Revisionist History - The Mystery of Mastery with Adam Gopnik

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

In a live conversation taped at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Malcolm chats with his old friend and New Yorker magazine colleague, Adam Gopnik, about Adam’s latest book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. In the book, Adam follows numerous masters of their craft to find out just how they do what they do—and discovers that there is mastery all around us. In this episode, Malcolm and Adam highlight a few of the folks from the book, and what they have to teach us. You can purchase the audiobook version of The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery at Pushkin.fmSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, hello everyone, Malcolm Gladwell here. You may have noticed that Revisionist History looks a little different this season. More things in your podcast feed. But I want to make clear, you're still going to get your annual dose of 10 scripted revisionist history jewel boxes. It's just that people kept coming up to me in the subway and saying, why can't we have more revisionist history? And finally, I thought, like the man said, give the people what they want. So coming up this year, we have the standard old school revisionist history lineup, including some on education, a crazy one about mothers, and a bunch on guns that I'm very

excited about. But we're also doing more episodes answering your questions or arguing with you with the help of our embarrassingly overqualified ombus person, Maria Konnikova. You can reach us, by the way, and Maria at info at pushkin.fm if you have questions or concerns or just want to rant for a while. And one of my favorite things we're doing, though, is we're bringing you a series of conversations,

live talks, or taped live anyway, with people I admire, people I want to learn something from, and who I think you'll enjoy as well. We had an amazing reaction to the chat with Justin Richmond. If you haven't heard that yet, please go back and listen. This week and next, we're running a match set of Revisionist History Live conversations we taped at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The first, today's episode, was with my old friend, New Yorker magazine colleague, and most crucially, fellow Canadian, Adam Gopnik. Maybe you know his most

famous book, Paris to the Moon, or perhaps you saw his cameo in the film Tar, where he played himself. Convincingly, I might add. Adam has a new book, The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery, in which he follows masters of their craft to find out just how they do what they do. So here we go, my conversation with the one and only Adam Gopnik. Thank you all for coming. Adam? Pleasure to see you, Malcolm. It's the first time we've been together, certainly since the pandemic. Yes. The last time we were on stage together was, were we not both debating the proposition that cats were better than dogs or dogs were better than cats? We were, and I took the dog side. I took the cat side. And you took the cat side.

And I ended my peroration, my claim by saying that you had to understand that not only was it the case that on the merits, all cats were Republicans and all dogs were Democrats, but you also had to understand that all cats were Goyasha and all dogs were Jewish. And somehow we won the debate in the middle of Manhattan. It was the dirtiest thing. Somehow you won the debate. Yes, I was going to say it was the dirtiest. That is by appealing to Jewish Democrats. Well, there are so few of them in New York, you know, that it showed some bravery, some courage. You were, yes, playing to the crowd. I suspect there'll be more than a little of that tonight as well. We're here to discuss your book, but as is always the case, we shouldn't really just discuss the book tonight because we want people to read the book.

Yes. So I thought we'd talk around the book. Absolutely. It's a book to talk around. And I want to do something very specific, but before I introduce the specific thing I'd like to do, I'd like to offer an overly simplistic, highly reductionist theory about the difference between dogs and cats? No, between you and I. Oh. Or is it you and me? Me. Me. Yes. Me. That would be one of the differences, right?

Yes. Here's the theory, all right? I start with an idea I'd like to explore. Search for someone to be kind of a window dressing, someone appropriate to dress it up and then pursue it. This is the problem with my writing, of course, because the reader senses halfway through that I've chosen the subject, the person, simply as a convenience to advance this agenda of mine. I would dispute that, but all right.

You do the opposite. Essentially, all of your writing is about, you meet someone, you fall in love with them, and then you come up with some elaborate theory to justify your affection for your character. I will accept that as roughly true. I think, though, that there are a lot of people in your stuff, Malcolm, who live on... We're not discussing me. You can only discuss your half-discovery. I certainly think it's generally true, and I will say this, and I will say it with a certain amount of vanity, that I love getting engaged with people, odd people, strange people, interesting people. And I, you know, John Updike once said, you know, someone said, what's the purpose of life?

And he answered instantly to give praise. And I always thought that was a beautiful... Well, this is exactly what I was going to say next, which is the other distinctive feature is of your writing, is that all of your real pieces, as opposed to your critics' pieces, which I don't mean they're not real, but I mean all the pieces of journalism...

