Susan malcolm gladwell, book number six out this week, talking to strangers. What is the premise of this book, your latest book . Malcolm the premise of this latest book is that were not very good at talking to strangers. I was struck by how many of the kind of contemporary highprofile controversies that we find ourselves in come down to the same problem, that two people who didnt know each other very well attempt to communicate and fail or attempt to understand each other and fail. Bernie madoff, people had conversations with Bernie Madoff and never understood who he was. The Jerry Sandusky case at penn state. Brock turner Sexual Assault case at stanford a few years back, these are failed communications. And the one that really, the book starts and ends with, the signature case im concerned with is the sandra brand case, which is one of those high profile encounters between African Americans and Law Enforcement that was, excuse me, so much in the news a few years ago, which was a conversation between a young black man, black woman and a Police Officer who pulls her over, and the conversation goes off the rails. And i wondered why is it, why is it that were, that we fail in these conversations with strangers . Thats where the book comes from. Susan each one of your books has explored an aspect of human communication. What is it about this topic that you keep coming back to . Why is it so important to you . Malcolm i dont know. I just think it is endlessly no one loves a transcript more than me. I am keenly interested in how people express themselves and how they succeed and fail at that. Im one of those people who, if someone is articulate, im all in. I find myself so one of the people interviewed me on my, did a little press tour of england. And i was interviewed by the actor russell brand, who has a podcast, a big, popular podcast in england. And i had never met him before. Only knew him from the movies, and he starts to talk, and i realize he is one of those astonishingly articulate people, and i was just kind of so in awe, and the whole im trying to figure out how, how is it this man has so commanded my attention and his choice of words i was having difficulty answering his questions, because i was so focused on like thinking about, oh, my goodness, i cant believe the brilliant way he phrased that, oh, i have to answer. So i dont know. Im just drawn to that, that whole aspect of human nature. Susan for our conversation, we have actually pulled some clips that helped to illustrate some of the things you talk about in the book. We want to start with the sandra bland story. This is very available video if people want to watch the entire video. Well watch a small clip. Lets watch and talk a little bit more about it. [video clip] officer encinia are you ok . Sandra you you, this is your job. I am waiting on you. Officer encinia you seem very irritated. Sandra i am, i really am. Im getting out of your way. I move over and you stopped me. Officer encinia you mind putting out your cigarette, please. Sandra im in my car, i dont have to put out my cigarette. Officer encinia you can step out now. Sandra i dont have to step out. Officer encinia step out of the car. Step out of the car. Step out of the car. Get out of the car. Sandra dont touch me. Officer encinia get out of the car. Sandra dont touch me, im not under arrest, you dont have officer encinia you are under arrest. Sandra im under arrest for what, for what . Officer encinia im going to drag you out of here. Sandra so you are fixing to drag me out of my own car. Officer encinia get out of the car. Get out of the car. I will lock you up. Get out now sandra wow, wow officer encinia get out of the car. Sandra for failure to signal, youre doing all of this officer encinia get over there. Susan that interaction ended in tragedy how . Malcom three days later, she is imprisoned for resisting arrest, and then three days later, she hangs herself in her cell, you know, a tragic and unexpected result, but the whole, that exchange that we saw, which by the way, goes on and on and on and on. We saw a small snippet of it, that was the kind of when i first saw that online, thats when i realized what i wanted to write about, because if you break that exchange down moment by moment, you see multiple failures of understanding, of empathy, of a million things. So just, for example, in the segment we just saw, she lights a cigarette, and we now know that sandra bland was someone who had struggled with emotional problems. She had a failed Suicide Attempt a few months earlier. She is upset and she also has several thousands of dollars in outstanding traffic fines. So being pulled over by a Police Officer is consequential for her. This has happened before. She is deeply in debt because of it. And so she is upset when she gets pulled over. And she lights a cigarette to calm her nerves, the way that many smokers will tell you thats why they smoke, right, to kind of calm down. So she is trying to stay under control, and unconsciously, i think, trying to signal to the Police Officer, i dont want this to go awry. I am trying to calm down. And he will not let her. He sees her lighting a cigarette as an act of defiance. If you watch the entire videotape, constantly you see that the two of them are talking entirely past each other and that he is reading her disquiet and distress as evidence of something sinister, as evidence of her being dangerous or malicious or criminal in some way. Its this kind of epic misunderstanding. And i wanted to kind of so over the course of the book, i sort of try to break it down, and then by reference to other stories, come to an understanding of how it is a very, very straightforward conversation can end in tragedy. Susan so you write of this, you have been thinking about these concepts for a while, and that you watch this video countless times, and you kept finding yourself getting angrier and angrier. Mine is a process question. It has been six years since you produced a book, you have ideas germinating in your head. What about this