Conversations with Tyler - Malcolm Gladwell Wants to Make the World Safe for Mediocrity (Live at Mason)

Episode Date: March 15, 2017

Journalist, author, and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell joins Tyler for a conversation on Joyce Gladwell, Caribbean identity, satire as a weapon, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, Harvard's under-theorized endowment, why early childhood intervention is overrated, long-distance running, and Malcolm's happy risk-averse career going from one "fur-lined rat hole to the next." Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.  Recorded February 27th, 2017 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Malcolm on Twitter Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. Now, most of my questions will be quite short, but my first question will be really, really long, since everyone knows you and your work so well,

I asked myself, who is Malcolm Gladwell? And I tried to come up with an answer. And I'll give you my answer, and then you can correct me or add to that. And this will take just a little while. So I think of you as a figure set, really coming out of the post-war Caribbean Enlightenment. So I put you in a context with, say, Sylvia Winter, C.L.R. James, Franz Fonin. And a common theme in their work is the notion that science is something potentially liberating an emancipatory. So you're picking up on that with one of the channels of influence being your

mother, who is herself a very well-known Caribbean writer and intellectual. So there's that Caribbean background, power of science, to liberate human individuals. There's then on you a Mennonite influence, both from your childhood and your family, where you grew up in Canada. So my understanding of Mennonites is they tend to stress the notion that in the scriptures, there's not much talk of original sin. So you see the possibility for goodness in people. You then spent much of your life in Canada, so there's a kind of modesty that comes from that of temperament and also intellectual modesty. You then have a father who was a mathematician, so there's the emphasis on data, and you got your 10,000 hours of practice, mostly at the Washington Post, an early person

behind the rise of database journalism. So key themes in your work, I think. think of them as contingency, optimism, and volunteerism, power of the individual. Your first book, Tipping Point, is about how small moves can lead to big changes. Your last book, David and Goliath, is about how David can beat Goliath in many contexts. So again, contingency, optimism, volunteerism,

the individual. And whether it boils down to is there a better way to shoot NBA free throws, or could Elvis Costello have improved on his recording of goodbye cruel world, there's this consistently optimistic perspective. So you're really a very systematic thinker with core themes running out your whole work. That's my take on who's Malcolm Gladwell.

How do you see it? Who is Malcolm Gladwell? Well, it's a very flattering interpretation. I don't know if I think that deeply about myself. The only thing I would add to that is, you know, I really liked to tell stories. And my desire to tell stories is not a product of my background. It's a reaction against my background because my family, with all due respect to them,

I love and dearly, are not good storytellers. And so I, you know, that was the role I felt I failed in my family since everyone was was so either uninterested this notion that you would sit around a dinner table and tell and recount hilarious stories from the day was utterly absent from my childhood

and when I discovered much later on that there were families where this happened I was just in awe so that was you know the so that's a you know there's two kinds influences. There is negative and positive influences. You just left out the negative ones, I think. I could imagine maybe your father, the mathematician, was not a natural storyteller. But if I think of your mother, Joyce Gladwell, I've been reading her book. It was published in

1969. You even make a cameo appearance on page 178. It's called Brownface Big Master. It's a memoir, and it's full of great stories. And what I find profound in that is her notion of both the importance of struggle and issues of race and feminism and fighting for your family, but also repeatedly being subjected to what she calls, quote, I quote, the medicine of acceptance and how you can combine those two things, struggle and medicine of acceptance in a life that also finds God, and she's full of profound stories on that. So did you get your story telling nature from her? It's very quiet. So she is a very lovely writer and a great storyteller when she writes, but she's not one to regale the room. So I, there, my, my mother

wrote a book, not as a, you know, some people will write books. What they're really doing is they're just kind of putting down on paper the stories they tell in public. My mother was putting down on paper the stories she would never tell in public. And it's funny that, I mean, she's on unusualness. This is why I always urge people to sit down with their parents while their parents are still with them and turn on the tape recorder and force them to tell stories because surprising numbers of people don't, unless they're forced to, don't, or unless it's a deliberate act, don't tell the stories from their life that are meaningful. So that was a, that writing that book was a, was a very, was a very deliberate act on my mother's part to try and, she was trying to make

sense of, I mean, one hesitates to call one's own mother's life extraordinary. It was not that it was extraordinary. It was just unusual. You know, she was a black woman trying to marry a white man in England in the 50s. So it was, you know, they were a little bit of an oddity. Can I tell my favorite story about my father? Tell your favorite story, sure. So my father, they get married and they move back to Jamaica. My father is teaching mathematics at University of West Indies in the early 60s, 61, and he needs to get...

I love the story. But this is a story. My father did not tell me until like three years ago, which tells you something about stories. So three years ago, he somehow just comes out and tells us, So at 61, he needs a particular textbook. And this being 1961, you can't go online. So he writes to all the libraries.

It turns out the closest library to Kingston, Jamaica, that has this book that needs for his research, is Georgia Tech. So he writes to Georgia Tech and says, can I come and use their library? And they say, yes. And so he makes preparations, and it means sailing from Kingston to Miami and taking a bus from Miami to Atlanta because he doesn't have any money. what he doesn't realize is that they said yes, but then the person who said yes got in trouble for saying yes before they figured out his race, because all they knew was that a man

from the University of West Indies was blind to use their library, and of course their library in 1961 would have been segregated. And so it set off this huge commotion at Georgia Tech as they tried to figure out whether my father was white black. And so they look, they try and find, you know, is there some, they figure out where he got his PhD. Could they find some kind of yearbook? They couldn't. They tried to get in touch with his thesis advisor, couldn't get his name, couldn't just call him because of course you can't place a call

to Kingston in 1961 and just sort of bash. Finally, they track him down through like long. The day before he's about to leave, he gets a call from like the dean of whatever at Georgia Tech, Mr. Gladwell. He says, yes, Dr. Galway. Well, we have a slightly odd question. He goes, yes, what is it? are you white? My father says yes. And the guy says, swear to God, oh, thank God. Now, to my point about stories, like I said, he told that story three years ago

just happened to come out. Like, who waits until 2014 to tell a story like that from 1961? There's a discussion that Sylvia Winter, the Jamaican intellectual, offered in year 2000, and I'd like your opinion on this. She said, there's something special about the United States, that in Jamaica or many parts of the Caribbean more broadly, that being middle class can in some

way counter the fact of blackness socially and serve as a kind of offset. But she said about the United States, and here I quote, the U.S. itself is based on the insistent negation of black identity, the obsessive hypervaluation of being white. Do you think that's an accurate perspective? Well, yeah, there is something under, well, I hesitate to say underth, theorized. But there is something under-theorized about the differences between West Indian and American black culture and the

particular the psychological difference between what it means to come from those two places. And the you don't, I think only when you look very closely at that difference, do you understand the heavy weight, the particular American heritage places on African Americans. But there is something enormously...

It's funny about West Indians is they can always spot another West Indian. Right? And you have to... At a certain point, you wonder, how do they always know? And it's because they're... After a while, you get good at spotting the absence of that weight. Right?

