Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Deep Cuts: Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Gladwell On: the importance of flow states, why people should have a lifelong pursuit or practice, and how he personally relaxes.Malcolm Gladwell is the president and co-founder of the podcasting network Pushkin Industries, and the author of six New York Times bestselling books including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers. He’s also the host of the Pushkin podcast Revisionist History. For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/For tickets to TPH's live and live streamed event in Colorado on November 3:https://www.milehichurch.org/calendar/10-percent-happier-with-dan-harris/Do you have a favorite episode of TPH? We want to hear about it!Here’s how you can help us uncover these hidden gems.Call [phone]Tell us your name and favorite episodeAnd, in a couple of sentences, tell us why this episode hit home for youDo this and your episode and story may be part of our Deep Cuts featureIn this episode we talk about: The backlash Malcolm faced from his work from home comments Pushing the noise aside when it comes to social media Lessons in kindness from a recent Revisionist History episodeThe importance of flow statesHow he personally relaxes Why people should have a lifelong pursuit or practiceWhat he thinks now about his famous 10,000 hours argumentWhy we need to engage and investigate the views of others to be morally alert as human beingsAnd his biggest journalistic mistakeContent Warning: Brief mention of eating disorders. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode//malcolm-gladwell-rerunSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Today, we have what we in the journalism business call a big get. It's Malcolm Gladwell, author of six New York Times bestsellers, including the tipping point, blink and outliers, and host of such hit podcasts as revisionist history and legacy of speed. We originally wanted to have Malcolm on to talk about some of the issues he's been addressing on his podcasts of late, including kindness, generosity,

and sacrifice. But this interview happened to fall on a day when Malcolm was at the center of a tabloid slash Twitter dust up over some comments. He had made about working from home, which he said, and I'm quoting here, is not in your best interest. Some people did not like that.

There was quite a backlash. And in this interview, you're going to hear Malcolm respond at length. This episode is part of Deepcuts, a new feature where you, the listener, get to choose your favorite TPH episode from the archives. It's simple. Just give us a call and leave us a voicemail that includes the episode you want to hear and why. The number to do so is 1-508-656 0540. We'll put it in the show notes, so you don't have to write it down. Anyway, here's the message we got about today's episode. My name is Jesse Kimble-Marx. I'm calling from Greenville, South Carolina, and I love 10% happier I've been listening to it for years since COVID. I have a long list of favorites that have gyms of insight,

but if you're asking for just one, the ones that really struck me, I heard that episode with Malcolm Gladwell, where he talked about his family, mother and father, getting together with friends to support refugees back in the 60s or 70s, and I thought, oh my gosh, why don't we do that today? And that actually launched me into looking for that in my own community and alone behold

there was a new group that had just started and set up called Lutheran Services for the Carolina. And I got involved with them and started just donating here and there, volunteering a little time. They really burdened me into action and had that direct impact on me helping others. So I just want to say thanks and yeah keep up the great work guys. I love what you do. Thank you Jesse. In today's episode you're going to hear Malcolm Gladwell talk about volunteering and sacrifice. You'll hear him tell the story, Jesse just referenced. He also talks about kindness, the importance of flow states, how he personally relaxes, his favorite hack for improving his

daily life, why he thinks everybody should have a lifelong practice or pursuit. His is running. Why writing and reading about other people is such an important human act. What he thinks now about his famous 10,000 hours argument, what maybe his biggest journalistic mistake. And as mentioned, his response to the recent remote work controversy. Also just to say, I have a couple of live events coming up on November 3rd. I'm doing a thing at the Mile High Church in Lakewood, Colorado. That's right outside of Denver. If you're not in the area, you can check out the live stream.

There's a link for tickets in the show notes. And I am told there are still a handful of tickets, maybe a dozen or two dozen still available for the live podcast taping we're doing in Boston on September 7th. We have very special guests, very special. I'm not exaggerating. There's also a link for that one in the show notes. Have you been considering starting or restarting your meditation practice? Well, in the words of highway billboards across America. If you're looking for a sign, this is it. To help you get started, we're offering subscriptions at a 40% discount until September 3rd. Of course, nothing is permanent

So get this deal before it ends by going to 10% dot com slash 40 that's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription Malcolm Gladwell, welcome to the show. Thank you, Dan So I'm prepped to the gills for this interview. I've got all these questions about issues related to the mind and how we do life. However, I did this thing I almost never do, which is last night. I went on Twitter and said, Hey, I'm going to interview Malcolm Gladwell tomorrow. What should I ask him?

I was overloaded with questions. I think this has never happened where I got a ton of good questions. It seems like there's a bit of a kerfuffle right now about some comments you made about working from home. So I thought I'd just start there and get a sense of what's on your mind. You, I guess, in another interview said, it's not in your best interest to work from home. Can you say more about what was on your mind when you said that and are you surprised by the response? No, I'm not terribly surprised by the response. What I meant was when I look at my own career and conversations that I've had with other people about

how do they learn to be good at what they do? How do they come to find meaning and significance in their work? Their answers overwhelmingly were about the social experience of work. The answers are overwhelmingly not about what I learned this way, but rather what I learned from this person. What I observed, the lesson this person taught me, the same issue of my own life, I spent the first 20 years of my career going into an office every day, and I realized looking back on that that that was an incalculable, important learning experience. And so I was simply making a point that I completely understand why going to the office every

day has not been an option during COVID and is not an option for all of us all the time. But I just wanted to make the point that when you abandoned the social context of work, you give something up. And I think we should be honest about what we're giving up under those circumstances. That's really all. Not prescribing to people how they got to live their lives. But if I hadn't gone to work for the first 20, 25 years of my working career, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be on a show. I wouldn't be any good at what I did. You know, I'm an old dude looking back on my life.

