sure he remembered that he told me the story the first time, but I did. I was so happy we did it again. I didn't stop him because in the repetition, and the fact that the context was different, and the fact that I was like, oh, I remember the story now. And I pushed, you know, I could, I could nudge the conversation in different ways.

The story got so much, it was all about his mom. And we uncovered this whole other layer. The first time around, he gave me the standard story about your mom. And the second time around, he did something much more, something so moving. And like, I was like, Jesus, I'm so glad we did this. But it's just that you can't, if you're talking about moms, for example,

you're never going to get, you're never going to get to the real story about your mom the first time around. You're going to have to repeat all those stories. And like, you know, if I started talking to you about your mom, there's no way we're getting to the truth of it in this conversation. I've got to come back. Same thing with my mom. You're not going to get. It's too complicated. And I felt like I didn't get to the core of it, but I got this layer that was,

It's just, it was, at the end of us, like, that is fantastic, what we just did. I have two things I wanted to share, which is, you ever see we did the Rick James, Charlie Murphy thing? You're welcome to any chick looking at the whole side of his face, man. I'm Rick James, bitch. So, I directed it, and the Charlie tells the story, right? And we, I filmed him sitting in a director's chair,

and he had like sunglasses on and I kind of lit it cool and then I showed it to my editor friend Bajan and he was like he's like this was better the way you told me it like a month ago so Charlie told me the story and then I repeated it and then we filmed it him sitting down and he suggested like you might want to reshoot this and it was like the first thing I directed on the show and I was like oh, this is, this makes me look, but I, but we re-filmed him telling the story, and I made him stand up. We go hang out with Rick James today, you know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. And it completely transformed.

No, that's interesting. His presentation. Yeah. Because telling a story sitting down and telling a story standing up are completely different, especially on camera. because no one's really standing on camera, like, talking for 25 minutes. But, and it was, it just changed the entire dynamics of everything. The thing of the long conversation, do you have an idea at the beginning, or you just go, there's something here with this person?

There's something, it's this, this thing about, if you're willing to spend time with somebody and to give them to extend that courtesy, to them, they will reward you. They'll give you something back. And I think that's the, you know, not to bring this back to comedy again, but when I was watching that Trevor Noah special, it's like, we gave him an hour, right? We didn't say, unless I'm laughing at porousy in five minutes, I'm out of here. Yeah.

Well, a lot, I mean, that's. We'll do that. Or when people, you have an hour, I'll play it at 1.5 speed and you have 35 minutes. Those of us who are fans of his, what we tell him is, he knows this when he's writing that special. He knows that I'm going to, I am committed to giving you an hour. Yeah. You've won that from me. And that frees him up to go all kinds of interesting places to say, to be really moving, to be, you know.

Yeah, he's built a lot of. things because he's known for his biography. Yeah. His autobiography, or his autobiography, so, like, it gives him more latitude in terms of speed, pace, theme. Don't you find that really, really beautiful? Yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome.

Bernie Max told somebody, you don't have to be funny for an hour, you have to be interesting for an hour. Yeah. But it's just hard, because if you're used to laughs, you get itchy. if you're like, I got, say some dumb shit here. I was, I thought that whole thing was,

that I think about, like in storytelling about how far can you push the kind of meat of it? Like, how long can I make you wait? It's a central issue. I would assume every episode of your podcast are like that. It has that issue, yeah.

What's your, you just have an internal compass? I mean, that's one of the things I don't think I'm usually wrong about it. I mean, that's the thing that we've, in the editing process, all of us and the team get together, and that's what we kind of, one of the main things we argue about. And invariably, my first draft, second draft, are, it's in the wrong place.

Too long. I'll wait forever. And I have to be reminded that you can't wait forever. Chappelle one time said, Neil would cut me out of the show if he could, because I'm like, let's go, go. Fucking nir. Like, we can, let's, sure, we got 21.30.