And it explains as well, the well-known phenomenon of how disproportionately successful West Indian Indian, West Indians are when they come to the United States because they seem to be better equipped to deal with this, with the particular pathologies attached to race in this country. You know, my mother being a very good example. But of course, there's a, there's a million examples. You know, I was just reading, for one of my podcasts, I was reading, I've been reading all these oral history transcripts from the civil rights movement. I was reading one today, and I'm

halfway through, and I had that completely unbidden thing. I was like, oh, this guy's a West Indian. He was an African-American attorney and civil rights lawyer in Virginia in the 60s. I got like a 30-page transcript. I got to page 15. I'm like, he's West Indian. And then literally, page 16, my father came from Trinidad and Tobago with my mother. It's like, it's a, there is something very, very real there that's sort of not, I feel like, really appreciated. Another difference that struck me, tell me what you think of this, is that the notion of freedom from much of the Caribbean, it's in some way more celebratory and it's more rooted in history, and it may be because these are mostly majority black societies. So history is in a sense controlled, so it's much more commemorative.

Does that make sense to you? It's not a struggle to control the narration of history at a national level. Oh, that says, yes. So you're in charge of the narrative, which is huge. but you're also, I thought of this because I wanted to do, sorry, my podcast is on my mind and I've been, I wanted to do a, and I haven't managed to figure out how to do it, but there's a Jamaican poet called Louise Bennett. And if you are Jamaican, you know exactly who this person is, and she's like the, probably the most important kind of colloquial poet. Maybe that's the wrong word, popular poet. And she was, she wrote poetry in dialect. So she was a kind of, um, uh, for a,

generation of Jamaicans, she was an assertion of Jamaican identity and culture. So when my mother, my mother was a scholarship student at a predominantly white boarding school in Jamaica, she and the other black students of the school as a kind of act of protest read Louise Bennett poetry at the school function when she was 12 years old. So she's that kind of, and if you read Louise Bennett's poetry, a lot of it is this, much of it is about race. but it's not it's about race where the Jamaican the black Jamaican often has the upper hand the black Jamaican is always telling some kind of sly joke at the expense of the white minority right so it's very much it's poetry that doesn't make sense or it doesn't make the same kind of sense

in a in a society where you're a relatively powerless minority it's the kind of thing that makes sense if you're you're 95% and you're not in control of major institutions and such but you are 95% of the population and you feel like you're going to win pretty soon and she has this my mother used to read this poem to me

as a child where Louise Bennett's poem is all about sitting in a beauty parlor getting her hair straightened sitting next to a white woman who's getting her hair curled and the joke is that the white woman's

paying a lot more to get her hair curled then he's band is to get her straightened. Like, that's the point, right? It's all this kind of subtle one-upmanship. But that's very Jamaican. Now, do I ask about your podcasts? I know some of them in the second season, they'll be about the civil rights movement,

in particular the 1950s, which are a somewhat neglected time. I'll throw out just a few possible forces that led America to start to become more integrated in the 50s, and you tell me which you think are neglected or underrated. One would be professional sports, and Jackie Robinson starting to play baseball in the late 40s. Another would be entertainers and move toward having more black leads in movies and also music, say Chuck Barry or even James Brown,

Harry Truman integrating the military, or the desire for purposes of Cold War propaganda to actually show this country is making some progress on civil rights issues. I mean, which of those or which other factors do you feel are the ones we're missing and understanding this history? I would put Army, if I direct those, Army 1. I would and I would say that

the entertainment and sports I would say that that had it was either neutral or worse than neutral. Why worse than neutral? Because I don't think I actually think if you if we would take the long view

and we would look at this from 100 years from now we would say that the fact that so it is not unusual for minorities to first make their mark in sports and entertainment. Right? We see though every, see it with Jews, you see it with Italians, you see it with, you know, Irish. But my thing, the thing that's striking to me about those movements is they move in and out of those worlds pretty quickly. So the Jewish moment in sports is really quite short.

Sure. I suspect not that surprising. Boxing especially. It's like that long. The African-American moment in those transitional fields is really long. It continues to this day. And it's almost to the point where you feel like that what happens is they move into those worlds and get stalled there. And their presence in that world accentuates and aggravates existing prejudice about their community, as opposed to serving as a kind of way station to a better place.

So if your problem is that you're facing a series of stereotypes about how you are intellectually inferior, how you have a kind of broken culture, how you have, you know, I could go on and on and on with all of the stereotypes that exist, then why is being, playing, how does playing, brutally violent sports help you?

How is an association almost an over-representation in these various kinds of public entertainments advance your cause? I sort of I kind of

I'm for those areas when those things when they're transitional and I'm against them when they're they seem like dead ends. How important a factor was the research of Mamie and Kenneth Clark? That's some work that had there been a Malcolm Gladwell at the time would have been written up even more. The notion that when there's segregation people may value themselves or their race less, it seems that had a big impact on the Warren court on other thinking. What's your take on their influence? Well there's a I just, it's funny, I was just both read the great book on this is

Daryl Scott's contempt and pity he's a very good black historian at Howard I believe yes he's the chair of history at Howard and points out he has much to say so I got quite taken

when I was doing this season of my podcast with the black critique of Brown and the black critique of Brown starts with some of that psychological research because the psychological research is profoundly problematic on many levels. So what Clark was showing and what so moved the court in the Warren decision was this research where you would take the black and the white doll and you show

that to the black kid. And the black kid, you would say, which is the good doll and the black kid points to the white doll and which doll do you associate with yourself and they don't want to answer the question, right? And the court said, this is the damage done by segregation. Scott points out that if you actually look at the research that Clark did, the black children who were most likely to have these deeply problematic responses in the doll test were those from the north who were in integrated schools. The southern kids in segregated schools

did not regard the black doll as problematic. They were like, that's me, fine. It was, and that result that it was kids from black kids, minority kids from integrated schools, schools who had the most adverse reactions to their own representation in Adal is consistent with all of the previous literature on self-hatred, which starts with Jews. It was originally, that literature begins with where does Jewish self-hatred come from? Jewish self-hatred does not come from Eastern Europe in the ghettos. It comes from when Jewish immigrants confront and come into

close conflict and contact with majority white culture. That's where in self-hatred starts, when you start measuring yourself at close quarters against the other, and the other seems so much more free and glamorous and what have you. So in other words, the Warren Court picks the wrong research. There's nothing to do with the problem caused. There are all kinds of problems caused by segregation. This happens to be not one of them. So why does the foreign court do that? Because they're trafficking, this is Scott's argument, they are trafficking in an uncomfortable and unfortunate trope about black Americans, which is that black Americans, black American culture is psychologically damaged,

that there is something, that the problem with black people is not that they're denied power, or that their doors are closed to them or that no it's because that there's something at their core their family life and their and their psyches are in some in some way been crushed or distorted or harmed by their by their history right it personalizes the struggle so by personalizing the struggle what the Warren Court is trying to do is to fact you're an argument against segregation that will be acceptable to white people, particularly southern white people. And so what they're saying is, like, look, it's not you

that's a problem. It's black people are, they're harmed in their hearts, and we have to, like, you know, usher them into the mainstream. You know, they're not making the correct argument, which would, which was, you guys have been messing with these people for 200 years. Stop, right? Like, they don't want to, they can't make that argument because they, because Warren desperately wants a majority, he wants a 9-0 majority on the court. So instead they construct this, in retrospect, deeply offensive argument about how it's all about black people carrying this, you know, and using social science in a way that's actually quite deeply problematic. Right? It's not what the social science said. This is a more recent line of research. Some of it coming from

Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt that at least claims that mixed race children growing up have a harder time and take more risks than just their socioeconomic status alone would predict. Do you agree with that? Take issue with it? Mixed race. Mixed race. Really? I never heard of that. It doesn't apply to me certainly. No one has lived a more risk-averse life than me. But I don't know. I mean, you know, although I have no with no most respect for both those economists, this isn't one of those highly imaginative use of correlations, is it? Well, we are economists.