So that was really all I was saying. So your central point is, if I'm hearing you correctly, you're not wagging a finger at people who are working from home right now, you're saying, especially to young people, there's an and use the word incalculable amount to gain from being in a professional community where you can learn from others. Yeah. And I think that on some level, most people recognize that fact, the problem is that we've loaded a whole series of complications on that fact. We have a housing crisis in this country.

Many people live far from the place that they work for economic reasons. They're spending three hours a day commuting, or two hours a day commuting, working from home can be a blasting in a certain sense as someone in that position. I totally understand that. Or somebody's got kids that they have to pick up, but you know, four o'clock from school. I mean, we can all list the reasons why I'm working at home, but have its advantages. I have a certain points in my career work from home. And so I understand, advantages. I have a certain points in my career work from home. So I understand, I'm just pointing out that you do lose something. And now you prepared, you find with that? And well, ever since I wrote my book Our Liars, a big theme of ours was this notion of what is meaningful work. And in writing that book,

I became convinced that one of the fundamental ways in which we give dignity to our fellow human beings is that we allow them the opportunity to engage in meaningful work. And I think meaningful work is a lot harder when you are isolated. Some people can handle that and some people can't. And I don't want to rush into a world where we are impoverishing a set of people just because it's, you know, it's a lot cheaper for companies to have everyone working on. I mean, we can go in that direction. I don't

know if that at the end of the day suits our interests. Do you work from home now? No, I work from the office for from the beginning of COVID. We opened this office at the beginning of COVID. I opened this office at the beginning of COVID. We kept it open through COVID because I've moved into a new phase in my career where I'm doing collaborative work, really, for the first time. You know, a book is solitary work. My podcast is a group creative effort. And I found it really hard to do group creative work in isolation. So I felt it was very important that we have an office for my team and that we get together as often as we could. You said you weren't surprised by the response, but my Twitter feed or my

app replies in Twitter. Ever since I became a happiness guy and transitioned out of journalism. I don't get a lot of tart replies. I was, I may be surprised as in the right word, but it was worthy of remark how people took your comment as an out of touch rich guy telling people who have exigencies in their life, how to live their life. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was unlucky enough to have some tabloids right about my remarks in a way that removed all new ons and subtly. It's not the first time that's happened. So, you know, and it's not really a conversation you can have on Twitter. Am I surprised at this point in my life that a Twitter conversation captures something less than the truth now? So

These things happen. I've this is not the first time I've been in the middle of a Twitter Bruh-ha-ha, so I'm kind of I'm not overly troubled by it. I Read an interview with you where somebody asked you do you care what other people think of you? And you said something to the effect of not that much. Is that true? And if that still holds, is it valuable at a moment like this? Well, I mean, I wouldn't be human if I wasn't in some way sensitive to that. I mean, I have social beings.

But I, you know, I always try to keep in mind that what people call a Twitter controversy is not a real life controversy, right? It's a controversy involving a very, the very, very tiny fraction of human beings who spend a lot of time on Twitter and take what Twitter says seriously or who consume the daily mail gossip every morning, there are 380 million people in America. If you asked all 380 million, what they think of Malcolm Gladwell's position on working from home, 379,900,000 would say, who's Malcolm Gladwell? So it's like, you know, it's hard under those circumstances to get to worked up. I take your point about Twitter and social media generally.

I guess though the deeper question for me is, how much armor do you have against other people's opinions about you? Because I know I care a lot too much, and it's pretty easy for my day to get ruined with one stray tweet. Like I said, I don't get them that often. My days get ruined generally by other things. So I'm just curious, I would love to hear you hold forth a little bit on the extent to

which you do or do not care and any tools that you use to move through the world where you are. You said most people wouldn't know who you are, but I think most people do know you are and that comes with strain. Yeah Well, it's not the first time this has happened So I'm 58 almost 59 I've in one way or another been in the public eye for 20 odd years Not always happily in the public eye. I mean, I've had a lot of success, but you know

there've been numerous occasions where people have taken shots at me each time it happens it matters less and also the thing that's so weird about forums like Twitter is that people weigh the negative comments more heavily than the positive comments. So 10 people can say I love that, but if 2 say something very nasty about you, you remember the 2, at least that's your initial response. And I've learned to reverse that. Like, you know,

I was sitting outside having a cup of coffee this morning before I came into work and two people came by and said, are you mucking level? I love your stuff. Like that's the reality of what my days are like. People never come up and say nasty things. They say nice things. I, you know, I continue to sell books and people continue to listen to my podcast. There's plenty of people out there who like what I do. And that ought to be sufficient.

