 Now, most of my questions will be quite short, but my first question will be really, really long, since everyone knows you and your work so well. I asked myself, who is Malcolm Gladwell, and I tried to come up with an answer, and I'll give you my answer, and then you can correct me or add to that, and this will take just a little while. So I think of you as a figure set, really coming out of the post-war Caribbean Enlightenment. So I put you in a context with, say, Sylvia Winter, C. L. R. James, Ron Svanen, and a common theme in their work is the notion that science is something potentially liberating and emancipatory. So you're picking up on that with one of the channels of influence being your mother, who is herself, a very well-known Caribbean writer and intellectual. So there's that Caribbean background, power of science, to liberate human individuals. There's then on you a Mennonite influence, both from your childhood and your family, where you grew up in Canada. So my understanding of Mennonites is they tend to stress the notion that in the scriptures there's not much talk of original sin. So you see the possibility for goodness in people. You then spent much of your life in Canada, so there's a kind of modesty that comes from that, of temperament and also intellectual modesty. You then have a father who is a mathematician, so there's the emphasis on data. And you got your 10,000 hours of practice, mostly at the Washington Post, an early person behind the rise of database journalism. So key themes in your work, I think of them as contingency, optimism, and volunteerism, power of the individual. Your first book, Tipping Point, is about how small moves can lead to big changes. Your last book, David and Goliath, is about how David can beat Goliath in many contexts. So again, contingency, optimism, volunteerism, the individual. And whether it boils down to is there a better way to shoot NBA free throws or could Elvis Costello have improved on his recording of Goodbye, Cruel World, there's this consistently optimistic perspective, so you're really a very systematic thinker with core themes running out your whole work. What's my take on Who's Malcolm Gladwell? How do you see it? Who's Malcolm Gladwell? Here. Well, it's a very flattering interpretation. I don't know if I think that deeply about myself. The only thing I would add to that is I really like to tell stories. And my desire to tell stories is not a product of my background, it's a reaction against my background because my family, with all due respect to them, I love them dearly, are not good storytellers. And so that was the role I felt I filled in my family since everyone was so either uninterested. The notion that you would sit around a dinner table and tell and recount hilarious stories from the day was utterly absent from my childhood. And when I discovered, much later on, that there were families where this happened, I was just in awe. So that was, you know, there's two kinds of influences. There's negative and positive influences. You just left out the negative ones, I think. I could imagine maybe your father, the mathematician, was not a natural storyteller. But if I think of your mother, Joyce Gladwell, I've been reading her book. It was published in 1969. You even make a cameo appearance on page 178. It's called Brown Face Big Master. It's a memoir. And it's full of great stories. And what I find profound in that is her notion of both the importance of struggle and issues of race and feminism and fighting for your family, but also repeatedly being subjected to what she calls, quote, I quote, the medicine of acceptance and how you can combine those two things, struggle and medicine of acceptance in a life that also finds God. And she's full of profound stories on that. So did you get your story telling? Well, my mother is very quiet. So she is a very lovely writer and a great storyteller when she writes. But she's not one to regale the room. So my mother wrote a book. Not as a, you know, some people will write books. What they're really doing is they're just kind of putting down on paper the stories they tell in public. My mother was putting down on paper the stories she would never tell in public. And it's funny that she's on unusualness. You know, this is why I always urge people to sit down with their parents while their parents are still with them and turn on the tape recorder and force them to tell stories. Because surprising numbers of people don't, unless they're forced to, don't, or unless it's a deliberate act, don't tell the stories from their life that are meaningful. So that was a, that writing that book was a, was I think a very, was a very deliberate act on my mother's part to try and, she was trying to make sense of, I mean, one hesitates to call one's mother, one's own mother's life. Extraordinary, it was not that it was extraordinary. It was just unusual. You know, she was a black woman trying to marry a white man in England. In the fifties. So it was, you know, they were a little bit of an oddity. Can I tell my favorite story about my father from this era? So my father, they get married and they move back to Jamaica. My father is teaching mathematics at University, at University of West Indies in the early 60s, 61. And he needs to get, I love the story. But this is a story my father did not tell me until like three years ago, which tells you something about stories. And so it just three years ago, he somehow just comes out and tells. So at 61, he needs a particular textbook. And this being 1961, you can't go online. So he writes to all the libraries and turns out the closest library to Kingston, Jamaica that has this book they needs for his research is Georgia Tech. So he writes to Georgia Tech and says, can I come and use your library? And they say, yes. And so he makes preparations and it means sailing from Kingston to Miami and taking a bus from Miami to Atlanta because he doesn't have any money. What he doesn't realize is that they said yes. But then the person who said yes got in trouble for saying yes before they figured out his race, because all they knew was that a man from the University of West Indies was blind to use their library. And of course, their library in 1961 would have been segregated. And so it set off this huge commotion at Georgia Tech as they tried to figure out whether my father was white or black. And so they look, they try and find, you know, is there some, they figure out where he got his PhD. Could they find some kind of yearbook they couldn't. They tried to get in touch with his thesis advisor, couldn't get his name. Couldn't just call him because of course you can't place a call to Kingston in 1961 and just sort of ask. Finally, they track him down through like long the day before he's about to leave, he gets a call from like the Dean of whatever at Georgia Tech. Mr. Gladwell says yes. Dr. Gladwell, we have a slightly odd question. He goes, yes, what is it? Are you white? And my father says yes. And the guy says, swear to God, oh thank God. Now, to my point about stories. Like I said, he told that story three years ago. Just happened to come out like, who waits until 2014 to tell a story like that like that from 1961. There's a discussion that Sylvia Winter, the Jamaican intellectual, offered in year 2000 and I'd like your opinion on this. She said there's something special about the United States that in Jamaica or many parts of the Caribbean more broadly, that being middle class can in some way counter the fact of blackness socially and serve as a kind of offset. But she said about the United States and here I quote, the U.S. itself is based on the insistent negation of black identity, the obsessive hypervaluation of being white. Do you think that's an accurate perspective? Well, yeah, there is something under, well I hate to say under theorized, but there is something under theorized about the differences between West Indian and American black culture and the particular, the psychological difference between what it means to come from those two places. And the, you don't, I think only when you look very closely at that difference do you understand the heavy weight, the particular American heritage places on African Americans. But there is something enormously, you know, it's funny about West Indians is they can always spot another West Indian, right? And you have to, at a certain point you wonder how do they always know and it's because they're, after a while you get good at spotting the absence of that weight, right? And it explains as well the well-known phenomenon of how disproportionately successful West Indian, West Indians are when they come to the United States because they're, they seem to be better equipped to deal with this, with the particular pathologies attached to race in this country. You know, my mother being a very good example. But of course there's a, there's a million examples. You know, I was just reading for one of my podcasts, I was reading, I've been reading all these oral history transcripts from the civil rights movement. I was reading one today and I said, I'm halfway through. And I had that completely unbidden thing. I was like, oh, this guy's a West Indian. He was a African American attorney and civil rights lawyer in Virginia in the 60s. I got