PBS News Hour - Full Show - Why Malcolm Gladwell is always changing his mind

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Author Malcolm Gladwell doesn't trust people who don't change their minds. He sits down with Amna Nawaz to discuss what he's learned through revisiting his first book, The Tipping Point, 25 years later, and how he handles hateful comments online. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Hi, everyone. It's Omna Navaz. Welcome back for another episode of Settle In. Today's conversation is with author, thinker, occasional provocateur Malcolm Gladwell. You probably heard about him or at least read his seminal book from back in 2000 called The Tipping Point. He's back now with a response to that. It's called Revenge of the Tipping Point. And it's a really cool look at the data and the analysis behind why we act the way we do. How epidemics move. not just medical ones, but informational and social and cultural. So he tells a lot of great stories in this book. We also talked about life growing up in Canada for little Malcolm Gladwell.

We talked about how he handles all of the haters online, and there are a few in his line of work. And he also gave us his honest, very honest take on this podcast title, which you won't want to miss. So settle in and enjoy my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Delight to be here. So you know you're one of our very first guests, right? I did not know that, but I'm honored. It is true. And we have a name. You want to know what the name is for the podcast?

Okay. It's called Settle In. What do you think? Don't, I mean, I like it, but I'm worried about what comes after Settle in. Settle in and fall asleep. Settle in. When I was a kid, my dad would, we would listen every night. We were living in England to some BBC children's program that went on after dinner. Yeah. And it always began with someone with a very proper BBC voice saying, are you sitting comfortably?

Then let's begin. So I feel like settle in is in that. Same vibe, I think. I don't have the proper British accent. But yeah, just kind of get comfortable. Let's chat. Have a drink. Well, speaking of that, so you, I know a little bit about you from what I've read in previous interviews, but you grew up for some part of your life in England. Is that right?

England till I was six, then Canada till I was 20, then America ever since. So you consider yourself Canadian, yes? I do. You do. So from what I've read, I know you grew up in a small town in Canada, and your father is British, your mother was Jamaican, I understand. You went on to study at the University of Toronto. Tell me, what took you into journalism? Was it always something you wanted to do?

Was it like someone you knew who went into this field you were copying, or now? It was something I never wanted to do. I wanted to go into advertising, and I failed, could get a job. And then I thought, oh, I'll go to either grad school or law school. And then a friend of mine, who was a subscriber to an obscure American magazine, told me they had an opening for an assistant managing editor. I'd never heard of the magazine, read it. It was in Indiana. And I had no other options.

So I was like, all right, I'll apply. I applied and I got the job. Wait, why advertising? What was it about advertising you wanted to do? Just seemed exciting at the time? I we had a football team of my college whose games were attended by no one and I took it upon myself to be the PR person for the football team and people started going to games and so I was like maybe there's a career in this I might be good at this I wrote I would write me and my friend Bruce would write do writeups for the game for the school newspaper and because no one went to the games we could make everything up so we pretended that there was a coach. The team had no coach. We made up some guy from Alabama with a drinking problem who we call Wexford Harding, who was constantly quoting Faulkner to his team.

You just created this character. I think to this day that maybe people who thought the coach of the Trinity College football team was Wexford Harding. People are going to listen to this episode and be devastated to learn it was all a lie. It was all a lie. That was the most, we thought that was the most southern sounding name we could come up with. It's pretty good. it is pretty good so journalism you take this job and then what is it about this work that speaks to you you've stayed in it why uh you know it doesn't seem like it's never seemed like a job um and i got lucky i i was at the washington post at the kind of height of the washington post for 10 years then it was the new yorker uh i don't want to say it was the height of the new yorker but at a time

when the New Yorker was really culturally central. Then I got into podcasting when podcasting was taking off. So I've always, by sheer good fortune, not by any kind of planning, been at the part of journalism that seems the most exciting. So I've stayed. You know, I never got the sense that I was in a part of journalism that was obsolete. You've always seemed like, it's interesting to hear you say it was kind of by chance that you're willing to try new things.