That are not the higher homework, right. Yes. You always like the subject. The subject, you're never at odds with the subject. And even when you are at odds with the subject, you go to great pains to suggest you're not really at odds with it. Not to the subject. The subject, you're never at odds with the subject. And even when you are at odds with the subject, you go to great pains to suggest you're not really at odds with it. This happens in this book, by the way, but we'll get there. Yes, that's interesting you say that, Malcolm.

I've never quite conceptualized it that way. I think it's true. The great kind of transformative moment of my life as a writer, my life as a man, as a person, was when I joined The New Yorker in 1986. And I was put to work writing The Talk of the Town. Back in those days, Talk of the Town was beautifully anonymous. That was part of the glory of it because John McPhee would contribute or John Updike. And then a little schnorrer like me would be thrown into the mix as well.

And it was the great epiphany of my life because up until that moment, I had been a graduate student. I mean, my whole life I'd been a graduate student. I was a graduate student when I was six years old because I come from, like you, I come from an academic family. And that was the way I had been raised. I, you know, pursuing a PhD since third grade. And the way you become, the way you're trained and taught to think and write is argumentative through buts. My sister, Alison, brilliant mind, still works that way, right? Somebody says something and you controvert it. You say, but on the other hand, that's not entirely true. People say that parenting is the most important thing in the world, but in truth,

you can't parent at all. This is the difference between improv and academia. Academia is yes, but improv is yes and. And that's what I realized when I was thrown out onto the streets to go cover table hockey tournaments in Flatbush, a wonderful editor, Chip McGrath, and Slack Rope Walkers lived on houseboats in the Hudson, is that you couldn't argue with these people. You had to illuminate them. You had to caricature them at times in a positive sense. You had to draw quick portraits of them. But yes, exactly, it was yes and, and that the only way to write beautifully, the only way to write descriptively, evocatively, significantly, was to construct small descriptive sentences connected by ands, not long contentious sentences disrupted by buts.

And that moment of moving from one to the other was the great moment in my life as a writer. You were the first person to come to the New Yorker and be forced to dumb it down. Well, yes, there's a truth in that, but dumb it down only in, not in the ultimate sense, to embrace a form of, if you like, faux-naïve writing, to embrace a form of minimalism, that wonderful New Yorker tradition that extends from E.B. White and Thurber right

into my fingers, at least, if no one else's, and that, with many others, but I mean, I esteem it particularly. So yes, I think that's true. And I think it's one of the things that makes the New Yorker tradition remarkable is its insistence, or its implied insistence through a tradition that the best writing are small descriptive sentences connected by ants. Okay, so here's what I want to do. Yes. I'm just going to name names from the book, and I would like you to tell us something about your relationship with that character, how you met them, why you like them, what they're like. You don't need to touch on their role in the book, but you can get there. But there's a ton of names, and I'm going to pick

them more or less at random. And then some of them I'm only picking because I have things I want to say about them, just so I can be involved in this conversation. But let's start with your mother. Oh, my mother. Where to begin with my mother? First of all, describe your mother, like physically. Physically, my mother is a small woman who is, among other things, was a professor of linguistics, very distinguished scientist,

instrumental in discovering the first gene for grammar, H-O-F-X-N-P. We all had to learn the name of it when we were children. But she's a small woman. She also designs jewelry, and she wears somewhat eccentric clothing. So if you saw her, you'd see this woman with long, unkempt hair, looks a little like Strega Nona,

who's wearing all of this avant-garde jewelry. You can't really approach her to hug her because it's too dangerous. The jewelry is a little like barbed wire and is in constant activity, constant activity. Now I should add that she's, you know, a little more subdued now at 88 than she used to be. In the book, I go up to bake with her because I had never done that. I have a complicated relationship with her. I don't mean to be saccharine about it at all. We're very much alike. And she's a driven person, as am I in lots of ways, in every way. But she's an amazing baker. And she's an amazingly inventive and impatient person. And I thought in this book and in life generally that the best way I could connect with her was through a shared activity. It's always been the only, the best way to connect with her.

