Transcripts For CSPAN2 Summer Series With Malcolm Gladwell 20240712

Good evening and welcome, both newcomers and repeat offenders, if you look around here, you notice the great many ponderous and intangible books out there in the world. That being the case, its always refreshing to find whose impact in the portion to the Tipping Point is one of those books, from time to time, usually its quite unexpected, work appears that acts as a decongestant for the brain, one strong spray with a passages to clean up, suddenly we can finally grasp things around us that weve always been looking at, we drop the enter gp and more sharply, it can be rather intoxicating, once again this is that kind of book. One of the delights i find of the Tipping Point is that malcolm asked the kind of question that a child might ask, the kind of question that is on the tip of her brain like the name on the tip of the tongue. Often we find it hard to focus on, not despite a bit but because of it. In the question he asks to hear is that one once weve heard asked, why didnt anybody think of this before, what makes things catch on. , what makes things take off, ideas, products, fads, trends, cultural phenomenon. I think you might find with the simplest questions often require the most difficult answers, the answers that are most difficult for an author to articulate. And i think it is malcolms credit that he has given us an answer in a book a very modest size as you can see but are rather in modest elegance if you read it if you know what i mean. , it tastes great and good for you at the same time like the phenomenon that malcolm talks about, the Tipping Point itself has caught on and i dont know if the sales figures for Daytona Beach but here in cambridge with the life of the mind is second in importance only to the red sox, this is a hot book. Tonight malcolm will talk about the book, do some reading perhaps and will open up to your questions and his answers in general discussion, those of you who would like to buy a copy of the book and i should say as the Tipping Point is on the National Campus and bestselling list is available for 40 off it could come up at the end of the presentation and we will sign a copy for you. With that it is my honor and my great pleasure to turn the floor over to malcolm. Thank you very much, those are very generous introduction. As of gone around the country, i sometimes ask the sellers for tips of a passage to reading and one person tells me what not to do and she said somebody who has written and read done it come to the bookstore and had read the last three pages and they wonder why nobody bought the book. So i will not be reading the last three pages of my book. , im going to read a couple of short segments and give you a flavor for some of the things im trying to do here. And then ill take questions, this is a book about applying the lessons of disease epidemics to social change, and to discuss a number of weird and interesting provocative examples of epidemics. The first section im going to read about is about an epidemic that took place in the South Pacific that i think really allows us to permit the disease and to think about epidemics in our society a little different. Not long ago in the South Pacific island, the 17yearold boy got into an argument with his father, he was staying with his family at his grandFathers House when his father stirred and demanding more from man ordered him out of bed early one morningth and told him to find a bamboo pole knife to harvest, he spent hours in the village looking without success for a pole knife, when he returned home and they handed, his father was. , the family would now go hungry he told his son waving a machete, get out of here and go find somewhere else to live. He left his grand Fathers House and walked back to his home village, along the way he ran into his 14yearold brother to borrow a pin, two hours later curious about where he had gone his brother went looking for h him, he returned to the empty family house and appeared in the window, in the middle of a dark room hanging from a noose with sema, he was dead, his suicide note read, my life is coming to an end atg this time, now is a day of sorrow and a day of suffering for me, its a day of celebration, today poppa sent me away, thank you for loving me so little sema. In the early 1960s suicide was almost unknown, but for reasons no one quite understood began to rise deeply and dramatically by leaps and bounds every year until the end of the 1980s there were more suicides per capita than anywhere else in the world for males between 15 24 the suicide rate in the United States is about 22 per hundred thousand. In the arms and neck under micronesia, there is 160 per 100,000, more seven times higher, at that level suicide is triggered by the smallest of incidents. He took his own life because his father yelled at him, in the midst of the micronesia academic, was hardly unusual, teams committed suicide because they saw their girlfriends or because their parents refused to give them a few extra dollars for beers, 119 on hung himself because his parents did not buy him a graduation gown, 117yearold hank himself because he been previewed by his older brother by making too much noise. In western culture is something rare and deeply pathological has become an a micronesia average about a lessons, his own particular rules and symbols. Virtually all suicides on the island are identical variation with his story, the victim is always almost always male, late teens, unmarried and living at home. That event is domestic in his dispute with carpenter parents and three quarters of the cases the victim has never tried or attempted suicide before, the suicide note tend to express not depression but a wounded pride in a protest against mistreatment, that occurs on a weekend night usually about drinking with friends in a few cases the victim observes the same procedures if they were stripped unwritten protocols to take ones own life. He finds a remote start eating soroka makes a noose but does not suspend himself in a typical western hanging, he ties the news to a low branch or window or door knob and leans forward to the weight of his body is tightly around his neck cutting off the flow of blood. Entry to his brain. In micronesia, these rituals have become embedded in the cucal culture, as a number of suicides have grown, the ideas set upon itself infecting younger and younger boys and transforming itself to the unthinkable that is somehow been wondering thinkable. Suicide images are widespread in micronesian communities and improperly expressed in recent songs proposed locally and aired on micronesian radio stations, number of young boys who attempted suicide reported that they are heard about eight or ten years old. As suicide grows more frequent, the idea itself requires a certain familiarity if not fascination to young men, and the act seems to be trivialized. Especially among some younger boys, the suicide acts appear to have required an experimental almost recreational element. , there is something very chilling about this package, suicide is not supposed to be trivialized like i this. But the truly chilling thing about it, how familiar, here we have a contagious epidemic of selfdestruction, engaged by youth in this. Of spree mentation imitation and rebellion. Here we have an mind this action that somehow among teenagers has become an apartment selfexpression, and a strange way the micronesian epidemic sounds like the epidemic of teenage smoking in the west. The rest of the chapter is an attempt to look at her problem with teenage smoking which is also epidemic and rising in recent years, heres the lens of the micronesian, these are both expressions of the same fundamental impulsive and adolescent cultures, they both have selfdestructive behavior, obviously played out in different ways, i think if you can understand the ways in which every dramatic selfdestruction has become among teens and micronesia, you can help us to better appreciate what is going on with the Lester Maddox but equally problematic epidemic in her own country. I always think this model is very useful way of thinking about columbine in the way of school violence, its another example of an epidemic of selfdestructive behavior which is come to take on a certain ritualized significance for teens, the really interesting thing about the micronesian, you get into it, the extent to which the act itself is come to be surrounded by all of these layers of symbolism and meaning in ritual and the fact that they all do it in the same way is incredibly important, smoking obviously is among them, part of the reason smoking is so powerful, so seductive for teens incomes of the whole culture attached to it, the thing that worries me most about the epidemic of School Shootings and the way the School Shootings in this country is the extent which the acts have taken on the element and is not just teens going in shooting, columbine was scary precisely because they were all these layers of ritual culture attached, the trenchcoat, the particular Computer Culture that these kids came out of, it also makes you wonder about the role of the media and all of that in this in fact a contagious columbine represents a contagious epidemic of selfdestructive behavior, does that mean that we ought to be talking about in a different way, and should we be mindful to the extent of those in the med media. The way in which you represent the act, are we aiding in the bedding and the ritualization process if you think about it. Anyway, that is one chapter, it is fairly heavy subject, much of this is on a much lighter tone, i assure you. I just thought, as i thought about this, as i wrote this before columbine enough that part it is resonated with me because i thought if you read into these accounts of what is happening and micronesia the parallels are so eerie and striking with whats going on in this country. The next thing im going to be is i have a whole chapter and what i call is stickiness, for an idea to become contagious, to beat up adamic is nothing more to be contagious in the cold virus is highly contagious, it does not stay around, comes and goes, we talk about epidemic ofun the flu because youre homesick and youre on your back and the difference between the flu in the cold is the flu is sticky, i think i will succeed succeed for the same reason, david is quality that makes it memorable. , that is not a by observation, what is interesting, if you look at the epidemic and try to figure out what made them sticky, you get into cool areas, the chapter that i talked about is a chapter that is concerned Childrens Television in particular. And the idea behind this chapter is that sesame street interestrate has created, they exterminate attention to stickiness, they were obsessed with stickiness, they wanted to find a way, not just to hold the attention but to hold the attention away that they remembered what they were seeing and learning, and some profound way, an incredible attempt at the time, much of the work that is done here by an nothing of people the harmony with evidence of superiority. , much of this nigerian Education School and a bunch of other people. In the brain of how three yearolds were, how the brains work, you can design information which makes an impact. They would do, they describe in the chapter, although the really cool things that they do to engineer every second of that show is engineered, so it made an extreme your impact, what im about to read is a little section by ed palmer and he just died you may have read, he just died a couple weeks ago and if you talk to people involved you with here hes the real hero of the show, he was a Research Guide the device all the ways to make the show sticky. What im going to read, little section where you talk about ed palmers big idea, i will mention in the course of this, i will also quote tom jerry lester just so you know. His innovation was something he called the distractor, he would play an episode of sesame street on the television monitor, when the slideshow showing a new slide every half second, we have the most slides we can imagine, we had a boy running down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, leafl with a picture taken on a microscope, anything to be novel, that was the idea, preschoolers would be rotting and told to watch Television Show, palmer and his assistants with sit to the side with pencil and paper quietly noting when the children were watching sesame street and they lost interest and looked at the slideshow, every time a slide changed, him and assistants were making a rotation so they had almost second by second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers attention and what part did not, the distractor was stickiness, we take that big size chart paper two by three and tape several together he said, we had data points remember for every se halfandf second which comes to 400 data points for a Single Program and we connect all the dots to the redline so it looks a stock Market Report from wall street. If it would decline we would say what was going on, other times it might hug the chart and we would say while that segment is grabbing the attention of the kids. With those distractor scores ends percentages, we have to 100 sometimes, its about 85 90 . But the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around 50, they would go back to the drawingng board. After the third or fourth season, i would say it was rare if we had a segment below 85 . We would never see anything 50 e would fix it. You know the survival of the fittest, window mechanism and decide what should survive. Not only were they doing this, the distraction was firmly on television but itil was invented by sesame street, one of the cool things about this incredible amount of researcher and television is how to make television work, start to sesame street and move into the mainstream from there. You could argue that legitimately sesame street was the most appoint Television Show ever in terms of its impact on the Way Television is structured. I will continue on. The most important thing that he ever found out was the distractor came at the beginning before sesame street was on the air, it was the summer of 1969 and we were a month and a half, we decided lets go, but put in five full shows one hour each before we go to air and see what we got, to test the shows they took them to philadelphia and it showed them two groups of preschoolers and 60 different homes out the city. What we found, almost destroyed us. The problem when it was conceived, the decision was made the all fantasy elements of the show be separated from the real elements. This was done with the assistance of many child psychologist who thought it was a mixed fantasy and misleading to children, they were only seen with other muppets and in sesame street involved only real adults and children. But in philadelphia as soon as they switch the streets, the kid lost all interest. The street was supposed to be the glue, it would always come back to the street, pull the show together but it was adults doing things and the kids were not interested. We were getting incredibly lowered tension levels, the kids were leaving the shelf, that was a pop back up that the muppets came up, we cannot lose them like that, that is because it was a turning point in the history of sesame street. We knew if we kept the street that way, the show is going to die, everything is happening so fast, weve been testing and we had to go on the air in the fall, we had to figure out what to do, he decided to defy the opinion of his scientific advisors, we decided to let the psychologist say we know how you guyswr feel about reality over going to do it anyway. , will be dead in the water. So the producers went back, jim hansen to coworker who could walk and talk and live alongside the other street. And thats a big bird was born, now we think of the essence of w sesame street, the blend of monsters not result its a wonderful illustration and Little Things can make a big difference, big words save sesame street, without big bird, all the revolution in television esthat we seem and it was until the added element and they desperately need to be interesteded in. To meet in such a wonderful illustration as well, how you dont know what will make something work and its another one of the somethings of the book that the little extra critical element is something that you can out off anticipate. Sometimes the difference between something being a complete failure in arranging success is something incredibly subtle and seemingly insignificant. You would not have thought that big bird is all that stands between a failure in a dramatic success, the turnout it is big bird, when i received big bird, the last section going to read is from the first section of the book devoted to a discussion and what wordofmouth is, the idea thbehind this is borrowed from epidemiology, and epidemiology one of the driving principles is that epidemics turn out to be created and generated and sustained an incredibly small a member of people. I give a couple of case studies to demonstrate this. We think of epidemics as a function of the behavior of a large group of people, it is not true, for example hiv, was commonly supposed in the 1980s with the tips among the gay communities of San Francisco and new york because of the high levels ofhe Sexual Activity amog many members of the Gay Community of those cities, that was the assumption. It tips because of the extraordinary high levels among a tiny fraction of the Gay Community. That is very consistent with the way epidemics work, all epidemics have that weird function. So i took that idea and i said wordofmouth is an epidemic, its a social epidemic involving some piece of information of the virus. Lets examine and supposes same principle is true and there are very small number of people who aret out there and driving is epidemics. I create three, i called them connectors and salesmen indigo and i find people who demonstrated and they have these long profiles, there are wild and hilarious weird people in the idea that weird people build the world. What im about to read is a little section with a third of these categories. , why is it that makes 70 persuasive, highly persuasive people play a key role some of us on the sidelines i didnt go to see titanic willingly, i went because i was drunk thereby somebody, that is true of many social epidemics that we join, we join them because 70 convinces us. People are incredibly persuasive, i think they represent this interesting and unusual significant personality group. So i defined who is the most persuasive i in america and the most persuasive one is tom gao and is a financial in Southern California, hes so good that hes down to four days a week, a third of the month of working and he has a house in the hills and he spends most of his time hanging out, he only has to work the bears minimum. , there in the world, theres a whole world of people who are obsessed with charisma and he is a man that they all worship. So i paid a visit to tom to figure out why hes an extra character. And at this point in the chapter, im not going to redo the whole section because then you would not buy thehe book but at this point in the section, i been hanging out with tom and i was talking about this idea that when people talk, they engage in this dance, very elaborate, very subtle dance, if you look at two people when theyre talking and videotape them and down to 112th, you would see the people interact in a weird way, if i was talking to you, you and i start to synchronize our movements. As i move my shoulder some tiny bit, your shoulder would move in harmony with me. Our voices would fall into a rhythm. In one of the ideas in pursuing his people like tom are incredibly persuasive because thedictate the terms, if you thk about Elvis Presley going on tour in the end of the 50s when he was extraordinary or asthmatic c figure, if you go to his concert, everybody wouldve been into in with Elvis Presley, you would be going along with him in every move you would be going along with him, the idea that Elvis Presleys and onetoone conversations, the same thing could happen in the ordinary conversation with somebody who hasco that charism. Im struggling with why the sky tom who is not the kind of person to whom i would normallyd be drawn irresistibly. , he is a financial guy from Southern California he is a big mustache and wears cowboy boots, within five minutes of a meeting him i want to sign over my entire assets to him. Believeov me, i came in with all of my Lower Manhattan journalist impulses front center and still i was like tom, the question was why does tom blow me away, i am picking up the middle of this discussion about the synchrony and special powers of tom. When two people talk they dont fall into harmony, theyfa also engage in motor, if you show people pictures of the smiling face or frowning face, they will smile or frown back, they can only be captured with electronic sensors, if i hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace and mimicked my emotional state, this is what is meant in a technical sense but empathy, we imitate each others emotions of expressing support and caring were basically as way of communicating. In their brilliant 1994 book, emotional contagion, the psychologist elaine and john go one step further, they argue its also about one of the memes and which we infect each other without the emotion, even a micro smile takes no more than several milliseconds, its not tissue imitating or emphasizing, its a way that i can pass on my happiness to you. Emotion is contagious, anyway this is perfectly intuitive, all of us had our spirits picked up by being around somebody in a good mood, if you thinke about this, it is quite a radical notion, we normally think of the expression on her face as an interstate, i feel happy so i smile, i feel satisfied frown, the motion goes inside out. Emotional contagion suggests that the opposite is also true, if i can make you smile, i can make you happy, if i can make you frown, it can make you sad, a motion in this sense goes outside in. If we think about emotion this way, as i did not inside out, how some people can have in enormous amount of influence over others, some of us after all are good at expressing emotions and feelings, were far more emotionally contagious than the far rest ofll us. They have special personalities, they are also different not just to study faces for example report theres huge differences among people the location of muscles in their face and their form and even in the prevalence. Its a situation unlike in medicine that their carriers, people who are especially susceptible, is not that emotional contagion of the disease but the mechanism is the same. Freedman a psychologist in the university of California Riverside had developed the Effective Communication test with his ability to send emotion to be contagious. And he had a survey with 13 questions with whether you can keep still when you hear a good dance move and how loud and how good with seductive glances, would you like to be the center of attention and things like that. The highest possible score is 117 points. The average score, summer7nt of. What does it mean to be a high score, to enter that he conducted an experiment, he picked a few dozen people who scored very high on a test, about 90 and asked a few dozen who scored low, below 60 in a few dozen scored lower, that is just a questionnaire mentioning how they felt at that instant, he put the high scores in separate rooms appeared each with two low scores, they were in the room together and they could look at each other but not talk, then once the session was over, they were asked again with a detailed questionnaire and how they were feeling. And they found in just two minutes it was being spoken, the low scores picked up the moods of the high scores, if the charismatic person started out depressed in the prison started out happy, by the end of the two minutes, the inexpressive person was suppressed as well, but it did not work the other way, only the charismatic person could affect the other people in the room with his or her emotions. Is this what he did tois me . The thing that strikes me most was his voice, he had the range of an opera singer, time to sound stern and draw easily and he would chuckle with laughter. In his face would light up accordingly from one state to another, with ambiguity, everything was written in his face, i could not see my own face of course but it was a close mirror of his, later i called him and asked him to take howard freedmans charisma, as he went through the list, question by question, he started chucklinchuckling, i am terrible charades, he was laughing out loud, im great at that, im always good at charades, out of 117 points, you scored 116. There is a little taste of the first section. And once again i am simply undercutting your incentive to read the book, id be delighted today questions. What are the one or two things that you regret most the did not make the final edit that you reallyin like . , i had originally, i had the personality to get carried away and so i get very carried away with the chapter and at one point it was a huge massive deconstruction of the sesame street phenomenon, i regret that some of that stuff had to go, was in and the cool thing about sesame street that jim henson has some of this in the book, he was picked because he was in advertising. , he had the hottest shop in the 60s, the idea was if jim can sell a lot of the muppets were originally developed as corporate pitchmen, i think it was a virgin of the lou troy dragon, he sold lou troy, i think grover was developed to do the work for ibm, the idea if this guy can sell in 30 seconds and he can sell the three rs for a minute, that is why they wanted him on board. The whole its all part of the session and the show they thought at the time the most effective way to reach a kid, they were so carried away by what they thought was a part of advertising and to make learning commercials, why in the beginning it was very, very short segments, because of duplicating the commercial. The other thing they do in the chapter is to go on thats another point but to talk away blues clues is a better show, they abandoned this idea of a commercial and goes for continuous narrative in its return to his storytelling, anyway, sometimes i regret that i could not have had a bunch more complete obsessive discussion. Any other question . You have an article in the newark a while ago there is very little, it was an article called the Tipping Point which was just about cri crime, is trying to explain why crime in york had fallen so quickly, that came out of 1996, that is now a version of the article, a much change version is a chapter of the book and its a little bit in this but not very much, most of it, its about 85 new. I noticed you have a website, the new yorker and you carry from your writing in the website. Everything that i put in the new yorker is on my website. How did that work when it comes to selling your books and selling on the web. This is new and the book is not on the website. I think it is good because nothing in the new yorker was in any archive, it is disappearing which i thought was silly. And i want people for example, a lot of colleges use articles in their syllabus and its much easier for them if its on a website and they can tell students to go to the site. Thats how a lot of people are using my stuff, it just helps in keeping my articles around, i do not like them to disappear. Do you think something on your website will help the people, how would that apply as small as that to the marketing or promotion . This is a very interesting question, i think there is a