you're willing to kind of jump into a new lane. I've heard previous interviews where you talked about how you work to kind of set yourself apart from other journalists. So when you were at the post, for example, you wanted to kind of have a different voice, develop a different style of reporting than everyone else. Do you feel like that has been an impulse in you always to just try to kind of find a different lane? If people are going left, you go right?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a very Gladwell thing. It's a family trait, particularly from my dad, that the point of life is to be different from people around you, not the same. That that's, there's no, there's no point in kind of following the crowd. To this day, this is the thing about the world that irks me the most, which is like when I came to America,

and I would go and visit people or do reporting at various American colleges, and they're all the same. If I dropped you by parachute onto Princeton University campus and then dropped you onto the Yale campus, could you tell, would you know whether you were in New Jersey or Connecticut? You would have no idea. But it's more than the way they all look the same. They're all trying to do the same thing. Right? They're trying to be small and exclusive and have lots of sports teams and wealthy alumni and mimic a kind of 19th century ethos and have a variety of, like, why aren't there, why isn't there more variety? There should be, schools, there should be more weird schools, right? There should be schools that like, same thing. You go to Las Vegas and every Las Vegas casino is trying to be the same thing. Yeah. Make any sense. Why wouldn't you try and be, if you're building a new Las Vegas casino,

wouldn't you try and make it as different as possible from all the other casinos? I want to talk about your books and your work in just a moment, too, but it struck me. You mentioned your dad was the one who told you you should try to stand out. You should try to be different. Why try to be like everyone else? So I'm curious, is that something that you're passing on to your kids now? Like, is that a family lesson that's getting passed down?

Well, my dad never said it. He just lived it? He lived it. So I would hope I would, my kids are too young to understand the concept of, you know, expressive difference. But, you know, a lot of what you pass on to your kids, I think you pass on unconsciously in your kind of, in the way you respond to what they do. And I suspect that in the same way that my father would respond very positively to signs of idiosyncrasy in his children. what were some of those signs tell me about young malcolm well i was like you know uh i was obsessed with cars to the point where i collected a brochure for every car made in the world when i was

12 or 13 with the exception of the russian zill and they still have them all big boxes of every single automobile made every single brochure Yeah. How did you even get your hands on those? I don't understand. Some combination of convincing my dad to take me to car dealerships and writing away, all the European brands or the obscure British brands, I would write their headquarters and request a copy of their brochure. Wow. So, you know, that's a very, very small example, but my dad thought this, it was, it would, there was a point where I would write these letters. And there was one time when I wrote away to a dealer for some brochures and one of the salespeople came to my house and said, I hear Malcolm Gladwell is very interested in buying a new, whatever it was, Cadillac. Came to your home.

Yeah. And can I speak to Mr. Gladwell? And my mom said, he's at school. but like that story that brought enormous enjoyment to my father that a car sale would have come to our home guys so convincingly I mean it was probably 11 and so convincingly pretended to be a qualified buyer that somebody would come you were very persuasive even back then I guess

huh yeah well I want to talk about the book. The book is from last year. It's out on paper back now, right? Revenge of the tipping point, we should say. I loved reading it, as I told you, a very active reader, flipped all the way through and took a bunch of notes as I went, too. But the origin of this book is basically a response to yourself in many ways, right? For folks who want to remember back in 2000, you wrote the tipping point that was based on an article. You wrote it, The New Yorker, went crazy viral in publishing terms, right? Bestseller. It's the kind of thing that people reference now is a cultural touchstone, 25 years later, you think that book deserves revenge, I guess,

deserves a response of some kind. Tell me why. What was the point of this? Well, I mean, so much had happened in the end of beating 25 years. So in the original tipping point, I sort of introduced what was then a fairly novel metaphor. It was a metaphor that had been used by academics, but not really by people in the, where the metaphor of the epidemic as a way of understanding how ideas and behavior spread. You could look at an epidemic of disease and you can learn lessons that can help you understand fashion trends or why crime would fall and rise. That was a really, the success of that first book was a testament to how unusual people, people found that idea.

That idea today is not unusual at all. I mean, it's commonplace. We use the word viral to describe spread of ideas constantly, right? So the job of the book had to be different. So I was like, I'd like to write a book now, now that everyone's accepted my premise, or the premise I put forth in the first one, now I can write a book exploring it far more kind of aggressively.

And the other thing was, there had been these two signature epidemics in the intervening 25 years, the opioid crisis and COVID. And I just thought we've been obsessed now with the world has been transformed by these two epidemics in the intervening years. So it was kind of a subject dying out for a response. So I wanted to kind of find a way, can we look at those two epidemics through fresh eyes and how? help us understand what happened, right? So I try and explain in parts of the book what did happen with the opioid crisis. In what sense was it in a real epidemic? And how did it, if so, how did it start? What was the, you know, who were the super spreaders in that particular?

And then with COVID as well, I wanted to explain. I think I thought, I, I went through that experience and came to and believe that we had misunderstood what COVID was all about. And so this is a great opportunity to come back and kind of explain to people what the real essence of that epidemic were. You also, in talking about the original tipping point, you talk about it in the context of that time, right? 2000 was a very different time in American history. I was a completely different person then. I'm sure you felt you were completely different then, but you've described it as a rosy book, a more optimistic book, right, in the context of its time. So in this, book in the context of its time, how would you just, what are the words you'd use to describe

that? What, what's the sort of moment that this book is meeting? Well, it's a little darker. Yeah. Because I am dealing with, you know, the book begins and ends with the opioid crisis. And it talks about, you know, the Holocaust and COVID. And it's not all fun in games. No, it is not. So, which is weird, because. Because I'm actually happier now than I was when I wrote the tipping point. But so when I was, you know. You mean you personally in your life. Yeah.