crystallized, yes, this is a topic i want to explore . Malcolm well, i had been kind of drawn to all of those encounters, problematic encounters between African Americans and Police Officers, you know, beginning with ferguson, because they all seem to me to be extraordinarily multilayered. On one hand, they were deeply personal. They were about Police Officers confronting someone, and something going, you know, something going wrong, someone getting shot. But on the other hand, ferguson is a really excellent example. You know, when the department of justice report comes out on ferguson, theres two reports. One report is about the actual conduct of the Police Officer and what happened between the officer and michael brown, and that report explains why the officer is not being indicted on civil rights charges, because its unclear that he did anything that was in sort of obvious violation of the law. The other, Second Department of justice report, which is perhaps more important, was the one about the Ferguson Police department and pointed out that the Police Department had been essentially a predatory force on the Africanamerican Community of ferguson. They had been essentially using their power and authority to levy fines on as many different people as they could in order to fill the citys coffers. The city was running itself on tickets. And so cops were encouraged to write tickets for everything. When you see the things that the police force had been engaged in the previous couple of years, your jaw drops. This is a town where the Africanamerican Community was so completely alienated from the police force because of the way the police force was behaving, and thats the context for ferguson. So really you have a if you only look at the encounter, you miss the real story, the real story is what happened before, years and years and years of the police force essentially using the black Community Like an a. T. M. In the way that no police force is supposed to do. It is funny, so one of the d. O. J. Reports that was exculpatory, and the other was so, was such a devastating kind of critique of what happened in ferguson, and they sat side by side. In order to understand ferguson, you have to read both. That struck me as incredibly interesting that, because i think we have a tendency sometimes, when we look at these kinds of encounters, to only do the first look, the personal look, to look at the interaction between the cop and think we can settle the issue if we can figure out exactly what happened in that interaction. But that ferguson reminds us that no, no, no, that just is the beginning of your job. You then have to take a step back and say, well, what was what were the environmental conditions that surrounded and predated that encounter. And i wanted to do Something Like that with sandra bland, only go even broader and start pulling in, you know, madoff and amanda knox and all of the other cases i talk about as a way of shedding light on that encounter. Susan you spent three years, you write on this project. If you look at the extensive notes that you have on the back, lots of documents you read, you never met a transcript you didnt like, lots of travel and lots of interviews. I guess people wonder who follow you with the really limitless vignettes, or examples, case studies that you can bring on a topic, how do you pick the right one . Malcolm there no procedure. Its an art. Sometimes youre successful at it. Sometimes youre not successful at it. You look for i like to tell a variety of stories just to remind people that what the stakes are. If you if every story i told in this book was a story of an encounter between a Young African american and a Police Officer, then people would think, oh, malcolm is just talking about, when he says he writes a book about talking to strangers, he is talking about interactions between Police Officers and black people. I dont want that. I dont this to be i dont want to give people reason to pigeonhole this. Im trying to Say Something that is actually quite broad about the way all of us talk to strangers. Its funny that i honestly dont believe, i think that many of us could have made the same mistakes that that Police Officer in that video made, that Brian Encinia made. I dont think he is an unusually inept or incompetent or biased or i think he is a Police Officer who is inexperienced and over his head and jumped to some conclusions he didnt. But, you know, we all do that. Thats the point of the book. Were making our mistakes in far lower stakes situations. Were not Police Officers with guns stopping people on the street, right. When i screw up in my understanding of a stranger, whats the consequence . Someone doesnt like me or i feel uncomfortable. No one is dead. Thats an important thing to keep in mind that this book is really meant to be, to make us all complicit in some of these tragedies. Susan one of the concepts that you say that we all do is that we default to truth. What does that mean . Malcolm so this is an idea that comes from a psychologist named tim levine, whose work i rely on a lot in talking to strangers. He was trying to understand why , it is a puzzle that has obsessed psychologists for a long time, why are human beings so bad at detecting deception. This has been studied a million different ways, but basically my ability to tell whether youre lying to me is scarcely better than chance. Were terrible at it, almost all of us, with a few small exceptions. Thats puzzling because you would think we were good at it. That would be something that evolution would have selected for. And his explanation is that evolution does not select for the ability to detect lies. It selects for the opposite. It selects for people who are willing to believe, implicitly believe what theyre told, because if you do that, if you trust, if you default to truth, as he says, then your life is so much easier. You can start companies. You can form groups. You can send your kids off to school and not worry. There are a million things you can do if you believe what people