We can't say that you're a failure as a public figure if 100% of the world doesn't agree with you at all times, right? That's a crazy standard. You know, Joe Biden, the president of the United States, the man who is arguably more important than any individual in the world, what's his approval rating right now? It's like 35%. You know, if Joe Biden took that as serious as he want people to take Twitter comments seriously, he wouldn't get out of bed in the morning and he wouldn't have able to pass the climate bill last week, right? Like let's just put all this in perspective. You have to do what you want to do with your life and put all of this

kind of noise. You have to push it aside. I hear at least two things in there that are scalable from your experience to the rest of us. One is, you said each time it happens, it matters less. I mean, that's a, it's kind of an exposure therapy to criticism. And the other thing I heard was your kind of hacking of the hard-wired, evolutionarily bequeathed negativity bias that exists in all of our brains and minds. You're saying, I'm not going to let the two negative tweets color my opinion of an event I'm going to focus on. The 10 positive ones are the people who stop me on the street. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's very important to understand that what's different in the world, in many, many ways, it's a very good thing, that for the first time in history, you have exposure to what people who are not part of your life think of you, right? There was no mechanism for that 50 years ago or 15 years ago, certainly not 200 years ago. Virtually all of your feedback was from people who moved in your orbit. Now, someone could say whatever they want.

You don't even know where they're from. It's just a weird moment and you have to kind of keep that in mind. Okay, like I said, I actually got some very thoughtful questions coming over the Transome via Twitter. We'll get to those later. I want to talk about some of the episodes you've been running on, one of your podcasts, revisionist history. In a recent episode of that show, you talk a lot about the idea of kindness and a kind of kindness contagion, how kindness can lead to kindness. Can you describe the episode in question here,

this sort of give us the backstory and then explain a little bit how you landed on this conclusion about the transmissibility of kindness. Yeah, I always wanted to do an episode about, when I was a kid in high school, in the end of the 70s, at the end of the Vietnam War, there were this flood of Vietnamese refugees, and my parents were part of a group of people who sponsored three refugees from the former South Vietnam. And they were a part of our lives for years thereafter,

even up until my father's death. You know, one of them came to his funeral and would come to birthday parties. And it was one of those kind of slightly magical stories about three people they showed up without speaking English without a dime to their name. And they all went on to have an education. They started families, their kids are doing the most amazing things.

And I always wanted to do something on that, sort of understand what that was about. Why did this random group of people from small town, southern Ontario, where my parents are from? How do they come to welcoming these strangers into their home? And why did it work? So I went home to see my mom in February and I asked her to invite the group,

those of them who were still alive, because they were all under late 80s and 90s. The group of people who had gotten to get into the late 70s to bring over these refugees, and they all came over for tea and I just recorded the conversation. And then sort of wondered, you know, what I would do, you know, I didn't have, I didn't have any more in my head than that.

And then I talked to my brother who was the principal of an elementary school in our same little town. And whose elementary school had took in so many, I mean, I think I've forgotten what it is. 30 or 40% of the school ended up being the children of refugees in a time that he was there. I just had him tell stories about what that was like. And then I just sort of put the stories together. It was a very simple, but I was struck by how untromatic the stories were that nobody gave up their lives to bring in these people. Nobody took on an extra job to support them. No one, it was this kind of lots of people doing small acts that added up to something big. And that was, that was the kind of very, very simple, very, very obvious, but I thought very beautiful

insight from all of these stories. I've been writing a book for the last four plus years about love and kindness. And I've been thinking recently, you know, we hear a lot about the banality of evil, but there's a humdrumness to kindness too. It doesn't have to be operatic. It can be pretty basic. But let's get to this notion of how kindness can be get more kindness. What did you learn about that in the course of making that episode? Well, you know, one of the very interesting things that I didn't really pull this out in the episode

as much as perhaps I should have is that my parents were like I say, part of this group of, say, 10 people back in the 70s who brought over the refugees. And when you talk to my, started with my own parents, one of the reasons they did that is that their parents had done that. My father's parents, my grandparents in England, they welcomed a stream of people into their home when my dad was growing up, same with my mother's parents in Jamaica. And then when my mother went to England in the 50s as a kind of black student in a kind of foreign land. She was welcomed into the people's houses.

It was made manageable by the fact that all these strangers would just have her over for dinner on a weekend or something and just made her feel at home. So there was this kind of practice that was being passed down from generation to generation, that this was not some kind of heroic thing, but it was just part of what you do as a human being is you welcome strangers into your home. And I see that as that kind of hereditary practice as being a powerful part of how kindness persists in the world, that you see it being modeled

and it just becomes part of your repertoire of behavior. It's humbling to hear this story though because I like and I think we all like to think of ourselves as good people, but I don't know that I would take a stranger into my home for a definite period of time. Would you? I don't know. It would be, well, don't know. So, very interesting point. So if they had been asked to do that, then we're moving beyond kindness to sacrifice, to something much harder. The beauty of 10 people getting together and sponsoring Vietnamese refugees is that you have enough resources that no one has to bear the burden, right?

So if it had just been my parents, they would have had to take their refugees into their home. And they wouldn't have done that. We didn't have space. That would have been our incredible burden. Both my parents were working at that point. But that's not what happened. Ten of them got together, pulled their resources, and got an apartment in town, and just checked in with them. And you know, 10 people checking in on three people and helping them is a very different story than one person. The more people who engage in active kindness is collectively the easier it gets. And that's a crucial part of it. It has to be manageable if you want the kind of kindness virus to spread. If you make it impossible, no one's going to do it.

You touched on this a little bit, but can you say more about the difference between sacrifice, kindness and generosity? Yeah, I was sort of struck when I was along the same lines. I was trying to kind of come up with a commitment scale for what it means to be good to someone else. And I think sometimes that one of the ways we get intimidated by the challenge of doing good is that we think the challenge of doing good is that we think the challenge of doing good necessarily involves sacrifice.