So when I was a dark person personally, I wrote a sunny book. And now that I'm a sunny person personally, I wrote a dark book. So it's not a reflection of my own personal. It's just what I think, you know, what I think the, what I think the world needs or wants. Yeah. Or what the story, you know, in the late 90s, when I was writing the tipping point, the things that needed to be explained were positive things. How could communism go away?

Why is every social problem, teenage pregnancy, plummeted, right? Crime. You know, in the span of a couple of years, New York City goes from one of the most dangerous to one of the safest large cities in the world. How on earth does that happen? These were, that was what was on everyone's minds. And this time around, the things that are on our mind are maybe a little bit are, you know, not why are good things suddenly happening, but maybe what's on our mind is why are bad things suddenly happening. And how do we make sense of some of those bad things, right?

There's also, you mentioned crime, and I wanted to ask you about this, because this has really stood out to me about you and the way you talk about your work and the way you are willing to revisit your own work and to say, I got something wrong. And the crime example, as you've mentioned, I know you wrote about in the tipping point that the broken windows policing policies in New York where the idea that little crimes could be tipping point for big crimes. And we know over time now years later how that led to very harmful policing policies like stop and frisk and disproportionately targeting black and brown people. And you have come out since then and said we were wrong. I was part of that and I'm sorry. And it was so striking to me to have someone with your kind of platform and voice. say something like that so definitively. So I wondered if you tell me a little bit

about what fed that decision and how hard that was to come out and say, I was wrong. Well, it wasn't hard at all. No? Because I do it all the time. If you knew me, you would know that my wife is always like, I so consistently changed my mind on things

that she sometimes looks at me and she's like, because I'll express an opinion. And she'll be like, well, You could change your mind tomorrow. And I'm going to be, actually. I might. I might. Or I'll go to a restaurant and she'll be like, I thought you hated that restaurant.

I was like, yeah, I did. But do you know what? Or I remember once I was, I worked with this guy named Martine and I was, I had a, I had a, a laptop made by Hewlett Packard. He was like, why do you have a Hewlett Packard laptop? And I went on, no, no, no, no, no, no. about how I will not join the Apple universe. That is, and I gave all these 17 reasons why it was a bad thing.

And then, like, a week later, he comes by and I'm working on an Apple laptop. And he's like, what? I was like, I changed my mind. I always change my mind. I think it's fine. I don't trust people who don't. But to be fair, changing your mind on, like, what restaurant you like or what laptop you use, that's different than something you researched and reported

and put into a book and then said, you know what? Something I researched and reported 25 years ago. Yeah. How many things do you believe from how many things did you believe in 25 years ago that you still believe today? Oh, yeah. I'm not saying things don't change. I'm saying for someone who published a book around one of these ideas to then have the courage and honesty to come out and say that, it feels like we live in a time where people aren't willing to do that. People will defend, defend, deny, deny, deny, like tell you you're not seeing something you're actually seeing. And you said, you know what, I actually got it wrong. That's not the norm. Is it? I mean, maybe. it's not the norm in public life, but I feel like ordinary people change their mind all the time. Yeah. And I feel like, it's funny, I put everything through the prism of being a parent now.

Parents, you always, the whole lesson of being a parent is that you are required to constantly change your mind. Your kids force you to change your mind nonstop. It's all they do, right? You say, it's time to go to bed. And they say, no, it's not. You know what happens? You're wrong. They're right.

They don't go to bed. So then you learn, oh, maybe my idea that they had to be in bed by 645 is a mistake, and then you change your mind. And then you, you know, it's all this kind of like, you're constantly gathering, you have a view about, I have two children, you have a view about one of them based on your experience with the other. Yeah. Then you discover, oh, you're wrong.

They're totally different. I can't do that with the second one. I won't say it. And so you, like, it's just one. So I feel like for ordinary people, I guess there's no ego involved in that as a parent. Yeah. So it's commonplace, but there has, I think you are right in the sense, there has been this very weird thing that's been, maybe it's true that this is recent in public life where people are scared about changing their mind. And I don't really understand it because I don't trust people who don't change their mind.