Sometimes the economists lose me when they play those games. Higher education, it's one of your passions in life. So there's a recent paper by Raj Chetty. It shows that at least 38 colleges are taking in more students from the top 1%, than from the bottom 60%. And many of those are Ivy League schools. Now, take for instance, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, why are those schools not doubling the number of students they take in?

In your opinion. Why don't they do this? I was going to say, why are you asking me? You're the one in the academy. You must have a theory of why the world is found in this way. Well, you know, why doesn't Louis Vuitton sell a $59 bag? because Louis de Foton doesn't want to be in the commodity bag business. They would rather sell a small number of bags at $10,000 each.

But Harvard could take in 2x and not lower tuition, I suspect. Harvard could take in 10x. 10x and not lower tuition. They still have 40 billion left over. No, I think it's, I mean, look, there's no, these guys are in the, they're in the luxury handbag business. They're not in the education business. They are interested in sustaining a certain brand equity,

and they see expanding the size of their schools as diluting their brand equity in exactly the same manner as Louis Vuitton does. Louis Vuitton is not going to open a Louis Vuitton store across the street, right? In that building over there next to the Starbucks and they're not going to do it, even though there may be people right here who want to go and buy a Louis Vuitton bag right now. they're very conscious of maintaining that era, aura, of exclusivity. That's all Harvard is doing. If you thought for a moment, their primary motivation was in educating as many people as they could,

as well as they could, then I think you're living in a dream world, right? This is not, they're, you know, I was walking around, a tangent. I was in D.C. this weekend, and I went for a walk with a friend of mine, and we went to, to Dunbart and Oaks. Dunbar, you know, it's gorgeous facility and it's owned by, it was given to Harvard University in 1940

by Robert Blisswood in its entirety. I happen to know that the, for complicated reasons that I shouldn't go into, that the endowment attached to the Robert Wood, to Dunbart and Oaks is, has many,

many zeros. Let's just say that the endowment attached Dunbarton Oaks is larger than the endowments of all but a tiny fraction of American colleges. And I also know that, we all know, that on the grounds of Dunbarton Oaks, you know, they have a museum where there's one of the great collections of pre-Columbian art in the world. So as I was walking around the grounds of Dunbart Oaks, I asked myself, here we have, this is a facility owned by a nonprofit institution, which receives enormous tax benefits from the American

taxpayer, and which has an astonishing, of money attached to it. Why can't I see the art? And why does no one get upset about this, by the way? I'm allowed to walk around the Rose Garden. Whoopi. Right? There's lots of, I can't, surely I should see the art. I am as an American taxpayer subsidizing this institution. And yet it's like, and where are the, why are there no, why aren't they bringing in, when was the last time they brought in a busload of high school students to Dunbart and Oaks to walked them to the pre-columbian art collection. Has it ever happened? I don't know. One economic puzzle, one economic puzzle to me is why universities such at Harvard have such high endowments.

Now, you've just raised some objections to endowments, but if one is taking a somewhat cynical economic approach to this, you would think actually they would spend more on themselves from the endowment, and they don't. And that raises the question of what are they really trying to maximize. What's your theory of endowments on why they're so high? And why don't the people at Harvard spend more on themselves? Because they're not all that rich, right? You had a great poster in Marjoral Revolution.

Remember, very short in which you said that you were giving a list of things you thought needed to be done in the world of economics. And one of them was you said, endowments are under theorized. Yes. I read that, and I went, ha! I'm going to steal that phrase. Totally under theorized. So, one of the greatest philanthropists

the 20th century was Julius Rosenwald, the guy who makes Sears Sears, an enormously wealthy man in the kind of 20s and 30s. And he starts the Rosenwald Fund. And what does the Rosenwald Fund do? It sets aside a sum of money, which in today's dollars would be, I've forgotten, but probably close to a billion.

And he decides what he wants to do is to go throughout the South and build public schools throughout the South in African-American communities. And one of his rules is no endowments. He said, we're going to spend it to zero. And they spent it to zero. And to this day, there has actually been some really lovely economic work

measuring the economic impact of the Rosenwald schools. And it's not subtle. It's if you look at the list of things that made a tangible difference in the south, in the first half of the 20th century, Rosenwald's schools is way up there. And why did he get way up there? Because he went to zero, right? If he set up an endowment to fund the building of schools for African Americans in the South,

we would still be building schools for African Americans in the South. It would be a hundred-year-long project, right? Instead of running through a billion dollars, you would run through 5% of a billion dollars every year. So the very fact that you set up an endowment means that you have decided before you start to minimize your impact, right? I'm going to take your dollar and I'm going to commit to spending five cents of it every year. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

Who does this? I don't know where it comes from. Why would you not spend your money? If you have $40 billion in your Harvard, there are tons. How many interesting educational things could you do with $40 billion if you gave yourself a 10-year time horizon?

By the way, given the track record of Harvard and raising money, why for a moment? do they think they can't replace the 40 billion once they run through the existing 40 billion. They're so, they have proven over and over again that there's one thing at which they truly are world-class, and that's raising money. So like the irrationality, it's irrationality upon irrationality, right? They haven't even owned up to the one thing that they're truly world-class at.

I'm pleased that we're holding this at George Mason, a school, which in the words of our president tries to be the best school for the world and not the best in the world, but let's say we put you in charge at Harvard. Yeah. What changes would you make? You appoint the board. You are the board. You and your mother. Oh, man. This is such a great question. Can I start at the beginning? Start at the beginning.

Okay. I would start by going, I would establish a set of baseline criteria for admissions, and then I would have a lottery after that. So if you are someone who has, you're in the top 2% of your high school class or whatever, we can, 5%, whatever cut off we want, following test scores at a certain point, whatever cut off we want, some minimum number of other things you do, you just go into the pot and we're pulling out names. I would, I'd probably triple or quadruple the size in the next 10 years. open campuses, probably two other campuses in the United States, one overseas.

I would, you know, I had this idea that, I'm not sure how you do it, but where I think that it would be really, really useful to ban graduates of elite colleges from ever disclosing that they went to an elite college. It's not a joke. It's deadly serious. Because what it does is it wonderfully clarifies the decision for the student of whether they want to go to an elite college. So you don't want the kid going to Harvard

who just wants the brand name Harvard. You want the kid to go to Harvard who genuinely believes that he or she can get an education there that they can't get anywhere else. Right? I want that kid. So if I say you can come here and get a word, world class, the greatest education in the world, but after you graduate, you can never tell anyone where you went. Then I'm, I'm weeding out all the Louis Vuitton shoppers, right? And I'm getting the true

scholars. So if there's a kid out there who says, there's the certain professor, one of my oldest friends is a professor at Harvard, Terry Martin. Huge fan of yours, by the way. Oh, great. Terry, if there's a kid out there who says, I read Terry's book, he's got a couple books, I want to do Soviet studies, I want to study with Terry, that's the kid I want, right? I will, and I don't actually, I'm willing to go to any lengths to get that kid, I'll give him a, I'll cut him a break, I'll kick them out of the lottery,

you know, I'll do all kinds of things. But you want that kind of, you want, if you're running a truly elite college, What you want to select for is the kids who are most powerfully motivated to leverage the institutional assets of the institution. I'm sorry, the intellectual assets of the institution, not the brand assets of the institution. And now a truly important question. How would you treat the faculty? Well, you know, there's a really interesting site, and I've forgotten to my eternal discredit who did it.

that looks at trends in educational spending and points out that educational spending has gone like higher ed setting has gone like that. The share of higher ed dollars that goes to faculty salaries when you do all the kind of, it's basically been flat for 50 years. So you'd pay us more. Oh, yeah, I absolutely would pay more. I mean, I don't say that because I'm out of university

talking to a professor and I'm the son of a professor. I say that because because it seems crazy to have to put academics in the kind of professional firmament it seems crazy to have them losing ground to other

professions when you would think that the importance in a modern society of having world-class faculty would be greater and to the extent I mean I'm not saying that if you pay academics properly more, you're going to get better academics necessarily. But I do think it's not a bad idea if you want to reward people going into that profession.