Let's, yeah, yeah, you. I like it nice and tight. Guys, the world's better. Just everything. I mean, people seem to be worse, but technology and equipment, it's better than it's ever been. Phone is incredible. That's why you love it so much. your car saw a lot of them parked themselves your headphones cancel noise what does that even mean your razor a lot of them not great flimsy overpriced kind of 2008 style it's where harry's plus comes in okay harry's plus you know they got it's a good razor it's got three blades it's got a it's got a moisturizing strip it's got uh it's got like a it's it's got a weighted handle and uh uh it's uh it's it's got a weighted handle and uh, uh,

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cover to protect your blades on the go. Just head to Harries.com slash N-E-A-L to claim this offer, and after your purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. I'm in love with you. Goodbye. Guys, look, which one of my joints is doing the worst? I'm going to go with, well, I used to have frozen shoulder, got rid of it. Recently, it's been the hips.

Hips are tricky because you don't really, I guess it's like the bald joint. Is that the hip joint? Yeah, they're a little stiff. But, but they want me to say that my skin has lost. of its natural goal i don't believe it but i will say like this thing this this beautiful specimen you see before you is not popping like it once was i'm not gonna i'm not gonna lie to you i've never have why start now why does this happen well because of collagen so your natural collagen production begins to decline in your mid 20s which i'm just coming out of for those who don't know

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It wasn't crazy. It was just kind of like, eh. So they're telling me I look like I'm in my 20s again. So that's pretty good. My mobility's good. Yeah, workout. My recoveries are good. Skin, you tell me.

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history is a lot about Hollywood. Well, we told that Zootopia story. I thought that was hilarious. I was on both sides of that. I, like, every movie gets sued. Yeah, but not every movie. I know, it is one of these weird. It's so weird and pointless.

That's what I was listening. I was like, this is, I don't even know what, not your exploration of it was pointless. I was like, why did they do this? Yeah. Because it's not even petty. It's like weird. Well, the Mormon, the whole Mormon twist at the end

is what that whole thing's about. It's the idea that we discover what is, you know, it's just unclear. We're just, we're, the idea that we're taking the head of animation for Disney, and we are crafting this incredibly elaborate theory as to why he wrote, Zootopia 2, the way he wrote, where he has no input in it. It's like, we don't call him up. We just, we're like, we're talking to friends of his dads.

I mean, it's just like, the whole thing was just so deeply hilarious for me. It's like, and he can't say any. You know, you can't say anything. You have a, how do you feel about, I mean, I'd seem, I'd seems like you, by what you just said, you enjoy an unfalsifiable theory. Yeah. Does it, is it not irresponsible? You don't think it's irresponsible as a journalist. It'd be like, this might be, here's.

It's not journalism. That, those two, it's a yarn, you know, that's, no, I got it. They're like a, there, it's a bit of a, there, it's a bit of a, What my, my dad was very fond of shaggy dog stories. It's a shaggy dog story, right? And really, you know. Yeah. Okay.

The, the, the, J-Lo, Erv Gotti one, I just listened to. This is all under the rubric of revisions. Oh, but is it revisionist history? Yeah. Okay. So this season's about mistakes in their Hollywood. That's just about hearing Irv Gotti's voice. Yeah.

Which is amazing. Yeah. Those records was colossal, not just in. the States on the planet Earth. I don't give a fuck if you went to Germany, Australia, Africa, that shit was in the heavy rotation. And for me to do unreal and then said, fuck

it and didn't, ain't it funny? At that point in my life, I was like on top of the world. It was a feeling of invincibility. It was a feeling of I could do whatever the fuck I want. Your response to the fact that the writer of the