If you don't, the only way I would ever give any expert the benefit of my trust is if I observe them, gather new evidence and alter their preconceived notion. Why do you think people are scared? Do you think they're scared of the reaction or scared it makes them look weak? Well, I'm the wrong got to ask because I have no understanding. I don't get it at all. With crime, I mean, the broader thing with crime, the reason I feel so free to change my mind is that we have been living in the last 25 years in the golden age of criminology where we have discovered things about crime and we've revised our understanding an incredibly fascinating. ways. The whole field, like I talk about one of the other books, I talk about, there's a guy named David Weisberg, who was part of a movement, what's called hotspot policing. It's this observation

that the crime in any given city, there's a handful of city blocks that year after year are responsible for an overwhelming majority of crime. Crime is not dispersed throughout an area. It's concentrated, and you can identify those concentrated places, and you can crack down on those places, and you can crack down on those places and you can drive an enormous crime. This is something we did not know 25 years ago. I mean, that and a number of a whole series of other things are things that we have discovered by very careful, brilliant work by really, really, really smart people. So to be interested in crime is of necessity to have to change your mind.

You can't believe what you believed 25 years ago because we've learned so much more. It's like saying like being around before Galileo and like saying, no, no, no, no. I'm not buying this whole thing that this guy Galileo is saying no you've got to change your mind if Galileo comes along and I don't understand why people particularly at a time when we're learning so much

why it isn't second nature for people to say oh yeah I learn more now I think differently put that in the lens of journalism for me of how like journalists should look at that because we wrestle with this idea all the time. I wonder if you do too, just about the levels of trust and the declining

trust, right, that the public has in journalism, in media writ large, and in journalists. And this idea of getting things wrong or things evolving as we learn more. How do you think journalists should be looking at that right now? Yeah. Well, I have a couple of things to say about that. One, when I went to the Washington Post, I had no experience writing daily journalism. And I got this kind of high, high end tutorial from some very brilliant journalists and discovered all kinds of things. And one of the first things you discover, and you would know this as a journalist, one of the first things you discover as a journalist, which is profoundly counterintuitive, is that most of the things that people honestly believe to be true are not

true. So you call someone up and you say, I'm doing a story about the meeting that just happened at the department of whatever. How many people were at the meeting? And they go, there were 10 of us there. Normal, someone who's not a journalist would say, okay, there was 10 people to meet. A journalist would say, this guy said they were 10, but in all likelihood, based of my experience as a journalist, people are wrong about how many people are at the meeting. Yeah. I got to make two other calls to find out how many people are at the meeting. That's a very, very You're skeptical about the first answer. You have to be because.

And that person's not lying to me. That person honestly believed they were 10 at the meeting. And you know what? I mean, if you do, you know, in all the books or in podcast episodes I do, we have a fact checker. And at the New Yorker, I had fact checkers. The first thing you learn with fact checkers is that an insane amount of things that you write believing to be true or not true. You've got details wrong. I don't mean necessarily macro wrong.

Yeah. And so it's this lesson in how incredibly compromised everyone's understanding of the world is. We just don't. And the only way to get it right is to be really, really careful and take your time and also to go back and correct yourself when you're wrong. And good journalism, as it was properly practiced at places like The Washington Post in the heyday of daily journalism, was really good at that thing. And that's why people trusted it. right it was a bunch of really really careful people who i remember at the washington post there was this incredibly important incendiary massive story that a couple of reporters at the post

in my time there have been trying to get in the paper for months and letter downy the great editor at the time wouldn't run it because he didn't think it was properly sourced and if he'd run it it would have sold a million newspapers i mean it would have transformed. It was a huge, huge story. And he wouldn't do it because he had this old school ethical commitment to making sure that everything that was published in the Washington Post was as true as it could possibly be. Right. And I just, I didn't realize it at the time, but now I realize that attitude is insanely important that the world needs more Leonard Downey's. That's how journalism gets trusted again.

The whole structure is so different now, too, right? The better to be right than be first impulse doesn't necessarily serve the business structure, right? Which is also the consumer demand, as people want to know what happened right now. They want the latest piece of information. They have a gazillion different ways to get it sent to them or to pull it from somewhere. And that doesn't match with, why don't I give this 24 hours and wait to see how this plays out? Except for what you just said, which is the long-term consequences of that are, that you destroy the very thing that you are,

this very business that you're a part of, right? That we have destroyed public trust because we abandoned our principles. There are so many fascinating stories that you explore in the book, in the Revenge of the Tipping Point. This idea, as you mentioned, social epidemics, ideas as contagions,

and the one around decision-making by parents in particular in certain communities, certain school communities specifically, choosing in those communities not to vaccinate their children, even when neighboring communities are doing so in much greater numbers. And you talk about how the contagious belief, however that is, that however, it unites people in the instances that it has the discipline to stop at the borders of their community. And this idea fascinated me that it's not like once an idea take holds, it just spreads infinitely in forever because that's the way it goes.