half, like a 30 page transcript. I got to page 15. I'm like, he's West Indian. And then literally page 16, my father came from Trinidad and Tobago with my mother. It's like, it's a, it's a, there is something very, very real there that's sort of not, I feel like fully appreciated. Another difference that struck me, tell me what you think of this, is that the notion of freedom from much of the Caribbean, it's in some way more celebratory and it's more rooted in history. And it may be because these are mostly majority black societies. So history is in a sense controlled. So it's much more commemorative. Does that make sense to you? It's not a struggle to control the narration of history at a national level. Oh, that's it. Yes. So you're in charge of the narrative. Yes. It's huge, but you're also, I thought of this because I wanted to do, sorry, my podcast is on my mind and I've been, I wanted to do a, and I haven't managed to figure out how to do it, but there's a Jamaican poet called Louise Bennett. And if you are Jamaican, you know exactly who this person is. And you're, she's like the, probably the most important kind of colloquial poet. Maybe that's the wrong word, popular poet. And she was, she wrote poetry in dialect. So she was a kind of, for a generation of Jamaicans, she was an assertion of Jamaican identity and culture. So when my mother, my mother was a scholarship student at a predominantly white boarding school in Jamaica. She and the other black students of the school as a kind of act of protest, read Louise Bennett poetry at the school function when she was 12 years old. So she's that kind of, and if you read Louise Bennett's poetry, a lot of it is this, it's all, much of it is about race, but it's not, it's about race where the Jamaican, the black Jamaican often has the upper hand. The black Jamaican is always telling some kind of sly joke at the expense of the white minority, right? So it's very much, it's poetry that doesn't make sense, but doesn't make the same kind of sense in a society where you're a relatively powerless minority. It's the kind of thing that makes sense if you're 95%, and you're not in control of major institutions and such, but you are 95% of the population and you feel like you're going to win pretty soon. And she has this, one of my mother used to read this poem to me as a child where Louise Bennett is, the poem is all about sitting in a beauty parlor, getting her hair straightened, sitting next to a white woman who's getting her hair curled. And the joke is that the white woman's paying a lot more to get her hair curled than Louise Bennett is to get her hair straightened. Like that's the point, right? It's like, it's all this kind of subtle one-upmanship. But that's very Jamaican. Now to ask about your podcasts, I know some of them in the second season, they'll be about the civil rights movement, in particular the 1950s, which are somewhat neglected time. I'll throw out just a few possible forces that led America to start to become more integrated in the 50s, and you tell me which you think are neglected or underrated. One would be professional sports and Jackie Robinson starting to play baseball in the late 40s. Another would be entertainers and move toward having more black leads in movies and also music, say Chuck Berry or even James Brown. Would you say the military Truman integrating the military or the desire for purposes of Cold War propaganda to actually show this country is making some progress on civil rights issues? I mean, which of those or which other factors do you feel are the ones we're missing in understanding this history? I would put army, if I had to rank those, army one. Okay. I would, and I would say that the entertainment and sports, I would say that that had, it was either neutral or worse than neutral. Why worse than neutral? Because I don't think, I actually think if you, if we were to take the long view and we would look at this from a hundred years from now, we would say that the fact that, that so it is not unusual for minorities to first make their mark in sports and entertainment, right? We see that every, you see it with Jews, you see it with Italians, you see it with, you know, Irish. But my thing, the thing that's striking to me about those movements is they move in and out of those worlds pretty quickly. So the Jewish moment in sports is really quite short. Sure. I respect not that surprising. Boxing especially. It's like that long. The African American moment in those transitional fields is really long. It continues to this day. And it's almost to the point where you feel like that what happens is they move into those worlds and get stalled there. And the presence in that world accentuates and aggravates existing prejudice about their, about their community as opposed to serving as a kind of way station to a better place. So if your problem is that you're facing a series of stereotypes about how you are intellectually inferior, how you have a kind of broken culture, how you have, you know, like a go on and on and on with all of the stereotypes that exist, then why is being playing, how does playing brutally violent sports help you? Right? How is an association almost an overrepresentation in these various kinds of public entertainments advance your cause? So I kind of, I'm for those areas when, those things when they're transitional and I'm against them when they seem like dead ends. How important a factor was the research of Mamie and Kenneth Clark? That's some work that had there been a Malcolm Gladwell at the time would have been written up even more. The notion that when there's segregation people may value themselves or their race less. It seems that had a big impact on the Warren court, on other thinking. What's your take on their influence? Well, there's a, I just, it's funny, I was just both read. The great book on this is Daryl Scott's Contempt and Pity, who's a, he's a very good black historian at Howard, I believe. Yes, he's the chair of History at Howard. And points out he has much to say. So I got quite taken when I was doing my, this season of my podcast with the black critique of Brown. And the black critique of Brown starts with some of that psychological research because the psychological research is profoundly problematic on many levels. So what Clark was showing and what so moved the court in the Warren decision was this research where you would take the black and the white doll and you show that to the black kid. And the black kid, you would say which is the good doll and the black kid points to the white doll and which doll do you associate with yourself and they don't want to answer the question, right? And the court said this is the damage done by segregation. Scott points out that if you actually look at the research that Clark did the black children who were most likely to have these deeply problematic responses in the doll test were those from the north who were in integrated schools. The sudden kids in segregated schools did not regard the black doll as problematic. They were like, that's me, fine. It was, and that result that it was kids from black kids, minority kids from integrated schools who had the most adverse reactions to their own representation in a doll is consistent with all of the previous literature on self-hatred, which starts with Jews. It was originally that literature begins with where does Jewish self-hatred come from? Jewish self-hatred does not come from Eastern Europe in the ghettos. It comes from when Jewish immigrants confront and come into close conflict and contact with majority white culture. That's where self-hatred starts, when you start measuring yourself at close quarters against the other, and the other seems so much more free and glamorous and what have you. So in other words, the Warren Court picks the wrong research. There's nothing to do with the problem caused. There are all kinds of problems caused by segregation. This happens to be not one of them. So why does the Warren Court do that? Because they're trafficking, this is Scott's argument, they are trafficking in an uncomfortable and unfortunate trope about black Americans, which is that black American culture is psychologically damaged, that the problem with black people is not that they're denied power or that their doors are closed to them, or that no, it's because that something at their core, their family life and their psyches are in some way being crushed or distorted or harmed by their history. It personalizes the struggle. So by personalizing the struggle, what the Warren Court is trying to do is to manufacture an argument against segregation that will be acceptable to white people, particularly southern white people, and so what they're saying is like, look, it's not you that's the problem, it's black people, they're harmed in their hearts, and we have to like usher them into the mainstream. They're not making the correct argument, which was, you guys have been messing with these people for 200 years, stop! They can't make that argument because Warren desperately wants a majority, he wants a 9-0 majority on the court. So instead they construct this in retrospect deeply offensive argument about how it's all about black people carrying this, and using social science in a way that's actually quite deeply