The Tim Ferriss Show - #168: Dissecting the Success of Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: June 21, 2016

Malcolm Gladwell (@gladwell) is the author of five New York Times bestsellers -- The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine and one of the Foreign Policy's Top Global Thinkers. He has explored how ideas spread in the Tipping Point, decision making in Blink, the roots of success in Outliers, and the advantages of disadvantages in his latest book David and Goliath. In his latest podcast project, Revisionist History, Gladwell examines the way the passage of time changes and enlightens our understanding of the world around us. In this in-depth, in-person conversation, we cover a ton, including: His research and writing process How he learned to ask good (and "dumb") questions Favorite books Routines, habits, and tools How he pulls together seemingly unrelated stories into a cohesive theme (and eventually a book) Philosophies related to public speaking His obsession with running Why he eats as little as possible in the mornings And much more... Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com This podcast is brought to you Gymnastic Bodies. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment. Coach Sommer appeared on a previous episode of the podcast, which turned into a sleeper hit. He is the former USA national team coach for men's gymnastics and creator of this bodyweight-based training system. I'm not easily impressed, and I have been completely blown away by the sophistication and the elegance of his programming. I have been using Gymnastic Bodies for just a few months now, and I already feel more flexible and stronger than I have in years. Check it out GymnasticBodies.com/tim, where you'll find the Fundamentals course for diagnosing your weakest areas and those you can tweak for fast improvements. It is incredible. Take a look at GymnasticBodies.com/tim for more details and a large discount. ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Quick sound check. Malcolm, can you tell me what you had for breakfast, please? I had a cappuccino and a third of a croissant. Third of a croissant. Do you divvy it up over three days or is that just, was it a bad croissant? No, I love croissants, but I feel like one, I don't, I think one should eat a minimum, the absolute minimum in the morning. I don't think you should eat a lot in the morning.

Oh, we will explore that further. Thank you. Optimal, minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

Me, Tim, Ferris, Joe. Chris Gellar. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free

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offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and squirrels. It is a late night in New York City. And the echo is from within the walls of a fine establishment, otherwise known as a hotel, that I'm calling my abode for this evening. Molly is curled up. All the children are snug in their beds with visions of sugar plums. No, that's not why we're here. This is the Tim Ferriss show and welcome to another episode where it is my job to deconstruct world-class experts and world-class performers so that we can borrow their habits, routines, tools, test them ourselves, improve how we perform

in our personal and professional lives. And this episode features Malcolm Gladwell. I've wanted to interview Malcolm quite a long time and it finally happened. We had a proper sit down. We've bumped into each other before a few times, but this was the first in-depth conversation and we cover a lot. Malcolm Gladwell, at Gladwell on Twitter, say hi, is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, mega bestsellers, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw,

and David and Goliath. He's been named one of the 100 most influential people by Time Magazine. He has explored how ideas spread, decision-making, the roots of success, the advantages of disadvantages. And in his latest podcast project, Revisionist History, which I highly recommend, Gladwell examines the way the passage of time changes and enlightens our understanding of the world around us. He also revisits certain aspects of history that perhaps we should take another look at. And in this wide-ranging, in-depth, in-person conversation, we cover a ton, including his research and writing process, how he learned to ask good questions, favorite books, routines,

habits, tools, how he puts together or pulls together, rather, seemingly unrelated stories into a cohesive theme and eventually a book, his obsession with running, why he eats as little as possible in the mornings, and much more. It is highly tactical. There are some hilarious and great stories, some very surprising stuff that I am sure you have not heard anywhere else. And that is all I have to say about that. So please say hi to him on Twitter at Gladwell. And I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Thanks for listening. Malcolm, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tim.

I really appreciate you making the time. And I know we've bumped into each other a few times over the years. I remember, I want to say the first time was at a salon that Peter Thiel put together about like religion, ethics, and morality or something like that. Oh, right. It was ages ago. Years ago. Years ago. And I remember showing up and Oren Hoffman, who had co-hosted the event, was a friend of mine was like, Hey, would you mind just like improv-ing and speaking at this event for a few minutes about X, Y, or Z? We haven't decided on the topics yet. And I said, sure. Then I showed up and I see Malcolm Gladwell. I see some award-winning, you know, voted favorite teacher of the decade, Harvard professor. And that's when I started drinking really heavily. So I suspect it was a poor performance on my part. In preparation for this,

because I've been looking forward to it, I pinged Stephen Dubner for economics, mutual friend, and his response was short. It was fun! He's a great talker. He likes to talk about writing, running, fast cars, not golf, being Canadian. Sorry, I got to run. Something along those lines and he took off. And I was planning to speak with you about at least one or two of those. And I thought we could start with writing. Okay. What have been the easiest and hardest books for you to write? Well, uh, that's an interesting question. Um, I don't find writing or to the extent that I find writing, I link hard and fun. So if it's not hard, it's not fun. Um, so I never think about writing in terms of hard and easy. I think about it in terms of fun and not fun.

So which one was the most fun? Probably the last two, mostly because I wrote the first book while I was still working pretty much full time at the New Yorker. So I just didn't have a lot of time. And that makes it less fun. You can't really kind of savor it and appreciate it. But the last two, I took as much time as I needed and deliberately dragged it out because I was enjoying myself so much. So I think that's probably the last two books were the, were the, so that, does that mean the last two were the hardest? The hardest slash most fun. Yes, I think they were. Because I was trying to do, tell better stories. I became convinced about 15 years ago or so that I, if I was to develop as a writer, I had to be a better storyteller. And so those,

the outliers in What the Dogs Saw were books where I was really, really trying to do a better job. Sorry, and David and Goliath, where I was really trying to do a better job of telling good stories. Who do you, are there any people who come to mind, fictional or otherwise, who are good storytellers? Yeah, Michael Lewis is the gold standard. Michael Lewis. And that's, it was actually in reading Michael Lewis that I realized that I wanted to be,

you can't be him any more than you can, you know, you can't say, I watched Steph Curry play basketball and I decided that's the kind of basketball player I want to be. Like, you know, you can try and, you can be inspired by him. You could pattern your play after him, but you can't be him. That only, you know, that's impossible. So I have tried to, I was inspired by Michael Lewis to get better, but I am not on his level. Well, I think both of you are very, very good at taking what could be dense, impenetrable material or overwhelming material and making it a story that is easy to consume.

I mean, as storytelling and consuming machines. He tells, I tell a million stories in one book. He tells one story. That's so much harder. What makes that harder? Cause you have to go to a level and complexity and have confidence. What happens is that I lose confidence in the reason I tell lots of stories that I don't have the confidence to keep going with the same one. I think, oh, I, everyone must be losing interest. I got to switch and do something else now. Michael doesn't have that problem. I mean, he, he has the kind of panache to say, I'm going to tell you a story about a guy basically trying to do high speed, kind of take on the high speed traders. And I will,

we're going to do this for 200 pages and you're going to love it. Like I, I don't, I can't start with that. That's part of the reason I also write my books in, and I'm not in any way comparing myself to you or, uh, you have every right to, I'm a writer who, or I'm a teacher who dabbles in writing and sometimes put stuff down that's intelligible. But the way that I tend to non-linearly write my books and encourage people to consume it in a non-linear way is precisely for that reason. Because I worry that if in some cases I can keep something interesting for 15, 20 pages, but I lack the confidence that I can do it for 200 or 300. Yeah. It takes that, you gotta be, you gotta be good to pull off that

feat, particularly with the sorts of topics that he chooses, which are, you know, esoteric. He wrote, he wrote a gripping thriller about credit swaps and derivatives. I mean, that's not easy. Not easy at all. Uh, I mean, then you have sabermetrics and he's so consistent. The, uh, next question I wanted to ask was, uh, related related to, it's a perennial topic, of course, but writer's block and, or anything that you might consider something like that. And it's related to the kind of module choose your own adventure like way in which I write myself, which is one way that I can put something on the shelf if I'm having trouble with it and move on to something else. It doesn't have to be sequential. Do you run into writer's block? If so,

how does that manifest and what do you, what do you do? Or do you get stuck? Well, I don't, you know, I worked for 10 years at a newspaper and if that experience teaches you anything, it's that you can't have writer's block. I mean, you quite literally can't, I mean, the story will be, you'll start the story at 1030 and it's due at four or 430 or whatever. Back in those days, there was hard deadlines. So you can't have, I mean, it's unthinkable.

I mean, you don't have the luxury. And if you went to your bosses and you said, I'm blocked on the story, they would look at you like you were insane. Take off your beret, put down your poetry. You have a job to do. So it's like, there's not even an issue. So, I mean, I did used to have these issues and then I went to the Washington Post

and you get cured in a hurry of any pretensions you have about your writing. And you just keep typing. I mean, it's not, there's no kind of alternative. And luckily that I have those habits that I learned over that 10 years at the Washington Post, they've stayed with me. And so I never... And also, you know, writing to me is only... Writing a book is maybe 20% writing and 80% organization, logistics. So I will think about something.