it's that all of these ideas have some kind of boundaries to them. Tell me about that. How do those stop? Yeah, this is an idea that I play a lot within the book because it's so, we have this idea that in the digital age, we have erased borders and that what we're participating in is now some kind of universal culture because of social media, because of, but in fact, when you look closely, the opposite is true, that there seems almost to be a strengthening of regionalism in epidemics of behavior and ideas. And I, you know, I talked about this

in this extraordinary stuff about in medical practice, about how the biggest determinant of how your doctor treats you is where your doctor treats you. Right. Right. Just going to talk Not where they went to school or their own experience, but where they happen to be living and practicing. And that if you look at pockets of of hostility to vaccination, they're specific to towns, to more than that, to schools within towns. They don't, it's not like the whole areas or the, you know, the, I tell a story of a school in this, you know, in a very wealthy community that had this overwhelming, enduring teen suicide problem. And that problem never spreads to the neighboring schools. It's specific to the school, right?

So it's like you have to kind of all of these things add up into, I think, this incredibly important point that there is some crucial dimension of culture which is tied to strong, the strong ties that comprise the community. That is local in the strongest sense of that word. And that the idea that we have kind of left the world of localism behind in the digital age is nonsense. But that also, this was, as I mentioned, came out in 2024, right? And this was just following on this idea of vaccines and skepticism around vaccines, there was not, for example, you know, a very senior health official who amplified ideas about skepticism in vaccines or efficacy of vaccines. And so is there, to use another idea you explore

here about social engineering, is there something that can sort of amplify or spread those ideas beyond those borders where they were previously contained because there's someone of incredibly strong voice or power or amplification potential there, who pushes it? beyond there? Like, is it different when the message is coming from another place rather than within the community? Yeah. I mean, I think the question is, is more dangerous then, too. I mean, separately in the book, I talk a lot about, one of the signatures of epidemics is the idea of the super spreader, that transmission of an idea of a virus is, is profoundly asymmetrical. Small number of people do all, particularly with things like COVID or the flu or, um,

Small number of people do all the work. With COVID, probably one in a hundred people. We're responsible for most of the transmissions. One in a hundred infected people. And I think when you talk about the impact of someone like RFK Jr. On anti-vax sentiment in this country, that we're talking about. He's a super spedder for the notion.

And he has a kind of, because he has a public position, and he has a certain amount of access. He goes on Rogan, and he has this kind of ardent following. His messages have the ability to spread in a way that other kind of calmer voices can't spread. So I think, yeah, I think he's absolutely a familiar figure in the lexicon of the epidemic. And so what does that mean for the way that you lay out ideas about how epidemics and ideas and those kinds of things spread in this? is that to mean we're living in more dangerous times? I mean, how would you look at that right now

in the context of where we are? I don't know whether it's more dangerous. I feel like all, you know, at any moment in history, we're facing some combination of positive and malignant forces, and the combination keeps constantly changing. So we have these people in public places like RFK Jr. who are spouting

all kinds of dangerous nonsense. But at the same time, we've created this thing, AI, which is essentially an incredibly efficient way of AI is best at scanning all the evidence

and giving us the most dispassionate evidence-based common-sense answer. So you have the rise of, on the one hand, a kind of reckless figure like RFK.

But on the other hand, all you have to do, if you go on chat GPT and you say, does Tylenol cause autism, it'll tell you it doesn't. If you go on chat GPT and ask it, should my kid have their full range of vaccinations,

chat GPT will say, yeah. So I don't know. Like, it's hard for me to say this is a uniquely dangerous period when we've created this tool, which is full of evidence-based common sense. There is another fascinating story I want to ask you about from the book when you talk about

the idea of overstories, right? This sort of the narratives that we create or curate about our own communities, our own cultures, our own nations, our own histories that kind of tell us the story of who we are. And I didn't expect to take this turn, but you focus in on two television executives, right? Two men by the name of Paul Klein and Irwin Segelstein, Siegelstein, if I'm saying that right? who basically changed the way that our entire country and the entire world talked about the Holocaust. Tell me that story. Yeah, this is a thing I just sort of stumbled on when I was doing the book because I just seemed like most of us that the Holocaust has always been a constant part of the way we made sense of the Second World War, right?