lot, i think the usefulness of the internet in the larger question, how useful is internet andn starting by wordofmouth, some of my own expenses by website, i learned a couple of things, an actual mechanism, if you go to my site you can buy my book it actually i have not sold many books that way, way fewer than i wouldve thought, i get tens of thousands of hits, but what i think it does do is build general awareness, some people go to bookstores andge they migt buy it another way, that is generally true, im skeptical people who think that the internet is a Magic Communications tool, i also wonder as we get more familiar and the novelty wears off, and also as it gets increasingly iced by people trained to sell you things like me, i think its useful begins to diminish, my suspicion a lot of the excitement, one of the things im fascinated with wordofmouth, what makes it powerful, these characters and these people that are mainly connectors, they are important in generating wordofmouth epidemics because they are our friends and because her interest in us is this interested. The maven who the person who gives advice, who knows a lot about that stuff, they are totally motivated by the desire to help but the minute that the maven is enlisted in some desire or financially implicated in the advice, the power disappears, the reason i go to certain kind for advice on what computer to buy, because are not getting a lot of dell stock in the not trained to show you, what is going on with the internet, they think they can take that mechanism and transported into a commercial environment without losing the effectiveness, i think that is a mistake and were about to find out how realistic that is. You said you carry a notebook around like everywhere you go, a little notebook and you write down every little fact, is how you wrote the book . This is an article it was an alleged article that i carry a notebook around write down everything i hear, i do sometimes, i believe the information acquisition process is social and you get all your ideas from talking to people. And so, i do find myself often in conversations with people on the airplane, on the way over here, this always happens to me i was sitting next to a guy because he didnt bring anything to read, you know how people pester you, i am one of those pastors and it turns out you would be amazed at how many totally interesting people are out there, some guy made all his money going to companies insane, if you let me in to take over, why am i telling you this anyway, its very interesting. Sure they want to hear . [laughter] he goes to the company and said if you met me, go when and rejigger your lighting system, i will split the savings with you, so he goes in and the amount of appet turned many people waste n light, is phenomenal, he could redo the lights and it was a 20000 a year and he would kick back ten to barnes noble and keep tran14 himself, i might can ie invest. [laughter] anyway i feel like im biased against this part of the room. Are there any questions, maybe im directly biased against. What was your favorite part about writing the book. It was when i was doing the first part about wordofmouth and i have these special people who i think played a critical role, hanging out with those people was so much fun because they are weird, part of me things are powerful, i said weird people around the world, i think that is true, its only until you hang out with them that you realize how profoundly weird they are. This guy, i had so much fun with this guy who is such a name, hes a know it all and theres a whole field of research in marketingg right now of market mavens, the field exist and was started by former grad students, hes a professor of some other field, economics, they all work and got their phd, at the end they city so weird there must be something in this. So theyin started it inspired by him, he is truly strange and a fabulous way, it was fun to hang around with these characters in the book is full of these characters, i like that, i find it very exciting, its one of the great things about being a writer, i write stories that are always about the same thing in some remarkable cool person and i concoct some excuse to write about them. What did you learn from writing the book that has perhaps changed your life or change the way you do thingse questioning. That is interesting. I guess one of the things that i learned was to stay with the theme of the remarkable people, the notion of small number of remarkable people around the world, something that i had never thought of before, its been a mine blog for me because one of the interesting things, there is a section where i talk about connectors of people who know everybody and i found a lot of these people and hung out with them, when she realized, went to me is revolutionary about the fact, we have convinced ourselves this moment in history that the important people are the people who are very, very rich and secondly very, very smart and thirdly live in the biggest houses or drive the fanciest cars, we also whave a notion that influence s all about status, social economic status, and whether you realize if you look closely at the dynamics of wordofmouth, influence has nothing to do with status, influence is a personality trait and you can find influence with people anywhere, there was a great moment where i described in hanging out with the Public Health guys who are trying to spread and start a safe sex antidrug epidemic of the heroin addicts of baltimore. They identified within this community of people, just about the desperately poor bleak depressing Disadvantage Community you confide in this country, they identified within the community a bunch of guys who were the charismatic people people, energetic, motivated people. It made me realize, they arere everywhere, we have to find a way to fall out of love with tthis notion that it is all abt our wealth, there was a moment a couple of years ago, the reason i got onto this whole thing, i dont know many of you know, there was a moment i will only articles of middleaged jewish women, i had seven in a row or five in a row, i became convinced, is very similar, if you read magazines, theyre all about old men and young women, is phenomenal, you can go to magazine rack and make all a list of articles and at least 80 would be about men over the age of say 45 and women under the age of 25. No one ever talks about middleaged women, if you think about it, as a group, women who is 65 has in her lifetime seen more change than any other Demographic Group in any time in Human History, its an incredible moment we never lied about these people. I went in and did the stories in my most fun one was hair dye, the women who did all the whole point of the article, there was this woman, totally amazing woman who is now in her 90s who is a shrink and comes to america in the 30s and goes to madison avenue and start this whole way of thinking about Market Research on madison avenue, the thing that got me and drew me away, when i went to visit her she lives up in the alps and it was snowing and i had to put chains on my car and people were skiing next to me as i wound my way out. And she is on an oxygen machine now because air is so thin and shes 90 years old, she only talked for two hours, i flew all the way over there and only got two hours, shes lying there with oxygen machine and she still a brilliant woman and she showed me these pictures, she worked in the 40s, the one other great madison avenue, she showed me a picture of the Christmas Party of Mccann Erickson in 1948, everyone is in a black tie, it is8 a room full of maybe 300 people, 299 armen, there was one woman, that tells you, that speaks volume about this woman, it was a completely closed mens world and she busted him because she was brilliant and she still brilliant, they were celebrating, how hard was it to become the head of the agency, not that hard, how hard im getting carried away anyways they were amazing people and we overlook them because they dont fall into the normal category, we had an obsession with incredibly wrong and boring categories of what makes someone interesting or important, and still turn a final question from over here how much damage have you uncoverer with people they become addicted with giving advice, the professor who is jewish anywhere to get the best ham foror easter, is this where people just do not want to say no so you ask themve a question and he answers any does not show up but you have so much faith in him. Sure, the question was about can the advice givers go too far, absolutely. Part of being a maven is to be at times annoying, they are know it all. But i dont think we can live without know it all. The suppressant we pay for having people i think these people are becoming more and more pertinent. How can you make your way nowr these days in the marketplace without a know it all on your side. It is impossible. How can you make your way to an internet without a know it all on your side, its 10 million sites. All buying ads and yelling at you andal telling you i cant remember at more than six dotcoms, im so overloaded, you need these people even when they are sometimes annoying and not as valuable but i dont agree how much alternative. In the back. Your article about the Tipping Point of where you want to go and crime, has anybody ever come to you and picked up on the observation that you made with implications for public policy, you dont know that its an incremental improvement in the idea that you might have to devote an enormous amount of resources to something before you see a result, hase anybody ever picked up on that and are there any studies that have happened, not necessarily as a result of what you wrote but something in the area . There is a lot of interest in it predates my observation in the academic world with this very fact, what is not happened which is a shame, these ideas, this notion has been picked up by the political realm, for obvious reasons, this is not a moment in american political history when theres much interest in the idea of determining the adequate level of social investment, its a hard sell at the moment i think the most obvious one is a head start, we know that certain kinds of intervention and preschoolers are affected, we know the head start is not as effective as we would like it to be. But the difference between the ones we know that work are not that great. To me there is a real opportunity, maybe there is a Tipping Point of overspending on headstart, i cannot imagine how anyone could go to washington and argue for an increase in head t start funding. Its hard to imagine. I think in some ways we have been talking about the Tipping Point is tipping toward something positive. I worked for four years on the internet site which was a Health Education site, really big one and because it was new, there was a lot of change within the system, people who monitor the site, people who were running it, the companies have absorbed it and took it over and everything. And the people that i was working with or the people had a certain kind of illness which would cause them a lot of depression, it was not a recognized illness, they felt very ignored. They were always running into the issues of being an ominous. Suas a result of being invisible and anonymous as well as the radical changes that were going on, they would go through these periods of real hostility towards each other and the whole systemol would feel like it woud tip over and fall apart instead of tipping the direction of being more and more productive. I felt that the people who manage the site were not aware of this and did not know how to do with it and i suspect this happens with social structures, was happening at al rapid rate n the despair. I think thats a really important point when you think heabout thinking about changes epidemic, epidemics are incredibly volatile and occasionally, we benefit from that becomes in this country crime can plummet overnight, it also means that changes can reverse. Issues volatility and social change is something if you think were entering a period where i think we do the social epidemic is going to become d prevalent. Were going to have to expect what were talking about this kind of volatility and cycle in extremes, more and more that were not terribly good at diagnosing and is something that makes her feel comfortable. Do you think enough testing goes on in graduate school, it seemed like an important thing. The question was about testing and the importance, when it comes to assessing the stickiness, i think we do far too little, we pay far too little attention to that, until a story in the book of the famous study of trying to get students to get a shot and every variable with 20 minute course and it made a difference whether they include the map with the package and show them where to go with the health center. Thats a classic example, that was a 2b. Them made the message sticky to take kickoff. Who wouldve known it was about the map, we were so possessed, its a very important lesson there for any communication, you cannot predict an advanced what the Tipping Point is, and systematically search for it. The history of social epidemics is an example of the weirdest, like big bird, who would know that they would need big bird, i can imagine if they did sesame street without the big bird and noticed kids were not learning, they would change 1 million things before they wouldve brought them onset, they wouldve thought the fundamental premises of the show, they would question the cognitive psychological functions but getting jim hansen to jessup as a guide and number two would be the last thing on their mind but thats what made a difference. This may be a better digression but the anniversary of the new yorker, i was wondering how to end up at the new yorker what the culture of the magazine done to change you in the way that you write . How did i end up at the new yorker, because i was working for the Washington Post and tina brown systematically hired me from the Washington Post and she went down the list, how has it changed, and is changed in the fundamental ways that they give you in the space, its amazing how good someone can look at them if you give them 7000 words. It is really hard to write an intelligent 3000 word article, a lot easier to write a 7000 its a permissive culture and also all the editing is so amazing. You have n no idea what finally comes. I do actually have editor right and if this is the perfect culture, it would be like being here and i would whisper in his ear [laughter] do you think theres some application to the notion of epidemiology to the infatuation with the internet and hightechnology that we are seeing currently . I steer clear of any kind of financial stuff in the book because they dont know enough about it and if you saw my own finances you would agree it was a wise decision, there is clearly a strong epidemic element, just these kind of wild market swings and this is been explored with all the parallels and all this kind of stuff in the volatility clearly has epidemic quality, the thing that worries me, if you think back to that example of the teen suicide epidemic, what epidemics to win their emotion is to create an alternate reality, that is a real danger, the weirdest thing about what happened in micronesia, the notion that they were experimenting with suicide in a talk on the chapter about all the cases with kids who wanted to try it out, there was a moment in the middle of the epidemic that the notion of suicide had become unhinged from the act itself, they were somehow in a place where that was not part of it, epidemics do that, they can profoundly work reality and that would be my big worry about epidemic enthusiasm, is this simply reflecting the internal logic of the epidemic or is there grounding to reality . Sure, is there anything, any lesson from the Tipping Point that you have applied to help the 2b. Achieve the Tipping Point. Yes as a matter of fact, we decided, me and my publisher decided we would identify the book mavens in the country and we made up a long list, most people, people who got independent bookstores, people in the northwest, it is a lot of wordofmouth, books that have a strong word and come out of the northwest, we basically sat down and made a long list and we went out in january and something copies of the book and we left lunch and tried to turn them on, i dont know whether, the books did well and im assuming the hud relevant and that was our attempt to enlist the power of wordofmouth on behalf of this book. But like anything it is hard to know what value has, there are booksellers in bookclub country, i talk about book clubs they play a key role in fermenting wordofmouth, if you can generate excitement in that part of the world successive book clubs in the northwest, i think you help with the cause of the book. On a lighter note, i kind of like your reference for your editor. I have an idea but i cannot take. Is better than this one. [laughter] is totally different, we know the return to the Tipping Point, the rules of the Tipping Point, heated 17 versions of his own, hes on a w week in the life of his own, what next month or 24 hours of his own. The better quality of the new yorkerid tradition. Im a big tina fan because she hired me. As much as i represent, i wouldd like to think part of the process, i am kidding, i think its actually the original purpose in the dna was to be something thats vital and on the cutting edge, i think i got too far. On that same line, can you share with us the response to the new editor since i cant ask you your opinion, i am interested in the response that is Public Knowledge and i happen to like the magazine. I think david has gotten really wonderful response and hes different from tina, those differences, i will simply say this, those differences manifest themselves in obvious ways. Should be know how long whos in charge christian mike. [laughter] im stretching peoples patient. After your book with the gnostic commodity took so long. , my editor was the same guy and not naturally took precedence over my luck. And so i got delayed for boring technical reasons. Should i take one more question . Do you find yourself since writing the book seeing or predicting Tipping Points left and right as i do [laughter] you can kinda get, its what i refer to as grad students, when youre in the middle, the entire world fits into the ideas about 17th century english poetry. So yes in fact i do see them everywhere and im hoping this particular pathology will come to an end before all of my friends. [laughter] anyway, thank you very much. [applause] i guess i will sit here and sign books. On behalf of the harvard coop, i would like to think him for being here tonight and thank you all for coming, we will see if we can geti more seating net time and have a good night. It. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you are watching book tv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Tonight were looking at programs with the best selling author of fromlm gladwell, of next 2005, he talks about his book think which looks at how people make splitsecond decisions. If everyone can hear me, my name is henry, im theen editol director and i would like to welcome you to the fifth annual new yorker festival. And i would like to say please turn off any cell phones or pager devices, malcolm will be speaking for about 40 minutes and will have 20, 30 minutes of q a after that, during the question. There will be microphones down the aisle and we were request that you line up and speak into your microphone at the time. Malcolm gladwell has been a staff writer to the new yorker magazine since 1796, before that he was then new york bureau chief for the Washington Post, at the new yorker he made his mark establishing a new genre of stories the Malcolm Gladwell story, very few people like that in the 80 years of his magazine, the editorial meeting was a subject that they come up in 70 says that has been done and they also say if we have a Malcolm Gladwell take, its a great cards,ation of trump malcolm has a kill your genius for explanations, sometimes very peculiar. [laughter] and it is tempting to try to explain what makes him an important writer, i think a lot of it has to do with a certain originality and distinctiveness, i think both of the qualities were on display in his best selling book the Tipping Point. Which is a book thats been quoted by one u. S. President , by joint chief of staff, by ceos, by philanthropist, also the title of a new album by the hiphop band the roots, the intellectual hero. [laughter] his new book is coming out in january, is called the power of thinking without thinking, i have never actually seen malcolm when he was not thinking so curious to see how is going too pull it off. Please welcome Malcolm Gladwell. [applause] thank you henry, and nine years of editing, that is the kindest anybody has ever been. [laughter] i am very happy to be here and happy to see all of you, im guessing most of you are here because you could not get into this last night, i think i got assigned to overflow. , which is fine but i should save any of your here expecting to get major blockbuster revelations about American Foreign policy, you are in the wrong place. The new yorker is divided into serious writers and when School Writers or as you like to say dinosaurs and cartoon dinosaurs. [laughter] and he is a dinosaur number crunching dinosaur. I was told about my new book it was called blink which is coming out in january and i hope that allyo of you buy it at that poi, its about the power of thinking without thinking and its really about what happens in the first to second of a person and a person that a person an idea or person in a situation. So for the bookas has been reviewed twice by the early review services, one of which said it was quite good and the other sideic and utterly forgettable piece. So the question is still up in the air, i hope its resolved by the time january comes around. I want to tell you story from the book, one of my favorite stories, i think its a pretty good introduction to what this book is about and the kinds of questions that im trying to address. It is something that happened five years ago, something a story all of us in new york remember but i think not allme f us particular at the time in new york adequatelyel understood, te ally was from guinea, recent immigrant, he is 22 years old and he was short, he is about 5foot six, i take those facts because not that im warm enough to tell a story but because but the smallest details of the case are absolutely critical in understanding what happened that night, one of the faults that i have was the way that we came to learn about the story and understand that story that it tswas interpreted about racism, about Police Departments, the status of this or that in america and is not a story about grand theme, its history about details, these details that i start with as i said absolutely essential to understanding what happened thatso night, he livedn the bronx called soundview, its in the southeastern bronx, in the late 1990s it was a pretty bad neighborhood, a major openair drug market that did not shut down about two or three blocks and he lived on a street of wheeler avenue, its a street that comes down off the main which is westchester boulevard. And its a very narrow street of twostory red brick row houses built around the century, they are very close to the street, there is a sidewalk, no grass in the sidewalk, just a street, sidewalk, two quick steps and then you have these buildings, the twostory buildings, he lived on one on the second floor and on the night of every third 1999, he comes home, he was a paddler and he sold one of the guys on 14th street that sells drugs and scarves hats, he talks his roommate around midnight and for reasons we dont know he comes downstairs, maybe he wanted to have a cigarette or taken the night air or feeling claustrophobic, we dont know, he stands in the building, its very small, probably no more than this wide and no more from the top of this stage back to about where i am now. He is standing on the edge looking up atg the street and s hean standing there, the car drives by don wheeler avenue, florida taurus unmarked, for people in it in for Police Officers who are part of the nypd street crime unit which had been set up in the late 1990s to break up things like open a drug market, the four guys in the car sean carroll, can boss, Richard Murphy, pat mcmillan, their in their mid20s an early 30s and they are not experienced, all just in jeans and sweatshirts and bulletproof refs underinvest, their baseball caps and regulation ninet miller handguns, cruising down wheeler avenue, they cruised by, hold up, who is that guy, he thought a racist who they were looking for in the area, about a year before, the thought that he was a lookout from the pushing robber who came from an Apartment Building and someone who left them in, basically they had a lookout on the ground floor and people coming into the building. Its one of the two things, they drive by and carol can get out of the car and carol opens up his wallet and his id and says Police Officers, can we have a word, now unbeknownst to them with a very recent immigrant, he is declined one of his friends several months before had been robbing people posing as Police Officers. So he is terrified by these guys, here is, sitting there taking in front of his house, four guys given him with a big popped out chest, white guys in the middle the south bronx, out ofle his car and speak in a language he may or may not understand, he is standing and he sees these guys and he turns around and he goes back to get back into his house, he turns around and puts his hand on the door, carol was standing there and so show us your hands, put your hands up, we dont know if he understands what that means at this point, he turned his body away and reaching for the door and he seems to be doing something with his right hand, this starts to get a little bit nervous, they think why is he turning his body so he can conceal what hes doing with his right hand, they start to run after him, they go up the steps to see what hes doing because of thinking this is getting strange. And then they look closer and they see what hes doing with hisin right hand is hes pulling out an object out of his coat, you look up the object and they see this little thing coming out, they start to get more concerned, they see the top of the black object in its shiny and the thinking, hes got a g gun, but he does not stop pulling it out, he keepspu goin, pointed out, pulling it out until hes actually out, until hes pointing it towards him like this, mcmillan says hes got a gun and he panics, he pushes back and jumps backwards, he starts firing, hes standing right there anything shes been hit, why else would he fall back, he sees the bullets ricocheting and he thinks, oh my god, hes firing a gun, he pulls out his gun andnd starts firing, back in the car you got boston murphy, they see him fall backwards and they think hes been hit, man down, he jumped out of the car and they pulled out their guns and start firing, in the end carol and mcmillan fire 15, 16 bullets each, bang, bang, bang. As their firing at him, hes in the corner in his back is straight and his knees are bent, hes thinking classic shooters crouched, this kid is been trained, hes back like this with this thing in his hand any string to make itself as small as possible, its what you do when youre confronted when nobody knows what youre doing, theyre all going bang at this guyss chest. Finally they stopped, he is down. And can gets up and walks towards him, he looks down at his right hand to see the gun, to get the gun, the palm is open and he