The Chris Cuomo Project - Malcolm Gladwell Says We’ve Been Thinking About Gun Violence All Wrong

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Malcolm Gladwell (journalist, podcast host, and author, “The American Way of Killing”) joins Chris Cuomo to explain why America has fundamentally misunderstood its gun violence epidemic. Gladwell challenges the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, examines its controversial historical origins, and argues that the country’s focus on assault weapons and mass shootings distracts from the greater toll of handguns and suicide. He also makes the case for more police officers and fewer people in prison, discusses the political divisions preventing meaningful reform, and weighs in on the future of MAGA and Donald Trump. Join The Chris Cuomo Project on YouTube for ad-free episodes, early releases, exclusive access to Chris, and more: https://www.youtube.com/@chriscuomo/join Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Support our sponsors: Download the Polymarket App to track the midterms. Deposit $10 get $25 with code "CUOMO": https://app.polymarket.us/S8ac/CUOMO See if you're overpaying for car insurance with Jerry: https://pnl.link/f1eJy80 Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at https://ethos.com/cuomo. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Trustpilot rating as of 8/1/2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do you think our country is so violent? Why do we use guns the way we do? What is not understood about what's happening that may change the debate in this country? Ooh, these are heavy questions. Now, they don't mean anything in the midterms. But what do they mean about us? I have a man who has a unique answer to that. And it's someone you want to hear from.

I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project, Malcolm Gladwell. His latest book, I think, I think, is the best. best intersection he's done to date of our politics and what matters in our politics and his unique way of distilling the realities that we often miss about how things work and why. Okay. And it is called the American way of killing Malcolm Gladwell. He's talking about gun violence. It's not talking about assault rifles. He's not talking about he's talking about gun violence. and how it got here, why we justify continuing, our rules and reason the way we do,

what we're not getting right, what we don't see, what we don't understand, what we get wrong on purpose. And then I'll also talk to Malcolm about how we're living and where we're headed and why. Now, he's not a politics guy, but he's a people guy. And he understands trends in society and our history and how they all go together in a way that nobody else does as well, in my opinion. So let's have a conversation with the one and only Malcolm Gladwell. This is why we're here. And I am very proud as a follower and a friend adjacent person in Malcolm Gladwell's life to tout this book. And I hope it is taken very seriously.

And maybe Malcolm is somebody who can get us to think about it. And I hope you can, Malcolm. But first, let's flip it. I mean, obviously Malcolm is clearly someone who believes in us, who believes that we can be better, who believes that critical thinking can matter. Why would you take this subject on in the hopes of making a difference? Mm-hmm.

Well, I feel like we have been struggling with this issue for 60, 50 years in a serious way. I mean, the violent crime rate in this country spikes in the end of the 60s, and basically with some ups and downs, has been substantially elevated ever since. And we've gotten to the point, I think, where people are, they're either so used to it that they kind of shrug, or they've given up, and they think there's nothing that really can be done. And I wanted, I thought this was an excellent opportunity to kind of define, why we've been struggling and then open up some kind of avenues for more productively addressing the problem. Good. And I am going to talk politics with you at some point, just in terms of

what's going on, just to get your head on it, but I care about this more. So I want to talk about this first, and then we can talk about how you feel about the state of play and the midterms. So let's deal with why this isn't dealt with. It's not dealt with because we've reached a point of resistance to where, well, it's a right. It's a right. So it's not the guns. I'll talk to you about it, but I won't talk to you about the guns, Malcolm, because that's a right and you don't have the right to take away my right. So we're never going to have no guns in America. Let's not talk about that anymore. What do you make of that premise? Yeah. Well, I spend two chapters of this book talking about the Second Amendment and particularly the way the Supreme Court has behaved around the Second Amendment

in recent years. And the two most significant Supreme Court cases dealing with the Second Amendment in the last generation, the Heller case and the Bruin case, are both, if you look closely, nonsensical. And I'd say that not in a kind of partisan way. They're not nonsensical because, you know, I may have voted Democrat in the last election, Democratic. They're nonsensical on the face of it for legal and historical reasons. So, for example, I have quite a, of a, of quite a, early in the book, is fun the right word? I have a chapter about the language of the Second Amendment and about the fact that it's this sentence,

you know, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arm shall not be infringed. That sentence doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense because it's written in the 1780s according to a set of grammatical norms that no longer exists. We don't talk that way or write that way anymore. What's the relationship of that first phrase to the principal clause?

And so, you know, linguists have weighed in on this hilariously and have pointed out that if you want to understand what that means, you have to go back to the way people wrote sentences like that in the 18th century, in particular to the way James Madison wrote sentences like that in the in the in the 1780s and once you look at things through james madison's eyes you realize we're getting it all wrong today and that's a kind of a key kind of moment in understanding that this is a fake conversation we're having about the second amendment it's not that's not what it was intended to mean it was fake until antonin scalia's shame Columbia v hiller where he did something

that was, first of all, not that it should matter most to lay people, but this was a man who believed, if you can't find it in the document, it's not there. And he changed that for his Heller decision. And that's why jurisprudentially, from his perspective and orthodoxy, this was a departure. The second thing is that the Second Amendment had never been construed to impute an individual. right because the history of it was where it came from was a lot of pushback among the states of, oh, this is Washington forcing us into that militia again, where we all got to have the weapons and we've got to train and we have to provide them. And, you know, we don't want that burden anymore, which was a huge beef of Washington's early on that, you know, we don't have a standing army.