But it turns out if you go back and reread history books or look for popular mentions of the Holocaust in the past, in the 30 years after the Second World War ends, it's absent. No one's talking about the Holocaust. There are no Holocaust museums in America, except for one in Los Angeles, which I talk about. If you read history books, prominent history books, textbooks,

the kind that are used in, you know, European history courses and colleges, the Holocaust gets one sentence. It's not called the Holocaust. There is one pop culture, popular pop culture thing devoted to the Holocaust in the years between the end of the war and the late 70s. And that's Diary of Anne Frank. But even Diary of Anne Frank, it's about her personal experience, not at a concentration camp, it's largely, it's about her and, you know, in hiding

in Amsterdam. It's not even like, it's not really, it's a kind of, and what changes is this miniseries that NBC runs in the late 70s called the Holocaust, which is really the thing that introduces that term because people, they would talk about the atrocities in no one was calling the Holocaust the Holocaust until this

miniseries in late 70s and half of America tuned in to watch this story, a kind of fictionalized story of a couple of a German family, a Jewish family in the war and what happened to them. And almost overnight, that kind of permits people to talk about the Holocaust, the overstory changes.

The Holocaust goes from something we didn't know how to talk about or even know about to something we began to understand and had some permission to discuss. And that's the most dramatic example that I could find of the existence of what I call the overstory, which is we have a kind of set of shared assumptions in a society that condition what we're willing to talk about. And those overstories can change quite dramatically. Do we still, does TV in particular, visual storytelling in particular? Does this still, do you think, has that potential to change over stories that way?

Or are we just in a completely different landscape now? Well, back then, but like half the country watched that many series, right? There's nothing that half the country watches anymore. So it's hard to imagine television having the same kind of, dramatic and immediate impact on the way we think and feel. So how to overstories change now? Can they still change? Because it does seem like we're in this period where we are kind of redefining who we are as a nation, right?

Even how we look at our own history or talk about it. Yeah. I mean, they can change, I think, on much more on a much more local or specific level. But, you know, I was just this morning reading, going back, and reading about Sandy Hook, the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. Nothing changes after Sandy Hook. It doesn't change. I would have thought Sandy Hook would have, or Columbine, for that matter,

would have changed the overstory about the way we think about gun violence. As far as I can tell, it doesn't make a difference. So it's a little bit puzzling about why some things do and why some things don't. But this fascinates me. You're not the first person who thinks. deeply about these things and who looks at them this closely to mention this to me that they really thought that would change things and it didn't. Why do you think that is? Why didn't it change much? In fact, after Sandy Hook, more states loosened their gun control laws than

strengthen them. So maybe it does change the overstory but not, but in the opposite direction that we would have imagined. That what Sandy Hook does is convince people who were already worried about their safety that what they really needed was a gun to feel. safe. So maybe we're just looking in the wrong place. But, I mean, it speaks to the fact that, you know, humans are complicated. And this business of trying to understand in the same way that epidemics are, the whole point of an epidemic is you don't know it's coming, right?

Until right, right before. Nobody predicted the AIDS epidemic. No one, if I had said to you in 1995, that we're going to have an over-dict. crisis in this country that's going to last for a quarter century and its peak will claim the lives of 120,000 Americans and will kill so many people that it will drive the life expectancy of Americans into reverse for the first time in recorded American history outside of the wars you would have said I was crazy right you said that's not going to happen it happened. So I don't know. There's something, we need to have some degree of humility about

our ability to predict the course of these epidemics. You've been so honest and upfront about being willing to change your mind on things and also just as like a, I think a core part of you of how journalists should be willing to poke the bear, as the phrase you've used before. Like to be able to spur conversation and say provocative things and you've never, you've never shy to away from speaking your mind. You've talked about your disdain for Ivy League schools, right? I don't take it personally, even as a Penn grad. Don't worry.

You talked about the sport of football being a moral abomination. I want to ask you about a lot of attention that you got for recent comments in an interview when you talked about transgender athletes. Because you said that you previously felt that you'd been cowed or pressured into accepting transgender women in women's sports, but that you now

believe that trans women have no place. competing against their cisgender peer. So just walk me through that. How and why did your views change? Well, they didn't change. This is what's hilarious about that controversy. This is an example, one example of me not changing my mind. No one, this whole country was so hilarious to me.

Because no one, I said, made these remarks on a very obscure track and field podcast based out of Cape Town, South Africa, with a guy. I love called Ross Tucker and he and I had been on a panel five years previously and I was the moderator of the panel and I was moderating a discussion between Ross and two transgender activists about whether trends women should be allowed in competitive sports so I said to Ross we talked about this for one minute I said I don't think I did a good job as moderator And I said there was one, this one thing that one of the people said on the panel, and I should have asked a follow-up question. That's it.