Sacrifice is where you give up something of yourself or take on some risk for another. And we've come to think, oh, in order for me to be of real value in the world, I have to sacrifice. But I was trying to point out that there are lesser levels of commitment that also work. And in the middle of that episode, I tell this story about a Holocaust survivor. I found the oral history of someone who escaped from a concentration camp and stayed alive in Poland until the end of the war. And he tells the story of how he stayed alive and no one sacrificed for him. And no one was even particularly generous towards him,

but lots and lots and lots of people were kind towards him. Gave him a meal, let him stay in our house for a day. And that was enough, because there were so many people willing to be kind, he survived. And I think he understood that if he was to stay in someone's house, in someone's basement for three months, in the middle of Poland, in the second World War, he was putting them at risk. And he didn't want to do that.

He wanted kindness. He wanted something manageable and replicable. And he knew that that's how he was going to stay alive. And it never occurred to me until I listened to that guy's oral history that in some ways repeated acts of kindness are preferable to solitary, extraordinary, and heroic acts of sacrifice. Let me move on to another set of episodes on revisionist history. You dedicate three episodes to a human experiment on starvation, which while not solitary does strike me as a pretty extreme act on the part of the participants in this experiment in sacrifice.

Can you describe the experiment in question and then maybe tell us a little bit about what you learned about self-sacrifice in the course of this reporting? Yeah, so this is a famous experiment from Second World War. It occurred in the University of Minnesota, 1944 through 45, and it involved a group of 36 men who agreed to starve themselves over the course of the bulk of a year in order that a famous nutritionist named Anselkees could study them and understand what happens to people when they undergo prolonged malnourishment and what the best ways of nursing them back to health are.

And the feeling was that during the Second World War there were millions of people around the world who were suffering from a lack of food and who would need to be rescued after the war. And we did not know how to do it. We didn't know how much to feed them, what to feed them, when to feed them. We didn't know what was wrong with them. We didn't know, what does it mean to starve for six months? Scientists had no clue.

So these guys essentially offered themselves up as guinea pigs in pursuit of that notion. And so these three episodes are the story of what happened to them. And I'm also preoccupied with the question of, would we do a kind of experiment like that today? Could we do an experiment like that today? And the answer is we couldn't. We don't allow experiments like that to happen anymore.

And I don't know why, because the more you get into the story of these men, the more you realize that A, they suffered tremendously. I mean, many of them had eating disorders for the rest of their life. They had health problems that dog them for the next 50 years, but almost every single one of them would have done it over again. They felt that they learned so much from the experience and they were so proud of how they contributed to our understanding of how to help others. They felt that their moral horizons had been so expanded by that process of sacrifice that they considered it to be one of the most important things that ever done.

And I, you know, in considering the question of whether such an experiment could be done today, I entertain the notion that we don't understand that idea of self-sacrifice anymore, that we don't think it's legitimate for somebody to want to give up that much of their own health and wellness on behalf of others. We're baffled by that notion. I don't think we should be baffled by that notion. Why do you say that we don't understand it anymore? Well, there's a million answers to that question. The men who volunteered for this experiment were all conscientious objectors, so they were men of deep religious faith, whose faith made it impossible for them to fight in war. And so already, at the outset of the war, they had agreed to be social pariahs on behalf of

their beliefs. They were comfortable with that notion, comfortable with the complexities of sitting at a war against a profoundly evil force in Europe. And we're trying struggling to find some other way to contribute to a society that they were in that moment, turning their backs on. And that willingness on their part to kind of engage with the complexities of their moral position is something that I don't want to say is absent today. But I want to say that we're not as comfortable with that today. One of the episodes I talk a lot about how much controversy there was about human challenge trials for COVID, a human challenge trials where in order to speed up research into stopping COVID, a healthy person agrees to be infected with COVID. And the amount of ink that was spilled in the

medical ethics community, decrying this practice, saying we can't possibly allow people to do this. My point is, why? Why can't someone say, I'm willing to take a risk on behalf of the millions of people who are being struck down by this disease? There's something about the kind of notion of thinking about your obligations to the collective that's harder today than it was back then. What do you think is going on there? I mean, would you tie it to the my understanding is that there's, I don't know how you measure this, but there's been a rise in self-centeredness among Americans, potentially another alternative

explanation would be what is often derided as safetyism, the idea that there's this kind of nanny state culturally and actually telling us we can't do things. Do you have a sense of what's driving this deemphasis on self-sacrifice? I don't have a good or simplistic answer. I mean, I think it's all the things you've described. I think a lot of it comes from a very good place, which is a lot of what was called noble self-sacrifice in the past was not that at all.

It was exploitation. And I think that we're very sensitive. Maybe we've over corrected from that. But you have to remember that not long after that experiment I described was that Tuskegee syphilis experiment, right? Where a group of African-American men were unwittingly used as guinea pigs in an incredibly harmful experiment around what syphilis

does to people's bodies. And the scientific community had no problem justifying that at the time of the experiment. So, I mean, there's plenty of cases where the human desire to volunteer for these kinds of things has been exploited. And so I think we're legitimately sensitive to that. But I don't think that I think we've gone is maybe in some senses we've gone too far. Coming up, Malcolm Gladwell talks about what he does to relax, why he believes we would all be healthier if we had a lifelong pursuit, and where he comes down on working from home.