looks down and theres no gun, just a wallet, he screams where is the [bleep] gun and then he starts writing up wheeler avenue, he has to call the ambulance and he has annoyed you to tell the ambulance were to go, hes running up and down screaming out where is the [bleep] gun, he gets up and he looks down and he start to cry. , what happened that night, i was attracted to the story when i went to write this book because its an unusually complicated and ambiguous story, all the ways that we have for explaining at the time were deeply unsatisfactory. We think back to that in the news, they were two sides to tha story and the way that it was told, one side that these cops are racist, assume hes a criminal, bang, bang, bang, 41 bullets, he writes a song, b cd 41 bullets, how you get shot just for living in your american skin, which was reductive notion that that wast all about the sn color, i dont deny skin color played a role, will get back to the issue later on but to say this is about an open shot case of racismis is absurd, everybody in this house is black, theyre not shooting everybody, they shoot one guy, also there is no evidence whatsoever that these fourur guys that theres nothing in the past is to just their vicious or angry, this is not the cop that attacks, i forgot his name, Something Like that case, these are good kids, half the people that need them, good solid honest, not a blemish on the record, on the other side the line adopted by the jury which acquitted these guys of all charges in the line adopted by nypd which is one of these things. Thisne happens. Its called police work, you get the situation sometimes its really sad but you make a mistake and theres nothing much we can do aboutk. Ti it. That is also deeply unsatisfactory, this is not just a routine mistake, a guy goes out to take in and have a cigarette and get shot 41 times with cops who have been down the street, theres nothing normal about that particular event, somethingg went wrong, what we need is an understanding of what happened that night, i think the only way to get us the understanding is to break down the little incident, second by second until we can see all of the moments, the decisions that went into that particular tragedy and how it came about. , to think about this case for moment, there are three particular moments in that instance that are worthy of discussion, first of all sean carol says to the others in the car, what is that guy doing there, hold up, what is he doing. The answer is he is getting air, hes totally innocently standing on the front porch to his own home. But carol looks at him and decides he is suspicious. Stick number one, hes innocently thinking suspicious, one of the things he says is when they backed up, he saw he was Still Standing there, he did not move and he would say later that that amazedat him. Why didnt this guy move, if youre standing on a street corner, for cops and mark hart drive past, back up toward you, you run. Thats what everybody else did, the sky stands there. Point number two, they think it is completely surrounded by four monstrous cops, he is curious indices for white guys is stick number two, he confuses brazenness with curiosity. And then Carol Mcmillan are standing and they watch him turn to his side and start to pull something black out of his coat and in that instant they decide he is dangerous. But he is not dangerous, he is terrified. Steak number three, mistake, terrified or terrifying. Ordinarily in the normal parts of our lives, we have no problem with these distinctions, we are really, really good as human beings at making a distinction between innocent and suspiciousness in making a distinction between brazenness and curiosity in making a distinction between terrified and terrifying, he walked down the street in the middle the night and you make those judgments every single moment when you see somebody, you say im scared of him, no he scared me, nothing were better at than doing that, weve been doing that for millions and millions and millions of years, thats whats interesting about the case, in that moment on the street corner, on the street that night we made three really, really basic errors that they should not have made, three errors that most of us would make very rarely in our lifetime. But theyfe compound them, why dd they do that, what is it that happened that night that caused them to be fundamentally incapable of reading his mind, that isad a failure, they were t able to put themselves into his shoes, they did not correctly understand his intentions in that moment, as a result they completely misinterpret what the social situation is all about, they put their own construction on it, its aboutow a crime and criminal instead of being outside with the air. I call this failure momentary autism in the idea i use the phrase because the simplest definition of autism is a neurological condition that renders us incapable of reading somebody elses mind. The british psychologist refers to autism as mind blindness. People with autism can listen and understand your words but they cannot understand your intentions. , there incapable of taking the extra step to interpret and put in an appropriate context, there are certainm situations when otherwise normal people become effectively artistic, just in that particular moment, not as a chronic condition but acute condition and a handful of seconds when theres moments of extreme stress, i think that is a surprisingly common kind of failure, if we look at the way theil world works or does not work, we see the pattern repeated over and over again that lets of mistakespa happen because there are certain situations which lead us from an ability to make sense of intentionality, to read other peoples minds into a state that we are incapable of doing. What i want to do is talk about this and then talk about what it takes to try to prevent these attacks and momentary autism. There is a really wonderful researcher at el, im not sure which one it is. I hope shes not watching. Theyve done really fascinating work in trying to understand and explain what happens when someone has autism, he has a patient and hes been seeing peter for many years and peter is now in his 40s or 50s, very intelligent man, a whole series of graduate degrees and has a job and liveses on his ow, he has autism, he comes and sees him every week and he helps to make decisions, not long ago he decided to do nicks permit with peter to try and. Demonstrate hw precisely peter make sense of social situations. What he does was prepare goggles on him and these are special goggles that track where your eyes move, when you control somebody something, put the goggles on in their eyes will draw a line on the screen, you can see where their eyes are following at any given time, he gave peter the goggles and he had to watch the movie with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and he chose that for reason, more importantly its a movie about a very complex social situation, is three people in a room, actually for in a room, theyre having an incredibly draw interaction, getting really drunk upset in this complex dynamics, he said he was not going to show peter terminator two because were the actual gun is the hero, which did not work and he did not have to decode, this would be a really interesting test, an extraordinary physic interface is entered among four people, how did peter make sense of this, whatho he does, he shows them the movie and peter is on the. Of the movie, we are seeing where peters eyes are moving at any given time and then he doesnt same thing with people who do not have autism, he watches where their eyes move, the scene where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are kissing, when you and i watch whthe scene, what their eyes do, here is burton and heres taylor, our eyes go back and forth, thats what we do when we watch people kissing and moving, you look at their eyes, the truth of everything is in their eyes, you want to know what kind of kiss is this, what is happening, they had to be excited, all thes information r much of the information is contained in the ice, what did peter do when he sawid that . He looked at the light switch behind him, why did he do that because for someone with autism there is no special meaning attached to eyes, he cannot make sense of information that he finds in someone eyes, he cannot read intention, he cannot mind read, as a result theres no reason for him to look at the eyes and any given scene, the thing that is equally interesting to look at the light switch and hes mechanically minded and he told me its really interesting, he was looking the whole time at the light switch, theres another scene where george segal pointed a painting, he said who did that painting and he answers him, we watch that scene in her eyes follow the line of george segals hand to the painting. Then her eyes go over to Richard Burton eyes, and then they come back to george segal to see how he reacts to the answer, really quick in a millisecond, boom, boom, boom. What does peter do . He is listening, watching, he painting,id that paintingt because he cannot mae sense of the gesture, it Means Nothing to someone who cannot readne minds to know what im pointing at ny and pointing at, have to be i be able to inhabity mind, why would malcolm do that, what is the purpose, peter cannotas do that, all he has is information, who did the painting, he looks at the wall with where the painting is but theres three paintings on the wall, what peter does hes going back and forth among all these paintings trying to figure out which paintings, meanwhile the conversation is already moved on,is he missed the whole meanig of the particular encounter. There is another more poignant scene where Elizabeth Taylor was flirting with george segal. Same flirting going on and Richard Burton is getting angrier and more jealous. Ool to look at the way normal viewers look at scenes because you doing the triangle thing at breakneck counting emotions, what is burton going to do, how dare she flirt with this man in front of her husband . What does peter do . Peter looks at george siegels mouth for a while and then looks at the drink and george siegels hand and spends a lot of time looking at this really cool brooch. He cant understand the social context. All he can hear the mewords. Words in that scene mean nothing. Its a scene about flirting, who cares whats being said. Its about the meaning of these three people interacting. He misses that because he cant mine read. What is left is a little shred of evidence from that scene, that little shred of evidence, whats being said, is wholly insufficient for making sense of whats happening in the movie. Theres a point in that scene where climaxes with Richard Burton, takes out a gun, points out Elizabeth Taylor, pulls the trigger and an umbrella pops up. As you see in the Movie Theater watching a movie at that moment there is a kind of shock stunned silence because your thinking, oh my god the umbrella comes at you like what . When peter saw that, he burst out laughing [laughter] because its slapstick to someone who doesnt understand the social context of whats going on in that movie. The inability to read minds creates an enormous problem when it comes to making sense of any fast flowing complex social situation. This is all a very long way of saying i think this is a very useful and powerful model for understanding what went on with those last night. They get to that seen and they are completely incapable of extracting the necessary and critical social information from it. Ex i dont get it. They are missing all these cues. They are like peter. Seeing some objectives fax, really little teinterpretation, black dye, young guy, young neighborhood, late at night, shiny black object. It misses all of the nuance on in that. All of these interpretations that might calibrate or cause seyou to think twice about the conclusion. All of that is somehow pushed aside. They walked in on this extremely narrow interpretation and that moment they are effectively artistic and standing and driving in a car and standing on the steps of the vestibule. The question is, what caused it . Why were they turned into the equivalent of autistic people at that moment on the steps. In the book i have the explanation that goes on for pages and its far more interesting than the explanation i will give you now. Which is why, as i said, you should buy the book in triplicate. [laughter] i will give you a sense of some of the things have to think about to try to understand why heautism abthe issue of arousal, what effect does being physiologically aroused have in our ability to mine read . In this case we have two guys convinced the person in front of them is trying to kill them. What is that situation do to your ability to migrate . To make sense of the social complexities of the situation . We know that all kinds of weird things happen to people when other people point guns at them. Its not like the movies where this is handled as kind of an everyday occurrence. If you read through testimony a particularly Police Officers who been fired upon or have fired, you learn that theres an extraordinary series of completely bizarre things that have happened to us in that situation. For example, almost everyone whos been fired on or is firing a gun describes an extraordinary moment of television, basically you only see whats immediately in front of. You, Everything Else is gone. The overwhelmingly people who lose their sense of hearing. You dont hear anything. This is actually a huge issue in Police Shootings because time and time again Police Officers fired their guns more times than they should. They emptied the gun into somebody and shouldve only fired once or twice. It always comes up why did you fire 16 boats . A lot of the times, this is always not taking seriously but its a completely serious explanation, they keep firing because they cant hear their gun going off. They think their gun is not working. Absolutely the case. That part of our sensory system shuts down to that kind of stress. David clear wrote into the kill zone its a series of fascinating interviews with Police Officers that have been fired on. Heres what im going to read from one of them, its about the Police Officers partner a guy named dan wrestling with the criminal, the officer is athat the criminal is trying to kill his partner dan and hes trying to kill the criminal before he kills dan. This all happened real fast in milliseconds. The same time i was bringing my gun up. Dan was fighting with him the only thought that came to my mind was, oh dear god, dont let me hit dan. I fired five rounds. My vision changed as soon as i started to shoot. He went to seeing the whole picture to just the suspect said, Everything Else just disappeared. I didnt see dan anymore. I didnt see anything else, i could see is the suspect said stop i saw four of ctmy five rounds hit. The first hit him on his left eyebrow, opened up a whole and the guys head snapped back and he said, like you got me. He continued to turn the gun and i fired my second round, i saw a red dot below the base of his left eye and his head turned sideways. I fired another round. It hit the outside of his left eye and his left eye exploded, ruptured and came out. My force shot hit just in front of his left ear. It goes on and on. That is a really really weird explanation because hes describing something thats not physiologically possible. You cant actually observe the actions of bullets in realtime. Yes he was in that moment so utterly locked in on this task and the person in front of him that it seemed to him as if everything has slowed down to the point where he could see the entry of his bullets and the kind of consequence of the bullets hitting this guys head. Its very easy to see how important from an evolutionary perspective this kind of ev physiological process is, if we are in a position of extraordinary danger, it makes total sense our body would just say, look, anything extra in us, were not to worry about. I want you to focus just on the thing in front of you, im going to slow things down im going to put off things like noise, which you dont need at this moment. I just want you to abone of the things people find in shootings and particularly war times is that an extraordinary number of people who are fired upon lose control of their bowels. A little unpleasant but true. When your body is confronted plwith a life death situation, thats not nonessential. Focusing on the problem at hand and control of that particular part of your body is something we can worry about later. Same thing with abcar accidents, talk to cops who done a lot of car accidents, first thing is the smell. People under that kind of stress shut down per various parts of their body. Think about that take into extreme. In the t beginning that kind of reaction is enormously useful, lets push it out further, your body starts to shut down and according to people who say this, between about 150 and 145, all these kinds of processes are really really useful, they help us zero in on whats going on but once you get beyond that when you start getting up into 150a75, 200 it starts to become a real problem because you start to become incapable of any rational thought and you hearing and eyesight shut down to the point where you are blind and deaf. Your motor coordination starts to really seriously deteriorate. Your behavior becomes extraordinarily aggressive. You have no more access to any higher cognitive control. This is why Police Officers will tell you that you need to practice dialing 911 because an extraordinary problem with people when they are in serious trouble is they cant dial 911. The number of people who dial 41 wanted an accident instead of 911 is extraordinary. You cant remember, its gone. People forget to press the send button on their cell phone. They will dial something and then look at their phone, its not working. All that stuff is gone and that moment under that extraordinary athis is why Police Departments recently have started to ban highspeed chases. Part of the problem with highspeed chase is what happens during the chase. You kill innocent bystanders. That is a serious consideration, is not the only consideration, however. The other, in some ways more importantly, what happens after the chase. If you have someone driving at t high speeds after some suspect in the middle of residential areas, their heart rates go crazy. The rate of arousal going on with them is absolutely insane. They get out of the car and they are no longer human by some sense. Theyve been turned by the forces of this physiological process into Something Else entirely. Think about rodney king. I had long discussions writing my book with these former lapd officers and they would say, everyone said that was about race, lots and lots of things that happened with the police in la and the public are about race but this is not about race. Nothing to do with race. Rodney king could have been as white as snow and exactly the same thing wouldve happen. This is about what happens when you have a group of eight young men chase another young man through residential area 100 miles an hour for a halfhour. You get out of the car your heart rate is at 200 and you go and find this guy and you go crazy on him. Remember there was a moment when stacy kuhn said, tell them to stop, they dont. Its a huge issue in trial. Stop stop they dont stop. Because they dont hear him. The first thing that went was hearing. They are completely oblivious to anyone shouting direction or instruction in that moment because in that moment they are out of their mind. One of the cases that really tbroke my heart is a case a couple years ago in a guy name russ russ was a kid driving to chicago and makes an illegal uturn. The cops see him and come after him but he doesnt stop. So they have a chase, gets on the dan ryan, finally they cops jump out and they say, get out of the car. The cop starts running toward the car. Smash in the back window of the car, sticks his gun in and says that russ went off to his gun. Should tim, russ is dead. Its a completely heartbreaking case. Its really, really, really bad police work. Its also a classic example of what happens in these chases. People forget all sense. What exactly is going on there. The Police Officer in that moment in order to successfully resolve that situation must engage in a kind of onmind reading. You must understand this whole situation from russs perspective. Russ is a kid. Russ did something really stupid. An illegal uturn in front of the cop. What did russ do . He panicked. He goes in this chase and they cut him off and his heart rate is going crazy. They yell, get out of the car, he cant hear them. He sitting there terrified this cop comes up behind him, smashes the window and sticks a gun in his face. Hes dead. What that cop lost in that moment, he lost as a result of his arousal was any ability to interpret the meaning of that event in a sophisticated way. He lost any sense of the social context of that event. He lost his ability to migrate. There is another key element, that the element of time. I think we lose our ability to migrate when we run out of time. This is a huge element in any kind of deadly encounter. We forget this because we are used to hollywood depictions of shootouts. In the movies or Television Show theres two cops, firing and they talk to each other and the victim the person they are eyfiring at shows up some challenge in a fire again and roll and the whole thing takes 20 minutes. , this never happens in the real world. This guy runs a bodyguard security agency, i had a long talk with him because he studied assassinations, who he has all these tapes. He analyzes them. He showed me the tape of the reagan assassination 1981, reagan is coming out of the speech, waves to the crowd, they go reagan, this kid robert hinckley, 22 in his hand, liens and, six shots. Its the Police Officer commits the secret service, hits the car, hits reagan. The big question is, how did he get six shots off . Reagan is surrounded by bodyguards. This guy pokes a gun shoots six times before they can wrestle him to the ground. Hes right there. How does that happen . The answer is, it happens because that whole thing was over in the blink of an eye. How long that whole incident was from the moment hinckleys gun is visible to the moment hinckleys on the ground you know how long it was . 1. 8 seconds. Done. You have any time to make sense of that situation . To mind read hinckley . To look at the crowd and think nswho is a threat and whos not threat, whose terrified . No time whatsoever. He so nervous he starts by shooting himself in the foot. [laughter] he points at the president and fires a shot and misses and hits president s wife in the head, she falls over dead. Bodyguard gets up, pulls out his gun, shoots, hits the sixyearold kid standing next to the assassin, the crowd grabs the guy, wrestle him to the ground, beginning to end, 3. 5 seconds. Over. Who could make sense of that. No one can make sense of that. It happens to ait happened too fast. Then we lose our ability to make, due to any sophisticated reasoning of whats going on, there is a guy psychologist named keith payne who did a beautiful experiment a couple years ago and inspired by the diablo shooting and thats sit you down in front of the er computer flashes a black face, a face of a young black male on the computer screen in front of you then he says, im going to show you this black face and its gonna be one of two objects appear on the screen either a wrench or gun. If its a rat she wants you to hit this key, the question is, how often do you make hit the button for a gun when its the ranch . The answer is, you make quite a lot. You could do all kinds of cool things if you flash a white face first they dont make the diablo error quite as easily. Basically plays a role in a sense but its not interesting finding, the interesting finding is that the more you speed the process up, the last time you give somebody to think about their choice, wrench, gun, wrench, gun, the more likely they are say gun. It doesnt matter how many times you show the wretch, they will always say gun. When you speed things up, people no longer try to make a they retreat to the most basic most simple and most destructive function. Only to say, its a black guy, chances are hes got a gun. You see how the element of time erodes our ability to do any kind of clear and more sophisticated analysis of the situation. This is why thPolice Department if you look at the way they train Police Officers are obsessed with guns, youre confronting a suspect the first thing you do is look for some way ieither to be out of the suspect line of sight or just even to obscure yourself in some way. Why is that . It keeps you safer but more important, it buys you time. It means you ngnever in a situation standing in front of that person and having to make a decision in a millisecond about whether to fire or not. Youre off by yourself, that person cant get you so you can slow things down and think. Thats what in the case of traffic stops. Theres a procedure. When the cop pulls you over, then he walks up along the passenger, drivers side he always stops behind your head, you ever notice this. Behind you, shined his flashlight over your shoulder. Why is he doing that . Because hes got a gun, he slowed abif youve got a gun he slowed the situation down. Who will have you standing in front of you you you could go boom. Hes help save your life in a certain sense. Hes tried to introduce a couple extra seconds that allows him to make a much more sophisticated analysis of whats going on. Bodyguards the same way after the reagan shooting, the problem of the reason ragan got shot is there was no white space. There wasaround ragan. You must have a protected area where there is no people, 10, 15, 20 feet in any given time around some and you want to keep safe. Because the greater amount of space between any potential sale and and a d target the mor time any kind of action aggressive action is going to take. And time means safety in a situation. Time gives the bodyguards the ability to scan the crowds and get an understanding of who might be dangerous. This is also why theres been such a push in recent years and Police Departments to replace two man cars with oneman cards. That seems counterintuitive people look at this and think theyre just trying to save money. Nothing to do with money. It has to do with time theres all kind of research that shows two officer cars get into from marshall end up shooting far more innocent people because the people and backings far more than officers traveling by themselves. Reason is you are with someone else you speed things up. You have the kind of social courage to rush in, you by yourself you never do that in a million years. You stay behind and call for help and as a result something that mightve been accelerated, steve is decelerated. The significance of all this is that its a reminder of how impoverished our vocabulary is for describing failures or disasters. We have this very simplistic way of trying to make sense of why things went wrong. We look at rodney king and we say, thats about a bunch of ouracist cops. Actually, no. Its about what happens when you chase someone for an hour at 100 miles an hour. Thats a far more useful way of understanding that particular problem. We look at the cop who rushes after awe say what a terrible awful person that cop is. He should be in jail. He is a terrible awful person in some sense but maybe he was really badly trained. Clearly at some point in his life it was not drilled into him that when you do aband that kind of situation you stand by your vehicle undercover and call out to the person to get out of the car. Is that training or abmaybe a little bit of both. Most of all, when we look at these kinds of social blunders at social blunders. Social blunders by people who happen to have guns in their hands. When we look at the things that go wrong and the cues they miss we forget that the kind of skills we have that make us human, allow us to function intelligently in the world are really really fragile. They are not always there with us. Their circumstances these kinds of very power and Critical Skills can ab take us from being capable of migrating to being functionally in that moment. To go back to diablo, there they were, sean carroll, ken bost, Edward Mallon and Richard Murphy. Its late, theyre in south bronx. They see a young black man, he seems to be behaving oddly. Since february, what is he doing outside . [laughter] they are cruising by right now they construct a system, a rigid system. Blackeye, late, 12 30 a. M. , can be good. He small too. He was five foot six interests. What a small meeting at 12 30 a. M. South bronx . And hes got a gun. Hes not abhe must have a gun. Hes not out there that size without packing. Then they pull over and he doesnt stop so now they are like hes totally not scared of the cops. Now they get out of the car, mcmillan says tells the Police Officer, let me have a word. Dale turns and runs back in the building because he is totally and utterly terrified. Four big white guys in the south bronx late at night coming after him with their chests puffed out with a bulletproof vest. They dont have time to think through all this because its a pursuit. Hes running back into the building. These guys arent seasoned professionals who done this before. They are raw, new to the bronx. The bounding up the steps after him. And that there at the door at the back of the vestibule and turned his body and tugging at something in his waistband. They dont have any cover. No way to slow this down. They are right in front of him and its a narrow festival. They are here he is anhere. Whatsoever. No chance to figure out what is that . Things are getting faster and faster, its a wallet, its not a gun. We are measuring this in milliseconds. Whatever you have to make a decision about a black person in a few milliseconds you think its a pegun you always think its a gun. Go online and do the experiment everyone in this world will say gun. He yells, hes got a gun mcmillan panics and jumps backwards and starts firing someone jumping backwards in that situation means only one thing. Hes been shot. Ken bost and Richard Murphy jump out of the car and they start firing too. The next day in the papers for months afterwards a huge amount is made of the fact that 41 bullets are fired. 