The Rich Roll Podcast - Malcolm Gladwell Is Lord Of All Things Overlooked and Misunderstood

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

What are the limits of human performance? How can we reimagine sport to boost lifelong adoption? And what is the athlete’s role in moving culture forward? Today we explore these questions and tons more with the lord of all things overlooked and misunderstood, Malcolm Gladwell. I suspect most of you are very familiar with Malcolm. Perhaps you’ve listened to his sensational podcast Revisionist History, where every episode re-examines something from the past—an event, a person, an idea, even a song—and asks whether our collective stories got it right the first time. Or maybe you’ve read one of his six New York Times best sellers, such as The Tipping Point,Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers. Today’s conversation begins with running, extends to sport, broadens into a conversation about the role of athletes in moving society forward, and (of course) unearths other topics overlooked and misunderstood—all in true Gladwellian style. We talk about his latest podcast, Legacy of Speed, and why this terrain just might be his most Gladwellian project to date. Malcolm also shares several of his orthogonal ideas around education, publishing, the future of audio, creativity, and many more fascinating topics. Today’s episode is also viewable on YouTube. More about Malcom + show notes: https://bit.ly/richroll692a Malcolm is someone I’ve wanted on the show since day one, and I am thrilled to finally have made it happen. I hope you enjoy this exchange as much as I was thrilled to host it. Peace + Plants, Rich

When it comes to evaluating the greatness of elite performers, we overemphasize peak performance and underemphasize longevity. And that is driving a lot of young people out of the sport and discouraging a lot of people and frustrating our attempt to restore the health of our society. One percent of the population in middle age is practicing healthy habits. Why is that? Because no one bothered to teach them at the moment when those habits need to be taught. The idea of having a standard of performance that spans 20 years, that matters. There's a lack of imagination in promoting the sport. And the people running sports are not thinking of promotion and broadening the base as their That matters. There's a lack of imagination in promoting the sport.

And the people running sports are not thinking of promotion and broadening the base as their goal. They're servicing the needs of the elite athlete. And we have to understand that there are times when those two things are in conflict. And we have to decide, well, who are we doing this for? The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. Oh, boy, are you in for it today? Because my guest is none other than Malcolm Gladwell. It's a good one. It's a good one that goes, as you might suspect,

because it is Malcolm in a number of fascinating directions and it's just everything I hoped it would be. I suspect many of you are already familiar with Malcolm. Perhaps you've listened to his sensational podcast, Revisionist History, where every episode reexamines something from the past, an event, a person, an idea, even a song, and asks whether our collective stories got it right the first time, or perhaps you've read one of his six

New York Times bestselling books, including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers. In The Slim Chance, you are unfamiliar, Malcolm is, how do you describe him? I would describe him as a prolific storyteller. He's a journalist. He's been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1996. And prior to that, spent many years at the Washington Post. He's a speaker. He's an author, of course.

And as president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries, he is innovating audio, pushing new creative limits in the podcast and audio book space. He also happens to be a great runner, as well as a track and field aficionado, passions that he puts on display in this brand new podcast he just launched

called Legacy of Speed, which is a limited series that tells the incredible story behind the San Jose State track and field program of the 1960s, which improbably launched the careers of several of the fastest sprinters of the day, who are today remembered as much for their protests at the 1968 Summer Olympics

as they are for their breathtaking speed. And most importantly, how this pivotal moment in sports history paved the way for the modern day activism of our contemporary sports heroes. And of course, this comprises part of today's discussion, which is coming right up. But first, some business.

We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere

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yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Malcolm. So today we talk about so many things. We talk about running, of course,

Malcolm's literary mile challenges, the equation between aging and performance, politics and professional sports, challenging notions of amateurism and the dumb jock trope, and when competitiveness is and isn't useful. Malcolm also shares his ideas around education, around publishing, the future of audio, creativity, and just tons more. This one is super fun. Malcolm is somebody I've wanted on the show since day one. It finally happened.

I did my best to not fan out too much. I think I did an okay job. You guys be the judge. In any case, I hope you enjoy it. So here we go. This is me and the one and only Malcolm Gladwell. All right, man. Nice to finally meet you.

Been looking forward to this for a long time. Oh, good, me too. I was reflecting on the many things that I wanna get into with you today. But the first thing I gotta clear up has to do with our friend, our mutual friend, David Epstein, who has gone on the record to say

that you are the world's ultimate sandbagger. Now that's, you know, first of all, I will only say that there is precious little upside to overstating your expectations. Sure, sure. So better to under promise and over deliver. That's- Right.

That's- In all areas of life, not just in writing. To have people underestimate you is a sort of underestimated superpower. Yes. Also, you know, in running, I do that because I'm typically the oldest, in any group I go running with,

I'm usually the oldest by like 20 years. Sometimes I'm typically the oldest in any group I go running with, I'm usually the oldest by like 20 years. Sometimes I'm twice, when I used to run with this track club in New York and I would literally be twice the age of the people that I was training with. So like in that situation, there is just, you don't wanna go out boasting.

You have to make it very plain that you're the old man. Is that the track that's down on the Lower East Side? Yeah. Yeah. And then I would run in Brooklyn as well. There was even, there, there were people who were like, I was almost three times as old as all of them. So you already have the age thing built in as, as you know, a factor or a reason for people

to underestimate you, but then you go the extra, you know, kind of mile to like double down on that. There's no, there's no. How does that play into the other areas of your life? Like when you're approaching people to speak to, or in the, you know, kind of terrain of what you do for a living. Well, which I'm, you know, I'm Canadian.

So this is a national trait. We're, you know, we're a tiny country that is kind of in the shadow of its large bellicose neighbor. And we like to stay humble. Yes, it is not becoming of a Canadian to be boastful. We're quiet and apologetic. And I think those are important traits to maintain. I agree.

We saw this play out in the infamous influencer mile the other year with you and our other mutual friend, Chris Chavez, which turned into a blowout. I loved watching that. That was super fun. And I think it dovetails into a terrain that I wanna explore with you, which is like, how can we make sports,

these sort of off kilter sports that we love more interesting to mainstream audiences? Like I was, I love running. I'm more in the ultra kind of trail running universe. I'm less of a track and field aficionado. I'm not the guy who's like tuning in to watch the live stream of whatever meet unlike you, but I was sure to be online when that was going down

because I had to see what was gonna happen. Well, you know, Chris, I mean, so it answers your question. Part one is we need more people like Chris Chavez. So those of us, those listening, Chris is just a young man who has a lot of imagination and creativity and who's chosen to put that to work to promote a sport he loves, track and field.

And you realize like every sport that's taken off has had a moment when, look at what happened with F1 after the Netflix. Oh, I'm a product of that. Like I'm obsessed now. And I previously found that sport impenetrable. Yeah, so someone chose, a group of people with imagination

chose to tell a story around a sport that opened it up to all kinds of that, you know, and you could do the same thing with, you can look at sports that have taken off and you see some moment where there is a compelling story that people were choosing, Billie Jean King and women's tennis to go way, way back. Or, you know, in the seventies,

the NBA was worse than irrelevant. It was an, I mean, teams were selling for nothing. I mean, players were, couldn't get around, you know, they didn't walk down the street and no one would know who they are. You know, that's, there's all of these, we do need this kind of infusion of, that's part one, but part two, I would say is,

and this is a bigger problem with running in particular is we were not growing the base aggressively enough. And I had this idea, I was, I idea that I was talking to someone about recently, which is think about something as simple as high school cross country. The way high school cross country is scored is you'll have a team, maybe it's five people, and you'll combine the, you get X number of points for first place, so many points for second place,

you combine the points and, you know, it's heavily weighted. The team with the elite runner, the most elite runner tends to win, right? Because you get extra. Why do we structure it that way? Why don't we say, first of all, in order to compete in a cross country meet,

you must have a minimum of many 20 people on your team. And then why don't we say scoring is simply the combined time of all 20 of your runners. Right, kind of like GC and Tour de France. Yes, so your 20th runner matters as much as your first runner. Now that changes the psychological makeup of the sport dramatically.

Right now, what's my, if I'm the 20th best runner at a high school, what's my motivation for joining the cross country team? It's zero. I don't count. I don't even score in meets. I'm way, way behind the first person. But now under this system, the 20th person,

we are as passionately interested in how well they run as we are in the first. Right. And that, the fact that we have to get away, I think in earlier, at earlier levels of sports, at all levels with, we can't impose adult models of hyper competitiveness on kids. The kids, kids sports must look and be structured completely differently from elite sports.

We cannot get away with this. We're indulging the fantasy life of parents who wanna believe that their 12-year-old is mimicking LeBron when they play basketball or some great, the greatest American runners when they run cross country. Or no, it's a different, we're playing a different game

when you're 12 and 14 and 16. Sure, so on some level, that's about injecting semi-individual sports with a team component to it that creates a mass team component to it. And then beyond that, it's shelving the idea of a winner takes all mindset and really getting honest about the fact that high school sports or just kids sports in general,

for every LeBron, there's a million kids who are doing it for very different reasons and are getting value out of it in a way that has nothing to do with becoming a champion. And that's what we're missing, I think, in all of these sports. Like I've been doing team tries. What is that?

Team triathlons with, we're on the runner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we have a swimmer. I did that in Malibu with Mary Kane and Alexi Pappas. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it was super fun. And it was, first of all, insanely fun. And I realized, oh, it's a way,

I'm never gonna do a triathlon, I can't swim. It's not gonna happen. I'll be the swimmer on your team though. Yeah, all right, all right, good. But I just thought, why triathlon world should do, and when we do, we do these team tries and they'll be like, we'll go to these local triathlons and there'll be like, we'll go to these like local triathlons and there'll be, you know, 200 competitors,

but only about three teams or four teams. And I think, you know, what a lost opportunity because it's the team that makes the sport accessible. Lots of people can round up a swimmer and a biker if they're a runner or some other combination. We should be putting the team triathlon front and center at the kind of mass level, the participation level. That opens up the sport.

And also so, by the way, our little, when we go to these little meets, it is so much fun. I had no idea triathlons was such a wonderfully fun activity. I'd never gone to one. Oh, really? Because why would I have, except as a spectator, right? Well, yeah, they are super fun. I mean, don't even get me started

on how to reimagine triathlon. I mean, first of all, the swim is irrelevant in almost every triathlon. It's so short by comparison to the other legs. So it really favors the other sports and coddles the non-swimmer, which drives me crazy as somebody who is first and foremost a swimmer.

