September 14, 2022 • 44 mins
When two inquisitive minds get together, it’s hard to predict where the conversation might go. Martha interviews Malcolm Gladwell, the influential, best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Outliers, and more. One of the most prolific podcasters, his 7th season of Revisionist History returns this week. Listen to them talk about everything from forecasting a pandemic, Russia’s chances in the war against Ukraine, their favorite spots in Tokyo, and his latest book, The Bomber Mafia.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is absolutely the case that we're going to get
it with something probably a lot even scarier than COVID nineteen.
Our ability to respond to those things effectively and quickly
is so much better than it was five years ago.
I mean, so it's an arms race, and we might
be winning the arms race right now. Malcolm Gladwell is
(00:23):
a journalist, a public speaker, a podcast host, co founder
of a podcast company, and a New York Times bestselling author.
Gladwell has been on the Time one hundred Most Influential
People list and as touted as one of Foreign Policy's
top global thinkers. Stephen Colbert once said that Malcolm says
(00:44):
things that other people haven't thought of before. And I'm
very delighted to have him here in my Bedford, New
York home and on my podcast. Welcome Malcolm. Thank you.
It's very nice to see you in person. Yes, I
think I have seen you speak before in person, but
you we never met in person. So it's a very
exciting and and it's really a droid to talk to
(01:06):
someone who has managed to take thoughts and put them
into absolutely clear writing. I mean, I just I'm always
amazed that you can take the word blink and make
it into a book that really is meaningful or or
the tipping point. But first I wanted to talk. I
(01:27):
had no idea, and I bet our audience doesn't have
any idea that you love cars. I do. Tell me
why you love cars? Well, I've always you know how
every four year old boy is obsessed with cars and
trucks and tractors. I just never grew out of that phase.
So it's just the rest of development. There's nothing more
than that. When I was a kid, when I was
(01:50):
thirteen years old, I rode away to every car company
in the world, with the exception of one, which one
the Russian zill which was not I didn't know how
to get in contact with him, but I collected and
I still have to this day. The promotional brochures on
every single car made, those big fancy books that they
put out every year every I think five, I have
(02:13):
one for every car in the world. How amazing, And
they're incredible time because you know, back then, more so
than now, incredible amount of thought and care went into
the making of these promotional brochures. They were beautiful. The
photography is so extraordinary, it's extraordinary, and the way they
set it up and they took them on to mountains
(02:34):
and deserts and all over the world. And the most
fun ones were the general motors adds back then always
had it took great pains to put to pair a
couple with car, so they would imagine what the ideal
couple was for this particular model of car, and they
would give you. You You know, it was a hilarious I
(02:56):
mean I was a little kid, so it was kind
of discovering the world of marketing. I guess it was
very rare for a car I can't belive we're talking.
This is so lovely. It's very rare for car ads
back then to have people in them. It was an America.
It was very much a Detroit thing. But you wouldn't
the Germans. You if you looked at the Mercedes brochure
from the mid seventies, only the engineering, right, Yeah, it
(03:17):
was a discussion of the engineering. It was a very
technical picture of the cars kind of inner workings, and
it was the car in motion on some Bavarian pass.
But there were no people. I mean, that was not
They weren't thinking about people in their in their marketing.
So what do you what do you collect? You collect cars?
To well to say I collect them as too much.
I have UM a Pride and Joy, which is a
(03:40):
two thousand and four BMW M five, which is considered
the great I have no idea what he's talking about.
It is the great analog. It's the last great car
they made before cars were taken over by computers? Is
it the little one? Was it little to be? I
must have had that car. You probably did if you
had a BMW in the I did in the early
(04:02):
two thousands. This is the card did. This is the car.
I gave it to my nephew because I didn't, you know,
I didn't like the air conditioning or the heating. That
something was your breaking bar. You gave it away, and
I get well. I gave it to my my nephew.
He needed a car, all right, he was at yale yea. Yeah,
I have UM. But I have you know, I have
these friends. I have several friends, one friend in particular, Dan,
(04:24):
who has a garage full of the most beautiful cars.
That's why I lived next door to here. Do you
know who? Ralph Lauren? Oh? Of course, who has got
a next door? Are you serious? Yes? You want to
go see his car? Colleps I would. I mean, that's
he's got one of the great car collections in the world,
in the world. I'm killed to see that. That's amazing.
(04:45):
I will arrange that be fantastic. Okay, any other thing
you want to say about cars, Well, if you would like,
I could talk about them forever. But we may want
to talk about other things. I think we should probably
talk about who is Malcolm good Well and what has
he done to to create a great, big buzz in
(05:05):
the world of thinking. Really, this is all about thinking.
It's for for me. It is like just incredible. And
your latest book, The Bomber Mafia. Tell us about that?
Is that your seventh book or eighth book? Can't I
think I can't remember it six or seven. It grew
out of a I went to Tokyo how many years ago?
(05:27):
This is three or four years ago. And um, first
of all, I mean, I'm sure you've been to Tokyo
many times. The most extraordinary city. I may I just
fell in love with it right away. We're just saying
it matters where you stay. Well, I stayed in this
little out of the way place, but I spent one
night in the Amman just to treat myself and good
(05:47):
it was. I mean, but the high Did you go
up to the top of the high? I didn't, So
I used to stay only at the Okra, which was
the traditional Frank Lloyd reightish kind of horizontal hotel. Is
that the one they tore down down? They knocked down
and then it's the most fabulous place and only to
Tommy rooms. You didn't sleep on a western bed, you
(06:10):
slept only on the on the futons. Yeah. So, but
then I then I stayed at the Hyatt, which went up.
I don't know. I can't remember how many stories short
compared to what they're building now in Singapore and elsewhere,
But what an amazing place. A friend of mine has
a theory about Japan which I love, which is the
smaller things get in Japan, the better they are. So
(06:33):
you you as opposed to nor only when you appreciate
a new place, you expand your horizons. You look up.
You could have looking. No, no, no, in Japan, you look,
you narrow your gaze because their geniuses all in the details.
Every d you look at Tokyo from afar, you don't understand.
It looks like any looks like new work, but it's
anything like Newark. So I my favorite tooky story was
(06:56):
I was walking down the street and I saw a
little tie any sign which said in English coffee. I'm
a residential street. There's no other sign, no evidence whatsoever
of this coffee shop. But I wanted. I actually wanted
a cup of coffee. So I spent twenty minutes hunting
for this coffee shop because it was clear that it
was somewhere ended up, you know, downstairs, through an alley, upstairs,
(07:19):
across the courtyard, up you know, down a long corridor,
and there is an absolutely exquisite room the size of
this one, with one person in it, young woman. It's gorgeous.
It's like, you know, a minimalist white with a beautiful
window over a garden. And she made me the greatest
cup of copy or I had in my life. And
when I tried to tip her, you know I'm an American,
(07:41):
she got very offended and I sort of felt like
I had I mean, it was I can't remember, Yes,
it was a couple of years, but it was such
a Japanese experience. It's like they had this exquisite coffee
house hidden away. You have to spend twenty minutes looking
for it and then then you and when you find it,
it's this little jew box. Oh no, I've been to
(08:01):
Japan many times. It's actually one of my very favorite
countries to visit. As people are flocking to Italy and
I have nothing against Italy. I love Italy. I would
rather go to Japan and discover that coffee shop and
the little sushi restaurant hidden away someplace, or the or
the oldest tree on Yakushima Island. I mean, that's what
I go for. It's it's an amazingly beautiful country. And
(08:26):
so so you were visiting their way, I happened to
go to this little museum um a private museum in
what looked like a dentist's office in way in some
distant corner of of of East Tokyo, and it was
a museum dedicated to it's called the Center for the
Bombing of Tokyo or something, and it was it was
(08:48):
a kind of the most homespun um d i y
museum you've ever seen, you know, things on print, you know,
print out computer print outs and photocopy things and scale
models of things. And it was a record of the
night that the US Air Force fire bomb Tokyo, in
(09:10):
March of nine. It maybe the day where more people
died in a wartime action than any single day in history.
UM certainly in the Second World War, hundred thousand people
as many of the hundred thousand people were killed in
this um with B twenty nine's dropping napalm. They napalm
to Tokyo in the spring of h was when was
(09:33):
the bomb dropped on hero Shima in the fall of
forty five, So this is right before the dropping of
the two nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. In Hirishima was the
consequence of the failure of the fire bombing campaign of
the summer of nine to bring to bring uh to
force Japan to surrender. They wouldn't surrender. So I went
(09:55):
to this place and I knew nothing about this history,
and I found the experience going to the museum so
moving that I thought I would love to tell the
story of that night. And of course the story of
that night. The minute you commit yourself to telling the
story of one night in a war, then you get
pulled in a million different directions. In the bottom off,
(10:16):
he is the kind of that I worked backwards from
that night and told you basically, try to tell the
story of how was it that America decided to burn
some huge portion of Tokyo to the ground with napalm
in the SPRINGTI that is the fortress awfullest kind of
(10:37):
thing to do, right, Yeah, it's a it's a. It
is probably the darkest moment for the United States of
the Second World War. UM, it may have been. There's
an argument that I make in the book, not that
I'm endorsed, but I just the book is not intended
to be a kind of It's not my theory on
the war. It's very descriptive. I'm trying to dis I
(11:00):
have a struggle between two men, Curtis the may and
I got into Haywood Hansel, who had two radicate different
ideas about how to pursue the war against Japan. And
they were polar opposites, and they hated each other and
they did it. They're both Americans, both Americans, are they
both generals, both generals, and Haywood Hansel is in charge
(11:21):
of the air war against Japan, and he tries it
his way and fails. And that was the atom bombs.
