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Hello, hello, revisionist history listeners.
This is Revenge of the Tipping Point Month at Revisionist History, where we bring you stories and snippets and tantalizing tales from my new book, now available everywhere.
And in this episode, we're bringing you the very first stop on my book tour, a conversation I had about my life and career with my old friend and former boss, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
We did this at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, my home away from home.
I first met David almost 40 years ago, when he was a star at the Washington Post and I was a cub reporter who'd never written a newspaper story before.
He's one of the people in the world who I admire the most.
And our conversation was hilarious and fun.
I hope you enjoy. It's been a while.
It has, yes. Malcolm, I have to tell you, the title of this book is so brilliant because it's like Revenge of King Kong.
It's fantastic. Pink Panther.
It's a Pink Panther shot at it.
Yeah. And I have to say that one of my fondest memories at The New Yorker, and we'll go back even earlier in a moment, but at The New Yorker, you're telling me, you know, I've written two pieces now, Cool Hunters and The Tipping Point.
I have this idea for a book.
You got an agent, The Redoubtable, Tina Bennett.
And you thought, you know, if I could make just a small amount of money, I could help out my family.
And let's just say by the end of the day, things went well.
And now 23 million books later, things have gone really well.
But what interests me most is not success, material success, however deeply jealous I am.
What interests me is how you invented yourself and what you do.
Because we have a not dissimilar background.
We were both at the Washington Post, we were both at The New Yorker, and I couldn't have, in many ways, a more conventional approach to journalism.
I wonder when you look back, and you look, you were at the spectator, you were at the post, and then you came to The New Yorker, but something happened at a certain point that a more conventional story was left behind.
And even a humorous story, like the one at the Washington Post, where you had a dog on death row, and you treated it.
Oh, that was my finest work.
It really was. There was a dog in Bergen County.
Well, should I back up and tell a story?
Sure. I became the New York correspondent for The Washington Post, and they were uninterested in stories about New York at that point.
I don't know why. And then I decided to make my life more interesting and maybe increase my profile in Washington.
I would only write stories from Bergen County.
My county? Yeah. Because I decided that Bergen County was more interesting.
I still believe this than New York City.
So just every day, I would read the Bergen County...
...Record. That's right.
And I saw a little tiny mention one day of a dog, a nikita named Taro, who had been confined to Doggie Death Row.
Now, Doggie Death Row in Bergen County is in Hackensack.
I was born. Were you born in Hackensack?
You bet. You think I'm joking when I say this, Doggie Death Row.
No, it is actually Doggie Death Row.
It's a... You can't get there.
It's like a ravine.
And if you want... You're on the other side of the ravine, and then you see a long string of cages, and there's all these dogs who are there pending.
There's all kinds of appeals, obviously.
And if they lose their appeals, then they are euthanized.
They're there for biting people.
And Taro, what had happened was he had been asleep, and a child, the nephew of his owner, had stumbled across him in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom.
And Taro had swiped the kid.
This is... Now, all of these claims I'm making were subject to a great amount of litigation.
And had cut... So stipulated.
So stipulated. Had cut the kid's lip, and the result was like they were like seven different lawsuits had...
And I became convinced that Taro was wrongfully convicted.
And I wrote for the Washington Post, I mean, it was thousands, thousands...
It was impressively long.
And the editor of the Washington Post, the next day, after it ran, came out to me and said, that was a very good piece on Taro.
It was, however, four times too long.
Just the greatest thing anyone's ever said to me.
And they were T -shirts, the owner printed out T -shirts, free Taro.
They were distributed.
And the story made the front page of The New York Post.
That's the goal. That was...
The New York Post picked up my story.
That's the heaven. Yeah.
So my point... It was...
So my whole strategy of conceiving of Bergen County as being a kind of more fertile ground for...
But this was rebellion, this was the beginning of the Gladwellian rebellion against the conventional, which is that New York, as I believe, is not only the most interesting place, but on certain days, the only interesting place.
I'm a patriot. So but when...
At what point, as we know what a Malcolm Gladwell story is, the kind of sense of surprise, playing with ideas, exploring ideas, reading social science, when did that begin to click in?
I think it starts at the Post because the problem, whenever I would take a job, you have to kind of conceive of what is the problem that you're trying to solve in this job.
And the problem that I had when I got to the Post was that I was 23 and I had never written a newspaper story in my life.
I had no idea how to do it.
And I was surrounded by people who were the greatest, like yourself.
Yeah. No, for those of you who don't know, David, in his day, was an absolutely legendary...
One of the great newspaper reporters of his generation.
Thank you. And they were...
Woodward... Bob Woodward was...
When I got to the West Coast, I was in the business section.
Woodward was there.
And I would watch, and like Steve Call, do you remember Steve Call who went on to become...
I mean, he's still around, but he ran the Columbia journalism school, Call when he...
I think you told me, you pointed this out to me.
When he had the push button phones, he would...
When I dial, he would be like, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude.
Call was like, that's too slow.
And he'd be like...
It was like a concert pianist.
He'd go... He'd play a chord.
Yeah. Like the white...
He'd get the White House and it would take him like five seconds.
I'm like, that was all...
And I had bike... The legendary Mike Isagoff was next to me.
Anyway, my point is I'm surrounded by all these people who are just better at daily journalism than I am.
And so the problem was, how do you succeed in the environment whenever...
And you succeed in that environment by being the thing that they are not.
Everyone else was fast and fluid, so I decided I would be slow and weird.
Right? And then... And in fairness, the Washington Post did not prize weirdness.