Human potential and talent, that's a key theme running throughout a lot of your work. Let me ask you two or three questions on that. Do you think that today we're actually working too hard to measure and spot talent very early, and thus we're branding and marking people and actually telling a lot of people they shouldn't do Activity X because they're measured too quickly. Yeah. So this is my friend David Epstein who wrote, Quartz Gene, who's really, really interesting on this subject

with respect to sports and points out that what really makes for successful elite athletes is a broad early base. So the last thing you want to do is to over-specialize too soon with a kid. For a number of reasons, one is, you know, the phenomenon of, you know, baseball pitchers having all kinds of arm problems in their teens

is a product of kids simply pitching too much too soon. But you can generalize them that, we think that an awful lot of injuries that elite athletes are suffering in their late adolescents are due to the fact that they have been doing the same repetitive motions from an early age. We think that burnout

is also a function of this. But it also is a very interesting argument beyond those to say that there is a body of skills that you only learn if you have a broaderly base. So the basketball analogy would be, you know, Hakeem Elijah one being a soccer player, or Steve Nash being a soccer player, or in tennis, Federer being a soccer player,

that there are extremely valuable things about basketball that are most usefully learned on a soccer pitch when you're very young. that kind of now that is a beautiful analogy for academic work as well or for any sort of intellectual work that the best preparation for something over here when you're very young maybe something over here and then the third thing is that the most important and the thing you're alluding to is that we do a really bad job of spotting early talent

simply because you can't spot you know I'm a runner and you every runner knows this. The kids who were the great runners in their early teens, and I was one of them, are not the ones who end up being the world-class athletes. Sometimes they are, but there's a huge changeover in the ranking of runners between 12 and 18. At least, when I look at the ranks of world-class runners, and you look at their times, at least half of them had mediocre times in there. You know, I was at the age of 13, the fastest

miler from my age in Canada. By 21, I was useless and washed up. And no longer... There was a kid who I used to destroy

when I was 13. He went on to be essentially world class. Right on the fringes of world class. I used to kill him. I mean, it was just not even close. And anyone looking at the two of the 13 would say, Gladwell is the talent. This other guy is like, boy, he should take up, he was, you know, he was terrible. He ended up running 335 for 1,500 meters, right? Let's say you're giving advice to the parents and grandparents in the room. You can't reshape the system. You can't even control Harvard, but you can tell them what to do for their children. What's your advice, given all of what you just said? well you should delay

specialization as long as possible you should because of all of those yeah because prediction is poor and burnout is as big an issue as poor prediction early prediction and I would avoid

I think the other parallel problem which I get at in David and Goliath is I think that overly competitive environments at too early and age are really deeply problematic. So I thought about this the other day when I was... I live most of the time.

Upstate New York. Very close to Bard. And I go and I work out at the Bard Gym and I was watching... So Bard has got... I don't know how many students. I mean, is it 2000? I don't even know. It's some tiny number. And I was watching the Bard lacrosse team workout.

and I don't know anyone I don't want to offend anyone who went to Bart they're not allowed to say by the way if they did that's right I can't say they're terrible I was just you know eyeballing the old lacrosse team and I was like good Lord I mean I felt that

I could go down there at 52 and make this team and then that was my first thought and my second thought was that is so fantastic because what it means is you can be an ordinary Joe at Bard and play lacrosse, right? Now, think about that in every different thing. So, in a school that small, with the exception of the things at which they are, I mean, there's probably two or three things

at which they genuinely do excel. I'm sure the drama program or the music program is formidable. But let's accept, though, any non-speciality item at Bard is going to be, it's wide open, it's totally accessible. You know, you want to be in the physics, Club at Bard? You can be in the physics club at Bard, right? And that is a massively underrated thing. So in other words, there's a continuum

here and exclusivity is at one end and opportunity is at the other end. And people constantly are confusing these two things and thinking that in exclusivity and in elite status is opportunity, false.

Eventually, that's where the opportunities lie. They don't lie there when you're 16 or 17, and what is required of you is experimentation. If you want your 17-year-old to explore the world, send your 17-year-old to a place where the world can be explored. The world cannot be explored at a super-elite university, right? It's impossible. I talk about in David and Glythe, the phenomenon of very, very, very good science and math students going to lead colleges and dropping out at enormously high rates because they're in the 99th percentile and they're in a class full of people in the 99.9th percentile. And when you are in the 99th percentile and you're up against someone in the 99.99th percentile,

you feel stupid, right? Even though you will never again in your life, unless you want to be an academic at MIT in physics, be surrounded by people that smart. right it's over after that then you go back to the real world and you're smart again so why would you artificially push yourself in a situation where you feel so dumb that you stop doing the very thing that you went to school to do that's just that is bananas that is like and why this isn't a fact that people like when i when i was in college what i went out for the university of toronto newspaper and they wouldn't give me a job. It was too hard to get in. They were brilliant people. So what did I do? I wrote for my pathetic joke of a, we had a residential college. We put out this

kind of joke thing every couple weeks. And it was insanely fun. It was like, I could do whatever I wanted. Nobody cared. We made up all kinds of crazy. I mean, in the end, I had a way better experience than I would have had if I was at the highly competitive newspaper. I've never forgotten that, right? By virtue of being this kind of lame forgotten thing, I got to do more fun stuff and have a much better time than I would have at the proper newspaper. You know, this drives me well, it clearly drives me crazy. You just say it tries me crazy. Now you've argued that in the NBA, more players should shoot their free throws underhanded. It would take them some time to learn, but it would turn poor shooters into somewhat better shooters, and that would be worth a lot

in terms of performance. Now, you are yourself a teacher in some way, in the broad sense. So what is it that we other teachers are doing wrong? What is for us the underhanded free throw we're not doing enough of? Oh, that's interesting. When are you not doing enough of? Well, I mean, I suppose I could expand on this notion of kind of that to encourage experimentation and open opportunities, one must also be much more tolerant of mediocrity. And that, the notion that there can be something lovely

in mediocrity is, to borrow one of your favorite phrases, and now mine is under theorized. And I wonder whether sort of making the world safe for mediocrity is not a very worthy goal of of teaching.

Not only because the people who will one day be good need to pass through mediocrity on their way to being good, but also that it's that, like I said, it's the gateway to experimentation. I don't know where one, how that practically translates. in a teaching session. But I think it's...

That's a very toquevillian answer. What is it that long-distance runners are not doing correctly? What is their equivalent of the underhanded free throw? Oh. You've been known to run a few times yourself. There are so many different arguments

going on right now about long distance running. I suppose the best way to sum them up is that like all highly competitive subspecialties, everyone wants to believe they have an answer that works for everyone. When in fact the truth is that there's probably 10 different ways to run a train effectively for long distance, and we're just slow to understand how variable runners are. The one interesting thing,

the most interesting thing happening to meet in distance, running right now is the rise of Japan as a distance running power. And what's interesting about Japan is that Japan does not have any one runner, particularly in marathons, does not have any one marathoner who is in the top 10 in the world or even the top 20 in the world, but they have an enormous number of people who are in the top hundred. And so your notion of whether Japan is a distance running power depends on how you choose to define distance running power. So we have one definition that we use where we say we recognize a country as being very good at distance running if they have lots and lots of people in the top 10.