That was no he he wanted to He had a
whole idea that you didn't uh. He believed in precision bombing.
Hit this notion you can bring your enemy to his
knees just by selectively bombing very critical industries, you know, aqueducts,
(11:43):
power stations. You don't you don't have to kill any civilians.
You don't have to destroy a city. That was sort
of a nice, nice way. It was the Yes, it's
the most humane way. It doesn't work, and he's at
wits end and he gets fired, and they bring in
his antithesis, this man named Curtis to May, and May
(12:03):
is the man who says, if if the humane way
doesn't work, I'm going to napalm Tokyo and burn to
the ground. And that's the book is about that story,
but of their conflict and also about the use of
airplanes in war. Yeah, it gets because you quickly once
you start from the premise. You know. It begins in
Alabama because a group of these visionaries in the Air
(12:25):
Force moved to Montgomery, Alabama in the mid nineteen thirties
because they want to be as far away as possible
from washing in d C. And they try to They
sit at Maxwell Air Force Base. If you've been to Montgomery,
by the way, I have been to concomery. But I
haven't been to the Air Force base. Ah, you must
go to Maxwell. Oh, actually this is a digression, but
(12:46):
you know this is how much you should go to Maxwell,
because what it is is it is first of all,
a time capsule of earlier of the of the Southern.
It is French colonial um villas for all of the officers.
So these imagine um these huge oaks, so those Southern oaks.
(13:09):
So we've got curving streets with these hundred year old
live oaks and these French colonial villas which are for
rear the officers. And it goes on for It's like
street after street after street of these you know, exactly
as they were in nineteen whatever thirty six when they
were built. And then you have these forties kind of
(13:33):
modernist buildings where all the Air Force offices are. It's
just like you think you've been you've been dropped into
ninety It's like you could film a movie there and
you wanted to change the singles. How great, because you know,
you go to other places, like in San Francisco, there's
like an army base that looks like that to not
not not Southern, but more like San Francisco architecture. They
(13:54):
used to take the idiom of the local architecture, the dormitories,
and you know, you go to places and it's so
amazing that they actually in Italy. We just we were
in Milan and we went to some air Force space
that they had had with all the hospitals in there,
in the hospital rooms everything, it's just looked like a
residential area. It's funny, So that sounds if ever you should,
(14:19):
you should go and take a little tour of Maxwell
and the you know, I went there in the summer
and you know, central Alabama in August is I love,
actually love it. It's that kind of really close heat
and that particular smell and the you know, the cicadas
and the cypress trees, trees. It was the swamps or
(14:41):
the swamps there, I mean super yeah, it's that whole.
I mean everything is the swamp. I mean it's so
humid you step outside and you're sort of drenched in sweat.
So the people I write about the Bomber Mafia with
this group of young men who they were in Virginia
and they felt that they were misunderstood by the Army
brass and literally said, what is the place we can
(15:02):
go in America and be as far away, not just
geographically but intellectually from this orthodoxy we can't stand. So
they were the ones who started to come up with
these ideas that bombing selectively would be more humane. So
they so they DeCamp to Maxwell Air Force in Montgomery,
which is but in and of itself is such a
kind of strange. Can you imagine being in Montgomery in
(15:24):
the thirties and all of a sudden these group of
young Air Force pilots just kind of land renegades, land
in the middle of what is the sleepiest, most conservative,
kind of most retrograde, you know, town in Alabama. So
it's it's a great story. So then back to what
(15:50):
was your sister first book, typic Point. Yes, this one
just put you on the map. This I mean you
were already uh you know one of the best writers
that you were born in England. I was educated in Canada,
and Canada outside Toronto, there's a there's a town called Waterloo,
which is where the big Canadian science universities, and then
(16:13):
started to write not only essays, but now this first
book was published in what year, in two thousand times
and betraying my advanced years. Yes, fifty eight years old.
He has accomplished more than most fifty eight year olds ever, ever,
ever could hope to accomplish. And what made you choose
(16:33):
chipping point? Well, I had to describe to our listeners
what because there probably are some, believe it or not,
that had not read your book. I moved to in
and in New York was You'll remember this was still
one of the most dangerous cities in the United States,
right it was, famously it was so. I remember going
(16:54):
out with my friends and at the end of the
evening we would pool our money and figure about how
everyone was going to get home because it wasn't safe too.
I had a walk or take the subway. Yet I
don't see. I don't know where that comes from. I was.
I felt so safe in New York I did. I
did not feel unsafe until nine twelve. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah,
(17:17):
we had a that was that was the tipping point
for me. And then I started to look up. I
never I never felt like looking up. I just was.
I was so happy. You never got mugged in New York,
and I did get mugged once. It's not a pleasant experience,
but I thought that was just like a kind of
a weird, a weird occurrence. I mean, I knew people
(17:38):
got mugged, but you know, you're in the big city. Yeah,
something I was going, what happened? I was going to
you just reminded me of this. I forgot about this.
I was going to my publisher with my only copy
of my manuscript for one of my cookbooks. It was
probably like Quick Cook or Quick Cook menus, I can't remember,
in a big bag. And I was taking a finished manuscript.
(18:01):
And this is pre computer. You know, we didn't have
it on I think I had a carbon copy at
home or something. And I was walking across the street.
They were at that time, they were below forty two
street on Park Avenue, and I was on the side
street on carrying this thing, and some man came up
to me and bashed me on my shoulders from the behind,
and I dropped my manuscript and I said, I looked around,
(18:22):
what do you want? And he said I want your money?
And I said to people were standing around me and
said help me, please. Nobody would help me. This is
like three o'clock in the afternoons. Yeah, And I picked
up my bag and I said, you get out of here,
and I ran across the street into the building. So
I didn't give him any money and nothing, but that
was that was scary. I remember he hit on the shoulder.
(18:45):
My shoulders hurt for a while. Goodness. Yeah, So that
was my This is my only muggy. This was not
sufficient to cause cause you to be scared of New York. No, no,
because that I mean, you know, any city, go to
go to Europe, you know, go any place, you would
get mugged. I got mugged by someone once and he
said I have a gun, and he had something. He
(19:06):
had his hand in his jacket pocket and it was
very clear that it was just his finger, but I
wasn't certain. And there was his finger. I was maybe
so I thought, well, there's a two percent chance it
actually is. It could be a small gun. So so
I thought about this and then I said, um, I said,
I'm not going to give my whole wallet, but I
(19:27):
will give you the money in my wallet. And he
thought that was a good arrangement, and that was the
That was the end of it. But so to my story,
New York in when I got there was statistically at
least a very unsafe place, and then within three or
four years. By the late nineties it was one of
the safest cities in the United States. It was this
(19:50):
extraordinary transformation, and there was no one who predicted that transformation.
To the contrary, if you talked to criminologists, they would
have said, it would be unimaginable that New York would
ever be a safe place. They couldn't know that if
if it changed at all, it would take decades. But
that's not what happened. It turned around in the space
of three or four years. And then if you ask
(20:11):
people after it turned around, well, how did that happen?
No one had an explanation. Even the savvaest criminologists in
the country. We're like, we're baffled as to why this happened.
So I was in the middle of this. I was
working for the Washington Post, and um I left to
go to the New Yorker, and I was reflecting on
this transformation, and I realized, Oh, there must be some
(20:34):
way to explain what happened. I should write a book
about that. So that was the genesis of the idea
of the tipping point, which is that social phenomenon can
behave like epidemics and just you know, an epidemic is
something that mysteriously goes from zero sixty and no time,
and then just as mysterious, they can disappear. Think about
(20:55):
the way the flu comes out of nowhere every winter
and then it's gone right overnight. So I said, what
if crime in a place like New York is following
the same logic as contagious disease? And then I thought, well,
but what if all kinds of things followed that logic?
So what if fashion trends really follow that? What if
(21:18):
they're contagious phenomenon? So that was what got me thinking.
And then and the tipping point is simply a is
the term that you used to describe when an epidemic
goes from that kind of hidden phase to exploding. And
you wrote so lucidly about that. I mean, it's such
an amazing man. Chipping point became part of our vernacular.