I get it. You guys are afraid that makes somebody a king. I get it. But these guys suck that you given me. So that was the origination of the amendment and it had never been discussed as an individual right until it was and Scalia read it in. So the question becomes, doesn't that end the argument until the case changes? Yeah. I mean, we should be so lucky for it to end the argument. In fact, you know, the historical context is actually even more striking than you say when, so the way that Madison intended that sentence to mean and the way he used that particular grammatical construction was, he means it very clearly that he's talking about gun rights

in the context of militias. Because we need a militia, individuals should have the right to bear arms. And then the second question is, what does he mean by militia? And the answer is contained this really brilliant work by historian Carl Bogus. He's talking about slave patrols in the South.

You know, Virginia was threatening to hold up ratification of the U.S. Constitution unless they had language that protected their rights to continue to have armed slave patrols, you know, patrolling the countryside in rural Virginia and South Carolina, where slaves outnumbered white people by, in some cases, 20 to 1. The planters were terrified. They needed to defend themselves. They had been slave rebellions. They read the Constitution, and it seemed to them the Constitution was going to take away their right to have these armed slave patrols. So they said to Madison, who was himself, the son of a plantation owner in Virginia, write us an amendment that protects us, protects our

slave patrols. And so he does. And what that amendment means, properly understood, is, because slave patrols are necessary to the security of states like Virginia and South Carolina, the right of the people to keep him bare arms should not be infringed. And the The reason Scalia has to go to such extraordinary lengths in a hell of decision to come up with a new interpretation of it is it's too embarrassing to admit that this was about sleigh, about appeasing plantation owners. You know, what's gun rights people have to admit? They're clinging to something that was constructed by the most disreputable group of people

in American history. They have a problem, right? They should. They should have a problem. You know, it's interesting. And, you know, Malcolm goes into this really beautiful. and eloquently in his book, in a way that's also really easy to absorb, which isn't easy with this stuff. I mean, this is dense, you know. And the original draft of Madison's Second Amendment

really gives you a sense of why they did it. So the right of the free people to keep in bare arms shall not be infringed. You know that part, okay. A well-armed and well-regulated militia being the best security for a free country, but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person. Now, the conscientious objector thing was his, and it was because there were a lot, okay? But it also tells you the context that he was writing this in. This was about equipping the military and having their responsibility in there. And it wasn't construed at the time as people need this and they're going to want this and the state may try to take it from them. So we have to make sure the state can't take that from them.

That's not what it was envisioned of. And his draft makes it pretty clear. But again, where we are today, Malcolm, seems somewhat immovable. And yeah, they'll say, yeah, yeah, slave owners, you can say whatever you want. It's a right. It's in there. I want my gun. And I'm not a racist, so I don't care about that.

And that's where we are. I mean, you know, I don't know that the needle can move on the gun thing. I don't know. I don't know. What do you think in writing this book? In writing this book, one of the things I was struck by was when you talk to people who are doing homicide prevention in the hardest hit areas of this country, they don't talk about gun control. Not because they're not in favor of it, but because they've kind of given up. You know, if we wait for the gun control movement to win, we're going to be waiting a long time.

And we don't have that kind of time. You know, I look at, you know, the anti-abortion folks, they waited 50 years to overturn Roe versus Wade. You know, the one thing we can look at them, and, you know, in some sense, I have a kind of grudging respect for them. They played the long game, and they understood it is, it is a long game when you're going to, and they, you know, And gun control is going to be the same thing. If it's going to succeed at all, it's going to be a very long game. But the problem is that we have a problem that is in this country that is pressing right now. So we need to be exploring other means in the intro.

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so that you don't understand. how bad it is because we save so many people. Yeah. So I spent a lot of time in the book talking with ER doctors about what it's like to treat gunshot wounds. And, you know, in this country, an ER doctor, ER doctors' group have gotten an extraordinary amount of practice, right? We've got a homicide, a gun violence problem that no other country in the world has. And we've had a series of wars, an unbroken series of wars since the Second World War.

And wars are this, again, an incredible learning experience for people who want to treat gunshot wounds. The result is that we are, we have one of the perverse areas of American specialty is treating gunshot wounds. We're so good that we have made the problem look a lot worse than it actually is. We are saving many, many people today, the lives of many, many gunshot victims who would be dead 25 or 30 years ago. And so when you look at the homicide rate and you look at that it's going down, you have to ask yourself, Is it going down because the underlying level of violence is going down? Or is it going down because ER doctors are so good at what they do that they are turning people homicide victims, are they turning homicides into aggravated assaults because they're

saving the lives of the people who come into their hospital? And a bigger chunk of it has to do with the quality of health care than I think we realize as a country. And they have, there's a number in the book, someone did a study of this couple years ago and said, if we kept the quality of health care from the 60s. If we still had that same, if we just kept that a constant, we probably would have upwards of 75,000 gunshot deaths. Fetrily, yep.

And that's like, you know, we have, what do we have from homicides, 15,000 or something like that. You know, so the effect of medicine on this is huge. And that has made it really easy for us to. shrug and say, you know, we're not serious about this. I don't think the 75,000 would change the debate. I think the only thing that would change the debate, and I don't want to see this, okay, and I'm not suggesting it.

I'm not putting it out there so that it can get manifested. Here's what I'm saying. You have the people who are in power have gun violence affect them. Now, I know what happened with Scalise and that that wasn't enough. I get it. But if you had a bunch of people in power, have their family members taken out by the gun violence that we have in this country, things would change because all pain is personal and all politics is personal. And you do something very interesting on that as a corollary to our ability to change the reality medically versus in terms of societally. You look at what is called the crime conflation error, which,

is, well, you need the guns, man, because it's what keeps property crime down. We've got low property crime here because, you know, we have a lot of guns. Otherwise, you can come in, they're going to steal your shit. When you look at our property crime rate, it's pretty much the same as a lot of other countries that don't have the weapons we do. It's when you look at the lethality of us through these weapons that we become an outlier, so to speak. Yeah. The, the, yeah, this is a really interesting point that I think that, you know, One of the things I try and do in the American Way of Killing is to talk about all of what I call the dishonesties that mark the way we talk about gun violence. And one of the dishonest, some of them are, you know, are kind of misunderstandings of the problem.