No. It did not. Although the key was...
The key... I mean, the problem to be solved was how do you stand up in an environment where everyone around you is a total pro.
And so to stand up, you have to do what everyone else is not doing.
So people around me were not writing 5 ,000 -word stories on death or dogs.
No, no. And I remember the first time I wrote a story for The New Yorker, I was still at the Washington Times before they were signed, so that way I could freelance without them knowing.
So I was writing these talk of the towns and I went to see Chip McGrath.
And it was Tina Brown's deputy editor.
And Chip said, I'd written this little talk of the town, and he had some problem.
He said, I want you to fix this problem.
He said, what? And so I said, I took it from him.
I said, okay, and I just wrote in the margins, my fix.
And I remember looking at him and he was astonished.
Bulgarian. It was vulgar.
He was vulgar. He expected me to go home and come back in a week with the fix.
I was like, no, I'll just move this here, do that.
And that's, at The New Yorker, you had to be that.
Otherwise, if you wanted to be slow and thoughtful and weird, then you were competing with everyone else.
So I got there and I had to completely change.
I had to work hard.
I had to do all these things that I wasn't doing at the Washington Post.
I'll be right back with more from my conversation with David Remnick.
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Which piece would you say set you off?
You're now at this retrospective moment in your literary journalistic life where you're writing a piece that echoes your first book and you're no longer 23 years old.
There must be some sense of self -examination about this.
It was probably a piece called The Cool Hunt.
Remember The Cool Hunt?
I do. Where I... I don't know how I found her.
A woman who was still a very good friend of mine, Dee Dee Gordon, who went around, whose business was going around America telling corporations what was cool.
T -shirts and the like.
T -shirts and she was...
And still is. Absolutely hilarious.
Anyway, she... I wrote a piece about her, about this idea that she would just go around and she would declare something cool and she would tell you what was...
And companies would hire her.
Hire her. But the whole point of that piece was the title, The Cool Hunt.
Once you had the title, it's like...
And there was someone wanting to make a movie out of it, of course nothing ever came of it.
But it was the first time I realized like that was...
That kind of... It was something else.
It was something fun about taking, being interested in pop culture for The New Yorker.
And she... Have that kind of thing before...
Now this kind of story comes up.
Yeah. But was that an absence that you were feeling, a vacuum?
I didn't know anyone else in The New York.
It was the same thing about trying to be different.
So I didn't know of anyone else who was writing about...
Dee Dee Gordon was not the typical subject of The New Yorker profile.
No. I mean, she was this kind of strange, hilarious...
She had this crazy crush on Keanu Reeves.
She was obsessed with Keanu Reeves.
But I just thought like, this is different in a way, this will stand out.
You just needed to stand out.
And then you did the tipping point, which is now associated with you.
But as you've said repeatedly, what you were doing is taking an idea that was very much in the air, in sociological terms, in terms of crime and much else.
So what was the idea for the book?
You had these two pieces.
And how did you cast out what the book...
What it would be, what shape it would take, what voice it would have?
Well, I didn't. My agent came Tina who I knew socially.
And then she became an agent.
She worked in the admissions department of some...
She had been a graduate student in history.
I just knew she's friends of friends.
And then she became an agent.
She said, can I be your agent?
I was like, I guess, sure.
And then she's now like the powerhouse of powerhouses.
But I knew who... And she said, you should write a book on this.
And I... But what is this?
The article, the tipping point.
Yeah. Because people got really interested in it.
And I started like...
Someone in California flew me out to speak to their group about it.
I remember thinking that was really weird, that a piece in New York could...
So I thought, oh, maybe people are kind of into this.
And Tina's like, yeah, you should do a book.
So I knew the article in New York, it was a chapter, clearly a chapter or a part of a chapter.
And then I had to kind of improvise.
I'd never written a book before.
I had to kind of...
But before we get to the way you reconsider the idea, because it's a very interesting bridge.
I wanna know... It probably is not in the stack of cards here.
I wanna know how you invented yourself as a voice and how naturally or not that came to me.
Because I can read a paragraph of yours or a page of yours.
And I know it right away.
That's you. There's a certain cadence, there's a certain way that chapters end.
There are moves that are as distinctive as somebody's...
You know, a piano player or an athlete, you watch enough athletes, you listen to enough music.
There's a gladwell cadence, there's a gladwell sense of humour.
It's very, very distinctive.
How self -aware are you of it?
How did it become itself?
Well, it's hard to say, you know.
So I spent 10 years at the Post, and there's something, I think that's crucial, because what happens at the Post is you learn how to write.
Meaning, you learn how to write without fear and self -consciousness.
You're forced to. I remember by the end of my time at the Washington Post, I remember when I was at one of the last stories I wrote before I left for The New Yorker, there was a shooting on the LIRR, and it happened at like 4 .30 in the afternoon.
And back then the deadline was like 6 .30.
So I get on the LIRR and I go out to the scene, I get there at like 5 .30.
And it's clearly a front -page story, and they're like, we need the story.
There's a shooting on the Long Island Railroad is a front -page story in the Washington Post?
It was a big shooting.
It was like serious.
Well, I mean, my assumption was I was telling them, of course, it's a front -page story.
That's the way it worked.
This is huge. Hold the front page, yeah.
Someone got shot in New York City.
Hold the front page.
It's above the fold, you know, like the whole manual.
You know this, you did this show yourself many, many times.
Oh my God, yeah. And you could do it from Moscow and you could just, they all get nervous.