It was invented by the swimmers. They let you wear wetsuits when it's not cold out. And it's so it's basically, you know, even at Ironman level, like you just have to stay in contact with everyone else. And then the other legs are so much more important. So that's absurd. And why don't we put the swim last?

Like if we really wanna make it interesting and then beyond that, yes, relays are the thing that really makes it fun, makes it inclusive. And also is more interesting for the spectator, whether it's track and field or swimming or triathlon. Yeah. Oh yeah. I think there's just a kind of, there's like I said, it goes back,

this is a lack of imagination in promoting a sport. And the people running sports are not thinking of promotion and broadening the base as their goal. They're thinking of, they're servicing the needs of the elite athlete. And we have to understand that there are times when those two things are in conflict and we have to pick up, we have to decide,

well, what are we doing this? Who are we doing this for? And I would love a stretch where we decide we're doing it for the ordinary athlete who wants to get out and have fun in this. These institutions are so calcified though. It feels like a heavy lift. Yeah.

Have you ever had like conversations with individuals who are organizers or at the heads of these leagues, et cetera, to try to inject some of these ideas and it's not gonna happen. I can only imagine. I know. So that's why these, you know,

the Billie Jean King thing and all of that, they're considered stunts, but actually they're like catalysts, I think, for interest. And I know that, you know, a couple of years ago, you challenged LeBron James to a mile. That never happened. Did you ever get any response like? No, so I didn't, although I pressed it actually quite far.

I did approach people at Nike and said, come on, just talk to LeBron about this. My, if I might explain my position on this, the reason I wanted to do this is not that I thought I could beat LeBron, the opposite. I thought LeBron would beat me. So at the time I was probably good for around a five minute mile. I honestly believe that LeBron can go sub five. And I think it's because there's two things going on here. Well, one thing that basketball has been turned into an aerobic sport over the last generation. It wasn't, in the 70s,

they were smoking cigarettes in the locker. And when you watch a 70s basketball game, no one's playing any defense. And it's defense, of course, where you exert all your effort. What they're doing is they're loafing until the ball's in their hands and then they explode to the hoop, right?

That's an anaerobic sport. So you can smoke cigarettes in the locker room and you can be fine. Now the players are exerting full effort the entire game, the entire time they're on the floor, there's no, they're two different sports, right? And I watched a video of LeBron doing this exercise where he was dribbling the length of the court, dunking,

and then without stopping, dribbling back to the other end, dunking. And he did this. It must've, I mean, I don't know how long it was, 10 minutes. And I was like, oh my God, this guy is an endurance athlete. He's a, I mean, and I thought LeBron can easily break five,

even if I don't care that he's 6'9", 250. He can break five. And I want, the only way I'm gonna prove this is if, you know, a dedicated admirer such as myself, albeit super old, takes on LeBron and LeBron cleans my clock, and then the world will realize, oh my God, this sport basketball is different than we thought.

Right, so that's the incentive for him to do it, but no chance in- He loses to me, however. Yeah, I guess so. Then I'm, you know. Right, I saw that video. I think it has like 124 million views on Instagram of LeBron just doing-

Of LeBron dribbling back. Yeah, it's impressive. I mean, it's like, he's running a steeple, it's a steeplechase, right? That's what he's doing. He's jumping up. He's just looping. He's just going from one end it's like, it's, he's running a steeple, it's a steeple chase, right? That's what he's doing. He's jumping up. He's just looping. He's just going from one end of the court to the next,

like, and he's got guys feeding him the ball for him to dump at each end. It's an incredible workout, right? Well, the challenge that I'd like to see would be the literary mile between you and Nick Thompson. It could be like the New Yorker versus the Atlantic. But you might have to do like a 10K or something like that, right?

Cause he's a marathoner. I run with Nick. Oh, you do? He's not, I'm not even in his league. Nick is a two, what is he now? A 228 marathoner in his well into his forties. He's on a whole nother level. So you're not taking the bait on that one?

No, I'm not. I mean, if there was some, if Nick's willing to give me some massive handicap, yes. I will. Can we age grade the results? This is the only chance I have. Then maybe I'll, I don't know. I don't know, man.

I think it's about the distance. You have to pick something in the middle where you guys would kind of measure up to each other. I don't think I'm faster than him. We used to do loops of, he once joined me in my little group of runners, running running friends. We were doing intervals around the Central Park Reservoir

in New York. And yeah, I mean, we were killing ourselves. I mean, he could have been on it. He could have been like on his phone the entire time. That's how easy it was for him. So that was all a kind of lesson for me. How does he maintain that fitness with the job that he has? I have no idea.

Yeah, it's impressive. I have no idea. I feel like he doesn't get enough attention or do for his running. Yeah, well, he's not aging, right? He's getting better in his forties. He ran his fastest marathon ever in his mid forties. That's kind of, I don't understand

how he also stays healthy. That's, you know, of course the big issue with runners. I don't know how he does that. I see him on Strava and he's like, he's running with a backpack on from Brooklyn to the office. That seems to be what he does. Yeah. How do you think about that equation

between aging and performance? Because we're seeing so many breakthroughs with athletes later in age. And as somebody who kind of hosts a lot of ultra runners here, I had Camille Heron on the other day, like she's breaking world records at the a hundred miles in her forties and beating all the guys and all of that.

Obviously the longer the distance, that gender gap narrows, but the performances that we're seeing continue to like astound me in endurance sports. And even in swimming, remember there was that period when they had the speed suits and everybody thought, well, those world records are never gonna get broken. And we just saw world championships in Budapest last week and all kinds of world records are continuing to get broken

by really young people. And how do you think about like the upper limits of human performance and performance as we get older? Yeah, well, there's two, this is not news to you, but on the older part, it's clear that what we thought was a decline in sort of physiological capacity as you age, may in large part simply be an increased tendency

to get injured. I think the injury thing is huge here that the last generation has seen this revolution in keeping older people healthy. And that when you extend the career of a whole group of athletes, you're gonna get, we're just, the base of the pyramid is now just a lot broader. So we're obviously gonna see changes in the top.

And the kind of the motivation, like if you look at swimmers, swimmers are a good example. Nobody swam into their late twenties, in the seventies or eighties. No, I mean, there was no money by the time you were 21 and you graduated college, that was it. You were done.

Whereas now there is a mechanism for doing that. So we're just extending the kind of useful life of, what I don't understand is the other, is what's going on at the younger end. I don't understand there's this kid, Arion Knighton, who's, I think I'm mispronouncing his name, who's, what is he, 19 or 18, who's like the second fastest sprinter

in the world right now. We're seeing all of these kind of, there's a 800 meter runner in England who's running astonishing times in his late teens. And as Jacob Ingebrigtsen, the greatest medalism runner in the world who was, I don't understand, is it simply that we're kind of bringing sophisticated training techniques earlier and earlier?

Although that's not a satisfactory answer to me because it's not clear to me that that, why that would work. Why wouldn't that just burn out runners earlier? Yeah, well, my frame for that is swimming. And when I see a 17 year old break a world record that I just never thought would get broken, I think, well, how many years of training could he have actually had

that would be meaningfully so young, right? There are huge advances in training techniques, but then to your point, right? There are huge advances in training techniques, but then to your point, like does that really account for that massive leap in performance or is the human species like evolving? You know, like it's confusing.

Like I don't know what the answer to that is, but it seems like there's no end in sight when it comes to that. Yeah, every time we, but maybe the other thing I'd love to know is there's a denominator effect, which is, when you look at any of these phenomenon, we have to know what the size of the denominator is.

And maybe the denominator, that is the number of people participating, entering the sport at the bottom end is growing much faster than we think. I did one of my podcasts this season, Revisionist History is all about the relative age effect. And both in education and in sport, this idea that without meaning to in youth sports,

the fact that there are age cutoffs in youth sports means that we unconsciously favor those who are relatively older in their age cohort. And in Australia, the most swimming mad country on earth, they did an analysis of their age class swimmers and realized there were no, because of the way they'd structured age cutoffs for, there were no late maturing swimmers

at all in the cohort of elite competitive age class swimmers. In other words, so they did it, there's a guy named Steven Cobley, who what he does is he takes all of the kids in Australia, men, boys doing the a hundred meter freestyle. And he does a very simple analysis. You can do a very simple analysis on adolescents, boys and girls, just by taking a series of seven

or eight measurements of the body and figure out how close, whether they are early matures, average matures or late matures. So he takes a cohort of the 400 best freestyles, age class swimmers in Australia, does this analysis on all of them and figures out, okay, which of these people are early, middle and late. And what he discovers is there are no late matures.

So anyone who just by pure chance happens to be a kid who's a little bit developmentally behind his peers, they have left the sport of swimming by the age of 14 and 15, they're gone. They got discouraged, they thought they weren't good. They didn't realize they were just behind three or four months. And if you're behind three or four or five months

at that age, of course it's everything, right? Can't compete. So when I look at that, and so they're gonna try and solve this problem in Australia and change the way they analyze youth sports. If they do that, they could potentially double the size of the denominator. They could, if all of those kids who quit at 12,

under the mistaken impression, they weren't any good, stuck with the sport, all of a sudden Australia is drawing its elite swimmers from a pool that's twice as big. Right. That's fascinating. So basically these talented kids are getting shunned or cast aside or are losing interest because they're not developing in lockstep with their peers. Exactly. And yet they're sitting on top of latent talent yet to be expressed. Exactly. What are the biomarkers that they test for to determine that?

biomarkers that they test for to determine that. Well, you can do, I can't remember the exact, it's like a seven, it's like a seven point algorithm. It's, you know, they start with weight and height and then they keep adding. I don't remember the exact, but you apparently you can, you can, there's an invasive one where I actually go in and, you know, poke around your body, but there's a kind of simple non-invasive algorithm

where I just take measurements that is 95% is accurate in terms of estimating. So I can take a 12 year old girl and I can say she is, and I can compare two 12 year old girls born in exactly the same day. And I can say developmentally, Jane is seven months ahead of Sally. Right, got it.

So you just pull that kid aside, who's gonna be a late bloomer and say, just hang in there. It might be rough for a couple of years. You can do more than that Rich. You can, the second part of what they've done is they've used this to do a very sophisticated kind of age grading.