You know, can't really, can't really talk with her. I mean, of course you can have a conversation, but the happiest moments were always when we were doing something together. I have this incredibly intense memory, which is the book begins with, of when I'm really little with my, I have many sisters, but this is my sister Allison. And she was unrolling strudel on a table. We were living in a housing project at that point. And just watching her, looking up and watching her unroll this strudel and make it kind of parchment thin. I thought, that's real. That was my first experience of mastery. That's my mother.

Since you're talking about your mother, I want to test out an idea. Recently, I have come to believe in the asymmetrical theory of parental memories, which is that everyone, when pressed, has way more memories of one parent than the other. So we all have one, not that we, one parent that we favor, but one parent who is, who,

who, um, is vivid. Yes. Who consumes all of our kind of storytelling. In your, in your case, your, your mother in your work has loomed much larger than your father. Yes. Although, even though in fact, I'm extremely close to my father and admire him limitlessly. I dedicated the book on liberalism to him because he had taught me all of those things.

But my father is, in his nature, a more recessive person than my mother. There is one chapter that's very much about my father in this, and it's the first time I've ever really written about him, about learning to drive. Because when I was learning to drive in my 50s with my son, Luke, we got our licenses on the same day.

I believe that's the only time that's ever happened. And my father was haunting me the whole time because my father is the most gently competent human being you will meet. And one of the things was he had been driving since he was 14 and he was the sort of person who thought nothing, you know, he has six kids and 20 grandchildren, of driving to a grandchild in Baltimore from rural Ontario, where they live, for 19 hours. And he just would do things like that. He was an utterly competent man. And I think we all make ourselves a little bit in the shadow of our father's accomplishments, but also by bending away from the shadow into our own sunshine. So my father was so super competent in all those ways that I made myself notably incompetent

in the little tasks of life. So my wife, Martha, did all the driving in our family. And I was the one in the, as my daughter, Olivia, who's here someplace, and I would point out, the gendered seat, which we usually assign to women in our culture, where I'm the one passing out the cookies and saying, hey, kids, kids, got to be quiet. Mom's trying to find the exit now. You know, when will we be there? We'll be there soon.

I promise you, we'll be there soon. Let mom concentrate. And I was in that seat for decades. And then I wanted to just nudge over to the other seat a bit. And so that was very much about my father. But absolutely, my mother is the vivid person. All right, all right.

Next name on the list. None of us knew him, but both of us are fascinated by him. Bud Schulberg. Can we do a Bud Schulberg shout-out? We should definitely do a Bud Schulberg shout-out. We're better than at the Y. I've been trying to get the Library of America

to put Bud Schulberg in print, you know, for a while, and maybe I still can't. Bud Schulberg, as all of you will know, was a writer, a journalist, most famous as a screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront and other things. But he wrote one of the most beautiful and forgotten novels in American English called The Disenchanted about his bizarre adventures writing a screenplay with the then on the brink of death Scott Fitzgerald. And it's the most beautiful portrait of Scott Fitzgerald that we have. And remarkable guy,

and his stuff should be back in print. And I suspect, quick parenthetical, that his name hurt him. One of my pet theories is that writers are very dependent on their names, right? There's a moment, there was a, Dr. Johnson said someplace that there was a poet laureate in England

named Elkanah Settle. And no one could ever believe that he could write a poet laureate in England named Elkanah Settle. And no one could ever believe that he could write a good poem with a name like Elkanah Settle. And I have struggled with this my whole life because Gopnik has got to be the single ugliest, most non-euphonious name there is. And Bud Schulberg, right? It sounds like a guy who runs a store, right? Whereas, you know, J.D. Salinger is clearly a writer of note. So that's something we all struggle with. There should be a version of Ellis Island Whereas, you know, J.D. Salinger is clearly a writer of Goat. So that's something we all struggle with. There should be a version of Ellis Island for writers. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. That's a whole story there about why the name Gopnik didn't get changed to Ellis Island, but I'll spare you for the moment. Jamie Swiss. Oh, Jamie Swiss is a dear friend. I just was texting with him. Jamie is the most gifted and most irascible magician there's ever been. He's a true intellectual of the magic world. And he is a truly contentious person. And what I love about Jamie is he's a magnificent sleight of hand man, a great teacher. He taught my son Luke card magic. And he was the most exacting, demanding, and rewarding, replenishing

teacher you could possibly have. But Jamie's just a beautifully irascible person who cannot take anything lightly. You know, as I say in the book someplace, you know, that people don't take magicians seriously, right? And they go up to the magician and say, oh, I know how you did that, which is like going up to Yo-Yo Ma and saying, oh, I know how you did that, which is like going up to Yo-Yo Ma and saying, oh, I know how you did that. You just scraped that thing along the strings, didn't you? I know how you did that. I have an uncle who does the same thing all the time. And most magicians just kind of bite their lips and say, oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. And Jamie is the one who says, you have no idea how the fuck I did that. You have no fucking idea how I did that. So don't tell me you do.