tell you. You can go into a store and you can buy go to a Grocery Store and buy 100 items and be satisfied that the bill they give you at the end is accurate, right. Its an extraordinary thing. There are 100 opportunities in your shopping cart for someone to cheat you, but how often do you see someone in the Grocery Store say wait a minute, i dont believe its 119, right. The only time i have ever seen anyone do this is actually my tangent, my father, who is a mathematician, had a gift for doing sums in his head, would count along with the checkout person, and only if they undercharged him would he correct them. This is in the days before the bar code scanners. I remember being a little kid and see him, and then he would say actually i owe you an extra 75 cents. He would fish it out. He wasnt doing it because he mistrusted them. He was doing it because it was a power trick. The point is the reason were able to do this as human beings, build these fabulous working societies, is that we trust, right, implicitly and automatically. So if you understand that, you realize that there is a cost of that, and this is his argument, the cost is that we will be we will occasionally be deceived. Were not good at spotting the scam artist. And that is, you know, thats why madoff exists. Its not because madoff is some kind of genius. Its because if you set out to systematically lie to people, youll get away with it, at least in the short term. Theyre not going to catch you. Right . Were not thinking, is this guy lying to me . Were thinking no, he has great returns, heres 1 million. Thats the way we operate. Susan speaking of Bernie Madoff, dipping into cspan video archives, we have a video of someone who is also in your book, henry markopolos. Lets listen to what he has to say to the s. E. C. Of Bernie Madoff. [video clip] henry i gift wrapped and delivered the hugest ponzi to them, and they couldnt conduct a proper investigation, because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. Ponzi schemeion doesnt make the list, who sets their priorities . Susan you call him holy fool. Malcolm yes, markopolos isnt the only person, but he saw the truth in Bernie Madoff 10 years before he was busted. He is going to the s. E. C. Saying he is running a massive ponzi scheme, no one would listen to him. He is someone who does not default to truth. I refer to people like him as holy fool, which is a term, a russian term to describe the kind of the crazy person who nonetheless has access to truth that none of us see, so the child who is not constrained by social convention in pointing out the truth, but the kid who says the emperor has no clothes, he is a holy fool. And markopolos is fascinating, because the question arises, do we want to be like him, he could see a fraud that the rest of us could not see. He had insight that the rest of us did not have. Do we want to be like him, would our society be better if there were more markopoloses . I say no, that you dont want to be like him. He will tell you this, i sat down with him, we talked about it, he is someone who is extraordinarily suspicious and paranoid. He thinks there is a scandal under every rock. He goes around the world every day of his life, is filled with the great fear that he is being scammed. He goes to the doctor, and he lectures the doctor on, you know, all the ways, dont do this to me and dont do this to me, im aware of all of your tricks. He, in fact, was so paranoid that after he after madoff was finally busted, markopolos came to believe that madoff was going to send hitmen to kill him, and then he became convinced that the s. E. C. Was going to send a squad of attackers to break into his house and steal all his files. He stayed up all night with a gun trained on the door of his house. You dont want to live like that. There is a cost with having that kind of insight. That is levines point, that insight cost is too high. You were much better off being gullible, or at least being believed, defaulting to truth, being people who implicitly believe, because liars like madoff are rare. I actually think that is profoundly wise. Susan should we be better at listening when someone is saying the sky is falling . Malcolm that depends. The unknown question is how many times does markopolos say there is a fraud and there isnt one . So he just a few weeks ago actually came with an announcement that he thought that General Electric was engaged in one of the largest accounting scandals of all time. It seems, i dont know yet, the story hasnt played out yet, but lots of people shrugged and said no, i think you are off the mark in this case. So i dont know. Certainly we would do well to we shouldnt ignore them, but we have to understand the difference in the way that most of us are calibrated, and its a good its probably a good thing to be trustworthy, or certainly one should not take from the madoff scandal, i think, the conclusion that the financial engine needs to be even more heavily regulated. If you reduce everyone in a complex industry to a state of suspicion and paranoia, then you destroy the thing youre trying to save, right. Susan our next example from your book is a very different kind. Its from Michigan State and penn state, the Jerry Sandusky scandal and dr. Nassar. Lets watch the video, and well come back and talk about that. [video clip] jerry he was coming to me with a concern about, you know, i guess in his words, somebody had talked to him about inappropriate behavior in the shower. And you told him jerry i told him that it didnt happen, and there wasnt, in my mind, it wasnt inappropriate behavior. Susan the court said differently, and he is now serving a long prison sentence. What should we take away from this and also the Michigan State situation . Malcolm yeah, so i have a chapter on the sandusky case. What interested me with the sandusky case is not sandusky himself, but rather what the prosecutors did after they convicted sandusky. They went after the leadership of penn state for failure to act earlier on to prevent sanduskys misbehavior, which