Michael Specter used to, his colleague of ours was so good at this.
He would do a kind of salami slicing where he'd take a story and do 10 stories out of it.
And each one would get on the front page because he would be like, it's changed.
The guy said, there's another wrinkle.
And they're like, oh my God.
And they put the first wrinkle on the front page.
They put the second wrinkle, then there's the three, oh my God.
Go out there. I'm on the LIR.
And I remember this is like, this is when I was at the peak of my powers.
So I interviewed all these people.
I don't have time to, there's no laptops back then.
There's no like, and I did the thing which I'd heard, you know, hard bit in newspaper reports.
I picked up the phone and I called it in.
I remember that feeling of like, I dictated a 1500 word story into the phone to someone typing on the other end straight through.
And I was so pleased with myself.
But I realized at that moment, I got nothing else to learn here.
But that's what you learned.
And you never lose that liquidity.
So in other words, every bad habit you have as a writer gets beaten out of you at a newspaper because it's just discipline.
It's like, boom, you know, tell the story.
Tell them the way that's compelling.
Something happens to your pros and I won't linger on this too long.
But if I read Anthony Lane, for example, I can read him.
And I know that obviously Anthony is an incredibly erudite reader and writer, but I know that he did not get through life without reading P .G.
Woodhouse over and over again.
That informs the texture of this tapestry.
Who was that for you or was it just the newspaper business?
Well, no, no, no. So then I get to I don't think I think I have a little bit of that post, but it's but it's by putting it, you get you get pared down, you get rid of all your bad habits and then you you have it's like a it's like, you know, in playing a musical instrument, you spend the first 10 years
mastering the fundamentals and then you're free to develop some kind of study.
But you have to do the compulsory work to get it.
And that's what the post is.
You it it it just you get reduced to the simplest essence of how to tell a story.
And now you have the freedom and it come to the a lot of it was Adam Gopnik.
So he was reading Gopnik long before I joined the New Yorker and Gopnik has an exceedingly distinctive voice.
Right. And I mean, a beautiful way of expressing himself and up.
And there's there's little kind of beautiful little frill.
I mean, his his prose sings his little choruses and frills.
And it's just like and reading that, you know, he's I'm a I'm half a generation.
But his move is he has many, but what is the pop culture or boomer pop culture, as he and I've discussed with reference when discussing something like, you know, Nietzsche or the French crucial.
So this reminds me of something.
When I was very when I was in middle school, I met my lab partner was a guy named Terry Martin, who I know of Terry Martin, now a Soviet scholar.
But he by happenstance in our little town in Canada, he was my lab partner.
And Terry was an absolutely brilliant guy.
And we were in biology together and we would do these experiments and he would always refuse to do the experiment the way we were supposed to do it.
Like as a matter. And I remember at first utterly horrified because we would never we couldn't finish anything nothing was ever handed in.
We would always get terrible grades.
And then about like by kind of November of seventh grade, I realized it's genius because what he taught me was that you have the freedom.
I mean, he wasn't he wasn't being destructive or nihilistic.
He was like saying, OK, so they're all going to do it this way, but we don't have to do it that way.
We can. There's another way to learn what's going on here.
He was deeply interested in biology.
What's so interesting, so play is what you use the word and and I think it even causes some people alarm or or they're offended intellectually or otherwise or they're jealous or whatever it is, you use the phrase playing with ideas as if this is to them somehow irresponsible.
What is playing with ideas mean?
It begins with Terry in seventh grade.
Because Terry and I then we developed this deep friendship and we would play endless games of Monopoly and we we then deregulated Monopoly and his whole idea was this is our idea was the rules at that point were like, well, the rules make no sense.
Like the game as it's a brilliant game.
But for example, why do you start with fifteen hundred dollars?
That's that is, by the way, if you're interested.
This is a flaw with with Monopoly because the point of Monopoly is when you're playing it, it should be a question of what can I afford?
You should. It should be a difficult question.
I land on Marvin Gardens.
Do I want to buy Marvin Gardens?
Should be a question that you have to entertain and come up with a serious answer to.
If you give each player fifteen dollars to start and you land on Marvin Gardens, you just buy it.
How is that interesting?
That's absurd. So it's a little bit like inherited wealth.
Yes, exactly. So we started with one dollar.
And what could you buy with one dollar?
So you can't even get a slice of pizza.
Much like Marvin Garza.
So the first 10 minutes is just speed circling the board, accumulating capital.
And then and then you then we have to come up with all kinds of ways to basically create systems for creating leverage.
So have too much time on your hands.
We played so much Monopoly.
So we would I realize now is that we would sell derivatives.
So I would say we like if I landed on your property, you had improved, you know, the blue property, you know, Vermont and Oriental and what I would I owe you five hundred bucks.
We'd never pay the five hundred dollars.
That was silly. Why would you pay the five hundred dollars?
Instead, it should be an invitation to a negotiation about there are clearly I owe you five hundred bucks.
All right. So how can I be useful to you in some other way?
Right. So it's goods and services.
Yeah, I have you land on you land on on Vermont.
You only five hundred bucks.
I have Broadway. I need Park Place.
So I say, OK, pay me one hundred.
But if you land on Park Place, I have the right of first refusal to buy the property from them.
Right. Now, that's a that's a simple example.
We constructed these insanely elaborate massive derivatives and we would play.
Did they have no drugs in Canada?
We would play with Terry's cousin Fred and we would play like three or four games an afternoon and we would play hundreds of games a summer.
It would just get together every morning, just play this game.
And like it was the same thing.