problematic. It's not what the social science said. There's a more recent line of research, some of it coming from Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt, that at least claims that mixed-race children growing up have a harder time and take more risks than just their socioeconomic status alone would predict. Do you agree with that? Take issue with it. Mixed-race. Really? Yeah, I've never heard of that. It doesn't apply to me, certainly. No one has lived a more risk-averse life than me. But I don't know, I mean, you know, although I have enormous respect for both those economists, this isn't one of those highly imaginative use of correlations, is it? Sometimes they lose me. We are economists. Economists lose me when they play those games. Higher education, it's one of your passions in life. So there's a recent paper by Raj Chetty. It shows that at least 38 colleges are taking in more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. And many of those are Ivy League schools. Now take, for instance, Harvard, Princeton, Yale. Why are those schools not doubling the number of students they take in? In your opinion. Why don't they do this? I was going to say, why are you asking me? You're the one in the academy. You must have a theory of why the world is... Why, well, you know, why doesn't Louis Vuitton sell a $59 bag? Because Louis Vuitton doesn't want to be in the commodity bag business. They would rather sell a small number of bags at $10,000 each. But Harvard could take in 2x and not lower tuition, I suspect. Harvard could take in 10x. 10x and not lower tuition. They'll have $40 billion left over. No, I think it's... I mean, look, there's no... These guys are in the luxury handbag business. They're not in the education business. They are interested in sustaining a certain brand equity, and they see expanding the size of their schools as diluting their brand equity in exactly the same manner as Louis Vuitton does. Louis Vuitton is not going to open a Louis Vuitton store across the street, right, in that building over there next to the Starbucks, and they're not going to do it. Even though there may be people right here who want to go and buy a Louis Vuitton bag right now, they're very conscious of maintaining that aura of exclusivity. That's all Harvard is doing. If you thought for a moment their primary motivation was in educating as many people as they could, as well as they could, then I think you're living in a dream world, right? This is not... You know, I was walking around... This is a tangent. I was in D.C. this weekend, and I went for a walk with a friend of mine, and we went to Dunbart-Nokes. Dunbart... You know, it's a gorgeous facility, and it's owned by... It was given to Harvard University in 1940 by Robert Bliss Wood in its entirety. I happen to know that, for complicated reasons that I shouldn't go into, that the endowment attached to Dunbart-Nokes has many, many zeros. Let's just say that the endowment attached to Dunbart-Nokes is larger than the endowments of all but a tiny fraction of American colleges. And I also know that we all know that on the grounds of Dunbart-Nokes, they have a museum where there's one of the great collections of pre-Columbian art in the world. So as I was walking around the grounds of Dunbart-Nokes, I asked myself, here we have... This is a facility owned by a nonprofit institution which receives enormous tax benefits from the American taxpayer and which has an astonishing sum of money attached to it. Why can't I see the art? And why does no one get upset about this, by the way? I'm allowed to walk around the Rose Garden. Whoopie. Right? There's lots of... Surely I should see the art. I am as an American taxpayer subsidizing this institution and yet it's like... And why are there no... Why are they bringing in... When was the last time they brought in a busload of high school students to Dunbart-Nokes to walk them through the pre-Columbian art collection? Has it ever happened? I don't know. One economic puzzle... One economic puzzle to me is why universities such at Harvard have such high endowments. Now you've just raised some objections to endowments but if one is taking a somewhat cynical economic approach to this, you would think actually they would spend more on themselves from the endowment and they don't. And that raises the question of what are they really trying to maximize? What's your theory of endowments and why they're so high and why don't the people at Harvard spend more on themselves? Because they're not all that rich, right? You had a great post on marginal revolution. I remember you very short in which you said that you were giving a list of things that you thought needed to be done in the world of economics. And one of them was you said endowments are under theorized. Yes. And I read that and I said, ha! I'm going to seal that phrase. Totally under theorized. So one of the greatest philanthropists of the 20th century was Julius Rosenwald, the guy who makes seers, seers. An enormously wealthy man in the kind of 20s and 30s. And he starts the Rosenwald fund and what does the Rosenwald fund do? It sets aside a sum of money which in today's dollars would be, I've forgotten, but probably close to a billion. And he decides what he wants to do is to go throughout the South and build public schools throughout the South in African American communities. And one of his rules is no endowments. He said we're going to spend it to zero and they spent it to zero. And to this day, there has actually been some really lovely economic work measuring the economic impact of the Rosenwald schools. And it's not subtle. If you look at the list of things that made a tangible difference in the South in the first half of the 20th century, Rosenwald schools is way up there. And why did he go way up there? Because he went to zero, right? If he set up an endowment to fund the building of schools for African Americans in the South, we would still be building schools for African Americans in the South. It would be a 100-year-long project. Instead of running through a billion dollars, you would run through 5% of a billion dollars every year. So the very fact that you set up an endowment means that you have decided before you start to minimize your impact. I'm going to take your dollar and I'm going to commit to spending five cents of it every year. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Who does this? I don't know where it comes from. Why would you not spend your money? If you have 40 billion in your Harvard, there are tons. How many interesting educational things could you do with 40 billion if you gave yourself a 10-year time horizon? And by the way, given the track record of Harvard in raising money, why for a moment do they think they can't replace the 40 billion with the 40 billion? They have proven over and over again that there's one thing at which they truly are world-class and that's raising money. It's irrationally upon irrationality. They haven't even owned up to the one thing that they're truly world-class at. I'm pleased that we're holding this at George Mason a school which in the words of our president tries to be the best school for the world and not the best in the world but let's say we put you in charge at Harvard. Yeah. What changes would you make? You appoint the board. You are the board. You and your mother. This is such a great question. Can I start at the beginning? Start at the beginning. Okay. I would start by going I would establish a set of baseline criteria for admissions and I would have a lottery after that. So if you are someone who has you're in the top 2% of your high school class or whatever we can, 5% whatever cut off we want following test scores at a certain point whatever cut off we want some minimum number of other things you do you just go into the pot and we're pulling out names. I would I probably triple or quadruple the size in the next 10 years open campuses probably two other campuses in the United States one overseas I would you know I had this idea that I'm not sure how you do it but where I think that it would be really, really useful to ban graduates of elite colleges from ever disclosing that they went to an elite college it's not a joke it's deadly serious because what it does is it wonderfully clarifies the decision for the student whether they want to go to an elite college so you don't want the kid going to Harvard who just wants the brand name Harvard you want the kid to go to Harvard who genuinely believes that he or she can get an education there that they can't get anywhere else right? I want that kid so if I say you can come here and get a world class to the greatest education in the world but after you graduate you can never tell anyone where you went then I'm I'm weeding out all the Louis Vuitton shoppers and I'm getting the true scholars so if there's a kid out there who says there's the certain professor one of my oldest friends is a professor at Harvard Terry Martin a huge fan of yours by the way Terry if there's a kid out there who says I want to take a I read Terry's book he's written a couple books I want to do Soviet studies I want to study with Terry that's the kid I want right? and I don't actually I'm willing to go to any lengths to get that kid I'll give him a I'll