i think is absurd. I go through chapter and verse why the prosecution was asking people in positions of leadership to do things that they should not do, that is essentially what the charge so the president of penn state was forced to resign and is still 10 years later, almost 10 years later, fighting a legal battle to stay out of jail. The Athletic Director and the Vice President of penn state both were convicted and sent to jail as a result of this scandal. In my mind, they did absolutely nothing wrong except that they did what human beings do, which is they defaulted to truth. They were presented with incredibly vague questions about Jerry Sandusky, and they chose to interpret them in the way that was most favorable to sandusky. They defaulted to truth when it came to this man who was in their employ. They said, you know what, i dont really know what that is. It sounds like maybe he is engaging in mildly inappropriate behavior, has boundary issues. Lets just say he cant take showers at the penn State Facility anymore. That decision landed them all either in prison or on the verge of going to prison. If you examine the case closely, what you discover is that this is a classic example of, as human beings, we are inclined to shrug off. When you default to truth, you believe in the truthfulness of what you were told, until the doubts rise to a level so high that you can no longer continue to abide by that original decision. So there is a high bar. So you see that with madoff. Lots and lots and lots of people on wall street had doubts about madoff, but the doubts didnt reach the point where they were willing to concede, make the enormous step to say he is a ponzi schemer. With sandusky, there were all of these kinds of whispers, and he was seen showering with young boys. But what was seen was incredibly vague, and even the football coach, who spotted sandusky in the shower, went home that night, told a medical doctor, who is a friend of his family, about what he had seen, and the doctor, who has a legal duty to report child abuse, didnt report it. Why . Because he was too vague. I couldnt figure out what he saw. It looked a little weird. He was upset about it. And then the same coach waits six weeks and tells joe paterno, the coach at penn state, who then tells the leadership the next day. Their response is, well, if this was so pressing, why did you wait so long to tell us . He doesnt actually say he actually saw a sexual act being committed. He saw something that made him feel weird. Why, what do we do with that, right . They default to truth. Thats what we do as human beings. And the absolute last thing we want to do is to tell people in positions of running major institutions that they should start being paranoid about all of their employees. You cannot run an effective intellectual community if you are deeply suspicious of every act of, you know, inexplicable behavior, mildly inexplicable behavior by your employees. You cant do that, nor can you, by the way, just the same way you cant run a regulatory agency, if every single even mildly, even mild digression from the absolute straight and narrow triggers a massive investigation. What you do is you act when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence. There was not an overwhelming amount of evidence in that case. And it is very easy in hindsight, i think, to get on your high horse and say these people should have been truth tellers. They should have seen into the heart of Jerry Sandusky. Well, guess what . Pedophiles go to extraordinary lengths to hide whats in their hearts. Susan you had to be working on this during the whole time of the metoo revelations. How did that, which is not pedophilia, of course, but improper sexual relationships and advances, how did that figure into your thinking about this . Malcolm thats interesting. So the problem, a good analogy, a good way of discussing this is to make reference to the other case you were talking about, the larry nassar case, which is a much more straightforward case than Jerry Sandusky, where here was a doctor at Michigan State, who was treating young gymnasts, and he was sexually abusing them repeatedly over and over again, sometimes in the presence of their parents. And it took 15 years for him to be brought to justice, not because people in positions, in the case at Michigan State, unlike penn state, people in positions of authority were being told quite explicitly that wrongdoing was happening, and they chose to either disbelieve it or shrug or look away. There i think some of the leadership absolutely should belong in jail. There was the condition of being overwhelming evidence was met, i think, in the case of Michigan State. What is fascinating about that in the context of metoo is how long it takes people, even parents of children who are being abused, to take the charge seriously. In other words, it takes years and years and years and years and years for people who are intimately connected to these victims to kind of accept the fact that something as heinous as a sexual crime has occurred, and that, to me, is the same lesson, its a lesson that runs throughout metoo, that this kind of behavior has been going on for millennia, but in our society, it has been happening as long as women have been in the workforce. It has taken until now for us to take it seriously. Bill cosby, or a better example would be harvey weinstein. I lived in new york. I know people in the film industry. It has been an open secret for years and years that he was doing that his behavior was unconscionable. I heard people talk about it, you know, 10 years ago. The New York Times five or six or seven years ago tried to do a story on it. Just couldnt get people to speak on the record. I mean, there is nothing this wasnt something that popped up in 2018. This was an open secret in these worlds for a decade or more, but it takes an extraordinarily long time for people to come to grips with the enormity of this crime and to kind of find a way to do something about it. Thats, to me, the intriguing