It was like, you know, and each over the course of summer would create ever more elaborate structures around.
But that's that's the origin of play because Terry's assumption.
This is what Terry taught me.
He was like, What does Parker Brothers know about Monopoly?
That was and the self confidence of that was fairly fair enough.
But when you're when you're dealing with auto safety, medical tests, all the many subjects that in other words, at what point do you feel grimly responsible to the set of ideas and the facts and and how does that interact with playing?
What's the difference between what you're doing and what an academic feels obliged to cause I mean, I mean, they have a piece of yours and there was a piece and it was so mean to Ralph Nader who I was so great who I was brought up to think was just an incredible hero for all.
OK, he lost the election at one point, but another mine.
But I can tell you what that came from.
So this goes to and then you blamed poor Ralph Nader for what?
Oh, it's so genius.
So on the sense of play, what's the first the first layer of play is understanding other people who want to play.
Right. So I got I like cars and I thought it'd be fun to write about automobile safety for the New York because nobody was right.
And if they were writing about it, they were writing about it in this kind of really kind of road boring.
Right. Right. Right.
So find someone who has an interesting take on auto safety.
Now, where would that person reside?
Well, not an academia.
They would work for a car company.
Right. Turns out this is a Scottish guy called Leonard Evans who ran the safety department at General Motors and Leonard wrote a book called Traffic Safety in America, which is so genius.
And I read traffic safety.
I was like, oh my God, Leonard, you're genius.
So I call up Leonard and he's got this whole Scottish Brogue accent that he's been waiting for you all his life waiting for him for his entire life.
No journalist has ever called Leonard.
Of course not. And Leonard's sitting in his office in like Dearborn, wherever the hell he is.
And he doesn't even bother to clear it with General Motors public relations because he's never had a journalist call him before.
He's just on the phone with me.
And Leonard does something.
The first story Leonard gives me, he goes in his Scottish accent, which I can't do.
He says, you realize we're talking about airbags and one of this is in the mid 90s, early late 90s.
And one of Leonard's points was airbags are suddenly a big deal.
Everyone was in love with airbags.
And his point was the airbag, if you're not wearing your seat belt, the airbag is can kill you, particularly if you are very young or very old or very small.
And Leonard said, the reason we don't realize this is that the reason we have airbags is because of Ralph Nader.
And Ralph Nader didn't understand this fact.
And he was promoting the airbag without he thought it was an alternative to the seat belt as opposed to an accompaniment to the seat belt.
And then Leonard said, and I never wrote about this, he said, what you should do is you should file a Freedom of Information Act request with the whatever the automobile, whatever the transit automobile bureaucracy is and ask for all the cases of people who died because they weren't wearing a seat belt
and the airbag went off.
And that's the blood that's on Ralph Nader's hands.
And I was like, oh, my God, so I file.
I file the FOIA request and like two months later, like seven huge boxes show up with the Washington Post and it's all the case files.
What did I do with that story?
Nothing. And then so I remember this and I remember Leonard and I get to the New Yorker and I'm filled with shame that I never wrote the story.
I would have won the Pulitzer Prize.
I would have won the letter and gave me a Pulitzer Prize.
It was all there in the boxes.
It was like hundreds of people.
I mean, it's sad. He did say it was sad.
Hashtag sad. And Leonard is not happy with me or not doing a story about this.
So then I say, I'll do the Ralph Nader story.
I'm not the ship of sail, but we'll do the Ralph Nader story.
And then I go. So then for some reason, I go to Detroit, but I don't hang out with Leonard.
I hang out with his competitor, Ford.
I think he got very concerned about that.
It was unhappy. But the guy at Ford had this whole thing about three point belts and we crashed all these cars.
It was so much fun.
And then I came back.
But the point it all starts with Leonard like Leonard was a guy who wanted to play.
He was an iconoclast ignored sitting in his office in Dearborn and nobody was listening to him.
And he was writing these books that were read by seven people and he was just great.
He was just like. And when you uncover someone like that and he was just so thrilled with the idea that I think another thing that thrilled you is that all the rest of us slobs who are writing about politics or show business or sports are obsessed with access.
You want to write a profile of LeBron James.
You want to write a profile of Kamala Harris or whatever.
And you have to go through these tentacles and seaweed of of of handlers and and and no and no and can we have quote approval and photo approval and the answer is no.
OK we're not. Blah blah blah.
It's terrible. It's terrible.
And I think part of it and tell me if I'm wrong was your antipathy to that.
Yeah. I mean the closest I think you might have done to a true celebrity profile one of my favorite pieces was the guy who was the Ronco was a call to the Ronco jar and bottle cutter.
That's one of my favorite pieces of all I ever did on the guy.
I did the Showtime which is really the right.
Oh the rotisserie chicken guy.
And but what I gleaned from that also you you had a very early interest.
And here we're going back a little bit before you were in journalism.
You were in advertising.
What was you. I wanted to be an average.
I think they couldn't get a job.
You couldn't get a job.
Why did you want to be an advertiser?
Well because I like the idea that someone can tell a story in 30 seconds.
I just thought that was fantastic.
And I was in awe of I thought the greatest achievement was a well told 30 second story was the hardest thing in the world.
And the idea that it can make you laugh or cry in 30 seconds while they're selling you something is just in the degree of difficulty on that it's just off the charts.
Well so I wanted to do that.
Hence what was his name the Ronco jar.
So Ron Pappil Ron Pappil he did that.
Remember he did. They used to do the late night infomercials.
He was the infomercial king.