Let me ask about a new podcast you've launched. This is not part of revisionist history. It's a standalone show called The Legacy of Speed. It's about, and you'll tell us more, but it's about African-American track and field stars in the 60s who mounted a social protest that became quite famous. And I'm wondering if you could just tell us about the show. And also, do you see the activism of these men within the framework of the discussion we've just been having about sacrifice, kindness, generosity. That's an interesting question.

So, yeah, this was a podcast at Tracksmith, the running brand, came to us with this idea, like, can we do a podcast about that iconic photograph from the 1968 Mexico City Olympics of Tommy Smith and Giancarlos on the victory stand of the 200 meters with their heads bowed and their black gloved fists raised and their black knee socks, you know, making the black power salute in sympathy with, you know, what was going on in the United photographs of the 20th century. And it turns out to be this extraordinary story behind it. Both about, factored all of these guys are from the same place. They all went to San Jose State, all coached by the same guy, a guy who revolutionized the way

we think about running. They were all inspired by Harry Edwards, who's still an incredible force in the social justice fight. And they were all challenging the notion that an athlete did not have a right to speak to the world outside of their sport. And in that moment, I think changed forever our definition of who has a right to speak up. In many domains, there was a feeling that your job was to stay within the boundaries of that domain. If you were a mailman, you delivered the mail.

If you were a musician, you played music. If you were an athlete, you ran or you jumped or you dribbled a basketball. You were not allowed to kind of step outside of that role and speak to other stuff. When Colin Kaepernick does it a couple of years back in the 21st century, he's blackballed by the National Football League. So there persists to be this notion that says that you cannot be fully human and raise your

voice as a human being if you are in one of these kind of subcultures. The podcast is an attempt to examine that question and understand, where did these guys, they're all in their early 20s. They have no money who basically hold a middle finger up to the world and say, you know what? I'm going to speak up because I'm a young black man and it's 1968 and I'm not going to turn down this opportunity to make myself heard. It's just like it was an insanely fascinating story to tell. Did they pay a price for it?

Did their act become a kind of self sacrifice? Oh my God, they totally paid a price for it. I mean, they were sent home for the Olympics. They struggled to find jobs after ones. It took them years to kind of find their place back in the world in the sport, death threats and they were denounced. And I mean, I could go on and on and on. They came home from Mexico City to the most kind of loud and resounding chorus of

booze and hatred and vitriol. I mean, in a way that we were talking about Twitter earlier. I mean, this had Twitter has nothing on what those guys went through. You know, Twitter's a walk into bark compared to, you know, what they had to deal with. I mean, it's extraordinary in my perspective. You mentioned briefly their coach. I believe you've described the running coach. I think his name is Bud Winter as bringing a kind of meditative approach to running. Can you say more about that? kind of meditative approach to running? Can you say more about that? Yes, so this is this fascinating thing. There was a prevailing notion in sport up through the 1950s and 60s that if you wanted to run as fast as you could possibly run, the way

you did that was to grit your teeth and to tense your upper body and to furiously drive your arms back and forth and to kind of will your way to victory. And this Godbud Winter, who's this track coach at San Jose State, has an experience in the Second World War where he's part of a team working with pilots, trying to deal with mental breakdown, psychological breakdowns by pilots. And they come to understand that the way to help pilots deal with the extraordinarily stresses they were under was to teach them how to relax. The path to peak performance and something as extraordinarily demanding as flying up World War II fighter plane in combat was to teach someone through various forms, meditation, relaxation techniques, to do the opposite of obvious

effort. And Winter takes that idea and says, this must be true of sprinting. That this idea that obvious effort is the only path to peak performance is wrong. That a sprinter while he or she is trying to run as fast as they can, are to be relaxed. And so if you look, I'm a big track and field fan, so this is obvious to me, but if you look today, you know, look at 100 meter final of the world championships, and look at the athletes in slow motion, the great ones. Shelly Anne Fraser Price, Jamaican Spinter,

arguably the greatest sprinter of all time. I was just yesterday watching a video of her at a meat and monaco. She won the 100 meters and they had showed her. She's running in slow motion and she's so relaxed. Her upper body, it looks like she's going for a walk in the park. She's focused, but she's blocked out the crowd. So it's not that she's all over the place. She's absolutely in the moment, but she is so fluid and so graceful and so elegant. Even if she is running faster, then almost any woman has run in the history of mankind. One person has run faster than she'll be impressed.

That idea was it now, it makes sense to us, was so deeply paradoxical and controversial in the 1960s. I mean, and this guy about winter was the guy who convinced the world that no, you, you have to retreat from the extremes if you want to perform at the extreme. We're talking about relaxation and flow. I'm wondering for you, what do you do? You know, you're so busy, you're so prolific. How do you achieve any level of relaxation and what impact does that have on your inner and outer life?

Well, I'm a runner, so running is my meditative act. When I run without headphones or because I want that kind of release from the world, what I'm doing that. And it's very, I've been injured for the last couple of months and I wasn't able to run with the frequency that I had before and I paid the price. I mean, it's really clear to me, sleeping suffered since of well-being suffered. So, you know, I'm acutely aware of how crucial it is to have some kind of outlet that allows you to break the umbilical cord with the world for a little bit. Do you think the people closest to you would have noticed the change in you during the injury?