And he's a contentious magician and it's wonderful. And he's brilliant. He's one of my dearest friends. And I love him exactly because he takes magic at the most serious conceivable level and won't allow it to be minimized or condescended to. Though he did say to me once, the only reason mimes exist is so the magicians have someone to patronize. What I love about your, by the way, the chapter of this book on magic is magic. It's the thing that I never really understood about magic until you wrote about it. And I could never tell whether this is true of magic or just true of you on magic, which is that all these magicians, at least the ones you write about, have thought so deeply and

beautifully and profoundly about their craft in a way that no other, you know, I've just spent, for a variety of reasons, the last couple of weeks, months, really, interviewing one trauma surgeon after another. And trauma surgeons are incredibly interesting. The work they do is really, really, really, really hard. The technology changes every, and technique changes every 10 minutes. But they don't, they're not talking about it on a philosophical level, they've taken something that's beautifully, powerfully complicated, and they have made it intensely practical. And they talk about it.

Yeah. Well, shop talk is the most beautiful talk that there is. One of the reasons writers are so occupationally miserable is because we have no shop talk, really, to talk about, right? Yeah. We talk about keyboards, computers, advances, and publishers, and then that's it, right? Talk about keyboards, computers, advances and publishers, and then that's it, right? We don't. Magicians have the most beautiful and rapturous shop talk of anyone because they can only talk about it to other magicians. They have a high level of trauma

surgeon-like technique, but they can't tell you or me about it. They can only talk about it to other magicians. So there's an intensity, an intellectual intensity to what they do. I will add as well, of course, and this is the implicit, if tenderly loving accusation you're making, I seek out the intellectual magicians and they seek and they choose to speak to me. Yeah. What is it that drew you to magic? Was it that, did Luke discover it or did you? Luke, it was simultaneously that my son Luke discovered magic and found that it gave him far more meaning, accomplishment, significance than anything he was studying in school. So I was drawn into it through Luke's obsessive interest in magic. But then I loved it, too, once I started going to Monday Night Magic and other things, too, because it seemed like such a model of art, of a very modest kind.

You know, magicians aren't, because they feel oppressed all the time. But the idea that you would have a profound technique that you kept to yourself, the idea that your primary impulse was to entertain rather than to impress or to intimidate, that that would be, that you would have all of these skills, but you would use them for the purposes of delight. That spoke somehow to my ideals for

writing and my ideals for art generally. And I was very taken, instantly taken by the company of magicians. I loved the company of magicians. The people I most have enjoyed hanging out with in life are magicians and cooks, and they have a great deal in common. There's an artisanal basis to everything they do. They are expert at doing something. And they tend to be very temperamental, people who have very difficult lives. Nothing is harder than running a restaurant except running a magic show. And yet the whole purpose of their existence is to delight. And I find that I find there's something sort of noble and even saintly about that. There's no high theory attached to the to cook. Yeah. Oh, yeah, there is. If you get chefs talking that, you know, I don't have it as much in this book.

But you get chefs talking about the ethics of seasonality or what counts as local and what doesn't, or you even get them talking about whether you have tarragon leaves or tarragon stems in a brunette sauce. They'll go on forever. They have that same kind of passionate shop talk, which I love to hear. More from the real work on the mystery of mastery in a moment. Now, back to my conversation on mastery with Adam Gopnik at the 92nd Street Y in New York. George Plimpton. I bring him up only because in this book, Adam goes in a series of quests to master certain activities, baking, boxing, magic, etc. Driving. Drawing. Drawing is the first one. And I'm wondering, is it an echo of George Plimpton? And how do you feel about George Plimpton's contribution to this? That's such an acute question because I deliberately dropped George