For every hour I spend writing, I spend three hours thinking about writing. So usually when I'm writing, first of all, it's a tiny period. And secondly, it's all worked out already. I mean, I'm just putting down on the page what has already been kind of figured out in my head. Where does, where do you,

now is that true also for a shorter piece and say the New Yorker? Yeah, I will have not all of it, but, uh, I know what I'm doing before I start, or I know what the pieces are. Could you give an example of, uh, any piece or any book where it started and what the process was for you in getting to the point that you're then putting words down on paper? And the reason I ask is that I'm, I am fascinated by structure. I don't think I'm particularly gifted at it, but I did, uh, long ago took a class with John McPhee, one of your colleagues, staff writer at the New Yorker and his, his grasp and approach to structure is just incredible.

Uh, at least the way that he visualizes his structure, but he has a very particular process. I can't follow his say day to day schedule, which is basically sitting in front of a blank piece of paper from like eight in the morning to 6 PM, whether anything's written or not, which would lead me to just want to throw my head through a window.

What, uh, can you give us any origins story of, uh, any, uh, so, uh, I mean, some are easy. I did a story for the New Yorker last fall about, um, a school shooter in Minnesota. And there I, that was super easy because I wanted to write about school shootings. I start rooting around the internet and I find this criminal complaint and transcript,

transcript of a interrogation of a kid who was caught basically in the act. A would-be school shooter caught in the act and he gives this, it's like 60 pages. And it's this absolutely extraordinary account of what he was thinking and what he was planning to do and why he was planning to do it.

And when you find something like that, I mean, your job's done, right? So you're like, oh, I'm going to tell this story. And then I'm going to step away only to kind of put that story in broader context. So those are rare. That wrote itself. That's rare. What's harder are things that have a less obvious structure. So my book, Outliers, began with, there was a chapter in that book about Jewish lawyers, about this curious fact that the group, the kind of core group of Jewish lawyers in New York City who rose to prominence in the 60s and 70s and basically kind of take over corporate law in the city all had strikingly similar backgrounds.

And so that's the first chapter I wrote in Outliers. That sort of is where I began that book because I met one of those lawyers was the father of a friend of mine. I met him and I talked to him. I was like, oh, wait a minute. They're all of his buddies. They're all from the same part of the Bronx. They all were born in practically the same year. They all went to City College.

They all went to NYU Law School. They all started in the same kind of firms. I mean, it's the same story again and again and again. And if you think about it, I mean, if one were, I don't know why one would, but if one were to study that book, Outliers, you would discover that almost all of the themes that I explore in that book are present in the story of the Jewish lawyers.

So everything is there. So I reported that story. I wrote that chapter. I thought about it. I was like, oh, okay, all the strands I'm interested in are there. I'm going to pull out strand after strand and write chapters about them. Did it start off in your head as a chapter in a perspective book, or was it a standalone?

No, it was, I wanted to write a book about successful people. And so it was always going to be a chapter in the book, but it was just a great, I don't know, it was just a lucky place to start because when you could start with one of those, I don't know if that's the best chapter in the book, but it is functionally the most important chapter in the book. Because it had all the macro elements in the micro.

Yes, and that's the gold standard when you can have that kind of you can begin on that kind of note um other ones have been much more difficult because they haven't had that now let's say you have that story uh you have that chapter how do you go out or go about rather collecting and let me take a step backwards. How did you, what tools were you using to query and find this 60 page transcript of the would-be school shooter? I honestly don't remember. I was, I was screwing around on the internet. I was interested in school shootings. I don't even know how, I mean, this was, there was zero coverage of this case. It was in the local Minnesota press.

That's it. I'd never heard of it. The kid was caught before he did anything. So it never made national headlines. And the transcript is just on the website of the local DA. So it's like, and I don't know how I found it. I can't remember. I just found it. I'd be so curious to, I'd be so curious to know. I would love to know now too. I

just, it was one of those, but other cases, like in my podcast, for example, one of the episodes I liked the most, two episodes actually touching this question. So one is an episode, I think it's the eighth or ninth episode, it's called Generous Orthodoxy. And it's the story of a 98-year-old Mennonite pastor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who takes on his church. And I come from a very Mennonite area in Ontario. Many of my friends and brother's friends are Mennonites. My brother's a Mennonite. My parents could have been. You know, I know that world really well. I go home at Christmas, and everyone's talking about this guy.

And when I say everyone, there's only a number of Mennonites in North America. It's very small. It's a very small, you know, evangelical Protestant sect, denomination. But they're talking about this letter this guy wrote. It's got a lot of Facebook likes for them, you know, and he's 98. And so I read the letter, and I'm like, oh, my goodness. What an extraordinary letter. So I track down the guy.

I interview him, like, a week later. Go out to drive out to Lancaster. And I look at the transcript, and I say, well, what's this about? And I realize that what's this about? And I realize that what it's about is how to protest. He's a guy who is so wise and it's an extraordinary interview. It's like, again, I did nothing. It's one of those cases where he's just amazing.

I stumbled into this. It's 10 o'clock at night on a cold Saturday night in January. I'm in this little tiny house on the turnpike in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, talking to a 98-year-old guy. And it's one of those amazing interviews where it's just all there. I don't have to do anything. And I'm crying by the end. I mean, it's just insane.

So I go home and I look at it and it's like, well, I want to make a podcast about this. And what's amazing now is I'm not writing this up in print. I'm using this man's own words, which because he's so insanely moving, powerful, you know, it's just like so much better that I can hear his voice. And so the question is, what does this story need to be finished? Not a lot, right? Just a little bit to put it in context. So there's a case where you stumble across something and your role, your only role is not to screw it up, right? Don't screw it up. Don't bury it. Just put him out

there, tell the story, and then just find some other little element that makes it clear what to the listener, what it's about. Um, so that's actually, it's my favorite revisionist history, um, episode for that reason. It's just so pure and simple. When you have, let's say in the case of the outlier chapters or chapter rather on the Jewish lawyers, how do you capture your notes and organize your notes on something like that? Oh. What tools do you use? I mean, I just, I mean, it's going to sound so old school. I transcribe the interview, print out the transcript,

and underline the parts I like, and then move them into a file. And do you move, what, is it a Word file? How do you, what type of file is it? I know this is getting very... It's a Word file, yeah. Just like move from one Word file to the next Word file. I don't even use Google Docs. I mean, I vaguely recently got into Google Docs, but the process is interesting to me. So if you take these quotes, how,

what qualifies, and this may seem like a, a sort of infantile question, but how do you, what qualifies as interesting? Yeah, no, it's not an infantile question.

That is in fact the core question, the whole, to the extent that a writer deserves his or her paycheck, it comes down to how good are they at looking through, at something like looking through a transcript and understanding what's interesting, right? If you can't do that, you can't kind of, you have to sort of visualize what the story is going to become

before it has become anything. So you might be dealing with a document that is 20,000 words, right? Which is, or even longer, could be 30,000 words, which is enormous. I mean, a book, my books are 75,000 words. I mean, so you're dealing with a single interview that might be, you know, a third of a book in length. And you have to distill out of that,

I don't know, a couple thousand words. So, you know, that process can take days. And I initially go through and I simply delete all of the stuff that's clearly, that clearly doesn't belong, just a dead space. And then I just take repeated passes, pruning, pruning, pruning until what I'm left with is what, until I know the interview almost by heart. And then when I'm, what i'm left with is the stuff that matters if you don't transcribe it yourself it's so much harder right you really there's enormous benefits to taking the huge amount of time necessary to transcribe it yourself to transcribe yourself and once you have these nuggets, these various highlights, how do you determine what starts a chapter?

Or a book for that matter. Yeah, that's the other thing. That's another thing that kind of qualifies you as a writer. The truth is that there are so many ways you can do it. There's so many answers to the problem that I don't get too hung up on it. I sort of think that it's not a math question where there's only one answer. So as long as you understand there's not just one good answer, it takes the pressure off. But typically, you know, I might try out several openings. I don't get, it's made easier by the fact that I don't start at the beginning.

So once you don't start at the beginning, your life just gets so much simpler. So on that point, so I have a tendency to always try the, and I think this has become a bit of a crutch for me because it seems to work well, but, uh, it's become a bit of a trope if that's the right word for me, where I'm always doing in media rests, right? So I'm always taking some exciting moment right in the middle of X that then requires explanation. And I get into that later in the piece, but I found myself doing that effectively all the time, not to turn this into like a writer doctor consultation, but do you ever find yourself doing that? And you're like, you know what? This recipe works, but I want to play with other recipes or. Well, that's why I wanted to do a podcast like this so much, which was that with a podcast,

you're still storytelling, but suddenly the, the list of considerations is different. It really matters how good your tape is, how powerful the voices are, how meaningful the interaction you have with the person you're interviewing is. So all those things, do you have archival tape that is incredibly powerful? So, you know, there's a, one of the shows is about, one of my favorites, I have two favorites. This is the other one. It's about giving. Sounds boring when I say that.