(21:40):
Bill Clinton used it once and I was like, I
can die happy now Bill Clinton is talking about tipping points. Well,
everybody has I I can't. I can't imagine any public
speaker not using tipping point? Is this your favorite book?
Do you have a favorite book? It might be talking
to strangers. I don't know. I think I'm talking to strangers.
What a great, great book tell us about that? That
(22:01):
one was just that I was struck by how many
um soften the way my book ideas come come from.
You know, I was just struck by how many of
the kind of controversies in the news we're all about
the same thing. This is a couple years ago. They
were all versions of we're confronted with someone and we
(22:23):
misinterpret them. So, you know, this was I was thinking
of the book. I was hatching a book when the
Bernie made Off case was at its height, and it
was such a classic example of this that a large
group of people think they know Bernie made off and
they don't. And the people who think they know Bernie
made off and you are mistaken, are not naive, They're intelligent, thoughtful, experienced,
(22:47):
they're not well look how many Look how many wealthy, intelligence,
successful people invested with him exactly, So it's how were
they taken in by him? So this is what was
interesting because normally when we see a scam artist, we say, oh,
a scam artist is someone who takes advantage of the
vulnerable of people who are who don't know anything, are
(23:07):
easily fooled. Are they're old the bad lage? You know.
They we come up with all kinds of reasons why
they were susceptible to being taken in in that way.
None of those arguments work with pretty made off. He
fooled the Kremla krem and so that makes him really interesting, right,
And then I thought, oh, there's tons of other examples
(23:29):
of this. You know, in the book I write about
the case of Jerry Sandusky, the football coach at Penn State,
who was a pedophile, and he, you know, the the
people who were taken in by him. The president of
the university was fooled by him. The Joe Paterno, one
of the great football coaches of our day, was fooled
(23:49):
by him. These were not people who were There was
an argument that I strenuously disagree with that said that
those people, Joe Paterno, when the president were complex it
in they were not complicit. The idea that the president
of university would would look the other way if he
thought there was a pedophile on the staff of his
school is nonsense. They were fooled by him, and the
(24:11):
same way that people were fooled by Bernie Madoff, and
the same way that all of us, if we are
honest about ourselves, we realize that we are also, on
occasion excessively trusting. And so what I wanted to discover
all of us? You really think that you can? You
can put us all in the same bucket human beings.
(24:31):
So this is the kind of core argument of the book,
which is this idea by this guy named Tim Leavin.
It brilliant researcher in in Birmingham, Alabama. His argument is
that we are by nature trusting as human beings, which
is why we have achieved what we've achieved. Right, we
would never have been able to to build a modern society,
(24:54):
to form companies, to innovate, to collaborate, to do anything
of value unless we trusted each other. But the cost
of that implicit trust that we have for one another
is that we will occasionally be deceived. On occasion we
are a little too willing to extend the benefit of
the doubt to people, and that means that Madoff can
(25:15):
come along every now and again and and and make
off with our money. Now, the good news, though, is
that there are vanishingly few Bernie Maynoffs in the world.
But what Tim would say is that that's the price
we pay for everything else that's good about the world.
And if you think about just read all a few
people that we have to put up with in the world,
(25:35):
think about your own career. You have gone from one
thing to the next, where you have built these um organizations, companies, communities,
all these these things. You've these collaborative things you've done
over the course everything that you've done has been based
on trust. Right you also extend that bene to the
(25:56):
doubt to others. Right that, so I said, the collaborative
nature of so many of the things to have done
our evidence that you. Um, if you the people who
give trust are rewarded with trust. That's a kind of
a fundamental principle of every now and then a bad
and were we can't let them ruin it for the
rest of us. We have to kind of you have
(26:16):
to say, all right, um, you know I made off
took me, but that doesn't mean that I have to
I have to assume that everyone who I deal with
is trying to rip me off. That is not the
right way to live your life. Right. I wanted to
get back to tipping point just for one second. Did
you ever when you were writing this book and vision
(26:38):
a pandemic like COVID nineteen. Well, oddly yes, I did,
because when I was at the Washington Post before I
wrote Tipping Point, one of the jobs I had was
that I was I covered the AIDS epidemic for the Post.
We had a full time reporter covering that, and I
was covering it at UH, one of the worst stretches,
(27:01):
so before we had any kind of effective treatment UM.
And in that, in that period of my life, had
many long conversations with epidemiologists and biologists. I actually knew.
I knew Tony Faucci back in the day, back when
Tony was UM was when his wh I called him
Tony an extraordinary human being who saw America through two
(27:27):
you know, devastating epidemics. But if he's spend any time
at all with virologists, UM, you absolutely entertain the notion
that there's going to be a big one one day.
I mean, that's what they've been. They spend their lives
worrying about that and trying to protect us against UM
that eventuality. So I was I would go down to
the CDC in Atlanta and they would talk about, you
(27:48):
know what did a you know there was a moment
when back in the eighties, when they you know, we
were fearful about how much damage aids, whether HIV could
spread far and wide as opposed to being confined to
particular subgroups. Um, when it became clear that HIV was
not nearly as contagious as we thought it was, then
(28:10):
the question immediately rose, well, what would it truly contagious
virus look like? It looked like a lot like COVID
denteteam by the way, and what do you what do
you see in the near future for that? Are you
going to write another book about that or not? My my,
my good friend Michael Spector, who was also uh covered
(28:32):
hivy with me at the Washington Post, he's doing a
book right now on vaccines, and so there are other
better people writing about this. But what he would tell
you is that although it is absolutely the case that
we're going to get hit with something probably a lot
even scarier than COVID nenteen, our ability to respond to
(28:52):
those things effectively and quickly is so much better than
it was five years ago. I mean, so it's an
arms race, and we might be winning the arms race
right now. So what about you must have thought about
Ukraine Russia, What do you think? Well, I, you know,
there's a thing that I follow. There's something called military
logistics Twitter, which is a group of these military people
(29:17):
x army guys mostly on Twitter, who are obsessed with logistics.
All they care about is like, how do you supply
an army? Do you? You know? They have long Twitter
threads on they examine a picture of a of a
tire from a Russian armored car and they'll tell you,
on the basis of what the tire looks like, what's
(29:38):
wrong with the Russian army? That those those guys, and
from the beginning they have been remarkably optimistic about Ukraine's chances,
even back in March, based on the fact that they
just think that the Russians, although they have a large army,
they're just seriously incompetent in in in warmaking and that's
really been and the Ukrainians, by contrast, are in the
(30:01):
mind the eyes of these these people that I thought,
this is Broye the way. The greatest thing about Twitter
is that you can locate a community of people who
know insane amounts about a very specific thing, and you
can follow them. You can get it as if I'm
talking to these guys every day, you know, me and
hundreds of thousands of people around the world get access
to the genius of these people. So they've been pointing
(30:22):
out that the Russians reading it, of course, but they
understanding that they're ill prepared. It's a little late in
today to fix things when you're in the middle of
a war and nobody's nobody's providing arms for maybe somebody
is helping them with more armaments. Yeah, they're not being
supplied with the sort of state of the art equipment
(30:43):
the way that Ukrainians are. What's the focus of your
next book. I'm writing a book about m Bradley, remember,
the mayor of Los Angeles, first African American mayor of
(31:04):
Los Angeles. And uh, it's a lot of it. It's turning.
It's turning into a lot about what does it mean
to be First of all, what was Los Angeles like
in the forties and fifties, and in particular, what does
it mean to be black in Los Angeles in the
forties and fifties. Um, So I'm very very focused on
his early long before he gets to be mayor. I'm
very focused on his early days and it's where do
(31:27):
you grew up with section? He grew up just off
Central Avenue, So you know, the black community in those
years was concentrated south of downtown on out side of
the term south central refers to the neighborhoods on out
the side of Central Avenue. It's been absolutely fascinating. And
I've been reading about Jackie Robinson because Jackie Robinson is uh,
(31:48):
you know, black Angelino of that here. It grew up
in Pasadena, goes to u C. L A. Is friends
with Tom Bradley there they went to college together. Um.
So the world of all these people that knew each other,
that interacted, and that we're all dealing with the same
issues in l A in those years. And it's been
(32:09):
I've been listening to all this kind of jazz from
l A. Because that's the fifties. Of course, it is
the time when that kind of music was sounds like
a good movie too. Oh. I think it would be
an amazing it would be an amazing audiobook because there's
so much incredible tape of that era and of um
all these incredible speeches and this is before both of
(32:32):
our time. But Jack Benny had a radio show in
the We sat at our kitchen table and eighties six
Old Place and Nottley and listened to Jack did you really?
We did. We were allowed to listen to Jack Benny,
to the Shadow, to a lone Ranger, um that Dogwood
or no Dad would? I mean, there were certain remember Rochester.