So all the 12 year olds swim the a hundred meter freestyle. And now they're starting this in Australian swimming. Two sets of results, the raw results, Jane one, and then the adjusted results, which we adjust for the level of maturity. So we can say, oh, wait a minute, Sally didn't make the final. But in fact, when we do a maturity adjustment,

Sally was the fastest swimmer out there. So now we don't use that. It's a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for that kid. But we can say, we don't have to give Sally the gold medal, but we can say to Sally, actually you can pull Sally aside at the end and say, Sally, you didn't make the final, but you are in fact the best swimmer on this day.

Right. Right? Don't quit. And the psychology of that keeps them invested, of course. But everyone, my argument in the podcast episode I did, this is in for the latest revision history season, was you could do this in education as well. Same thing is happening. We give a bunch of 12 year olds a math test

and we say, Jimmy's better than Joey, but we don't adjust for their maturity, right? Right. And if we just for the, maybe Joey walks away thinking he can't do math, but it's just a fiction because Joey is developmentally behind everyone else in the class. Maybe Joey is a December kid

and everyone else is a January kid. And on top of that, Joey is developmentally behind. So Joey could be two years behind his age cohort. And you're trying to tell me you can give him the same math test as everyone else and have any confidence in the result? The whole way, this actually, I'm getting wound up. I know.

This drives me- When it comes to education, this animates you more than any other subject, clearly. This drives me nuts. The stupidity with which we conduct any kind of competition among pre-adults drives me to distraction. It's like, what are we doing?

Why are we having races, any kind of competition? Why are we having any academic or athletic involving 12 or 13 year olds and having any confidence in the result? This is just nuts. Do you think that what's the bigger lift? Like seeing that kind of change happen in sport or in education?

Like I feel like education is- Way harder. Yeah. I mean, the way we do, I mean, bitch, we're gonna, this is another podcast. I know, I had mean, the way we do, I mean, bitch, we're gonna, this is another podcast. I know. Well, I had like, I'm staring at my outline right now. And of course I have a whole thing on education that I was gonna get to later.

Cause I wanna talk about legacy speed. Let's talk about legacy speed. Yeah, let's do that. We can come back to it. Yeah, we will if we have time. I love this new series. It's fantastic. And I feel like I want you to explain it and set the stage,

but I really feel like it is in the kind of Gladwellian bullseye. Like there are themes from all of your books that come into play. This is like the sweet spot where, you know, ideas that percolate up from, you know, outliers, David and Goliath, like Blink, like all of these things, you know, outliers, David and Goliath, like Blink, like all of these things, you know, are apparent

in this, you know, amazing story that kind of unearths some truths about what actually transpired in 1968. And I find it fascinating. So, I mean, thank you for doing it. I really enjoyed it, but you know, explain what it is that this is all about. So this is a podcast that we did in collaboration with Tracksmith and-

I'm wearing my Tracksmith shirt today. I'm wearing my Tracksmith legacy speed. Yes, there you go. Short as we talk and Puma. And it's the story of that photograph, which everyone knows of the three sprinters on the 200 meter metal podium at the Mexico City Olympics, 1968.

Tommy Smith and John Carlos have their head bowed. They're wearing black socks. They have a black glove on one hand and they have their fists in here, right? It's this iconic. And so we did a whole podcast series on that photograph who how did it come to pass what what's behind it what does it mean and it turns out to be first of all like virtually everything i learned in doing this podcast i did not know and i am a

massive track and field fan starting with the fact that everyone involved with that iconic 76, 68 protests is from the same place. The Lee Evans who also staged a protest when he won the 400 meters at the games, John Carlos and Tommy Smith are all from the same school, the same track team, San Jose State. They're all coached by the same guy, Bud Winter. And Bud Winter turns out to be, I think he's one of the most important coaches of the 20th century.

He puts John Wooden to shame. He really doesn't just reinvent sprinting. Although every sprinter today, every elite sprinter today is really sprinting in the way that Bud Winter instructed sprinters to sprint. He's the person who brings techniques of relaxation, really sort of meditative techniques. Things that he learned as a fighter pilot. As someone who studied fighter pilot. In the second world war, there was this kind of crisis with fighter pilots having breakdowns

and being unable to perform obviously because of what, and there was a whole movement to try and understand how to prepare them properly for this incredibly arduous task and what came out of that was this idea that we needed to teach these fighter pilots how to relax, that out of relaxation, this sort of paradox that the best way to achieve peak performance was to relax, which is commonplace now,

heresy in the 1940s. Bud Winter is part of this movement. And he sees, he says, oh, wait a minute, this surely applies to running, that the notion about maximum exertion at those days in sprinting was that that required the visible application of effort. You grimaced, you tensed your muscles,

you like, you know, you propelled yourself down the track and winter was like, no, no, no, no. You float down the track. That your entire, your body must be relaxed. Your upper body must be, it must look like you're having tea with friends. You must, that notion is that wonderful thing that must when a runner runs,

it must look like that if you just jostled them from the side, they would fall over. That's how relaxed they have to be. That's all about winter. And he produces at this one commuter school in Northern California in San Jose. There's a stretch of time And he produces at this one commuter school in Northern California, in San Jose. There's a stretch of time when he's the coach there, where like basically every world record

is set by one of his runners. He just, his runners, at this nothing, no nothing school back then, dominate international sprinting for a stretch of 15 years, culminating in the 68 games where two of his guys break world records. And at the same time though, it's another guy in his track team called Harry Edwards.

Then as now, one of the most important figures in sort of understanding, he's the guy who leads all of the, who invents the sociology of sport, who leads all of these kind of protest movements around sport. He comes and he joins with these athletes and he convinces them they should use their sprinting prowess

as a kind of platform for social justice. And that all comes together in the Mexico City games. And it's an unbelievable story. And that's the story we're trying to tell in the podcast. Yeah, the convergence of all of these individuals just happening to be at the same place at the same time, this commuter school, which was white, right? Predominantly a white commuter school,

not on the map at all in terms of track and field and creating this unbelievable team of world record breaking athletes and performances on no budget also, which is the other piece here. Like there was, they were on a shoestring while they were doing this and going out and beating all these other legendary track track and field athletes and teams.

Yeah. Oh, it's, and even down to, I mean, the kind of pressure these guys are under. So the context is really important, which is the Mexico games are 68. So 67 is the long hot summer. It's, there were, I think, 152 race riots in the United States in 1967.

It's where the kind of optimism that accompanied Martin Luther King's version of civil rights dissipates in violence and rage. And you can argue, I think the summer of 67 is about as traumatic a summer as America has had in its history. We've sort of forgotten that now. So here we have a group of young black men

who are the greatest sprinters in the world and who are very much immersed in what's going on in 67 and they're asking this question what is our obligation when we go to the olympics in 68 we are going to be at the the whole world's going to be watching we are the best in the world of what we do we are young black men and America is in flames. Do we have an obligation to do something with our position? And that is the amount of, we're talking about 19 and 20 year old young men,

I mean, who are being thrust into onto the world stage and asked to defy the dominant ethos of the time about what an athlete was how an athlete ought to conduct themselves you know it was against explicitly against the olympic um ethos to you to bring politics at all to the games. Yeah, we sort of are, you know, inured to this idea that athletes can be activists and can, you know, flex their profile in order to advance social change. But this was not part of the landscape at the time.

In fact, it was anathema to it, especially when you consider, you know, the power that was wielded by Avery Brundage and this whole notion that the Olympics should be completely separate from any kind of political statement whatsoever. Brundage is the, I mean, the series has, he's the villain of the series.

Well, he's an easy target for sure. I mean, the guy was like, yeah, I mean, he's a Bond villain, as you say. Well, he's an easy target for sure. I mean, the guy was like, yeah, I mean, he's a Bond villain, as you say. Yeah, he's unbelievable. And he runs the Olympics for 35 years. I mean, the modern Olympics is really kind of created by him and he has to say he has reprehensible views about and retrograde views about the role of sport in society

is to understate it. So he very strongly believes, for example, that Rhodesia and South Africa at the time that they have white supremacist regimes running them ought to be welcome at the games. Why? Part because he's sympathetic to what they do, but largely because, but his stated belief is a country's politics are irrelevant when it comes to sports, that it is not the role of the Olympic games to pass judgment on any participating countries, internal policies.

We're above that, we're sports. We're about young men and women who are, you know, embracing the amateur ideal and in this kind of, on the shining city in the hill, doing our best on the field or the track and then going home and going back to their ordinary life. That's his model. His model is Roger Bannister who breaks the four minute mile

and then goes back to medical school and never says a peep about the larger world. And God forbid he should ever profit off of his prowess. Exactly, that's Brundage, that's what he believes. And on the sort of a backdrop to that and the history, I watched The Stand last night, the documentary about this very subject matter. And what I didn't understand is how,

like the legacy of this dating back to, and you talk about this in the series as well, like Brundage's role back in 1936, the Olympics then, and there was this whole, you know, kind of consideration at the time as to whether the United States should boycott. And they had this meeting at the New York Athletic Club,

but of course, Jews are not allowed to enter the building there. And so this vote was cast about whether or not to boycott. And of course, there's no boycott. So that, as you said, he's been doing this for a long time. Yeah, Brundage is the guy sent by the American Olympic Committee to Germany

to figure out whether it would be appropriate to attend the 36 games in Berlin. And he comes back and says, yeah, it's fine. to Germany to figure out whether it would be appropriate to attend the 36 games in Berlin. And he comes back and says, yeah, it's fine. Now, this brings up an interesting philosophical point though. I actually think it was appropriate for America to attend the 36 games,

even though Adolf Hitler was intending those games to be a showcase for his Nazi state. And the reason I think it was appropriate was that we went there and, you know and Jesse Owens and a bunch of others kicked everyone's ass and stole the show. And Hitler had this vision of Aryan supremacy and a black guy from Ohio shows up and like dominates the game.

So it's like, be careful what you wish for if you're Adolf Hitler. It's I think, and I think the same thing happens, you know, the same question was given to the athletes in 68. Originally the idea was that black athletes in America would boycott the 68 games. And they said, actually, you know what? It's better that we go and use that platform

to make a stand than to stay home and turn our back on the institution. And I love, I think in both cases going and making a statement is superior to staying home. I'm not, I completely agree with the way they, we ended up on in both those cases. Yeah, you have a whole episode where you pose this choice like voice exit or loyalty, right? So go use your voice, exit meaning boycott

or the Brundage model of just be loyal, be quiet and do your job. And it seems to me that, you know, when you kind of canvas history, voice ends up being the most powerful over time. There's sort of, collateral damage in the short term, but ultimately with distance, you see the impact of that like resonate and becoming,

like when we look at that photograph, that is the kind of touchstone of this whole series, nobody hasn't seen that image. I mean, it just resonates across decades. Yeah, yeah, no, it ended up being a kind of, yeah, I agree with you. I think with, you know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar famously does stay home, 68, boycotts.