It's about giving. Sounds boring when I say that. It's about university philanthropy. And I contrast two very wealthy men, one who may reach very different conclusions about where they're going to give their money. And one of the men is my hero and one is my villain. And the hero, I'm not going to, I don't want to spoil it, but there was a little bit of tape. The hero had just died and the school that he had given his money to had a memorial service for him. And at the memorial service, a local acapella group sang a kind of semi-cheesy boy band song, and I've forgotten the title of it, in memoriam of him, but in such a way that it wasn't cheesy anymore.

It was actually really touching. And so you hear this tape, and you hear this acapella group singing the song, and your initial thought is, oh my God. And then you're like, oh, right? And you get it. The emotion hits you. Now, if you're writing about that, it's meaningless, right?

All that nuance is lost. In a podcast, suddenly you're like, oh wow, that's my beginning, right? No question. That's how, that's the way in. Because you want that movement from, oh, this is cheesy to, oh my God, no, it's incredibly meaningful, right? That's that little thing. So that's, what's lovely. It's suddenly I'm after 20 years of doing

the pure print thing, I'm shake and I have to break out of that and think in a different way about what's powerful. You are a very good public speaker. I think you're a tremendous speaker. How do you plan your keynotes? Because this is yet a different format. Yeah. Well, if you think of your most, let's say your most successful and then perhaps a less successful presentation. Yeah.

How have they differed? They differ. Well, there's, first of all, I, the breakthrough for me in speaking came when I realized that it required about 10 X more work than I was giving to it. And that was a huge moment. So I had to decide. What did you realize that? Sorry to interrupt.

I would say. Was there a particular incident or conversation that catalyzed? 10 years ago, uh, when I asked myself the question, do I want to continue doing this? Because it has its pluses and its minuses. And I realized I only want to continue doing it if I get much better at it and if I change it in a way that it's much more meaningful to me. So it was then I decided I needed way more material.

I have to give very, very different speeches. I can't just give the same one all the time. I have to spend a lot more time thinking about who I'm speaking to. And I have to spend a lot more time thinking about my performance. And realizing, by the way, that it is a performance. That it's not, I'm not giving a speech, I'm giving a performance. And all of those things, I thought a lot about all of those things. And it took a long time to kind of fully kind of implement them. But it has made

it much more interesting to me. And now I enjoy it in a way I didn't enjoy it when I was, it didn't feel like I was doing it in a kind of halfway manner. But I realized in retrospect, I was just because I hadn't understood. I thought that what giving a speech was, was reading an article. And if you think that's what it is, then you just get up and you read your article, right? And it's very, once you actually know it's a world that has its own rules and principles, you're really acting, then you're like, oh, wow,

that's totally different. I've got to throw myself into that in a significant way. And so that's what I tried to do. Is there anyone in the world of speaking, alive or dead, who is the Michael Lewis for you? I once went to a wedding, not a wedding, I'm sorry, sorry a birthday party for an old old friend of mine and it was in in england i can say with my friend ann applebaum and she has all of these she's been in england for years and she has all these sort of kind of fancy english friends when i say fancy you know not posh but like you know historians and just kind of like english

intellectuals so she had this birthday party in this little country house in the middle of England. And the English, of course, A, way better at giving speeches than we are, first of all. But secondly, we were talking about the creme de la creme of English speech givers, like serious kind of, you know, Cambridge and Oxford debating society kind of people. So Neil Ferguson, the historian, gave a wedding toast that is, birthday toast, which is just the best toast I've ever heard in my life.

I mean, it was like so much better than anything I had ever heard. It's like on another level, I was like, oh my God, that's good. And part of what made it genius was he really gave you the impression he was making it up on the spot now he might actually have done that he may be so good he could do that but he he got up and you just like that was the the conceit was it i'm just this is off the cuff i'm just yeah this is totally the cuff. I'm just, yeah, this is totally spontaneous. And it was so cleverly done and so hilarious.

And the other thing I realized was that it was so charming that it, and what was charming about it was the ways in which he was wrong. Like that, the kind of part of the joke was, he was going to make this elaborate, hilarious argument about Anne, who was turning 50, and half the stuff that he was going to say was not right. It was like, I mean, that was sort of like... Wait, did he start off saying that? No, no. He sort of spun a theory about the weekend and about her birthday and about her friends.

That was like hilarious because it was not accurate. You know, but it was like, he did it with such panache and kind of, and I was just like, first of all, that would never have occurred to me to like make stuff up in such a dramatic way. But also I can't do the thing, I can do conversational, but I don't think I ever get to the level

where people think I'm off the cuff. Like I'm not, it's clear that there's been some effort here, but with him, there's just no, it was just like, so I ever since I like worship the guy. I mean, I just think, I think he walks on water. What, what are the elements of a good performance for you? What are some of the ingredients that make a good performance in your case? The thing that I strive for in speaking is authenticity, which sounds corny, but it's really hard to do when you're giving a prepared talk to a group of people

who belong to a world that you don't belong to. So if I'm speaking to a group of IT specialists, I don't know anything about IT, right? Nothing. So I'm an outsider. And yet I'm trying to say something that will engage them and be intelligent and make them think. So in the context of doing something that is artificial, by artificial, I don't mean phony. I mean, in a sense that I have to make an effort to connect with them. I can't just stand up and talk the way I would talk to my friends, right? These guys belong to a world I don't know or belong to. So I'm doing something that requires an effort, but at the same time, it has to feel like me, right? They have to feel like they are connecting with me and that I'm not, I can't feel like I'm faking it. So that's hard.

And that's really, but it's hard in a good way. That's what makes it interesting. So the question I ask myself is, I would like to say something intelligent about IT while still remaining true to myself, someone who knows very little about IT. So this, that, and if you pull it off, that's interesting to the audience. So they get that.

They don't, they're not bringing me in because I'm an IT specialist, but they do what they want, what would bring, what makes them, what satisfies them is my attempt to speak to them while being true to myself, right? My attempt to bridge the, can I bridge the gap is the question really that they're asking themselves in the back of their mind. And when you can bridge the gap, that's really satisfying to someone.

It's like, oh, right, that's, you know, that I think you, you know, you've succeeded. When you have, and just a few more questions about writing, because I'm most likely about to go into, as we discussed briefly, crunch writing deadline myself when you have for instance one or two stories for a book and you you understand what the theme is going to be or some of the the structural components how do you find the others or is it a case where you've gathered these stories over the span of a time with the

inkling of an idea and then you have half of it locked and loaded already? Well, there's a good actual example of this from Revisionist History, from this podcast. I started out by wanting, I wanted to tell a story about this kid who I had met, who was a teenager and lived in LA, came from a poor family and had, I don't know what his IQ is, 150. I mean, he's a one in a million kid. And I thought his story of how does that, what happens to you if you're, you have an IQ of 150 and you grow up in South Central? That's sort of interesting. So I was going to tell that story.

And so I talked to the kid. And I was particularly interested in how does he get to college? Is it easy? Do you get recognized? Is it like you're a great 15-year- player and they, they find, they always find you. If you, if you can dunk a basketball and hit a three point shot and you're, you can dominate your, you know, middle school basketball team and you live in Nebraska, they find you.

Right. So my question was, is that what it's like if you've got an IQ of one 50 and you live in South Central? Do they just find you and like adopt you? So I went out. I had this long conversation with this kid. It's incredibly powerful. It's totally interesting. And then as I tell the story, I realized, oh, so my episodes are 45 minutes. And I realized this story is all I need. I mean, he's the whole thing.

I mean, I can't, he's, he's the whole thing. I mean, I can do little contact contextual things, but there's no room for anything else here. Not just room logistically or physically, there's no emotional room for anything else, right? This kid is, you're in tears by the end. I mean, he's, and what happened to him and his story is crazy. And then this is an another kid we talk about. It's like, you can't. So then I said, oh, so there's other things I wanted to say. So I thought I'd do another show.

Also on the same topic of what happens, how good are we at finding, at fulfilling the American dream, the American promise, which is if you work hard and you have some ability, you can make your way up the ladder. That's really what, so this part of Revisionist history is revisiting that promise that we make. How good are we at fulfilling it? So I do a second show, which is all about, do colleges actually, do they find these kids? Do they do a good job of finding them?

How do they find them? Do they spend a lot of time and money on it? And the answer is, the colleges do a terrible job of finding them. So the guy says, well, why? So I do this show on why. Why do they do a terrible job? And the answer is, a lot of the time, they're distracted. But more than that, they're spending their money somewhere else.

It takes money to find these kids, not just to find them. If the cost of educating a kid is $50,000, and you want to bring in a kid from South Central, he doesn't have $50,000. So you've got to pay $50,000. You're out $50,000 if you want to bring in a kid from South Central, he doesn't have 50 grand. So you got to pay 50 grand. You got to, you're out 50 grand if you want to bring them to your school. So if you got to spend 50 grand on him, it's 50 grand you can't spend on something else, right? That starts to get really interesting. All right, so what's the thing you can't spend on? And if you can't

spend on that other thing, how do you compete with other colleges that do spend on the other thing, right? So that's what the whole episode's about. So then I do that one and I'm like't spend on that other thing how do you compete with other colleges that do spend on the other thing right so that's what the whole episode's about so then i do that one and i'm like i do that one like wait a minute i'm not done this gets more interesting right so if you have to spend you've got to find the 50 grand then where do you get the 50 grand so now we get into philanthropy that's where i did this whole thing on philanthropy. So that was the third one. So then, so these are all stories that grow out of, do you know what I mean? You find, it all starts with one kid.