Right. And he did. He made a number of things but his showpiece product was the Showtime retisserie oven which was I claimed dollar for dollar the finest kitchen appliance ever made.
And I still believe that to be the case.
And I went out to L .A.
And I hung out with Ron and it was I decided to go deep on Ron.
And he turns out he's from like Asbury Park or somewhere in his his people were all.
They were tumblers.
They were sales on the boardwalk in New Jersey.
They also like knives and stuff on the boardwalk.
And Ron was that you know another guy and McMahon was part of that circle.
And a guy named Kidder's Morris who was Ron Pappil's grandfather was a legendary guy from the old country who came over and was selling kitchen gadgets on the boardwalk.
And they were they would do the spiel and you know the chop chop chop they'd have the they'd have the all the vegetables and they'd be sitting on the boardwalk and they would show you the knife and they go chop chop chop chop and the whole thing was the term.
This is a crucial thing that he learns back then which is so the crowd gathers around you and you got the ginsu knife and you're chopping the vegetables and then at a certain first of all you can't you have a he taught me this.
He's like he got the carrots and the potatoes and you got the pineapple can't ever chop the pineapple.
Why. Because it's so expensive.
It's just there. It's the thought that he might somehow one day chop the pineapple that keeps the people coming.
But no no you chop the carrots the carrots are like five cents a carrot.
But the key thing is to turn so the people come close together around you going chop chop chop chop and you've got to sell them.
The knife and they got to get out of there because the news when do people have to come in.
That's the key so that anybody could do the thing chop chop chop chop chop people gather round but it's turning that crowd and bringing in a new one in a seamless fashion.
That's the and Ron was battle tested on the board.
He was the greatest of all the boardwalk and then he goes to L .A.
and he takes it up a notch and he starts doing late night infomercials and he was so good and I hung out with him and he from.
I was out there for like two weeks mostly goofing around but hang and I talked with the guy who collaborated with on the Showtime Oven and I actually got a I used to eat for years I I used to cook my chickens in this on the Showtime was amazing no more.
I think I don't know what I say it got really squeaky and like you're six yet is yet a squeaky roaches and a squeaky when and Ron told me that I had a fix it and I.
You threw it out but his big thing you threw out the oven I did.
His big thing that you know a lot of the back then in the old days the rotisseries.
They they went like this like this is the spirit they were vertical and Ron's like why do you do it vertical it makes no sense.
The juices flow to the bottom crazy it's got to be horizontal he's the guy who starts through a horizontal rotisserie and he was so he was so and the getting into the family history and one point he takes me to the grave site.
In New Jersey where all the whole the three generations of these legendary pitchmen who work the boardwalk and they're all buried in this thing and he starts to cry and it was just like.
Unbelievable, but the move there and this my letter your dear friend Henry Fender was very he was another very formative figure in this he's like.
Everyone the standard move is to make fun of romp appeal do not make fun of romp appeal.
You have to genuinely he's a hero.
You have and the the if the reader thinks for a moment you're mocking the man you've failed and I that is the.
100 % and to this day people make this air journalists do they they think at some point they have to demonstrate their superiority to the subject.
Yeah, no. The subject the subject is the hero and you have to find your job there I you can there's 10 ways to write that romp appeal had a very complicated except in political reporting, but okay yeah.
But Ron had it there's 10 ways to write the romp appeal profile nine of those ways you make fun of him.
Thank you and one way you record you look for what is what was fantastic about this guy which is.
Devoted his life and his people for three generation devoted his life to making.
Working in the kitchen a happier healthier easier more efficient that's a fantastic he cared about whether the chicken was vertical or horizontal.
We'll be right back.
This year pushkin we've been able to work with some of the world's biggest brands on creating bespoke content whether it's a custom episode in partnership with a brand or a creative ad campaign we want to be sure that our content reaches people.
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This November I'm heading to the Lone Star State as part of my book tour.
I'll be speaking about my book Revenge of the Tipping Point in Dallas one day Houston the next and Austin a few short days after that a brief four night trip.
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We're back at the 92nd Street Y with David Remnick.
You are no longer 23 and you've just had a couple of kids there how old now.
I got a toddler and a baby.
And I'm forbidden. I didn't get the really 60.
I'm you. You know you're 14.
First of all good luck.
Second of all second of all famously and you once told me you know how you you did one of your moves about college admissions.
I love that stuff. Crazy getting in and the 92nd Street Y kindergarten and Ivy League this and Canada we just filled out an application the night before and I.
All right. Not even the night before.
You the day of David.
My parents weren't even involved.
My father asked me where you applying to college.
I was like well I'm just doing the form now and what did you put on it Monopoly.
No you just send the form in.
It's like a page. You just send it in.
All right. So your kids are going to not stay toddler and baby for very long.
I promise you that I this this is one area where I know more.
How are you going to feel about college admissions when they get to be 16 17 18 because you're you're you're rant about Ivy League which I've been doing for years which is it's one of the most perfected rants of all time.
I got a new rant by the way I got I got two episodes of my podcast it is so I've been working on this rant you're right.
15 years I have perfect.
So I got two episodes of my podcast coming out I think next week it's called the Georgetown Massacre.
It is when I say this is this is like it is my Beethoven's fifth.
It is my it is my white album.
It is my everything else I have done.
This is what's going on.
It is just like chump change compared.
This is two parts two parts on one case involving a tennis player who goes to Georgetown and every single everything I've done as a writer has been building building towards it's so genius and it like by the end it's just like and it has twists and turns and it's just it's.