And I wonder, I would really love to talk to him and to see whether he regrets that decision, you know, as an old man now. Or if we look at the 1980 Olympic boycott, like did that really achieve anything? Yeah, yeah, I think that all it did, I think, was rob a group of athletes of a chance to, I mean, to have gone to Moscow

at the height of the Soviet Union and to have dominated on the track. I mean, that would have, you know, when we think about the domestic audience for the Moscow games in 1980, were a group of people who had been told the West was weak and decadent. And because of that,

that's what justified the Soviet regime, that they were pursuing a better model of how, but to have shown up and to have put that notion to the, that lie to the test would have been incredibly powerful. Yeah, interesting. I have friends that were on that 80 team. And to this day, like, you know, it's- Who do you know who was on there?

My friend, John Moffitt. He was the youngest member of the 1980 Olympic swimming team. He made the team in the 100 breast. I think he was 16 years old at the time. He ended up making, there's a weird parallel with Tommy in this. He ends up making the 84 team

and sets the world record at Olympic trials in the 100 breaststroke. And in the prelims, he swims the Olympic record to qualify first, but he pulls his groin muscle. And ultimately ends up, I think fourth or sixth or something like that. Steve Lundquist wins. So it's sort of a mirror image,

the converse of what happens with Tommy in the 200 meters in 68. Yeah, this is, you bring up the, one of the many incredible side stories of the 200 meters of this series legacy of speed is Tommy Smith, then the greatest 200 meter runner in the world, in the semis, as you say, pulls a groin. And first of all, if you pull a groin- You're done.

You're done. I mean, I watched the documentary last night. You see him like noticeably limping. And you're like, this guy has no chance. No chance. Because it's not like he has a couple of days in between the semis and the final. Like he's got a couple of hours.

Hours, yeah. And Bud Winter, this legendary coach, I mean, it's the greatest act of coaching. They have been, his entire career, Tommy Smith has been a disciple of Bud Winter's notions about relaxation and about, and sort of engaging the mental and psychological aspect of the sport.

And Winter and Tommy Smith kind of retreat. And they, he, they, Smith prepares himself psychologically and emotionally for that final in such a way that not only is he capable of running with a pull going, he breaks the world record, a world record that would, that would last, I think 20 years. And he pulls up like in the last five or 10 meters,

he eases off. It's insane. It's crazy. It is the most, yeah. Once you know that- And it comes from behind too. It's the whole thing's insane. Yeah. It's the whole thing's insane. John Carlos is interesting.

John Carlos is like, I have a special affection for Carlos because like me, he has a Jamaican mom. And he's part of the kind of West Indian diaspora to New York City. And he's so Jamaican in some, I mean, I realize I'm engaging in cultural stereotypes here, but he's just like a firebrand.

He's just like, he's the kind of outspoken- More charismatic. Charismatic performer one. And it doesn't really happen. You know, I talk a little bit in the series about how you need to have a John Carlos if you're ever gonna do, the construction of these iconic moments

invariably includes a kind of John Carlos like figure, someone who has the kind of, we were talking earlier about the role of imagination and someone who has the imagination to see the possibilities of a moment like that. Right, so we have Tommy Smith, we've got John Carlos, they both compete in the 200 meters. The backdrop to that is all of these discussions

leading up to the Olympics about whether to boycott or not. They decide to go. What was interesting about John Carlos is in the interim at some period leading up to the Olympic games, he goes back to Harlem and he has this meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. Who encourages him to go and to use that moment for his voice.

And of course we have, Harry Edwards, Professor Harry Edwards, who's preparing these young athletes for, you know, he seems to be the visionary in all of this, knowing like you guys are young, maybe you don't even realize like how seismic this could possibly be. If things break in your favor and you win gold medals,

or you're on that podium, you have this opportunity, how are you gonna use that? So they go, they compete, Tommy, you know, ends up winning the gold medal, you know, despite the groin and all of that, Carlos is third. And what was interesting about the way that you kind of unfurl this aspect of the story is that despite all of the energy behind the scenes,

they still hadn't figured out what they were gonna do or not do until kind of the last minute. They're under the stadium, like working out, we gotta do something. And although it's funny, all of them, as is so often the case in these kinds of histories, everyone has their own version of what happens,

but they did bring black socks and black gloves with them to Mexico and little- But didn't Tommy have to tell his wife like after he had already arrived there and she was coming later, like, oh, bring the gloves. They're clearly thinking about what kind of symbolic statement makes the most sense. And by the end, you know, they wearing a scarf

and a scarf, you know, the socks symbolize the kind of working man, the beads, their jackets are open because- I didn't know any of this. I mean, you know the glove, but you don't know any of the other stuff. Yeah, there's like five or six different things they're doing that all have a very specific

symbolic purpose. It's this kind of weirdly complex coded act. That is again, yeah, I didn't know all I knew all, I just thought it was a black glove in the air. Right. And the other amazing story, the guy who wins the silver in the 200 is this guy, Norman, Peter Norman, who's an Australian white guy.

And they're backstage and they're all talking about Smith and Carlos who win the gold and the bronze are talking about what they wanna do. And Norman says, oh, can I be a part of this? And of course the other guy's like, wait, you're like a white guy from Australia. And Norman says, well, actually, you know, my family is deeply involved with the Salvation Army.

They've been sort of, we've been social justice pioneers my whole life. Your cause is something I believe in. And so they go and they find him a little, they're all wearing these pins. He's kind of that sort of symbolize their cause. Norman borrows a pin and puts it on. So he's also in his, he's not raising a fist,

but he's also participating. And the effect of him wearing a pin is that he is banned from the Australian Olympic team. He does not get to go in 1972. They don't even invite him, even though to this day, he is the Australian record holder in the 200 meters. They don't even invite him to the Sydney games.

He's just banished from the sport because he chose to participate in this. He really never recovers. Yeah. And he ends up dying, right? Like he died several years ago. Yeah. And he ends up dying, right? Like he died several years ago. Yeah. And I think Tommy and John went and were his pallbearers.

Yeah, it's a lovely kind of. Well, it's, you know, we look at this courageous act in an era in which, you know, courage is hard to come by. Like, I don't know that we could ever really imagine just how courageous it was for them to do that at that moment. And we think, what an amazing symbolic act

on behalf of civil rights. And we tend to overlook like, or we don't understand the fallout from that. I mean, we have Brundage who basically gets rid of these guys immediately. And then these guys go on to have a really hard time for a very long time. It's only in many decades later

that we can kind of appreciate them and erect statues and kind of celebrate them. But their lives were decimated as a result of this in many ways. The kind of, the way the popular press reacted to that in the moment to that protest was in retrospect, vicious. I mean, people thought they were outlaws that they had, Avery Brundage referred to what Carlos and Tommy Smith

did on the podium as a violent act. He would in fact, in 1972, when there was an actual violent act, when the Israeli Olympic team was slaughtered by terrorists, Brundage famously talked about twin, you know, referred to those in the same breath, those two acts, an actual terrorist attack and two young men holding up their fists on a victory stand as violent assaults on the Olympic dream. And then they come home and like sports writers turn on them, the public turns on them. What's weird, of course, about that,

of course, is that it brings up Colin Kaepernick, who was also advised by Harry Edwards. And he was acting in his protests, about that of course is that it brings up the Colin Kaepernick who was also advised by Harry Edwards. And he was acting in his protest very much in a spirit of Smith and Carlos in 68. And the same thing happens to Kaepernick. I mean, we think we're beyond that. We think we somehow, but Kaepernick gets, I mean, he has more support than Smith and Carlos do in 68,

but the NFL establishment turns its back on him, pushes him out of the sport. Yeah, it makes you think like, have we really come that far? Yeah. You know, that change is slow and hard wrought in so many ways. I mean, I think, you know, with Kaepernick,

I feel like there's a division, you know, there are plenty of people who are supportive of what he did, but not enough for him to be playing in the NFL. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that thread in the same way that you can't understand Usain Bolt, you can't really understand contextually Colin Kaepernick

without understanding this story. Yeah, yeah, yes. No, it's funny. I hadn't thought about, I didn't realize, I never, it's funny, even though I, like I say, I'm a truck and field fan, I hadn't made the connection between Kaepernick and 68, that he's very self-consciously participating

in that tradition of silent protest, right? And of, you know, there's, and I don't know even the interesting question to ask Kaepernick, I've never heard, I'm sure he has an answer, I know, is whether he anticipated that he would face as much backlash as he did. Did he think, was he doing that on the assumption

that the world of the contemporary world was very different in 68, that his act would have new meaning today? Or did he think he would face the same kind of firestorm as Smith and Carlos? I don't know what he- Did you try to reach out to him for this? No, I didn't.

I didn't. We were very much in this, you know, we talk about Kaepernick glancingly at the end, but we were trying in this podcast to stay very focused on the events leading up to 68. And I think it's sometimes better in these kinds of stories to let the listener draw their own conclusions about how these themes resonate in today.

Yeah, you mentioned the pin that Norman adorned, Peter Norman, right? Peter Norman, yes. That pin that Norman adorned, Peter Norman, right? Yes. That pin was for this organization called the Olympic Project for Human Rights, right? Yes. And there's a whole story there as well that involves the Harvard crew team, which I thought was really interesting.

They can't, they're trying to find a pin for Norman and no one has an extra one, but it turns out the Harvard crew team or the crew team, which is made up of many people from Harvard, they have pins. So Tommy Smith goes over to them and says, can we borrow a pin for Norman?

Our friend here wants to wear it on the victory stand. So it is like, there's this, I mean, who wouldn't love to have loved to have been backstage leading up to that in those moments. And then the other great, fantastic fact about the medal ceremony that day is Brundage doesn't even show up. So our villain who is always there

in the big moments of the Olympics, he lives what he lives for. The Olympics is his creation. If a world record's broken, he's there handing out the medals. He's in Acapulco for the yachting competition. Twirling his mustache. Twirling his mustache.