But that strikes me as being incredibly arbitrary. And it goes to my point about we're not encouraging mediocrity. Why? All that says is, okay, so Kenya's guy. So Kenya's guy, you know, nine of the top 10 fastest marathon is right now. Why is it, why is that better than having 300 of the top thousand, right? It's purely arbitrary that we choose to define greatest as just the country that most densely occupies the 99th percentile. Why can't we define it as the country that most densely occupies the 75th through a hundredth percentiles? Right? There's always a segment in the middle of these chats called

overrated or underrated. So I'm going to list a few things. You're free to pass. Overrated or underrated. Ketchup. Your first famous article on ketchup. I'm on record as saying underrated, massively. Massively underrated.

And which is the best ketchup? Heinz. Hines. William F. Buckley. Well, in his day appropriately rated, now underrated. I mean, you're talking about someone who was a massive, William Buckley is my childhood, who was obsessed with him until I had entire works of his seemingly memorized, so under.

Who is the most underrated figure in Jamaican popular music? Past, present, either. Everyone knows Bob Marley, but who's the hidden gem? Oh, my goodness. That's a really, really, really, really. I'm going to pass on that one. I want to get in trouble. I would say Desmond Decker or Lee Perry, if you're curious.

But why are they under? I mean, I feel like there are places pretty... Anyway, we don't need to get into it, but... In Jamaica, but I don't... Millennials don't seem to know very much about who they are, is my sense. Or even Tootsin the Maitals or Keith Hudson or King Tubby. I think they're somewhat... Not in Jamaica forgotten, because there, there,

a more celebratory notion of history, right? Yeah. But in the United States, to me that's sad. And the notion that the leading figures in electronic music in the 70s would come from Jamaica, not a high-tech country, that's an extraordinary story that seems to me somewhat or not.

You need to get me started on Jamaican triumphalism. It's a David versus Goliath story, and the Jamaicans win. My colleague, Steve Pearlstein. Oh, is he? My own... He's not here, is he? He used to be of the Washington Post.

Of course. My former editor. Your former editor. Steve. Underrated. Absolutely. I have lunch with him every week. His father owned that great clothing store in Louis of Boston.

Louis of Boston. That's right. And he was always, Steve, I remember as a young reporter of the Washington Post, I was very badly dressed. And Steve, you know, a highly intellectual guy who cut his teeth in a high-end men's clothing store in Boston, would have always come up to me and, like, you know, adjust my suit jacket and say, what are you, like a 36 short? You know, I always love that. This reminds me, by the way, can I do a little. Sure, sure. One of my favorite things, I, the trend, one of the

things about the Jewish immigrant experience in America that I have never gotten over, it that always thrills me to bits, and I don't know why, is the transition from merchant to intellectual class, that generational move, which is just so fantastic. And my favorite one, there's many, many great ones, is speaking of Boston and retail, is that Filene's basement, right, was started by the, or Filene's, rather,

It was started by the Philein brothers, and one of whose name was Lincoln, Lincoln Philein. And their kind of manager, the guy the CEO of their store, was a guy named Kirstein. And Kirstein had a son who he named for his boss, Lincoln, who is Lincoln Kirstein, the great giant of American ballet. And so you see in Lincoln Kirstein in the name of this extraordinary cultural figure, echoes of of bargain retail from Boston like the idea that one person's name

summons those two worlds simultaneously it's just so it's so beautiful it's the similar version of this is the fact that some of the people who were of the people who were saved by during the Holocaust by Schindler then went on moved to New Jersey

became real estate developers, did all these subdivisions, and would always name a street after Schindler, and they would bring them over for the opening. But once again, you have this incredibly moving and powerful tribute that's grounded in the prosaic. It's the reverse of Lincoln Kirstein, right? But that move of moving back and forth between these worlds, I just find that really beautiful and sort of moving.

Anyway. What's the most underrated John La Carrey novel? Oh, wow. So many, right? Well, the very early was small town in Germany. The pre-spy came in from the cold ones I really like. And I also really like, you know, I thought, a little drummer girl is really fantastic.

But I think maybe the pre, the super early ones are remarkably good. And are La Carre novels Gladwellian in their worldview, or do you enjoy them so much because they're not? Are they offset or confirmation? I didn't know there was such a thing as Gladwellian. Are they, or, why do I enjoy them? There is to us.

Why do I enjoy them? I enjoy them because I enjoy them for a very specific reason that has to do with the fact that I, you know, I spent, I was born in English. and my father is English, and he's a product of my father is essentially John Likari's age. So they come from the same world, kind of bleak, middle class, post-war English. And I have such an affection for that particular era and world. And when I go back to London, I was just in London, I find myself, I gravitate to those parts of London that still look that way.

because to me that's what London is. London is not the shiny, rich London of today, and London is not the gorgeous historic. What's London to me is kind of 1950. And that weird moment when you're walking down a street in East London, and you see a block that was clearly bombed, and they built something clearly in 1948, that just abuts, something that was built in 1820, that thing, whenever I see that, it just gets me every time. And John LaCari, particularly, well, Spy who went from the Cold,

is just about to me, it's just about that kind of unrelenting bleakness of that world, and that how all of the kind of, all of the material niceties of their world were, I mean, it was just, and biscuits, that's as good as it got, right? That's what you look forward to every day. And

it was always raining and no one could say, I love you. And, you know, it's just all part of it, it's just like, it's fantastic. It's just, when I'm in that world, I feel so normal. I just like, I am this ray of sunshine. What's your favorite non-current movie? You know, I don't go to the movies anymore. I haven't into a movie in years. I don't even, I can't do it. I don't know why. They lost me. But old movies? Michael Powell, if you like Alder England? No, I don't even, I can't remember the last movie I saw, to be honest. Overrated or underrated, the idea of early childhood intervention to set societal ills right? Uh, overrated,

because it's in, to my mind, it's just another form. So, it became, politically impermissible to say that certain people in society would never make it because they were genetically inferior. So I feel like that group, it's like, all right, we can't say it anymore, we'll just move the goal post up two years, and we'll

say, well, if you don't get, or three years, if you don't get the right kind of stimulation by the time you're three, basically, it's curtains. So it's like, why is that argument, which we decided we didn't like it when they set the goalpost at zero? And somehow it's like super important. And and legitimate and, you know, chin-stroking-worthy

when they move the goalpost to three. Truth is, like, it's not over at three any more than it was over at zero. Like, there are certain things that it would be nice to get done by the age of three, but if they're not, the idea that it's, that it's curtains, it's preposterous. It's the same kind of fatalism

that I thought we had defeated, you know, in the, I mean, you could make a really, You know, if you want to say that the goal post should be at 30, then I'm open to it. Would you settle for 55? I'm very glad to hear that answer. Now, I looked back. There was an article you wrote actually in the 1990s for the Washington Post. It's not online, but I can confide to you all that.

It was leaked to me. And it's called 10 Things D.C. could learn from New York City. And I know it will be very hard for this crowd to believe, but you actually evince an ever so slight preference for New York City over Washington, D.C. at that time. And one of the things you thought Washington needed more of, this is number three. And I quote, more adventurous celebrities. Do you still feel that we need more adventurous celebrities? Pretty sure my opinion would change if I was doing it today.