41 bullets can be fired by people with semiautomatic pistols and two seconds or three seconds. Its not a significant number if youre in that a degree of excitement. Ntthis entire incident probably takes place from beginning to end and no more than about six or seven seconds. They stopped the car and call out to diablo Police Officers may we have a word . Dlo turns runs back in the building, they jump toward, 1002, he reaches into his pockets to get something comes out 2003. Hes got a gun 2004. Shooting starts 2005, 2006, silence. Ken bost gets up, walks toward diablo in the ground, looks down at his hand and tries to see where the gun is and e sees wallet and says wheres the gun . 2008, he runs up the street hes forgotten where they are. Sean carroll goes down and starts to cry. Thats the end of amadou dialo. Thank you. [applause] such a downer [laughter] what is this information tell us about, and not try to make this political but what does it tell us about trying to win the e war in iraq with 19yearold kids in a foreign culture . [laughter] i hesitate to give any kind of global interpretation of this. Im not interested, deliberately uninterested in this book in grand themes. I will say that it can teach us a lot about those instantaneous moments when things go wrong in war. There was a moment in this war where there was a lot of these cases where the checkpoint and you supposed to stop at the checkpoint and the car comes to the checkpoint and full of iraqis and it doesnt stop in the open fire and everybody dies. Its a classic case of that. There needs to be some way to slow things down in that situation. The 19yearold private who two months ago was in kentucky somewhere has to decide in that moment whether the people in front of them are car bomb or innocent family out for a drive who dont understand the ruinstruction to stop their car. That kind of thing will inevitably lead to heartbreak unless we change the situation in such a way to allow there to be inextricable beats. There can be some kind of mind reading of whoevers approaching. Theres lots of ideas going on now in police work about trying to slow things down. A lot of this moved to nonlethal guns for cops. If you absolutely have to make a splitsecond decision come your not sure about it, you dont kill a person, you just knock them down. Thats a good way of coming to terms with that. May ask two questions . Do you have plans to address any Law Enforcement groups . Military groups with this information . Book is not out yet. If people would like me to come i would love to. This is not theres been a lot of work, im not telling them something they dont know. Theres been a lot of work on this in the last couple years and thinking really hard and cops, theres a reason why accidental shootings, for example, in major Police Department in the country are lower today than they were in the past. Training for Police Officers has changed dramatically over the last years. Its not nearly as good at other places in the country is new york city but its getting better. Just hearing you talk maybe think about people raised in a culture of fear and how to rainhibit creative thoughts if you raise that culture. I was raised in a family where fear was a common response of anthings, as an adult ive had learn how to slow down, i wonder if looking into this if you thought about applications to less dramatically extreme moments and, do you meditate . Having done all this work . As with all things, with all books, which he finished people tell you all kinds of wonderful ideas for the way you ought to have written the book. [laughter]. Youve just done that. [laughter] you describe the ability to interpret scenes in whos afraid of Virginia Woolf happening in milliseconds but i take it the viewer can do this because theyre not adrenaline loaded in that hyper heart rated. So i was wondering if the application of your thesis is only two or perhaps no application to anything that isnt a drumming one fooled. There is no way to speed up the capacity to do the mind reading . Its interesting. In the chapter and the book on my reading i limit myself to these kinds of sped up situations. Kinds of very stressful situations because i think thats where the application is clearest. I think you can play with this and all of your contacts but i have it and perhaps should have. [laughter] but i think there are far more cases where we are in the stressful situations than we think its not just Police Officers, anyone whos driven a car has moments where they are in situations where things are sped up too much and adrenaline is racing or so i think there iis a wider applicability of some of these ideas to everyday life. We get so things like abthey are not trivial. They really impact the way we set about to construct our society. I think its important to think about them in a sophisticated way. I like the idea of the momentary autism. One of the things you describe as autistic is the inability to read another person basically through the eyes of the key thing. Wasnt there something in the dialo case about darkness of the vestibule and the cops inability to see his eyes . Is that tied in with this autistic response to see a persons eyes . Absolutely. Theres a word thing about the way they teach Police Officers. One of the things they teach them is always look at hand. Theres a little training where fin many ways they are taught t avoid the very thing that could tell them a lot. Theres a reason, its very complicate it argument about where you ought to be looking. The hands certainly tell you as we can see, a weapon is a very ambiguous. If walt, quick guns under the right circumstances. Maybe they are more important but certainly it was dark. Even if they had, i think they are looking at his hands to begin with even if its been perfectly light out they wouldve missed a lot of the evidence of the eyes. In this case it was dark and it does harm things a bit but typically with the driving path, innocence is something we interpret from a lot of things from peoples eyes, peoples demeanor, the way they are standing. There driving back its dark out, they dont have a lot of these visual cues we normally use to make that additional assessment of whether thought someone is a threat or harmless. The darkness plays a big role. Also the darkness helps them jump to this conclusion that hes this bad ass. They dont think that if its 12 noon. I think that darkness is big. One of the things i found interesting was the art experts that were able to spot a forgery immediately after a already bought it. In a way its the opposite kind of example where somebody can make the right decision very quickly and very unconsciously because of the expertise. Could you talk a little bit about that . Without giving away huge chunks of the book, the longer i talk about it the more i diminish your incentive to buy it. [laughter] im interested in the two sides of snap judgments. The fact that they are under some circumstances extraordinary good. I talked about a statue in the gettys, the getty bought in 1980, 1990, which turned out to be fake. He spent 10 million on it. They analyzed it tfor 14 months. It was one of those greek marble greek statues of a boy. They were given by abtheres 200 corrupt around the world and most are quite importunate. This was in beautiful shape. They were just starting out as a museum and light, this is extraordinary they took it and analyzed said we are going to be very clear this is not a fix so we will take on loan for another year put it through all the paces. So they brought the geologists and archaeologists and experts and the paper published in scientific america where one of the lead geologists analyzing proven why marble was 2000 years old and so happy they bought it for 10 million and then down the basement in the restoration studio and so happens this woman named evelyn harrison, one of the worlds most foremost experts on Greek Culture shes visiting so the curator says, evelyn, ive got something to show you. Come with me. They go into this dark room and the statue is sitting seven feet high. He whisks off the clock and he says look at that . Its gonna be ours in like two weeks. She said its fake. Evelyn, youre out of your mind. Two weeks later r thomas hogan, remember thomas hogan come also greek expert he comes to visit and he says thomas, ive got something to show you. He whisks off the cloth and hogan goes that the check cleared . Is it too late to stop it . So they take it to idgreece and they have like rooms full. Full of all the top greek guys. They whisk the clock off and everyone is like ab he was hit by a wave of intuitive propulsion. It turns out its fake. Its not 2000 years old. They bought it from some guy at the airport and its a plaster cast in the plaster cast is like exactly like this corrupts and its not 2000 years old. The plaster cast dates from alana 1979 today if you look in the gettty catalog theres a picture that says either 636 bc or 1980. [laughter] one of my favorite. Theres a case where the snap is really good. So does the book goes back and forth and says, one of the good and one of the bad . What are the circumstances under which and what are the things that destroy this inherently very powerful tool we have to make sense of our world . When does it break down . Thats why im so interested in the cops because normally theyve got no problem, you structure that situation right, dialo would still be alive today. They would look at him and say what are you doing out here . Show us your hands. He puts his hands up and he takes his wallet and they say we dont want your wallet. In normal circumstance they would say, hes just some kids. Because of all these strange things that fall apart. The book is concerned with discovering what causes this normally extraordinary faculty default part. Talk about cops as we talk about situations where really good cops in that moment are capable of making extraordinarily sophisticated judgment because theyre very welltrained. I have a story about a cop who confronts a kid and the kid is pulling a gun on him, like 50 years old, facetoface. Kids got a gun, the cops got his gun on him like this, dont pull the gun on me and the kid is pulling it and pulling it sand pulling it in the cup weights because he looks into his eyes and says, i dont think this kid is bad anyways. The kid goes, and drops it. Doesnt shoot. That somebody extraordinarily well trained and experienced in that moment. Anyway. Like the previous speaker ive also read blank its excellent. [laughter] i really enjoyed the stories that talked about indicators, key bits of information you can focus on and snap judgment. I recollect from you talking about the Tipping Points that theres so many people you interview that could all make it into the book. They couldnt all necessarily fit with the argument. Mckenna wanted to talk one or two of the stories you are curious about that you pursued and eventually didnt make it in . You want to know about the kind of wouldve a call in the movie business . Outtakes. Ive been publishing on the outtakes. [laughter] where is henry . [laughter] thats not true. And pretty efficient. One of the first thing they teach you in the paper world is use your entire notebook. I pretty much use my entire notebook. The only thing i didnt do which im going to do is i was really interested in magic. I dont have a lot of stuff that was left out. I was having a little problem with the term mindreading that you use a lot. Im assuming since you said there was a chapter in the book that it really plays a prominent role because its not really, it seemed to me it was really the mind that we were reading but the cues and the signals that most of us are able to learn that those with mild autism and Different Levels of autism are unable learn about that. Its not really the mind that we are reading. You are right. We cant read minds. Literally. What we are reading is intentions. Process of inferring intentions. When i point out this all of you in this room know that im pointing at the camera. You can logically infer intention from the hand, eyes, tone of voice, all the stuff you can put together. We are assembling and making sense of a whole group of external cues and drawing whats often remarkably accurate difference about whats going on. Different form of language and reading. Yes. Although, its important to distinguish between those kinds of inferences and the evidence of language because peter knows that they are talking about a painting. Peter has an iq of 150. But peter cant make this kind of, he cant interpret something as simple as this gesture. It does go to something about his inability to put himself in the mind of someone else. Perhaps the best way of saying it, you need to be able to imagine yourself in the shoes of the person you are observing or conversing with. Thats what pete cant do and thats what we cant do when we are in these traumatic situations him. You mentioned a couple times that the dialo case was not about racism. Looking at the experiment in which the white face speeded up does not yield the same results, that says to me this is fundamentally about racism and the fact is subconscious deeply ingrained automatic first response, racism doesnt make it less troubling. In fact, i think it makes it more troubling then a kkk obvious kind of reason. This says that theres something rotten at the core of our entire society we need to deal with and not just by better training but fundamentally changing the way we think. You are quite right. I have two responses to that. I had in the book, that chapter and another chapter a long discussion of precisely that point that there are two kinds of racism. Conscious racism and unconscious racism. I give the test you can figure out what your levels are. They are profoundly disconnected phenomenon. I could be on a conscious level and extraordinarily unbiased person. On a conscious level my behavior could be profoundly influenced by a series of discriminatory impulses of liable below the surface. Thats a powerful contributory factor in that situation. That the whole sequence they construct race is a powerful, the fact that hes a young man, very important. The fact that if the south bronx. The fact that hes black, very very important. In that sense youre absolutely right. However, it is not what i mean to say is its not the only or the central otfactor, in other words, once we identify racism as a contributory cause, we cant stop. Its wrong to say its just about race, its not about thrace, its about race and thi and this and things speeding up any constructive scenario with the same thing happens and is not black. Its park avenue. Its 86th and park. Its 1 00 a. M. 2 00 a. M. , four cops driving down 86 street and one of the Service Entrance they see a guy going like this, they drive by any peaks around like dialo does, put his head back and they stop the car and backup, what is that i do . Turns around, grabs the door and goes to the fact that he is white, i dont know how much that saves him. You could construct a scenario where the cops would gone down that pathway regardless of the color of the mans skin. The tickets much more likely to have with the black person, in that sense you are right. But it could happen without. Same with rodney king in a sense, rodney king cobra and white. That happens with white people all the time. I think you are right but i think its important to stress that it is a powerful contributory factor and not a sufficient factor for how these things can happen. I also enjoyed blank. [laughter] a little biased. I kept waiting for you to address the issue of the role of desire in the intention of the Police Officers in the dialo case. Or the idea that we see what we want to see or that we create our own realities over and over and i found i was surprised that you didnt include that. Remember, the chapter is this long and my talk was this long. Theres a little more of that in the book. You are right. We can do another analysis. We could say, what is the context in which those four guys are operating. Its 1999 and they been there in the midst of the most triumphant season in the nypd history they have conquered crime in new york. They been told, correctly, that the reason they conquered crime over the last four or five years is that they have become far more aggressive and active. The reason that was drummed into police in this city and around the country in 1990s, correctly, that you cannot be an effective you cannot effectively enforce the law if you are passive as a Police Department. Thats what they are operating in. There operating in a situation that says you got to be aggressive. They are put into discrete crimes unit. That part of the nypd that supposed to be even more aggressive. Its proactive you go into the community, you prowl up and down when you see something you stop and say, whats up . Whats going on with that. Thats what they were taught 10 years ago or 15 Years Ago Police didnt do that. It was not the culture of the Police Department. There is this institutional desire. A very powerful part of that. What we are seeing is the kind haof flipside of this i think i many ways a positive change in Law Enforcement culture but it gets you into trouble if you dont correctly observe the proper ways of approaching a suspect or you dont have guys who are welltrained. There is that kind of they were influenced by the kind of overall environment which nypd was operating. I read blink also and i truly loved it. [laughter] when i read page 53 i started crying. The locked door concept when you know you know. Do you think you are touched with the spirit moving to coming out of the intellect and more into spiritual realm and almost bringing spirit to the masses. The young lady who as the first question, talking about meditation, in order to be intuitive to me have to be quiet can we have to get out of the intellect. How do we get quiet . How do we not speed up that time, to meditate . Is it the message youre bringing . Im certainly so pleased to hear this and i believe it know if you know what you are doing. [laughter] i probably dont. Thats been said many times by henry. [laughter] i want you to know that i know you are being a master you probably dont even know it and thank you for bringing your work. We absolutely love you. Thank you very much. [applause] one of the things that motivated about the book is a sense that we have become infatuated with the results of a certain kind of thinking, deliberate thinking and we have become dismissive of another kind of thinking. Its very important to describe these kinds of snap judgments. If thinking, when we say its got to feeling and often its a way of thinking of dismissing it and saying its a second order kind of cognition, it is not. Its every bit as critical and every bit as rational in a certain sense as a kind of thinking we do that takes place over long period of time and involves conscious deliberation. I wanted the kind of privilege other kind of thinking. Im glad to hear at least five of you. Make it six. [laughter] i did not orchestrate this. When i read the book i felt like the last chapter, which he pretty much described today was more reactive situation where you reacted and maybe not the most positively where the first of the book you described a proactive way to use quick judgment. I was wondering if you would talk about how you chose the term and put it in a nutshell for us. Its a big theme of the book and describes the process by which we reach conclusions based on very thin slices of experience. If you look at a lot of very complicated decision people make its impossible to reach a profound sophisticated conclusion based on far less information than you think going in. I spent a lot of time talking about god, who is able to diagnose with uncanny accuracy, 95 percent plus weather a couple would be cadaver or not 15 years in the future based on 15 minutes of conversation with them. Tiny thin slice of that couple allows him to make it extraordinarily accurate and meaningful production about the. State of their marriage. Thats not an anomalous situation. Time and time again if you look closely about how predictions are made you can see there are very very y small number of variables taking place over a very short period of time that can be enormously predictive of nany kind of future outcome. That erprocess described with t marriage is a kind of formal, what if we do this constantly . We are constantly making very searching and reaching conclusions based on extremely thin slices. Meet somebody, you go on a date, you meet them, boom, thats a thin slice come you know, you dont know, you have a job interview, you think that in fact youre making your decision based on five or six hours of careful abyou are not. Youre making a decision, right there and then. I did a story a couple years ago from the new yorker on this kid, this man. A guy named nathan nolan myers. I was talking to one guy and then another conversation he just started listing all the people who wanted to hire him including Steve Ballmer at microsoft. He was calling him in his dorm room. Nolan myers, not the best student at harvard. Solid b student. Really really nice guy. After a couple minutes talking to him, i wanted to hire him. [laughter] i called up all these people, why did you want to hire him so much . How long did it take you to decide he wanted to hire him . Pretty much right away. Walked in, thats the way we operate. For better or worse. Extraordinarily dependent on information gathered in that first initial encounter. I spent time trying to figure out when that kind of thin slicing is justified and when it comes problematic. How does your own thin slicing or intuition operate you for you as a writer and reporter and can give examples . Im the least intuitive person probably ever. So it doesnt really, im constantly missing things that go on in the moment and discovering them much later when an editor or someone elses, what about that back i go, joya, that, my father is a mathematician and is very firmly in the camp of the deliberate National Side and i take after him, im afraid. This book was written from the perspective not of insider but as an outsider to these processes. Im a tourist in the land of the intuitive. And very nearly got a hold of the book, if i had gotten it i would have read it. How did you guys get this already . There were big piles of it by the time i got there they were gone. A big exam i had to take in medical school it was important i knew sometimes i get worked up about these things so i took this drug called abits perfectly safe, dont look at me like that. What this does is under any conditions make your heart rate very stable, it does not rise. I did okay but not great, which i will choose to blame on the drug. Have you looked into whether what the drugs and judgment because i didnt feel like improved my mental performance even though i was physically calm and whether this should be applied professionally to people who need to be calm . Thats interesting. I suspect that, are you saying do we want to put Police Officers on beta blockers at all times . I aughter] i dont know. Wonder, when it comes to pharmaceuticals and always proud of myself as having an open mind. [laughter] maybe we ought to trythat. One last question. All the pressures on you. A lot of what you are talking about is people navigating the world visually. How do people who are blind and navigate their way through . Thats interesting. I dont know the answer to that. I suspect the cues we get from the visual cues we get our only there only part of the information that comes up about intentionality. That inte. And with those other aspects i dont know. Its a really good question. But i do know for example when there is a wonderful place years ago with their people to mind read could you successfully detective somebody was lying. And those who had suffered certain kinds of strokes were remarkably better than those who had not. So being deprived of certain faculties to pay much more attention to the nonverbal pieces of information. And then to have some of your sensorys disabled can be an improvement to pick up on this other information. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] every saturday evening this summer beginning at 8 00 p. M. We take the opportunity to open archives tonight we are featuring bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. He has appeared on cspan 20 times looking at why certain people succeed. Here he is in 2008. [applause] if my mother knew i was standing in front of a church in front of hundreds of people she would have a heart attack. The very happy to be here. I would be remiss. My editor is here the one primarily responsible to write about the collectivity well i will give you a choice. With a relatively short synopsis of my book and i could tell you a story. And where we are from it what we choose to do for a living. And it takes a whole second half of the book. Its a very profound and difficult thing to wrestle with. So i thought i would do today is tell a story from the chapter but i will not tell you the whole chapter. But to in the interim would be flying a plane in the next month or so . [laughter] but the most important thing that i want to talk about it is it is scary not because it is unusual but typical. But the clashes are the young guys 052 that takes off from columbia january 25th 1990 bound for jfk airport in new york. Columbia isnt that far. And then you cross the Caribbean Sea in got the east coast of the United States. This is january and there is a noreaster on the east coast and all sorts of planes were delayed that night. And the relatively routine flight. And the copilot and then to be held up by air Traffic Control they are held up for about 20 minutes and then above Atlantic City for 30 minutes and then again outside 40 miles for an additional 30 minutes. And they come down to jfk they encounter severe windshear above the ground. That is a situation where the wind blows very heavily so you add power to maintain constant speed than at a certain point the wind it just drops off and then you go tooin fast. So then the autopilot will adjust and you cant land safely anyway but for reasons we dont understand the autopilot was turned offs wewe perhaps it was malfunctioning. So he executed as a pilot to go around so you pull up and circle around and then a big circle over long island and as a fly towards jfk the Flight Engineer calls out flame out on in june number four in the number 21 by one engines were blowing. The captain says show me the way. We get to the runway so then we come down and crash in the backyard john mcenroe fathers estate on oyster bay in long island. Seventy people die the worst attack in many years. They come to the wreckage and retrieve the black box and start investigation but in this case it doesntin take weeks in fact they know by the nextke morning and it has nothing to do with the plane in perfect working order and nothing to do with the pilots they were not drunk or high or sick although the weather was bad or air Traffic Control doesnt make a catastrophic mistake. It was feel the exhaustion they had run out of gas. So i meant by saying it was a futypical crash that and to have a catastrophic pause. What something blows up in the cockpit hes thrown back against to see him and says dear god the Flight Attendant rushes in and her face is ashen and the passengers are screaming thats a mental image. But nothing further from the truth. Rarely do they take that format all. They tend to be a subtle process that gradually overtakes until the plane ends up in the irredeemablehe crisis. And overwhelmingly not if it is so whether that the weather is bad enough the pilot is under stress. So when the plane is behind schedule but enough behind schedule we all know that you start to make mistakes the overwhelming number of cases when the two pilots have never flown together before. And when things get difficult and we also know plane crashes to air on the part of the pilot not just one or two but a typical plane crash with seven consecutive errors which each would not be sufficient to cause an accident but in combination is enough to bring down the planeen so they are not cases or examples when he shouldve turned left instead of right rather when you look closely they are errors of communication. One supposed to tell the time that something and doesnt or tells them something in a form that allows the other. So if you look closely at plane crashes they are overwhelmingly technical phenomenons and social phenomenons. Thats why evian car 052 mr. Typical because it is thed quintessential social accident. One of the things i did with plane crashes one of those that i spent time with you is a marvelous pilot from sri lanka and flies for a very big airline it is an expert on the people who study the interaction of technology of humans very much what a plane crash is allha about. And then walks me through the accident that it is typical we have the bad weather and the plane behind schedule. And the minor malfunction of the autopilot what is a contributing factor so what else makes the point what makes that clear is the captain flying a boeing seven oh seven a previous workforce of the 737 but it is an old generation plane. So the levers are connected with pulleys to the sheetmetal. And then today you use the joystick but circling around the east coast for an hour and it is hard work. You get tired and then in the cockpit you can see and its easy to see them when you are working hard and then to be in all of the controls. And then starts to ask for things to be repeated over and over again if you look at the flight transcript. Thats what happens when you aree exhausted. You cannot process as easily and quickly and translate into spanish even though he is a fluent englishsh i speaker. So that peripheral cognitive processes start to shut down. He also starts to make mistakes on the first abort landing a ground proximity Warning System and hes coming into low and the ground proximity goes off 15 times and he seems to ignore it and he can avast to land at philadelphia and doesnt that he is logged in new york and cannot conceive of changing his plan in any other way thats another thing that happens we are exhausted. So thats one thing that goes thon but also what strange thats going on is how quiet itli is. And those that are responsible for all of the communication. He is the one that is supposed to be coordinated and seems to be passive or peculiar. He doesnt care air Traffic Control they are running out of fuel until the end of the Holding Pattern which would be unusual. And then to say avianca 052 cleared for landing but he was allowed avianca 052 to go to the front of the line of all the plane circling around jfk that night he thought they were putting them at the front to land first but they were putting them at the end so they command last. It is a crucial misunderstanding and one that would prove fatal for this plane. But he never once tried to clarify or steps in to say are we at the front of the line or the back . And he kept coming back to understand what went wrong that night of avianca 052 we met at his hotel in manhattan just fine into jfk. He just came in from dubai. He said we had an issue a couple of hours out of dubai. You go north up over moscow with the Arctic Circle and then come down when they were over moscow a woman in the back, an indian woman traveling with her husband had a stroke and started to vomit and having seizures. He said she only has at best one hour to live to get medical attention and at that point and then to had a make a series of decisions about what to do. And then said i cant land in moscow they dont even speak english from a tiny village and says if i put them down in moscow they will be in a live and we will never see them agai again. We have to find a first world country. So he thinks helsinki. Thats what he will land the plane. He is 60 turns overweight and just took off planes are not supposed to land with that tndmuch fuel you are supposed o use up all your if you will get to the destination and the land that he has 60 tons of extra fuel and electronics are not calibrated to land the plane that heavy. He has a decision tonoat make. Drag over the baltic sea and dump the fuel . That will take 40 minutes and no one is happy when you dump 60 tons of fuel in the baltic see. [laughter] so i will land heavy that means turn off electronics and land the plane as light as a feather and if you dont you can structurally damage the plane. So immediately he has to start dealing with thisel crisis and has a window 40 minutes so he has to say is it okay if i land heavy i will risk your 400 milliondollar plane but i have to and then get on the phone with helsinki does even know if he can handle the plane and typically you come in over the water not over the city because they dont want planes coming in for noise reasons but over the water typically the wind is behind you so he is heavy. He needs to land into the wind so not only get helsinki to talk to him and to do what you are not supposed to do which is coming in over helsinki. Then talk to the doctor exactly how much time do i need. An ambulance waiting on the ground right where he will land immediately get the woman off the plane. The Flight Attendants to communicate to the people in the back t now we will not crash we have a woman who was very sick. I could go wind but he never stopped talking and those 40 minutes and what that means to be a good pilot he has to land heavy but we are asking that pilot and then get on the phone and then get on the phone and talk and then get on the radio and get them all calm down and on and on and then to fly the plane through two canyons that that has nothing to do with it what it means to be a good pilot. And then to talk to all kinds of different people in the honest and persuasive way and to talk your way out of this particular crisis. So that is going on in the cockpit of avianca 052. So with the transcript of the flight recorder. So they say the runway. Where is it . I dont see it . That they realize they cant make it and pull up the landing gear. And then the captain says to ask air Traffic Control for a traffic pattern and then ten seconds passed. Almost to himself he mutters we dont have fuel. And then 17 seconds passed just to get an sense we are hearing a story of a guy who has a crisis this much a serious as avianca 052 and he never stop talking for 40 minutes. Not one moment of silence in the cockpit. Now we just had ten seconds of silence between the captain muttering we dont have fuel now another 17 seconds we will do this just to understand what this is like. Ready . [silence] the plane is on them to you just botched of the landing. [silence] and then he says that i know what happened withnw the runway. I didnt see it. Thats in the past and not even thinking about the plane but we lost the runway. Then he says finally and then set i didnt see it. But then he says tell air Traffic Control we are in an emergency and clouse says to air Traffic Controld thats right to 180 on the heading and we will try again we are running out of fuel. Now back to the cockpit. They have the fuel gauge on empty they have blown their shot at the landing there is a whole long line of planes waiting to land and in crisis mode somewhere over long island and the cast as the captain is desperate tell them we are in an emergency. He is panicking properly and clouse says thats right on the heading and we will tryn once again we are running out of fuel. That has a meeting in the world of avie on aviation as you come into land you are running out of fuel. All planes run out of fuel at the end of their journey. Doesnt mean anything if you hear that as the air Traffic Controller that doesnt check r m anything so thinking about one think about the structure of the sentence he starts with the routine acknowledgment of the instruction then in the second half he puts his concern we are in crisis it does if youre in a restaurant and say i will have a refill on the coffee and im choking on a chicken bone. [laughter] thats not the way we talk we tried to communicate about a situation. Even the pause between the two sentences is ance important and to undercut the seriousness of what he saying. Meant to bring an air Traffic Controllers and they said we had no idea they were in trouble it was nonchalant nothing in his tone of voice to suggest that something was seriously amiss with the plane. Its called mitigation and to describe where people undercut the seriousness of what they are saying. That he went your boss to read something and get back to you dont say i need you to read this now and get back to me. S w you say if you have time this weekend its no big deal, it on mitigation. [laughter] and then to say i need you to read this now you wouldnt be employed much longer and then what that tool for communicating. But in the aviation row the people realize that this was a cause of a lot of problems in the cockpit it was a place where mitigation was not an appropriate strategy. So now we are flying and on the weather radar a big ugly patch of thunderstorms and they have been telling us over the last ten minutes about the choppy weather ahead. That you just fly straight intoto it so i went to communicate to you that we should find at way. So how do i do it cracks there are many different strategies in terms of the level of mitigation. The first thing is a command. Turned 30 degrees right. That is fully inappropriate for me to say that to you. I am the boss. Not you thats hard to say to a pilot to someone who is your superior. And then a true obligation statement to say Something Like i think we need to deviate right now. I think and i say we instead of 30 degrees i say deviate now. A little more accessible. But that could be too much. s then i could use a suggestion and take it down a notch and say lets gogo a arou. Lets go around. So i could do and simple question. Which direction do you want to deviate. Will you go right or left . Whats up . And simply to say the preference there is a difference between turned 30 degrees right and it looks mean up ahead. And then to command an action and then so soft it is easy for you to ignore it. This is what people in the aviation world became obsessed with medication because they started to listen to the transcripts of the black box and then they began to understand in the minutes and hours before the plane crash used to allied of mitigation. That was causing all of those errors relying on hansen using the language to compel action so the air florida crash in the 1980s in washington it was a winter day so she was number 15 and then to the ford in the nice begins to reform on the wings so the copilot wants to tell the pilot look at how the ices on that back there. Total mitigation and they hope the captain fills in the blanks. And then the i. C. E. Is getting thicker. R. Then says see those icicles on the back . Now he says icicles. Then a couple more minutes ttssedpa and now the copilot is concerned and he says this is a losing battle to deice those and gives you a false sense of security. That is all it does. Little hint three sentences but still a hint see goes away into a suggestion and then says lets check the tops again. And the captain says were good to go in a minute. And then he says that when i. C. E. Forms on the wings it diminishes your left and then and then they clip the 14 street bridge and as they go down the copilot turns to the captain and the first moment of honest conversation and open communication since they got into the cockpit and the copilot says larry, we are going down larry. The captain says i know it. Now fighting mitigation is the great crusade crusade in the Airline World if you look why plane crashes have dropped so dramatically over the last 20 years simply because of the success to retrain pilots and how they talk to each other. That was never the case before now pilots are required to call by the first name if youre talking to them not captain smith but jack you are more likely to communicate openly with him. Some have got it done away with pilot and copilot are captain and first officer. It is the attempt to open communication. You know at brown they gave freshman boys all those instructions how to make out with a girl. Can i place my hand here . Yes or no. [laughter] can i move my hand 6 inches lower . Is that a yes . Please sign here. [laughter] they do that. They give you a script if you are copilot and having trouble communicating and that is surprisingly effective with more often in conversation rpwith social context difficult its one of the Great Success stories of aviation. And then think about what was going on in the cockpit in terms of mitigation. They had just blown the first landing and circling around and clouse is on the phone with the air Traffic Controller. And he says what did he say . He said i already advised him we are going to attempt again because now we can and then four seconds of silence and then says advised him we are sand emergency. That is a second time he says that. Former seconds. [silence] the captain tries again. Did you tell him . Clouse says yes sir i already advised him. That he starts talking to air Traffic Control with details and air Traffic Control says 150 maintaining 2000 avianca 052 heavy and the captain freaks ou out. Advised him we dont have fuel. He gets back on the radio with air Traffic Control and says maintain 3000 and we are running out of fuel, sir. There it is again. He does not mention the word emergency that is the word you are trained to listen for. The minute someone says emergency lacked. He doesnt use it he just says we are running out of fuel which every single plane was jfalso doing. When does he say that . In the second half of the sentence preceded by the mitigating pause. Now one minute passes. Air Traffic Control says avianca 052 heavy i will bring you 15 miles northeast then turn you back into the approach. Is that okay with you and your fuel . Andhe clouse says i guess so. Thank you very much. I guess so. Thank you very much. What is going onat here . One thing you have to know about kennedy air Traffic Control is famous possibly the finest air Traffic Controllers in the world one of the biggest airports in the world and they are also the most obnoxious air Traffic Controllers in the world and they are famous and they are bullies and will not put up with anything. Pilots of all kinds of Great Stories tell them jfk stories. [laughter] i heard one jfk is so crazy that once you land it is easy to get lost. Pilot gets lost trying to find his way to the terminal hes bothering for directions and finally she says to him and of course all pilots are listening and she says shut up. Stay there. Dont move i will get back in touch with you when i ammh ready. Is silence and the pilot says maam, was i married you in an earlier life . [laughter]r] this is what they are like. They are total bullies and push you around. The only way to get what you want if you land at kennedy is to push back and play their game. They will only respect you if you stand up to them and say this is my issue i need it resolved right now. Then they will respond. That is what he cannot do he is intimidated. What is going on . Think very much and that is what is so puzzlingou about thi. We understand intimidation and mitigation when you avoid a thunderstorm 25 miles ahead. We can understand it when we are in the plane on the ground at Washington National its possible and then he was worried and its really hard to understand mitigation when you are in aar plane and the fuel gauges on empty and you know you will crash unless you do something now. So thats the puzzle. Why is klaus that way . So the answer i think, or one of the answers is to use the work of this fascinating dutch psychologist who works for ibm in the sixties and what has to be done is goes around the world to give them a detailed psychologicall questionnaire how should we behave as a country differently inow ifdifferent cultures do we behave the same way and cape town as copenhagen . And then try to get a read on what it means and then those dimensions that are famous and cross culture. And a wave of understandingto that the cultures of the world differ. He comes up with a series of dimensions so one of them is individualism and says all the countries of the world exists somewhere so that culture is guatemala. The mosthe individualistic culture is the United States which makes sense. Why are we the only industrialized nation not to have National Health insurance . Because were individuals. So to what extent do you feel responsible for the welfare of someone other than yourself . And any other country in the world . Another one of his dimensions uncertainty avoidance how tolerant is ambiguity. If there is a big crisis do you adhere to the rules of thehe principles before hand . So there are wide differences among that dimension so those that are least tolerant of ambiguity or most keen to sticking to the rules of circumstances of greece, portugal, guatemala, ury and belgium so on the other end of the spectrum, the most tolerant of ambiguity or hong kong, sweden, denmark , singapore and jamaica. Limits important to understand. He just says its one of the ways that culture differs and to understand when we deal with the culture that this is specific along these lines it is one of the least tolerant of ambiguity in denmark is the most they are to northern countries that architecture is the same but you would think as a strangermo going in and then to say no. On this dimension, denmark has more in common with jamaica and belgium has more in common with guatemala. That is a fascinating insight. So the most interesting and crucial for our purposes is power distance which is the measure of orientation to hierarchy by asking questions like how likely in your culture to express disagreement with a superior. And then to have more experience or a higher social standing so how is it with positions in power to down portland downplay or accentuate the status and there are huge differences. So to see political leaders to hide their power so we go to austria you can see he was a the Prime Minister takes the streetcar to work. Thats what you do said he was once on holiday in spain he saw the primeme minister of the etnetherlands in a vacation trailer park. [laughter] that is one of the lower power distance countries in the world thats what you do if you the Prime Minister of the netherlands to act as normal as you can. So what are the odds you seen the president of france in a trailer park in spain . [laughter] and those that are right next door to each other. And those for the aviation world thats exactly what we have been talking about. And then to express disagreement with a superior so this completely helps us to understand to combat plane crashes in the culture that respects hierarchy the task to combat mitigation and then to understand the likelihood of a culture to have a plane crash just by looking at thet level in a very famous paper done in the eighties where they list all the countries of the world according to plane crashes per capita according to the power distance of their pilot and they discover this is the most powerful way to understand the likelihood of a particular airline having a crash so its the countries that you would expect. Austria, United States, australia, israel, one of the most low powered on earth can you imagine and israelis subordinate having difficulty expressing disagreement in this area . [laughter] somebody was telling me one of theau big problems with the israeli army patrol on the west bank at night is the leader of the patrol just cant get the people who are supposed to be subordinates to shut up. Because is a no no no. Dont go that way. [laughter] one of the countries that has one of the highest levels . Columbia. In fact the crash is notot the first time klaus the national avianca 052 had this type hiof accident. Back to back crashes they have an investigation and they have had for crashes in quick succession all took exactly the same t form. The plane in perfect working order the pilots were noter sic. Not a massive mistake. Not a massive technological failure. But they still crash because of a social breakdown between the pilot and the copilot. Bre there was a crash in madrid i will quote you the two lines from the conclusion from the report. The copilot saw something trying to bring it to the attention of the pilot and failed. The report said the copilot was right. But they died, the plane crash because when the copilot asked questions the implied suggestions were very weak. The captains reply was to ignore him totally. This is the endemic problem with avianca 052 the problem wasnt one of klaus and ability to communicate effectively that avianca 052 problem of the inability of copilots to communicate. Even more than that but system of the culture to allow subordinates to openly question their superiors. They could not be understood individually is a much larger context. Its very easy to find this fitalk offensive so defined that language and that line of argument to be problematic with good reason because so often that stereotype is used to harm. One of the arguments i make in the book there are times and locations we havehe to talk. Plays an Important Role how we behave in think and go about doing our job and we have to be willing to confront legacies this is not what they do a good job for my culture does go on do a good job. So we leave all kinds of problems on the table. So understand where he is from and what happens to the plane that night, he comes from a culture deeply hierarchical and its very difficult for us subordinate to speak openly to a superior. Leaders are supposed to lead whats going on . He is not leading. The man supposed to be in charge isin exhausted. He is on the end of his tether. Hes going around for an hour and a half. Klaus is all by himself. And kennedy controllers are the totally low power distance obnoxious bully new yorkers. He tells them he is in trouble he uses his own culture language that says when you say that you mitigate. Who are the controllers . They come from a different cultural context. And they hear someone mitigate they dont think they are being appropriately deferential to authority but they dont have a problem. It is an incredible moment with a cultural disconnect between klaus and air Traffic Controllers its almost painful to read it is our lastt exchange between air Traffic Control and avianca 052. Klaus just said i guess so thank you very much. And the pilot says what did he say . What did the controller just tell you . Understand this is the very end of the flight in this foggy night somewhere over long island. The fuel gauges at empty. One of the Flight Attendants knows the story because she was one of the few survivors comes in the cockpit at that moment to ask what is going on. She asked the Flight Engineer and he just goes like this. They know it is over. And then there is klaus at wits end because he is using his own cultural language to communicate the seriousness to air Traffic Control and realizes he has completely failed. Completely failed. The only way you can make sense ofns that is to assume he has somehow offended air Traffic Control. So the pilot says what did he say . And klaus says they guy is angry. Than the Flight Engineer says flameout on engine number four. Then the pilot says where is the runway thinking he can bring it into land but he cant because they are miles away. Then there is two minutes of nothing but static than the last thing you hear air Traffic Control comes on and says avianca 052 do you have enough fuel to make the runway . [applause] i think we have time for a few questions. Back to outliers and i call yourself an outlier so what are the cultural background there is a section the book and what it takes to be good in that it seems to master complex task you to practice 10000 hours. Outside of that . Im not good at answering autobiographical questions. But i grew up in an atmosphere with my parents who were borderline alcoholics but that seemed like a good thing. And with that work in that way. Thank you very much. One of the examples people who practice well is the beatle beatles. I am curious. I understand how they use their Technical Skills but their longterm success was from their ability to innovate did that come from practice or Something Else . Make this was an reference along the same lines talking about the beatles before they come to america there is an extraordinary the soldier in a strip club they play eighten hours sets, seven days a week thats where they get their 10000 hours. The questionn is and the ability to innovate. And what innovation is and if you master that field well enough to master the responsibility. Its very