(32:56):
Of course Rochester was his like aide de camp. You know,
I sidekick Jack Benny is. There's people who don't know
Jack Benny is one of the great American comedians of
the very great Yeah, he's up there with you know
that generation George, Yes, yes, that whole and he had
(33:16):
a so the Ray. He had this famous radio show,
and he had a sidekick on radio show. He was
an actor, a black actor called Eddie Anderson, who played
Jack Benny's butler. But he was this kind of He
wasn't a subservient, you know, he was He was outrageous.
He was outrageous. Eddie Anderson, who played Rochester, was was
(33:39):
his informal title was the mayor of Central Avenue. So
he's living in that part of Los Angeles where all
these people were Tom Bradley, Jackie Robinson, Eddie Anderson, and
Eddie Anderson is the kind of guy you would go to.
If you were black in l A in the forties
and you had a problem, you go to Eddie Anderson.
He lived at a magnificent house not far from Central Avenue,
(34:00):
and he had he had a kept He must have
driven around in a fancy cars. Oh my god. He
had racehorses, famous race horse called Burnt Cork, which was
his way of of thumbing his nose at um because
Burt Cork was what people used the black and her
face is the midst the whole kind of um. And
(34:21):
he his way of kind of giving the finger to
that racist tradition. What it was to call his racehorse
burnt Cork. I mean, he had a sense of humor
about even that. But that's the world, and that's the
world I've invented. I have to make a movie. What's
it called. I haven't come up with the tittle yet
for the book, but and it changes. I'm only in
(34:42):
mid book, so it's changing all the time. But I'm
I'm just interested in this cast of characters and what
influence they had on the young Tom Bradley, because he's
a remarkable did you ever meet him? A remarkable, remarkable
man who has been forgotten? You know. I always say
they everyone else gets an airport named after them. All
(35:04):
they need l A X should be Tom Bradley Airport.
All they named after him was the International Terminal. It's
such a diss The man was the mayor of Los
Angeles for twenty years. He is the father of modern
l A. He revived down town l A. He's the
first African American to be the mayor of a major
American city where where African Americans were not the majority.
(35:29):
He's an incredible figure in twenties century American politics. And
he's been he's been hidden away um and forgotten, I
think unjustly in Los Angeles. Okay, well that I cannot
wait for the new book. And I'm going to make
sure it's a movie. I have a part for Snoop
Dogg in that movie. I want to know about Pushkin
(35:49):
and you're making you're making all kinds of wonderful podcasts
with this company. And you partnered with one of my
oldest friends, Jacob Weisberg, who I met in Washington, D c.
And teen eighty five when he was nineteen, and he
rented a room from a windowless room, a windowless, un
(36:09):
air conditioned room for me in the Washington, d C. Summer,
so he was in retrospect. It was a torturous experience
for him. But he and I about four years ago,
three years ago now, UM decided to get together and
start a little audio company which we call Pushkin and UM.
It was it's to make my novelist after the novelists,
(36:32):
actually sort of. I had a dog called Pushkin, who
was named after So who was named after the the
Russian poet. So it's it's it's it's the Russian poet.
By you know, one step removed to a dog with
my first dog, a delightful uh lab. It was actually
a nut. But so we started this company and we
(36:53):
make We do my podcast Revisions History, we make audiobooks.
We do a bunch of other podcasts, um the Happiness Lab,
Aloi Santos, which has been a big success for us,
and Michael Lewis's podcast Against the Rules, and UM a
whole and bunch of broken record this music podcast that
we do. When we do audiobooks. For example, we did
(37:15):
something called Miracle and Wonder I went actually lived not
far from here, no longer does. But with my friend Bruce,
we did an audiobook with Paul Simon called Miracle and Wonder,
and we sat down with him for forty I would
drive from Hudson to New Cayman. He sold his house
to Richard Geary. I didn't know that Richard bought it.
(37:35):
It's a lovely house. This is in the middle of
the pandemic. I would go there. I must have gone
there seven or eight times, and Paul, who's such a genius,
would we would meet in his uh in his studio
and he would just talk and play and we would
ask him questions, and we use those tapes and created
this audiobook called Miracle and Wonder, which is one of
(37:56):
the best things I've ever been associated with. Signing books
that are not really printed books, but their audio because
they can incorporate the music, they can incorporate speech. Why
would you read about Paul Simon when you can listen
to him? Because you know, the fun part is when
he'd be talking about something and he'd pick up his guitar.
I used to always say, I would say to Bruce,
(38:16):
who I did the book with? Its like Paul has
to have his guitar in his hands because of the
musician he thinks with a guitar in his hands right
and he would so he would be talking and say
and then I thought of this, and he would play something.
It was just so magical to have this genius in
front of you recreating some moment of inspiration from the audio.
(38:38):
But it could have also been a documentary. It could
have been, but it would have been Here's my issue
with documentaries. There's so much more work involved with the
documentary documentary that he takes you out of the moment.
I mean, what was fun about us visiting with Paul
is it was really just his engineer, Bruce, me and Paul.
There were no cameraman, there were We weren't stopping every
(39:02):
fifteen minutes to dab someone's forehead and change the tape.
And just like I agree it sounds it sounds like
such a great idea. It was just that kind of
It was so relaxing and fun. So you get a
different perspective Paul Simon through an audio book. For an
audio do you see something closer? I think you give
up something, you don't get to see him, but you
(39:24):
gain something, which is you gain a kind of intimacy
because we're also relaxing in a moment. But he'll still
has he's done a documentary. He is doing a documentary.
Actually it's I think going to come out this year.
So you can get you can there's books about get
everything you want. There's at this point. But and he
deserves all kinds of all kinds of coverage. I love
(39:45):
him so much, I think, he said, I truly think
he is. He is the great twentieth century American song matter.
I don't think anyone else is on his level. The lyrics,
just the lyrics, like amazing. Yeah. Now I grew up
in stomping around the house listening to Paul Simon and Funcle.
It's amazing that he's when you think about he's been
(40:08):
a part of Yeah, he's been a part of your
entire life. Oh yes, yeah. I mean it's like how
many artists do you say of that that they are
they are relevant to you over decades and decades. Elvis, Yeah,
that's windows but but so powerful. I mean I still
still and Carol King, she was very important to me.
(40:32):
I have always wanted to interview Carol King. She's fantastic.
You should know her. I know her, Oh my goodness,
I would love that. You shouldn't do that. I just
think that and he has that raspy, fabulous voice, and
she's just she's just an incredible person. So you know
that she she tutored Paul Simon in in math when
they were kids in Queen's I didn't know that. They
(40:53):
go way wait, wait, way back. They were doing things
together as teenagers. They were they had some part time
job and her in her play. I don't remember that.
I don't think so. But they knew each other from,
you know, from the neighborhood. It's hilarious to think of
all these people in the same you know, a little world.
Once at dinner with Bono and Carol Kinge together in
(41:13):
Ireland and Dublin. What a great night that wasn't I
didn't even know. I mean, I'm so naive. I was
sitting there with these people, and you know how you
think afterwards, oh my god, that's a moment before everybody's
holding up their phones and taking pictures of everybody. But
what fun that was. But your your work is so
interesting and you have time to do the podcast which
(41:36):
are so valuable to so many of us who spend
time on a treadmill, on a riding a bike around
the countryside listening to podcasts. Podcasts I think are turning
into something very valuable for for the human race, just
because you do get to know subjects more intimately than
you would just reading. And sometimes you can't read. You
(41:57):
can't read and while you're doing something else, but you
can list into podcasts. And now with the new the
new little um Ear Buzz, they promise it doesn't hurt
your ear drums. You know they're promising it. Do you
believe that kind of I mean, I would be I
would be, you know, acting against my own interest if
I discourage people from putting them in. So no, no,
(42:19):
that I just read a big report that they're not there.
They are totally harmless to the to the hearing of
our of our youth. Yeah, the issue is the volume. Yeah,
ok about itself? Yeah okay, well we'll make a note
of that for the grandchildren. You don't you want to
be able to talk to when they get old. So well,
it's been so much fun talking to you. We could
(42:41):
go on forever, but I think we've covered a lot
of territory and I cannot wait for your newest book.
And I want everybody to know that the latest book,
The Bomber Mafia, A dream of Temptation in the Longest
Night of the Second World War is in bookstores right now,
and of course online you can let's to Malcolm's podcast
Revisionist History and Broken Record wherever you get your podcasts,
(43:05):
and of course you can keep up with Malcolm by
following him on Twitter. Is your Twitter as interesting as
that bunch of strategists and logistic guys? Oh? No, not
nearly as interesting. But occasionally I have something nice to say,
I'm sure more than occasionally. And the handle is at Gladwell, Malcolm,
it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today
(43:26):
and I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for
coming all the way from Budson, and I enjoyed it
as well. I say, you've held one of the great
(43:47):
collections of cook cooks I've ever seen. Oh it's edited
to I have thousands more, but I keep editing because
there's so many cookbooks. Do you how many of these
do you use? Well? I know where they are. I
know they're all here, and we've used them over the years.