lesson. Susan last example from this, because our time really evaporates quickly, another person in the news right now, Khalid Sheikh mohammed, his military court judge just set his trial date for january 2021. Lets watch the video, and lets help us understand what you how he fits into what you are talking about here. [video clip] i have dealt with 13 or 14 of the worst ones, k. S. M. , zabeta, i have dealt with a lot, and none of them refuse to identify what they have done. So we werent looking for confessions, because confessions wont stop attacks. What stops attacks is actionable intelligence. The way that you can get the actionable intelligence dealt with is by to get through these enhanced interrogations, get them working with you so that you can use social influence after that to get the information that you want. Susan one of the lead interrogators of k. S. M. Malcolm yes, who i talked to at length as well and who i found genuinely interesting and fascinating person who was asked to do an extraordinarily difficult job, which was to interrogate some of the most hardened terrorists in the world. What he was doing is a very good example of he had to talk to strangers. The enhanced interrogation post9 11 is a textbook example of what my book is about, which is the difficulty of seeing the truth or truly understanding what someone, what a stranger is saying or telling you. In his case, he is quite open about it, resorted to some, well, enhanced, i was going to say extreme measures to try to facilitate the communication with the stranger, with the terrorist. And the question i raise in the chapter is, what happens when you do that . So faced with the same problem that all of these cases i have talked about are faced with, which is you have someone you dont fully understand and you are tasked with getting the truth out of them, finding the truth and we see how the Police Officer botches it with sandra bland. He totally misunderstands what she is about. We see that with the other examples. In this case, though, the added element is there was coercion, physical coercion and emotional coercion was added into the mix to try to enhance the truth discovery process. In that chapter, the point of it is to say thats not without its cost either. The issue with using physical coercion to get someone to talk, its in using coercion, you change their memories, so you affect the information youre getting. So the crucial question and its impossible to answer with certainty, but the crucial question is, so then is the cost of coercion worth its benefits . So i can definitely make you talk if i water board you, like right now, you would talk. But in the act of water boarding do i affect your ability to remember what you did, right, what there is to talk about. In other words, do i harm the conversation in the process of trying to facilitate the conversation . So you have this tradeoff and is it a good one . Thats a question that i dont think the proponents of well, the proponents of enhanced interrogation answer that question very differently than the opponents of it. My feeling and my conclusion in the book is that i tend to side with the opponents. I tend to believe that the costs of coercion are really high, higher than we realize, and i talk at length to a psychiatrist who studied this very question and i think he is quite convincing that youre really in unchartered territory. You dont know what to make with the information that you retrieve through physical coercion because its so compromised by that act of coercion. Susan just being able to skim the surface of your numerous case studies in here, bring it all full circle. What do you want readers to understand about your thinking and what they should be thinking about in their conversations with strangers . I want people to have i end with a call for caution and humility. I want people to slow down to understand that the task of getting to know a stranger is very, very difficult. It cannot be done quickly or easily, that some of the things you do to speed it up make the problem worse and that we need to be, devise systems that account for that weakness. The last quote of the book is about policing and Law Enforcement strategies. What does Law Enforcement look like if you take the task of talking to strangers seriously . The answer is police behave in a different way and be far more selective in how they use the most proactive tools of Law Enforcement. The lesson of sandra bland is not the Police Officer needs to be a better conversationalist when he stops people, is that he it is that he shouldnt have stopped her. You should only stop someone when there is an overwhelming reason to believe that some possibly criminal thing might be taking place. He had nothing. All he had was that he drove up behind her and she didnt use a turning signal and that she was a black woman with out of state plates. Those are not sufficient reasons to set in motion a potentially dangerous conversation. Susan why did you exclude from your book the way that most people interact with strangers in society today, and thats social media . Malcolm i have no interest in social media. Susan really . Malcolm i do in the sense we use it. Does the world need another book on social media . Of course thats important, i suppose, there are lots of books that talk about it. Its really unnecessary for me to weigh in. I think when youre writing a book, you have to ask yourself a question, where can i best contribute to this conversation . I dont think i would contribute by duplicating 1,000 other books that have been written about twitter in the last yearandahalf. Susan it was interesting preparing for this, watching the reaction and the conventional media comics. The Los Angeles Times wrote at a time when the world feels polarized, a book that examines or failwe misinterpret to communicate with others could not be more necessary. On the others, i was interested in the graphic in the New York Times, the business section which we can show it to our audience. It basically said gladwell is