How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S7, Ep2 How to Fail: Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

**TW: contains references to police brutality against Black people**My guest this week is Malcolm Gladwell, a man who has challenged and changed the way we think with six bestselling books including The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. Gladwell also hosts his own highly successful podcast, Revisionist History and is basically 98% brain. Obviously this makes him quite an intimidating prospect to interview, but luckily he was extremely nice and, as luck would have it, his new book is all about how we can best talk to strangers. It is called, appropriately enough, Talking To Strangers, and I found it a fascinating read, written in Gladwell's trademark style which combines academic research with humour, insight and journalistic expertise, all of which makes for a curiously propulsive narrative.Malcolm really engaged with the idea of this podcast and came up with three highly thoughtful failures, including a professional low-point which caused him public embarrassment and a deeply felt failure to stand by an alcoholic friend. We also chat about running, faith and whether prejudice can ever be a force for good. Talking to Malcolm for an hour felt like plunging into a freezing pool and emerging zingily refreshed from the experience. It was thought-provoking in the best, most meaningful way and I hope it stimulates you as much as it did me.*The Sunday Times Top 5 bestselling book of the podcast, How To Fail: Everything I've Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong is out now in paperback and available to buy here.*Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell is published by Penguin Books and is available to buy here. * This episode is sponsored by MEYA, a new meditation app that uses the power of music to switch you into a meditative state. Download the app here to experience the power of MEYA mind journeys and a new way to fit meditation into your daily routine this January. *How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. We love hearing from you! To contact us, email [e-mail]* Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayMalcolm Gladwell @gladwellMEYA @meya_app               Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger, because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. According to my guest this week, the key to success in any field is simply a matter of practicing a specific task for 10,000 hours. At 56, he has had over 490,000 hours to become an expert in the art of being Malcolm Gladwell. He does it extremely well. The author of six best-selling books, including The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, Gladwell has challenged and changed the way we think. He writes with wry curiosity and a penchant for anecdotal interrogation, fusing scientific, sociological and psychological research in a way that is both readable and stimulating. Little wonder then that his books have sold millions of copies or that his podcast, Revisionist History, was an immediate hit on its launch in 2016. But success was not always assured. Gladwell's grades

were not good enough for graduate school and, as a young man, he was rejected by every advertising agency he applied to. He turned to journalism. These days, he's a staff writer on The New Yorker. His latest book, Talking to Strangers, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and is a fascinating examination of why humans have a natural assumption to trust other people and what this costs us. Gladwell himself is not immune. I'm excessively trusting, he said in an interview earlier this year, confessing that he thought he'd been scammed while trying to buy a car. Malcolm Gladwell, I want to know whether you were scammed while trying to buy that car. I was. I got the car in the end, but not without some degree of

heartache, but it ended semi-happily. What kind of car is it? I was buying a 1973 Mercedes 280. You know those cars that used to be sort of taxi cabs in third world nations? That's the one I got. I'm a car aficionado. I always wanted to have one of those. But it proved to be quite a complicated, took a year to arrive. And for many months during that year, I suspected it would never arrive. So you say you were excessively trusting.

And I'm interested in that because I feel that that's atypical and not many people would feel the same way. Are you excessively trusting in all transactions, in business transactions and intimate relationships? Yes, I think so. I've thought about it more in kind of non-personal encounters. But the argument that I make in talking to strangers is that that's the right strategy, that the number of liars and sociopaths and cheats out there is actually quite small. And the benefits from trusting others are really large. And so the common sense position is to trust everyone and just accept that every now and again you'll get cheated. But it's a very small price to pay for the enormous benefits that come from being open to the world. Do you think if you're an excessively trusting person, you're more likely to get scammed or be cheated on?

Sort of. But the thing about, you know, I spend a lot of time in the book talking about cheats. The point about cheats is that they end up fooling everyone. So they fool the super trusting and the semi trusting and the not so trusting seems to be equally. This history of spies is that spies usually do their treachery over, you know, years and they fool everyone, even fellow spies, who you would think would be the least trusting people imaginable. I tell a number of spy stories in the book. And what's remarkable is, you know, MI6 or the CIA or any of these organizations, you would think if anyone had their suspicious antenna out looking for someone who was guilty of treachery, it would be them. And yet, I feel like every five years we learn about a new person who has successfully fooled the CIA or MI6 for years and years and years. So, I don't know. It seems like everyone gets taken in the end. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is a more personal one, and it concerns your father,

who is a mathematics professor. And he was emerging from a shower while he was on vacation and stumbled across an intruder. And his reaction was to say, get out now. And the intruder who had a knife to your mother's throat actually complied. That's astonishing to me. Why do you think that happened? Why did the intruder comply? Well, it's a very good question.