difficult to innovate if you dont know what to innovate or whats wrong with the existing paradigm. And as rock bands go, they had played together 1200 times by the time they come to america. And by the time they are in their early twenties. And then when you have that different type of background. I recently discovered the podcast on the website. Immediately went to become part of the event to realize its easier to be invited especially with a ten year waiting list. I could spend 10000 hours and perfect days skilled. But do you have tips how to convince the members to invite you . [laughter] no. I have not been invited back. I am in the same predicament as you are. [laughter] if i hear anything i will pass it along. I[laughter] i enjoy your books i hope you keep writing them. The lack of women in the first half with individuals and groupst of people it isnt surprising and then those exceptions and then success before her. And with the ideal year for males do you think the age of the woman and is before us . What you think about female , success . You are right there is an absence of women in the first half of the book it is dishonest to put them in. The whole argument is the function that is granted by society. Am pointing out through Human History to have those opportunitiesd in one of the ways be glossed over the to tell stories of success pretending there is as many women ase men. It is a day simple function of ability but do i think that will change . I hope so. To buy another version in 40 years. [laughter]i and then tell a very different story. To tell the story of jewish lawyers. You cannot find any end the cold war. It isrt amazing. This group beautifully poised to take on a profession but yet all of those opportunities were granted to 50 percent of the population. It is a reminder how tragically we have underutilize the talent of population. Hello. I havent read your most recent book yet you may have answered this question but there is an author writing about selfdeception and he actually cited the same story of the icing on the wings with the pilots enemy can deceive ourselves that everything is okay but itsin not so do you think that concept claims of those cultural ideas . So to apply that may be what that is happening is part of the deception is the hierarchy will take care of you the person higher up the chain knows more than you where as the culture is a more random fact then speaks to ability your judgment and then going on in the high power distance world but that high power distance is not always a bad thing. But that chapter is concerned with the high power distance culture. And then to struggle with this issue in the year but in all other areas that has been enormously useful. It doesnt go from being in ruins at the end of the korean war to one of the most powerful economic forces in kothe world in the past halfcentury and those ideas that support this organization in order. So i hesitate to describe hierarchy entirely in negative terms. It seems a lot of what you are talking about is out of peoples control with the culture we come from and what we have been raised with. Given the other factor the amount practice was something we choose to engage with is there something we can choose with the culture that we come from . . To my annoyance but im the opposite. The culture is only deterministic of our behavior if we choose to ignore it. Its about clean air and how that goes from one that is almost pushed out of business to now one of the premier airlines in the world. Precisely because they say they decide at long last to confront their cultural legacy and deal with that. They discover their honest and open in thiss instance, the cockpit, acting like a korean is not a good idea. Changed it. They do. They take it this close from to now ang worldclass airline. We continue the theme in the second half of the book. Once we can confront culture we can change it. Its only if we pretend it doesnt exist. This is the great objection to deal with cultural stereotypes in society. We decided its better to ignore them in the interest of those few cases. That is a shame. I devoted chapter in the book which talks a about that points out asian people vastly outperform their western counterparts so can we learn from them . Yes we can. Western culture is deficient giving kids the emotional equipment necessary to achieve. We do a terrible job and into a really good job. Does that mean we are prisoners of that notion . Know. There are schools like the Charter School movement so can we get disadvantaged hispanic and students . Yes you can. And then you have to be determineded about it and then say we havent prepared them properly we should look up on cultural legacies and just say lets assume everyone has us andng to teach thats way we get around the trap of the hierarchy of cultures. [applause] thank you for joining us tonigh tonight. Form agh signing line. Thank you for joining us. [inaudible conversations] you are watching book tv on cspan2. Serious television for serious readers. Now, gladwell is the other six books in a longtime staff writer at the new yorker. Coming up next for 2013 is a look at his book david and goliath about underdogs and why they often succeed. Here is Malcolm Gladwell. I brought some of my colleagues and friends here to see Malcolm Gladwell and one of them i handed the ticket and he said that guy with the crazy here . [laughter] he is known for a lot more than that. Despite having writtenoo a book called brains to power, one of the beauties of his works is he makes you think. His work uncovers truths in data and as a marketer and philosophy major, things that are uncovering the hidden truth are dear to my heart and another reason i like Malcolm Gladwell. Is fascinating style to give use one insights about our world and our place in it. Is best selling books include the Tipping Point, outliers. How many people have read the Malcolm Gladwell black . A lot of you. That explains why Malcolm Gladwell is the number one bestselling author on amazon in the business section and he wakes 19 overall in history on amazon. Com. [applause] his new book which he is here to talk about is called david and goliath. Philadelphia is an appropriate venue to talk about underdogs. [laughter] of course with rocky the biggest underdogs. In this book Malcolm Gladwell challenges conventional notions of obstacles the beauty and progress which arrives from suffering and diversity. His singular gift is animating the experiences of his subject and to have the uncanny ability to simplify without being simplistic in the service of storytelling. Ladies and gentlemen please join me to welcome Malcolm Gladwells be. [applause] thank you it is a pleasure to be here. I think this is my third time. It only gets better. It occurred to me coming here the first stop on my book tour in new york but then they went to San Francisco for jcc. [laughter] and i then washington with the synagogue you can see where im going with this. Se [laughter] and then tonight. [laughter] the one to talk to nonjewish audiences. [laughter] [applause] glad that worked out. So from that point to talk about my book tonight figure you would buy the book. So i thought i would talk about a book of the story that is related in one of the themes is why do underdogs fight . Why do people who are outgunned and outmanned andtc overmatched continue to keep on fighting against much larger and stronger opponents . What fuels that kind of resistance . So to tell a story about someone on a very important way one of the most important figures there is very in her life to suggest or pretend with our life radicalism and if we understand how she came to the why People Choose to battle and belmont is the name the other name that she became famous in Elvis Smithers that she was born with the semi prosperous and then moving to new york city and domineering bad tempered evil and maniacal she picked fights even from the youngest age little that the friend of hers tried to be nice to resemble the pekinese that would be more accurate to say that she looked a lot like a pitbull. [laughter] and one of the indomitable people that walks into a room and it takes it over. That she is in new i york for grand ambitions and decides the only way she will make her mark on the world as if she has s access to some kind of money. She doesnt have any herself so castor i across new york society and settles on a man named vanderbilt to was a charming and handsome playboy you happen to be the grandson of the richest man in the world. So she marriesches him. She wears him a daughter and two sons and then sets about on a course to become the greatest conspicuous consumer in the history of conspicuous consumptions. Me realize what an extraordinary accomplishment that is. The first thing she does is buy a Hundred Acres on long s island and instructs the architects of the time to build her something overlooking the bay. And then to build the french style chateau that cost 3 million that is a couple hundred nine in todays money so to give you a sense to give you an account of one of the many books written about vanderbilts portfolio what they could be called real estate pornography. [laughter] everything was everywhere walls of red african marble hunting with brocade and leaves and flowers and butterflies with precious stones feelings of mahogany and bamboo and wainscoting and ebony and ivory and creation oriental renaissance french and victorian touches. [laughter] in crowded rooms with stainedglass and marble and mosaic. And then she decides she wants a yacht and then when she christens the alberta. But then to build one in Newport Rhode island so this required first the construction of a special harbor big enough to handle the 500,000 cubic feet of the marble sheju was importing. And now her attention turns to her daughter. She is a painfully shy girl raised under the strictest of fashion make her mother. Required only to speak french to her parents. On friday nights she must recite a poem from german by memory in front of her mother. Wear a corset at all time with a steel bods inof the back. If she makes the slightest misstepp in public immediately ridiculed and corrected by her mother. And that she injures adolescent adolescents, alba get the idea what she really wants to do is marry her daughter off to an english aristocrat. This is not an original idea at this time. At this time it was fashion for the wealthy daughters to be married off to the sons of english aristocrat on aristocrats it was called cash for class. [laughter] but she only wants the very her daughter so her high falls on Charles Richard John Spencer Churchill who was the night drew of marlboro the linear ancestor of princess di and the first cousin of Winston Churchill in the air to the palace one of the private homes in the world the main buildings of which encompass 7 acres and make alberts chateau look like a ranch style bungalow. Yl [laughter] but she does her homework and discovers the house is falling down in churchill doesnt have the funds to fix it up and she realizes there is my opportunity. So the first idea that sonny is a miserable side and to give you a sense his second wife emily d can use to sleep with a revolver by capello in case her husband should come to her in the middle of the night. [laughter] the second problem is that she was madly in love with winthrop waterford from fabulous new york family and a dashing man and gradeew athlete and she gets a single rose in the mail with no note and she knows its from hi him. Not long after she goes for a bicycle ride so as she approaches a corner in the road so out of sight of the turns and then he proposes and she says absolutely. That she realizes something is up so she tries to catch up and she looks at her daughter and she realizes what just happened so she whisks her daughter away the next day to paris and winfrey sends letter after love letter to his beloved and each is intercepted and then he gets on about it goes to paris to meet her and all the bars the door. And then he takes her to the cottage in newport and marks her up like a pencil in the castle and when he comes to try to see her once again he cannot get there. Finally she had enough and she marches up the marble staircase to herghk mothers bedroom replete with cherubs holding shields in place and with a letter. [laughter] and says you cant do this to me. I am in love with this man i can marry the man they choose. Her mother turns to her in a cold rage and says absolutely not. You will be a duchess. Do you know what that means . Consuela summers and doesnt say a word and in defiance her mom turns into a rage because no one ever defies her. She calls them every name under the sun and consuelo stands there and takes it into realize there is no point she cannot defy her mother. She has to give up on the man she loves. On november 6, 1895 new york sees the grandest wedding in history the daughter of one of the richest men in the country marries one of the grandest aristocrats on fifth avenue and all the hired 80 decorators just to work on the sanctuary. She marches up the aisle with her two young sons wearing this extraordinary blue satin dress and outsiders every reporter in the country taking photographs and they are held back by Police Officers with the grand carriages and elvis stands at the front of the church probably awaiting her daughter. And she waits and she waits for five minutes and ten minutes. Consuelo does not show up because she is at home weeping into the arms of her father. Finally she pulls herself together and they cleaned her up and gets in the carriage and goes to the church. The minister pronounces the man and wife and alva immediately whisks her daughter and soninlaw into a room behind the sanctuary and the prenuptial a assigned 1 million upfront with a guarantee of 100,000 per year for life he gets into a carriage with his pride and they drive off down fifth avenue and sonny says i thank you shouldft know i dont love you. And i will never love you. Your responsibility is to fix the castle and bear me an error. Standing on the steps of the church is alva and a tear comes to her eye as she watches the carriage go down fifthve avenue. The greatest moment of her life. The little girl for mobileob alabama now the mother of a duchess. Fulfillment of all of her dreams. Or so she thinks because things are about to get a little complicated. Now iof said earlier i think of as an unlikely radical and you can seean why its not typically the case that very wealthy people with lots of homes and fancy close turn into radicals. Its like the kardashian sisters joining the occupy movement. [laughter] its a little unlikely. So how do we account for this . The best way to answer that is to take a step back in general why it is they choose to rebel against authority. There is a numberar of answers. So People Choose to break the law or go against authority or disobey where and the cost of disobedience is lower than the benefits we way whether its worth it makes more sense to fight back then it does to succumb then we fight back. This is called deterrence third on theory. In 1970 the police in montreal strike and then in the 19 hour. And then people started to rob banks and gunbattles in the streets this is canada so there are all kinds of cases to explain our behavior so a simple one would be the decision of people want to pay their taxes. A little cheating on taxes iner fact this is probably americans are more honest on tax savings and anyone else in the world. Now so the question is, if the return theory works, that would suggest that therr penalties for cheating on her taxes must be creature here an increase or in italy. The cost of breaking the law must be greater in this country if we are so well behaved on tax day. Well if that is a case. Know stunts pretty in fact the penalties for cheating on taxes are lower peer than anywhere else. Basically, we dont really have penalties. The irs, you dontwe pay her tas and the finance, theyie just tel you to pay them. And pay small penalty. They really putte you in jail fr it. And the auditse rate in this country, is a fraction of what they are in other countries. If you cheat on taxes, you probably wont get caught. I dont mean for any of you to take that to heart. [laughter]. But the fact is that taxpaying behavior this country does not collide with the deterrence theory. It doesnt make any sense. Heres another example. If the deterrence theory really works then countries or jurisdictions the dramatically increased their penalties for breaking the law, must or should see a decline in crime. Bso lets look at the best example of that. California, years ago they enacted the most dramatic increase in the severity of criminal penalties that we have seen almost anywhere in the western world. Over the last 100 years. My treat strikes, it was unbelievable increase in severity. So what happened. If the deterrence theory is correct, i mean plunge in california. Good. Will it did but then it also plunged same time and every of the state in the union. Even those who didnt change the laws at all. As we have looked closer and closer, to the california experience what we discovered is that no one really can figure out what happened in california. Some people say the crime went down a little bit and some people say that Nothing Happened in other peopleli said that actually crime is higher today than if they wouldnt have passed that line california. Once again, the legitimacy theory does not seem to explain what people do or dont behave or behave theeh law. So if the response of these problems of deterrence. Most people come forward andof said, the real issue is not that. It is not the cost of the benefits of breaking the law. It is really how the law or how laws are enacted pretty includes scholars. What really matters is whether people perceive the laws that govern them to be legitimate. By the german it would be three things print one has that people will be the law when they feel like they are treated with respect. They feel that if they speak up, they will be heard. To have a right to speak up. People will perceive a lot thats legitimate when they feel like it is fair. The one off for me or are we all being treated roughly the same. They also will of a lot when they see it legitimate when they feel like it is consistent. Is it going to change dramatically tomorrow. Think back to the puzzle of why americans in texas. We pay her taxes not because they are huge penalties associated with cheating. We believe theve american system mais legitimate. But the truth of the matter is, if you stand up and complain about your taxes, we be barred. Of course you will be barred. Entire party in the american political system devoted to listening to be roundly aboutar the taxes. His affair. Also perfect. But it is pretty fair. There is a whole different set of rules for certain kind of people. But the amount of unfairness in our system is a fraction of the unfairness and other systems around the world. An effort is our system consistent. Yes it is. We dont go willynilly from one year to the next grade make changes in our tax code after a lot of discussion. We know what is happening. This isnt some kind of strange and knowable system. Not now compare that to greece. They fails on all three counts. You cant speak up in the system. It is totally corrupt. Eapeople cutting special deals that changes from one year to the next. It treats one class of citizens completely different than another class of citizens pretty we would pay her taxes either if it was like that. Completely legitimate. P didnt three stacks of a discernible affecting company. Guess maybe if you block out everyone in sight which is what california did pretty baby people from thoset communities come to think of the system is illegitimate readiness on forget that california and the tenures after three strikes was passed, the prison population doubled. They ended up on a per capita basis, seven times as many bapeople in prison as canada or western europe. Thats an astonishing number. Do you think that the people from those communities this essentially an entire cohort of black men picked up and shipped off to prison, do you think that they perceived system is legitimate. Do you think they thought they could speak up and be part of they thought the once over the same set of rules for governing White America as governing their community. To think they saw the system is being consistent and trustworthy as opposed to arbitrary. Of course not. So what happens in situations where people perceive system is illegitimate. They were built. They get angry. They feel no compulsion to obey the law. Nothing serves as a bigger enginede a defiance in the condition of feeling that you are under some kind of disrespectful and trustworthy arbitrary system. Which brings us back to alpha pretty because she lived in a society that did not treat her with any legitimacy. It seems hard to believe because here we have this insanely rich woman running around building these castles. It seems like she would have no complaints in the world. But the truth is she lived in a world that was incredibly narrow and oppressive. Women of her class and station, were expected to stay at home and keep their mouth shut. They werent allowed to post on the could not have jobs, they could not go to college. He cannot participate in any many fourway in the public life of which they were apart. They were told to stay at home, take care of the children and service and put on dinner parties. The men meanwhile, do whatever they wanted. College, start businesses, have meaningful jobs, run for Public Office. None of the laws that time, men who divorce woman simply by alleging infidelity. For a moment to diverse demand, she had approved infidelity and cruelty. One set of rules for women in one supplement. And the men in that circle that she was a part of, but i dont everyone they wanted. We get on the jeep pretty Marvin Johnson gutsy and filthy out with congressman mr. Since an apartment in town with whom they openly consorted. Meanwhile, the women, they had to stay home and keep up this parents is pretty and willie been about, he was no exception. He was a spoiled boy. He didnt work for a living. Inherited this gigantic fortune he was handsome and charming and had an affair after another. Openly. And in front of all of the people in their social circle. Was required to keep her mouth shut and be the dutiful hostess. And from the outside to look like a woman in command of her world. In effect, she was very happy. She was later described the years leading up to the wedding, was the worst of her life. And she a bully and began to argue. She had begun to feelsh increasingly trapped in dissatisfied. To be demand. With whom she falls in love with. But she cannot have an affair with him. Theres no way abu woman of her situation and sandy can possibly do with all the men were doing. And she finally an attempt to save her marriage, charitably and she says, can we take a family vacation. And so the coop withto the famy to paris but its a complete disaster because the minute ticket to paris, but it starts an affair. Not just with her best friend. But also with this prostitute. Highclass prostitute in paris called nelly rated as she runs around paris but these two women completely humiliating alpha pretty and she feels she has no choice. And so she kicks out pretty she said that is it. And everyone in her life, since you cannot do that. Lawyer with whom she tries to file divorce papers against, her husband said no, it wont do it for her. That would be ridiculous bring all of herit friends are up in arms. In the, can you imagine. To descend on her. So here we. Have to one of the wealthiest couples all america, having this very publicly god. You can imagine with the press did pretty she comes out of the church in fortwh worth sheep has been attending her entire adult life and all of these people who she considers her friends, turned their back on her. They will talk to her. They pretend she does not exist. She feels she has no choice. In later life when she writes her memoirs. She raises incredibly poignant passage about what it was likee to beo a woman in that era and she says, it was considered religious dignified incorrect for the wife to withdraw into the shadows while her husband and family respects to the sunshine. The woman was supposed to get her sunlight by proxy through her husband. Here we have this brilliant ambitious and driven woman. Inwo todays world, she would be an entrepreneur. She would govern their own company. She would be running something pretty Public Office right. She would be taking on the world on a grand scale. But every one have those at fitness is denied to her. What is the only thing she can do. Build houses. So it is do, she builds houses. Right on the grandest most ambitious scale she can and why because she has no other outlet for her Extraordinary Energy and extraordinary nativity and intelligence. And she is frustrated. Society in which he lives, want to give her a chance to do anything being full. And this also make sense her seemingly excusable inexcusable behaviors around her daughter, then her daughters marriage. Our daughter may be in love with winthrop butt winthrop, shoulde remembered was 33. At the time that consuela was 18. He was as handsome man from a family that was described by one of the tabloids ofra that era as best known for wearing expensive clothing. Hes a dilettante. He plays golf and follows with nothe Newport Country Club all y long. She seeslooks at him, just another version of her own useless and useless husband. Some by the societal deck content plan drug it will condemn her daughter to a lifetime of misery. By contrast, what does it do. Hes a miserable thug in another country. In a place where she could be called the duchess an embryo standing inss society. Insanity listen to when she wants to speak. Have a place in a Public Affairs on that world and live in a society that is free from the kind of stressful constraints of new york high society. To us, that sounds like a dreadfully cynical calculation. Because consuelo was generally genuinely in love with him. And we think that love to be the basis for marriage. The 100 years ago in the society in which, was apocalypse seemed to her like an impossible luxury. Consuelo was a great hope. And she was not going to let her daughter squander her life in the same way she felt her own life had been squandered. So that moment when consuela and sonny are pulling away in the carriage and here tear comes to him as i read is a tragic moment for her. This is a woman played to alienate her own blooded daughter. In order to save her. This is a woman who was trapped in the most horrible and loveless and benighted marriage rated this as a woman who has witnessed the society in which she has a part turned against her. Why, because she dared to stand up to thiss jerk she was marrid to. Shes a woman who was living a life of indescribableo help. She does not turn back or back down. And why not. Because she b does not perceive the authority of those which on hard as legitimate. They have notot given or standig pretty did not elaborate to speak up about what is going wrong. And not her fairly. The law the governor her and tells her what she should and shouldnt do do is arbitrary. Is not trustworthy. She supposed to stay at home and be quiet while her husband runs around town the french prostitute. And that that moment when, is in a position of indescribable, she is undergoing the moment it already. Y. She is angry. One of the things that im trying to figure out an answer in my book and david and goliath is why it is the people in positions of power failed to understand the significance of anger. Why do we understand just what