He gets out of town. He wants to know part of, cause they know something is up with Smith and Carlos. It's so weird that it really doing this series really made me think hard about our notions about amateurism and how did sport in those years, and it still lingers today. How do we come to think of sport as something that

ought to be separate from the rest of society? That, you know, why is it so shocking to us not to be separate from the rest of society. Why is it so shocking to us that Colin Kaepernick would want to reflect at a football game what was going on outside the stadium? Why does that upset us? Or what is that? I don't get that. Yeah, I mean, there still is this legacy,

this Brundage- ask legacy of like, these things should not be intertwined with each other. What is the Genesis of that? This Puritan ideal that sports exist completely outside of any other ideas. Part of that is there is this kind of notion and it is unconsciously, I think racist in in origin or maybe not racist is the wrong word but um because it applies both to blacks and whites there is a feeling that if you excel

athletically you have you have sometimes you have somehow compromised your intellectual gifts that you can do one or the other that the the person who, you know, strengthens their muscles is at the same time weakening their mind, right? That's a kind of very old trope that we had about the dumb, you know, the dumb jock, that's what that's about. But of course, and you know this better than I do, the modern athlete is the opposite of that, that there is no way to succeed at a high level

in sports today, if you are not intellectually sophisticated and cognitively engaged in what you're doing. You can't be a dumb jock and a good jock today. It's not possible, right? Like you can't, there's no, you can't be, you think LeBron James is a brilliant guy? Of course he has to be. I mean, he's done what no one else has done.

He's figured out all this stuff about like how to succeed at the high level for 20 years. Right, employing teams of people and spending millions of dollars to ensure his success by surrounding himself with the smartest people to make him the smartest athlete that he can possibly be. And even discipline that's necessary in any kind of sport at a high level now.

We all know, we know, we've always known that discipline is a very close corollary of cognitive sophistication, right? And so I'm even, I don't know why that idea, but it does persist in curious ways. Shut up and dribble. Shut up and dribble. Shut up and dribble. Yeah.

How do we transcend that? Only through these types of transgressive acts. Yeah. I think, I mean, I don't see any other way past that. And it is interesting. This is such an interesting case study because back to the Harvard crew team, I mean, they had their Olympic trials,

I think in California, and then they went to go see Harry Edwards. Like they wanted to, these are all white guys at the most privileged university in the world. And they're like, we wanna figure out a way to support you and participate in this. And Harry Edwards then went and visited them at Cambridge

and there's this press conference. So, there were people who were kind of on the right page of history with this. And yet there's so, so much further to go. I mean, we have rule 50 right now, which was debated leading into Tokyo. And they made these tiny concessions that are confusing. I don't know if you've read through

like the amendments to it. And I'm like, I don't even really know what to make of this. Like it's still very much Avery inspired I don't know if you've read through like the amendments to it and I'm like, I don't even really know what to make of this. Like it's still very much Avery inspired in terms of like what you can and can't do. Rule 50 is the part of the Olympic charter that says you essentially, you can't bring politics to the games.

And we'll let you kind of do a little bit here and there, but just as long as it's not during competition or during any of the anthems or on the podium or any of the places where it would be the most impactful. Yeah, I mean, can you imagine if we had an Olympics this summer and a Ukrainian athlete, there's a brilliant Ukrainian high jumper woman, she wins the gold medal.

Right. What a moment for someone to make it some kind of symbolic gesture. You know, there's why we would deny ourselves. By the way, parenthetically, the Olympics is primarily, you know, for the general public, it's entertainment. Why are they trying to make this sport less interesting? But there is something so uniquely special

about the Olympics. And there always has been. I mean, I grew up obsessed with the Olympics, watching all those fantastic, but Greenspan movies with the monotone flat voiceover and just riveted by the kind of elevated notion of that Olympic ideal, which I guess is, you know,

like does have some Avery Brundage roots in it. Like this is separate from normal humans, what's going on here. Yeah, yeah. And I think that that creates that high energy crucible for making some kind of statement. Yeah. Because it will resonate more than your average NFL game.

I mean, Kaepernick is an outlier in that regard, but in general, all eyes are on the Olympics once every four years, what are you gonna do in that moment? It's funny, I've kind of lost, the Olympics have, I was that kid who was obsessed. That is certainly waned. I no longer, I think it's become this kind of absurd,

bloated enterprise. It's too unwieldy, it's too big, it costs too much money. This idea that countries are spending tens of billions of dollars to stage an event the last three weeks or whatever it is, and then everyone goes home again. There's just something that rubs me the wrong way. I think it needs to be radically re-imagined. It should be in one place or just rotate among three cities. It needs to be broken up so it's more manageable.

This is all kinds of, I think it's sort of a little bit out of control at the moment. And the idea that we would have, we're having games in like places where the weather is completely inhospitable to authentic performance. I mean, it's just not, it's nuts. You're gonna have a marathon in Rio or Japan

in the middle of the summer, like, are we nuts? Well, if you're gonna talk about extricating politics from the Olympics, I mean, let's begin with how they select the cities, right? Is the most overtly political thing there is. Yeah, no, I think it should be in like, it should be like in, it should be in Oslo. They have a ton of money, the Norwegians.

I don't know if they have enough hotel rooms, but the weather is nice and cool in the summer. Stick it in Oslo and just say, we're all going to Oslo over four years. And shouldn't it just be in Athens for every summer games? No, because it's too hot. Yeah, but that is the history of the games, right? But you can't make it impossible

for people to run their events. Wasn't Mexico City in like October? Yeah, it was pushed. It was weird, right? It was later in the year. Because of, they wanted the Mexican, there's many reasons. If one rumor thing is they want the Mexican government needed more time to get there.

The country was being racked by protests and they wanted a chance to get it under control. But I thought it was also- Which has to do with the money being spent on the Olympic games and not on the populace. But would there be a weather reason? No, because Mexico City is at altitude, it shouldn't be a, not a terribly hot place in the summer.

Right, I just thought it was, I didn't understand why it was later in the year than typical. The other character that we haven't talked about is Lee Evans. Yeah. And he creates a no-win situation for himself despite winning a gold medal.

Well, he had the bad fortune to come after the 200 meters. So he's a 400 meter runner and the world's greatest 400 meter runner at the time. And his final is after the 200 meters. So after basically Carlos and Tommy Smith have burned the place down and the whole world is in uproar over what they've done.

They're sent home. They're sent home. And the US team was almost, I mean, if they weren't sent home, the US team was looking at possibly the entire team having to go home. Would Brundage really have done that? I've thought about that. He would have destroyed the games to do that.

But Smith's like, so everyone's looking at Smith and like, or Evans and like, all right, Lee, you're up next, you're part of the same group. You're probably gonna win the gold medal. What are you gonna do on the stand? And he has a kind of full-fledged breakdown before the 400 meters. You know, a crowd of journalists like mobbing him

and there's like, and Bud Winter kind of takes him aside and does the same thing he had to do with Tommy Smith, nurses him back to kind of psychological health before the final. And Smith, Bud Winter has this, he says, turns to him at one point, this is like hours before the final and Smith, Bud Winter has this, he says, turns to him at one point, this is like hours before the final and said,

Lee, you can't even, you couldn't run to the corner store to get a pint of milk right now. That's how kind of in, he's just overwhelmed with the pressure of the moment. And he takes him back to his room and like, they go through all their meditative techniques and he kind of restores his state of mind. And Evan goes out there and sets a world record that would not be broken for, I think more than 20 years. It's one of the, was one of the great track and field.

He just has a sensational performance. And he does on the victory stand, a muted version of the protest that Smith and Carlos do. He kind of finds a middle ground, but it's just a kind of, so he doesn't go, he doesn't produce the iconic moment that Smith and Carlos does, but he sort of doesn't have to,

because what he's saying is he continues the kind of, the tradition and makes it plain that he's also making a statement. Yeah, I mean, a couple observations on that. I mean, first, the pressure alone just to perform at the Olympic games when you're expected to win a gold medal is beyond what most of us can imagine. And then to layer on top of that,

all the political ramifications of what he might or might not do on the podium. I mean, how do you not have your head just explode? They're worried they're gonna get shot. They're getting death threats left and right. They think that when you stand up on that podium, someone's gonna take out a gun and a sniper is gonna.

I mean, the thing with Tommy, when he pulled his grind, he thought that he might've been shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a legit fear. I mean, how crazy is that? A legit fear for a runner in a race at the Olympics is that someone's gonna take them out, someone's gonna kill them.

But that's, it takes us back to 68. Not only was the long hot summer in America, 67, where the whole country seemed like they were in flames, but just weeks before the Olympic games in Mexico, the city was in lockdown. There was massive, there's a massacre, 10 days before the games open. There's a massacre at a big square in Mexico city

where the army just takes out a bunch of students who are protesting. I mean, we don't know how many were killed in that but it could have been over a hundred people it's just a sort of like it's just hard for us to wrap our minds around how crazy and uh the kind of that period was and here are these and their kid you know I don't use use the word kids lightly but Evans and Smith and Carlos they're they're 19 and 20 years old I and they're kids, I don't use the word kids lightly, but Evans and Smith and Carlos, they're 19 and 20 years old. I mean, they're not like,

and they're suddenly thrust onto the world stage in the middle of all of this maelstrom. It's amazing, it's just the whole thing is just kind of blows me away. So Evans wears a beret as he's walking up onto the podium, but then he takes it off when they play the anthem. And so that becomes a situation in which certain people think that he went too far and another group of people

think that he didn't do enough. And so he's really pleasing nobody in this act, in the moment, and then has a really hard time for the rest of his life. Like these guys can't get jobs. Like they really, you know, suffer. Yeah. They pay the price in like a really material way.