cut him a break I'll keep him out of the lottery you know I'll do all kinds of things but you want that kind of if you're running a truly elite college what you want to select for is someone who is the kids who are most powerfully motivated to leverage the institutional assets of the institution I'm sorry the intellectual assets of the institution not the brand assets of the institution and now a truly important question how would you treat the faculty well you know there's a really interesting site I haven't forgotten to my eternal discredit who did it but that looks at trends in educational spending and points out that educational spending has gone like higher ed spending has gone like that the share of higher ed dollars that goes to faculty salaries when you do all the kind of it's basically been flat for 50 years so you'd pay us more I mean I don't say that because I'm at a university talking to a professor and I'm the son of a professor I say that because because it seems crazy to have to put academics in the kind of professional firmament it seems crazy to have them losing ground to other professions when you would think that the importance in a modern society of having world class faculty would be greater and to the extent I mean I'm not saying that if you pay academics properly more you're going to get better academics necessarily but I do think it's not a bad idea if you want to reward people going into that profession human potential and talent that's a key theme running throughout a lot of your work let me ask you two or three questions on that do you think that today we're actually able to measure and spot talent very early and thus we're branding and marking people and actually telling a lot of people they shouldn't do Activity X because they're measured too quickly so this is my friend David Epstein who wrote Sports Gene is really really interesting on this subject with respect to sports and points out that what really makes for successful elite athletes is early base so the last thing you want to do is to over specialize too soon with a with a kid for a number of reasons one is you know the phenomenon of you know baseball pitchers having all kinds of arm problems in their teens is a product of kids simply pitching too much too soon but you can generalize we think that an awful lot of injuries that elite athletes are suffering in their late adolescence are due to the fact that they have been doing the same repetitive motions from an early age we think that burnout is also a function of this but there also is a very interesting argument beyond those to say that there is a body of skills that you only learn if you have a broad early base so the basketball analogy would be you know Hakim Elijahwan being a soccer player or Steve Nash being a soccer player or in tennis Federer being a soccer player that there are extremely valuable things about basketball that are most usefully learned on a soccer pitch when you're very young that kind of now that is a beautiful analogy for academic work as well or for any sort of intellectual work that the best preparation for something over here when you're very young maybe something over here and then the third thing is that the most important and the thing you're alluding to is that we do a really bad job of spotting early talent simply because you can't spot you know I'm a runner and every runner knows this the kids who are the great runners in their early teens and I was one of them are not the ones who end up being the world class athletes sometimes they are but there's a huge change over in the ranking of runners between 12 and 18 at least when you look at the ranks of world class runners and you look at their times at least half of them had mediocre times in there you know I was at the age of 13 the fastest myler from my age in Canada by 21 I was useless and washed up and no longer there was a kid who I used to destroy when I was 13 he went on to be essentially world class right on the fringes of world class I used to kill him I mean he was just not even close anyone looking at the two of us at 13 would say glad well as the talent this other guy is like he was terrible he ended up running 335 for 1500 meters let's say you're giving advice to the parents parents in the room you can't reshape the system you can't even control Harvard but you can tell them what to do for their children what's your advice given all of what you just said well you should delay specialization as long as possible you should because of all of those yeah because prediction is poor and burnout is an issue is poor prediction early prediction and I would avoid I think the other parallel problem which I get at in David and Goliath is I think that overly competitive environments at two early in age are really deeply problematic so I thought about this the other day when I was I lived most of the time upstate New York very close to Bard I had a big workout at the Bard gym and I was watching so Bard has got I don't know how many students I mean is it two thousand I don't even know it's some tiny number and I was watching the Bard lacrosse team workout and I don't know anyone I don't want to offend anyone who went to Bard they're not allowed to say by the way that's right they can't say they're terrible I was just eyeballing the old lacrosse team good lord I felt that I could go down there at 52 and make this team and then that was my first thought my second thought was that is so fantastic because what it means is you can be an ordinary Joe at Bard and play lacrosse right now think about that in every different thing it so in a school that small with the exception of the things at which they are I mean there's probably two or three things at Bard that they genuinely do excel I'm sure the drama program or the music program is formidable but let's accept though any non-specialty item at Bard is going to be it's wide open it's totally accessible you know you want to be in the physics club at Bard you can be in the physics club at Bard and that is a massively underrated thing so in other words there's a continuum here and exclusivity is at one end and opportunity is at the other end and people constantly are confusing these two things and thinking that in exclusivity and in elite status is opportunity false eventually that's where the opportunities lie they don't lie there when you're 16 or 17 and you when what is required of you is experimentation if you want your 17 year old to explore the world send your 17 year old to a place where the world can be explored the world cannot be explored at a super elite university right it's impossible I had to talk about David and Glythe the phenomenon of very very very good science and math students going to elite colleges and dropping out at enormously high rates because they're in the 99th percentile and they're in a class full of people in the 99.9th percentile in the 99th percentile and you're up against someone in the 99.99th percentile you feel stupid right even though you will never again in your life unless you want to be an academic at MIT in physics be surrounded by people that smart right it's over after that then you go back to the real world and you're smart again so why would you artificially push yourself in a situation where you feel so dumb that you stop doing the very thing that you went to school to do that's just that is bananas that is like and why this isn't a fact that people like when I when I was in college what I went out for the university Toronto newspaper and they wouldn't give me a job it was too hard to get in they were the brilliant people so what did I do I wrote for my pathetic joke of a we had a residential college we put out this kind of joke thing every couple weeks and it was insanely fun it was like I could do whatever I wanted nobody cared we made up all kinds of crazy I mean in the end I had a way better experience than I would have had if I was at the highly competitive newspaper I've never forgotten that right by virtue of being this kind of lame forgotten thing I got to do more fun stuff and I have a much better time than I would have at the proper newspaper you know there this tries to be well clearly drives me crazy now you've argued that in the NBA more players should shoot their free throws underhanded it would take them some time to learn but it would turn poor shooters into somewhat better shooters and that would be worth a lot in terms of performance now you are yourself a teacher in some way in the broad sense so what is it that we other teachers are doing wrong what is for us the underhanded free throw we're not doing enough of that's interesting when are you not doing enough of well I suppose I could expand on this notion of kind of that to encourage experimentation and open opportunities one must also be much more tolerant of mediocrity and that the notion that there can be something lovely in mediocrity is or one of your favorite phrases and now mine is under theorized and I wonder whether sort of making the world safe for mediocrity is not a very worthy goal of of teaching because not only because the people who will one day be good need to pass through mediocrity on their way to being good but also that like I said it's the gateway to experimentation I don't know where one sort of how