And this is a really simple and but important one. There is a distinction between crime and violence. Crime is like your likelihood of your house being broken into or your car being stolen or being mugged on the street. And levels of crime in America are no higher than levels of crime in similar cities, Western cities around the world. You actually are more likely to have your car stolen in Montreal than you are in New York City. You're more likely to have your house broken into in Chicago than you are in L.A. You know, or I'm sorry, house broken into in Paris than you are in L.A.

I could go down the list. You're more likely to be raped in London than you are in many American cities. What distinguishes the United States is gun violence. That is, and violent, gun violence is something that is done for very different reasons by a very different set of people than crime. It's not the same, you talk about the criminal element. No, no, no. The people who are burglaring in your house are not the people who will, who are shooting someone on the street. It's different, different roots, different sociological understanding, different psychological, I could go on and on and on.

And until we disentangle these two things, we're not going to have a real conversation in this country. Politicians stand up and say, I want to get tough on crime. No, crime is not the issue. I need you to say that you want to get tough on gun violence. And there's a reason why politicians don't want to be that, be accurate, because they don't want to admit that this is about gun violence, right? They want to, they want to pretend it's about a general pattern of illegal and immoral behavior. How do you reconcile that it's about gun violence with the leading statistic of gun death, which is suicide? Well, that's another thing that I bring up. This is an incredibly important point, you know, and I actually fault the gun control movement on this. They should stop talking about mass shootings and homicides and just talk about suicides.

many, many more people die from guns in suicides than in homicides. It's like, I've forgotten what exact, like twice as. It's definitely two to one. It's two to one all day. And incredibly in the Bruin decision, the Supreme Court's Bruin decision, which overturned New York State's handgun ban of a hundred years to, New York State had a hand, the Sullivan Act, as you're very familiar with, was around for 100 years.

And it made it really hard to get a handgun in New York State. And the result of that was that New York State's suicide rate was half the national average. It saved thousands of lives over the last 100 years. And the court overturned that handgun licensing law and never mentioned suicide once, which is a moral and, I mean, it's not just a legal lapse. It is a, Chris, it is a profound moral. lapse. It ought to have, that should have been the scandal. Every single gun control person should have stood up and said, I'm sorry, I'm going to swear, what the fuck are you doing? You cannot,

you cannot overturn this handgun ban in New York State, this licensing law in New York State, when it has saved thousands and thousands of lives from suicide. You have to at least deal with the suicide. You can't ignore it. That's an unimaginable lapse. And we allowed them to get away with it because we have made this, we've sort of so narrowly focused our concern, I think, inappropriately on homicides. It's much bigger than that. You know, to this day, I don't know why. How did they get away with that, Chris? They got away with it.

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E-T-H-O-S dot com slash Cuomo. Application times are going to vary. Rates will vary. They got away with it through what scares people. Suicide doesn't scare people, even though the numbers suggest you should be worried about it in terms of your loved ones. But what scares you is the boogeyman. What scares you is, you know, the brother's coming into your house.

You know, I mean, that's what scares people, and that's what they play to, is fears that are based off identity. And look, and we see it manifested in what we just talked about, which is the crime conflation, which is, this is not, we're not safer because of the guns. We're safer despite the guns, okay, or as safe as other places despite the guns. Overall, we are less safe. but also they'll say, well, look, I mean, you know, without them, where would we be? In a position where we would deal with the fact that we don't have enough police? And I know people will say, wait, what are you talking about? We're like over-police like crazy already.

No, we're not. Not compared to other places. And you bring this up in the book, and I think it's really smart because people would be surprised by this. Yeah, this is a big, another one of these kind of ways in which we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of our problem. there is this fantasy among many people on the left that America is over-policed. And what they are responding to is what they see as correctly as, you know, there are level, the police engage in behavior and levels of aggression and violence in this country and in ways that other police around a world do not, right?

So people conclude from that that we have too many police. Defund the police was famously the cry of the after-tort. Floyd. If you look closer, you discover, no, no, no. We are, we have compared to our, our, our, uh, uh, peer countries around the world, way fewer police than everybody else. I use the example in the book of, um, Los Angeles and Berlin are exactly the same size. Los Angeles, on a good day, has 8,500 police officers. Berlin has 18,000, right? A typical European city has twice the police that American cities do. When European police chiefs come to America,

they look around, they say, what are you guys doing? You have a crime problem, you have a violence problem that dwarfs the one we have, and you're trying to make do with half the cops? And if you talk to cops, I had a wonderful interview for the book

with a guy named Dano, it's one of the most sort of progressive police chiefs and big city police chiefs in this country. And I just had him talk to me through what he would do. if I gave them twice as many cops.