Yeah. No, it's, I mean, the sacrifice is real in a way that it's, you know, I mean. It was just you're angry black men go away. And there's a whole debate over, you know, what the fist meant. Did it mean black power? I mean, Lee Evans was saying that I'm doing, that was kind of a black debate over, you know, what the fist meant, did it mean black power? I mean, Lee Evans was saying that I'm doing,

that was kind of a black Panther move, right? To wear the beret, whereas Tommy and John, that was about, they were trying to convey, you know, this sense of like solidarity with humanity that got twisted and misinterpreted. It's important to remember just what a kind of bogeyman the Black Panther movement was in the late 60s. I mean, many white Americans were truly terrified

of the notion that there would be a radical, armed radical violent part of the civil rights movement. And that's what the Black Panthers were. They were the radical arm of this kind of fight for social justice. And they did engage in acts of violence and they did, and they, people were completely terrified of them. So the idea that Lee Evans would employ symbolism

of the Black Panthers in, as he made his way to the podium in the 40 meters was a kind of, it's, freaked a lot of people out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting when you think about that in juxtaposition with modern day versions of this, like I'm thinking of Steve Kerr's press conference and how that really just seemed to resonate

across the board in a powerful way. Like does that, and he's a white man, so it's different qualitatively, but does that happen without the legacy of all these prior acts of courage? Yeah, I don't think it does. Kurz, interesting and special because his own father of course was assassinated

in a terrorist act. And he, although I mean, my reaction to Kerr is I always wonder why so few NFL and NBA coaches don't follow his lead. He does seem like he's still a little bit lonely out there when he makes those stands. Yeah. You know, Popovich, Greg Popovich has made it clear

that he belongs on the same side as Steve Kerr, but that's only, there's a long list of NBA coaches who keep their mouth shut. And I don't know why. And it's interesting, the differences between the various professional leagues, like the NBA versus the NFL, which is a very different animal altogether

because of its customer base essentially, right? Yeah, yeah, no, the NFL. I always feel like the apocalypse could come, global warming could wipe out all of humanity and the NFL will still be playing its games on Sunday. I feel like they are like there's something about them that's never ever gonna change. Yeah, and it's also interesting

how the kind of modern day athlete activist is showing up now. Like it's mostly about mental health now when these sort of transgressive acts, like you have Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka taking a stand for their own kind of personal wellbeing. How do you think about that in relationship to the history? Well, I have to say that there was no controversy

out of in recent Olympic history that baffled me as much as the amount of hostility that Simone Biles attracted when she dropped out of that event. To this day, I don't get it. So- Well, I think it's, you know, when you think about the amateur ideal, then it would be the purview of the athlete

to make that choice because they are an amateur, but now it is so commercialized and commodified. These people are a product and they're expected to perform. And we, as the audience are demanding of that. But she's the greatest there ever was, right? This is what I understand. At what point shouldn't she earn? So it's not like, I don't understand anyone who,

for example, who would feel they have standing to criticize a decision she makes about her own performance. She's the best there ever was. This is like, it's like, it would be like me criticizing Michael Jordan over the way he shot a jump shot. Like, he's Michael Jordan. Like you can't criticize, you know, if he doesn't know,

she's- You're not qualified to make that judgment. She's the goat. And she's doing something which is not a, she's engaged in a sport, which is nuts. I mean, it's like the most dangerous high wire act. And she's doing stuff that no one in the history of the world has ever done in gymnastics.

She makes a call. She has an experience that shakes her and shakes her, this is the toughest athlete that ever walked into a gymnastics arena. And she says, it's in my own best interest not to go on. I would have thought that we would all have just sat there and said, oh my God, like, tell know, tell us more, what can we learn? You know, blah, blah, blah.

And then instead what she gets is this sort of tidal wave of criticism from people who probably haven't even strapped down a pair of running shoes in the last 15 years. Yeah. I just was like completely, I was like, this was one of the lowest moments in American public discourse in a very long time. So what is that?

Is it this sense, this archaic sense that if you're a true competitor, you don't opt out of difficult scenarios? Like what is the, like the antecedent of that? No, I mean, part of this is this idea, and it goes back to Bud Winter. You know, Bud Winter, when he reinvents sprinting, he's confronting a kind of intuitive notion

about what effort looks like. And his point is that our intuitive notion that in order to get the most out of any kind of physical exertion, you have to display obvious effort. You have, he said said that notion is false. That the paradoxically, the best way to run as fast as you can possibly run is not to be,

is not to be, is not to look like you're running as fast and not to act as if you're trying to run as fast as you. You know, that through relaxation comes peak performance. The root of that intuitive notion that you need to look like you're the thing that he was trying to confront is this idea that you can grit and grimace your way through that perseverance, even in the face of pain or difficulty or is always the best course.

That's what a hero is, the person who perseveres, right? And we know, real athletes know that to be false. If you get an injury, the first thing you should do is stop, not persevere. Perseverance is sometimes useful, but the elite athletes knows the difference between wise and unwise perseverance. And I think that there's a class of people

who never, who didn't appreciate that distinction. And what, you know, no one has persevered more than Simone Biles, but she perseveres wisely. She doesn't persevere unwisely. And there's a kind of troglodyte, pre 21st century, pre 20th century notion that doesn't make that crucial distinction. Yeah, there's also, I think a sense of ownership, right? Like we have, you talked about standing,

but like we have this expectation and you need to jump when we say jump, like a strange relationship between audience and athlete that is perverse. Yeah, that is interesting. That the fan by virtue of their fandom feels they have some ownership of the athlete. But that's also a weird idea.

I know, I know. But I love the Bud, the other thing about Bud Winter is he's also doing visualization, right? Which is, that's like key to, I mean, any athlete, now that's like part and parcel of the ABCs of preparing for your sport. But that was kind of revolutionary at the time too. This idea of like, can you be present?

Can you walk through mental, like the whole mental game begins with him. The idea that, yeah. And he teaches it so powerfully that, you know, he got a guy with a groin pulled to set a whole record in the 200 meters. I know. I had one groin up in my life.

It was so terrible. And it takes like nine months for it to heal. And he just takes them out on the track and like calms them down and they do some, you know, 60% effort, some 80% efforts, gets his mind right. And then, you know, it's so beautiful how Tommy walks through like second by second, you know, him being on the starting blocks,

not being able to like warm up his starts, like everybody else, not knowing what's gonna happen. But when the gun goes off, like all the training comes into play and he's able to, like his aperture just like narrows down to what he knows how to do through. But I wonder, it's really interesting because his injury forces him to do the very thing

that Winter's trying to do, which is the best way to run at 100% is not to run at 100%, right? So he's holding himself back and the result of just a little bit, just he won't go right to the, which would be the danger in the Olympic final is that you do push yourself too far, right?

Particularly in a sport like sprinting. So he can't do that. So in a weird way, maybe he's freed up to have the greatest performance of his life. Yeah, yeah. Which is an interesting thing with running in general, right? Because so much of running is about holding back economy.

So this is funny. I once had a conversation, I won't use his name, with a Nobel prize-winning economist who you've probably heard of, who I genuinely like. I've known him for a long time. He's a brilliant, lovely guy, not an athlete.

And he said, he didn't understand. We were talking about running and we're talking about middle distance running. He was like, he found it all baffling. He said, I don't understand why they don't just, you just don't go out and run as hard as you can for as long as you can. And it was, he thought like,

and I was incapable of explaining to him why that was wrong. I couldn't do it. I couldn't, it's like, cause he was, imagine a guy who's never exercised a day in his life, but has an IQ of 200. He's a purely rational. He was like, well, you have X amount of energy.

Surely the danger is that you, you have a hundred points of energy. The danger is you'll finish the race and you'll only have used 90, right? So the best way to ensure you use all a hundred points of energy. The danger is you'll finish the race and you'll only have used 90, right? So the best way to ensure you use all a hundred is just to go as hard as you can for as long as you can. But that's the same mistake you can make with F1, right? Like, well, you know, just get out there

and drive faster than the other guy. And then you learn like, oh my God, this is so complex. And there's so much strategy here and the tires and all of this stuff, right? And you realize like, it's not about that at all. It's the gap between the great privilege of being a journalist is that you learn in the best possible way, how large the gap is

between lay understanding of some field and expert understanding. You always think if you're a lay person under normal circumstances, I think you think that gap is smaller than it actually is. You think, yeah, my doctor knows more about medicine than I do, but I did a Google search before I came and pretty sure what I have is this. And then doctor says, I don't like, are you sure doctor?

We think it's a narrow difference between when you're a journalist and you report stories, what you get as a reminder, every time you pick up the phone and do an interview that your knowledge is way down here. And the person you're talking to his knowledge is way up here. And that gap is 10 times larger than you thought it was when you picked up the phone.

Right, that is what journalism, that's the great gift of journalism. It is an act, it is a discipline that forces, that reinforces humility at every turn. Yeah, is it, what's the theory, the Dunning-Kruger effect where the less you know, the more you think you have command over terrain, right? Journalism is reversed at Kruger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good for the soul. What, you know, when your curiosity is peaked and you think this is something I wanna learn more about and you go into that interviewer mode, like what is your sort of strategy or superpower as an interviewer to get the best out of the person that you're talking to?

Ask dumb questions. Humility. What's that? Which is an act of humility, right? Yes, don't, because you'll discover that very often what you thought it was a dumb question is not dumb at all um and that to the knowledge you presume you already have you probably don't have don't i try not to over script interviews because the most value in an interview comes from the unexpected places the person that you're talking to goes um which again is a version of the same thing. Don't pretend you know, like when I,

sometimes I interview people or I see people who are preparing for an interview and they have, you know, 25 questions written out. Yeah. I think. I'm closing my outline right now. Which is just my security blanket anyway. It's useful. But I would say, are you really so sure

that you know the direction the conversation's going to go? And also, are you sure you want to direct the conversation? Whatever happened to listening and to responding and kind of improvise? The best interviews have an element of improvisation in them. And I'm thinking of some of the ones I did for this season of revisionist history,

where there was some kind of surprising turn. Often it's with emotion that you won't understand the parts of the story that you're eliciting from someone that have a great emotional meaning to them. You have no way of knowing. Yeah. And then when that happens, you need to be prepared to kind of pause and reflect on that emotion as opposed to,

you know, the rookie error in interviewing is that people are so in a hurry to get to the next question that they don't- Of course. You know, pause. Of course. We've both been guests on podcasts where somebody has their list. They're not listening to what you say.

You answer the question, they say, awesome. And then they ask the next, they're thinking about the next question. The problem that I always run into is, you know, is obviously I talk to people and this is what I do. When it's somebody like yourself that I'm really excited to talk to people and this is what I do. When it's somebody like yourself that I'm really excited to talk to, I do have a tendency to over-prepare

because I wanna be on top of everything and it does rob the experience of any surprise. Like if I already kind of know too much, then it boxes you into a corner and where do you go from that? But it takes a level of security to hold yourself back, like in running, right? I'm gonna hold myself back.

I know I could read all this other stuff, but I'm not gonna do that. Do I have enough confidence in my conversational ability to just show up and be present and listen? You go to a dinner party, you don't prepare for a dinner party. You go and you engage with the person. Like, can we have that type of experience

and trust that it will go in the direction that it needs to go? Yeah. Well, you know the, but I don't want you to be too hard on yourself. You know, if I'm- But if I'm doing it, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna obviously listen to the podcast

and understand the terrain and the subject matter. It would be disrespectful to you who's going out of your way to come here and spend time to not do that. Yes, the way I would phrase it is that if preparation is in the, what the best kind of preparation is it simply allows you to understand all the things that you don't know.