My father was then in his 70s. He's come out of the shower. He's naked and dripping. The intruder is a young man with a knife to my mother's throat. The glib explanation, which someone suggested to me, was that no one wants to fight a naked man, which is sort of true. But the more complicated explanation is that my father was someone, and I talk about the significance of this in the book at some length, whose emotions were not represented on his face. So he was difficult to read. And when he said that to the intruder, get out now, he must have looked stern and forbidding, even though, of course, he was terrified. And the intruder was probably so stunned by the sight of this naked, dripping 75-year-old man who was acting like he had the upper hand, right? Poor man must have been so befuddled at that moment that he just thought,

oh, I better get out of here while I can before the naked man descends on me. But I tell that story as part of this larger point that those who are like my father, whose emotional displays are inconsistent with their feelings, really hard for the rest of us to deal with. Not if we know them well, if you knew my father, you knew that fact about him, but if we don't know them, if they're strangers. So confronting someone like that for the first time is just deeply confusing because you don't know what is going on with this person, right, who looks one way and is feeling another. Do you think you display your emotions and feelings visibly? I read somewhere that you cry, but you don't get angry.

Yeah, I don't really get angry a lot to cry, yes. The reason this is all so difficult and puzzling is that we never see our face when we experience an emotion. I mean, unless we carry around a mirror with us at all times. But so I assume that when I'm happy, I smile. And when I'm sad, I frown. And when I'm upset, I look distressed. But I have no idea. I don't look at my face when other people do. I mean, if you knew me very well, you could tell me. You really need another person to tell you. This is sort of one of the reasons why we struggle so much with facial expressions is that the best way to get smart about facial expressions would be to permanently have a picture of our own face in front of us when we experience an emotion. We don't. All we have are other people's faces, but a problem with that is that we see their face,

but not their heart. And we see, when it comes to us, our heart and not our face. So you have to resolve one of those two problems. Either you need to attach some spectacular device to the hearts of other people so you can see heart and face simultaneously, or carry a mirror. Short of those two things, you have no idea what's going on. Well, if you can't make the device, I guess I'll have to carry a mirror. But then I'm looking at the mirror while I'm experiencing the feeling. So then you're disconnected from the person you're projecting the feeling to you because you're just looking at yourself. So there's a whole other problem. I tell a story in the book about one of my favorite psychological experiments, which is these two German psychologists did this. They led people down a long, dark hallway

into a room where they were asked to read some Kafka, of course, they're Germans, and then answer a series of questions. And then they were told they could leave. Unbeknownst to them, while they're reading the Kafka, the room is rearranged. The hallway disappears. It becomes a very large room with red walls lit by a single naked light bulb. And under the light bulb is sitting their best friend. So they come out, after an hour of reading Kafka, they reemerge thinking they're going to just go down a long hallway. Boom, big room with red walls, their best friend sitting under a light bulb. They're trying to engineer the most surprising thing imaginable.

So they videotape these people as they come out the door and see, boom, this strange room. The first thing they ask them is, were you surprised when you saw your friend under the light bulb? And they say, well, of course. On a scale of 9 to 10, what were you? 9 out of 10 surprised. What do you think your face showed at that moment? Oh, my God, jaw dropped, eyes wide, eyebrows raised.

Then they show them the videotape. And in almost no case do people's faces show the classic sign of surprise, even though they're incredibly surprised. So experiments like that have led us to believe that this practice we have when we meet a stranger of investing greatly in the evidence that's on their face is just full of holes. It leads nowhere good. But something for someone to, anyone who goes on a first date should remember this. I'm so blown away by the amount of effort that scientists go to, to construct experiments like that. I mean, it's almost like a set design. Isn't it fantastic? It is an exercise. I'm sure it is an exercise in elaborate set design. One of the cases that you examine with infinite detail in Talking to Strangers, which, by the way, I loved reading, is the case of Sandra Bland, who was a woman in her late 20s who hanged herself after three days in custody after having been stopped for a very minor traffic violation.