that practically translates in a teaching session but I think it's that's a very Tocquevillean answer what is it that long distance runners are not doing correctly what is their equivalent of the underhanded free throw well there's so many there's so many different arguments going on right now about long distance running I suppose the best way to sum them up is that like all highly competitive subspecialties everyone wants to believe they have an answer that works for everyone when in fact the truth is that there's probably 10 different ways to run a train effectively for long distance and we were just slow to understand how variable runners are the one interesting thing the most interesting thing happening to meet in distance running right now is the rise of Japan as a distance running power and what's interesting about Japan is that Japan does not have any one runner particularly in marathons does not have any one marathoner who is in the top 10 in the world but they have an enormous number of people who are in the top 100 and so your notion of whether Japan is a distance running power depends on how you choose to define distance running power so we have one definition that we use where we say we recognize a country is being very good at distance running if they have lots and lots of people in the top 10 but that's just being incredibly arbitrary and it goes to my point about we're not encouraging mediocrity why? all that says is okay so Kenya's got 9 of the top 10 fastest marathons right now why is that better than having 300 of the top 1000 it's purely arbitrary that we choose to define greatest as just the country that most densely occupies the 99th percentile why can't we define it as the country that most densely occupies the 75th through 100th percentiles right? there's always a segment in the middle of these chats called overrated or underrated so I'm going to list a few things you're free to pass overrated or underrated ketchup the first famous article on ketchup I'm on record as saying underrated massively massively underrated and which is the best ketchup Heinz has to be William F. Buckley well in his day appropriately rated now underrated I mean talking about someone who was a massive William Buckley as my childhood I was obsessed with him until I had entire works of his seemingly memorized so under who is the most underrated figure in Jamaican popular music past, present, either everyone knows Bob Marley but who's the hidden gem oh my goodness that's a really really really really I'm going to pass on that one I want to get in trouble I would say Desmond Decker or Lee Perry if you're curious but why are they under? I mean I feel like their place is pretty anyway we don't need to get into it but in Jamaica but I don't millennials don't seem to know very much about who they are is my sense or even Toots and the Mytals or Keith Hudson or King Tubby somewhat not in Jamaica forgotten because there there's a more celebratory notion of history right? Yeah but in the United States to me that's sad and the notion that the leading figures in electronic music in the 70s would come from Jamaican not a high tech country that's an extraordinary story that seems to me so I don't need to get me started on Jamaican triumphalism it's a David versus Goliath story Jamaican's win my colleague Steve Perlstein oh is he he's not here is he he used to be of the Washington Post my former editor, I love Steve underrated absolutely I have lunch with him every week his father owned that great clothing store in Luisa Boston and he was always Steve I remember as a young reporter of the Washington Post I was very badly dressed and Steve you know a highly intellectual guy who cut his teeth in a high-end men's clothing store in Boston would have always come up to me and like you know adjust my suit jacket and say what are you like a 36 short you know I always love that this reminds me by the way can I do a little one of my favorite things one of the things about the Jewish immigrant experience in America that I have never gotten over that always thrills me to bits and I don't know why is the transition from merchant to intellectual class that generational move which is just so fantastic and my favorite one there's many many great ones is the speaking of Boston and retail is that Filene's basement right was started by the Filene's it was started by the Filene brothers and one of whose name was Lincoln, Lincoln Filene and their kind of manager the guy the CEO of their store was a guy named Kirsten and Kirsten had a son who he named for his boss Lincoln who is Lincoln Kirsten the great giant of American Ballet and and so you see in Lincoln Kirsten in the name of this extraordinary cultural figure echoes of of bargain retail from Boston like the idea that one person's name summons those two worlds simultaneously it's just so it's so beautiful it's the similar version of this is the fact that some of the people who were of the people who were saved by during the Holocaust by Schindler then went on moved to New Jersey became real estate developers did all these subdivisions and would always name a street after Schindler and they would bring them over for the opening but once again you have this incredibly moving and powerful tribute that's grounded in the prosaic it's the reverse of Lincoln Kirsten right it's the move of moving back and forth between these worlds I just find that I feel really beautiful and sort of moving anyway what's the most underrated John Le Carré novel oh wow so many right well the very old small town in Germany the pre spy committed from the coal ones I really like and I also really like you know I thought I've always a little drummer girl is really fantastic but I think maybe the pre the really the super early ones are remarkably good and our Le Carré novels glad Wellian in their world view or do you enjoy them so much because they're not are they offset or confirmation I didn't know there was such a thing as why do I enjoy I enjoy them because I enjoy them for a very specific reason that has to do with the fact that I you know I spent I was born in England and my father is English and he's a product of my father's essentially John Le Carré's age so they come from the same world kind of bleak middle-class post-war English and I have a such an affection for that particular era and world and when I go back to London I was just in London I find myself I gravitate to those parts of London it still look that way because to me that's what London is London is not the shiny rich London of today and London is not the gorgeous historic what's London to me is kind of 1950 and that weird moment when you're walking down a street in East London and there you see a block that was clearly bombed and they built something in 19 clearly in 1948 that just abuts something that was built in 1820 that thing whenever I see that I just it just gets me every time and John Le Carré particularly well spy from the cold is just about to me it's just about that that kind of unrelenting bleakness of that world and that how all of the kind of every all of the the material niceties of their world were I mean it was just tea and biscuits that's as good as it got right that's what you look forward to every day and it was always raining and no one could say I love you and you know it's just all part of it is just like it's fantastic it's just and when I'm in that world I feel so normal I just feel like I am this this ray of sunshine what's your favorite noncurrent movie you know I don't go to the movies anymore I haven't been to a movie in years I don't even I can't do it I don't know why I just they lost me but old movies Michael Powell if you like Alder England no I don't even I can't remember the last movie I saw to be honest overrated or underrated the idea of early childhood intervention to set societal ills right uh overrated because it's and to my mind it's just another form so it became politically impermissible to say that certain people in society would never make it because they were genetically inferior so I feel like that group it's like all right we can't say that anymore we'll just move the goalpost up two years and we'll say well if you don't get or three years if you don't get the right kind of stimulation by the time you're three basically it's curtains so it's like why is that argument which we decided we didn't like it when they set the goalpost at zero somehow it's like super important and legitimate and you know chin stroking worthy and it's when they set when they move the goalpost to three truth is like people it's not over at three any more than it was over at zero like there are certain things that will be nice to get done by the age of three but if they're not the you know the idea that it's that it's that it's curtains is preposterous it's the same kind of fatalism that I thought we had defeated you know in the I mean you could make a really you know if you want to say that the goalpost should be at 30 then I'm open to would you settle for 55 I'm very glad to hear that answer now I looked back there was an article you wrote actually in the 1990s for the Washington Post it's not online but I can confide to you all that it was leaked to me and it's called 10 things DC could learn from New York City and I know