I was surprised by the idea that you would have cut a thing out of an interview if because the interviewed person didn't want it in. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That, is that journal? Is that the, are those the rules? Because, so basically, Irv Gotti said something in an interview

and it ruined a relationship with J-Lo, right? And basically he heard before it went to print, this is in 2002, that, it was going to be in a lore magazine and he called the writer and was like, could you cut it out? And the guy was, or they called the fact checker. And the guy was, and the fact checker was like,

no, we can't get rid of it. No, you said it. And I thought that's what, so is that, if you keep something, is that automatically gotcha journalism? Or is it? Well, it depends on who you are and why you're doing it. So, in my, my kind of journalism, just not all kinds of journalism,

but in my kind of journalism, if I'm interviewing somebody, I'm interested in accurately representing who they are. And in the course of any conversation you have with anyone, there are moments, particularly taken out of context, when people do not accurately represent who they are, right? You know, I rarely lose my temper. Recently, I'll loss my temper.

If you were to have recorded me the episode of me losing my temper and run it, it's not an accurate representation of who I am. It's an aberration. And if you were going to write an article about me and you would use that, you should check with me and you should say, Malcolm, I'm representing you to the world. I am trying to accurately give people a sense of who you are. Is this an accurate sense of who you are?

And I would say, I don't think it is. I haven't actually lost my temper since 1989. This is unusual. If you're going to use it, you should say Malcolm has been, if you're going to use it, but better, don't use it at all. I extend people that courtesy because I don't want, I'm not interested in. What if it's Pete Heggsaf?

No, if he says, it doesn't matter who it is. It matters. There's enough of Pete Hesketh that Pete Hesketh is personally proud of that I don't need to miss. I don't need to misrepresent him to make a point about him. Okay. An elected official or someone with a lot of power in society or... But a slip of...

If it's... I like what you were saying, because I happen to agree with you. Like, there are things I cut out of this that I'm like, I just don't... That could blow up in the person's face. I'm like, I'm not a journalist and I'm friends with most of people that come on here. So... Yeah. So, but I was surprised to hear someone who is pretty explicitly a journalist

saying like, nah, I would have cut that temper tantrum out, and I would have, if he'd asked me, I would have cut it up. Yeah. And do you think that's most journalists agree with you? I actually think most do. There's a small majority who don't, and I feel like they make it hard on the rest of us. I mean, remember that I got my start in the newspaper world in Washington covering the government. Right. And there, it really does matter that you accurately represent what's happening.

So if, you know, I covered the FDA for years. If I'm talking to some senior official, the FDA who says, yeah, we just approved that drug, but I think it's a bullshit decision. You don't, you don't quote him saying that's a bullshit decision. It's going to get a fired. It's irrelevant. This is not about the personal beliefs of FDA officials. They have a process. The process was honored. The drug was approved. Like, of course, there are going to be people who have different opinions, but unless you want to write a piece about the complexity of interpreting scientific data and thoughtfully talk about how people have differences opinion, there's no place in your article. You just leave it out. Like, and also,

Also, you're going to need to talk to that guy again. You can't, like, you know, burning your bridge. You have a responsibility to your readers to, on an ongoing basis, make that world transparent to them. And if you just blow up all of your sources, you can't do that anymore. We can do your job. Well, I know.

Well, that's the rub. It's like, if you cut it out, it is, or if the writer had cut out the Ur-Gaddy quote, it's one type of, of fake news and if you leave it in it's gotcha it's you know what i mean it's like it's there is no it there's so much gray area in this yeah which brings me to my next thing two of your episodes on revisionist history involve joe rogan who you've done the pot you've done this podcast ten times or something no once oh you've only done it once okay i've done a

i've done a bunch times i did burn that rich but it no yeah it was interesting that was like Boy, you're really fucking, you could hear, I heard you buy the matches and walk under the bridge and like, wow. I don't think I'm getting invited back. Okay. You, before that. It was interesting, it's a really interesting. That was a sociological theory that I really,

I agree with you. I think it's true. And it was fun to listen to. It was about how, if you're, it's episode, um, five and six of season 13 of reversions history. Um, it's about R of K. it's how he feels about

it's a it's a Byzantine and then one is Woody Harrelson's involved it's it's fun it's a bit of a while right very quickly I listened to the Elvis episode twice without realizing it

over I didn't realize how long you've been doing the podcast I listened to it eight years apart because I was like I think this is how I know what Elvis referred to as mother's toes as? Would you tell the audience what Elvis, how he referred to his mother's toes, I believe? I can't even remember it so long ago. That episode was about Elvis's inability to sing the bridge to, what song was it? I don't even remember. Like, Lonesome Tonight or something. Yeah, are you lonesome tonight? Yeah. How, whenever he performed that song in public, he would botch the bridge.