a powerful emotion it is for people who appear to be on the outside. They appear to have no obvious resources to hold in their hearts. Im a chapter the book about the troubles in ireland. I went and spent a good portion of one summer there pretty assessment that i would recommend that anyone do. But it was over the summer that i went to a meeting is held in the neighborhood, catholic neighborhood. It was to commemorate the anniversary of the nascar pretty when british troops opened fired on a group of catholic civilians them. G several of and in, no one thinks about this customer anymore. It was 30 years ago. They moved on. Not dwelling onn it. They are worried about other things. They think of it as something that is happened in the past. But if you stood in that auditorium as i did, just like this this many people as this. They were talking about events that happened three decades ago pretty wouldve thought that the shooting had happened yesterday. The emotions for that row. People were collapsing in tears and crying out in the brief and being pulled screaming from the room. It made me realize that long after we have forgotten the consequences of her actions, the people who have been oppressed and abused continue to nurse the rage in their anchoring own hearts. It made me think about what people think in iraq and pakistan and afghanistan. Were going to move on from them and we are going to forget about them. Were going to think it is all done and dusted. But that is a a mistake. If the people who we were fighting against, did not or do not perceive authority as legitimate. They will. Anger in the hearts for generations. And we will bear the consequences. And that was the situation with help of breed new when the renter understood the consequences of her anger. No one understood what it meant to have a ticking time bomb in their midst. It was Walking Around with agreements. In the consequences would be great read in the greatest of ironies, the person who sets off the ticking time bomb, that is what pretty is consuela her daughter pretty in the years after her marriage to sonny. This weather was transformed. She risen two sons and she would thereafter refer to as near and stare. [laughter]. And then she leaves him. Of course she does. And when she leaves him, she so respected by her peers in the english society. And she handles yourself with such grace and everyone knows what a complete jerk her husband is rated and London Society surrounds her. And she turns into one of the leading moral voices of her generation. She becomes an advocate for genuine social justice and change in victorian england. And in oh eight she returns to new york for the first time. Then suddenly tall and beautiful charismatic woman. And she gives a famous speech towards all of the assembled Society Ladies of new york. At the walter authority. And what she has discovered when her time in england, this is a very different place than i the market. Woman really couldgl stand up ad speak out pretty england was a place to occur, they could play a real role in public society. And what she does tour. Lisa c all of these assembled society of ladies is chastised them. An essay youre wasting your life. You are slave to your husband. Evocative resources an opportunity to make a difference in your not taking it braided you are a disgrace. And sitting in the front row of the audience is about. You can imagine how she feels. Fifteen years ago she had sent her daughter off in tears. And taking her away from the only man shed ever loved. Because she felt that was the only way to save her. Now her daughters back in new york and what is happened. Her daughter has been saved. And they have a talk afterwards after the speeches over and she turns to her and she said in spite of everything. I am glad i married him, and englishmen. And you can imagine, a weight has been lifted off of her back read all the kilts that shes been carrying around with her so long is unsolved. In a long after that, albert except the invitation to hear speech on the suffrage movement. And woman of course in america and around the world in those years not vote. Theyve been denied that most basic of human rights. And during the period in america, billy farmer concedes, were women giving limited rights. Wyoming, idaho and colorado read but the movement for nation wide Voting Rights and installed. It was going to work. And alva this is to the speech and she felt like this was the only by winning then vote can e create a system inom america against women voice. That treats them fairly. Entry seven without, trustworthy and non arbitrary manner. And she looked at the stated that movement to keep realizes that it is in disarray. They could not drive from that but no strategy. They have no energy, no resources, no money. All those things are things that alva has. So what is she do. She does the same thing she is in her entire life. She merges and she takes over. And headquarters on the moment in that era was in ohio. And alva hears his rollsroyce. She said, are you kidding me. Warren, ohio and she moves it into a building that she bought on fifth avenue in new york. Then she says my country cottage in newport, rhode island. Thats going to be our convention headquarters. This turnout started have the meanings of movement, miss the ffgrand juror of alvas house whether fancy neighborse look n with outrage. And when a group of female immigrant workers go on strike in protest against the appalling conditions under which they work and start in march through downtown manhattan. Who is in the front of the march. Alva is. When they get arrested and are being held by judge in some prison in downtown new york. Who stands in the courtroom all night long eyeballing the judge until we let them freak. Alva desperate and who stands up and says wait a minute. The black women of america belong in this movement. Until that point, therewo had bn a group of black women off on their own but this blackandwhite to the mix but alva said what you mean, the women just like us. They belong with us. And when the movement was perceived by some as having to quickly. Many stood up and said, if we continue to be this aggressive, were going to start antagonizing men. And alva says that men dont worry about antagonizing men. Why shouldd we read in the First World War starts. Unless of suffrage would say that this is no time for us to be pushing for this kind of radical reform. We should take down the particulars outside of the white house. And alva stands up and says over my dead body. This isys exactly the time thate should be pushing for this kind of radical form. And she made sure that the tickets stood up there until the end of the war. And what happened to alva in this period, you can imagine. She was roundly denounced and ostracized and pushed out of society. She was seen as this domineering tutorial ego maniacal woman who had barged into anor organizatin in lebanon some radical aspirated mission of the the other thing that happened. On august 18, 1920. Nineteen the movement to thest United States constitution was aspirated giving women for the first time in American History, the right to vote. And that lesson of alvas great history is pertinent today as it was 100 years ago read and that is if you deny people legitima legitimacy, they will one day, by one means or another, come back and defeat you. One last thing. Alva dies in the spring of 1933 from a stroke. Their funerals held at st. Thomas church on fifth avenue. The same church where her daughter was married so many years ago. And everyone shows up. The limousines lined the streets read and their reporters from every newspaper in the country, and the crowds strong. And police and the 20 of the most prominent feminists in the Country Service or pallbearers. An inner surface, the crowd sings, three hymns. The first is a famous him by. So, the second is separate that a song the march of the women. Andof the third is him composedy alva herself. Greatest of all tributes to this remarkable and extraordinary woman. In the hymn is all about how when alva is heaven, shall be damned if shes going to let the man see peter, stand in judgment of her. [laughter]. An it begins, no waiting at the gates of paradise. The tribunal of men to judge. The watchers of the tower proclaim, a daughter of the cane. Thank you. [applause]. [applause]. I think we have time for questions. I forgot how they work but i can repeat the question so people can hear. Guest where in the world do you see the greatest illegitimacy right now. Malcolm in so many places large and small. In any country where, but in the are treated in many parts of the middle east. Look at the way in this country, we continue to treat Illegal Immigrants or other groups. I could go on and on and on. Except i think that even within, we dont even have to look at a global level. We can go into Numerous Companies and you can see how underlings are treated byy their superiors. I think this is also a lesson for all of us that to be fair and impartial and consistent is the obligation of those in power read just because you have all of the resources, does not mean that you can behave as you wish. It is the old cliche, with power comes responsibility. We need to be reminded of that everyday because every day we forget it. Any other questions. Im sounding like im on my horse. Sounds so grim and forbidding. Guest in this country, incoming equality spring and rapid rate and we have recently had a demonstration that most of us dont think or feel that our government represented is fair and consistent in representing aspirated and although it seems. Jim legitimacy theory that we have rebellion at our backs. Is that what you see. Malcolm hard to say that i am, i guess islands of the site. If you need historical accounts of the last period in American History where we have income inequalities greatest we have now predict which is really of this generation. What is amazing to learn is how close this country came to massive social policy revolution this too far. But close to having a real breakdown in social order. We have forgotten that now. This is a perilous, position to have this kind of gap between rich and poor. Its not sustainable. We are saved less time by the depression by very courageous man in fdr. I hope we have similar, i dont know if we a depressing and i hope we have similar politician of courage who can sort of right the ship. Close that gap so we have a chance to have a fresh start. When the back. Guest i feel like we can hear you though. Weve given you voice freed. [laughter]. Guest your wellknown for bringing together many facts and theories rated excluding when you hone in on your research remarks. With your daily kind of info becoming sources. When he rated like what is your world is like. [laughter]. Malcolm i feel like and giving away trade secrets at this point. [laughter]. Like col. Sanders telling you about about the herbs and spices. [laughter]. [laughter]. Will nothing exciting happens. Theres a lot of kind of aimless drifting around. Theres a lot of time spent wandering through libraries hoping to stumble on something amazing. Which is what libraries and why im a selfprofessed library nerd braided because thats what happens. [applause]. La [applause]. Malcolm listening to people. You know, almost everyone has an interesting story to tell. But what none of us, will all of us have an interesting story to tell. But what we dont know is which of our stories are interesting braided because the new perspective on it read in one of the things that you learn to do if youre a journalist is probe and ask questions until you stumble on what is interesting. That might give you a little dumb example. My father, but a year and a half ago, he waited till the. As a proof of proposition the people do not know the most interesting stories are. Okay. So exhibit a. He says when the phone story reads quite a long story. Bear with me. My father raised my mother in 1958. My mothers to make it father is english. Mildly radical accident time. And they moved to jamaica and they teach at the university. And he needs to get access to a library book or his Research Read mathematical text produced on the library the university. Any campuses in the states to discover it is in the library of georgia tech. He writes to georgia tech. And they say yes. But then only later does he realize that the permission was granted to hastily read and georgia tech sent him to a panic because this was 1959. And georgia tech is a segregated institution. The realized to their horror they just granted permission to use their library to someone who teaches at the university of west indies in jamaica. Only thoughtht is, oh god, whatf he is black. So the stars this frantic attempt by the administration of georgia tech to discover whether in fact the father is black. Because its not like, he cant tell by his name pretty and you cant go on the inter net that that an image google him. So they start calling around america and sending letters. Hes in jamaica. Its hard to get calls even at the time. So panic said and bridges and finally, the day before my father essentially for this odyssey. Because it was not as a pretty good in the boat, to miami in the bus to a fun upgraded to track him down attached calls ad my father has this voice. , i have an awkward question. Iosurefire way. Summa are you white pretty my father said by yes pretty demented oh thank god. [laughter]. At which point my father mentionsme this, ill areas and obscene braided in the story and volts. So my father was a giant photograph of my mother industry my case braided ways to get to georgiaav tech braided and exemt dinners and hes all of the luminaries around the table. Then they are pale skinned and midway through dinner he pulls out picture my mother. This is determined, im a newlywed. Then the view to a picture my bride. And watches them. [laughter]. Thats an interesting story. I knew my father for 48 years before he told me the story. I never occurred to me to sit down and ask him, questions about you didnt marry my mother and 58. This mustve been pretty interesting. I think that everyone has got versions of that. We just dont understand because there are stories. We just dont understand how great they are. In one of the simplest tasks that the journalist is just to keep asking questions until you get those kind of stories. Sure. One back there. Speaking of newlyweds. Im wondering why in the context to restart we dont same sort of champions of non essential marriages today that we did 100 years ago. And how big of an injustice will will v be looked upon this 80 to 100 years from now predict. Malcolm yes. I think f it is, it took us a vy long time. I think a very is now finally falling rated but toys a astonishing how long it takes to bring about some kind of change like this. Its always amazing about the stories is why we only now on the cusp of getting may be, female president. Why only now is tied slowly turning on the legalization of gay marriage. It seems like we have these kinds of moral insights but the gap the moral insights the practical demonstration of the inside can be decades. I guess the task is to try and shrink that gap. It still amazes me. She looked blessed of major western not western. Major countries in the world. One of the few now that it never had a female that of this kind of astonishing. Even countries that you wouldve thought wouldve weakness to the punch. Sure. Guest youve already accomplished an impressive body work. Im curious if theres one particular work that you are most part of but one that you also might have looked at differently braided. Malcolm are you asking me if i have regrets. [laughter]. A few. [laughter]. I am not going to say its great if thats what youre thinking. You thought that i was going that direction didnt you. I, yeah, virtually everything ive ever done. [laughter]. So not surprising that i would have regrets about my writing. I think that will i have it read a story that since i brought it. And seemly delivers in 1998. Lets all think back to when arrives more like in 1998 braided ask yourselves, if we were suddenly transported back in time, when we feel carnival with her choices at that moment. [laughter]. Would you be happy with the way your hair look to 1998. [laughter]. Goes to work. Or the color of the furniture in your living room. Theres so many things about 1998 that are deeply versing to me in retrospect. The quite sure that if i were to reread Tipping Point, i would probably wince in pain. [laughter]. So one of my most proud of. The things that youre proud of the most are the things, all human beings are proud of things that other human being so a euro is drawn to the same. That question invite you to say, everyone in the world hated th this. They didnt understand the true genius. So i have done things that have been universally hated but i have quietly loved. So thats probably the things our product. Always like Little Things like little limericks that she wrote for someones Birthday Party fell flat when he delivered them. You actually thought they were kind of sly and ingenious. [laughter]. Is that kind of thing that i feel most proud of. But i am sure by the time im an old man, i will look back on my efforts and hang my head. Im sure that is inevitable. As with all of us read sure, in the front row. Guest is about the legacy during your talk. I was wondering how we as a country feel about reconciling with those who remain anchored over the years in the national community. Malcolm thats a really good question. So if you are the question. If you create anger. The residue of anger ineligible to see. How do you go about correcting that spring to tell the story in my book. Finally mentioning five books. An hour and 15 minutes into his book talk. I think he mentions that he written a book. [laughter]. Etell a story of david and goliath. About a woman called joanne jaffe who is the head of the house in new york city. Who asked that his job is to police and Housing Project of new york. The worst parts of the city. That said the exact orchard could she get a job and she says, police are not considered legitimate in the force neighborhoods of new york with good reason. Not because the police force as misbehaved. This because look, its really hard if you live in a community where the cops are on the presence. All see them interacting and fraught, emotionally and physically crossway with all of the young men in your neighborhood. Its very hard for you to think about forces being legitimate. I cannot get this out of my mind is that if you look at a young, the percentage of young black men were in the 1970s, who did not graduate from college. High school drop. Black high school about men pretty boring 1973 to 69 percent of them have spent some time behindn, bars. After from one of those neighborhoods. There is no way that you perceive the laws is legitimate. So thats what she said to herself. I know in charge of those neighborhoods. They dont seem he is legitimate. What do i do. What she did was to embark upon a policy up to try to win back the trust. It was an extraordinary. The results were incredible. But it took a lot of hard work braided and involved her behaving in ways the Police Officers do not normally behave. She basically had to go to the family of juvenile delinquents and make friends. Not on the door and introduce yourself read she started by bringing them turkeys and said i know you dont trust us but all i wanted to say is im here and now your kid, is delinquent, cops are always coming around and harassing him predict and appeared to say the money side. Heres a turkey. Thats how it started. She gradually one of the trust of these families the crime rate and fall. Why, because they realize the law could be inside. That took years of hard work. She had a higher Police Officers who cared about kids and you couldd do that. We knocked on the door and they say and they say a few. They had a car to be the kind of person to say, i would just like to talk to you pretty get to know you. Theres a grand way of doing it. Can only be done in the persontoperson painstaking way. She had pute her story and suca powerful lesson about in her accomplishments are so good pretty to look at the declining crime those inputs. Its just mindboggling. Guest i thought so many of the stories in your book or so moving and so inspirational. But there was one chapter about Martin Luther king that it really had trouble with. Because it seemed to me although i know that all of us responded to what we see on the radio and tv etc. But what have been taught to believe happened. I was so surprised. Malcolm dont give away the surprise ending. Spoiler alert braided careers everyone. [laughter]. Guest let me say that iar was very surprised at what you do out of Martin Luther kingst experience. I found it very upsetting. Malcolm it is supposed to be upsetting. G. I dont disagree with your reaction. So not going to give away the ending but they willin just say that tell a story about the Civil Rights Movement in birmingham. How did they manage to win against all odds braided and part of the answer is they played a trick and its a trick that made people very uncomfortable the time. That led to widespread criticism along the way Martin Luther king. In continues my people and incredible today. You and me. I will confess that nasa find that a little bit uncomfortable. Guest what did you find that. Malcolm the trick is openly admitted to by wyatt walker, Martin Luther kings number two men. So the men who played the trick after it succeeded, then was very frank about what he did. Theres no secret. He did many many interviews in the 60s in which he described precisely what they saidd about twoin foldable over the ice and the ice of the press. It is not a secret or kind of speculative conclusion. This was this really remarkable naguy whos kind of king strategist say in the shadows pretty brilliant brilliant guy. And who is the author of this kind of thing. If you read the book. Be. Curious to know your response because i said, i dont disagree with your reaction. I think it is weird but they did. Swear to think about what they did in the context. Now i cant keep talking about this. Im going to stop. I am with you. And i appreciate that response. Malcolm how do i choose. In the back. The person most disputes pressle. Glasses, blonde hair an. Guest perhaps the only sacrilegious jew who was attending on a friday night. [laughter]. I have to ask this question. Which is how much you think religious upbringing placed into this. Because i will say reform conservative to this product challenge god, do everything, challenge authority versus my catholic friend who were accepting of authority. Im wondering, you havent mentioned the religious factor yet and im wondering if it is significant in golf. Malcolm will the last of my book is all about the faith. Last two chapters in particular but also the civil rights chapter is about the consequences in part, of deep religious commitment. And what they give you. And then the two chapters are all about extraordinary things that faith makes possible. And i think, blended on that now because i came to understand and appreciate in writing the book that most significant weapon in the arsenal of underdogs, are the weapons of the spirit. Thats the power you get from your belief in god. And at the end of the day, that. G can beat then tell a story about a woman on the strength of her faith, forgives the murderer of her daughter. And lester in the book is about the village up in the mountains the france tradedll protestant village that openly takes into use during this in the world for defiance of the. And theres no mystery about why there are two sips of people who have no external material advantage. No formal power. Then no money. Thener nothing. When they have is something in the heart the says i am empowered by god to do the right thing. And that is enough. And its a very both uplifting and also kind of it moved me in the way of writing this book, in ways that the previous books did not braided just by the end, to sit in the backyard of a little bungalow in winnipeg, manitoba and talk to a woman whose daughter was murdered brutally by a sexua para durbind up on the date that her tortured daughters body was found, stood up in front of a press conference of 100 people waving microphones and face and said withoutt even knowing who your daughters murder was predict whoever he is, i am on the path of forgiving you. And that was the hearsay that was just the most charming then than enforcement still. And you could not hope to have all for the power of that type of thing if you. Firsthand. Anyway. Thank you all. [applause]. In our look at bestselling author of Malcolm Gladwells concludes with this most recent appearances cspan. This is from 201900 q a program. He spoke about his latest book, talking to strangers. Which examines how we misread strangers words and actions. Here is Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm gladwell, book number six at this rate. Talking to strangers. The premise of this book what is it. 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 high profile controversies within ourselves and, come down to the same problem. The two people he didnt know each other very well, tim to communicate and fail predict attempt to understand each other and fail. People have conversations and never understood who he was. Anna penn states, the Sexual Assault case, he just failed the communications. In the ones that really the book starts and ends with, and the signature case that im concerned with. Its one of those highprofile encounters, africanamerican sand Law Enforcement that skews me. So much in the news a few years ago. It was a conversation between young black men, and a black woman and Police Officer. And they pulled her over the conversation goes off the rail braided and i wondered why is it that we fail in these conversations with strangers. Each one of your books explores aspect of human communication pretty but is it about this topic that is so important to you. Malcolm i dont know. No one loves a transcript more than me. Ive 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. I am all in. Malcolm the people, i was unimpressed tour in england. I was interviewed by the actor russell brand. It is a big popular podcast in england. In urinating new them from the movies. And he starts to talk. I realize hes one of those astonishingly articulate people. And i was just kind of so in awe. It in the whole time i started to figure out, how is it that this man is so commanded my attention. In his choice of words. I was having difficulty answering his questions because i was so focused on like thinking about all my goodness, can leave the brilliant way that he prays that. Oh yeah i haveha to answer it. So im just drawn that. The whole aspect of human nature. For conversation, helping to illustrate some of the things that spin your book. Want to start with sanders story. This a very available video people want to watch it. Heres a small clip. Lets watch and then come back and talk a little bit more about it braided. Are you okay. This is jojo. It. Seem very irritated. I am. [inaudible]. And i moved over and you got me. You mind putting out yourst cigarette man read. I am in my car and i dont have to put out my cigarettes pradip and i do not have to step out of my car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Do not touch me. Im not under arrest. You are under arrest pretty. For what braided. I am going to drag you out of here. Not out of my car. Let me go. Well get back now. Get out of the car. You doing all of thi pretty. That interaction ended in tragedy how pretty. Malcolm she is in prison because obstructing arrest in two days later she hangs yourself and yourself. Its very tragic and unexpected results. That exchange that we saw which by the way goes on and on and on and on predict we saw a small step in of w it. 