it will be very hard for this crowd to believe but you actually have ever so slight preference for New York City over Washington DC at that time and one of the things you thought Washington needed more of this is number three and I quote more adventurous celebrities do you still feel that we need more adventurous celebrities pretty sure my opinion would change if I was doing it today your number one however was shame that this was a city that needed more shame really yes I have no memory of this number five was the Knicks so clearly you have no memory of this but over time how was your view of Washington DC changed there's a 2007 radio show you did with your mother it's actually my favorite of all your outputs I love this podcast I recommend it to everyone but there you said that you and also she did well because you were always serial outsiders do you feel that in any way Washington DC with its culture that is in some ways fairly bland passively pushy nervously ambitious and just too full of politics is this has this now become a city where it's a good place to be a serial outsider or simply not wow that's a really good question what was particular about so I was in DC from 85 January of 1985 until July of 1993 and the city obviously has gotten a lot wealthier and safer and wider sure and more day area a lot more diverse since I was there has the I came here in Reagan years when an upheaval was going on politically I suppose that's happening again in some sense I don't know whether you know the thing that's peculiar about DC is that particularly if you're in your 20s is the turnover so there are very few places and you actually make this point in complacent class about how the move Americans are a lot less mobile than they used to be strikingly less mobile than they used to be this has huge consequences for society and I actually think you're absolutely right it's a really really important point DC if you're in your 20s is this grand exception is massive turnover everyone, not everyone but when I think of the cohort I was with when I was 23 in DC none of them are in DC anymore all gone with a few exceptions and I feel there is that kind of churning and that churning is really really useful in terms of giving people opportunities to look at what's going on from an outsider's perspective because you're not committing to the city, you're outside of there's permanent Washington and in your 20s you're not part of permanent Washington you're skipping through from in this kind of you're kind of ringing the permanent city and that was really what made my time here so special if I had stayed I feel like it would in my memory have diminished a little bit by the way in the 90s you also wrote a profile of Pat Buchanan which I would encourage you to reread you may be surprised by your own prescience you would have to change a few words in the article but much of it would apply today do you think New York City and Manhattan in particular is that still a good place to be a serial outsider and what is it that you do in general to keep yourself as a serial outsider well lead Manhattan where do you go well there's two things I mean there one problem that I have as a writer you have a series of problems one problem a serious problem is that I'm old and I don't mean that in a you know I'm decrepit what I mean is that that it's very important if you are a writer to remain kind of current and the greatest danger you face is this sort of fossilization of your positions and views one of the main reasons that I wanted to do a podcast is that a podcast forces me out of my age cohort and puts me back in the land of people in their 20s and 30s primarily and that's you know I'm not being Peter Pan I'm trying to kind of rejuvenate my thinking because you become aware and you have a kind of many professionals have a kind of professional peak in your 40s and then you can feel yourself your views hardening and you feel yourself closing off to new ideas the minute you see yourself rolling your eyes at something that's what the kids think because the end is nigh and you have to take so part of what I do is try and even when I'm writing, I don't write in an office I write in coffee shops I don't particularly think coffee shops are amazing places to write but I do think that simply just being around people who are not my age is really useful and I travel a lot and that's a really, really useful way of breaking out of bad intellectual habits and to remind yourself about what the rest of the world is like I also try to be intellectually flexible and let me tell you about a worry I have, maybe you can talk me out of my worry I worry that in so far as one is intellectually flexible on any particular thing it becomes a way actually of protecting some broader and more hidden edifice that there's a kind of oddly hidden desperation or even pessimism embedded in certain kind of flexibilities and there's something to be said for erecting a quite rigid structure which people tend to do more when they're young and then it can be toppled so one becomes quote-unquote wiser more flexible, more willing to revise you've written about how different columns they're just, they're opening questions so you get people to think and I worry in my own writing I do this that in some ways it's a deeper dogmatism than erecting the highly dogmatic structure which can be toppled do you have that same worry or how do you see those trade-offs? Do you see what I'm saying? We're at the point in the conversation where you reveal yourself to be much smarter than I am I've never thought it through that deeply I think, well because I don't think of myself as having a edifice so I have a series of positions and feelings about things so you said early on that you thought of my work as being optimistic I feel like that's a feeling and not an edifice I don't have a formal reason to be optimistic, I'm just an optimistic person I have a physiological optimism as opposed to an intellectual optimism and also I don't understand what the point would be if you weren't optimistic like why would you get up I know people who enjoy their own pessimism it's strange right? I don't think you could be to come back to running you can't really be an athlete and be a pessimist the whole point of being an athlete is you're building towards something you don't just work out to work out you work out because there's something out there that you're trying to anyway that's the side point but I sort of think of my like here's a good example on the affordable care act I have changed my mind six, seven times I'm not toggling back and forth between pro and con I feel like I'm jumping around I'm eminently persuadable on it and what that has done is it's been very very useful now because now it's very fashionable for liberals to be super into the affordable care act because it's under fire and I feel myself being sucked in that direction but then I remember wait a minute I've been kind of bouncing around for five years on this why am I suddenly just because it's politically expedient running to the defense of this thing which literally a year ago if you courted me at a party I would be the guy saying here's another problem with that right this is still the best book I read about about the on healthcare was an out attack on Obamacare so like so I kind of that to me is that's really useful to kind of turn over your and accept the fact that 50% of the time you're going to be wrong on these kind of things but that's fine now it's been said that satire sometimes reaffirms power while poetry affirms only its own power you have a podcast where you express a worry that Tina Fey by mimicking and satirizing Sarah Palin actually made her more acceptable and more likeable in doing so so fast forward to the current moment we have Saturday Night Live Alec Baldwin and Donald Trump is that useful satire is it not sufficiently negative should we be deploying poetry or is that the effective medium for social commentary well I don't like the Alec Baldwin Donald Trump I don't think actually it's I mean if you compare it to the to the Sean Spicer it's not as good and it's not as good because the truly effective satirical personation is one that finds something essential about the character and magnifies it something buried that you wouldn't ordinarily have seen or have glimpsed in that person and draw so with the Spicer personation why that's so brilliant is that it draws out his anger he's angry at being put in this impossible position that's the essence of that character so what is a how does a person respond to this it's almost an absurd position he's in he has this kind of it's not sublimated it's there this kind of rage like in every one of his utterances it's like I can't fucking believe I am in this satirical personation gets beautifully at that thing it satirizes that and so when I've forgotten the name of the woman who does it when Melissa McCarthy when she picks up the podium that's an absurd illustration of that fundamental point but the Alec Baldwin Trump doesn't get at something essential about Trump it simply takes his mannerisms and exaggerates them slightly but he hasn't mined Trump and so there are many directions you can go with Trump I mean the kind of extraordinary insecurity of the man which I like I