And what you do by examining that case is that you take apart race relations and the history of policing in modern America. And I wondered why you chose to open and end the book with Sandra Bland. Well, it was a very, very big deal case in the United States. It was in the news. It was much discussed. was unusual in these kinds of high profile cases in that the entire encounter between Sandra Bland and the police officer, which began as a routine traffic stop and then kind of degenerates into an argument, ending with the officer dragging her out of her car, was captured on videotape. You can actually go on YouTube right now and see it if you wish. So we know exactly what happened between the two of them.

And that's unusual in the sense that normally what prevents us, I think, from really learning from these kinds of episodes is that we never get past the point where we're arguing over what happened. In this case, there is no argument about what happened. We have the tape. So we can move directly to the crucial bit, which is making sense of what happened. From the standpoint of a storyteller, that's enormously appealing. And then most of all, I just personally found that story so upsetting. I mean, I just remember at the time when it happened, I mean, there were a whole string of those cases, beginning with, remember, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot by a cop.

That one got me in a way, just because it was so stupid. It's the middle of the day. It's a, you know, a lovely young woman coming from a job interview. She's not some shadowy character. She's just educated, interesting, in the middle of the day in a small town in Texas. I mean, there's no context. It's not back alleyway at night when everyone's been drinking and they're, you know, having a fight or something. You just can't believe that a moment that ordinary could go so wrong. And that made it heartbreaking. You've written in Blink about how when you grew your hair out, you were being stopped more frequently by police officers, and you are biracial. How much did that play into the heartbreak that you felt? You know, it's funny, I never thought of that till now. I'm sure it had something to do with it. I

mean, none of my stops were problematic in the way that one was, but I'm certainly familiar with what it feels like to be stopped for no good reason and how alienating and angering that is. And the last part of the book is kind of an examination of the way police behave and trying to figure out, are there better ways to ensure safety than sending the police on fishing expeditions to find potential criminals by stopping people for all manner of trivial offenses. And that is something that I've thought a lot about, that that's well-intentioned behavior, but the side effect is so toxic that it's really worth wondering whether we should continue doing it. wondering whether we should continue doing it.

You've sent me three really profound failures. And your mother, who is a Jamaican psychotherapist, I wonder how used you are, because of that kind of upbringing, to asking these sorts of questions of yourself, to asking who you are and what is a failure and what is a success. My mother never turned her antenna in my direction in that same way. So not used to it at all. In fact, I had tremendous difficulty coming up with this list. I had to think about it for a long time. I'm not someone who dwells on failures at all. And I bury them, I think probably so effectively that it took a while to kind of unearth them for this podcast.

But no. So if you imagine that because my mother is a therapist, I lived in a house where we were constantly sharing our feelings and exposing our deepest and most raw emotions, the answer is no, the opposite. My father was a reserved Englishman and all talk of emotion was largely absent from my upbringing. Your first failure is that as a child, you were a very successful runner, but you quit at 16. Why did you quit? I think about this all the time. So I was a

Canadian record holder for my age. My life was running. If you asked me at 13 or 14 who I was, I would have said I was a runner before all other descriptors. Almost nothing personal that I've done by myself has given me as much pleasure as running. When I was about 16, it occurred to me that I was not going to be, although I was very successful, I knew that writing was on the wall and it wouldn't last. It's funny about age class sports. There's a great sorting that takes place in late adolescence. 5% of the good people go on to be really good and the other 95% fall away. And I realized I was part of the 95%, and I quit. I quit the thing I loved the most because I didn't think I was going to be one of the best. 30 years pass, and I start running seriously again. And this time, I'm no longer the best in the country. I'm good. I'm not

great. And I discover the joys of running all over again. Only this time I discover it. It's much more profound joy because I'm not good. And I realized that actually the joy of running comes not from winning in competition, but from the community of runners, from just doing something for the sheer pleasure of it, from, you know, moving through the countryside on a snowy morning, you know, for an hour and a half or what have you. In other words, the pleasure of running comes not from excellence, but from mediocrity. To my 14-year-old self, this would have been impossible to understand. And even to my 30-year-old self, this would have been impossible to understand. I mean, I suppose I got so caught up in the pursuit of excellence in everything and this feeling that if I wasn't going to be excellent, it wasn't worth it.