Yeah, probably. Yeah. I mean, I see it when I break my whatever, I don't love this term, but I'm going to self-care regime, especially if I don't have a chance to meditate. Just the various members of my inner dramatic persona, I get more obnoxious and more prominent and I have less self-awareness and therefore I'm owned by them more frequently and everybody suffers. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because I've been with my fellow runners,

we've been, I've been engaging in this kind of public brainstorming about how to encourage people to take up running as a lifetime activity, not just something they do in high school. And it is because I am aware and all my fellow runners are aware of just how extraordinarily valuable taking up an activity as a kid and keeping at it through middle age is, that we're trying to go back now and rethink, you know, at that age when we were recruiting high school

and middle school, when you recruit kids into lifetime practices. What kind of lifetime practices do we want to recruit them into? Particularly, if you believe, and there is overwhelming evidence for it, that we're going through a mental health crisis right now, those are the questions we need to be taking really seriously. Something's wrong, and there are probably 20 things we have to do to fix it, and helping people find lifetime practices of things like exercises clearly one of them. I think the data are pretty clear.

Even before the pandemic, we'd seen pretty significant spikes in anxiety, depression, addiction, loneliness, and suicide. And that went unfortunately on steroids. And I don't say that in a glib way in the pandemic. Is there something special about running or do you think any kind of exercise, any kind of sport, any kind of musical instrument perhaps would be the lifetime practice that

would fit the bill here? Well, you know, as a runner, I'm obliged contractually to promote my sport, but no, do I think, no, no, there's obviously any number of, you know, my father was not a runner, but he was a gardener and he walked the dog like religiously. It's the same thing. Like, they're already number of things that can function in this way. You know, I remember years ago, when I was just starting out as a writer, I remember coming across this study, I think it was from the 50s or 60s. It was such a fantastic, I never forgotten it. It was a guy trying to figure out who got colds. So he studied like a massive group of people and had them mark how many colds they

got over the course of a winter. And what he discovered, he saw a relationship now, was this correlation or causation. He saw a relationship between what he called the number of worlds people belong to and the number of calls they got And the more worlds you belong to the fewer calls you got. So for example, you're someone who coaches little league is an active member of your church has a job collect stamps and Love cycling. That's five worlds. And this point was the person with five worlds gets fewer colds and the person who just works 60 hours a week. And his reasoning was that, by the way, the person who is in five worlds

is exposed to way more people than, but it was a physiological. It was that if something goes wrong in one of those worlds, you have four others that will raise your spirits. You lose your job, but then you go to church on Sunday and you've got a community that supports you and then you go and coach little league and the kids are delighted to see you and then you go home and you work on your stamp collection, you feel better and then you go for a long bike ride and his point was like you need to haveers. And the more buffers you have, the healthier physically, you'll be the less toll stress takes.

And that's what we're talking about here. It's, can we give people these other worlds to belong to? We introduce them to new worlds and that'll help them down away. I might argue that if you strip this down to the struts, if you get down to the nub of this, yes, it is passion, intellectual engagement, but on a even simpler yet deeper level, it is human connection, and we are social animals and overlook that to our peril. Yeah, it sounds like Dan that you're making a statement about working from home right now. Well played, well played. I work from home and I love it, but I'm an old man and I did have those formative years

in the office. Yeah, yeah. I read this thing here today. There's a book coming out by a guy who was a one of the lead pollsters at Gallup. And this is not something new, but I love the way he described it. In his book, I haven't read the book. I just saw a reference to it. He describes this new trend, which was for years and years and years and years, Gallup has been asking Americans to rank their well-being on a scale of one to 10. And you know, you're used to see the classic bell curve.

And he says, now you don't see the bell curve anymore. What you see is some portion, large portion of people are doing better than ever. They're 10 out of 10. Never used to see that many people who were 10 at a 10. Totally new. And at the same time, there's a huge number of people who are zero out of 10.

He's like, we never saw this bulge. So you've gone from a bell curve to a double-humped camel. Now, this actually, not to come back to the working-from-home thing, but this explains the level, I think, of response to the working-from-home comment. There legit are a large group of people who are way happier with the way their life is right now than they were before. No question about it. It works for them, right? And then there's another group of people who are now at zero and didn't use to be. And the question is how do you resolve that? I don't have a good answer to that, but the conversation cannot be entirely dictated by the tense, right? And the fact that someone is a 10 and who does love the

way that, let's say remote working does, doesn't mean that there aren't out there people who are zeroes, who are really suffering. And the trick is to find a way to engage with both those people and create some kind of middle ground. Now, here's the hard part. Let's just see my m10 and I've decided to work from home. Is my presence in the office necessary for the one to become a four or a five? That's the hard question, right? In other words, let's say you're someone who benefited from and learned from an in-office working environment for the first 20 years of your career. Now you're working at home and you love it. Master what needs to be mastered. You've made all the relationships. You're at the top of the pyramid, so you're not worried

about getting fired. But what if by being at home, you are depriving the young generation of the kind of in-person knowledge transfer that's necessary for them to develop and be happy? I'm not pretend I have an answer to that, but that's the hard question, right? The really hard question. I think it's a really good question. I was just talking to my agent yesterday in his office in New York. Oh, well, he was visiting the New York office from his home office in L.A. And he was saying just what you were saying that he does not need to go into the office, but does because as a leader in his firm, he wants to be around the younger people who need