turning to dark topics and wondering whether or not your readers will respond. Are you turning darker in your thinking about the world . Malcolm no, i dont think i mean this book is not dark in the sense that it is trying to make the world a better place and trying to ask the question, what can we do differently to make sure that people like sandra bland dont have the same fate or that, i have a long chapter on the case at stanford, that is all about how can we prevent sexual abuse cases in the future . Those are dark topics, but the goal of the examination is positive, trying to make the world work a little better. I dont know whether i do think readers in these days are, these are sort of dark times. I think people are perfectly happy to talk about spies and frauds and Police Shootings and things like that. Susan when you started to dive into the stanford rape case, were you surprised about the statistics on alcohol abuse on american campuses . Malcolm yes. I wanted to write about sexual abuse as a classic example of campus sexual abuse cases, many of them, dont follow the trajectory of violent rapes, stranger rapes. They are about people meet at a party, have a conversation and then something goes wrong, they start out in a very different way. I thought this would be an excellent thing to include in my book. I began to go into campuses and talk to people who have studied this issue. I discovered, to my surprise, that they really only wanted to talk about alcohol. To many people who study the problem, they feel they are dealing with drinking. That at the core of this is the abuse of alcohol on campuses and the consequences of drunkenness and that you cant talk about sexual abuse without talking about drunkenness. They came to convince me of that. The stanford rape case is a story about two very, very drunk people who meet on the dance floor and in the case of brock turner, his drunkenness contributes very heavily to him engaging in criminal behavior. In the case of his victim, her drunkenness contributes very greatly to the fact that she was victimized, right . So you have and i think its impossible to talk about how do we prevent this in the future without asking the question, how do we prevent people from being so drunk that on the one hand, they greatly increase their chances of being a criminal. On the other hand, they greatly increase their chances of being a victim. Susan i want for the audience put statistics from the National Institute of alcohol abuse and alcoholism, it says that drinking by College Students age 1824 contributes to an estimated 1,500 Student Deaths every year. In addition, there are estimated 696,000 assaults by students who have been drinking and 97,000 annual cases of Sexual Assault on campuses. Malcolm the numbers are astonishing. Many people of our generation, and im going to lump myself in, because i suspect you are much younger than i am, we forget because when we were when we were of college age, drinking was quite different. It has changed quite dramatically over the last generation. The amount of hard alcohol is way up, hard liquor gets you drunker more seriously and far more quickly. The amount of binge drinking is way up. And most importantly, the amount of drinking by women is way up. Whereas in my generation, it was unheard of for a woman to match a man drink for drink in a social setting, that is much closer to the norm. That has profound consequences for drunkenness for a variety of physiological reasons. Women do not process alcohol as efficiently as men do and get much drunker on the same amount. This is a very those numbers you told me, they are astonishing. I am struck by the absence of a meaningful conversation in this country about how dangerous drinking patterns are, and, two, im struck by the fact that, i quote this in the book, that when you talk to young people, people in college, they dont see this link between sexual abuse and their drinking. They see them as being disconnected. That is madness, absolute madness. Susan you have been exploring a number of these topics as well in your podcast which is on its Fourth Season . Malcolm just finished the Fourth Season. Susan just finished the Fourth Season. I want to play a clip from one of your podcasts or one of the chapters of the book and give people a sense of how you do that. Lets listen. Malcolm tensions rose, coming to a head on february 24, 1996. That afternoon three planes took off for the florida straits. As they neared the cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force mig fighter jets shot down two of the planes out of the sky killing all four people aboard. The response to the attack was immediate. The United States Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the cuban government. A grave president clinton held a press conference. Ladies and gentlemen, i have just been briefed by the National Security advisor on the shooting down today in broad daylight of two american civilian airplanes by cuban military aircraft. Susan so a podcast and this is also going to be your audio book allows you to do, as weve been doing today, put realvideo and today putting real video and audio into the subject matter. How does that enhance the experience for your intended audience . Malcolm yeah, so we did, well, ill speak first to the audio book, so i have been doing this podcast for four years, and i have learned a lot about how different storytelling is in the podcast form. Its much more emotionally immediate, and the idea that you can hear once you can hear someones voice in your ears, i feel theyre summoned in a much more visceral way than reading about them on the page. It wasnt obvious when i started it thats the way it would be, but you can with a podcast, you can move someone to tears whereas easily, where its quite hard to do on the page. Its much harder to do in print. Just by people are so emotionally connected to the things that come in that channel, so when it came time to doing the audio book for talking to strangers, because so much of the material in the book is