said there are many things you could pluck out but that for one the idea of doing an impersonation where you really thought deeply about what it would mean in a comic way to represent this man's almost kind of tragic level of insecurity that's an interesting and Alec Baldwin is not he's a little too glib to be able to and that's the problem with Saturday Night Live the larger problem and I was trying to get out of that podcast episode on satire the problem with doing satire through the vehicle of a show like Saturday Night Live is they're not incentivized to do that kind of deep thinking the Melissa McCarthy thing is an exception it's not the rule really what they're incentivized to do is to use for the actor who is in many cases as famous or more famous than the person they are impersonating it's the actor is using the character to further their own ends Tina Fey's infinitely more popular more accomplished more whatever than Sarah Palin will ever be and so she's using Sarah Palin to further her own ends that's backwards right she's not inhabiting the character of Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Sarah Palin she is inhabiting Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Tina Fey right and I feel like so long as satire is done by a television show which has such a lofty position in the cultural hierarchy it's always going to be the case that's what's going to drive their impersonations they're always going to be sitting on their hands remember they're making fun of Trump six months after they had him on the show right after they were complicit in his rise right I mean and after Jimmy Fallon ruffled his hair on camera so I mean these are people who I mean maybe that's fine my point is you can't be an effective satirist if you are so deeply complicit in the object of your satire my last question before we have a few audience questions I was very struck by what I think is your latest New Yorker column where you wrote about what is parallel and not parallel between the cases of Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers case and in my reading of the Pentagon Papers case here's what really struck and astonished me and I'd like your your view on how it's changed when the Pentagon Papers became public in I think 1971 first they were incredibly boring but when you did read them or read excerpts one thing that startled so many people is it came out that there were accords dating back to 1954 where it turned out America had broken the accords and not North Vietnam and this shocked people and caused them to reassess their whole sense of the Vietnam War and that's 1954 which was then from 1971 a long time ago so there was a sense of history embedded in how people understood that episode that seems to me entirely lacking today to get someone to care that much about something done under other administrations 17 years earlier seems virtually impossible and what is it about America that's changed so that history now doesn't matter the way it did then you've touched on the thing about the Pentagon Papers controversy which is in retrospect so unbelievable it makes viewed it through a present day lens the whole thing is bananas it makes no sense whatsoever it's the most hilariously wonky nerdy exercise so even step back what is the Pentagon Papers it is Robert McNamara saying in whatever 69 or 68 whatever what we really need is to get a bunch the smartest historians in a room to write me a 10 volume set on historical analysis going back 20 years on this conflict we're involved in so right from the start we're in a kind of rarefied academic realm and he got us a bunch of PhDs who slave away on this thing and produced this massive turgid you know and you have Ellsberg who is the central player in this whole thing and what is Ellsberg he is the wonkiest of the wonks so he is he wrote a bit of it and his great complaint as he takes he gets a copy of the Pentagon Papers he's trying to get everyone to read it and by reading it he means I need you to go away for however many months it will take you and work your way through all 10 volumes and there's these hilarious conversations he has with Kissinger where he's trying to get Kissinger just wants a summary it's like no you can't do a summary you got to read the whole thing you got to get a couple thousand words in before the page is in before it makes any sense you know what I'm saying it's just like there's no contemporary I mean it's like history something it's not just 2017 and 1971 viewed through the lens of the Pentagon Papers controversy they belong on different planets I mean we're not even the whole and when the New York Times gets the copies I mean remember and it takes them like a year or whatever to photocopy all of it because it's enormous and the copies are really slow and the great year the great story which is the woman who is now Linda Resnick who's now a billionaire and lives in the great you know when you're driving down Wilshire in Beverly Hills there's like those massive houses to your left as you drive into Beverly Hills houses she's the one who has the pomegranate juice anyway she was the girlfriend of Ellsberg's best friend and she ran a ad agency on Beverly Boulevard and she had a Xerox machine which is a huge deal in 1971 so he does it he goes she has the she's the one who provides this which I just think is I once ran into her at some event in LA I was like you had the Xerox machine what a great role to play in history but every part of it is all about people who took history so seriously that they were willing to spend all night photocopying for months on end and then Ellsberg took copies he went around the Capitol also trying to get senators to read it and you know it's just as long and his big and over and over again the complaint that drove him to Lincoln to the New York Times was that no one's taking this seriously and what does the New York Times do when they get a copy when they get the copies they rent a room two rooms in the Hilton like right next to the New York Times headquarters put a guard out front and then spend months reading it again months reading it months like it's it's just this kind of thing that it's just I mean imagine today if this thing dropped I didn't even know how we would people would have to do takes that would come out within six hours I mean there isn't that had to do an executive summary of the executive summary in order to be able to yeah the whole age isn't it belongs to a different era I almost feel like it's the last it feels like the it is the final act in a in an intellectual era in American life when institutionalized government was expected to comport itself according to to standards and norms that came from the academy right that's what the whole thing is about people who came out of elite schools and had a certain expectation about what it meant to be a public servant and what your intellectual responsibilities were as a public servant and they carried those norms with them from graduate school to Washington right and that's the whole and the fact that Ellsberg is a PhD in decision sciences and wrote papers with Thomas Schelling is not a peripheral fact it's the core fact right that's who they were right so when you we go fast forward and you have Edward Snowden who is a community college dropout which I don't say is a snobbish thing I'm contrasting him to his predecessor who was a PhD from MIT and Snowden's intellectual understanding of what he was engaged in is just a fraction he used a search engine just to pluck stuff at random from the NSA files and hand it over to people that's not what Ellsberg was doing in the gap between those two figures is the story of the last 50 years of the changes of the last 50 years in American life before we move to a very brief Q&A let's have a big round of applause for Malcolm Gladwell we have two microphones just to be clear the purpose is for Malcolm to answer not really for you to ask so if you make a speech I will cut you off please ask a brief to the point question and we will start at this microphone yes hi I just wanted to know when we're going to get more podcasts I'm doing them I'm writing them as we speak I'm actually doing some interviews tomorrow in the DC area for one of the shows there and they'll come back out in June thank you next question over here hi good evening thanks again what tools should we use to discover your talent within ourselves and others question great question impossible to answer in time that I have if I can use my favorite subject of running as an example the the amount of if you look at times in the marathon today and compare them to times from a few years ago we are radically slower today I'm not talking about the elite level I'm talking about the sub elite level the number of Americans for example who can break three hours in the marathon today is a fraction of what it was in 1980 or 1985 and that goes to this point that our tools are in order to extract you need to have a really really broad base and the broad base is gone there is still elite running that produces really good fast runners but in 1980 there was this many people running the kind of mileage necessary to run a marathon properly and today there's this many and all of our attention and focus is on the 95th percentile but what