We've we've we've created recipes now there, So this is
this is references reference. If you had to take one
(44:12):
with you, one book you're going to you can tell,
really the craziest thing is the joy of cooking. Yeah,
I'm looking at it. Right there, there's my various editions
of Joy of Cooking, saying
It is absolutely the case that we're going to get
it with something probably a lot even scarier than COVID nineteen.
Our ability to respond to those things effectively and quickly
is so much better than it was five years ago.
I mean, so it's an arms race, and we might
be winning the arms race right now. Malcolm Gladwell is
(00:23):
a journalist, a public speaker, a podcast host, co founder
of a podcast company, and a New York Times bestselling author.
Gladwell has been on the Time one hundred Most Influential
People list and as touted as one of Foreign Policy's
top global thinkers. Stephen Colbert once said that Malcolm says
(00:44):
things that other people haven't thought of before. And I'm
very delighted to have him here in my Bedford, New
York home and on my podcast. Welcome Malcolm. Thank you.
It's very nice to see you in person. Yes, I
think I have seen you speak before in person, but
you we never met in person. So it's a very
exciting and and it's really a droid to talk to
(01:06):
someone who has managed to take thoughts and put them
into absolutely clear writing. I mean, I just I'm always
amazed that you can take the word blink and make
it into a book that really is meaningful or or
the tipping point. But first I wanted to talk. I
(01:27):
had no idea, and I bet our audience doesn't have
any idea that you love cars. I do. Tell me
why you love cars? Well, I've always you know how
every four year old boy is obsessed with cars and
trucks and tractors. I just never grew out of that phase.
So it's just the rest of development. There's nothing more
than that. When I was a kid, when I was
(01:50):
thirteen years old, I rode away to every car company
in the world, with the exception of one, which one
the Russian zill which was not I didn't know how
to get in contact with him, but I collected and
I still have to this day. The promotional brochures on
every single car made, those big fancy books that they
put out every year every I think five, I have
(02:13):
one for every car in the world. How amazing, And
they're incredible time because you know, back then, more so
than now, incredible amount of thought and care went into
the making of these promotional brochures. They were beautiful. The
photography is so extraordinary, it's extraordinary, and the way they
set it up and they took them on to mountains
(02:34):
and deserts and all over the world. And the most
fun ones were the general motors adds back then always
had it took great pains to put to pair a
couple with car, so they would imagine what the ideal
couple was for this particular model of car, and they
would give you. You You know, it was a hilarious I
(02:56):
mean I was a little kid, so it was kind
of discovering the world of marketing. I guess it was
very rare for a car I can't belive we're talking.
This is so lovely. It's very rare for car ads
back then to have people in them. It was an America.
It was very much a Detroit thing. But you wouldn't
the Germans. You if you looked at the Mercedes brochure
from the mid seventies, only the engineering, right, Yeah, it
(03:17):
was a discussion of the engineering. It was a very
technical picture of the cars kind of inner workings, and
it was the car in motion on some Bavarian pass.
But there were no people. I mean, that was not
They weren't thinking about people in their in their marketing.
So what do you what do you collect? You collect cars?
To well to say I collect them as too much.
I have UM a Pride and Joy, which is a
(03:40):
two thousand and four BMW M five, which is considered
the great I have no idea what he's talking about.
It is the great analog. It's the last great car
they made before cars were taken over by computers? Is
it the little one? Was it little to be? I
must have had that car. You probably did if you
had a BMW in the I did in the early
(04:02):
two thousands. This is the card did. This is the car.
I gave it to my nephew because I didn't, you know,
I didn't like the air conditioning or the heating. That
something was your breaking bar. You gave it away, and
I get well. I gave it to my my nephew.
He needed a car, all right, he was at yale yea. Yeah,
I have UM. But I have you know, I have
these friends. I have several friends, one friend in particular, Dan,
(04:24):
who has a garage full of the most beautiful cars.
That's why I lived next door to here. Do you
know who? Ralph Lauren? Oh? Of course, who has got
a next door? Are you serious? Yes? You want to
go see his car? Colleps I would. I mean, that's
he's got one of the great car collections in the world,
in the world. I'm killed to see that. That's amazing.
(04:45):
I will arrange that be fantastic. Okay, any other thing
you want to say about cars, Well, if you would like,
I could talk about them forever. But we may want
to talk about other things. I think we should probably
talk about who is Malcolm good Well and what has
he done to to create a great, big buzz in
(05:05):
the world of thinking. Really, this is all about thinking.
It's for for me. It is like just incredible. And
your latest book, The Bomber Mafia. Tell us about that?
Is that your seventh book or eighth book? Can't I
think I can't remember it six or seven. It grew
out of a I went to Tokyo how many years ago?
(05:27):
This is three or four years ago. And um, first
of all, I mean, I'm sure you've been to Tokyo
many times. The most extraordinary city. I may I just
fell in love with it right away. We're just saying
it matters where you stay. Well, I stayed in this
little out of the way place, but I spent one
night in the Amman just to treat myself and good
(05:47):
it was. I mean, but the high Did you go
up to the top of the high? I didn't, So
I used to stay only at the Okra, which was
the traditional Frank Lloyd reightish kind of horizontal hotel. Is
that the one they tore down down? They knocked down
and then it's the most fabulous place and only to
Tommy rooms. You didn't sleep on a western bed, you
(06:10):
slept only on the on the futons. Yeah. So, but
then I then I stayed at the Hyatt, which went up.
I don't know. I can't remember how many stories short
compared to what they're building now in Singapore and elsewhere,
But what an amazing place. A friend of mine has
a theory about Japan which I love, which is the
smaller things get in Japan, the better they are. So
(06:33):
you you as opposed to nor only when you appreciate
a new place, you expand your horizons. You look up.
You could have looking. No, no, no, in Japan, you look,
you narrow your gaze because their geniuses all in the details.
Every d you look at Tokyo from afar, you don't understand.
It looks like any looks like new work, but it's
anything like Newark. So I my favorite tooky story was
(06:56):
I was walking down the street and I saw a
little tie any sign which said in English coffee. I'm
a residential street. There's no other sign, no evidence whatsoever
of this coffee shop. But I wanted. I actually wanted
a cup of coffee. So I spent twenty minutes hunting
for this coffee shop because it was clear that it
was somewhere ended up, you know, downstairs, through an alley, upstairs,
(07:19):
across the courtyard, up you know, down a long corridor,
and there is an absolutely exquisite room the size of
this one, with one person in it, young woman. It's gorgeous.
It's like, you know, a minimalist white with a beautiful
window over a garden. And she made me the greatest
cup of copy or I had in my life. And
when I tried to tip her, you know I'm an American,
(07:41):
she got very offended and I sort of felt like
I had I mean, it was I can't remember, Yes,
it was a couple of years, but it was such
a Japanese experience. It's like they had this exquisite coffee
house hidden away. You have to spend twenty minutes looking
for it and then then you and when you find it,
it's this little jew box. Oh no, I've been to
(08:01):
Japan many times. It's actually one of my very favorite
countries to visit. As people are flocking to Italy and
I have nothing against Italy. I love Italy. I would
rather go to Japan and discover that coffee shop and
the little sushi restaurant hidden away someplace, or the or
the oldest tree on Yakushima Island. I mean, that's what
I go for. It's it's an amazingly beautiful country. And
(08:26):
so so you were visiting their way, I happened to
go to this little museum um a private museum in
what looked like a dentist's office in way in some
distant corner of of of East Tokyo, and it was
a museum dedicated to it's called the Center for the
Bombing of Tokyo or something, and it was it was
(08:48):
a kind of the most homespun um d i y
museum you've ever seen, you know, things on print, you know,
print out computer print outs and photocopy things and scale
models of things. And it was a record of the
night that the US Air Force fire bomb Tokyo, in
(09:10):
March of nine. It maybe the day where more people
died in a wartime action than any single day in history.
UM certainly in the Second World War, hundred thousand people
as many of the hundred thousand people were killed in
this um with B twenty nine's dropping napalm. They napalm
to Tokyo in the spring of h was when was
(09:33):
the bomb dropped on hero Shima in the fall of
forty five, So this is right before the dropping of
the two nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. In Hirishima was the
consequence of the failure of the fire bombing campaign of
the summer of nine to bring to bring uh to
force Japan to surrender. They wouldn't surrender. So I went
(09:55):
to this place and I knew nothing about this history,
and I found the experience going to the museum so
moving that I thought I would love to tell the
story of that night. And of course the story of
that night. The minute you commit yourself to telling the
story of one night in a war, then you get
pulled in a million different directions. In the bottom off,
(10:16):
he is the kind of that I worked backwards from
that night and told you basically, try to tell the
story of how was it that America decided to burn
some huge portion of Tokyo to the ground with napalm
in the SPRINGTI that is the fortress awfullest kind of
(10:37):
thing to do, right, Yeah, it's a it's a. It
is probably the darkest moment for the United States of
the Second World War. UM, it may have been. There's
an argument that I make in the book, not that
I'm endorsed, but I just the book is not intended
to be a kind of It's not my theory on
the war. It's very descriptive. I'm trying to dis I
(11:00):
have a struggle between two men, Curtis the may and
I got into Haywood Hansel, who had two radicate different
ideas about how to pursue the war against Japan. And
they were polar opposites, and they hated each other and
they did it. They're both Americans, both Americans, are they
both generals, both generals, and Haywood Hansel is in charge
(11:21):
of the air war against Japan, and he tries it
his way and fails. And that was the atom bombs.