And then I realized, actually, no, that some of the most beautiful things we do are the things that we do badly or do averagely. And it breaks my heart that it took me until the age of 50 to figure that out. originally. And it breaks my heart that it took me until the age of 50 to figure that out. And why do you think you were so driven as a child to be the best? I don't know. I mean, here you're asking me to be. I just was. I mean, I don't think that I was an insanely ambitious child. I just believed very strongly that if you're going to do something, you should do your best and you should. And I did thing that I think and this is going to be sound odd but I think it's very male to conflate what you do well with what you like so I always think the great one of the

great things that women have over men is that women are able to separate those two things more easily they don't necessarily feel that because they do something well, that's what they should like. But as a man, you, at a very early age, it seems like your options are narrowed and you're kind of instructed by society that your choice of options is limited to those things that you can excel at. And that was the trap that I was in. And then I discovered, it's funny because I think so much about this mediocrity argument. I was at a little college not far from where I live called Bard College, which is a famous artsy kind of place where you go and write poetry and smoke lots of pot and form a bad rock band. It's that kind of place. It's like 1,200 students.

I was watching them one day. I went to the campus to go to the library or something, and I was watching their soccer team play, and they were terrible, terrible, as you can imagine a tiny school full of super artsy kids to be. And my first thought was, they're terrible. This is embarrassing. My second thought was, no, no, no, this is brilliant, that at a school like this, you could do whatever you want. no, no, no, this is brilliant, that at a school like this, you could do whatever you want. You could enjoy soccer. Every other serious university in America has got a soccer team full of absolutely brilliant players. And if you just like soccer, you're not very good at it, you can't play. At Bard, you can play even if you're bad. It's fantastic. It's the best place.

And by the way, at a school that small, and that's only interested in these kind of amorphous artsy things, you can do whatever you want, right? If you want to be on the debate team, you can join the debate team. No one's on the debate team. They're all off smoking weed and making bad music. There's something incredibly liberating. And by the way, when you're 20, that's what you should be doing. You should be trying a million things, especially the things you're not good at, just to see if there's some wonderful little thing you can extract from the experience. Like I said, it breaks my heart that it took me this long to learn that lesson. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online.

It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions. If you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second. Then join me, Hunter Harris.

And me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that,

but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago, these words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago, set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Do you enjoy writing? I do, yes. And you're a phenomenally successful writer. So that is one area in which I don't think you could claim to be at all mediocre in that you are a bestselling author and a noted staff writer on The New Yorker. Do you ever worry

that the success of your writing will ultimately take away from the enjoyment of it? Does it place more pressure on you? No. So at this point, so unforced, it would be different if i thought i wrote all too much but the weird thing about writing books is that you spend only a small portion of the time when you're writing a book writing if i could order the world the way i wanted i would write way more but i don't actually write much at all you spend all your time arranging interviews, conducting interviews, reading, thinking, answering emails. So I continue to enjoy it so much. I only wish I could do more of it. I mentioned in the introduction that you initially, after graduation, applied for advertising jobs and you got rejected from every single one.

For someone who was used to pursuing excellence, what did that feel like? Well, I was 20. So, I mean, I don't think I was terribly distressed. I kind of felt like, how did I feel? I remember putting up all of the rejection letters on the wall of my room in university. So I made it into a kind of joke. I was never, and to this day, I'm not someone who spends a lot of time worrying about what's going to happen tomorrow. So we knew I was going to graduate and I would need to figure out what to do. But I just don't think that far ahead. So I kind of postponed whatever anxiety would be associated with the fact that I had no idea what I was going to do.

I had successfully pushed off into the future. to do what I was going to do, I had successfully pushed off into the future. And also, oddly, Canada at that moment was in a very, very, very, very serious recession. And no one was getting jobs. So, you know, I mean, if no one's getting a job, and my dad would say, my dad used to say, in order to lower my expectations appropriately, he's like, be prepared for the fact that you might be unemployed upon graduation. So I was like, you know, this is not – it would be quite a different thing if this would have happened today under full employment. If there's full employment and you're the only one without a job, you feel bad. If unemployment rate is 15% or whatever it was in Canada at the time, then I felt like I was just joining the club of kind of shiftless and aimless young people. Are you an only child?