Your number one, however, was shame that this was a city that needed more shame. Really? Yes. I have no memory of this. Number five was the NICS, so clearly you have no memory of this. But over time, how is your view of Washington, D.C. changed. There's a 2007 radio show you did with your mother. It's actually my favorite of all your outputs.

I love this podcast. I recommend it to everyone. But there you said that you and also she did well because you were always serial outsiders. Do you feel that in any way, Washington, D.C., with its culture that is in some ways fairly bland, passively pushy, nervously ambitious, and just too full of politics, has this now become a city where it's a good place to be a serial outsider or simply not? That's really a good question. What was particular about...

So I was in D.C. from 85, January of 1985, until July of 1993 of 1993. And the city obviously has gotten a lot wealthier and safer and wider. Sure. And more diverse, the area, a lot more diverse since I was there. Has the, you know, I came here in Reagan years when an upheaval was going on politically. I suppose that's happening again in some sense. I don't know whether, you know, the thing that's peculiar about D.C. is that is the is uh particularly if you're in your 20s is the turnover right so there are uh very few

places and you you actually make this point in complacent class about how the move americans are a lot less mobile than they used to be strikingly less yes and that this has this has huge consequences for society and i actually think you're absolutely right it's a really really important point DC if you're in your 20s is this grand exception is massive turnover every not everyone, but when I think of the cohort I was with when I was 23 in DC, none of them are in DC anymore, all gone with a few exceptions. And I feel there is that kind of churning. And that churning is really, really useful in terms of giving people opportunities to look at what's going on from an outsider's perspective. Because you're not a, you're not committing

to the city, you're outside of the, there's a permanent Washington, and then you're 20s, you're not part of permanent Washington. You're, you know, you're skipping through from, you know, in this kind of, you know, you're in, you're kind of ringing the permanent city. And that was really, that was what made my time here so special. If I had stayed, I feel like it would, in my memory, have diminished a little bit. By the way, in the 90s, you also wrote a profile of Pat Buchanan, which I would encourage you to reread. You may be surprised by your own prescience. You would have to change a few words in the article, but much of it would apply today. Do you think New York City and Manhattan in particular, is that still a good place to be a serial outsider? And what is it that

you do in general to keep yourself as a serial outsider? Well, I leave Manhattan. Where do you go? Well, there's two things. I mean, there's one problem that I have, as a writer you have a series of problems. One problem, a serious problem is that I'm old. And I don't mean that in a, you know, I'm decrepit. What I mean is that it's very important if you are a writer to remain kind of current. And the greatest danger you face is this sort of fossilization of your positions and views. One of the main reasons that I wanted to do a podcast is that a podcast forces me out of my age cohort. and puts me back in the land of people in their 20s and 30s, primarily.

And that's, you know, I'm not being Peter Pan. I'm trying to kind of rejuvenate my thinking. Because you become aware in your, you know, you have a kind of many professionals, have a kind of professional peak in your 40s, and then you can feel yourself, your views hardening. And you feel your self closing off to new ideas. And the minute you see yourself rolling your eyes at something,

that's, oh, that's what the kids think. Then you realize the end is nigh. And you have to take... So part of what I do is try and... Even when I'm writing, I don't write in an office. I write in coffee shops. Why? I don't particularly think coffee shops are amazing places to write.

But I do think that simply just being around. people who are not my age is really useful and I travel a lot and that's a really really useful way of breaking out of bad intellectual habits and to remind yourself about what the rest of the world is like I also try to be intellectually flexible and let me tell you about a worry I have maybe you can talk me out of my worry I worry that insofar as one is intellectually flexible and any particular thing, it becomes a way actually of protecting some broader and more hidden edifice, that there's a kind of oddly hidden desperation or even pessimism embedded in certain kind of flexibilities,

and there's something to be said for erecting a quite rigid structure, which people tend to do more when they're young, and then it can be toppled. So one becomes, quote unquote, wiser, more flexible, more willing to revise. You've written about how different columns, you know, they're just, they're opening questions, or to get people to think. And I worry in my own writing, when I try to do this, that in some ways it's a deeper dogmatism than erecting the highly dogmatic structure, which can be toppled.

Do you have that same worry, or how do you see those trade-offs? Do you see what I'm saying? We're at the point in the conversation where you reveal yourself to be much smarter than I am. I've never thought it through that deeply. I think, well, because I don't think of myself as having an edifice. So I have a series of positions and feelings about things.

So you said early on that you thought of my work as being optimistic. So that's not an, I feel like that's a feeling and not an edifice. I don't have a formal reason to be optimistic. I'm just an optimistic person. I have a physiological optimism as opposed to an intellectual optimism. And also I don't understand what the point would be if you weren't optimistic. Like, why would you get up? I know people who enjoy their own pessimism in a strange way.

Also, I don't think you could be a run, I mean, to come back to running, you can't really be an athlete and be a pessimist. The whole point of being an athlete is you're building towards something, right? You don't just work out to work out. You work out because there's something out there that you're trying to do. Anyway, that's the side point. But I sort of think of, here's a good example. On the Affordable Care Act, I have changed my mind six, seven times.

I'm not toggling back and forth between pro and con. I feel like I'm jumping around, I'm eminently persuadable on it. And what that has done is it has, it's been very, very useful now because now it's very fashionable for liberals to be super into the affordable Care Act because it's under fire. And I feel

myself being sucked in that direction. But then I remember, wait a minute, I've been kind of I've been bouncing around for five years on this. Why am I suddenly, just because it's politically expedient, running to defense of this thing, which literally

a year ago, if you quoted me at a party, I would be the guy saying, and here's another problem with that. And, you know, there's still the best book I read about about health care was an out and out

attack on Obama care. So like so I kind of that to me is that's really useful to kind of turn over your and accept the fact that 50% of the time you're going to be wrong on these kind of things but that's fine.

Now it's been said that satire sometimes reaffirms power while poetry affirms only its own power. You have a podcast where you express a worry that Tina Faye, by mimicking and satirizing Sarah Palin, actually made her more acceptable and more likable in doing so. So fast forward to the current moment. We have Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin and Donald Trump.

Is that useful satire? Is it not sufficiently negative? Should we be deploying poetry? Or is that the effective medium for social commentary? Well, I don't like the Alec Baldwin, Donald Trump. I don't think actually it's, I mean, if you compare it to the Sean Spicer, it's not as good, and it's not as good because the truly effective satirical impersonation is one that finds something essential.

about the character and magnifies it, something buried that you wouldn't ordinarily have seen or have glimpsed in that person. So with the Spicer personation, why that's so brilliant is that it draws out his anger. He's angry at being put in this impossible position, right? That is the essence of that character. So what is a, how does a person respond

to this it's almost an absurd position he's in, right? And he has this kind of it's not sublimated. It's there, this kind of rage. Like, I mean, in every one of his utterances, it's like,

I can't fucking believe that I am in this. And so that Saturday Night Live impersonation gets beautifully at that thing. It satirizes that. And so when I forgot in the name of the woman who does it. Yes. When Melissa

McCarthy, when she picks up the podium, that's an absurd illustration of that fundamental point. But the Alec Baldwin, Trump, doesn't get at something essential about Trump. It simply takes his mannerisms and exaggerates them slightly, but he hasn't mined Trump. And there's so many directions you can go with Trump. I mean, the kind of extraordinary insecurity

of the man, which I, you know, like I said, There were many things you could pluck out. But that, for one, the idea of doing an impersonation where you really thought deeply about what it would mean in a comic way to represent this man's almost kind of tragic level of insecurity. That's an interesting... And Al-Balban is not... He's a little too glib to be able to...