And he said, oh my God, it would make all the difference in the world. He said, I could do community policing. I could have, I could find out about problems in the community before they bubble up to the surface. I could keep track of the schools. You have to know what's going on in the schools because the problems that end up on the streets start in the schools. You got to know the kids are in trouble who are going the wrong direction so you can

intervene early. You got to have effective liaison there. He said, I could get to a barfills. fight in 10 minutes as opposed to five. And that's the difference between somebody being killed and somebody living. He just went on and on and on. And it was like, you realize it's so much of what we want from our police can only be accomplished if we have more of them. Now, the second crucial thing about this, and this is absolutely essential in understanding this, the amount of money, the share of GDP that America spends on public safety is the same as European countries spend on safety.

but they spend all their money on the cops and a tiny bit on prisons. We spend all our money on prisons and a tiny bit on cops. And there is no, once you explain it that way, there is no one who thinks the way we divvy up the pie is a better idea. How do you argue the point without sounding like you want less people in prison, which makes people believe that you want more bad things going on? I do want less people in prison. And I think one, if you put a lot of,

more money into law enforcement, first of all, you could prevent a lot of crimes. You could stop people from committing crimes, particularly violent crimes. I mean, since writing the book, I've been doing this big project on Baltimore, which has seen this homicide rate drop dramatically over the last couple of years. And they have, they brought their homicide, right? They had 350 homicides a year. They could be under 100 this year. It's insane drop. And they've done that. They used to do 100,000 arrests in a year. Now, last year they did 17,000. They're not sending people to,

they didn't accomplish this crime drop by sending more people to prison. They did the opposite by reaching out and preventing these kinds of violent crimes from ever happening. And so if you do that, you don't need as much, you don't need as many prisons, right?

You're not arresting and you're not responding after the fact. You're preventing the crime from ever happening. But the second thing is, we have to own up to the fact that in this country, we do send way too many people to prison for too long. It's just not, no one else does this in the world. It doesn't lower your crime rate. 65 to 70% of the people in our prisons have hard mental health diagnoses,

mental illness diagnoses, hard. Most other societies, what you call peer countries, don't group those people together. They don't group bad and sick together. And, of course, you can have people who are bad and sick, of course. But they don't group them the way we do. They treat them in a way that winds up giving them much better outcomes. And yes, America has certain unique features.

But still, it is there. And part of the sequelae there to this line of reasoning is about what our emphasis is. And, you know, you argued earlier, you know, you got to emphasize the right thing. handgun crime, we romanticize the assault weapon. The advocates for more gun control see the assault weapon as such an unnatural thing. It's so military. It's so obviously not for any kind of application that people often argue we need. And you argue, yeah, yeah, maybe, but focus on handguns. Forget about the assault rifle. That's not where you place the emphasis. It's the handguns. stupid would be the Corvill equivalent.

Why do you think we're distracted and how do you get to the handgun? Well, the first thing you need to understand is that when you look at what people mean when they say, talk about assault rifle bans, and, you know, we did have one in place in this country for 10 years or so, starting from the 90s to the early odds. And then there have been every, you know, every year there's a new one proposed in, in, in, in, in, If you read them, you realize, although they're called assault rifle bans, they don't actually ban assault rifles. What they ban is an assault rifle is a platform and you can attach all kinds of, everything is modular. You can screw it off and screwing something new.

They just ban the number of it and the kind of attachments you can buy off the internet to customize it. And most of those attachments are cosmetic. The basic gun isn't banned. And if you look on a, I always tell people, the biggest, the biggest, the biggest, the biggest, biggest flaw right now in journalism is a journalist have stopped reading to the end. You got to read to the end of the hand of the handgun ban because at the end is the appendix, and the appendix is maybe four pages and the appendix is like 50 pages. And the appendix is a list of all the incredibly lethal, high-powered rifles not covered by the ban.

This is a joke. It's a joke, people. Like they just, they're using this to raise money, the gun control people. It's crazy. And also when you look closely at everyone says, well, what about mass shootings? More people die from handguns and mass shootings than die from... Oh, it's not even close. It's not even close.

Look, we are big on mass shootings because, again, it's the phobic response. It's kids. It's innocence. And frankly, it's people that we don't usually associate with gun violence. Because when you say, you know, if you're worried about groups of people, go look at your, you know, your high crime. area shootings and there's always multiple people involved, even if it's a planned and targeted specific hit of an individual. Yeah, I don't care about those, though. Why? Because I can't be my kid. I'm not in the hood. You know, I'm not, that's not what I'm worried about. So we romanticized and projected onto the mass

shooting. We're protecting our children from these terrible weapons. It's literally less than 2% of gun crime. And, and yeah, and that's always been a myth that has been very frustrating for me because people don't care about any of the other ones. Hey, when you're doing Baltimore, just as a side point, a really important thing there. I've been covering that place for a long time, you know, back when there was the corner and the wire and all those things, I can't tell you how many,

how many scratches on my legs they got going through holes that connected one row house to next. You know, they would hollow them out in there as part of their criminal interview. And I spent a lot in that drug game down there. And the intern, and I know this is expensive, and I know people don't like it and think that you've got to raise your own family. Yep, yep. Their program of putting people in hospitals as social workers to deal with the victim's families of people who get shot. So I get shot. They bring these people in to calm my brother down and to create a network around them so he doesn't go shoot who shot me. And you may think that like, oh, who does that? A lot of people do that, especially in a very heavy affiliated community,

meaning a lot of gang tensions and an understanding that if you don't get back at somebody, you don't get your respect, as they would say down there at that time, then it's going to keep happening to you. They dealt with that and it made a huge difference. But, you know, that's a tough sell on people. But back to the specifics of this particular book and the, that assault rifle focus that they are doing, it's very hard because they've gotten a lot of traction off of that.

And it makes you wonder, what would be, so you say it's a long game, so you just believe it'll be the accumulation of experience and time and gradual culture shift. You don't believe that it could be something more sudden. You don't think that there could be something that changes us soon. Well, you know, like everyone, I would have thought that thing was Sandy Hook. I know.