Yeah. Which is a spoken word, kind of. And it was, this is an illustration. of the Freudian notion of parapraxis, which is the idea that slips of the tongue are revelatory, the Freudian slip. And so we were trying to figure out what does the fact that Elvis, the bridge is all about someone explaining how their heart was broken by a woman. Let me cut you off here.

Elvis referred to his mother's toes as... He called them her little sooties. Little suities. This is a weird dude. Just a real weird dude. But if you ever want to creep your wife or girlfriend out, or boyfriend or husband, call his feet and toes his little suit. That's maybe one of my favorite episodes I've ever done.

The idea of, I started with a, you know, a classic Freudian psychoanalyst on the Upper East Side, and I went to Elvis, and I went, I mean, it sort of, it goes so many direction. And then I had, I had Jack White in there. I had this, I had Bobby Braddock in there. I had, I mean, it was just like, it was a, went to Nashville and hung out.

It was a classic kind of a version of history episode. In one point, you can go to the studio in Midtown where Elvis used to record. They still have the tapes of the sessions. I went there and they played me the tapes from the 1950s. They'll sell them to you. And you hear Elvis like talking. It's like it's insane.

The idea that we have those kinds of things. I want to talk about the Derek Chauvin episode. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which the, it's episode one and two of season 13. of revisionist history. You must have been surprised by your... It is interesting to hear your... how you ingested the information.

Because you start off, like, most people are like, I'm like... I don't like what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd, right? Which you didn't end up feeling like fine with it. But you're the... You seem to be the only person who did a real investigation, a pretty neutral investigation. investigation. I'm always surprised in press stuff how little, how kind of human laziness

interferes with good, like they just, ah, they didn't look it up. They didn't, they didn't ask. They didn't, it's my favorite one is Michael Moore, uh, the George Bush finding out about 9-11. Nobody had asked the teacher if she had video. And then he just asked and she's like, oh, yeah, I have it. The George Floyd and Derek Chauvin was you went back into his history and interviewed people he dealt with and... Read the trial transcripts. I mean, one of the things that people don't do was read the trial transcripts. Because there are, you know, there's hundreds and hundreds of pages.

And we had done, before I did that, I did, I had done those episodes about this Georgetown lost, the two episodes on someone who tried to get their daughter into Georgetown on the tennis team. and got the last of the Varsely Blues cases. And that one was all based on the fact that I was willing to read a thousand pages of court transcripts. And I kind of fell in love with court transcripts and realized nobody reads all the transcripts. So if you read them, so then I got interested in the Chauvin case and decided, I'll read all the court transcripts.

And, you know, you realize that no one's, part of this is about the change in the kind of structure of journalism, that there is no, you know, that function used to be covered by local media. The local newspaper would send somebody to that trial, and that person's job was to ingest the entire trial. And there's no one, like in the Scotcheng thing we did, I realized there was no journalist covering the trial.

None. I've never, when I was coming up, a trial, this was one of the Barcy Blues cases, a very, very huge, you know, in the headlines kind of case. In a federal court, you'd think there would be somebody there. There was nobody there. So, like, would she realize that? It's like, oh, okay, so chances are.

And you think it's budgetary? Or it's just like what the culture is doing? They don't have the kind of bodies available to. And also, nobody wants to, you know, if you want to read a thousand pages of trial transcripts, but sometimes it's more. you have to make a commitment, right? And people just don't want to make it.