So like, for example, if I'm talking to some scientist who's written a research paper, I will totally read the research paper first, but that's only to generate a whole series of questions. Invariably, deep reading of anyone's work usually gives you an insight into all the things that you don't know, the further things, the things that were left unsaid,

the assumptions that weren't, there's people's research or people's work is only a kind of an approximation of their knowledge. It's a little window, right? So if I know, oh, okay, I can see this little piece of it, then I know, oh, I need to ask questions about all of the hidden underpinnings. And then you take all of that

and you do your Gladwellian synthesis, like only you can do to create these works, whether written or audio. And I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of the advent, like this explosion in creative audio that you're at the center of. I think it's so interesting, especially in context to, you know, legacy publishing,

what's broken about that, where they're kind of myopic about where, you know, modern audiences place their attention. Well, my, you know, I got interested in sort of rethinking audio because when I got to New York, 20 some odd years ago, I'd ride the subway and everyone would be reading magazines and books. And then five years ago,

I get in the subway and everyone was listening to something with their ears. And I realized, oh, I just lost an audience. And if I don't move from the eyes to the ears, I'm out of a job or at least not out of a job as to, I'm missing, there's a whole group of people I'm just gonna miss. And then my question was, well,

why are the things that we're giving them to listen to so bad? You write a book and you just read the book into a microphone in a closet. It's horrible. It's like, what was it? It's horrible. It's horrible.

Most of those experiences are terrible. And they're generally worse with some like kind of overly trained voice actor reading them. It is amazing. And so we decided we would do, let's do different, let's do real stuff, stuff that's worthy of being listened to. So it can be as simple as in my book,

talking to strangers, it was like a podcast. All of the interviews I did, I have tape and I use that tape. So you, and I used archival tape. If I'm talking about general so-and-so, you hear general so-and-so, you don't hear me saying he said this. When I'm talking about some special kind of bomber,

you're gonna hear the bomber. We did that whole, it's a produced cost 10 times as much. And it's not just a matter of taking what would be appropriate in book form and just vocalizing it. Like these are different mediums that have different priorities in terms of how you bring the best out of this story that you're trying to tell.

They have very different, audio is so much more emotional that it changes. If you're gonna think in terms of telling a story in audio, it changes the kind of story that you can tell. So when I think about podcast episodes, the best podcast episodes I do in revisionist history are episodes that could not be done in print. Just wouldn't, the story wouldn't work,

wouldn't be interesting, wouldn't like, and vice versa. So now there are some that can work, but they tend to be B-level podcast episodes. The great ones. Like I did one a couple of years ago on Elvis. There's a song that Elvis sang and he would always botch the lyrics of it. One with Jack White.

Yeah, with Jack White. And that's one, you can write that, but it's not, it would be interesting, kind of. You had to hear it. You gotta hear Elvis, you gotta hear Jack. I'm in the studio with Jack White. There's this woman named Casey Bowles who sings a song in the middle of that,

where she breaks down in the middle of the thing. Everyone's crying. It's just like, it was just this nuts thing, but you have to hear it, right? It doesn't work on the page. That's the gold standard. Yeah, very difficult to achieve that. I think people under appreciate

how hard it is to do what you do. I mean, you're essentially making documentaries without cameras. You need a team of incredibly skilled people. I mean, I'm sure it's unbelievably time intensive and expensive and very different from the writing process of you going out, interviewing people and sitting at your desk

and writing something. This is a team effort, right? So suddenly you have to be a manager of people and you have to be in meetings and it's a whole different kind of personality trait that you have to leverage to make these things. It's really fun. I mean, it's just- I heard you say something like,

like now you have to be in all these meetings and you're like, this is fantastic. You know, like I get to talk to people, right? I mean, most writers aren't like, they've completely constructed their lives to avoid that. Yeah, I have a great team and we have a lot of fun and we do, every year we try and do a reporting trip. I take two of my producers, We went last year, we went,

cause I did an episode on these dogs that can sniff for COVID. Right. And we went to this- I remember that. Place in Alabama, the hills of Alabama. We had such a blast. And then this year we went to,

we have an episode that's all about, you know, the woman who wrote, Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With The Wind, was killed in a drunk driving crash. And so we went to Atlanta. We love all these trips, I end up going to Atlanta, because I love Atlanta.

But we ended up going to her, all of her papers were in Atlanta. Then we went to the second half of the story, it's too hard to explain now, but it's all about the original A Star Is Born movie. And the papers of that are at the University of Georgia in Athens. So we did this really fun road trip where we were like

wandering around Atlanta, recreating the crash scene and going to Athens and reading like, you know, through a hundred year old files. And it was just like, we enjoy ourselves. Yeah, it just seems like such a heavy lift. Like I just know I do the simplest version of this possible and I know how much it consumes my life. Like to hear that, like, how do you, you go out,

you do all that, you have to bring it back. You gotta listen to all of it. You gotta figure out what is the narrative here. Yeah. Like that is, that's a challenge I would imagine. Okay, I won't be able to do it for, it's cut into either, although I don't mean to, it's fun. It just, and it's like all things,

it gets much easier the longer you do it. And remember before I started podcasting, I had two previous careers. One is a newspaper reporter, one is a magazine writer. And they were enormously, that kind of preparation is incredibly useful. So the thing you learn, I was 20 years a newspaper reporter

and what you learn in being a newspaper reporter is efficiency. It's all about efficiency. So it's about how quickly can I master a subject? How quickly can I spot a story? How quickly can I represent the story? And those, I am still, that was a 20 year long masterclass. And I'm still living off those lessons I learned.

Right, where there's no room for writer's block. You're just bowling forward at all times. Yeah, and that idea of zeroing in on very quickly on where you think the gold is. That's what you learn as a, I don't even know how you would learn it any other way, but you're getting so many reps. You're writing, you know, you might write four, five,

six stories a week for 20 years. Yeah. Actually, I was a newspaper reporter for 20 years. I was a newspaper reporter for 10. I always make, I always doubled it. It was 10 years, 10 years. Yeah. Actually, I was a newspaper reporter for 20 years. I was a newspaper reporter for 10. I always make, I always doubled it. It was 10 years, 10 years. Is that a senior moment? Well, I'm conflating it with my magazine stuff.

It was 20 years of newspaper and magazine. Right. And so how does that leave you? Like I know Bomber Mafia was audio book first, right? So how do you think about print media now? Like when you consider that you can reach so many people through the audio products and you can do this fun, creative stuff and really,

you know, elevate storytelling in a way that, you know, nobody else is doing right now, you know, is there still, you know, an inclination to, you know, write a book book or is it just like audio is where it's at? This is what I'm hearing now. No, I think, because I think, it works in, it's very hard to turn a written work

into a compelling bit of audio if you don't have all the tape and all that thing, but you can go in the other direction. So if you list, if you read Talking to Strangers, for example, bomber mafia but talking to strangers was a book i wrote uh and from the beginning i had the notion that i was going to create one of our kinds one of our kinds of special audiobooks it was going to be an audio experience so i was collecting all the tape and and the way if you read the and the way the book

is written is very much in, it's written as if I'm reading it to you. It's written in a conversational form. And that, I think it totally works as a print book. It feels a little different. It feels more personal and emotional. But if you go in that direction from audio to print, I think that works.

It's just hard to go in the other direction. Well, that also depends on what kind of book it is. Yeah. Doesn't it? Well, Talking to Strangers was a very emotional book. It was a series of these very compelling narratives. So yeah, I did for that kind of book, it works. You couldn't do a economics textbook now. Right, right, right.

But it is interesting how entrenched legacy media is in the way that they've always done things. Like I know when I wrote my first book in like 2012, it wasn't even clear that there would be an audio book. It was, I almost had to talk them into it. And then I did it and the audio outsells the print. And yet they still haven't really, now they take it more seriously

when you're negotiating your deal, right? They understand the value of the audio book when not that long ago, it was like this cast away afterthought, but still they don't wanna put the time or the resources into kind of creating something of quality. It's just go in a booth and read the thing. It drives me crazy.

I know, right? You'd think they would like, oh, this is the future. We need to figure out how to like, you know, be exceptional at this. Yeah. But they just, they kind of usually, sometimes they do it in-house or they just find some third-party company

to kind of do it for them. Rich, I hope you call up Pushkin Industries next time you have a audio book you wanna do. I will definitely do that. Cause you know, the more audio you do, you realize like, oh, this is, there's so much room for creativity here that is untapped. And clearly, you know, Pushkin and your team,

like you've realized this, you're an early mover in this space, but I think you've only just, you know, tapped the tip of the iceberg of what's possible. I mean, we did, the Paul Simon book we did is a good example of this, where it wouldn't work at all as a print book. It was so far in the audio direction

where we just simply, I called up Paul Simon and I said, I have an idea. Let me, me and my friend Bruce, let us come to you and sit down and just have conversations and just see where it goes. And he said, yes, to my surprise. And so we went 10 times. We met with Paul Simon in his various places,

wherever he was in the world. And we would encourage him to have a guitar in his hands and we would record it. And we were just like, see what happens. We'd have these four, we had 10, five hour conversations and it's magic. We turned it into a six hour audio book called Miracle and Wonder.

And it is unlike any other audio book I've ever listened to. I won't be so immodest as to say it's better. It's different. It's like, it's not really a book. It's edited conversations. And then I give kind of, I wrote sort of riffs on trying to make sense of, you know, there's a first chapter is,

what does it mean that he grew up in Queens in the fifties? Does that shape the kind of music that he ends up making? I think it does. So we talked to him or what's the significance in retrospect of Graceland? White guy goes to South Africa in early 1980s and wants to sit down with South African musicians and create something he doesn't know. He can't tell you what it is

because he hasn't figured any. He just thinks it would be fun to sit down. Now that has political implications, social implications, it's the middle of apartheid, creative implications. He produces one of the greatest albums of the 20th century. Like, how do we think about that in 2022? Like, so there's all this kind of really cool things that come up when you're talking to someone like that.

He's been musically relevant in five decades. How's that possible? Right, the thesis being that, you know, he's perhaps the greatest rock star of our time because of his ability to maintain relevance over so many decades. Yeah, so this is a little hobby horse of mine, Rich. When it comes to- I know where this is going.