It's just. Would you like to preview it.
No and I want to give it away.
You got to listen to it.
So I'm not giving it away.
So good. This is why I have to work for a living.
No, I know what you're saying.
Am I going to be a hypocrite?
Yeah, of course. What the one thing I will not do though.
Yeah what? There was one place where I believe where are you going to where you're going to draw the line.
S .A .T. prep. No, I'm not I'm not making the call.
Oh, OK. You mean the call to the the mock or call it call in.
I know the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy who's on the board.
Not doing that. OK.
I say. We talked about voice before and and one of the reasons I think that your podcast is so successful and so seductive and I don't notice them is that it it it has a real human voice.
It doesn't feel read even though I know damn well that you've worked on them really hard.
Similar to your prose.
It feels your written prose feel spoken and vice versa, which I mean is high praise.
Podcasting is a relatively new form.
Why did you gravitate toward it in such a complete way.
It's not this is not some avocation.
In fact, at a certain point, you know, you've done work where the book is an extension of the podcast is with a bomber book.
So tell me about that in your attraction to certain kinds of stories.
So for example, the story I was just talking about the George Tom, asker.
You could you could write it, but it's not nearly as fun in written form.
Right. So there's a certain kind of story which lends itself beautifully to audio where audio permits you.
It could be more playful.
You can get away with stuff.
What does that mean?
Get away with stuff.
Yeah, there's no critical infrastructure.
So it was like no one's going to understand you could be more full of shit.
No, you couldn't be like you have to be careful.
I mean, I am no, no, we're not not making stuff up.
What I'm saying is people are more accepting of a kind of playful outlandishness.
So part of the the Georgetown, asker episodes there, there's a tongue is in the cheek, right?
Even as I'm making a substantive point.
And you feel you can do that more than on in castle on type in a magazine.
You would not let me write that for the New Yorker.
You take it out because I would feel what it wouldn't work.
It's like I don't it's hard to explain because a lot of what's playful about audio is stuff you're doing with your voice, right?
So you're you know, you I can I can adopt a tone of voice that says we're we're getting around we're having a fun.
We're playing with ideas.
Yeah. Like there's a character in the Georgetown massacre.
There's part of it is a turn and we meet the guy who's charged in a case and he takes as his lawyers as the two legendary two greatest defense lawyers in the country.
Roy Black and Howard Shrapnick, these two guys in Miami.
And we meet Roy and Howard.
Now, the first crucial thing is.
I could if I'm writing a print version, you'll meet Roy and Howard.
I described them. I could you got to hear when you hear them.
It's just so much better and you realize like and then when you're describing them, I can describe them in a much more colorful way when I know you're going to hear their voice, right?
I can't explain it better than that, but there is something about I can like Howard has got long hair and rides a motorcycle in the early morning hours and looks like a movie star and does this in this trial.
He does a he does a direct examination of the defendant's daughter.
That is just so masterful.
I mean, it's just it's like I was reading, you know, you read the transcript and you come to this thing and you're like someone because people like you and I, you know, our business fundamentally is not about we're not in the writing business.
We're in the interviewing business, right?
We only write because we've interviewed somebody.
It's really interviewing.
You think of it that way.
Oh, yeah. Really? Oh, yeah.
The whole game is interviewing.
It's not. Okay. Writing is I would never write something without it.
The idea of writing something just without having sat down first to talk to someone is unthinkable to me.
So when you a defense lawyer is just to stipulate that's the fun part for you.
That's the that's the that's the juice of it above all.
Well, I don't find the writing part hard.
I find the writing part is just it's just a matter of sitting down and it's that it's under don't tell any writers that but that's the gift of being at the Washington Post for 10 years.
It used to be hard and it wasn't by the time I was done there.
I was on the phone dictating the story like they solved that problem.
The hard part is can I sit down with somebody and can I understand who they are and what they're trying to say and represent that in a way that's meaningful and powerful and all of that is stuff you get from the interview.
You don't you can't make it up after the fact.
So you have to like I was doing this summer.
I spent I spent like 20 hours.
Maybe I forgot how many hours 10 15 20 hours with this woman who's a psychologist and it was incredible.
Like she agreed. Thank God to sit with me for that long.
Telling you stay. You're like the competition for goodness sake.
It hurts me very much.
Got time. Telling you it was the same thing with the Paul Simon thing that we did.
Yeah, I've heard of him where he you know, he sat for 40 hours and the whole thing the trick not the trick that was interesting.
What's hard about that was not writing it up afterwards.
All those problems were solved in the interview.
The trick was when we were talking to him and I if I started to interrupt which is the worst thing you do in an interview, but I've interviewed Paul Simon.
He's not immediately easy.
No, he's not easy. And you had him for, you know, on and on and on and it got richer and richer and richer and he is something you did something about you your patience your interest your silence whatever whatever it was drew out a guy that I think it's fair to say is not immediately thrilled with being
the process of being interviewed.
He was I don't understand why he was so he was he kept on I kept on saying I'm done and then he would say no.
Let's when we meeting again and we would be in Bruce.
My friend Bruce did it together and we Bruce and I would look at his at all.
He said yeah, Bruce they would look at you like he really wants to do it again and he would always do it again.
And then I couldn't believe it and I think that you know, if I was kind of reconstructing why he was so kind of generous with his time that would be part of it.
Part of it was I think we were uninterested in the parts of his life that he felt had been picked over.
So we're not interested in your marriage to so and so in relationship with our car.
But we were really interested in his dad.
And I remember there was one moment.