I find the kid. And all of a sudden I end up with three very different stories, all of which look at the problem of the kid from a different angle. And that's very typical of the way books work for me, which is you start with the nugget and then you just start walking around it and parts of it just kind of, you're like, oh, that deserves its own, you know, that's, that's a, you know, it's like

when you, the thing I find myself doing when I interview someone most often is stopping them. Say, wait, wait, wait. When I transcribe tapes, I hear that so many times. Wait, wait, stop. And then I make them go back and elaborate on that point, which was like that kind of weird point. Wait, is that, you know, they skip over it because it's old hat to them. And you were like, no, no, no, no, no. I could spend hours on that point, you know? Oh, they skip over it cause it's old hat to them. And you were like, no, no, no, no, no. I could spend hours on that point, you know? So it's that. Oh, I do. I know exactly how that feels. And it strikes me that you ask questions as part of that walking around the first story, right? And you ask a question that then redirects you or focuses you in into another topic, you find a story and then you ask another

question, which then leads to, in this case, another episode, but it could have been another chapter of a book. If you were to credit someone or some people or resources with helping you to get better at asking questions, who or what would that be? My dad is a great question asker. And my father has this, I've spoken about it many times. He has, of his many gifts, one in particular, as a kid, always had the biggest impact on me, which is my father has zero intellectual insecurities. So this is the only thing he has in common with Obama. He and Obama are the same way. My dad has no, it has never crossed his mind to be concerned that the world thinks he's an idiot. Just doesn't, he's not in that game, right?

So if he doesn't understand something, he just asks you. He doesn't care if he sounds foolish. He will ask the most obvious question. Like, you know, and it was without any sort of concern about it maybe it's because he's my dad's a mathematician so he has his thing that he knows it's he's really good at and so he's like he's home free i think if you have a phd in math you're home free you're home free well it's something either true or it's false or it's clear it's not yeah and it's like you're not if you look like an idiot because you don't know anything about basketball who cares right so he he asks lots and lots and lots of

dumb questions i mean dumb in the best sense of that word dumb questions wait like he'll say to someone i don't understand explain that to me or he'll and he'll just keep asking questions until he gets it right. And I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting. You know, my father made friends. So my father, here's this guy with his PhD in math. He made friends with all of these farmers who were our neighbors, who were all dropouts. This was in Canada.

In Canada. They all went, they basically had maybe seventh grade. And he, first of all, treated them like equals. And secondly, was intensely interested in what they knew that he didn't know. And would ask them tons and tons of questions about why they did what they did. So that's what I grew up around, right? And that's what I do. I mean, it's straight from my dad.

I don't think there's any, I just do. And what, you know, when I'm hanging out with my father and someone interesting, we do the same thing. We just start asking questions. It's our sort of thing. Well, it strikes me also that the, uh, the dumb questions or the obvious questions are precisely the questions oftentimes that we should be asking because half of the people in the room, if it's in a group setting are probably thinking of those questions anyway, but are embarrassed for whatever reason to bring them up. You know, it's a great example of this. I often imagine my dad meeting Bernie Madoff. My father would say, he would look at the returns and he would say, wow, that's really good. Because as a mathematician, he would know that, you know, these steady, whatever it was, 9% a year,

year in, year out, you know, that's really, and then he would say, how did you do that? And then Madoff had that, remember that stock explanation that didn't, that was bullshit. And my father would just simply continue to ask really, really dumb, obvious questions. And until Madoff would either have had to leave or, you know, cause he would have tried his patience and been at risk of, but he would never have invested money with him because he would have said, I don't understand a hundred times, right? I don't understand how that works. I don't understand. Like in this kind of dumb kind of, you know, slow voice,

I don't understand, sir. yeah you know what is going on so so let me ask a uh and you feel free to not to not answer this if you don't want but so i i ask a lot of questions i enjoy asking a lot of questions it can drive some people crazy yeah uh did your mom get the 20 questions about a lot of things or was the relationship different oh she asked lots of questions too i they are neither of them she's not intellectually insecure either they're not um it wasn't directed at my mother it was directed at the outside world they had a they have a uh an exceedingly harmonious relationship they don't yeah they don't they don't do that that's it's all it's reserved for outsiders really what to what would you attribute the,

the harmony? Cause there are a lot of non-harmonious, unharmonious relationships in the world. Uh, there, I mean, they were lucky to be well suited. They're also both,

um, incredibly, incredibly, um, uh, they're very calm people. So there's very, very few, they have very little conflict because it doesn't,

they diffuse conflict really well. I think it probably would be a good way of saying it. So they can speak rationally instead of- Yeah, they're not interested in, I've never seen them pick a fight with each other, for example, that doesn't interest them. So I have so many questions that I want to ask you. I'm just going to jump into a rather uncohesive list of miscellanea. I'm going to try some new

ones this time around. What is the best or most worthwhile investment you've ever made? Could be money, time, energy, or otherwise, or just a very good investment. It's a really interesting question. All of the investments that, the most worthwhile investments are investments about time. They have to do with time. And they're all about persevering past the point that I would normally have quit. So I can think, for example, of books where there's no,

the payoff didn't come until page 1,000. And yet it was very, getting to that page was incredibly important in some future endeavor. Or when I was describing how I ran across that transcript of that school shooter, which that was about an investment of time where, I mean, I was sort of screwing around. Now, screwing around is the wrong word. I was looking for much longer than I would normally look.

I kind of, for reasons I don't really understand, put my impatience aside and committed a much longer period of time to that hunt. So those are, I would say those are probably the, that's a very broad category, but those are the best investments. Now, when you said page a thousand, you're talking about reading. Yeah. But I mean, in any kind of, generally speaking, hunting, so many of the really wonderful things that I've uncovered in my life, not just for my writing, but also personally,

have come after elongated hunts. So you never find the thing that is moving, moving and powerful in the first five minutes. This doesn't happen. I remember a friend of mine who I didn't really feel very friendly towards when he said this said to me when I was 90% done with my second book for our body. And I said, wow, well, you know, pretty close to the finish line, 90% done. He goes, okay, congratulations.

You only have 50% left. And I've heard that from a lot of long distance runners also, you know, like kind of the race starts at mile 20 or whatever it might be. Yeah. Going back to the sort of investments and these not postponed, but like delayed gratification wins like this page a thousand. Can you think of any failures that set you up for later success or a favorite failure of yours? Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's all kinds. I, when I was a kid, I was, uh, in just one of many, but I was, uh, uh, a runner, very serious runner. And I, what distance? 1500 meters and 800 meters.

And I, the puking distances. Yes. And I, I, uh, in my third year of running seriously, lost races I thought I was going to win. I mean, it kind of, what for me at that age was quite a traumatic fashion. And I quit running. And it was the first, I would regard that as the, of that, the first real failure of my life. Something I really wanted to do well that I didn't and um I feel like it was hugely important both because it made me think hard about what my priorities were what that I had placed running too high in that list um but more than that it it um I then later in life went back and thought a lot about why I quit and was dissatisfied with my reasons. So anything you can, this whole notion of circling back, I think is so important.

I mean, this shows God revisionist history, so it's explicitly about that. But, you know, I would almost obsessively revisit my reasons for quitting running and scrutinize them and say, is it right? What did I learn in the intervening 5, 10, 15, 20 years about who I am, what I want, what it takes to be good at something? So that was a very valuable, a really valuable experience at exactly the right time. Cause that's the age where, you know, where decisions, um, not decisions matter, but where, uh, I think you reflect on things in your adolescence in a way that you don't reflect on things later in your life. What, uh, what age was this or what grade? I was 15.

15. I always thought I was going to go back at some point and be a ninth grade teacher. So right around that like 14 to 16 range. It seems like there are a lot of very important forks in the road. Yeah, I think there is. I think you are because so much is, everything is plastic at that age, right? So you can mold it whatever way you want. And so it's just a kind of like i think about what how confusing and complicated those years are in retrospect what is uh do you have any morning routines

what does the first 60 minutes of your day look like could be any day of the week let's just say it's a work day i well i was just saying earlier i try i think one should eat very little in the morning so what time do you wake up you know eight i have a big thing of tea what type of tea sorry i'm going to keep lapsing souchong oh that's great stuff great stuff if you like what is it i remember a friend who's getting off of he loved whiskey and he felt like the smell reminded him of some type of peaty alcoholic beverage so yeah it has an amazing smell um it's a very controversial tea and then i might i might pull a malcolm here wait wait wait why is it a controversial tea it some people smell it and they just run in the opposite direction they think it it they're they don't even think it's tea i, I've never seen people have such a kind of...