This was on the podcast with Ross. That's what you said. That's all I said. So this turns into this huge thing. And I was reading these things. It was like, I've never been so. Wait, so this part about feeling cowed about what was happening in the room, like you couldn't speak your mind? No.

one of the women on the panel says to Ross the other guy Ross you have to let us win and I take interviewing very seriously and I said this is what I said to Ross was in the context of the trans debate that's an incredibly important moment and because it tells you

that she was no longer making the argument that trans women did not have an advantage when they competed with biological women What she was saying is they did have an advantage, but that it shouldn't matter. And if I am the moderator of a debate, my job is to seize on those moments and have them explain. I should have said, wait a second, what did you mean by that? They should have said to Ross, Ross, respond to her. As a moderator, that's your job.

You felt like you failed in the moment to follow up. But your views have always been that way. Is that right? Yeah, I've been saying for as long as this is, issue has been live. I've been clear that I don't think trans women belong in competitive elite sports. So as, I mean, I've seen the response to it. I'm sure you have too. What has it been like? Tell me about that response. And what's it been like to have to kind of face that and reckon with that now? It doesn't matter. I mean, it all blows over because this is the,

the nature of the world we live in is A. So people make up, no one actually listened to the actual podcast. So no one knew what I said or didn't say. Then they went nuts with a response. And then after 48 hours, it all went away. Why should I care about that? No one brings it up. I mean, it's a nothing burger. You can't get, you can't be someone who is involved in the world of ideas and lose sleep over these moments of kind of collective stupidity. Like, you can't. Like, what am I supposed to do? Like, you know, why?

You don't, you don't read the comments. You don't read, you don't read the book reviews either, do you? Don't really read. I mean, I mean, every now and again, but you can't take it personally. And by the way, the internet can go crazy about something. And it's, it's 0.001% of people going crazy. Who cares? Like, like, like.

Well, I guess in the context of this moment, Just to follow up on that, obviously there is a larger debate still going on very much so about transgender women and at which level they should be able to compete, et cetera. But there's also this larger context of a time when there's a very intentional conservative campaign around anti-trans legislation, right, especially at the state and local level. And it's been record numbers of bills over the last few years. And so there is this larger context, right, in which this is unfolding. You think that fueled a lot of the interest and what you had to say and what someone with a very high public profile has to say around these issues? Well, I mean, I am 100% in, I am a deep supporter of the entire trans rights agenda.

I've been very clear about that. I mean, what's going on right now in that community is they're facing it's an existential crisis. that stuff going on in the conservative side is crazy. I mean, it's like, it's, it's unimaginable what people are saying and doing. I just don't think, I don't understand why is elite competitive sports somehow part of their agenda. It doesn't make any sense to me. And I think most people agree with me.

I think most Americans would say, I am 100% in favor of everything on, I don't believe trans people should be discriminated against in any way. But they would say, at the same time, it doesn't really make sense. for someone who is biologically male to compete against biological women, right? No one, as far as I can tell, 90% of people make that distinction

in their mind. So this is why it's another nothing burger. There's nothing, any parent with a daughter in competitive sports is going to tell you, no, it doesn't make any sense. You can't do that.

And it shouldn't be part of, that's not how you, if you are you can't link these two things you can't say unless you support item number 10 on an agenda then I'm I'm not going to accept your support on items one through nine even when one through nine are the things that really matter how many people how many this issue of trans participation in elite professional sports how many people do you think are affected by that Well, I think this is the whole, this is the crux of the debate as well, right? Like, why is there so much focus on a small community?

Can you name? I'm curious. Can you name any trans athlete who is currently affected by this? No, but I also think that your language here is really important, which is you're being very specific about elite sports, right? And there's a lot of conversation about at which levels trans women and trans girls should be able to participate. It does. It should not be a controversial statement. And also, by the way, if someone disagrees with me, totally fine. I don't think of this is a life or death issue.

I'm just like, I'm a track and field fan. There's a reason trans women can't compete in the Olympics or at any, or at the international level in the female category

in any international sport. Right? It's just, I mean, it's this own little specific thing. Like, I don't, this is why this, I just roll my eyes at this. It's like,

can we get on and talk about things that really matter with, um, on this issue? Well, so this does relate to the other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is this moment we're in and this reignited debate around free speech and defense of free speech and who gets to define free speech even. And of course, all of this is coming after the death of Charlie Kirk. And I just wondered how you're looking at that right now because free speech tended to be kind of this defensive argument deployed by largely conservatives who felt they were being silenced in a lot of public places and spaces. it feels like maybe now has it swung the other way?

I mean, you're seeing it being deployed as justification to fire people or, you know, target people who say things that they disagree with. I'm just wondering how you look at all of this right now. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, it is, this part is distressing to me. I don't understand why I'm fine with people disagreeing with me. It doesn't bother me. A lot of people I work with.

don't share my views on any number of issues, you know, but I don't expect them or even want them. I don't want to live in a world where everyone thinks like me. How boring would that be? It's like I'm just so baffled. I grew up in a environment both at home and in and culturally where it was considered a good thing when people, when society was, when a broad variety of perspectives were represented in society, that was considered to be a positive thing, right? Because then we can have a discussion.