We were a musician who was a musician.
I remember there was one time where Bruce and I asked him some question.
I asked him some question about his dad and he went.
He talked straight for like half an hour got incredibly emotional and then he said I have to stop and he got up and walked outside.
Was like wow. It was there was something really deep and the idea is so interesting and it's that thing that moment in and when you're interviewing somebody first of all, it never gets old when you tap into something.
So we had tapped into something that was real about him that his relationship to his father is a man in his 70s.
His father's been dead for 30 years.
He eclipsed his father in every conventional way by a million miles and yet he was still you realize he was still writing about his father.
He was still dreaming about his father father was still like with him, you know, it was just such a kind of like but that when you get there and that was that took a long time for us to get there when you get there with somebody that like I said the writing is not hard when you get that kind of moment
on the how did your parents affect the way you look you're now this some you're moving forward but slightly retrospective you have kids your life has changed.
You look back on it.
How did your parents inform?
Who you are in your work?
My dad was um was a he was a mischief maker in the he was someone who is had no interest whatsoever in any authority in any he he did not the psychological term that best describes him was disagreeable not the psychologist when he was a term they don't mean obnoxious.
He was the first thing from not just incredibly gracious man in psychological terms disagreeable means you are uninterested in what in the approval of others.
You know could kill us just the idea of standing out and being different was just second nature for him.
It wasn't that he relished that being different.
She didn't care. Just did what he was different.
He taught me. I've told this very many times but he we came we moved to Canada were living in rural Canada in in kind of Mennonite Country was always old auto Mennonites people who are like the Amish there in driving buggies and a barn would burn down and they would do a barn raising that all gather
the next day and they would raise the barn in one day hundreds of Mennonites would come in their horses and buggies from miles around and they would you know the huge spread of food and they would just it was incredible to watch actually if you go to a barn raising hundreds of them putting up a barn
and my father decided to join and he see so this one car kind of you know of all his Volvo in with like a hundred horses and buggies and he's like an English guy.
They're all like clean -shaven wearing black pants and like these you know and hats straw hats and he's like got a big beard and a tie and you know, he looks like a mathematician an English mathematician and he drives up in his Volvo with his kids in the in tow and not an ounce of self -consciousness
not even from did it even occur to him to ask permission to show up.
He shows up and says, you know, basically put me to work and they're like, okay, and they he doesn't know what they're doing.
So he's doing the most manual labor.
No one none of the hundred people this barn raising had had more than a sixth grade education.
He has a PhD in advanced mathematics and he's the happiest man there.
That's so my dad who's like like and like went home and then never spoke about it again or my favorite story about my dad a story.
He told me when he was.
In his 70s. I don't know why I never told you this before.
He's married. My mom my mom is Jamaican there in Jamaica.
He's teaching at the University of West Indies where one of his students is Kamala Harris's dad common hours of staff and he decides he wants to write.
He's writing some paper and back then if you needed a book you would it wasn't there's no the book he needed was not in the University of West Indies library and he figures out it's at the Georgia Tech Library.
And so he's going to go to Georgia Tech and so you write a letter to the professor friendly knows a Georgia Tech.
My name is Graham Blabell.
I'm a professor at University of West Indies.
I would like to come to Georgia Tech to read your user library guy says yes and he's preparing to go and he learns later that he kicks off a panic at Georgia Tech because it's 1960 Georgia Tech is segregated and they don't know whether he's white or black.
They just know he's a professor from the University of West Indies.
God knows he could be a black guy coming to our camp.
We just invited a black guy to the campus.
Holy shit. And like they go nuts and finally there's no telephone there's no there's no telephone.
There's no direct line.
They try and find out where finally they reach you on the phone before he's about to come and you know, he's called to the switchboard whatever you know professor.
Apple. Yes, this is so -and -so from Georgia Tech.
Yes. Are you white?
He goes yes, they go oh, thank God.
So then but this is the stories that over so then now they're gonna roll out the red carpet, right?
But so it gets on the boat, sails from Jamaica to Miami, gets on the bus.
Now you did it back then.
Takes the bus from Miami to Atlanta goes, they have a welcome dinner.
They're all sitting down all like these white men and halfway through the meal.
He pulls out a large eight by ten photo of my mom.
Says yes, my wife. I was gonna bring up right side again.
Hands it around the room.
Like no. To him that was a fantastic moment, like show these guys never mentioned a word about that story for 40 somebody for and that he's a man.
Oh, I went to Georgia Tech and I had interviewed some guy there who was the head of the political science department, who was a black guy from Atlanta and I told it to my dad because oh, it's so funny.
Wasn't always that way.
Tell the story. But his that's that was so hammy.
Just like he just it was like he just like he loved nothing more than like poking the bear, but he didn't, you know, you didn't make a big deal about it.
He just wanted to go around poking the bear before I ask about your mom.
You mentioned that your dad was taught Kamala Harris's father Donald Harris was student of his.
We knew him somehow.
I don't Donald Harris told me this not my dad because my dad obviously it passed by the time Kamala became a big deal.
But yeah, they were Kamala.
Donald Harris. My mom knows Donald Harris is from is from a brownstone, which is where my mom went to school.
She knows. She went to school.
She went to church at his father's church and like they did they clearly must have seen each other across a few at the age of the degree of excitement in well, all Jim.
I mean first of all, what's hilarious is there's one group that says Kamala Harris is black.
Then there's another group that says she's Indian and there's the Jamaicans are like she's Jamaican.
Right. So the level of excitement among the Jamaicans over her is my mother like literally.