And if you do, you'll be rewarded. And so, going back to this notion of time, you know, get a return on your time. And so with the Chauvin case, it was like, well, there were a lot of people testified at that trial who said a lot of things. And, you know, you should sort through them before you jump to a conclusion about what did or didn't happen.

And, you know, the heartbreaking thing about that whole case, the thing that really is kind of at the core, part of what was at the core of that series was, this kid who was his first week on the job, who understands that what Chauvin is doing is unspeakable and tries to stop him and doesn't know how to do it. Yeah.

And that was just like, you just realized, once you see the case through that kid's eyes, you see a very different, you understand what a monster Chauvin is, And you understand how complicated the power dynamics are within the police department. But I think you came away, or at least I think I did. I came away like, I'm not going to say I had empathy for Chauvin, but you come away going, it contextualizes police work, and it contextualizes him, not in a way that's like, great, but you just go, wow, okay.

I mean, it's just a... What being a cop does to people, who they are to begin with? Yeah. No, no, it was... And the idea that, like, the incredibly... You know, the progressive Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, when asked what the core issue was in the George Floyd case, he said, it's the union contract.

It's like, that was such an incredible moment. Yeah, that's the other funny thing. You're like, I can't fire these guys. What do you want me to do? This guy should have been fired. Yeah, like, police... can kind of be more violent because of the teachers' union contract

concessions between, I mean, just like labor concessions, and you're like, well, I'm pro-labor, it's just so much conflict and so much contradiction. Yeah. I hope it's funny. I was giving a speech to some company, I won't say what it was, and I decided to tell the story of, to summarize, those two episodes or whatever,

was of her vicious issue, tell a little story of Derek Chauvin to, it's a group of people in the HR business. And because I thought it was a, that's stories about HR, right? That's what it is. It's about a guy who should never have been a police officer. Yeah. And how the presence of a bad apple screws everything up. He drags down those young cops with him.

He, you know, one of the things I highlighted in that series was a previous incident where we have video of Chauvin just beating up some young kid for no. reason. And the other cops who came to the scene with him, just leave the room. They can't stomach it. Just leave the room. And you mentioned, like, tearing up and crying, watching it. It's just like, it's as moving in many ways as Chauvin. You realize this guy was a cancer and they couldn't get rid of it. Anyway, I gave this, I wanted to give this talk. So I gave this talk. You said moving as George Floyd. Is that mean? Well, they're moving in different ways. Yeah. Because this other case is a kid.

Oh, yeah, but it's George Schoven's beating him up as well. Beating him out. Yeah. Hitting him and like the kids pleading with him. Yeah. And the other cops there just leave. Yeah. It was all captured on body cam.

So we see it all. It came out. This footage came out after the trial. But I gave this talk to a group of HR professionals because I thought this is about HR. And I don't think I've, I bombed so completely. You bombed so I've already, I wish I'd seen their faces. I don't know what.

And to this day, I can't figure out. I thought about it a lot. Time and a place, bro. You just, you're going to, some shit ain't for everybody. You're just going to, it ain't too heavy. Yeah, it's not, what if you're in a hotel ballroom? But to my mind, I, the speech was all about, to them, my point was, this is why what you do matters. Because as a profession, HR is the put-upon profession.

It's the part of the corporate suite that everyone dumps on. And I was going to them and I was saying, the single most socially and politically divisive controversy in American society of the last five years was caused by the failure of the HR function. And if you guys were allowed to do your job, this would not have happened. We would have been spared that.

So that was how I was, I was trying to say to them. It was pro-HR. Yeah, I was trying to say to them, this is why what you do matters. Yeah. And I blew it. And it was a, I don't know what? I've never, like, two, it was like a room of a thousand people.

And I think like three people, like, three people like, and it was such a disaster. I had to send an apology to the, it was just, I've never bombed so completely in my life. I was like, why did I? That's why you work out material. Should have worked out at other venues. Okay, well, in closing, are you optimistic about the human project?