There's a little coffee shop where I go often in the morning to have my tea and they have it. I think I'm one of the only people who order it. I think they get it because of me. And it's like I walk in, they're like, you know, make a beeline for it. But it's clear that, you know,

I'm in a distinct minority. It smells. I mean, you can smell it from quite a ways off i might eat a little bit of oatmeal that's pretty much all i'll eat in the morning that's your goat one of your go-tos yeah um but not a lot and then i look at three websites okay so we're gonna come back to three hours so not a lot means like a cup full a couple of spoons like a a cup full half a cup something just enough that i'm you know have a reason of something in my stomach um and then i will look at three websites the first one is let's run.com the nerdy runners all serious runners read

let's run then i read marginal revolution tyler cohen's column and Then I read Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cohen's column. And then I read ESPN.com, just to make sure nothing major happened in the world of sports. And then I start my work. How do you, and what time is that then when you're starting your work? So we're talking, we're now, we're still before nine. And then if I have writing to do,

it's best to do it in the next, in the two hours that follow. So before lunch. Yeah. And what does your routine look like in those few hours when you start your work? What does that look like? Is there a particular music you listen to? Sitting in a coffee shop. Sitting in a coffee shop.

I'm, or, you know, some restaurant. I'm not at home. And I'm not in an office. And I'm working pretty steadily. I'm not at home. Uh, and I'm not in an office and I'm, um, uh, working pretty steadily. I'm not really easily distractible been around 1130 or so. I kind of have to do other things. I mean, I, I don't stop working, but I stopped writing. Do you listen to music when you write? Do you just take in the music on in the, I write almost entirely in public places. So whatever, I don't listen to music myself.

No headphones. But I like the noise. Because I came of age in a newsroom, so I need that. I mean, I learned how to write in the middle of, when newsrooms are not noisy now, they used to be incredibly loud. So that's what I need to kind of get going. And then do you, is that when the bulk of your writing is done? Is that pre-lunch period or do you write in the afternoons?

No, I rarely write in the afternoon. I find, yeah, journalists seem to be very adaptable or former journalists. People have worked in newspapers or had those types of daily deadlines. Yeah, we're faster. And also, remember, writing is not the time-consuming part. It's knowing what to write. It's the thinking and the arranging and the interviewing and the researching and the organizing. That's what takes time.

Writing is blissful. I wish I could do it more. I mean, it's a break from all of the hassle. So let's just say end of work day to bed. What do your wind-down routines look like? Well, I'll go running then probably um after the end of the afternoon uh and although i'm injured now but um uh that's really the highlight of the day of the kind of work day um some days i'll go to my train with my track club sometimes i'll go

for a long run or i'll go biking or i'll go do a crossfit workout or something physical what is your favorite movement in crossfit or exercise and least well i kind of runners you know secretly disdain any activity that's not run so i i know enough runners to do right so i don't i don't i don't even want to think about favorite in that context. It's something I suffer through because it's necessary to ward off injury. And when it's over, I'm very happy. But, you know, I'm much happier if I can go and, you know, run eight miles with some friends. Got it.

Pre-bed, anything in particular? No, I'll eat dinner, might read in the evening, I watch sports or TV. Do you have trouble getting to sleep or do you generally sleep easily? I come from a family of, we are champion sleepers. Gladwells are some of our- Some of the best sleepers out there.

We are some of the best. It is our defining characteristic that we're, and our definition of a bad night of sleep is so hilarious because it's like, you know, my father will say he had trouble sleeping. And what that means is he was up for 20 minutes between, you know, four and four 20. I mean, that's a bad night of sleep. So if the Gladwells are heading up the leaderboard in sleep, we're really good. What are you guys not good at? We are.

Or are you personal? What are we not good at? What do you find challenging? Well, we're not great talkers. We're all pretty introverted, with the exception of my brother who makes up for it. We're not terribly adventurous. I mean, we're adventurous in certain very, very specific ways,

but I didn't grow up going. We would go on family vacations to either England or Jamaica, where both my parents are from. My father would travel a lot to interesting places, but we never went out to eat or went to the movies or went to concerts. The sort of going out thing was not something we did. We were, we would, I would go entire summers when I basically never left the house, you know? So we're, we were not, um, we didn't have,

we're, we didn't explore the, our immediate surroundings in a way that we might've. Uh, what is some of the, or an example of the worst advice that you hear being dispensed or given? Could be related to anything. Writing, running, doesn't matter. Yeah, the worst advice that in general we give in America is that we terrify high school kids about their college choices.

I mean, all things related to college fall under the category of bad advice. As you will find out when you listen to my rants about college on this podcast, I think the American college system needs to be blown up and they need to start over. I mean, to my mind, you could not have conceived of a worse system.

So, you know, anything, any advice that has to do with you need to work hard and get into the best college you can is just, I'm sorry, it's just bullshit. I mean, it is just terrible. You should not try to go to the best college you can, because particularly if best is defined by U.S. News and World Report, you should go to a place that what college should, the sole test of what a good college is, is, is it a place where I find myself late at night having deeply interesting conversations with people that I like and find interesting. If you, you go where you can do that, right? That's all that matters. So am I so inspired by what I learned during the day that I want to be talking about it at one in the morning? And do I have someone who will have that conversation with me and will challenge me? That's it. That's it. Everything else is nonsense,

right? So you tell me what that place is. Now is, so that place could be any number of a thousand places in the world. Maybe you. Maybe even that place is unpredictable. Maybe it is that what matters is not that some schools can provide that experience and some can't. What matters is what happens when I go to that school? Do I create that experience for myself? And I think that experience could be created at almost any institution in the country, right? There are interesting kids everywhere. And it's only in our snobbery that we have decided that interestingness is defined by your test scores. This is just such, it's so, it's just an outrageous lie, right? Test scores,

sure they matter in some day, but I'm talking about college now. What makes for a powerful college experience is, can I find someone about college now. What makes for a powerful college experience is, can I find someone interesting to have an interesting discussion with? And that you can do, you can do that if you're curious and you're interesting, that's it. Oh, you're, by the way, not that you're interesting, you're interested. Interested. Right? That's all that matters. She comes back to the questions, right? Having the ability and the ammo to ask good questions and follow-up questions. Some of the people that you learn most from in those settings

are some of the most flawed people, right? People, it's not true that you learn the most from the smartest, most put-together people. I think about my college experience. It's the people who had a lasting impact on me were deeply, deeply flawed people. And their flaws were what almost drew them to me, drew me to them. And what I kind of fixated on and found fascinating. I had a friend, still one of my very best friends, ended up being very,

very successful. In college, he was a basket case, complete basket case, to the point where he literally said this to me once. I said, why do you have a library book that's three months overdue? Your fine is going up every day. He said, well, I'm afraid to take it back because I can't afford the fine. He said this to me. This is a guy that fast, you know, that kind of, and yet simultaneously he was, I actually turned out to be a brilliant student or a brilliant professional. And just the squaring those two sides to his personality, the idea that he was hapless in some really crucial respects and yet made an incredibly successful place for himself in the world figuring that contradiction out took years and when i did kind of figure it out it so enhanced my understanding of people in the world and just

of understanding the ways in which he compensated for his haplessness brilliantly. Right. And also realizing that it doesn't, if you're hapless in that kind of logistical sense, common sense sense, he has no common sense. If you can, if you're, if you're thoughtful about it, it won't matter one iota. What flaws or weaknesses do you have that have turned out to be strengths in some capacity? This is like a job interview question, isn't it? I was going to offer you a position at Tim Ferriss Enterprises, but I think you're too busy. Well, probably, God, my... It's only a job interview if you say you say sometimes I just work too hard. Exactly. Well, in, in, in, in dealing with my own impatience and my sloppiness, uh, into attending

to those flaws, uh, I think I have done, that's been a really crucial thing in helping me achieve what I've achieved. So it's just... Could you elaborate on that? Yeah. I mean, I'm sloppy. How are you? In what sense?

You know, I don't... Sloppy like... I'm in a hurry. Like clothes all over the floor or sloppy? No, no, no. Sloppy about... I'm in a hurry. I, you know, I don't always double check something I know. Or I'll interview someone for 45 minutes when I should interview them for two hours.

Or, you know, I'm just kind of like, I'm a good enough person. I'm not a perfectionist. It's fine. Let's do that. And so I've become so aware of that now that I've compensated. And I have taught myself to be a lot more of a perfectionist or I've forced myself to keep asking questions much longer than I would have. And I said earlier that it was these investments of time that had been so, that's what I'm talking about, that I forced myself to invest more time in a lot of activities, knowing that if I did it my normal way, I'd be out the door.

Right. You know, I'd be thinking about what I want for dinner as opposed to. So that's sort of a very it's why I buy it. By the way, I so object to. So when you observe or measure someone's natural inclinations, you haven't got a picture of them because you don't know what they do with those natural inclinations, right? So it turns out that one of the most important things about me is how obsessed I am with those two flaws of mine, right? So identifying those as my natural inclinations tells you exactly the opposite about me. Because you're compensating by developing the opposite. I am massively compensating for them all day long, right?