I am the youngest of three. Oh, okay. What do you think it's like being the youngest as opposed to the oldest? Have you spent any time thinking about it? Well, you know, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. You know, the great benefit of being the youngest is that your parents have exhausted all of their anxieties are exhausted by the time they get to you. So they basically, in a lovely way, kind of check out, right? When I say in a lovely way, I mean that. I don't mean my parents neglected me to the contrary. I grew up in the most loving household. But they had long ago disabused them of the notion that parenting involved vigilance.

When I was in high school, my best friend and I decided that we weren't interested in going to high school, but not in a traditional truant way. We were very interested in learning, but just not in school. So our goal was to be the best possible student we could be without attending class. And my mother was so down for this experiment. She participated, encouraged. She ran interference with the principal. I mean, she wouldn't own up to it today, but I never for once felt that I was defying my parents' expectations. They were like, fine. If you think it's better to learn outside the classroom, go for it. I mean, that's the kind of gift a youngest child gets. What are you? I'm the youngest of two. So I totally agree with you. I feel like my sister,

who's four years older, went through all of those tricky phases of talking to my parents about getting her ears pierced. And then I just sailed through in her wake. So much better. So much better. Your second failure, we're now going to fast forward a bit because this is when you're writing for The New Yorker magazine. And it's about the fact that you quoted or rather misquoted a passage from a book by the author Charles Murray. Would you explain a bit more about what happened? I've thought about this so much over the years. Charles Murray is a very controversial conservative thinker in America. He's written many books, but his most notorious book was called The Bell Curve,

which was an argument that black people were, when it came to intelligence, genetically inferior to white people. He dressed up that argument in very respectable sounding language and statistics, but at core, that's what he was saying. As someone with a black mother, you can imagine how I felt about this book. It so happens that at some point later, I'm at the New Yorker magazine, and I'm writing a story in which I talk about Charles Murray's work in a kind of hostile way. And I quote from this book, this same book. And the quote in his book is, he's trying to defend the kind of outrageousness of his claim by saying, look, just because I believe black people are not as smart as white people, it doesn't mean that we should do all kinds of outrageous things like discriminate against them or block them up in camps and not let them procreate, etc. I saw that quote and left out

the not. So I had him saying we should essentially be rounding up black people and not letting them, or some version of that. And we have a fact-checking process at The New Yorker, but for some reason I declined to give the fact-checker the kind of original source material. She declined to find it. The editors somehow read this and it didn't register them as ridiculous. So it made its way into the magazine. And it's just about the most egregious. I mean, Charles Murray, for all of the eccentricities of his position, is a serious person. He does not believe in overt acts of hostility against black people. And the question I asked myself was, how on earth could I have made this error? It wasn't

conscious. I didn't, afterwards, there was a kind of hullabaloo in journalism circles. And some people said, well, on the right, they said, this was in a deliberate attempt by Gladwell to smear Charles Murray. It was not deliberate in the world. I would never have done something that would embarrass myself in such an outrageous way and embarrass him. It was unconscious, which does not make it, by the way, any better. It just makes it sort of deeper and more. But on some unconscious way, my desire to denigrate and diminish this man led me to distort his words and then be incapable of acknowledging and seeing my own distortion. And it was a little object lesson in the power of bias, which is highly ironic because my objection to his work is that I feel it's biased. And yet, on some fundamental level,

when I was discussing his work, I displayed another bias, not the same bias, but a bias of an equally, not equal, a pernicious bias, just of a different sort. Talk about holding a window up to your own frailty. And I was reminded, my mother wrote a memoir in which she recounts an episode in which she's just come to London in the 50s. And a young boy drives past her on a bicycle and yells at her in some context. And she's sort of horrified and taken aback and upset. And then in the memoir, she goes into this

long discussion about how that moment prompted her to think, now, wait a minute, have I expressed the same, not of that variety, but am I also guilty of some form of discrimination in my own life? She then has a long passage about the prejudices held by light-skinned Jamaicans, as she is, towards darker-skinned Jamaicans. And she sort of wonders whether, is that any different from what this boy was doing to me? It's this precise parallel. That was 1956, probably. This was 1996 or something, 2006. I don't know. Two moments separated by 50 odd years involving me and my mother in which we're forced, these kinds of highly fraught social moments to examine our own prejudices. I just thought it was sort of interesting, the kind of parallelism of, they're different instances, but they're just weirdly similar in the way that we're kind of forced to think about our own weaknesses. Blind spots.