Plimpton's name in the opening chapter. I'm thinking no one will pick up on my little homage to Plimpton in the opening chapter because it goes by very quickly. But I put that there exactly for that reason. George Plimpton did these wonderful books, Paper Lion, Mad Ducks and Bears, about his own engagement. As an amateur, he would go and he would box with Archie Moore or he would play quarterback for the Detroit Lions and so on. And so there's certainly an element of Plimpton-ness in this. His book, Mad Ducks and Bears, is one of the most entertaining sports books ever written. So I greatly admire his prose writing. But it isn't a Plimpton-like book in the sense that

Plimpton's comedy came out of his incapacity to do it. You know, Plimpton was making a, was, had, he was a wonderful writer, but he had kind of one joke to tell, right? I attempt to do this thing, I learn a lot, and then I fail at it. And I wanted to tell two jokes. I attempt to do this thing, and I enter into the world of the people who do it. Well, Plimpton did that too, I guess. But yes, certainly Plimpton is one of the ghosts who's someplace in the back of the book. And I put him in one sentence and you caught it. But I want you to talk a little bit more about the difference. So both of you are beginning in the same spirit.

Yes. Which is there are worlds outside your own experience that fascinate you and you would like to bear witness to them, to experience? I guess, and I say this, and there's every reason to prefer Plimpton's approach, which is more amateur to my own, but I can't resist being a bit of a generalizer, a theory producer about it. And the book is full of my generalizations, my guesses, my attempts to find the commonality across all of these dimensions, boxing and dancing. What do they have in common? What's similar about the way we learn them? I can't not be my mother's son in that way. My mother was a professor. My father was a professor. All of my brothers and sisters are professors. So I am the only one who isn't. I'm

what's called a Jewish dropout. And so I think that that urge to teach, to explicate is very strong. It was not at all in, you know, Plimpton was an aristocratic wasp. And for him, teaching and explicating, I think, was a little vulgar. He's a performer. Yeah, he's a performer, yeah. A literary performer, and yes, you are much more of a teacher. A professor, yes. I'm a ham as well, but there's more professorialness in my performance than there ever was in his. Yeah.

One thing you don't talk about in this book was your foray into music. I do talk about it a bit. A little bit. A little bit, not at great length. I was wondering, there has always been this kind of desire to experiment with your experiences in a way that's not true of a lot of, very adventurous. And one of the adventurous things you did was, describe a little bit about your kind of musical adventurous. And one of the adventurous things you did was describe a little bit about your kind of musical adventures. Well, when I came to New York, when Martha and I came to New York

on a bus from Canada, like in a bad 40s movie, I wanted to be a songwriter. That was my primary ambition. Well, I wanted to be a songwriter and a writer for The New Yorker. I figured I could do both. I could be Stephen Sondheim and John Updike simultaneously. That turned out not to be the case. But I wanted to do that. And I never pursued it adequately. It was one of those things that I left behind too soon. So in the course of life, a wonderful composer, David Shire, approached me about writing a musical with him. And somewhat to his shock, I jumped at the opportunity because it was the form I writing a musical with him. And somewhat to his shock, I jumped at the opportunity because it was the form I love most in the world. And we wrote a show called Our Table, which you can find on Spotify. And we wrote some 60 songs together.

And I loved it. You wrote, excuse me, how many songs? 60 songs. Six, zero? Six, zero. Because that's the usual ratio in Broadway musicals. They have a very strong, you call them trunk songs. You write 60 songs and you throw out 40. I mean, that's the standard rate at which it's done. It's a funny thing, not that the 40 are worse than the 20. It's a kind of weird kind of almost religious discipline that Broadway people have. And in any way, I love- Hold on. I can't get over this. 60. So every Broadway play has 40 songs

that are just lying in a vault somewhere. Yes, in a word, yes. And those are called trunk songs. I don't know if it's always 40 and 20. It could be sometimes 30 and 10. But yes, every songwriting team and every Broadway songwriter will tell you that even Sondheim threw away four

different endings for company before he arrived at being alive it's part of the discipline of the craft I'm not always sure that it's a productive discipline in the sense that the ones you throw away may actually be better than the than the one you arrive at does anyone independently analyze the ones that are thrown away like is there some this should be some central committee of Broadway that kind of takes all these in and... Like FDA inspectors who come in and say, you don't have to throw this away. No, no, this is...