And that's the problem with Saturday Night Live, the larger problem, and I was trying to get out of that podcast episode on satire. The problem with doing satire through the vehicle of a show like Saturday Night Live is they're not incentivized to do that kind of deep thinking. The Melissa McCarthy thing is an exception. It's not the rule. Really what they're incentivized to do is for the actor who is, in many cases, as famous or more famous than the person they are impersonating.

the actor is using the character to further their own ends. Tina Fey is infinitely more popular, more accomplished, more whatever than Sarah Palin will ever be. And so she's using Sarah Palin to further her own ends. That's backwards, right? She's not inhabiting the character of Sailor Palin in order to make a point about Sarah Palin. She is inhabiting Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Tina Feyn. right and I feel like so long as satire is done by a television show which has such a lofty position in the cultural hierarchy it's always going to be the case that that is going to that's what's going to drive their impersonations they're always going to be sitting on their hands right remember they're making fun of Trump six months after they had him on the show right after they were complicit in his rise right I mean and after Jimmy Fallon ruffled his hair on camera so I mean these are people who are I mean, you can, maybe that's fine.

My point is, you can't be an effective satirist if you are so deeply complicit in the object of your satire. My last question before we have a few audience questions, I was very struck by what I think is your latest New Yorker column, where you wrote about what is parallel and not parallel between the cases of Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers case. And in my reading of the Pentagon Papers case,

here's what really struck and astonished me. And I'd like your view on how it's changed. When the Pentagon Papers became public in, I think, 1971, first they were incredibly boring, but when you did read them or read excerpts, one of the thing that startled so many people is it came out that there were accords dating back to 1954, where it turned out America had broken the accords and not North Vietnam, and this shocked people and caused them to reassess their whole sense of the Vietnam War, and that's 1954, which was then from 1971, a long time ago. So there was a sense of history embedded in how people understood that episode that seems to me entirely lacking today to get someone to care that much about something done under other

administrations. You know, 17 years earlier seems virtually impossible. And what is it about America that's changed? Yeah. So that history now doesn't matter the way it did then. So this is, this is, you've touched on the thing about the Pentagon Papers controversy, which is in retrospect, so unbelievable. It makes, viewed it through a present day lens, the whole thing is bananas. It makes no sense whatsoever. It's the most hilariously wonky, nerdy exercise. So even step back, what is the Pentagon Papers? It is Robert McNamara saying in whatever, 69 or 68, whatever, what we really need is to get the smartest historians in a room to write me a 10-volume set on historical analysis going by 20 years on this conflict we're involved in. So right from the start, we're in a kind of rarefied academic realm, and he got us a bunch of PhDs who slave away on this thing and produce this massive turgid, you know.

And you have Ellsberg, who is the central player in this whole thing. what is Ellsberg? He is the wonkiest of the wonks. So he wrote a bit of it, and his great complaint, as he takes, he gets a copy of the Pentagon Papers, he's trying to get everyone to read it. And by reading it, he means, I need you to go away for however many months it'll take you, and work you away through all 10 volumes. And there's these hilarious conversations he has with Kissinger, where he's trying to get, Kissinger just wants a summary. It's like, no, you can't do a summary. You've got to read the whole thing. You've got to get a couple thousand words in before.

Pages in before it makes any sense. And it's just like there's no contemporary, I mean, it's like history, something. It's not just, 2017 and 1971 viewed through the lens of the Pentagon Papers' controversy, they belong on different planets. I mean, we're not even the whole. And when the New York Times gets the copies, I mean, remember, and it takes them like a year or whatever to photocopy all of it because it's enormous, and the copies are really slow. And the great year, the great story, which is the woman who is now Linda Resnick, who's now a billionaire and lives in a great, you know, when you're driving down Wilshire in Beverly Hills, there's like those massive houses to your left as you drive into Beverly Hills. She lives in one of those houses.

She's the one who has the pomegranate juice, palm juice. Anyway, she was the boyfriend, the girlfriend of Ellsberg's best friend, and she ran a ad agency on Beverly Boulevard, and she had a Xerox machine, which is a huge deal in 1971. So he does it.

He goes, she's the one who provides this, which I just think is up, I once ran into her at some event in L.A. I was like, you had the Xerox machine. What a great role. to play in history. But every part of it is all about people who took history so seriously that they were willing to spend all night photocopying for months on end. And then

Ellesberg took copies. He went around the Capitol also trying to get senators to read it. And, you know, it was just this long and his big, and over and over again, the complaint that drove him to leak it to the New York Times was that no one's taking this seriously. And what does the New York Times do when they get a copy, when they get the copies? They rent a room, two rooms in the Hilton, like right next to the New York Times headquarters, put a guard out front and then spend months reading it. Again, months, reading it, months. Like, it's just this kind of thing that, it's just, I mean, imagine today if this thing

dropped. I didn't even know how we would, people would have to do takes that would come out within six hours. I mean, there isn't, it had to do an executive summary of the executive summary in order to be able to, like, yeah, the whole age isn't, it belongs to a different era. I almost feel like it's the last, it feels like the, the, it is the final act in a, in, an intellectual era in American life when institutionalized government was, expected to comport itself according to standards and norms that came from the academy. Right? That's what's the whole thing is about people who came out of elite schools and had a certain expectation

about what it meant to be a public servant and what your intellectual responsibilities were as a public servant. And they carried those norms with them from graduate school to Washington, right? And that's the whole, and the fact that Ellsberg is a PhD in decision sciences and wrote papers with Thomas Schelling is not a peripheral fact. It's the core fact, right? That's who they were. So when you, we go fast forward and you have Edward Snowden, who is a community college dropout, which I don't say is a snobbish thing. I'm contrasting him to his predecessor who was a PhD from MIT. right and Snowden's intellectual understanding of what he was engaged in is just it is a fraction of you know he he used a search engine just to pluck stuff at random from the NSA files and hand it over to people that's not what Ellsberg was doing and you in the gap between those two figures is is the story of you know the last 50 years of the changes of the last 50 years in American life Before we move to a very brief Q&A, let's have a big round of applause for Malcolm Gladwell.

We have two microphones. Just to be clear, the purpose is for Malcolm to answer, not really for you to ask. So if you make a speech, I will cut you off. Please ask a brief to the point question. And we will start at this microphone. Yes. Hi. I just wanted to know when we're going to get more podcasts. Ah, I'm doing them, I'm writing them as we speak. I'm actually doing some interviews tomorrow in the D.C. area for one of the shows. They're, and they'll come back out in June. Awesome. Thank you.

Next question over here. Hi, good evening. Thanks again. What tools should we use to discover talent within ourselves and others? It's a good question. It's a great question. impossible to answer in time that I have. But, well, you know, if I can use my favorite subject of running as an example, the amount of, if you look at times in the marathon today

and compare them to times from 30 years ago, we are radically slower today. I'm not talking about the elite level, I'm talking about at the sub-elite level. the number of Americans, for example, who can break three hours in a marathon today is a fraction of what it was in 1980 or 1985. And that goes to this point that our tools are, in order to extract running talent from the general population, you need to have a really, really broad base, and the broad base is gone. There is still elite running that produces really good, fast runners. In 1980, there was this many people running the kind of mileage necessary to run a marathon properly,

and today there's this many. And all of our attention and focus is on the 95th percentile, but what we don't understand is we'll never find the next great marathoner until we re-broadened the base. When we had a base this big of mediocre marathoners, we had the two greatest marathoners in the world. Now that our base is this big, we got nobody in the top ten. This side, next question. Thank you. Hi, my name is Jesse Rifkin, big fan.