I know. My sister Maria did a beautiful documentary about Sandy Hook and the people and the families. And I remember covering it. And I'll tell you something that I never reported. So I get up there and the Connecticut offices of the FBI is kind of running the scene. kind of running the scene there. And I can't get this guy on the phone. And trying to get him, trying to get him, trying to get him.

And because I got to go on TV. So he finally calls me and he's like, not happy, right? Which I get. I've been blowing up his phone. He's like, you have no idea. I can't give you the information because these rounds blew these little bodies apart. So I can't, we're trying to. put pieces together. That's why we came out with the adults so fast. And he showed me crime

scene photos that they were dealing with processing. And I got to tell you, Malcolm, I made a very strong argument multiple times that you got to let me show these. And he was like, no way, it's never going to happen. Nobody's going to let you show them. It's too disrespectful of families. Let me tell you something. If there's anybody who wants pictures like that out there, it's someone whose loved one has suffered this kind of fate. Because the one thing that keeps you tethered to your existence and wanting to continue to live is to put some purpose to your pain and that you don't ever want to see anybody have to deal with what you're dealing with.

But I'll tell you, Malcolm, I had never, and I've seen some shit, I had never seen anything like that. If this guy had been intentionally trying to mutilate, and yet it was still plenty poignant enough. Everybody was crying on TV, right? everybody's crying for like three, four days. It meant nothing. If anything, it galvanized the pro-gun movement.

In fact, we actually have evidence. There was a whole kind of backlash to Sandy Hook where it redoubled the efforts of some gun advocates to roll back gun control laws. No, I mean, at that point, I was one of, you know, many, I mean, I think Obama said the same thing. He thought that was going to be a turning point. And it wasn't.

And at a certain point, you've got to say, all right, maybe this just isn't happening anytime soon. And also, I don't know, I don't mean, I'm not saying this in a snarky way. I'm saying this in a serious way. So imagine we did pass a massive restriction on or said that everyone who has a handgun has got to have a register, right? How do you do that? How do you put that in place? You're going to go door to Texas and knock on people's doors and say, show me all your handguns? I mean, I don't understand what the next step is.

That would be the righteous way to do it. By the way, that's my remedy for all this bullshit about needing an ID to vote and, you know, how obvious it is to some people. Here's my new position is this. I get it. You want it. I get most Americans say they want it. I also don't think they've thought it through, but fine, reading to the end, as Malcolm would say. But let's find you want it.

It's on the government. If the government can put an ID in every eligible voter's hands, I'm with you. then you got to bring that with you when you vote from now on. I'm fine. The government has the onus. You go find the married women. You go find the people who are disconnected from community and afraid of government infrastructure. You go and give them all.

Well, that's impossible. Well, nothing's impossible. If you want it enough, then go do it. And I say, you switch that onus, and I'm okay with the law. But if you don't switch the onus, then the people who won't get the IDs fall disproportionately. in the group that doesn't vote for this administration. And to me, I can't overcome that in my own head. But, you know, it's almost seven and a half people out of 10 in America say you should have an ID when you vote.

I mean, this has gotten a lot of traction really fast. But it's that the burden, if we put the burden on the state. But the problem is we don't want to put the burden on the state, Malcolm, which is a segue question for me. That you call this an epidemic in his book. And I'm telling you, I always tell you to read it. his shit because it's food for thought for critical thinkers. He's done the thinking for you. Okay. Digest it. And you can now ask yourself the right questions to help you incorporate this into your own intellectual construct. This is powerful medicine what he puts in his books,

especially this one. And I think he should do a number of these. By the way, it's just a lot of work for him. And I don't know how he maintains it because of my segue question. Our real epidemic is division. Our real epidemic is blind obeisance. That's what we're dealing with in the society right now. That is the riddle to MAGA, which is people are the opposite of being a Gladwell Reader. They're making all their political judgments right now on the basis of the opposite of critical thinking. Yeah. What do you think of that, one of our philosophers? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think there is an opportunity for someone. to come along and to take the ideology out of lots of issues.

What's happened is that we've turned everything into a partisan issue and everything's not a partisan issue. Gun violence should not be a partisan issue, right? It's not like, there's not a democratic, Democrats don't care more about loved ones who've been killed than Republicans. Everyone is shattered by that. There's no difference in the response of a parent

who's lost a child depending on their on their on their on their on their on their on their on their on their on their on their certain things where we should be able to have discussions that don't devolve into into uh battles around party position so i think step number one to getting us back on track is just acknowledging there's a there are certain things where we're going to argue about taxes okay we're going to that's going to be republicans and democrats i think in many ways but public safety should not be and we've got to give, you know, like I, for example, the argument I'm making the book about how Americans need more police, that issue should never have been, never have been ideologized. Yeah. It's like, why would they, this like, why would you march around saying defund the police when, A, it's not true and B, it is guaranteed to antagonize and irritate 60, 70% of the country? It's just dumb. Why don't you just talk about what you want your police to do and the resources they need to do that?

And that's an argument, that's a discussion we can all enter into in a kind of honest and fair way. And, you know, when you talk to, when I talk to these, for this book, I talk to all kinds of people who were involved in, like this fight on the kind of street level. And I don't even, I don't know who they voted for. It never comes up. It's like, like I have old chapter on this brilliant,

maybe the greatest trauma surgeon in the country, this guy, Eddie Cornwall at Howard University, I spent hours in this with him, long, fascinating conversation. I had no idea who he voted for. I don't know. Never came up. He's trying to save lives.