we don't understand is we'll never find next great marathoner until we re-broadened the base when we had a base this big of mediocre marathoners we had the two greatest marathoners in the world now that our base is this big we got nobody in the top 10 this side next question thank you hi my name is Jesse Rifkin big fan my question is when you were interviewed by Ezra Klein recently you said that you and some friends used to run a publication titled ad homonym a journal of slander and political opinion in a world where academics and quality journalists and intellectuals so often fail to connect with the public and at least if November's any indication ad homonym attacks do should we bring that or something like that back oh no this was a zine that had a unnecessarily provocative title we were we felt that we were all obsessed with William F. Buckley and we thought that there was a quality of high-end invective that he personified that we were trying to emulate I don't think that is a necessary exercise in 2017 I think it was it might have been it was more useful in a more genteel era but I think it's a bad idea screw you next question hi so I've heard you talk about systematic inequalities and how we identify students in education do you think the same exist in small business and so what could a small business do to identify kind of an undermined pool of talent that isn't being reached yeah that's another interesting question I don't know if I have a kind of a useful answer to that but I think recently by looking at a set of numbers and I might have been on Marginal Revolution about how the rate of start-ups in this country has been falling has fallen quite dramatically since the 80s like most people I was surprised by that I sort of bought the Kool-Aid that thought we were in this kind of great age of new business formation and the thing about that that's so worrying is I would imagine that an awful lot of what it takes to encourage someone that takes for someone to start a new business is some kind of direct knowledge of someone else who started a new business in the same way that it's very hard to get people to want to go to college if they don't have someone in their life who has gone to college right or to understand the importance of it unless they have some kind of personal connection that so when you have these when you see a trend line that's going down in something like that I wonder whether it will accelerate over time that the less business gets started the less business gets started because there's no one with any kind of connection of you have to have some glimpse of this as a potential possibility and that would result I think in a lot of business talent being squandered I mean I will say parenthetically to this that I'm someone who's self-employed when I worked for before I was self-employed I worked for large organizations and if you would ask me when I worked for the Washington Post say would I ever want to be self-employed I would have said reacted with horror I would have thought I can't understand how you could do that don't you wake up every morning in a cold sweat knowing where your next dollar is coming from turns out I'm way happier than I was working for but getting there took and you know it took 20 years it took all kinds of lucky breaks it took all kinds of there was no one in my life who I didn't know any self-employed people I didn't know how to make that kind of jump and I you know I wonder how many people are in a similar position of not realizing they have the ability to be do something entrepreneurial and would be happy doing something entrepreneurial but just have no example next over here hi thanks for being here something that surprised me about what you just said earlier in the conversation was that you feel you're a very risk averse person can you expand on that well I'm a product of one of the greatest welfare states in the history of welfare states Canada in the 70s I have come from my home with two happily married people who were you know the sweetest kindest no most non-threatening parents of all time I went to genial Canadian public schools where I was treated with respect at every turn and then I got out of college and was almost immediately given a job by a very very well healed Fortune 500 company where I was costed and given every opportunity without ever asking for it so like where is the risk taking I my bio is just one long effortless riskless frictionless you know I've gone from one it was a wonderful phrase that Charles Lane once used to describe the Washington Post he would describe it as the fur-lined rat hole and I have gone from one fur-lined rat hole to the next so yeah I've never had to really take any risks final question hi as a Canadian and Jamaican background can you explain your take on the anti-intellectual movement in the United States just that we have big guns, big religion and you know we're not afraid to throw that around or what do you think yeah well is it any different I mean different first of all I don't know whether well let me back up the role that evangelical Christianity plays in this country's culture is very different from other western countries so that's clearly a consideration that's been a force not for anti-intellectualism that's wrong it's been a force for a particular approach to intellectual life you know Christianity and I say this is someone who comes from the image of a Christian background is a deeply intellectual culture on many levels but there are certain questions on which their religious perspective orients is different from the secular intellectual mainstream so that's been a prominent part of this country I think for a long time but also I think that there's a I would say I would phrase a lot of what's going on now not in terms of intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism but a kind of I've said this before that the most striking thing about American public life to me as a non-American is the extent to which it's dominated by backlash I think of the history of American life over the last 150 years as just one period of prolonged backlash after another there are these you have a backlash to the Civil War that basically lasts 75 years then you have the Brown decision then you have backlash to the Brown decision the last 25 years and then you have a little moment for feminism in the 70s and you have a backlash that lasts until I mean it might still be going on you have a little I mean there's a gay rights backlash which dwarfs the little moment of gay rights pops its head into the public discourse and the backlash goes on for years and like and you know chases every Democrat out of congress and distorts you know two election cycles I mean so it's like and I feel like we're in the middle of these I don't know why American backlash cycles it's a kind of one step forward four steps back that I don't maybe I'm naive I don't see that in other cultures I've just been I only been thinking this because I've been doing these podcast episodes on the 50s and 60s and on civil rights movements in those and the backlash you know the backlash to Brown is so phenomenal I mean it's it's so great that you have to seriously ask yourself if Brown was worth it I mean there's a great paper written on the Brown backlash thesis by a historian whose name sadly has escaped me right now Clark is it Clark Michael Clark maybe I'm already Clarkman Michael Clarkman thank you which you should read because although he doesn't take this tack but as I read that paper he just points out you know the backlash is sort of 10x what Brown is south for two generations you read that and you have to think Jesus maybe it wasn't worth it I mean maybe we should have just done something a lot more subtle and not risk this and I feel like what's going on now in American life is a backlash that maybe one reading is that there was a the dominant kind of liberal intellectual culture in this culture in this country went too fast maybe we went too fast we just have to learn to slow down you can't do everything you want in one generation and my current take on I'm currently pro Obamacare this will change but my current take is it was a good idea but you know what maybe it was a bridge too far maybe it just was the thing that maybe we should have done a little tiny smaller piece of it and just mail it out because in part that's what we're seeing now like the centrality of Obamacare in the current backlash narrative is so weird right make any sense many of the people who are against it are beneficiaries of it this law is not this kind of pox on American life it's managed to bring down I mean there's tons of from a perfectly rational standpoint if you were an ardent right winger this is not the thing you would go after there's a ton of other battles the fact that they want to fight this battle first is really strange and can only be interpreted in terms of it's the backlash it's the symbol of the thing that just drove you crazy and appalled you over the last couple of years and you just want to banish it from your site you know so that's I think does that answer your question two announcements there is book signing outside and second you can subscribe to this podcast just google conversations with Tyler again a big hand for Malcolm Gladwell