to learn from the elders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's complicated. Coming up, Malcolm talks about how he uses reading and exploration of the world to step outside of himself. His shortcut to a better frame of mind and what he says is the most meaningful category

of wrong. This is in reference to the many errors he says he has made in his own career. A few more questions for me. You recently produced a course for master class about writing, and there was a quote in there from you that I'm going to read back to you because I'd love to hear you just say a little bit more about it. The active writing about others is not trivial, it's not entertainment, it's not a distraction. You don't read nonfiction for the same reason that you chew gum or watch the Kardashians on TV. You read it because you're in search of something powerful and fundamental about what it means

to be a better person. Can you tell us more about that sentiment, that argument? Yeah, I mean, I've always thought that what drives my reading and my exploration of the world is a desire to step outside of myself. In other words, if I find myself reading something and all it's doing is affirming my own choices or my own position in the world, I think that's kind of a waste of time. What I'm really looking for in the things

that I read and engage with is a kind of invitation to empathy, a way of appreciating someone else's perspective. I found all these interviews with these jazz musicians who were active in Los Angeles in the 30s, 40s and 50s. And each one of you of them gives you this slightly different picture of what it meant to be a black man in LA in 1945, right? What was it like? Who did you hang out with? When you played, what did the audiences do? Who did you hang out with when you played? What do the audiences do? Who did you learn from? How did you interact with the police? What happened when you walked

down the street? All those kinds of things. There's no other way to find out about that. I mean, you can watch a Hollywood movie, but you don't know if they made it up. You have to actually make an effort trying to figure that out. And I sort of feel like it's important to figure that out. Do I know why necessarily this point? No. It's just like, it seems to me that there's something in that that's crucial for, I don't know, to be a kind of morally alert as a human, I feel like you have to actively investigate other people's lives in that way.

Let me get some of the Twitter questions because there are along these lines about, you know, how we view and treat each other species wide these days. Here's one of the questions from Thomas Harbinson. He says, has the world entered a tipping point in political discourse where understanding and consideration is no longer capable and a constructive manner. If no, how do we avoid getting there?

And if yes, how do we move away from it? Well, it's funny. I'm going to ask this question to someone who just spent the morning reading these interviews with these jazz musicians from the 30s and 40s and 50s. One of the useful outcomes of this exercise that I've been doing and reading these interviews is that you realize man was the world an uncivil place if you were a black person living in South L.A. in 1940. So although I am as alarmed as anyone by the state of public discourse in America, and I'm also acutely aware that it was a lot worse if you were a black person in LA in 1940.

So if these jazz guys who are around today, they would say, what are you complaining about? Right? Like You just read about like how nuts the world Jim Crow was and this is within the lifetime of many Americans and Like you we're not we, we're not worse today. We're going through a bad patch, but like, that is a lot worse than what's going on today. So I guess in this weird way, reading about how bad things were back then makes me feel better about how bad things are now.

And I'm optimistic we'll recover from this. Yeah, historical perspective can be a bomb BALM. Okay, this is a question from Vatsai Tyal. So three-part question you can take any of this or none of it. One, what's his take on meditation and free will? Has he read Sam Harris's book on free will? Two, if you could let people know just one thing that he would list as his hack or life's learning, what would that be? And three, what is his key learning about human behavior?

Any of those questions, Strecku, is worthy of a response? Do I have a hack? I haven't read the Sam Harris book, although I have a enormous respect for Sam Harris. I haven't read the Sam Harris book, although I have enormous respect for Sam Harris. Do I have a hack? I don't know. Get lost of sleep. Take the long view. You know, I was in England recently and I was on this British podcast. And one of the things I was asked to prepare before I was a guest on the show, they wanted

an example of a small win. They do this as a regular question. They ask people to come up with their small win. And I love the exercise of small wins because it is a lovely kind of shortcut to a better frame of mind. And my, my small win was, I was in London and I was getting a cup of coffee and I desperately needed to send an email. So I sit down and this coffee shop and I'm working with this thing and I desperately needed to send an email. So I sit down in this coffee shop

and I'm working with him to say, and I realize I have no money, and I've already ordered coffee, and I desperately need the server to be really, really slow. So then I can get this email off before they come and say, you know, what do you wanna,

and this is one of those occasions where my whole life I've wanted the service to be really fast, and I was like, just ignore me, just like, be a typical London waiter and pretend I don't exist. And that's exactly what happened. They didn't find me for like 45 minutes. So it was like, that was my small win. So small wins, that's a pretty good.

My mom's a big believer in small wins. So that's a good life hack. Another word for that might be just gratitude. Yeah, looking a little harder for ways to be happy. Richmond Stace, otherwise known as the pain coach, asks, what is MG's view on 10,000 hours now? Well, it's the same as what it always was. I mean, that was one of those ideas that kind of took on a life of its own, and I began to see descriptions of it that bore the initially small resemblance to my understanding of the principle.

But I was just basically trying to get across the idea in outliers with that notion that mastery takes longer than we think. I mean, 10,000 hours is a form of a metaphor for the fact that in the domains that we have studied this playing chess, being a computer programmer, composing pop songs, we find that these apprenticeship periods are much longer than we would have imagined. And I was interested in that book in exploring the implications of that. So if it does take 10 years playing chess before you couldn't even hope to be an international grandmaster, that means that you've got to start really young and it means your mom and your dad's got to drive you to tournaments.