That's his, and like, there's no reason why we can't all share, have issues where we share that kind of perspective. Well, we know we do. I do something on my show called, we the people. dot, dot, agree. And it shows how on all these big ticket items,

you get at least six and a half to seven out of ten of us on the same page about what government should be doing and what we should be focused on. And so the division is manufactured. And it is also the answer to your question of, well, why can't we do this? Well, I'll tell you why. Because it's based on, and you know this, but it's based off identity. And I can't work with you on anything, Malcolm. You guys are evil.

You guys are evil. I can't work with you. I mean, who works for the Nazi? I can't work with you. So it doesn't matter that you get the fact that children should have food. I can't do it your way because you're the problem. And that's where we've arrived in our politics. I'll give you a story about you.

So somebody says, I saw your conversation with Gladwell. You know, I just can't get with him with Obama and how significant Obama was and all that stuff. It's just like, you know, I said, well, he was very significant. He was the first of his kind. And especially to people from the minority community, especially people of color, especially people who are of African-American extract, it mattered because they were validated in the way they never had been. And to Malcolm, that's a big part of his lived experience with his lineage. And he said, what do you mean with his lineage? I said, well, Malcolm's got a whole black side to his family.

He's a Malcolm Gladwell's black. I said, yeah, he goes, well, I mean, you know, he goes, and all of a sudden he just flips. And he's like, well, I see, I mean, that's what it is, man. It's just this black guy. He's said, oh, now he's a black guy. So he likes Obama. Well, you didn't even know he was 18 seconds ago. And what it evidenced wasn't just the beefwittedness of his particular form of argument.

It was that you got to default to side right now. And I've never seen it like this. I know it's been like this at different periods in history. Just not in the 30 years I've been covering it, Malcolm. I've never seen where. Everything gets politicized. Everything. There's no controversy we deal with Malcolm.

So what do you do with that and how does it manifest itself and how you approach us? Yeah. I'm with you. You know, I'm always struck when I spent a lot of time traveling around the country. And I totally agree that a lot of this is manufactured. That the minute you leave, you know, certain kind of hot house areas of the country, of the country, everybody's in the middle and everyone's worried about the same things. And everyone is like, so a lot of that is just kind of refocusing the conversation away from

the people who are anxiously trying to create division. And that's not, it shouldn't, that's not hard. You know, you, and you don't need to pay attention, you shouldn't pay attention to people who have just, just because they're making a lot of noise. Because most people in the country don't make any noise at all, right? just go about doing their business. So a lot of that is just kind of understanding that it's like I do this in when I talk about, people always ask me, you know, as a writer, do I care about my reviews or the comments on Amazon?

And I say, well, I don't read them. Why would I? Like, why do I care what? If it's 100 comments, that's 100 people. There are 260 million people in the United States. Why would I care about what 100 people think? Right? Listen, I used to say that exact same thing in 2009 when social media and Twitter kind of really took hold.

Okay? And again, I remember the day. I'm having a conversation and somebody is telling me, yeah, but so-and-so thinks it. I said, yeah, but that's, he's like a, you know, he's like a mouth breather that guy. You know, when you get to the more intelligent members of the caucus, they're not thinking that. That's it. Show ends. I get a call like four hours later.

I was doing the morning show at CNN at the time. It's a PR person. Did you say this morning that somebody's mouth breather? I said, yeah, if he doesn't like it, he can come on the show. Happy to have him on. No, no, no, I haven't heard from him. But there is a group of people who have mouth breathing as a manifestation of a certain physical problem that they have. And they're offended by being called a mouth breather.

And people on social media are very upset about it. I said, people on social media. I said, I've never even heard of this. I said, I don't even know what you're talking about. So I go on and it was like 50 retweeted comments, right? And I'm like, I call them back up. I'm like, listen, you know, I get more people on the way home giving me a hard time than this. I don't give a shit what they say.

The next call I get is from the Washington Post. And I remember the day the music died in terms of us really trying to figure out what's Vox Populi versus social media. and, you know, to a beautiful example that you give in the revenge of the tipping point, do you see that mechanism of tipping point of that critical mass plus in our politics right now? That's interesting. I mean, the question is, so we are witnessing, I think, finally, the kind of dissolution of the, of the, of the MAGA movement.

It seems like it's splintering and slowing and getting... It's in its... It's on its last legs, I feel like. I mean, maybe... That's by sense, anyway. So maybe the end, in this case, looks prolonged and drawn out

and not... And not kind of... I mean, tipping points are when you see really dramatic shifts overnight shifts in the way people perceive things and a war can do that to you or other kind of

or you know I in a book talked in that book talked about how our feelings about gay marriage flipped overnight and nobody was expecting is expecting that but that was an interesting case because what really was the case was the opposition to gay marriage was always weird to begin with because this was a group of people who had been on the outside

who wanted to be like everyone else. And they were asking to participate in the most beautiful institution of modern society. And like, of course we were going to come around, right? Like, it's not like they weren't asking to do something that we all thought was horrendous. They were asking to do something that we all loved. It's like so, you know, so in that case,

I'm less surprised that there was a tipping point. But with things like the current political thing, I sort of think it's going to be long and protracted. And it feels that way, doesn't it? It feels like it's, it doesn't feel like there's going to be a sudden. Well, it's been long. It's been a decade. Okay.

And this guy, to have this president come back and win the most votes ever, yes, you have to adjust for growth in demographics or population. But this was, to me, a moment that I didn't properly contextualize. And I remember, and recently I have been not just owning it, but kind of saying, yeah, I fucked that up. When I said to people, when I came back into the media, Harris versus Trump, and I was like, well, look, you know, you've got to be open. You've got to be open to voting for Kamala Harris. You've got to be open to voting for Trump and you have to go.