That was no he he wanted to He had a
whole idea that you didn't uh. He believed in precision bombing.
Hit this notion you can bring your enemy to his
knees just by selectively bombing very critical industries, you know, aqueducts,
(11:43):
power stations. You don't you don't have to kill any civilians.
You don't have to destroy a city. That was sort
of a nice, nice way. It was the Yes, it's
the most humane way. It doesn't work, and he's at
wits end and he gets fired, and they bring in
his antithesis, this man named Curtis to May, and May
(12:03):
is the man who says, if if the humane way
doesn't work, I'm going to napalm Tokyo and burn to
the ground. And that's the book is about that story,
but of their conflict and also about the use of
airplanes in war. Yeah, it gets because you quickly once
you start from the premise. You know. It begins in
Alabama because a group of these visionaries in the Air
(12:25):
Force moved to Montgomery, Alabama in the mid nineteen thirties
because they want to be as far away as possible
from washing in d C. And they try to They
sit at Maxwell Air Force Base. If you've been to Montgomery,
by the way, I have been to concomery. But I
haven't been to the Air Force base. Ah, you must
go to Maxwell. Oh, actually this is a digression, but
(12:46):
you know this is how much you should go to Maxwell,
because what it is is it is first of all,
a time capsule of earlier of the of the Southern.
It is French colonial um villas for all of the officers.
So these imagine um these huge oaks, so those Southern oaks.
(13:09):
So we've got curving streets with these hundred year old
live oaks and these French colonial villas which are for
rear the officers. And it goes on for It's like
street after street after street of these you know, exactly
as they were in nineteen whatever thirty six when they
were built. And then you have these forties kind of
(13:33):
modernist buildings where all the Air Force offices are. It's
just like you think you've been you've been dropped into
ninety It's like you could film a movie there and
you wanted to change the singles. How great, because you know,
you go to other places, like in San Francisco, there's
like an army base that looks like that to not
not not Southern, but more like San Francisco architecture. They
(13:54):
used to take the idiom of the local architecture, the dormitories,
and you know, you go to places and it's so
amazing that they actually in Italy. We just we were
in Milan and we went to some air Force space
that they had had with all the hospitals in there,
in the hospital rooms everything, it's just looked like a
residential area. It's funny, So that sounds if ever you should,
(14:19):
you should go and take a little tour of Maxwell
and the you know, I went there in the summer
and you know, central Alabama in August is I love,
actually love it. It's that kind of really close heat
and that particular smell and the you know, the cicadas
and the cypress trees, trees. It was the swamps or
(14:41):
the swamps there, I mean super yeah, it's that whole.
I mean everything is the swamp. I mean it's so
humid you step outside and you're sort of drenched in sweat.
So the people I write about the Bomber Mafia with
this group of young men who they were in Virginia
and they felt that they were misunderstood by the Army
brass and literally said, what is the place we can
(15:02):
go in America and be as far away, not just
geographically but intellectually from this orthodoxy we can't stand. So
they were the ones who started to come up with
these ideas that bombing selectively would be more humane. So
they so they DeCamp to Maxwell Air Force in Montgomery,
which is but in and of itself is such a
kind of strange. Can you imagine being in Montgomery in
(15:24):
the thirties and all of a sudden these group of
young Air Force pilots just kind of land renegades, land
in the middle of what is the sleepiest, most conservative,
kind of most retrograde, you know, town in Alabama. So
it's it's a great story. So then back to what
(15:50):
was your sister first book, typic Point. Yes, this one
just put you on the map. This I mean you
were already uh you know one of the best writers
that you were born in England. I was educated in Canada,
and Canada outside Toronto, there's a there's a town called Waterloo,
which is where the big Canadian science universities, and then
(16:13):
started to write not only essays, but now this first
book was published in what year, in two thousand times
and betraying my advanced years. Yes, fifty eight years old.
He has accomplished more than most fifty eight year olds ever, ever,
ever could hope to accomplish. And what made you choose
(16:33):
chipping point? Well, I had to describe to our listeners
what because there probably are some, believe it or not,
that had not read your book. I moved to in
and in New York was You'll remember this was still
one of the most dangerous cities in the United States,
right it was, famously it was so. I remember going
(16:54):
out with my friends and at the end of the
evening we would pool our money and figure about how
everyone was going to get home because it wasn't safe too.
I had a walk or take the subway. Yet I
don't see. I don't know where that comes from. I was.
I felt so safe in New York I did. I
did not feel unsafe until nine twelve. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah,
(17:17):
we had a that was that was the tipping point
for me. And then I started to look up. I
never I never felt like looking up. I just was.
I was so happy. You never got mugged in New York,
and I did get mugged once. It's not a pleasant experience,
but I thought that was just like a kind of
a weird, a weird occurrence. I mean, I knew people
(17:38):
got mugged, but you know, you're in the big city. Yeah,
something I was going, what happened? I was going to
you just reminded me of this. I forgot about this.
I was going to my publisher with my only copy
of my manuscript for one of my cookbooks. It was
probably like Quick Cook or Quick Cook menus, I can't remember,
in a big bag. And I was taking a finished manuscript.
(18:01):
And this is pre computer. You know, we didn't have
it on I think I had a carbon copy at
home or something. And I was walking across the street.
They were at that time, they were below forty two
street on Park Avenue, and I was on the side
street on carrying this thing, and some man came up
to me and bashed me on my shoulders from the behind,
and I dropped my manuscript and I said, I looked around,
(18:22):
what do you want? And he said I want your money?
And I said to people were standing around me and
said help me, please. Nobody would help me. This is
like three o'clock in the afternoons. Yeah, And I picked
up my bag and I said, you get out of here,
and I ran across the street into the building. So
I didn't give him any money and nothing, but that
was that was scary. I remember he hit on the shoulder.
(18:45):
My shoulders hurt for a while. Goodness. Yeah, So that
was my This is my only muggy. This was not
sufficient to cause cause you to be scared of New York. No, no,
because that I mean, you know, any city, go to
go to Europe, you know, go any place, you would
get mugged. I got mugged by someone once and he
said I have a gun, and he had something. He
(19:06):
had his hand in his jacket pocket and it was
very clear that it was just his finger, but I
wasn't certain. And there was his finger. I was maybe
so I thought, well, there's a two percent chance it
actually is. It could be a small gun. So so
I thought about this and then I said, um, I said,
I'm not going to give my whole wallet, but I
(19:27):
will give you the money in my wallet. And he
thought that was a good arrangement, and that was the
That was the end of it. But so to my story,
New York in when I got there was statistically at
least a very unsafe place, and then within three or
four years. By the late nineties it was one of
the safest cities in the United States. It was this
(19:50):
extraordinary transformation, and there was no one who predicted that transformation.
To the contrary, if you talked to criminologists, they would
have said, it would be unimaginable that New York would
ever be a safe place. They couldn't know that if
if it changed at all, it would take decades. But
that's not what happened. It turned around in the space
of three or four years. And then if you ask
(20:11):
people after it turned around, well, how did that happen?
No one had an explanation. Even the savvaest criminologists in
the country. We're like, we're baffled as to why this happened.
So I was in the middle of this. I was
working for the Washington Post, and um I left to
go to the New Yorker, and I was reflecting on
this transformation, and I realized, Oh, there must be some
(20:34):
way to explain what happened. I should write a book
about that. So that was the genesis of the idea
of the tipping point, which is that social phenomenon can
behave like epidemics and just you know, an epidemic is
something that mysteriously goes from zero sixty and no time,
and then just as mysterious, they can disappear. Think about
(20:55):
the way the flu comes out of nowhere every winter
and then it's gone right overnight. So I said, what
if crime in a place like New York is following
the same logic as contagious disease? And then I thought, well,
but what if all kinds of things followed that logic?
So what if fashion trends really follow that? What if
(21:18):
they're contagious phenomenon? So that was what got me thinking.
And then and the tipping point is simply a is
the term that you used to describe when an epidemic
goes from that kind of hidden phase to exploding. And
you wrote so lucidly about that. I mean, it's such
an amazing man. Chipping point became part of our vernacular.
(21:40):
Bill Clinton used it once and I was like, I
can die happy now Bill Clinton is talking about tipping points. Well,
everybody has I I can't. I can't imagine any public
speaker not using tipping point? Is this your favorite book?
Do you have a favorite book? It might be talking
to strangers. I don't know. I think I'm talking to strangers.