If we all agree with each other, what are we going to talk about? Right? Like, you know, from my earliest stage, I remember going to Bible school in summer as a 10-year-old. And this wonderful local preacher was teaching the class. and it was all about the different ways you interpret a bit of scripture. Some people will see it this way. Some people will see it this way. It was natural, of course.

So like from the earliest age, I just thought this was natural. And I understand why would people be upset or offended by the fact that I say something that they don't happen? Particularly if I'm not acting maliciously. Most people are not. Well, I guess that's the line, right? Like, where is that line? How do you define and protect free speech so it's not causing harm to other people? Well, stop pretending things are harmful when they're not.

Like what? Like the number of bad actors is really, really, really small, I think. When you say bad actors, you mean? People who are saying things with an intent to harm another person or to incite people to something. No, it's just like, like, I don't think, I think most people are kind of quite genuinely espousing a position. And also, I have confidence people actually do change their mind over time.

So how do you hold someone to something? When there's a chance they won't believe that thing, you know, you're from now. Like, it seems crazy. I mean, you seem very fluid in being able to say, I changed my mind, I learned, I studied, I ask questions. How do you change someone's mind? It doesn't feel like we live in a time when people, people are very willing to change their minds. It feels like we live in a time where people are dug in and are tribal about their beliefs.

Well, I suspect we live in a time where people are trying to pretend they don't change their mind. But I have confidence. Like I said, if you're a parent, you change your mind all the time. What's that confidence based on? I'm asking. If you're a parent, you change your mind. A lot of times people change their mind, you know, the most common way that people change their mind, me included, is that you take a position and then you forget you took that position and then you take a new position.

So weak memory is key here. That's what you're saying. I'm deadly, I'm deadly serious. Really? And like every round again, we catch some politician out, like, but wait, in 2006, you said X. And then there's always this moment. Politician, you're like, oh, you realize they're thinking, oh, I forgot. I said that, which I think is beautiful.

Yeah, that's a mechanism. Well, they forgot or enough time passed that, you know, the context in which the working is different, their constituency is different, all of those things, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of, yeah, I just think that's just normal human behavior. So here's the other thing. I mean, you've talked a lot over our conversation about how parenthood has changed you. You see everything through the lens of parenthood. Now, how old are your kids, by the way?

You said they're young. Two and four. Two and four. It's a very young. Okay. So you got a lot of chances to change your mind in the years ahead. But I wonder how, and it sounds like you're open to this, you have these deeply held beliefs, things you've argued for, reported on, written on about, you know, the use of

of elite schools, for example, American football, all these kinds of things. Are you open to changing your minds about that, too? Like, what if your kids get into Harvard? I know, of course. Like, the thing is it's unpredictable. You can't predict. I'm not going to sit here and predict I'll change my mind on that score, but I can say I can look at my past history and the past history of human beings and say, if I do change my mind, it shouldn't surprise anyone. Right. Of course, if your own kid gets into Harvard, you're like, and you've been saying Harvard's a bad thing for 20 years, you know, is there an incentive for you to change your mind? I mean, sure. Sure. Let's wait and see. If they're, let's hope they're that smart that at least I have the

opportunity to change my mind on this question. What if they want to play football at Harbor? Is that too, that's like a step too far? Well, football, luckily I have girls. Football. Malcolm, they could play football one day. That's true. I'll try and, I'm going to be Little League parent on on them, and I'm doing everything in my power to make sure they run track. Like, there's going to be so much pressure from me as a parent on this. I'm going to say, you can do whatever you want on whatever else you do, but you're going off across country, and that's, there's no arguments here. So you're constantly exploring new ideas.

I know, obviously, there's a new season of your podcast out now as well. What should we know about that? It's the best thing we have ever done on Revision's history. tell me about it. It's called the Alabama murders. It's true crime, but it's not true crime. It's true crime that very quickly becomes something more than true crime. And it's, if you're not in tears by the seventh and last episode, then I can't help you. And I know this one, Revenge of the tipping point, which is out on paperback. Now, this was sort of response to the tipping point 25 years earlier. So I guess it's hard to say, but, you know, in another generation, 25 years from now, is there going to be, like, a revenge to the revenge. We're going to answer to this one. If I'm still kicking, 25 years from now, of course. The 50th anniversary, yes. I'll weigh in again. I look forward to it. I look forward to talking to you more about it then. And I thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. Malcolm Gladwell. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. It's been fun.

Thank you.