Go ahead. When it comes to- I know where this is going, go ahead. When it comes to evaluating, it's particularly true of athletes and artists. When it comes to evaluating the greatness of elite performers, we overemphasize peak performance and underemphasize longevity. So I sometimes participate in the web, let's run running website.

Yes, well, this came up in your, in the kind of extended blog post interview that you did with David Epstein and then let's run kind of erupted in outrage over your thesis here. They are so wrong and I am so right. So I said that the Myler, Nick Willis, quote, does not belong in the same conversation as Matt Centruetz.

Otherwise Willis is up here, Centruetz is a step below. Even though, and everyone said, well, Matt Centruetz won the gold medal in the 1500 meters. How can you say that Nick Willis, who has never won a gold medal in any games, is his equal? And I would say, well, the answer is that Matt Centruetz had one great shining moment, that gold medal.

And he was a relevant runner for a kind of three, four year window and had one very, very fast 1500 meters that he ran. Nick Willis was relevant for 15 years. His top, he had a, he doesn't have a gold, but he had a silver and a bronze in two separate Olympics

separated by a lot of years. He was a threat to win almost any race he entered from, you know, for over a decade. His top three times are all faster than Matt Sentulis' times. He's broken four minutes for the mile in 20 consecutive years. And I think as a culture,

we are somehow dismissive of long periods of elite performance and infatuated with brief windows of extraordinary elite performance. And I think that's wrong. Right. Well, of course, being, you know, as we're getting older, we have a longevity bias, right? David accuses you of being, you know, this is, you know, of course you're going to over-index on this because we're getting old, right? David accuses you of being, you know, this is, you know, of course you're gonna over index on this because we're getting old, right? Absolutely, 100%. But it goes back to the beginning of our conversation

when we were talking about kids sports, right? Like we over index on the highest performers and we're not paying attention to how we kind of inject these experiences with joy to create lifelong pursuits. So imagine, you're right, this is exactly the same conversation. Imagine that Rich, I make you the athletic head at one of these local high schools,

and you stand up in front of the entire school on your first day in the job, what is the speech you give, right? Now I'm gonna put words, I know the speech you give, right? Now I'm gonna put words. I know you're gonna write the speech for me. Well, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say, I am here to create in you teenagers, a set of habits around physical exercise

that will stay with you for the rest of your life, right? How to be, I'm gonna teach you, I'm gonna use my job as athletic director to teach you how to live a healthy life by, and you're talking about healthy in a sense of physical exercise, but all those things as well, because that leads you into psychological health,

emotional health, that's your goal. You are not gonna say, I'm gonna try and win as many California state titles over the next five years as I possibly can, right? You're not gonna give that. And the tragedy is that everybody else who gets that job says, I'm here to win as many California titles as I can over the next five years.

Everyone should give the speech you give. That is the speech that's not being given and we are suffering as a country, as a society, as a result. We look around you. 1% of the population in middle age is practicing healthy habits. Why is that? Because no one bothered to teach them at the moment when those habits need to be taught, right? So this whole, my argument about Nick Willis, the idea of having a standard of performance that spans 20 years,

that matters, why? Because Nick's gonna be, when he's 70, Nick's gonna be healthy and running and competing in. And that's what I want. I don't care whether he's winning at 70, but the idea that he could put together a portfolio of running that starts in his teens and ends in his 70s is something that makes me so just proud to be part of the same group of runners

as he is. Well, the animating force behind longevity is joy, right? Like you can't have a long standing career at a high bar, unless you're enjoying what you're doing, right? So we have seen, you know, outstanding excellent performances from people who reached the very peak, but then they burn out or they hate what they're doing and they walk away from it,

never to participate in it again. So how do you ignite that level of joy and connection to that pursuit that keeps you going? So at your age, you're still interested in running and training and all of those things, and it brings joy and community into your life. And if there's a great performance, every once in a while that comes out of that, great.

If not, who cares? So I like that argument. It is, it's very Gladwellian, of course. It's orthogonal to like the way that we think about these things. But there is, you can, you can't be, you can't be intellectually honest about this unless you recognize that that occasional, you know,

outstanding performer is the kind of spark that inspires us all, right? Like for, you need the Michael Phelps's and the LeBrons to set this bar that, you know, kind of gets us excited about maybe engaging in that sport to begin with. Yes. I'm not saying that I'm opposed to.

I mean, look at how much you talk about these fantastic track and field athletes. Obviously these are important to you. They are, but I also recognize that that set of values applied to the body of the sport are counterproductive. So what I'm arguing is, it goes back to the conversation we have in the very beginning about cross country teams

should have 20 people on them and the 20th person should matter as much as the first. That is not a, I'm not saying we run the world cross country championships that way, but I do think we run the middle school and the high school cross country championships that way. In other do think we run the middle school and the high school cross country championships that way. In other words, it's time for us to understand that there are two very different models here

and that the models can be contradictory and we need to find a way to kind of foster them both. And right now the elite model, the peak performance model is winning. And that is driving a lot of young people out of the sport and discouraging a lot of people and frustrating our attempt to restore the health of our society.

Yeah, and on that subject of health and mental health, as we touched on earlier, did you see the story about Terri McKeever, the head women's swimming coach at Berkeley? No. So she's sort of considered the most legendary coach, produced Olympians, world record, blah, blah, blah, for decade after decade after decade.

And now coming out of the woodwork are all of these former athletes of hers telling tales of abuse and eating disorders and suicides and the like, because, you know, that kind of reign was marked by terror. Like these young athletes being so terrified of their coach and that coach holding them to such a high standard that yes, it produces champions,

but it produces a lot of carnage along the way. And I feel like socially, like as a culture, we're reckoning with that kind of legacy modality of coaching in a healthy way, but we're still purging ourselves of, you know, the ills of that kind of philosophy of sport. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have a long way to go in that. I know.

Well, before I let you go, the final thing I can't let you go without asking you about is, so much of your work is about like, as you just illustrated, like looking at things through a different lens or kind of deconstructing conventional wisdom. What else, it doesn't have to be sports related, is like making you nuts right now

or what would you change that you kind of see around you in your daily life? Oh, wow, I mean, the list of things that I'd like to change. There's probably a lot, right? And the world is so long. And we didn't even, I didn't even get to education. That was gonna be like a whole hour of this podcast, so maybe another time.

In the beginning. I guess, you know, I would only say, I would follow up on what we've been talking about, which is I have been thinking really long and hard about competition and when it's useful and when it's not. And I really have, I'm someone who is deeply competitive and who growing up, there was not a game or a sport or a thing

that I didn't try to win at. I'm that kind of person. And now I'm beginning to understand that there are lots of places where that attitude is counterproductive. And that not just in sports, but across all, like I was chatting with my brother. I saw him this weekend.

He was a retired elementary school principal. And I was talking about my obsession with all this relative age effect stuff. And he goes, you know, well, we're talking about possible solutions. He goes, you know, well, we don't have to rank and grade kids under the age of 14 or 15. There's no particular need to.

What's at stake? We can start doing it when, under the age of 14 or 15, there's no particular need to. What's at stake? We can start doing it when, we did start doing high school if you like, but you could just stop grading in elementary school and middle school. You could teach the same things and keep tabs on who's behind. And I just like, it was such a kind of like,

my brother also a very competitive guy was a fantastic athlete in his day. He's not, but you're after 40 years in the public school system, he's as an elementary school teacher and principal. He was like, there's just no point to it. Is this doing more harm than good? Yeah, and that would be very,

that's a really, really useful question to start answering in a lot of domains. That does bring up the education discussion though. So much of education is premised on competition from the way that colleges are ranked and you have a whole thing about that to, you know, the whole kind of ecosystem around getting kids into college and what that means and what that doesn't mean

that is so retrograde in so many ways and does so much damage to young people, especially in this era in which so much of what higher education is about is really detached from what is necessary to be productive in the world. Yeah, yeah. No, there's no, I had a conversation last night with a friend who was trying

to figure out where to send her daughter to school. And she really, she said, well, she really should go to, I think, Colorado, Boulder.

What's the, some college in Boulder. UC Boulder. Probably, you know, cause she's outdoorsy. She likes, but when I suggested that

to my daughter, she burst into tears cause her daughter wants to go to a school that other people think is a good school for her. Like it's so weirdly detached that, you know, objectively this is a place where she would be happy. And yet she doesn't wanna go there

because the world tells her that you have to go to a place that's ranked, you know, one through 25. Right, and schools being brands and these brands, you know, have a lot of power and resonance in a way that is, you know, really damaging to a lot. I mean, we're gonna get, that's a whole thing. Yeah. Maybe do that another time.

I had a conversation with Adam Grant. We love to have these arguments every now and again. And I was thinking about what I would like to do is in a very subversive way, screw up the whole system. And I said to Adam, what if you created schools that had totally arbitrary admissions criteria? So what if you had a school where you said, all right, in order to get into this, be considered for admission to our school, you've got to be able to break six minutes in a mile for men and for women, you know, 630, let's just say. We want to, well, let's have the bar a little lower,

higher for women. Like just random shit like that and see what happens. Well, if you specific, if you've got someone like Adam to design the testing, right? You could like select for the kind of people that would get along with each other and benefit from being in each other's company. Would you like to go to an academically rigorous school

that was made up a hundred percent of competitive athletes? Right. When I say competitive, people who like to, people who take athletics seriously. I actually think that would be super interesting. I don't know. Would I learn something different

than the random school I went to? Yeah, I think so. We're trying. Yeah, yeah. Then making that a reality is a whole different to? Yeah, I think so. We're trying. Yeah, yeah. Then making that a reality is a whole different thing. I know. Thank you, Malcolm Gladwell. I really appreciate your time.

Super fun to talk to you. Thank you, Rich. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's fantastic. Legacy of Speed, Pushkin Industries. You can find it wherever you listen to fine podcasts and you can find, Malcolm's pretty easy to find on the internet. I don't think anyone's gonna have any trouble

tracking you down. You got a newsletter. What else do you wanna draw people's attention to? Provisionist History. Season seven. Season seven drops this coming Friday, June 30th. Right, and it's all about experiments, right? It's not out as of the moment we're recording this,

but I'm looking forward to that. Anything that involves Australian swimmers, I'm in. Yeah, it's all about experiments, right? It's not out as of the moment we're recording this, but I'm looking forward to that. Anything that involves Australian swimmers, I'm in. Yeah, it's all there. Cool, well, come and talk to me again sometime, I hope. Thank you, thank you. All right, peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra,

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