Smells good to me. Yes, exactly. This is unbelievable. It's, you know... It's like a... It's so show-offy, by the way. You know... The rest of us are, like,

making use of every last scrap, but... So I did that, and I loved it, and I wrote all the lyrics, and I felt, you know, and I put myself to work to master that craft and that art as much as I could because my ultimate heroes, Lorenzo da Ponte, Lorenz Hart, Larry Hart, took part in that field. You have no fear of embarrassment.

I live in total fear of embarrassment. But I suppose when it comes to the contest between my egotism and my embarrassment, my egotism wins somehow. I don't know. I mean, if I can put it in slightly kinder terms to myself, I'm ambitious, you know, and I like doing ambitious things. And I, you know, it's not like I'm out there, you know, trying to compete with Elon Musk in rocketry. You know, what I'm good at, or what I believe myself to be good at, is shaping sentences. And some of those sentences are essays. That's the form I love most in the world is the essay, what's sometimes called the personal essay. But writing lyrics or writing a show, it's the same enterprise, right?

It's organizing language in ways that express emotion. And for me, the thing I love most is exactly the moments in that act when you get an emotion and an idea humming together. And that's what I always try to do in things is what you were talking about before. And when it's just ideas, it feels arid to me. And when it's just emotions, it feels amateurish to me. And there's no form known to man in which ideas, well, you did this, you talked about this in your Paul Simon audio book. There's no form in which ideas, well, you did this, you talked about this in your Paul Simon audiobook. There's no form in which ideas and emotions come into such intimate entanglement as in a song. So anybody who can write one good song, one memorable song, has got a little bit

of purchase on immortality. And I think I've written one, but I will continue to write more. On one level, what this book is, is about the special pleasures of mediocrity. Yes. And because you embark on a series of things and implicit in, not all of them, but in some of the things that you embark on, is the idea that you're not- Never going to be good at them. You're never going to be good at them. Right.

And this is the great discovery of my middle age. When I was very young, I only pursued things that I was good at. And I realized when I hit 40 that that was a trap. And you know why I realized that? I realized it because I went to Bard. And when I was using the gym, I saw the Bard lacrosse team practice. And I observed them. And I observed that they were the most laughably inept lacrosse team

I'd ever seen. And my first thought was, you know, I have all kinds of athletic pretensions. So I was looking down my nose. And then my second thought was, that is fantastic because it means that anyone who wants to play lacrosse at Bard can play lacrosse at Bard. And that is such a better model than every other lacrosse team. If you want to play lacrosse at Johns Hopkins, it's impossible. Because you're never going to be good enough. You're never going to make the team. A pleasure is denied to you. Why?

For the completely random and totally unfair reason that a small number of kids have been playing lacrosse in suburban Baltimore since they were six years old because their parents had the nutty notion that mastery of lacrosse was something they wanted to use their kids. And it would get them into Johns Hopkins. So what do we do? We impoverish the vast pool of kids who would really enjoy playing lacrosse in favor of a small. Bart flips it and just says, we're going to have a bad lacrosse team. Yes, I know, but not to be pious, but that's sort of one of the themes of the book.

It maybe is the theme of the book. Because the truth is, and I have a little chapter called The Mystery of Interiority, where I look into that old folk legend that hummingbirds and elephants have the same number of heartbeats in their life and find that there's actually, at the University of North Carolina State, there's a scientific team that looks into this question, that took up this question, and it's true. And the point of it, the metaphor of it is, is that the hummingbird's sense of existence is just as extended as the

elephant's. It just is only, that feels that way for the hummingbird, right? Not for the elephant. And in exactly the same way, the accomplishments that we master or attempt to master, at which we're no good, give us the same sense of, you know, little steps turning into a seamless sequence. The sense of the flow, which is the key to happiness. Happiness is absorption. Happiness is reaching that flow state. And in a weird way, any time you achieve it, you have the hummingbird's heartbeat inside you. You have a strong interior sense, like the kids at Bard, right?

They didn't know they were bad lacrosse players, and I'm sure they talked about lacrosse all the time and tried to improve their game. And that's exactly why... No, no, no, no, no. They do know they're bad lacrosse players. No, no, no, I don't mean that as a joke. Right.