Yeah, blind spots. Do you think prejudice can ever be good? What an interesting question. When it is good, we call it by another name. So my prejudice towards members of my own family, yes. Or to fellow Canadians, yes. I suppose what distinguishes that, we don't call that prejudice because it's positive and doesn't necessarily imply the diminishment or demeaning of those who don't

fall in that category because i love my family does not mean that i don't love others it doesn't crowd out whereas i suppose prejudice always involves lowering someone in your own esteem so maybe maybe it can't ever be good i don don't know. Well, I think prejudice within a power dynamic is always negative, isn't it? Yes. I suppose that's a crucial issue. I just want to point out that Charles Murray is also the man who claimed that there were no great female philosophers or scientists. He's a problematic character, but he did use the word not, and I left it out. Have you ever met him?

No, I tried. It's funny, I contacted him a few years ago when I started to do my podcast. And I said, you know, it would be really interesting for me to do a podcast about this very moment, what I did to you. And he was open to the idea,

but just not then. And so I might go back to him. So I would have met him in that instance, even if I ever to you. And he was open to the idea, but just not then. And so I might go back to him. So I would have met him in that instance, even if I ever do it. As someone who is also a print journalist, although not at your level, I can only imagine the stomach lurching feeling when you realized you'd made that mistake. Oh my God, it was like... How did you find out what happened? Well, I mean, he called my editor on the phone the day

the magazine appeared and said, you left out the not. In an unimaginable way, you have libeled me. So, you know, there was all kinds of apologies that ensued. It was really a kind of stressful and upsetting period. Do you think it's made you into a better journalist or writer as a result? A more cautious writer, but I would say that the real influence of that was not on my writing. It was on something, I think, deeper. I think of getting older as a process of humbling. And as the humbling moments mount, I think you become, if you're lucky, a slightly better person. And this is one of that long list of humbling moments

that have kind of, I think, reduced my levels of overconfidence and self-regard to more appropriate point. That's a really beautiful way of putting it, that growing older is a process of humbling. I know that you are someone of faith, and I wonder if you feel the humbling is partly humbling in the face of God. I do. And, you know, my mother, who is 89 years old, and herself a woman of very strong faith,

has said this in bits and pieces about how at peace she feels, because I feel like in her case, the humbling process is nearing completion, which makes the kind of prospect of death much more manageable. Or, you know, she's at peace, because I feel like all of that long learning curve is reaching close to the end. So yeah, I do think it's very much entwined with that notion. You said in the past that you have lost and refound your faith. But one thing that you never questioned was the logic of Christian faith. And I'm super interested in that because a lot of people would countenance that Christian faith is illogical and irrational. Explain to me what you mean by the logic of Christian faith. Well, I mean, there are many different ways to express that, and I am not a theologian.

Whatever I say is bound to be somewhat inarticulate. But the idea that we are bound together by something greater than ourselves, it seems to me that nothing of value is possible in society without that understanding. Otherwise, what's the point? And also, otherwise, why would I be a good person otherwise, right? There has to be a kind of underlying reason that pushes us to behave morally, to have regard for others, to do all the things that make life livable. And I don't believe that beauty happens without explanation and sort of without design. I'm not someone who thinks that you can get beauty out of randomness.

It's very hard to be a writer and believe that because the whole process of writing is that beauty emerges out of insanely hard work, right? And the opposite of randomness, of careful consideration. And once you've seen that insight and then seen that insight repeatedly, every time you look at excellence in any field, it's the result of great consideration. So why would the beauty of humankind and the world we live in be any different? I guess that's what I mean. mankind and the world we live in be any different. I guess that's what I mean. I hope you don't mind my bringing this up, but I think it's such a beautiful story. And it's about when you were researching David and Goliath, and you met Cliff and Wilma Dirksen. And it was that