I was given the textbook answer. That's the right answer for a journalist to give, okay? However, it was the wrong answer. It was the wrong answer. To see Kamala Harris, and I have this debate with people all the time now, what could she have done that would have been worse than what we're living? Just tell me, what do you think? What do you think was possible? And that's my rejoinder to them.

And people say, well, you just hate Trump. No. I didn't believe that Donald Trump had what we're seeing right now in him. And you can say, how not? What about January 6th? I didn't give him enough blame for January 6th. I see him as an instrument too much and not an originator. And I thought my knowledge of him as a person for all these years was more informative than it turned out being. And I was wrong. I should not have said, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, be open to both, the equal propositions. They are not equal propositions. I don't know what Kamala Harris. Harris could mean or what she was and she had plenty of flaws. This guy is going to do things that are destructive to the institutions that matter in this country. Every indication is that's exactly what he's going to do. And of course he is. And I didn't, I didn't do it. I didn't see it.

You know, I've often thought that people, so you and I both were in New York and I got to New York in 93. So, but I sort of saw, and you've been in New York your whole life, but those of us who grew up in New York in that era, we have a handicap because we never took Trump seriously. We knew it when he was just a guy who went to parties

and dated Russian models and had one bankruptcy after another. Like, he was just a joke. And like, we can't, it was, it has been so hard for us to get over this. We had 30 years of evidence about what a buffoon in a joke. he was. Like, do you remember that spy magazine used to make, called him a short-fingered vulgarian?

He was a laughing stock. Yep. Like, now we're supposed to take him seriously as president. It's just, it's a harder, and it's been really hard for, to make that to sort of transition in our minds from that initial understanding of who he was to what he's become. So I have sympathy for, I share your, I do the same thing. I thought he just, I just thought he was like a, Well, I will give it to you in 2015. You're right. That's what he was. I did this in 2024.

And when he was running against Harris, I said, look, I was not a supporter of his first administration. He has very few cable critics who are more demonstrative than I am. I don't do the orange man, the hair. I don't fuck around with the personal stuff because I don't need to. The policy is enough. The words and the deeds are enough. John McCain was right. I'm not going to talk to you about who the guy is or who he isn't.

I'm just going to talk to you about what he does. He was right. He was right. So yet, yet, that I should have said, I should have, you know, said, no, he's disqualified himself. He's disqualified. And look, you want to argue that Harris is disqualified because the party fucked up the whole process and they just gave her this nomination? Yeah, you can argue that too. But it's not the same kind of toxicity.

we're dealing with here. And sure enough, here we are now. And I got to tell you, another thing I've stopped doing, when people would say to me, I don't think we're going to have the elections. Do you think we're going to have the elections? Do you think I would say, well, you stop. Of course we're going to have the election. Where the fuck is my confidence coming from? Where is my confidence coming from? When you get these people who stand in front of Congress on TV, refuse to say who won the last election, right? When you have them and they refuse to say, Cash Patel, about what he's going to do on election day. Right now we have no plans. You know, yeah, right now you don't have plans, but when you leave this room, you may have a plan, you know, that there is an existential concern here I've never

dealt with before in our politics. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What do you do with it? Well, you, I don't know. You know, I, the only thing I could say, and I, it is that if, any kind of reasonable student of American history can observe. that there have been moments when things have been worse, and we bounce back, right? So I take some solace.

I go back and I, like, read about what Congress was like in the 30s, or, like, you know, or like, you know, Jim, go back and read some history about Jim Crow, and that'll make you feel better. Right. It's definitely been worse, I guess. Although then you look at the ice stuff. I guess you would analogize it to the 50s and when the cops just turned hoses and dogs on people that were protesting for equality.

I mean, I guess that's the analog to what we're seeing with ICE because in my lifetime, my professional lifetime now spanning decades, I've never seen it. I mean, when we have one person who is beaten by cops in a way that does not seem right under the circumstances, we go nuts and entire. community can be triggered and we get it. Now it's happening all the time and the needle does not move. And you know, to go to go back to, you know, that chapter I have my book that we talk about all the possibilities we could explore if we had devoted more resources to policing. The police desperately want to do something different. They want to have, they want to have, uh, have close relationships with community. They want to have the time and the resources to do more than simply arrest people, right? Ice comes along. The people who are, that I've talked to in private conversations,

who are most upset about ICE, are people in law enforcement. The police chiefs are furious. They feel like this group is coming along and is undermining a generation's worth of work to try and restore the good reputation of American, or create a good reputation for American policing. They're trying really hard to do the right thing, right? And along comes a bunch of lunatics who are untrained, who know nothing about the kind of subtleties and nuances and sensitivities of policing and are charging into neighborhoods like an invading army. And that makes the life of everyday police officers a lot harder. And we don't talk. We don't talk about that enough.

And it's an really important point because if we frame it that way, and we make a lot of common sense Republicans and conservatives, they would start to get alarmed. Because the one thing I will give them is I think they do honestly believe in the importance of a well-funded and well-behaved police force. And if you said to them, okay, I share that. I'm with you on the police. So let's get together and let's talk about a,

ice and how ice is undoing all their good work. That would be a really effective way, I think, of combating ice. I think so. I think so. Because you're not going to do it from the target side. If you want to move the needle, what I'm saying is you're not going to do it because there are people who are just like, yeah, they're here illegally. Don't come here illegally. And to me, it's an ugly extension of the, well, don't resist. Just do what the cop says. And you don't have to worry about it. It's not how policing is supposed to work. And you are right, though. That blue line thing doesn't really exist with ICE.