I'm obsessed with compensating for them. Have you received a lot of bad advice along the way as to what you might do professionally, or has that not been the case? No, I mean, I'm not an advice seeker about those kinds of things, nor much of an advice giver. So I haven't really gotten a lot of, and also my position is you can't know. I've kind of stumbled into most of the things I've been doing. Um, I much referred simply to be open to opportunity than to plan my path. I think that's a better for me anyway, I don't know. I mean, people are different. So some people need to plan, but I'm not up. I don't think ahead really at all.

You know, your, your comment about the compensation and just that, that last mile, so to speak with the interviews and so on reminds me of Laird Hamilton, the surfer. And the advice he gave me, he was trying to teach me a lot of patients at a surf at one point a few years ago. And he said, when you think you've caught a wave paddle again, he's like, because if you don't, it's like that last paddle and you think you're there, you're just not going to catch the wave. Yeah.

When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind and why? Well, you know, I'm so deeply obsessed with running these days that I immediately think of runners. That's fine. There's an American runner, Galen Rupp, who's maybe our silver medalist in the London games in the, uh, 10,000. And I really admire him for many reasons. He's first of all, a very, a very he's a system runner that's to say he was sort of identified in high school as being someone of promise he's been with the same coach ever since

and he had a very thoughtful training path and career path what was his name again galen rup he's a very also a very beautiful runner both those things matter to me what makes a beautiful runner he is if you look him up on the internet and you looked at the way he moved, you would say he's like a ballet dancer. He just has grace. There are ugly runners and there are beautiful runners. He's a beautiful runner. Those two things in combination,

the idea that he, on an aesthetic level, is deeply pleasing. So he does the thing that he wants to do, not just successfully by the standard metric, he runs very quickly, he wins races, but also by a purely irrelevant aesthetic metric. He creates beauty as he's doing it, right? That matters to me. And it matters to me that he's so thoughtful, purposeful in his, to use that overused phrase, in his preparation. You know, that it's not happenstance or that he sort of thought about what does it mean for me, Galen Robb, to bring out the best in myself. And, you know, running is tricky because running is all about restraint, even especially at the elite level you can't be obsessive or a perfectionist and succeed as a runner you'll get injured running is all about

good enough because you will have too much training volume yeah you can't the minute you you're walking this fine line between adequately preparing yourself for racing and overtraining, which leads to injury and burnout and all these kinds of things. And the whole struggle in running is to not get injured, to not cross that line. And so in order to not cross that line, you have to rein in all of these tendencies, your obsessiveness, you want to do the 10th, you know, repetition, you know, you're doing 10 times, uh, whatever, half miles. And you know, logically that after nine, that that's enough, you've pushed your body as far as it can go, but your, you know, your kind of anal discipline self says, no, do 10 because 10 was the workout, right? You can't do 10. You have to be tough enough to say, no, no, no,

I've done enough for the day and walk away, right? Do you know how hard that is? Particularly for the kinds of personalities who are attracted to elite running. I mean, it's insane, right? So that kind of, that notion of how hard it is to say it's good enough and walk away. It's like, he does that. Well, so a couple of things. It makes me think about a story I heard related to Charlie Francis,

very controversial sprint coach, Ben Johnson and so on. The reality is he was a brilliant coach. Brilliant coach. And I hate to say it, but I'm not going to point fingers at any specific people, but very likely that all of the top sprinters at that level are using something besides Spirulina.

I'm not sure it's still true, but go on. In that era, in Charlie Francis' era, absolutely. I mean, that was kind of the golden age of doping in a sense, but the athletes always have more resources than the WADA crew in terms of testing in that cat and mouse game. But some really interesting things that have come out. I mean, just recently, I'll give you an example. Sorry. So there was a period of time where the vast majority of world championship or Olympic sprinters had prescriptions due to their narcolepsy because they wanted to take modafinil as a stimulant pre-race. But I digress.

But what Charlie said was in the case of an elite sprinter, someone said, how do you push your athletes? And he said, no, no, no. The last thing I need to do is push my athletes. It's my job to reign them in. I always have to reign them in. And he would have to say, no, Charlie, you can't do two sets of squats with 600 pounds on your back at 160 or whatever it was. You have to do one set and, uh, and so on. But the, I wanted to come back to plan. So you said you're not much for plans, but you are one for systems, right? So made me think of, it seems at least in the case of running made me think of, and I'm going to paraphrase here. There's a quote from, I want to say Jeff Bezos, something along the lines of, you know, we're uncompromising on the vision

and flexible on the details. Uh, where do you have systems in your life that you rely on? I wish I had more systems sometimes. I don't really have a lot of, I mean, I've sort of, because now I'm essentially self-employed and don't go, I mean, I have discipline, personal discipline, but it's not, is it that rigid? I don't know if I have. Part of the reason I said I think Galen Rupp is successful is because I'm a

little bit envious of the system and structure that he has in place. And it's clear to me that how much can be achieved when you're that kind of thoughtful about what you're doing. I mean, nothing, as someone, you know, as obsessed with sports as I am, the thing that always breaks your heart is the, someone who leaves potential on the table. Right. And I don't think Galen Rupp has, and that is an extraordinary achievement, right.

To be able to say when he retires, I ran as fast as I could possibly have run. That is more important than to say, I want a gold medal or I set a world record or, right? And I don't mean that in a kind of cheesy, I mean that really, I really mean that to say I got it 99% of my ability. It's huge. And I think folks would be surprised and you've probably interacted with many more elite runners than i have but i've met people a few of them and i've also interacted with coaches and for instance physical therapists who've worked with people like jackie joyner

kersey uh and it's very common that they would say about that level of athlete i just can't get them they've never let it all go and really give it 100 because whether it's fear of a hamstring tear fear of x fear of y z whatever it might be so the fact that this yeah this runner is believing it's leaving it all on the track yeah so it's interesting you know we've been talking there's two um necessarily contradictory things here with runners, which is training is about restraint, but racing is not, right? So that's why we're sort of getting at why the psychology of these elite athletes is so complex. Restraint, restraint, restraint in preparation, get on the track. And all of a sudden, no,

no more restraint, go. All that behavior you've been conditioning, no, ignore all that. Really hard to kind of, and you know, as I returned to running quite recently and running in a serious way, and that's the piece of it that is proving really hard for me to grasp is that idea of turning it on on race day. So I train very well and I race less well. And for that very reason, whereas I look around me, you know, really elite runners, the distance difference between their training and racing is astounding. Like they're just different animals. I mean, it's, it's fascinating to see that. What books, uh, besides your own, have you gifted to

other people the most? I, um, there's one book I've given the most in my life which is a book called well there's several now I think about it there's a book by um Timothy Wilson called strangers to ourselves which is one of the loveliest most insightful books about social psychology that I've ever read and I give that a lot to people and uh I give, every time I meet, and weirdly I'm always meeting people who work in retail, particularly, like, I always send them, particularly if they're Jewish, I send them a book called The Merchant Princes.

The Merchant Princes. It's a book about the great Jewish retail families of America. So in the 19th century, all these people come over from Europe who have experience in the garment trade or retailing, and all of the, not all of them, but an extraordinary number of the early 20th century, late 19th century department stores that pop up around America are founded by Jewish immigrants from Europe, right? You know, from, you know, I mean, literally, you go to any town in America, the traditional department store is one of those families. Well, a guy, and I've forgotten his name, wrote a book about those families.

It's called The Merchant Princes, and it's fantastic. Oh, princes. Princes, plural, okay. Yes. It's fantastic. As a kind of, it's about everything Oh, princes. Princes, plural. Okay. Yes. It's fantastic. As a kind of, it's about everything I'm interested in. It's about immigrants. It's about people figuring out and then conquering an unfamiliar marketplace.

Right? It's about all of the brilliant ideas that came to these guys in, as they, as they invented the department store, right? The ideas that, by the way, we're still, you know, all these internet retailers, there's, they're just grandchildren of these guys. I mean, there's nothing, nothing dramatically new has happened. They worked it all out a hundred years ago. I mean, it really humbles you about the so-called retail revolution of the last 10 years. And there's such extraordinary characters. And I love the way their personality is kind of imprinted on their, on their business.

So there's a fantastic chapter about Filene's, Filene brothers who start Filene's in Boston. Which they have Filene's basement and so on. Yeah. And they invent these incredibly interesting ideas about how to hold a sale, how to generate, how to use people's kind of psychological impulses

to generate the desire to buy. These guys are so far ahead of everybody else. It's like a hundred years ago and they are on another level, right? Just like, it's just that, it's one story like that after another. It's a brilliant book. Uh, do you read any fiction? Oh, huge amounts. I read, uh, I read, um, spy, spy novels, spy novels. Yeah. If it has the word spy in it, I've read it. Any, uh, so for someone who's unfamiliar with the genre, but excited to get started,

what, where should they start? Well, I mean, do we have, how many hours do we have? But we should, if you know nothing about it, you should start with John le Carre, of course, and read his first five books. So I would read through, at least through Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And you can keep going. Actually, no, no, read, you should read a little drum tour little drummer's girl or even russia house i like his later stuff less so but it's still fantastic um but you must read spy came in from the cold i mean that's just kind of like gold standard given yeah um and then uh i mean i read all the lee ch child books are not spy thrillers per se,

but they're thrillers. Um, that those are fantastic. Um, I mean, I have hundreds, I have literally hundreds of spy novels in my, in my house.