Because it's the second, the corollary to the observation that there is beauty in... Badness. Is that the second thing is that it is only through pursuing something, not badly, you weren't bad at these things, but inexpertly, that you come to a full appreciation of the expert. The person who goes up to the magician and says, I know how you did that, is someone who doesn't try to be a mediocre. If they were a mediocre magician, they would know better. Precisely how they would be in true awe. It's the same thing.

I was going to say this. It is only when I became a mediocre runner in my middle age that I began to appreciate what a world-class runner can do. Exactly. And it's only by being a terrible pianist that I have some glimpse of what it is to be Bill Evans or Errol Garner. This is the greatest case for community theater. Yes.

This is true? Which is the kind of whipping boy. Community theory is the whipping boy of every pretentious intellectual. I grew up with community theater, and I'm here to tell you, civilization is... Community theater. Is based on community theater. I mean that. But you know, that's not...

You know who said that? Forgive me for a professorial moment. Frederick Law Olmsted, the great designer of Central Park and one of the great American political thinkers, said that the commonplace civilization of a liberal society depended on community theater. He talked about glee clubs. He talked about amateur opera societies. That's the living, beating heart of a liberal society are those things. Yeah, yeah. Give me one more name. I'm loving this so much. Oh, okay. I'll give you one more name. It's like being in therapy. Let's do David Blaine. Why not? Let's finish on

magic. David Blaine was, so Luca, my wonderful son, who is now doing his PhD in philosophy at the University of Texas. After all of his adventures, magic and music. He ended as a philosopher. Went to work as David Blaine's personal assistant. David offered him that job. And it was a wonderful learning experience, much better than going to progressive school, because he had to learn how to keep, you know, Russian models away from each other and how to care for an albino alligator and many other things. And David, in the middle of it, this is my favorite anecdote in the book, was doing a bullet catch. Now, a bullet catch, he was doing it for a TV special.

And in the bullet catch, the magician has a steel cup in his mouth or her mouth, and somebody fires a bullet from a rifle directly into the cup. You have to catch the bullet. And now, normally, it's done as a trick, as a gaffe, because it's too dangerous. Twelve magicians were killed in the early part of the 20th century doing the bullet catch on stage. So nobody does it that way. And Luke explained to me, David was going to do a true bullet catch. And I said, well, how do you do a bullet catch? And he said, well, it's a very strong titanium cup and it's a very low velocity rifle and a very small caliber

bullet and it's all laser guided. I said, oh really? So there's no trick to the bullet catch? And he said, oh no dad, there's a trick to the bullet catch. The trick to the bullet catch is catching the bullet. And as soon as Luke said that to me I said, that's the wisest thing I've ever heard, right? Because we all instantly know what that means, right? That after all the preparation you do when you're writing or talking or anything, after all the ways in which you make sure that you will not be killed by the bullet, at some point you have to stand there with your mouth open and the cup in it

while somebody points a rifle at you. And that for me is the existential leap that we all have to make in artistry, mastery, whatever we choose to call it. And I thought, so I thought it was a wonderful story because everybody knows what that moment is of catching the bullet. That trick can only be done in certain states. Yes, exactly. Stand your ground laws.

Can I thank you, Malcolm, for your incredible generosity in doing this? And can I tell you a story that I don't think you know? Is that Malcolm is known in our house, as my children were growing up, as not that you're not dad Malcolm. Because this is the conversation we would always have. Malcolm would come for dinner, dazzle Luke and Olivia. And then they would say, Malcolm tells the most interesting anecdotes. And he always finds the one right story to illustrate it.

Not that you don't, Dad. Or Malcolm always has exactly the right question to ask. Not that you're not doing that, Dad. And so we, in our household, Malcolm Gladwell is known as Not That You're Not Dad Malcolm. So thank you, Not that you're not. Adam Gopnik's book, The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery, is available now. And be sure to check out the audiobook version at pushkin.fm. Special thanks to the 92nd Street Y for hosting us. This episode of Revisionist History was produced by Kiara Powell with Ben-Nadav Hafri, Leemon Gistu, and Jacob Smith.

Fact-checking by Cashel Williams and Tali Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Extra special thanks this week to Julia Barton, Morgan Ratner, Kerry Brody, and Eric Sandler. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Sarah Bruguere, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Glabo.