so emotional, we decided to make the audio book like a podcast. So what we just listened to was a clip of one of the chapters of my audio book, and you heard that little clip from bill clinton. Well, throughout the book, if im interviewing someone, you hear the person im interviewing. When im describing what happened to sandra bland, you hear that tape we just saw of sandra bland and Brian Encinia. When Brian Encinia does his deposition in the case, i walk through the deposition expanding his behavior, you hear it in his voice. I have the tape of the deposition. All of that means that the experience, i think, is just a lot more powerful, and people who have listened to the, some of the people who have listened to the audio book and read the book it is a small number, but there is some they tell me it is almost like two different books. Youre drawn to two Different Things and your reactions are very different. Susan do you have more fun working on the podcast than you do the labor of writing a book . Malcolm yeah, because in the podcast, you can do really goofy things. You do goofy things in the podcast that you couldnt i have a podcast episode on the two chutzpah, they have different meaning and pronunciations. It was a lark. Ill never write that in a book. There is a kind of playfulness that comes in a podcast format thats not really available in serious nonfiction. Susan looking up the numbers, there are 750,000 different podcasts and 30 million episodes that people can avail themselves of. How do you see this whole podcasting market shaking out over time . Malcolm well, the vast majority of those podcasts dont earn any income for the creator and dont really have that many listeners, so the tale, were talking about a phenomenon that has a very, very long tail, much like the Book Business does, only its longer, because the cost of producing a podcast is smaller than the cost of producing a book. Anytime you have an industry where the costs eventually are essentially zero, youre going to have a very, very long tail. You have tons and tons and tons of entrants. That doesnt have to shake out , because, you know, its like people do podcasts for all kinds of reasons, and maybe having listeners and making money is not central to a lot of those people in the long tail. The issue is about the small number of podcasts that command a decent amount of viewers. The issue is that are those numbers going to grow . Will a podcast like joe rogans podcast has im assuming he has 5 million downloads per episode. Are we, in the next 20 years, will there be, you know, five times as many podcasts with 5 million downloads a day or will someone like joe rogan go from 5 million to 20 million, thats interesting, what happens to the growth at the far end of the tail. The sheer number of podcasts i dont think is terribly meaningful. Susan your partner in the podcast is jacob weisberg, someone you had a long relationship, and in a sidebar to one of the reviews, it was mentioned that you felt that he was a game changer for you in your journalism career. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to him and what he brings to the table . Malcolm so jacob, when i first moved to washington, d. C. In 1985, jacob was answered an ad to be a roommate in my house in mount pleasant. I met him for the first time, he was at that point taking a year off, he was taking his year off from school. He took a break between his junior and senior years, interning at the new republic, and he introduced me to people at the new republic, and i began to freelance there. He was the one that got me my start in journalism. We remained Close Friends ever since. He has been running for many years, he ran the slate group, slate magazine and all of the podcasts associated with slate as part of the Washington Post companys digital arm. So he is quite a he both has extraordinary editorial sense, but also, unlike me, he knows how to run a business. So he and i started this Podcast Company called pushkin, and he is the c. E. O. And im arm candy. He does all of the kind of serious heavy lifting, and i, well, i produce my podcast for it, but im a name on the masthead. There is no one in the world im happier to defer to than jacob. Susan do you also have a cat called pushkin . Malcolm no, i have many things called pushkin. Susan why is that . [laughter] malcolm i had a dog growing up. Then we named them after russians, tolstoy, and then i used to call my apartment pushkin. Susan your apartment has a name . Malcolm sure, im english. Though in england, im the son of an englishman who named everything in his life. He named his dogs, his garden carts, his rototiller, his cars, its Second Nature for me to give things names. People love the name pushkin so much that they petitioned that we call our new Company Called pushkin. Susan who was it, for people who dont know . Malcolm pushkin was a brilliant, maybe the most famous literate figure in russian history, after tolstoy. Russian art love sam. Late 19th century poet, lawyer, writer, intellectual. He was part black, which is, as i am, so he is a kind of wonderful role model. Susan this is our last dip into the archives and a bit of an apology. This is the earliest clip we have of you in our video archives. Malcolm oh, my goodness. Susan i wanted to show you and folks watching a little bit of this from 1996. This is about personal history. What is this about . Malcolm my piece was about, a very good example of what i was talking about. ,y piece is about west indian my family, which is half west indian, and talks about what the success in america. What does it mean . Tell us about racism. Susan i wanted to show that, not because the clip was particularly poignant malcolm times have changed. [laughs] susan a bit to talk about your parents, a little bit more. In your acknowledgements, you tell us two things, first of all, that your mother taught you how to writ,e and you lost your e, and you lost your father when this was being produced. Will you talk about the contributions each of them has made to you