experience that restored your faith. Can you tell us why? that restored your faith. Can you tell us why? Well, they were a couple, lived in Winnipeg, Canada, and their daughter, who at the time was, I can't remember, an adolescent, 11 or 12, was abducted, sexually assaulted, and then killed. There was a long search for the killer, and they found him. And the Dirksons, the two of them, publicly forgave the man who did this to their daughter. And the story, what they did is so extraordinarily courageous in one way and beautiful in another. But also when you talk to them and listen to necessary, that they began to understand that unless they forgave him, not only would his life be beyond redemption, but their own would be as well. They would be consumed with their anger and their distress for the rest of their lives, and that their existence

depended on them making this gesture towards this man. The question then was, so how were they capable of doing this incredibly brave and unorthodox thing? And the only explanation that you can come up with is that it was done through the grace of God. It's not something I think we can do by ourselves. I mean, can you imagine someone does that to your own daughter and then you stand up? They forgave him before they found him. They stood up and said, whoever this is, we forgive you. I don't think you can tell a story like that and meet the people who are capable of that act and be unaffected by it and unaffected by its lessons.

Your third failure, and I'm just going to read out how you wrote it to me, is that I had a very close friend who I realized after many years of knowing her was an alcoholic a serious one since I made that realization our friendship has faltered I realized I gave up on her why and how that happened remains one of the most difficult questions I've ever dealt with and I don't really know how to ask you about it because it must be profoundly painful on many levels. When did you realize, how did you make the realization? Well, when her life fell apart. I mean, all of her friends realized roughly the same time.

She had a number of difficult things happen in her life and we just all became aware that her drinking had become out of control. And then we slowly realized that this had been going on for a very long time, and it had been hidden from all of us. And then she went into the familiar kind of first spiral, and then various attempts at recovery. And these stories are very familiar. You know, there's a long hidden period, and there is the sudden revelation of what has been going on. And then there is the very public attempt at rehabilitation. And if you're lucky, it works. And if you're not lucky, it continues. And is part of the reason that you let that friendship go because you didn't feel equipped to help her or you tried to help her and it wasn't helping? And it wasn't helping.

Many reasons. And I don't know which is the most important one. But I think partly because the sudden realization that she had this weakness so violated my sense of who I thought she was. She's an extraordinary, charismatic, appealing, indomitable character. And that is what I loved about her. And then she was suddenly revealed in all of her frailty. And it was almost as if she had become someone else. And this is an indefensible position, but I think it's almost as if I said, well, I'm not friends with that person. I was friends with the old person, the indomitable one, right? And I couldn't make the transition. It's such a sort of damning realization when you

realize that your friendship is not with the person on a fundamental level, with their soul, but with a set of traits that they appear to carry. It's really no different from being in love with someone when they're attractive and falling out of love when they become old and unattractive, right? It's the same thing. Are you fearful that your other friendships are also that? Well, of course. I mean, I think this is part of what is so incredibly difficult about addiction issues for the friends of those who have the problem. And that is that very quickly, it isn't just that your friendship with the person themselves is called into question. It's that it does, it starts to call into question all your friendships. And you begin to wonder,

well, what kind of friend am I to everyone? It's destabilizing. It's kind of upsetting to kind of come to that realization. And when was the last time you were in touch with her? Like maybe a month ago. Yeah, about a a month ago and do you think she feels let down by you or she did okay i think the friendships are such hard things to navigate in so many respects because we're taught culturally how to handle the end of a romantic relationship i mean there's a zillion films about it but a friendship friendship, it's very, you're never taught how to end a friendship. And you're never taught that friendships go through phases and that sometimes you'll be distant and there'll be no logical explanation for it. And you just have to ride the rough seas.

Yeah, yeah. But that sometimes we can feel as much love for friends as we do for romantic partners, if not more so. Yeah, I think that's true. There's also, the one thing I would say is that this is another thing about friendships that maybe distinguishes them from romantic relationships. Romantic relationships often end with a bang and there's no hope of kind of renewal. Whereas friendship friendships, in some sense, they're never really over. I mean, there's always a chance. I'm not without hope that this friendship could come back. It's a very painful process to kind of, in looking and in considering someone else's

frailty to discover your own. That's what's so hard. Have you apologized to her or do you feel that you need to? No, but I think I would say that I was waiting for her to apologize to me. And again, I think that's part of the problem here because as is again, often the case in these situations, things got very messy at the end. So I think that's what's, maybe that's what stands in the way. I've had a couple of close friendships that have fallen by the wayside and I find the idea of confronting that friend almost excruciating. There's something within me, I just can't face it because I can't face being told,