What a great, great book tell us about that? That
(22:01):
one was just that I was struck by how many
um soften the way my book ideas come come from.
You know, I was just struck by how many of
the kind of controversies in the news we're all about
the same thing. This is a couple years ago. They
were all versions of we're confronted with someone and we
(22:23):
misinterpret them. So, you know, this was I was thinking
of the book. I was hatching a book when the
Bernie made Off case was at its height, and it
was such a classic example of this that a large
group of people think they know Bernie made off and
they don't. And the people who think they know Bernie
made off and you are mistaken, are not naive, They're intelligent, thoughtful, experienced,
(22:47):
they're not well look how many Look how many wealthy, intelligence,
successful people invested with him exactly, So it's how were
they taken in by him? So this is what was
interesting because normally when we see a scam artist, we say, oh,
a scam artist is someone who takes advantage of the
vulnerable of people who are who don't know anything, are
(23:07):
easily fooled. Are they're old the bad lage? You know.
They we come up with all kinds of reasons why
they were susceptible to being taken in in that way.
None of those arguments work with pretty made off. He
fooled the Kremla krem and so that makes him really interesting, right,
And then I thought, oh, there's tons of other examples
(23:29):
of this. You know, in the book I write about
the case of Jerry Sandusky, the football coach at Penn State,
who was a pedophile, and he, you know, the the
people who were taken in by him. The president of
the university was fooled by him. The Joe Paterno, one
of the great football coaches of our day, was fooled
(23:49):
by him. These were not people who were There was
an argument that I strenuously disagree with that said that
those people, Joe Paterno, when the president were complex it
in they were not complicit. The idea that the president
of university would would look the other way if he
thought there was a pedophile on the staff of his
school is nonsense. They were fooled by him, and the
(24:11):
same way that people were fooled by Bernie Madoff, and
the same way that all of us, if we are
honest about ourselves, we realize that we are also, on
occasion excessively trusting. And so what I wanted to discover
all of us? You really think that you can? You
can put us all in the same bucket human beings.
(24:31):
So this is the kind of core argument of the book,
which is this idea by this guy named Tim Leavin.
It brilliant researcher in in Birmingham, Alabama. His argument is
that we are by nature trusting as human beings, which
is why we have achieved what we've achieved. Right, we
would never have been able to to build a modern society,
(24:54):
to form companies, to innovate, to collaborate, to do anything
of value unless we trusted each other. But the cost
of that implicit trust that we have for one another
is that we will occasionally be deceived. On occasion we
are a little too willing to extend the benefit of
the doubt to people, and that means that Madoff can
(25:15):
come along every now and again and and and make
off with our money. Now, the good news, though, is
that there are vanishingly few Bernie Maynoffs in the world.
But what Tim would say is that that's the price
we pay for everything else that's good about the world.
And if you think about just read all a few
people that we have to put up with in the world,
(25:35):
think about your own career. You have gone from one
thing to the next, where you have built these um organizations, companies, communities,
all these these things. You've these collaborative things you've done
over the course everything that you've done has been based
on trust. Right you also extend that bene to the
(25:56):
doubt to others. Right that, so I said, the collaborative
nature of so many of the things to have done
our evidence that you. Um, if you the people who
give trust are rewarded with trust. That's a kind of
a fundamental principle of every now and then a bad
and were we can't let them ruin it for the
rest of us. We have to kind of you have
(26:16):
to say, all right, um, you know I made off
took me, but that doesn't mean that I have to
I have to assume that everyone who I deal with
is trying to rip me off. That is not the
right way to live your life. Right. I wanted to
get back to tipping point just for one second. Did
you ever when you were writing this book and vision
(26:38):
a pandemic like COVID nineteen. Well, oddly yes, I did,
because when I was at the Washington Post before I
wrote Tipping Point, one of the jobs I had was
that I was I covered the AIDS epidemic for the Post.
We had a full time reporter covering that, and I
was covering it at UH, one of the worst stretches,
(27:01):
so before we had any kind of effective treatment UM.
And in that, in that period of my life, had
many long conversations with epidemiologists and biologists. I actually knew.
I knew Tony Faucci back in the day, back when
Tony was UM was when his wh I called him
Tony an extraordinary human being who saw America through two
(27:27):
you know, devastating epidemics. But if he's spend any time
at all with virologists, UM, you absolutely entertain the notion
that there's going to be a big one one day.
I mean, that's what they've been. They spend their lives
worrying about that and trying to protect us against UM
that eventuality. So I was I would go down to
the CDC in Atlanta and they would talk about, you
(27:48):
know what did a you know there was a moment
when back in the eighties, when they you know, we
were fearful about how much damage aids, whether HIV could
spread far and wide as opposed to being confined to
particular subgroups. Um, when it became clear that HIV was
not nearly as contagious as we thought it was, then
(28:10):
the question immediately rose, well, what would it truly contagious
virus look like? It looked like a lot like COVID
denteteam by the way, and what do you what do
you see in the near future for that? Are you
going to write another book about that or not? My my,
my good friend Michael Spector, who was also uh covered
(28:32):
hivy with me at the Washington Post, he's doing a
book right now on vaccines, and so there are other
better people writing about this. But what he would tell
you is that although it is absolutely the case that
we're going to get hit with something probably a lot
even scarier than COVID nenteen, our ability to respond to
(28:52):
those things effectively and quickly is so much better than
it was five years ago. I mean, so it's an
arms race, and we might be winning the arms race
right now. So what about you must have thought about
Ukraine Russia, What do you think? Well, I, you know,
there's a thing that I follow. There's something called military
logistics Twitter, which is a group of these military people
(29:17):
x army guys mostly on Twitter, who are obsessed with logistics.
All they care about is like, how do you supply
an army? Do you? You know? They have long Twitter
threads on they examine a picture of a of a
tire from a Russian armored car and they'll tell you,
on the basis of what the tire looks like, what's
(29:38):
wrong with the Russian army? That those those guys, and
from the beginning they have been remarkably optimistic about Ukraine's chances,
even back in March, based on the fact that they
just think that the Russians, although they have a large army,
they're just seriously incompetent in in in warmaking and that's
really been and the Ukrainians, by contrast, are in the
(30:01):
mind the eyes of these these people that I thought,
this is Broye the way. The greatest thing about Twitter
is that you can locate a community of people who
know insane amounts about a very specific thing, and you
can follow them. You can get it as if I'm
talking to these guys every day, you know, me and
hundreds of thousands of people around the world get access
to the genius of these people. So they've been pointing
(30:22):
out that the Russians reading it, of course, but they
understanding that they're ill prepared. It's a little late in
today to fix things when you're in the middle of
a war and nobody's nobody's providing arms for maybe somebody
is helping them with more armaments. Yeah, they're not being
supplied with the sort of state of the art equipment
(30:43):
the way that Ukrainians are. What's the focus of your
next book. I'm writing a book about m Bradley, remember,
the mayor of Los Angeles, first African American mayor of
(31:04):
Los Angeles. And uh, it's a lot of it. It's turning.
It's turning into a lot about what does it mean
to be First of all, what was Los Angeles like
in the forties and fifties, and in particular, what does
it mean to be black in Los Angeles in the
forties and fifties. Um, So I'm very very focused on
his early long before he gets to be mayor. I'm
very focused on his early days and it's where do
(31:27):
you grew up with section? He grew up just off
Central Avenue, So you know, the black community in those
years was concentrated south of downtown on out side of
the term south central refers to the neighborhoods on out
the side of Central Avenue. It's been absolutely fascinating. And
I've been reading about Jackie Robinson because Jackie Robinson is uh,
(31:48):
you know, black Angelino of that here. It grew up
in Pasadena, goes to u C. L A. Is friends
with Tom Bradley there they went to college together. Um.
So the world of all these people that knew each other,
that interacted, and that we're all dealing with the same
issues in l A in those years. And it's been
(32:09):
I've been listening to all this kind of jazz from
l A. Because that's the fifties. Of course, it is
the time when that kind of music was sounds like
a good movie too. Oh. I think it would be
an amazing it would be an amazing audiobook because there's
so much incredible tape of that era and of um
all these incredible speeches and this is before both of
(32:32):
our time. But Jack Benny had a radio show in
the We sat at our kitchen table and eighties six
Old Place and Nottley and listened to Jack did you really?
We did. We were allowed to listen to Jack Benny,
to the Shadow, to a lone Ranger, um that Dogwood
or no Dad would? I mean, there were certain remember Rochester.
(32:56):
Of course Rochester was his like aide de camp. You know,
I sidekick Jack Benny is. There's people who don't know
Jack Benny is one of the great American comedians of
the very great Yeah, he's up there with you know
that generation George, Yes, yes, that whole and he had
(33:16):
a so the Ray. He had this famous radio show,
and he had a sidekick on radio show. He was
an actor, a black actor called Eddie Anderson, who played
Jack Benny's butler. But he was this kind of He
wasn't a subservient, you know, he was He was outrageous.