as a person . Malcolm well, my parents, they were on the surface very different. My father was a mathematician, kind of a National Physically fearless go getter, and my mother was a family therapist and she is a much more kind of , contemplative, soulful type. In some ways they are similar. They were both very independentminded, and they were selfsufficient, and my father in particular, and my mother as well, my father had a great sense of mischief. And i have inherited his sense of mischief. He never took either himself or the world that seriously, and he was playful in the way he thought about ideas, and i think at my best, i am playful about ideas, or at least i try to be. So thats from thats sort of my fathers principal contribution. My mother has, she is a writer. She is an extraordinarily she speaks in beautifully perfectly formed sentences that i admired. As long as i have known speech. They have both helped me be who i am. Susan do you find listening to how she says things rather than listen to what she says . Malcolm my mother speaks she doesnt say much, so she expresses, so i do marvel at it. Its not like with russell brand, there was like an enormous outpouring of words to kind of analyze. With my mother, there would be, like, a sentence and a half. Susan while were talking with how things change, where do you do most of your writing . Do you write in your aforementioned apartment . Malcolm no, in the coffee shop. Susan one of the things that has changed over the course of your writing career, your celebrity. You have six books, five best sellers, you do extensive speaking tours, top 10 podcasts, so when you travel, people must recognize you. You have made a lot of money with the best selling books over the years. How has celebrity and wealth changed your life . Malcolm well, i mean, i dont worry about money anymore, but i never really did. And celebrity, i dont really i mean, celebrity is an odd word, brad pitt is a celebrity. Im not a celebrity. If brad pitt were to walk down the street, people would mob him. I dont get mobbed walking down the street. What happens to me is somebody would say, hey, i love your podcast, and keep walking. Or they will say, you know, at the most someone might stop me and say can i take a picture. But its always, its not in the kind of celebrity awe thing, its like im familiar to them. Its like i think of celebrity as someone who is up there, whereas people who talk to me are relating to me as a peer. Its like i have heard you, i have read your books, i have heard you on your podcast. Its almost like youre in my life, and they call me malcolm, and they act like they have known me forever, and they sort of have. It is an odd thing. It doesnt feel like fame, it feels like familiarity, if that makes sense. Susan does it feel like a good life . Malcolm yeah, i dont have any complaints. Susan as you look at the millions of people that you reach in these three areas, podcasts, speeches, books, and the like, what do you want your body of work to do for society . Malcolm just encourage people to look at things a little differently. I always say, i dont really im not trying to persuade people of something or im just trying to encourage them to step out of their mindset for a moment, like just consider the problem from this perspective. You can go back to your old way of thinking in the end, but just pause for a moment while you read this chapter and or listen to this podcast, and imagine what it would be like to think about this very familiar issue in a different way, the way someone else does. That, i think, i think that is something i try to do in my own life, and i think that any kind of art improves the world, but it encourages people to adopt different perspectives, even if its only fittingly. Fleetingly. Thats part of what i think makes us better human beings. Susan thank you for spending an hour with us today. I appreciate your time. Malcolm thank you so much. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] announcer all q a programs are available on our website or as a podcast at cspan. Org. Next sunday on q a, Kay Coles James talking about her life in government and politics and her work as the president of the Heritage Foundation think tank. Thats q a next sunday at 8 00 p. M. On cspan. Life today on cspan, comparing International Terrorism to domestic terrorism, live in about 45 minutes, 1 00 p. M. Eastern time. Later this evening, more from campaign 20 with democratic president ial candidate senator elizabeth warren. She will be speaking in new york citys Washington Square park. And more from the campaign trail this evening with President Trump in rio rancho, new mexico. For a Campaign Rally live tonight at 9 00 p. M. Eastern. We will have that on cspan, online at cspan. Org, or you can listen live on the free cspan radio app. Tonight on the communicators, california ,epresentative mcnerney cochair of the Artificial Intelligence caucus, on the future of Artificial Intelligence, Election Security and whether Big Tech Companies need more regulation. Rep. Mcnerney google is a californiabased company. I think if we want to look at how its doing its business practices, its important to do it in a very thoughtful way. I know that the department of justice and the federal trade commission are also talking about doing investigations into competitive practices of these companies, and its good to look at this and investigate it and make sure that the companies are behaving. Im not sure that breaking companies up is a good idea. These are Big Companies with a lot of tentacles, a lot of employees, and if you break a company like that up, if you can manage to do it, there is going to be unintended consequences. Tonight at 8 30 p. M. Eastern on cspan2. Bill caitlin emma is budget appropriations and budget reporter with politico. The week ahead largely focused on fiscal year 2020 spending. Lets start with the house and a tweet of yours saying house leaders are readying a continuing resolution, likely
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