She's 93. There is zero chance.
She will exit this world between now and the election.
It is not happening like the degree to which and her defense.
I call her up. She just the first 10 minutes just defending Kamala against and they were attacking her for her big thing is they were attacking her for not revealing her positions.
She just started how can you have positions before she starts?
My mother's whole thing is this should unfold over the passage of time.
It's I remember I had the privilege of meeting her a few times particularly in Washington and she struck me as a very proper.
She's my mother is a very very yes.
She is a very refined dignified Jamaican lady.
Yeah, you don't nobody messes with she was she also you know, she loved also confronting authority and did it endlessly and to great effect in our little town.
They had never met.
How did she navigate rural, Ontario?
She just sailed right in she she met all the kind of power brokers in town charm them got on all the right committees and I mean it was Mennonites.
So the Mennonites are there's no they're not they're the opposite end of the they're not racist.
It's no race. It was no race.
You know, it was nothing and also it's a very different now that I understand this.
It's a very different story when you're the only black person in town.
And you mean actually talk about some book.
An outsider is not threatening at those in those numbers, right?
Particularly an outsider who is and she was this is a deeply Christian town and my mother is a very devout woman.
And so she read very she seemed very familiar to them even if she was at the same time in some sense exotic, but she's very she would never register, even if something untoward was done to to her.
She would never register that in the moment.
You know, she would to hold it back and she would tell you about it.
Maybe later, but it was in a and also there's a so a lot of us in will tell you this.
It's very different to come from a culture where you're in the majority.
You know, a story I showed an outliers when my mom was in she was a scholarship student at a boarding school in Jamaica and all of the scholarship students were black, right?
They would be and they were all there because they're really good students.
And so she's like 11 years old and she reads in the Encyclopedia to Britannica that black people are genetically inferior to white people when it comes to intelligence and she is no she can't comprehend this because in her world all the smart people are the Jews in the Britannica.
Yeah. This is like from 1900.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's there.
So in Jamaica in 1930, whatever but in her world all the smart people are black and the dumb ones are the you know, the plantation owners daughters, you know, these white kids from you know, one generation.
They're like, what are they doing here?
You know, and so it's like that's the if that's your mindset when all you in her so she has a see you come to Canada, you have no comprehension of the basis you think of racism you think of racist tropes as absurd as opposed to being malignant.
Malcolm, I want to thank you deeply for your work and your friendship.
I miss you. You live in like God knows where in Upstate, New York.
I wish I saw you much more often.
All right, your idea of Upstate, New York is like embossing.
That's about as far as you go.
You're like, we're thinking I are going away from the weekend.
Where are you going?
Yonkers. Yonkers. What was your theory?
There was what was the Mountain Jews.
I'm not a Mountain Jew.
You're not a no, I'm really not.
No, no, no, no, I'm an environmentalist because I want there to be a wonderful and healthy environment for you are you know, you're a bar menace because you you've you've been told there is an environment out there.
I check in with Betsy Colbert and Bill McKibben and and and others.
Yes, and I'm told like the other day I was walking into my my building and I heard this racket.
Yeah, and I said, what is that?
And the and the door guy said those are birds.
Evidently, this is a bad attitude.
I want to close by asking you very crucial question.
You you have have an ambivalent relationship with sports with sports.
You once said I know you're a huge sports fan, Buffalo Bills running your terrific runner, but you've also said that sports are a moral abomination.
Did I say that you did?
Yeah, yeah. I remember what in what in what era of my I think you were your annoyance with professional sports.
Well, I do, you know, so here's my in a nutshell my current thinking on this.
I was a very good high school runner and then I quit and did run for 30 years and started again and became a kind of slightly better than mediocre better than that.
But okay, not. Yeah, when I was at 16, I was up here when I was 50, I was done and I had way way way more fun.
When I was 50 and mediocre than I did when I was 15 and a national champion and it is made me realize that you actually you want to be mediocre.
You don't want to be you don't want to be good.
Is that aside from the very very small group of people who genuinely if you're LeBron or you're Usain Bolt, fine, but the the the idea that the rest of us should be pursuing that kind of athletic excellence is in the stake and what's happened there is I think in the audience a woman named Linda Flanagan who wrote
this book. I adore called taking back the game, which is this critique of what's gone wrong with you sports.
And this is I think one of her set with is one of her central arguments in this wonderful book which really changed the way I think about which is that we've destroyed the very thing that made sports fun play play right by by this kind of professionalizing of youth sports and I I realized that was my
problem when I was 15.
I was caught up in a fantasy about that.
I was going to go to the Olympics and I was and it ruined running for me and I didn't run for 30 years and that's heartbreaking because I love running more than almost anything else and I I I recovered my joy of running only when I was coming in 28 in my local 5k and so that's what I mean by like this.
We shouldn't be telling we shouldn't be Linda would tell you why are you taking a 13 year old and putting them through the torture and the torture and getting in a car and driving for three hours for like a soccer match.
Why that the drive should never be longer than the match.
That should be a rule right.
Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to that conversation with David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y.
You can find revenge of the tipping point wherever you get your audiobooks next time on revisionist history and update on broken windows Theory.
revisionist history is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Ben Nadaaf -Haffry and Nina Bird -Lawrence.
Our editor is Karen Schicherjee.
Original scoring by Louis Guerra mastering by Echo Mountain engineering by Nina Bird -Lawrence production support from Luke Lamond.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith special.
Thanks to Sarah Nix and as always El Jefe.
Gotta come. I'm out from Glapo.
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