He was outrageous. Eddie Anderson, who played Rochester, was was
(33:39):
his informal title was the mayor of Central Avenue. So
he's living in that part of Los Angeles where all
these people were Tom Bradley, Jackie Robinson, Eddie Anderson, and
Eddie Anderson is the kind of guy you would go to.
If you were black in l A in the forties
and you had a problem, you go to Eddie Anderson.
He lived at a magnificent house not far from Central Avenue,
(34:00):
and he had he had a kept He must have
driven around in a fancy cars. Oh my god. He
had racehorses, famous race horse called Burnt Cork, which was
his way of of thumbing his nose at um because
Burt Cork was what people used the black and her
face is the midst the whole kind of um. And
(34:21):
he his way of kind of giving the finger to
that racist tradition. What it was to call his racehorse
burnt Cork. I mean, he had a sense of humor
about even that. But that's the world, and that's the
world I've invented. I have to make a movie. What's
it called. I haven't come up with the tittle yet
for the book, but and it changes. I'm only in
(34:42):
mid book, so it's changing all the time. But I'm
I'm just interested in this cast of characters and what
influence they had on the young Tom Bradley, because he's
a remarkable did you ever meet him? A remarkable, remarkable
man who has been forgotten? You know. I always say
they everyone else gets an airport named after them. All
(35:04):
they need l A X should be Tom Bradley Airport.
All they named after him was the International Terminal. It's
such a diss The man was the mayor of Los
Angeles for twenty years. He is the father of modern
l A. He revived down town l A. He's the
first African American to be the mayor of a major
American city where where African Americans were not the majority.
(35:29):
He's an incredible figure in twenties century American politics. And
he's been he's been hidden away um and forgotten, I
think unjustly in Los Angeles. Okay, well that I cannot
wait for the new book. And I'm going to make
sure it's a movie. I have a part for Snoop
Dogg in that movie. I want to know about Pushkin
(35:49):
and you're making you're making all kinds of wonderful podcasts
with this company. And you partnered with one of my
oldest friends, Jacob Weisberg, who I met in Washington, D c.
And teen eighty five when he was nineteen, and he
rented a room from a windowless room, a windowless, un
(36:09):
air conditioned room for me in the Washington, d C. Summer,
so he was in retrospect. It was a torturous experience
for him. But he and I about four years ago,
three years ago now, UM decided to get together and
start a little audio company which we call Pushkin and UM.
It was it's to make my novelist after the novelists,
(36:32):
actually sort of. I had a dog called Pushkin, who
was named after So who was named after the the
Russian poet. So it's it's it's it's the Russian poet.
By you know, one step removed to a dog with
my first dog, a delightful uh lab. It was actually
a nut. But so we started this company and we
(36:53):
make We do my podcast Revisions History, we make audiobooks.
We do a bunch of other podcasts, um the Happiness Lab,
Aloi Santos, which has been a big success for us,
and Michael Lewis's podcast Against the Rules, and UM a
whole and bunch of broken record this music podcast that
we do. When we do audiobooks. For example, we did
(37:15):
something called Miracle and Wonder I went actually lived not
far from here, no longer does. But with my friend Bruce,
we did an audiobook with Paul Simon called Miracle and Wonder,
and we sat down with him for forty I would
drive from Hudson to New Cayman. He sold his house
to Richard Geary. I didn't know that Richard bought it.
(37:35):
It's a lovely house. This is in the middle of
the pandemic. I would go there. I must have gone
there seven or eight times, and Paul, who's such a genius,
would we would meet in his uh in his studio
and he would just talk and play and we would
ask him questions, and we use those tapes and created
this audiobook called Miracle and Wonder, which is one of
(37:56):
the best things I've ever been associated with. Signing books
that are not really printed books, but their audio because
they can incorporate the music, they can incorporate speech. Why
would you read about Paul Simon when you can listen
to him? Because you know, the fun part is when
he'd be talking about something and he'd pick up his guitar.
I used to always say, I would say to Bruce,
(38:16):
who I did the book with? Its like Paul has
to have his guitar in his hands because of the
musician he thinks with a guitar in his hands right
and he would so he would be talking and say
and then I thought of this, and he would play something.
It was just so magical to have this genius in
front of you recreating some moment of inspiration from the audio.
(38:38):
But it could have also been a documentary. It could
have been, but it would have been Here's my issue
with documentaries. There's so much more work involved with the
documentary documentary that he takes you out of the moment.
I mean, what was fun about us visiting with Paul
is it was really just his engineer, Bruce, me and Paul.
There were no cameraman, there were We weren't stopping every
(39:02):
fifteen minutes to dab someone's forehead and change the tape.
And just like I agree it sounds it sounds like
such a great idea. It was just that kind of
It was so relaxing and fun. So you get a
different perspective Paul Simon through an audio book. For an
audio do you see something closer? I think you give
up something, you don't get to see him, but you
(39:24):
gain something, which is you gain a kind of intimacy
because we're also relaxing in a moment. But he'll still
has he's done a documentary. He is doing a documentary.
Actually it's I think going to come out this year.
So you can get you can there's books about get
everything you want. There's at this point. But and he
deserves all kinds of all kinds of coverage. I love
(39:45):
him so much, I think, he said, I truly think
he is. He is the great twentieth century American song matter.
I don't think anyone else is on his level. The lyrics,
just the lyrics, like amazing. Yeah. Now I grew up
in stomping around the house listening to Paul Simon and Funcle.
It's amazing that he's when you think about he's been
(40:08):
a part of Yeah, he's been a part of your
entire life. Oh yes, yeah. I mean it's like how
many artists do you say of that that they are
they are relevant to you over decades and decades. Elvis, Yeah,
that's windows but but so powerful. I mean I still
still and Carol King, she was very important to me.
(40:32):
I have always wanted to interview Carol King. She's fantastic.
You should know her. I know her, Oh my goodness,
I would love that. You shouldn't do that. I just
think that and he has that raspy, fabulous voice, and
she's just she's just an incredible person. So you know
that she she tutored Paul Simon in in math when
they were kids in Queen's I didn't know that. They
(40:53):
go way wait, wait, way back. They were doing things
together as teenagers. They were they had some part time
job and her in her play. I don't remember that.
I don't think so. But they knew each other from,
you know, from the neighborhood. It's hilarious to think of
all these people in the same you know, a little world.
Once at dinner with Bono and Carol Kinge together in
(41:13):
Ireland and Dublin. What a great night that wasn't I
didn't even know. I mean, I'm so naive. I was
sitting there with these people, and you know how you
think afterwards, oh my god, that's a moment before everybody's
holding up their phones and taking pictures of everybody. But
what fun that was. But your your work is so
interesting and you have time to do the podcast which
(41:36):
are so valuable to so many of us who spend
time on a treadmill, on a riding a bike around
the countryside listening to podcasts. Podcasts I think are turning
into something very valuable for for the human race, just
because you do get to know subjects more intimately than
you would just reading. And sometimes you can't read. You
(41:57):
can't read and while you're doing something else, but you
can list into podcasts. And now with the new the
new little um Ear Buzz, they promise it doesn't hurt
your ear drums. You know they're promising it. Do you
believe that kind of I mean, I would be I
would be, you know, acting against my own interest if
I discourage people from putting them in. So no, no,
(42:19):
that I just read a big report that they're not there.
They are totally harmless to the to the hearing of
our of our youth. Yeah, the issue is the volume. Yeah,
ok about itself? Yeah okay, well we'll make a note
of that for the grandchildren. You don't you want to
be able to talk to when they get old. So well,
it's been so much fun talking to you. We could
(42:41):
go on forever, but I think we've covered a lot
of territory and I cannot wait for your newest book.
And I want everybody to know that the latest book,
The Bomber Mafia, A dream of Temptation in the Longest
Night of the Second World War is in bookstores right now,
and of course online you can let's to Malcolm's podcast
Revisionist History and Broken Record wherever you get your podcasts,
(43:05):
and of course you can keep up with Malcolm by
following him on Twitter. Is your Twitter as interesting as
that bunch of strategists and logistic guys? Oh? No, not
nearly as interesting. But occasionally I have something nice to say,
I'm sure more than occasionally. And the handle is at Gladwell, Malcolm,
it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today
(43:26):
and I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for
coming all the way from Budson, and I enjoyed it
as well. I say, you've held one of the great
(43:47):
collections of cook cooks I've ever seen. Oh it's edited
to I have thousands more, but I keep editing because
there's so many cookbooks. Do you how many of these
do you use? Well? I know where they are. I
know they're all here, and we've used them over the years.
We've we've we've created recipes now there, So this is
this is references reference. If you had to take one
(44:12):
with you, one book you're going to you can tell,
really the craziest thing is the joy of cooking. Yeah,
I'm looking at it. Right there, there's my various editions
of Joy of Cooking, saying
Host
Martha Stewart
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!