Introducing: Go and See

From Lexus and Pushkin Industries, Go and See is a six-part series about Malcolm Gladwell's experience in Lexus's customer-focused, hospitality-driven culture. Episode 1 drops March 5.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hello. Hello, it's Malcolm Gladwell here. I've been working
on a project I can't wait to share with you.
It's about something special, something close to my heart, something
that consumes me. I Malcolm Gladwell. I'm a carna. When

(00:40):
I go online in the morning, my first stop is
bring a Trailer dot com, where people like me auction
off their cars to other people like me. Just so
we're clear, I read the comments on bring a trailer,
which is one level of obsession beyond the standard bring
a trailer obsession. I have on a shelf in my
office every issue of Car magazine, the British Vogue of

(01:02):
Auto magazines, going back to April nineteen ninety nine. And
I'm almost embarrassed to tell you how many cars I've
owned over the years. A nineteen seventy two Mercedes two
eighty and original factory lime Green, a bunch of BW
golf horrors, a push of Boxer GTS, an immaculate E
thirty nine, BMWM five, and once many years ago, Alexus

(01:26):
I S two fifty, a delightful little Japanese sports sedan,
fantastic gearbox. I loved it, but then the lease was
up and I replaced it with a Golf GTI. In
my memory, I somehow filed away Lexus as just another
kind of luxury car, like an Audie, only from Asia.
But then one day Lexus called me up and said, Malcolm,

(01:51):
we'd like to prove you wrong. My first thought was, oh, wow,
they're going to give me a free car, which, by
the way, I would totally be fine with. But no,
it was better than that. They said, come to Japan
because we think the art of Lexus is something that
you can only understand firsthand in its home country. Go
and see it. So I said, what any self respecting

(02:13):
carna to say, twist my arm. My producer Jacob and
I went to Japan to experience Lexus's take on luxury firsthand.
We found out how a tea ceremony influenced their car design,
how floral arrangement inspires engineering, how o muchanashi the Japanese
concept of hospitality infiltrates the entire culture of Lexus, And

(02:36):
you thought I was obsessive? Coming soon my six part
series about my Lexus experience. Find it wherever you like
to listen, go and see