Yeah. How do you feel about the arc of the moral universe? Well, it's a little grim at the moment. Yeah. But I feel like, you know, this is, this is, the story of American society is about backlash. It's all... Just back and forth. It's just back and forth.

And I feel like the backlash, I'm hoping, I think, to what's going on now will be pretty strong. I think people are. There was a story, I was at a... This is another story of a talk I gave. I was giving a talk, and I mentioned CQ Brown. So CQ Brown was a guy got to know when I did my bomber mafia book. It was Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

and he was, to be Chief of Staff of the Air Force is to be the winner in one of the most grueling meritocracies we have in America. Air Force is already the elite, right? And Chief of Staff is ahead of the air. You know, you have gone through seven layers of, and at the very end, to get chosen to Chief of Staff, they have like a bake-off where they take the foremost brilliant people

and they put them through like a year of the most demanding, and they picked the winner, and he was the winner. The demand is what the demanding one? He send you, your predecessor, selects his possible successors and gives them jobs, sends them around the world, puts them in, you know, harm's way, whatever, to evaluate whether they're worthy of... Are they literally like dangerous?

No, no, no. Or just... You're administrative or organization. Got it. No, but you're being tested. And he emerged. These guys, if you ever meet a four star general, they are the most impressive people you have.

Anyway, seek you. becomes head of this because he's this superstar. And then he gets bumped up after he's to be head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior military position in the United States. Again, he's rewarded because he says Trump rolls in and fires him because he's black. And Trump's whole thing was, remember, if you're black, then you must have gotten this job because of DEI, right? which is so phenomenally offensive

to this whole. And so I was at some, giving some talk to a room that I, I don't know, was probably majority Republican. I talked about this, about like, this really upset me. And this didn't upset me. People in the, if you talk to anyone in the force,

this, what happened to CQ Brown is stuck in their crop. It was deeply, it was offensive to the entire, project that they're a part of, which is they're the last meritocracy. They don't fuck around with any of this stuff, right? And so when some Yahoo comes along and says, oh, you must have, this was affirmative action. They're like, no, no, do you know nothing about, anyway, I told the story and I, I had the very, very strong sense. I had that sense you rarely have. You know the sense,

though, as a performance. Everyone in the room was with me. Yeah. Like, they were like, you know what, I may have voted for this guy. I may, but like, yeah, it's a bridge too far. This, you can't. This is not, this is not who we are, right? And I feel like if those guys, those kinds of things, those kinds of things rankle.

Yeah. They don't, people don't. You know, the same thing with, I had a friend who knew Rob Reiner. And when, you know, obviously was, incredibly upset by his murder. And then when Trump writes that, yeah, it upset him in a way I've never seen him upset.

Like, it shook him. Yeah. And I, again, it's, there's the steady accumulation of these moments makes me feel like the backlash will be, it will be swift. I'm hoping, I'm hoping, you're right. Because I, it, I remember Chappelle tell me a story like 25 years ago. He had a dog. He had like a little, um, white alaskan something it's like a tiny little white dog he had like a white lady dog right

and he's like his dog's name was monk and he was like yeah monk and monk got caught up with like a bunch of like foxes and they were all they were all chasing some kind of like uh you know a hedgehog or something and and and he said and uh one of the foxes caught the hedgehog and did the thing where just snapped his neck and he goes and i saw monk's face he was like yo like what the fuck are we doing and i'm hope i think about it all the time yeah because i'm hoping that's what republicans yeah come to like yo we're firing cq brown like no this is that we're shooting people on the like i i'm all for chasing yeah but yeah and then try not to judge them for chasing That's the, like, try not to, the parts that they wanted.

I think it's worth forgiving all the... A lot of people disagree with me, though, about, like, forgiving people for wanting to vote for him in the first place. I think I have no further questions, guys. Malcolm Gladwell. Well, he almost got out of here block freight. But it's the five liquids. It's not a block.

It's just fucking stupid. Malcolm Gladwell, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks, man. Thank you. That's fun.