Uh, what $100 or less purchase? I mean, this is ballpark, right? Meaning just not a Bugatti or something. Yeah. That has most positively impacted your life that comes to mind.

Probably a piece of music. I think it was probably an album by Brian Eno called Another Green World, which is one of his earlier, early seventies, I think. It's ambient music, not not the kind of really weird ambient music there's an adage that says the music you discover when you are 18 i think it's 18 it's the magic here is the music that stays with you for the rest of your life well i discovered that when i was 18 and i i sing the songs that album in my head all the time. And, um, I worship brand, you know,

um, he, he's a fascinating guy. Have you interviewed him? I haven't. I would enjoy it though. I have, I have a collection of cards that he also put out called oblique strategy.

Yes. Yes. I know of all about those. Yeah. Yeah. And I have it right on top of, there's another one called the whack pack, which is like a series of odd questions just intended to help you.

It's genius. He's also, uh, the most articulate person I've ever met. Wow. I should try to get Mr. Eno on the podcast. You should. Oh, you should. Because just to listen to him talk, it's distracting how perfectly he talks. He's one of those. You just want to listen because it's perfectly done paragraphs and it's ready for publication. It's just, yeah, you just, I mean, it's, I can't explain the experience. It's just kind of awe inspiring. Sounds like, um, I've had that experience when

watching Neil Gaiman speak or listening to him speak also perform just incredible. What is something you believe that other people think is crazy or something that a lot of people believe that you think is crazy aside from the college piece, either one, but I'm most interested in things that you believe that other people would raise an eyebrow. I think I believe in ghosts. I like this. All right.

Tell me more. I just do. I don't understand. My aunt who lives in Jamaica used to live in this house called Hilton Hill, which was said to be haunted. It was a particular room that was said to be haunted. And so I slept in a room. I was a kid, like 13, 14.

It was haunted. I saw a ghost in there. We played the guitar in the middle of the night. I don't know. And at that age, I was like, in Jamaica, everyone believes in ghosts. Not everyone, but it's a kind, you know, people believe in ghosts. So do I think the house is haunted? I actually do think it's haunted. And I also don't understand, if you believe in God, as I do, it's not that hard to believe in ghosts.

I mean, so I believe in the existence of things outside my own direct physical experience. Right? So, and also I don't believe why that's controversial. Like why people think that you can only believe in things that we have conventional explanations for and that you can see and touch. Well, that strikes me as being being why would you limit yourself like that i mean i'm not crazy i don't believe in ufos although i don't rule them out i mean i don't i'm not a kind of spiritualist but in a kind of purely rational way i believe there's stuff out there that can't be properly explained why because why would we have explanations for everything or

not yet right i mean there are it's just just because there's a ways to go there are phenomena that we can't currently explain or examine using the scientific method right which is uh sometimes poorly sometimes properly implemented uh doesn't mean we won't and there's i mean you just have to sort of look back in the history books to see many many many examples of this yeah uh if you're my mother's an identical twin and if you know an identical twin you witness that they live thousands of one lives in jamaica one is in canada you know and they do that thing that twins do which is they call each other and say i was so worried about you and then the other one will say, I just had some kind of accident. Or one will say, I woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible pain

in my stomach. And my mother's like, that's because I just had an operation for, you know, like that kind of stuff, which is like that weird thing you read about and it happens. I don't know. This is the second time this has come up on this podcast. I had an identical twin on my podcast and we talked about this. Yeah. It's like, so do I have a rational explanation for that? Does my mother know? Does it, is it maybe a coincidence? I don't know. Maybe. I don't, I mean, I don't know. It just needs explanation. I don't have one, but I'm open to things that don't have explanation. So I, I, I, the, the question, the, what is something you believe that other people think is insane is actually modified kind of paraphrased wording of a question that Peter Thiel likes to ask. I suppose when he's interviewing founders,

what is your, what are your, what is your opinion of Peter Thiel? If you have one? Well, all I know about him is what I know from this whole Gawker thing. I know that he's in bad odor among some people. And I never read his book, but I think he said, he might've taken a shot at me. I don't remember this. So the zero to one, he takes issue with what he,

how he interprets your position as it relates to success and circumstantial factors or luck. Does he think there's more, he's more up to the individual that would be his position oh i see it's a reasonable position i mean the the irony in part and one of my fans pointed this out is that he talks in the very beginning of the book how uh failing to get a sort of by a string of events outside of his control failing to get a clerkship led to all these

other things that wouldn't have happened had he received the clerkship. But, uh, there we go. Are there any, uh, I'm going to word this broadly innovators and that's sort of jumping. I live in Silicon Valley. Uh, so a lot of real innovators and even more people who like to fashion themselves innovators. Uh, are there any people do you think are engaged in very interesting innovation at the moment oh wow uh i mean so many obviously so many people and most of the people doing the interesting stuff we wouldn't even know about would we i mean they wouldn't have told us so don't have publicists um yeah they're i don't know if i have a good answer to that.

I mean, I'm sort of continually... We could also take a retrospective. I mean, because like everything that was old is once new again, right? Yeah. In terms of the retail. So there are other examples of innovators that have had a...

that you've become fascinated by. For instance, I interviewed Mark Andreessen recently. Incredible tech icon. Fascinating guy. And he looks to people like walt disney and edison to apply lessons that they learned and habits they developed rules they developed for themselves to yeah i guess i would say my new yorker colleague atul gawande has done all this work with checklists. So, such great stuff.

Fantastic stuff. And I really admire him because it's deeply unpopular work within his own profession. But it's work that has, I mean, extraordinary potential for saving lives. And particularly, it's one of those things that ultimately I think has far more usefulness in developing world and the developed world. I mean, the Lyme infection example in the checklist manifesto is just, it's just staggering. I mean, the, uh, but you, he took an extraordinary risk, uh, to his own reputation in domestically in America and the medical profession by doing that. People, doctors do not like checklists. And they think of him as simplifying, dumbing down.

They have all these kind of epithets they use against him. Unfairly, I think, because he's not saying all medicine can be reduced to a checklist. He's saying, let's find the parts that can be and do it that way. Right. So, um, I admire the idea, but almost more, I admire the kind of guts that made the idea possible. I have, so there are a number of books, about 20 or 30 that I have in my living room because I spent a lot of time there writing oftentimes, although I do like to get out to a third location of some sense. I'll go stir crazy, but I have, let's say about 10 books that are face out to remind me of certain things or to elicit certain emotions. And the checklist manifesto is one of them. Oh yeah. I'd be pleased to hear that. The other thing, by the way, tons and tons of people write interesting things. Atul then went and put his ideas into action on a

grand scale throughout the world. I mean, follow through. So he's not this kind of intellectual holding forth. He has the idea, he takes the heat, and then he makes it happen in a real way around the world. I mean, it's extraordinary. Very commendable. What advice would you give to your, actually, before we get to that one, we talked about books.

Do you have any favorite movies or documentaries that you've seen multiple times? No, I'm not really a movie or a documentary guy. All right. Well then that's an easy, easy pass to the advice you would give your 30 year old self. I would have left North America, leave North America to get out of there. Get out. Why? Because you'll wake up when you're 50 and realize that you spent your entire working career in North America, which is, despite the fact that it pretends to be the only place that matters, is not the only place that matters. I just would have been, I would have been so much more interesting and thoughtful and insightful and whatever if I had experience, particularly in the developing world. I had an idea when I was in my 20s that I wanted

to go and study in Jamaica, you know, a place where I have family and I have some familiarity with it. I should have done it or some similar kind of thing. I just think, and it's always my advice to young people, which is particularly young people of privilege, is just leave. I mean, go away. You can come back, but you have to, you can't stay in the cocoon your whole life. Yeah. Right?

It will limit you in ways you cannot even begin to understand at this point. Totally agree. I was chatting with Sebastian Junger about... Oh, he got out of the bubble. Yeah. Yeah. About the system and also, uh, any potential remedies. And he felt a mandatory year of, in his case, national service,

but it could be volunteering with the peace corps after I think it was high school and spending a year exposing yourself to those types of environments before going into the quote real world somewhere in this case, North America, two. Two of the religious groups who take a lot of heat, but for which I, for whom I have enormous respect, the Mennonites and the Mormons have an institutionalized practice of sending people to other cultures, their mission, the mission. And that's, I just, you know, the people who go on those missions come back transformed, not just spiritually, but, you know, they have seen the side of the world. And by the way, they're not going as American college students do when they do the year abroad to Florence. Florence does not, going to Florence does not expand your horizons.