You have a lot of first responders who will say to you, I do not like this, man. These guys are a problem the way they're doing things. It's bad for all of us. And I'm seeing it in my community with how people talk to me now because of them and what they expect of me. But so you think it's a slow wind down. I want to put it into the context of what we're saying. seeing, so I'm fascinated, I don't know how you feel about this, I'm fascinated by the polymarkets. I'm fascinated by people putting money where their mouth is.

Now, it's also proven to be pretty solid in its connection to outcomes, right? Especially, I mean, it's about when you look at the market. But like, they have 63 cents of every dollar going into polymarket right now says the Democrats take both houses. Are you that certain as the people betting on polymarket that the Democrats are going to take both houses? I'm the wrong guy to ask. I'm not I'm not that much of a political junkie. I have you know, I know what I want to have happen, but I'm also aware that what you want can often cloud your judgment and obscure your understanding of what will happen. So I'm the wrong.

I worry that there's a lot of people betting their desire, not betting the truth. But they're betting. They're not talking to a pollster. That's the part that really gets me. Like, U.S. Senate, I would take the bet all day long that the Democrats don't take control of the Senate. It's not about what I want or don't want. It's just too hard in terms of the seats that are up. And yes, they're doing better than they have in certain.

But that doesn't mean they're going to win. 90 cents on every dollar on polymarket, Democrats are going to win the Senate. Yeah. Am I missing something? Because this is money, Malcolm. This isn't what someone's saying in a bar, you know? Yeah.

I don't know. Maybe you should, maybe you should put some money on it yourself. You think I should make a bet. You think I should make a bet. I know, but I'm worried because, one, I don't bet. I've never gambled. I think I'm too much of a control freak. I also think that I'm probably not smart enough.

When I watch people gamble, when they talk about the permutations and what they're betting their wagers on, it's way over my head. Like craps, I love the fundamental aspect of it. I can't keep all the bet straight and why they are so confident. I don't know. You know, everybody's got strengths. Some have fewer than others. I will say this about the prediction markets that, and I'm, you know, you probably

know more about this than me, but I think we do have a sense. that it's getting harder and harder to poll accurately. Yeah, yeah. That, you know, that we're, the, the, the, the, the, the polling business has been complicated by a number of kind of different social movements. And so, we probably, we do need more information. And prediction markets are giving us a good additional source of information to allow us to kind of more accurately assess, you know, what, what polls mean.

I'm with you, though. I'm with you, though, on like the feel of the kind of the rate of diminishment within MAGA. And I actually believe that the reaction to MAGA has a lot more energy than MAGA does. Because people outside the system are always angrier than the people who are in charge of the system. And MAGA is in power right now. And yet, I can't believe that there is a real chance. that another Republican or a MAGA person or whatever they call themselves in 2028 wins after this.

I can't believe it. I can't believe it. But everybody who's in the business of being a better mind on this is like, well, you better start believing it because the Democrats, it's all who the Democrats put up. Yeah. But isn't that what these midterms are about that? No, it's not actually just about who you put up. It's about what you put up.

And that when you can be straight up rejected and that people believe that the people rejecting you get why you're being rejected so they vote for them. And that may happen in the presidency as long as the person isn't off-putting. I mean, you know, what's more powerful, in your opinion, the messenger or the message? Oh, wow. I mean, I feel like it shifts from time to time. What we want from something like a president is changes dramatically from one moment to the next. I'll give you an example from my native country of Canada. Canada had a prime minister in place, Justin Trudeau, who was glamorous and charismatic and charming and, you know,

this kind of like jet setting with a great political, you know, the sion of the greatest political family in Canadian history. And they soured on him and they elected. Mark Carney, who is cerebral, profoundly uncharismatic, he's like the polar opposite. He's like a kind of

a solid, boring, really, really smart, like, wonky guy. And one was a response to the other, right? So, like, I feel like these, we desiccite, we, there's a, there are these inevitable processes of overcorrection

that happened. You have someone, like, I feel like the successor to Trump will be the anti-Trump. It'll be somebody who's buttoned up and by the book and all those things. Well, I agree with all of that, but most of all, what I agree is in the congratulations and the validation and the praise that you deserve for what you're trying to do. And whether it's the latest opus, the American way of killing. I don't usually put red and yellow together, by the way. I want you to know that. But Malcolm Gladwell thinks about what has to be thought about.

He doesn't like being called a philosopher, but I hold that in the highest regard where people take cognition and apply it to foundational principles to try to understand the world around them. And Malcolm is one of the best. Continued success and curiosity. Thank you for being a seeker. Thank you for putting out things for the rest of us. And thank you for joining me for a conversation.

I absolutely love the time with you. Thank you, Chris. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on. Man, that guy is the human embodiment of food for thought. Is he not? What a critical thinker. I love that he sets the table for us.

I love that he allows us to understand something that's so confounding. Why we kill each other so much in this place? you know, and all the explanations we give ourselves for why it has to be this way or what has to change. And I like that he looks in this book, not just at the problem, but also the problems with the perceived solutions and pushback. Very helpful, very instructive. And I hope it matters to you the way it did to me. Thank you for the opportunity of giving you food for thought as a critical thinker. That's why I sell the stuff is so that we can brand back as independence and wear our independence, right?

and show people we're not lemmings, right? We're not just going to default to type, right? And I got some special ones for you for Halloween that Rose made up. You maga me crazy. No, you maga me scared. That's good, right? And your politics scare me or something like that. But they're kind of clever and Halloween-y and getting the message out there that you've got to be an independent, man.

You've got to be a critical thinker. And I'm thankful for the opportunity. to help you in that process. All right? The challenges are real. Conversation can be the cure. So let's get after.