you let me down or you weren't enough or this is why or you were mean or I just can't, I can't deal with it in a way that I think I would be able to if it was a boyfriend. What's that about, Malcolm? I'm now just like treating you as my therapist. I don't know. I think what you said earlier, actually, is super interesting. I hadn't thought about that, is that we have so many scripts, available scripts for romantic relationships, and so few for the complexities of simple friendships. And this weird cultural expectation that says that friendships are easy and romance is hard, which is probably not true.

Do you have lots of friends or do you have a select few? I have a small number of, very small number of close friends. And I'm not a heavily social being. Do you think you're an introvert? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And how do you feel about boundaries, which is something that I've been thinking about

a lot of late? Because I think friendships that are bad for your soul, toxic friendships, can also really challenge boundaries that you put around yourself. Where are you at with that? Are you quite a boundary person? Well, I'm sure I am. I suspect that what I am is, with regard to boundaries, is asymmetrical. That is, in the course of a typical conversation, I probably ask more questions than I answer and listen more than I talk. So I'm often in the position of other people confiding in me, but much less in the position of me confiding in other people. And I don't really

know why. My sense is that I never quite believe that other people are interested in my own confessions. So I tend to believe that other people's boundaries are sort of more permeable than my own or more, there's more to be gained by hopping over their fences than hopping over my fence. So how's this experience for you? I'm quite enjoying it. Oh, good. Now that we've discussed your three failures, how do you feel about failure? Because you are someone who is so associated with success, not only in terms of the work that you produce, but the content of the work.

So that incredibly famous proposition that you just have to put 10,000 hours into something. How do you feel about failure now? Well, you know, I don't think of, I don't like the word. This is one of the reasons I struggled so much with this exercise that you gave me, was that I don't like that word and I rarely use it. So things that might otherwise be perceived as failures, I very often choose to perceive as something else, as interesting or as useful. Or, you know, there's a number of ways which I kind of euphemistically, but that's actually a wrong word because it suggests that I actually, that it's very productive to reframe and healthy

to reframe what might be considered a failure as something else. So when I run a race and don't win, when I was 14, I would have said that was a failure. Now in my advanced years, I say, I just think I had fun. I enjoy the pressure being off. And I, you know, there's all kinds of ways

in which I realized actually that was a better experience. You know, there's something very freeing about being willing to try something that doesn't work, right? Because it just opens up. Once you're willing to do stuff that doesn't work, you can do infinitely more things. If you accept the fact that you're not a good cook, then you can cook anything, right?

I'm not a good cook, but I don't think of that as a failure. I think of that just means like, I'll try and cook anything. As long as we're clear that it's not going to come out well, that gives me license to do, try anything under the sun, right? I mean, it's sort of, on the other hand, if I was deeply invested in my notion of myself as a brilliant cook, I would, the whole process would become high stakes and I would only do the thing I was better at. But people know when they come to my house for dinner, the food's not going to be great unless someone intervenes in the process. And that actually is fantastic. We can

concentrate on having a good time. I love it. That's the entire premise of this podcast. I just want to bottle you up and put you in every episode. My final question is extremely important. When you wrote this email to me detailing your failures, you use no capital letters at the beginning of sentences. Yes. Is that why? Are you just very busy or too busy for capital letters? I don't use capital letters. I didn't know people use capital letters in emails anymore. I haven't used them in 10 years. I kind of like the way it looks. And why? But I mean,

at this point, I don't know. I just, I thought we all did this now. Do you not do this? Are you very formal in your correspondence? I'm extremely formal. But I'm a sort of grammatical pedant. Oh, you are? Yeah, it's annoying.

It's probably about trying to impose control on the random chaos of the universe. Yeah. At some deep level. But are you also in your, are you a very neat and tidy person? Yes. You're that person.

But I'm not obsessively so. Oh no, of course you wouldn't admit that, would you? Damn it, you've seen into my soul. Oh, well, Malcolm Gladwell, I love you, even though you don't use capital letters. Thank you so, so much for such an enlightening conversation. And thank you for coming on How to Fail. Thank you. I enjoyed it. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you

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