Don't do a year abroad in Paris. Like this is that notion that, Oh, I, you know, my school, I'm going to break out of the box and go and spend the, you know, six months in this, in the seventh around a small, you know, that bullshit go somewhere real, right? That's the, that's what the, that's the upside of that kind of experience. When, when people have the means, I mean, I spent a year in Japan as an exchange student at 15. It's my first real time outside of the United States and completely rocked my world. It's just called everything into question. And I, so when, when people have the chance to like, well, I'm thinking about going here, here, here. And if Japan's on this, I go, I always respond with go

to Japan because it will make no sense. You won't be able to read anything. And the English that you do read won't make any sense. People do not speak English well. And you should just walk until you get lost and then try to find your way back because it's safe. You won't get hurt. And it's amazing. I went there for the first time two months ago. Oh, really? Blew my mind. I mean, it's like, oh my God, it's so interesting. Oh, any, any favorite moments or frames? I was there so briefly. I had to come back sadly,

cause I was working on this podcast, but I was there for like four days. I just walked around. Oh yeah. I mean I did what I had to do and then I just like went for, I went for this. I remember once I was at, I was walking down some perfectly ordinary random residential street. I see a little, I was thirsty. I saw a sign, tiny sign called coffee. So I look, is there a coffee shop? Can't find it. Search. Finally have to go down some stairs, through doors, up some stairs, through another door and there's like a room. And there's like

a woman, young woman behind a counter. And she makes a cup of coffee that is so far and away the greatest cup of coffee I've ever had. Like nothing else is even close. Right. And then I tried to tip her as one would, and she got offended. I think, you know, threw the money back. It was just like this kind of an impossible to find in the middle of nowhere coffee shop that just kills any other. But that's, that's Japan. Yeah.

It's like walking through a fever dream. I mean, Japan is, it's so much fun. So the podcast, how did you decide, no doubt you have had people propose that you do a podcast before. Yeah. I mean, I still, I still think we're at the very early stages of adoption. People, I think something like 15 or 17% of the people in the U.S. have listened to podcasts. It's a very relatively early days minority group at this point.

Why now? I mean, what led to the decision? Well, my friend Jacob, who runs a Slate group, an old, old friend of mine, Panoply is theirs, big podcasting company. And he said, do you want to do a podcast? I said, no. He said, come on, do a podcast.

So I said, all right. It was really that. And then I sort of got really into it and realized how fun it was. And for all the reasons I talked about earlier, just how it's a different way to tell a story. What about it has been the most fun for you? I mean, maybe we covered it already. I mean, it is a different way to tell a story. What about it has been the most fun for you? I mean, maybe we covered it already. I mean, it is a certain... Well, it's a group.

One is that I've never done a group experience, group thing before. So creating in a group was super novel. I mean, I just, I don't even go to meetings. There are no meetings in my life. And suddenly I went to meetings and I didn't realize everyone hates meetings, but I was like, whoa, this is exciting.

So everything was just kind of like, and then the idea of just the, the ability to generate emotion in a way you can't do on the page is, was just more than a revelation. It was a kind of, I mean, I was entranced by that possibility. It's transformative.

I mean, for me, this podcast started as a, um, a lark, something to do in between extremely exhausting book projects. And when people, if, if, if any fans come up to me now, when I'm on the street, at least nine times out of 10, probably even a higher percentage talk about the podcast and not the books. And hopefully that's not because my books are terrible. That could, that could mean that relatively speaking, um, that is the case. But I think the emotional bond, the emotional response you're able to create and the emotional bond that is forged through the audio medium is

just, it's, it's, I have to imagine it's, it's some, it's a reflective of some hardwiring that we have as storytelling machines. It's kind of an amazingly powerful thing. Where would you, and maybe this is, is to be kept a secret, but where would you in an ideal world, let's say two years from now, what are you doing in audio or not? What is, or what does the podcast look like? What is your. Well, I imagine I'll do another season. And I have played with the idea of inviting someone to join the Revisionist History rubric

and have someone else do some episodes that try something similar. I mean, there's a reason why I can't be a kind of... If I'm doing a collective project, let's make it just really make a collective, like not just me dreaming up there. So I thought about that. If I could find someone who, you know, took it seriously and want to,

and was have shared my, but, uh, I don't know. And then, you know, can I make a living doing it? That's another question.

Um, so, uh, you can certainly talk more about the last, last piece offline, but I would say the answer should be yes. There's no reason why it shouldn't be. that uh on the the second to last piece uh i would absolutely encourage you to experiment with the format because it's such a lightweight relatively speaking

uh medium and format for doing that i mean i've i've tried four or five different formats some were complete strikeouts yeah and some in in terms of the cost of creation in terms of energy time money etc to the output and impact on listeners was so disproportionately favorable i was like wow i'm really glad i tried those five because these didn't work. But like the solo Q and A's that I do sometimes as round twos with guests started off because if you want to talk about kind of a, I was sick at the time I did the Peter Thiel interview. And so it ended up being this solo read of sorts, which was profound and hilarious and great in a bunch of different ways. And I realized, oh, wait a second, I don't actually have to be there for this to be useful

to listeners. And so I hope you experiment with that. Last real question, and then we'll wrap up here. If you had a billboard and could put anything on it, what would you put on that billboard? Probably a picture of one of my favorite runners on my phone. I show it's on my phone. Oh, yeah. He's obscured by all the... the icons but who is that ashbel kiprop world's greatest miler from kenya he's my screensaver for on my picture on my phone um i don't know i'm obsessed with the idea that uh track and field ought to be one of our most popular sports and in fact is our least popular sport. So I would love to, um,

I want, I want to, I want a day when America's, you know, when the American record holder in the five K can walk down the street and everyone will come up to her and say, you know, wow, can I have your autograph?

And she'll be mobbed. And you know, that's what I want to happen one day. So do you have any, do you have any, this, uh, this could seem like a silly question, but do you have any quotes that you live your life by or mantras in a non-woo-woo kind of sense that are meaningful to you?

They might just be like heuristics, rules of thumb, anything like that? Not really. I mean, kind of in a playful way, I used love i really like the i keep calling myself coming back to that the legal adage difficult cases make bad law which i think is an incredibly insightful comment about how because we're we're drawn to the difficult case one but you shouldn't generalize from it and then we can't that's this problem we run into in the political realm over and over again, not just the political, many realms.

Can you give an example of that? I'm not sure I'm clear. Yeah. So 9-11, it's a difficult case, right? An incredibly rare catastrophic event catches us by surprise. Should you try to generate policy exclusively from the 9-11 experience?

That's what we did. And what did we do? I think we made a bunch of really terrible mistakes, right? We spent $2 trillion on a war that went nowhere and made the world worse off. We subverted our own civil liberties. We created these monolithic government agencies that God knows what they're doing. Are we actually safer than we were? I'm not sure. That's a case where you, if, if we had exercised some restraint and said, you know what, you can't use a single incident, which was this bizarre outlier and base the whole national security policy of your country on it. You have to look at the long view, take the long view, right?

Obama is a very natural, that kind of thinking is very natural to him. He's a difficult cases, bad law kind of guy. He's like, let's not overreact, let's wait and see, that kind of thing, which people find very frustrating with him. But I like that notion. Similarly, you know, it's about not overreacting to black swans, you know, to outlying events. And also not choosing your case studies wisely. That's, I think, what it's really about. And I suppose you could also generalize it to your personal life in many ways too. I mean, just because you're mugged once doesn't mean you should have a fundamental distrust of every human being as you go throughout life. Yes, exactly.

Exactly right. And yeah, the, and we, I think we can go further that just because you have been traumatized in some way doesn't mean you are permanently scarred, right? That human beings are resilient. They recover. And that's something that Sebastian also brought up. And not everyone shares this opinion, but given his extensive experience with vets and soldiers, he felt like they should not be treated like victims when they come back, if they suffer from PTSD for a whole host of reasons that I won't get into, but this has been so much fun. I, I really think we could, we could continue talking for hours, but I want to be respectful of your time. Malcolm, where can people find the podcast? Where can they find you on social media or elsewhere? Where would you like them to,

to check things out? Podcast is revisionisthistory.com, but anywhere there are podcasts, you can find Revisionist History. And my Twitter handle is just at Gladwell. I'm the only Gladwell out there. So, and I, but I, I tweet, I'm an indifferent tweeter, but I, I get into little moments when I, when I go off. Especially if someone brings up the, the, the myths and policies of current higher education in the United States. Oh, that gets me going. I remember Pope Bronson told me once I asked at a, at a Q and a, this was before I had written any books. And I asked him what he does when he has writer's block. And he said, I write about what makes me angry. Occasionally I use that. It seems to work pretty well, at least to get me, get me started. Malcolm, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Tim. That was really fun.

I can't wait to, to jump into, uh, the episodes you mentioned of the podcast and I'll probably just go from start to finish. That's like, I can be pretty linear that way. Yeah. And, uh, to everybody listening, you can find links to business history, to everything we discussed, the books mentioned, et cetera, in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And until next time, and as always, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday

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