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 seek multiple failures of understanding of empathy, a million things. Just in the segment we celebrated she lights a cigarette. And we now know that but someone who had struggled withad emotiol problems. She had a failed Suicide Attempt a few months earlier. She is upset and she also had several thousand dollars in outstanding epic finds. So this was consequential for her. This happened before shes deeply in debt because of it. So shes upset when she is pullover. And she lights a cigarette to calm her nerves. The way the many smokers will tell you that is why the smoke. To calm down. So she is trying to stay under control good and unconsciously i think, from the Police Officer, i dont want this to go awry. Im trying to calm down. He wont let her any caesar lighting the cigarette is negative defiance. If you watch the entire video tape. Constantly you see the two of them are talking entirely at each other. And he is reading her distress as evidence of something sinister. Cspan you been thinking about these concepts for a while that you are watching this video many times and find yourself getting angrier. Its been six years since you produced a book so what was it that crystallized this is the topic . I am drawn to all of those encounters beginning with ferguson to be extraordinarily multilayered. On the one hand they were deeply personal about Police Officers confronting someone. Someone getting shot so when the department of justice report comes out ferguson one and is the actual comment to the Police Officer and what happened between him and Michael Brown that explains why he is up on charges clear withs obvious violation of the law. The Second Department of justice report which is more important is about the ferguson Police Department that had been essentially a predatory force of the Africanamerican Community and using their power and authority for as many different people as they could. The city was running itself on tickets. Cops were encouraged to write tickets for everything and when you see the thing they were engaged in the previous couple of years, that this is a town where the community was so completely alienated from the police force because of the way they were behaving. Thats the context for ferguson. If you only look at the encounter you miss the real story. Thats what happened before her years and years using them like the atm like no police force is supposed to do one of the dea john doj reports was exculpatory and one was such a devastating critique and they sat sidebyside and in order to understand that struck me as incredibly interesting because we have a tendency some time looking at dose encounters to only the first look and the interaction with a cop to think we can settle the issue with that interaction but ferguson reminds us that this is just the beginning of your job you have to take a step back toou say what would that environmental condition encounter . And i wanted to do Something Like that but only go even broader and start to pull in all the other cases i talk about. Host you spent three years on this project also the notes that you never met a transcript that you dont like and a lot of travel anddo interviews. People wonder where all those case studies that you could bring to bear on a topic how do you select the ones that say yes this helps . Its an art. Sometimes your successful sometimes you are not. Theres no procedure i like to tell a variety of stories. Just to remind people what the stakes are. If every story i told in the book was a story of an encounter between a young africanamerican in the Police Officer people would think hes just talking about strangers he means just Police Officers and black people. I dont want that i want people to give reason im trying to Say Something thats actually quite broad the way all of us talk to strangers. I honestly dont believe that many of us could have made the same mistakes the Police Officer did in that video i dont think he is unusually inept or incompetent or biased , i think he is a Police Officer who was inexperienced that we are not Police Officers we are not stopping people in the street with guns when i screw up with my understanding of a stranger what is the consequence . Somebody doesnt like me nobody is dead. Thats important to keep in mind this book is to make us complicit in some of these tragedies. One of the concepts you say that we do is default to truth . This comes from a psychologist whose work i rely on a lot in talking to strangers. He is trying to understand a puzzle that has obsessed psychologist why are human being so bad at figuring out deception my ability to tell if you are lying to me is scarcely better than chance. With a few small exceptions and thats puzzling because he would think we would be good at it that evolution would have selected for. His explanation it doesnt select for the lie but for the opposite for people who are willing to believe implicitly what they are told because if you do b that and the default to truth then your life is so much easier. You can Start Companies and form groups and send your kids to school and not war worry in a million things you can do if you believe what people tell even go into a store and buy 100 items and be satisfied the bill they give you at the end is accurate it is an extraordinary thing there is 100 opportunities in your shopping cart for someone to cheat you but how oftenen do you see someone say wait i dont believe thats 119. Doing team ive seen someone do that is my father who was a mathematician and had a gift for doing it in his head would count along with the checkout person and only if they under charged him with ath correct one what he correct them but i remember as a little kid he was actually iou an extra 75 cents. [laughter] he wasnt doing it because he distrusted but that was a power trip that the reason we were able to do this is that we trust implicitly and automatically so if you understand that there is a cost to that we will occasionally be deceived they were not good at a scam artist thats why made off exist not genius but if you systematically lie to people you will get away with it in the short term they will not catch you he will not think he is lying to me. No. He has great returns. Here is 1 million. This is how we operate. Host talk about Bernie Madoff we have a videoth of henry mark coppolas he was also in your book you must listen to what he has to say to the sec after bernie teaches becca giftwrapped the largest ponzi scheme in history and somehow they cannot be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority if a 50 billiondollar ponzi scheme doesnt make the sec policy less than i want to know who set their priorities. He is the guy almost the only one that saw the truth with bernie made off oneio ten madoff ten years before he was busted he said he is running a massive ponzi scheme and nobody would listen. He is a rare example of someone who does not to fall to truth. Ex i refer to them as a holy fool which is a russian term to describe the crazy person who nonetheless has truth so to be constrained by social convention and then the emperor has no clothes. So the question arises do we coppolas . Like mark he could see a fried that the rest of us could not see and had insight the rest of us did not have to be want to be like mark coppolas h would be benefit if there were more . I saye no. You dont want to be like him and he will tell you this, we talked about it and i sat with him he is extraordinarily suspicious and paranoid and thinks there is a scandal under every rock. He goes around the world every day he thinks he is being scammed and goes to theit doctor and says dont do this to me i am aware of her tracks and in fact he is so a paranoid that after madoff was busted mark coppolas came to believe that madoff would send hit then to kill him then he became invents on convinced the sec would break a squad of attackers to come to come rate his house and he was up with the gun there is a cost to have that insight. That cost is too high. Youre much better off being gullible or defaulting to truth of those who implicitly believe because liars like madoff are rare if you cheated once in a while its not the end of the world. Host should we be better at listening if someone says the sky is falling . T that depends so how many times did he say theres fried and there isnt quite just a few weeks ago he came out and said General Electric was engaged in one of the largest accounting scandals of all time and i dont know yet but a lot of people just shrugged and said no. You are off the mark in this case. I know. Certainly we would do well, we should not ignore them but we have to understand the difference in the way most of us arece calibrated and its probably a good thing to be trustworthy are certainly one should not take from the madoff scandal the conclusion the financial Industry Needs to be even more heavily regulated. If you reduce everyone to a state of suspicion and paranoia thena you destroy what you try to save. Host the next example is from penn state and Michigan State with the Jerry Sandusky scandal and mr. Nasser. He was coming to me with concern because in his words somebody talk to him about inappropriate behavior in the shower. And you told him . I told him it didnt happen. And in my mind it wasnt an appropriate behavior. The court said differently now serving a long prison sentence so what do we take away from this and also Michigan State . I had a chapter on the sandusky case. That is not sandusky himself but rather what the prosecutors did after they convicted sandusky they went after the leadership of penn state foronvi failure to act earlier to prevent his misbehavior which i think is absurd and i go through chapter and verse by the prosecution was asking people in positions of leadership to do things they should not do which essentially the president of penn state was forced to resign and still ten years later almost ten years later still fighting a legal battle to stay out of o jail. The director and vice were convicted and sent to jail as a result. In my mind they did nothing wrong except the fact they defaulted to truth and presented with incredibly vague questions about Jerry Sandusky and they chose to interpret them in the way that is most favorable to sandusky and said i only know what that is it sounds like maybe hes engaging and mildly appropriate behavior in an appropriate behavior with boundary issues and say he cant take showers anymore. That decision landed then in prison or on the verge of going. If you examine it closely this is a case of a classic example that human beings are inclined to shrug off. When you default to truth, you believe in the truthfulness of what you are told until the level is so high you can no longer continue to abide by that original position. It is a high bar. You see that with madoff a lot of people on wall street had doubts but they didnt reach the point they were willing to take the enormous steps to say its a ponzi scheme with sandusky there were whispers he was seen showering with young boys but it was vague and even the football coach you spotted sandusky in the shower went home that night and told the medical doctor what he had seenotus and a doctr who had a legal duty to report child abuse did not reporthe it. Because it was too vague. He couldnt figure out what he saw. He wasld upset but then the same coach waited six weeks to tell the leadership and their response was this is so pressing then why did you wait so long to tell us . He doesnt say he saw a sexual act to being committed but it made you feel him weird. What do we do with that . So the absolute last thing you want to do is tell people in positions of running major institutions they said it should start being paranoid about their employees. You cannot run and effective intellectualni community you were deeply suspicious of every act of inexplicable behavior by your employees. You cant do that and by the way in the same way you cannot run a Regulatory Agency with every single mild digression triggers a massive investigation. You act when there is the overwhelming amount of evidence. There wasnt in that case and its very easy in hindsightas i think to get on your high horse and say these people should have been Truth Tellers but guess what cracks pedophiles go to extraordinary lengths to hide what is in their hearts. Host you were working on this with the metoo revelations how to that figure into your thinking about this . Thats interesting. A good analogy to make reference to the other case of the larry nasser case is much more straightforward than Jerry Sandusky where he was yoh a doctor at Michigan State treating young gymnast and sexually abusing them repeatedly over and over sometimes in the presence of their parents. And it took 15 years to be brought to justice. Not because people in that position unlike penn state people were told quite explicitly wrongdoing was happening and they chose to either not believe it or shrug or look away actually sandusky does belong in jail. And that was met in the case of Michigan State. But whats fascinating about that with metoo how long it takes people, even parents to take it seriously it takes years and years for those who are intimately connected to accept the fact something as heinous something a sexual crime has occurred that is the same lesson that runs throughout metoo that this behavior has been going on for a moment any of that in our society what has taken until now to take it seriously. Lake Harvey Weinstein i live in new york i people in the film industry. Its an open secret for years and years he was behavior was unconscionable. I heard people talk about it ten years ago. The New York Times try to do a story on and couldnt get people to speak on the record this wasnt something that popped up in 2018. This was an open secret for a decade or more but it takes an extraordinary long time for people to come to grips with the enormity of the crime and to find a way to do something about it. Host other person in the news right now Khalid Shaikh mohammed his military court judge just set the trial date january 2021. Its watch the video to understand how he fits in. Dealing with 13 or 14 of the worst w ones. And they refuse to identify what they had done because confessions. Attacks and the way that you get actionable intelligence is to get through these enhanced interrogations to use social influence after that to get what you want. Host what does that mean . And genuinely interestingly fascinating person asked to do an extraordinarily difficult job to interrogate the most hardened terrorists in the world. And he had to talk to strangers. And it is a textbook example of what my book is about which is the difficulty to see the truth of truly understanding what a stranger is saying and in his case he was quite open but resorted i was going to say extreme measures to facilitate the communication with the stranger in the terrace. The questions i raise in the chapter is what happens when you do that . Faced witht . The same problem with center plan totally understands what thats about and we see that that there was coercion and physical and emotional conversion added into the mix to enhance the truth and the discovery process. So in that chapter the point is to say thats not without the cost but use physical coercion so you affect information you are getting. And its impossible to answer with certainty but it is the cost or benefits i can make you talk if i water board you. But in that act do i affect your ability to remember what you did and what there is to talk about . And in the process to facilitate that conversation. So you have a tradeoff. Is it a good one . And thats a question i dont think the proponent seven hansen carried on interrogation answer differently than the opponents. In my ceiling and my conclusion i tend to believe the cost of coercion is higher than we realize and i talk at length a psychiatrist and is quite convincing you are on unchartered territory. You dont know what to make of that information because its roso compromised. Host so just to skim the surface of your case studie studies, bring it fullcircle. What do you want leaders to understand what they should be thinking about . I want to call for an end of caution and humility. I want people to slow down and understand that this is very difficult and cannot be done quickly or easily and what you do to speed it up. We need to devise systems that account for that weakness the last part is all about policing and lawaw enforcement strategy and what does that look like if its a task strangers seriously . Or how they use the most proactive tool of Law Enforcement. But sandra planned that used to be a better conversation he should not have stopped her. There was no reason to believe that criminal activity had been taking place. He had nothing he just drove up behind her and she did not use a turning signal and the black woman with outofstate plates. That was not is sufficient to set in motion a dangerous conversation. Host why didnt youti exclude from your book through social media . I have no interest in social media. Does the world need another book about social media . I suppose thats important but it is a necessary for me. So when youre writing a book ask yourself the question where can i best contribute to this conversation . I think i contribute by duplicating other books like twitter over the last year and a half. Host as your books debuted watching the reaction with many conventional reading critics the l. A. Times that at a time the world feels polarized book examining the ways we misinterpret or fail to communicate could not feel more necessary but some on the other side of the business section of the New York Times basically said gladwell is starting to dark topics and wondering whether or not your readers will respond. Are you turning darker in your thinking . No. This book is not dark in the sense it is trying to make the world a better place and ask the question what can we do differently so people like sandra planned dont have the same fate. Those are dark topics but its positive to make the world work a littlee better. I dont know if leaders these days i am perfectly happy to talk about spies in Police Shootings and things like that. Were you surprised at the statistics of alcohol abuse . Yes. I wanted to write as a classic example many of them dont follow the trajectory and those to have a conversation and then something goes wrong. And that that would be an excellent thing to include in my book went to talk to people who have studied this issue and i discovered to my surprise they only want to talk about alcohol. Into many people who studynd the problem they feel they are dealing with drinking. At the core is the abuse on campuses and that consequence of drunkenness and you cannot talk about sexual abuse without drunkenness and they came to convince me of that. And three very drunk people on the dance floor and in the case of brock turner and then to engage in criminal behavior and one contributes greatly think its impossible to talk about how we prevent this in the future without asking the question how we prevent people from being so drunk and increases their chances to be a criminal or being a victim. Host i want to put some statistics on the National Institute of alcohol abuse that says drinking by College Students 18 through 24 contributes to an estimated 1500 Student Deaths every year and in addition 696,000 of drinking and 97000 annual cases of Sexual Assault. Many people of our generation we forget and then to change dramatically over the last generation with the amount of hard alcohol is way up course alcohol get you drunk or seriously and more quickly and binge drinking and drinking by women is way up so it would have been unheard of to drink in a social setting now its much closer to the norm. That has profound consequences for drunkenness and then they get munched on much drunker so it is astonishing. With the absence of a meaningful conversation but when you talk to young people in college you dont see the link between sexual abuse and their drinking with absolute madness. You have been exploring a number of these topics asne well in your podcast. I went to play a clip from your podcast and that people get a sense of how you do that. Tensions rose, coming to a head on separate one every h three planes took off for the florida straits as they near the cuban coastline to fighter jets shut down two planes out of the sky killing all four people aboard. The response to the attack was immediate the Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the cuban government president clinton held a press conference. Ladies and gentlemen i have just been briefed by the National Security advisor line shooting down today in broad daylight to american civilian airplanes by aircraft. Host this is a podcast and also your audiobook to put real video and audio into the subject matter. How does that enhance the experience for your intended audience. Speaking to the audiobook i have learned a lot different storytelling its much more immediate and the idea that once you can hear someones voice in your ears its much lmore visceral is not obvious thats the way it would be better with a podcast you can move someone to tears and its quite hard to do in print that people are so emotionally connected to things that come nn that channels so when it came time to do the audiobook we do tie one decided to make it like a podcast so we just listen to a clip of a chapter of my audiobook and throughout the book normally the person im interviewing describing sandra planned you hear that tape bed when brian does the deposition and that i come back to the case to walk through the deposition you can hear it in his voice. All of that means he experiences more powerful and people who have listened to the audiobook and read the booke tell me its like two different books in your john two very different things. You have more fun working on the podcast . Yes. You can do goofy thing. And a podcast episode and things had different meanings in different pronunciations. I would never write that in the book. There is the playfulness that comes with the podcast format that start really available. 750,000 different podcast and 30 million episodes. How do you think one see this playing out over time . The vast majority dont earn any income for the creator so were talking about a phenomenon much like the Book Business because its even smaller than the cost of a book so the industry where the cost of entry is zero and then have it doesnt have to shake out because people do you podcast for all kinds of reasons maybe thats not central the issue is a small number of podcasts and a decent amount of viewers will those numbers grow . A podcast like joe rogan im assuming he has 5 million downloads per episode. In the next 20 years five times as many podcast with 5 million downloads per day or will joe rogan go from 5 million to 20 million . Thats what happens at the far end of the tail i dont think its terribly meaningful. In a sidebar to one of the reviews that was mentioned he felt it was a game changer in your journalism career and what he brought to the table. When i first moved to washington dc 1985 jacob was a roommate in my house and met him for the first time taking a year off from school. He took a break between junior and senior year and he introduced me to people at the republic and i began to freelance they are so he got me my start in journalism. We were Close Friends ever sinc since. He has been running for many years so slate magazine is part of the Washington Post companys digital arm. But also knows how to run a business. He and i started this Podcast Company and he does the heavy lifting i use my podcast i am a name on the masthead. But there is no when im happier towa defer to i have a dog called pushkin and then we named all of our dogs after russians like tolstoy. And then i used to call my apartment pushkin. Host your apartment had a name. [laughter] sure. Im english. In england the english man who named everything in his life. His dogs, garden carts, cars commit Second Nature for me to give things names. People loved it so much they petitioned we call the new company pushkin. Hes the most famous literary figure in russian history after tolstoy. Russians love him late 19th century poet writer, intellectual, and what is part black as i am so a role model. Host the last dip into the archives the earliest clip we have of you but i want to show you and the folks watching from 1996. Oh my goodness. Showing the viewers your piece. What is this about . My piece is about west indians and my family and the success of what does that mean and to tell us about racism. Host i wanted to show that because times have changed. [laughter] but in your acknowledgment you tell us that your mother taught you how to write. And you lost your father as this book was produced. So talk about the camp contributions a peach made you as a person. My parents on the surface were very different he was a mathematician physically fearless gogetter and my mother was a family therapist and a much more so wall full type that in some ways they are very similar. They were both very independentminded and selfsufficient. And my father had a great sense of mischief and i have inherited his sense of mischief he never checked himself for the world that seriously and he was playful in the way he thought about ideas. And my best i am playful. And thats my principal contribution. She speaks is beautifully perfectly formed sentences that i admire ever since i understood speech. Host defined how she says things . My mother speaks. She doesnt say much so i do more ofve all but where is the enormous outpouring. Host first of all where do you do most of your writing . Coffee shop. Host what has changed over the course of your writing career five of your books are bestsellers and you speaking tours in the top ten podcast so people must recognize you when you two are he also made a lot of money over the years. How has celebrity and wealth changed your life . I dont worry about money anymore. But i never really did. Celebrity is an odd word. I am not a celebrity. If hitler walked down the street people would mob him. I dont have mobs to me somebody will say i love your podcast and keep walking. Or they will say can i take a picture but so i think of someone that is up there but people who talk to me its like i heard you on your podcast its almost like you are in my life and act like they have known me forever and a half. It doesnt feel like same that familiarity. Host does it feel like a good life . Yes. So with these three major areas what do you want your body of work to do . To look at things differently. Not trying to persuade people with that mindset. And then to go back to your old way of thinking at the end in a very familiar issue in a different way. That is something i try to do in my own life that it improves the world but encourages people to adopt different perspectives even if only fleeting to make us a better human being. Host thank you for spending one hour with us today. We appreciate your time. Thank you for being with us this saturday evening with the look from her archives Malcolm Gladwell has appeared over 20 times you can watch any of those at book tv. Org. August 4th, 2020. On may 5th we spoke with Janet Webster jones orner of source book sellers how the shutdown has affected her business. Give us an update five months into the covid. Thank you for having us on cspan. I look at you are at home a lot you helped us improve our