My question is, when you were interviewed by Ezra Klein recently, you said that you and some friends used to run a publication titled Ad homonym, a journal of slander and political opinion. In a world where, you know, academics and quality journalists and intellectuals so often fail to connect with the public, and at least if November's any indication, ad hominem attacks do, should we bring that or something like that back? Oh.

No, this was his stay, this was a zine that had a unnecessarily provocative title. We were, we felt that there was a quality, we were all obsessed with William M. Buckley, and we thought that there was a quality of high-end invective that he personified that we were trying to emulate. I don't think that is a necessary exercise in 2017. I think it was, it might have been, it was more useful in a more genteel era. But I don't, I think it's a bad. Well, screw you. Next question.

Hi. So I've heard you talk about kind of systematic inequalities and how we identify students in education. Do you think the same exist in small business? And if so, what could a small business do to identify kind of an understanding? undermine pool of talent that isn't being reached. Yeah. That's another interesting question. I don't know if I have a kind of useful answer to that. I mean, I was struck recently by looking at a set of numbers,

and I may have been on marginal revolution, about how the rate of startups in this country has been falling. Correct, since the 80s. since the 80s, which, you know, like most people, I was surprised by that. I thought I sort of bought the Kool-Aid that thought we were in this kind of great age of new business formation. And the thing about that that's so worrying is I would have thought that, I would imagine that an awful lot of what it takes to encourage someone, that takes for someone to start a new business,

is some kind of direct knowledge of someone else who started a new business, in the same way that it's very hard to get people to want to go to college if they don't have someone in their life who has gone to college, right? Or to understand the importance of it unless they have some kind of personal connection. So when you have these... So when you see a trend line that's going down

in something like that, I wonder whether it will accelerate over time that the less business gets started, the less business gets started, right? Because there's no one with any kind of connection of... You have to have some... glimpse of this as a potential possibility.

And that would result, I think, in a lot of business talent being squandered. I mean, I will say parenthetically to this, that the number, you know, I'm someone who's self-employed. When I worked for, before I was self-employed, I worked for large organizations. And if you would ask me when I worked for the Washington Post, say, would I ever want to be self-employed, I would have said, reacted with horror. I would have thought, I can't understand how you could do that. Don't you wake up every morning in a cold sweat, knowing where your next dollar is coming from? Turns out, I'm way happier self-employed than I was working for.

But getting there took, and it took 20 years, it took all kinds of lucky breaks, it took all kinds of, there was no one in my life who, I didn't know any self-employed people, I didn't know how to make that kind of jump. And I, you know, I wonder how many people are in a similar position of not realizing they have the ability to be do something entrepreneurial and would be happy doing something entrepreneurial, but just have no example. Two more questions next. Over here. Hi. Thanks for being here. Something that surprised me about what you just said earlier in the conversation was that you feel you're a very risk-adverse person. Can you expand on that? Well, I'm a product of one of the greatest welfare states in the history of welfare states, Canada in the 70s.

I have come from my home with two happily married people who were, you know, the sweetest, kindest, almost non-threatening parents of all time. I went to genial Canadian public schools where I was treated with respect at every turn. and then I got out of college and was almost immediately given a job by a very, very well-heeled Fortune 500 company where I was cosseted and given every opportunity without ever asking for it.

So like, where is the risk-taking? My bio is just one long, you know, effortless, riskless, frictionless. You know, I've gone from one that was a wonderful phrase that that Chuck Lane, Charles Lane,

who once used to describe the Washington Post, he described it as the fur-lined rat hole. And I have gone from one fur-lined rat hole to the next of the course of my life. So, yeah, I've never had to really take any risks. Final question. Hi, as a Canadian and, you know, Jamaican background, can you explain your take on

the anti-intellectual movement in the United States? Is it just that we have big guns, big religion, and we're not afraid to throw that around? Or what do you think? Yeah. Well, is it any different? I mean, different, first of all, I don't know whether, well, let me back up.

the role that evangelical Christianity plays in this country's culture is very different from other Western countries. So that's clearly a consideration. That's been a force not for anti-intellectualism. That's wrong. It's been a force for a particular approach to intellectual life. You know, Christianity, and I say this as someone who comes from any evangelical Christian background, is a deeply intellectual culture in many levels. but there are certain questions on which the religious perspective

orientes thinking a little differently from the secular intellectual mainstream. So that's been a prominent part of this country, I think, for a long time. But also I think that there's a... I would say I would phrase a lot of what's going on now, not in terms of intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism, but a kind of... I've said this before, that the most striking thing about American public life to me as a non-American is the extent to which it's dominated by backlash. I think of the history of American life over the last

150 years as just one period of prolonged backlash after another. There are these, you know, you have a backlash to the Civil War that basically lasts 75 years. Then you have the Brown decision. Then you have backlash of the Brown decision that last 25 years. And then you have you know, a little moment for feminism in the 70s and you have a backlash that lasts until, I mean, it may still be going on. You have a little, I mean, there's a gay rights backlash which dwarfs the little moment of gay rights pops its head into the public discourse. And the backlash goes on for years and like, you know, chases every Democrat out of Congress. and distorts, you know, two election cycles.

I mean, so it's like, and I feel like we're going to, we're in the middle of another one of these. I don't know why American backlash cycles, it's a kind of one step forward, four steps back that I don't, maybe I'm naive, I don't see that in other cultures. I've just been, I'm only been thinking this because I've been doing these podcast episodes on the 50s and 60s and on civil rights movements in those. And the backlash, you know, the backlash to Brown is so phenomenal. I mean, it's so great that you have to seriously ask yourself whether Brown was worth it. I mean, there's a great paper written on the Brown backlash thesis by a historian whose name, sadly, just gave me right now.

Clare. Michael Clare, maybe I'm running. Claremann, Michael Claremont, thank you. Which you should read, because, although he doesn't take this tack, but as I read that paper, he just points out, you know, the backlash is sort of 10x what Brown is, distorts the politics of the South for two generations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You read that and you have to think,

Jesus, maybe it wasn't worth it. I mean, maybe we should have just done something a lot more subtle and not risked this. And I feel like what's going on now in American life is a backlash that maybe one reading is that there was the dominant kind of liberal intellectual culture in this country when too fast.

Maybe we went too fast. We just have to learn to slow down. You can't do everything you want in one generation. And my current take on, I'm currently pro-abomacare, this will change. But my current take is, it was a good idea, but you know what? Maybe it was a bridge too far. Maybe it just was the thing that maybe we should have done a little, tiny, smaller piece of it and just mel it out because in part, that's what we're seeing now.

the centrality of Obamacare in the current backlash narrative is so weird, right? It doesn't make any sense. Many of the people who are against it are beneficiaries of it. This law is not this kind of pox on American life. It's managed to bring down. I mean, there's tons of, from a perfectly rational standpoint, if you were an ardent right-winger, this is not the thing you would go after, right? There's a ton of other battles.

The fact that they want to fight this battle first is, Really strange and can only be interpreted in terms of, it's the backlash. It's like, it's this symbol of what you, of the thing that just drove you crazy and appalled you over the last couple of years. And you just want to banish it from your sight, you know. And that's, so that's, I think that does that answer your question? Two announcements, there is book signing outside. And second, you can subscribe to this podcast, just Google, conversations with Tyler, iTunes, many other ways. Again, a big hand from Malcolm Gladwell.

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