Right? So if you don't have a mom or a dad who can drive you to tournaments, you can't be an international grandmaster. I mean, I'm slightly, but I defy you to find an international grandmaster who didn't have a parent capable of driving that person to a chest tournament, not just once, but over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Right? So that gives you a powerful perspective when people say, well, why are there no international chest grandmasters from disadvantaged backgrounds. Hello, because 10,000 hours means you've got to have a parent who helped you out, right?

And if your parents are working two jobs, then it's not happening, is it? Or if you're living so far from a place where test tournaments are, it doesn't work. I was trying to get at the social structure, the implied social structure behind expertise. social structure behind expertise. And people focused on the math there of the specificity of 10,000 hours, and if I'm hearing you correctly, that's a metaphor for a shitload of time. Yes, yes, exactly. Last question here, it's from somebody named Milk Toast, which is, I think we need more Milk Toast on Twitter. Ask him what he's

ever been wrong about. Oh, lots of things. I mean, wrong means, could mean many different things. Typically, I think that the category of wrongness, most meaningful, is where you make the category of wrong that's most meaningful is where you make the mistake of drawing a declarative conclusion about something where no declarative conclusion is called for. So where knowledge is evolving, either the world's knowledge or your own knowledge, right? So what it means to learn from being wrong is more than simply changing your mind. It's retreating from that kind of false certainty. So to give you an example, years ago I wrote a piece, God, I regretted it to the stay about a woman named Susan Love, who was a medical doctor who took a stand against hormone replacement therapy in postmenopausal women. She thought this was untested

and dangerous and there were all kinds of consequences. And all the big scientists in her study said, no, no, no, no, no, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. And then it turned out that we hadn't done the right kind of studies. And so we did the right kind of studies and we discovered low and behold, Susan love was right. And I wrote a piece about Susan love before the definitive studies came out, in which I basically belittled her for standing up to scientific consensus. Without ever asking the question of whether

this was a conclusion about which we could be definitive about, it was a huge error. Like I think we can be definitive about the world is getting warmer. Because there's been a million studies in many different ways, and you can say something weird is going on with the weather. But if you spent more than 10 minutes

when I wrote that article, examining in detail and talking to people about, wait a second, how good are the studies that we have on home and replacement therapy? And if you dug into what you discover, they're not that good. And that's what Susan love is saying, right? I would never have written that article. So that was a case of a kind of journalistic hubris where you make two calls or three calls on a difficult

subject and you think you've mastered it. You know, I wish I could say that was the last time I ever did that, but I don't think it is. I think that many of his in journalism continue to make that mistake. I mean, I was very upset at myself for that error, but it took years for me to get upset at myself for that error, right? I didn't wake up to like, Jesus, what did I do for years? You know, in the beginning, I just kind of was like, oh, whatever, it's journalism. And it's not, you know, it's not journalism.

It's that is deeply problematic behavior on the part of a journalist in this case, me. Two responses that one is that Dr. Susan Love she was a professor at Harvard teaching hospitalism. Am I correct about that? I think so, which is why I think she was so interested in this. Yeah, the reason why I bring it up is because if that Susan love, she was a frequent visitor

to my childhood home in Newton, Massachusetts, because she was a colleague of my father's. Oh my gosh. Yes, and I do remember. Yes, she was a breast cancer doctor. Yes, yes, so was my dad. Oh, I see. Susan love was a regular

house guest and my memory serves just an awesome person. But as to your what you're describing as a mistake, I wonder if this is kind of an example of the upside of the negativity bias, because it's obvious just hearing you talk about it, how exercised you are about this perceived error to this day. And maybe that's good. Maybe that fear or shame or remorse or whatever you wanna call it is inoculating you against future errors. Inoculation is a strong word

because I don't think one example, one experience like that is sufficient because I think it's very, very easy to fall back into the trap. But I think it's very, very easy to fall back into the trap. But I think it definitely sensitized me to this tendency in me and in others, but in this we're talking about me. So it sensitized me to that air, that category of air. And then I compounded the air because what I really should have done is I should have written a meacolpa. And I didn't. I should have at least called her up when the world finally turned and people

woke up to what she was saying. I should have called her up and said, ex number of years ago, I did you a disservice. I didn't do that. It's hard to say, scoot up, really is hard. This is turning into an unexpectedly humbling podcast. That was not my design. I just wanna say, as a fellow journalist, I've made many, many errors. I once killed a company that wasn't dead on national television. I covered the

Iraq war and the run up to it. And even though I was personally incredibly skeptical, I think the media did not do a great job and did not cover itself in glory and the run up to the Iraq war. And I was part of the mainstream media. So I bear some of the responsibility there. I would say history will a judge. One of the biggest acts of journalistic malpractice over the last 20 to 30 years has been our failure to wake up or belated waking up to climate change. And I was a part of the mainstream media for that whole period of time. So it is hard to do this public work without screwing up consequentially repeatedly.

Yeah. I think that's true. Consequently, repeatedly. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's true. Is there something I should have asked, but didn't? I don't know, I think we've done well, don't you? I do. Malcolm Gladwell, pleasure to meet you. Thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you so much, David. Thanks again to Malcolm Gladwell and thank you to Jesse Kendall Marks for her suggestion for this deep cut episode. And thank you most of all to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% Happier is produced by Justinian Davy, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere as our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman as our senior editor, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a brand new episode of Freshy with the great meditation

teacher Diana Winston. We'll see you then. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.