Transcripts For CSPAN2 Summer Series With Malcolm Gladwell 20240712

[inaudible conversations] good evening and welcome those newcomers and repeat offenders. If you look around you notice in impenetrable books are out there in the world. That being the case it is always refreshing to find one whose impact with the proportion to the length and have to and the Tipping Point is one of those books with from time to time a work appears that acts as a decongestant for the brain , one strong spray and the intellectual passages clear up even if they were blocked in the first place. Now we can grasp the things around us were always looking at and the effect on the reader can be rather intoxicating. Once again it is that kind of book to ask the kinds of questions a child might ask on the tip of the tongue the name on the brain and we find it hard to focus on not despite the obviousness why didnt anybody think of this before . And then what makes things catch on and take off and ideas and products fads and trends in fashion cultural phenomenon and you may find the simplest questions often require the most difficult answers that are the most difficult for an author to articulate. And to Malcolm Gladwells credit he has given us an answer in a book thats very modest that you can see but with odd insight and even elegance if you know what i mean. It tastes great and is good for you at the same time. The likely phenomenon the Tipping Point itself has taken off know the sales figures for instance for Daytona Beach but hearing cambridge second in importance only to the red sox this is a hot book. Tonight we will talk about the book and do some reading from it and open it for your questions and his answers and a general discussion if you like to buy a copy the Tipping Point is on and National Bestseller list available 40 percent off. At the end of the presentation and to sign a copy for you. Now we will turn it over to Malcolm Gladwell. [applause] thats a very generous introduction. Thank you very much. As i have gone around the country told me told me what not to do somebody had a whodunit and read the last three pages and wondered why nobody bought the book. I will not read the last three pages. I will read a couple of short segments. And then ill take questions this is a book about plying to social change. With the weird and interesting and provocative. That epidemic that took place in the South Pacific one South Pacific. And allow us to think about the epidemic also. A 17 yearold boy got into an argument with his father. So when his father a stern and demanding man told him to fan the bamboo pole knife we spent hours in the village and then they would even go hungry get out here and go find someone he left his grandfathers house and walked out to the home village. Two hours later curious later he went looking for him and returned and looked in the window. Hanging from the noose was the may he was dead and the suicide note read my life is coming to an end now today is the day of sorrow for myself and suffering but also a day for celebration because today papa sent me away. Thank you for loving me so little. In the early sixties suicide in micronesia was almost unknown but for reasons know when understood began to rise leaps and bounds until by the end of the eighties more suicides in micronesia than anywhere in the world males between 15 and 24 the suicide rate in the United States is 22 per 100,000 and micronesia 160 per 100,000, seven times higher. Suicide is almost commonplace. And then that was hardly unusual committing suicide because they saw other adults do it and the parents refuse to get a few extra dollars for beer. At 19. One nature doesnt hang themselves because you get a graduation gift a 70 know that because his older brother said he made too much noise. In micronesia a ritual and with those suicides are identical of a variations late teens unmarried. And then to be domestic and in three quarters of the cases the victims never tried or attempted suicide before. And then wounded pride of selfpity. Usually after out drinking with friends and they had the same procedures with the strict unwritten protocol. He takes the rope and makes a noose. He ties it to low branch and then leans forward so the weight of his body cuts off this flow of blood to the brain. In micronesia they say these rituals are embedded in the local culture. As the number of suicide has grown then to transform so that the unthinkable has been rendered think of all. Widespread in certain micronesian communities and then to compose locally on radio stations. And then to have a certain familiarity. And then it seems to be trivialized. Suicide asked seem to have been acquired and experimental recreational element. There is something very chilling about this passage it is is supposed to be trivialized like this but its how familiar it seems. Here with the contagion epidemic of selfdestruction by the spirit of experimentation rebellion keeping in mind that somehow among teenagers that is an important form of selfexpression. In a strange way the epidemic sounds like teenage smoking in the west. The rest of that chapter is the attempt to look at our problem with teenage smoking. And these are both expressions of the same fundamental impulse of adolescent culture. Selfdestructive behaviors. Played out in different ways but if you can explain the ways that are traumatic you can better appreciate what is going on equally problematic. And look at columbine and School Violence another way that has come to take on a significance and what is interested is that the extent that is surrounded by all these layers of symbolism and meaning in ritual and that they do quite the same way is incredibly important one of the reasons smoking is so powerful is it comes with a whole culture attached to it but what worries me the most with the epidemic of School Shootings is the extent to which to take on that same element. And it was scary because all the layers the trenchcoat the Computer Culture and also to roll about the media. If columbine represents a contagious does selfdestructive behavior should we be talking about it . And should we be mindful of the went on to that extent. Are we aiding and abetting this process . Thats one chapter. I understand its a heavy subject. Much of the book is a much lighter tone i assure you. And that has always resonated with me because if you read into these accounts what happened micronesia and that theory and striking. I have a whole chapter with the idea for an idea to become contagious of an epidemic it has to be contagious. We never talk about epidemics of the common cold because it doesnt stay around and comes and goes. You can still go to work but epidemic with the flu you are sick and on your back. And those that succeed for the same reason to have an additional quality. That is a banal observation but if you look at successful epidemics then you get into cool areas. And the chapter and concerned with Childrens Television and in particular. And those that founded the show paid extraordinary attention to the idea. They wanted to find how to hold the attention of kids but in such a way they can remember what they were seeing was sticking in their brain for some profound way so there is a time in the late sixties and if how the brain works then you can look at how that makes impact on their health. And all those really cool things that they do to engineer to make this extraordinary impact. What im about to read is a little section from ed palmer. You talk to people and was the research i. So to read as section and i will mention in the course of this will also be quoting jerry lesser. Innovation was something he called the distractor playing sesame street on the dell Television Monitor and then to show a new slide every seven and a half seconds. To have a boy riding on the street with his arms down picture of a Tall Building a rainbow and a picture taking. Anything could be novel. Quietly noting when they were watching sesame street and when they lost interest. Every time it changed they would make a new notation by the end of the show we almost had a second by second account of what part of the episode held their attention and what did not. The distractor was the machine. We had data points for every seven. Five seconds 400 data points for a Single Program we connect all of those with a redline like a stock market report. Sometimes they could hug the top of the chart we would say its really grabbing the attention of the kids. We had have 100 percent sometimes. If the producers got that they were happy it was 50 percent they go back to the drink drawing board. Never see anything 50 to 60 percent anymore and if we did we would fix it. Darwin survival of the fittest and then to decide what should survive now thats a familiar thing but it was invented by sesame street an incredible amount of research with television and ideas how to make Television Work moves into the mainstream from there. You could argue legitimately the best Television Show ever in terms of its structure. But i will continue on. The most important thing came at the very beginning summer of 1969 a month and a half and we decided lets go for broke five shows one hour agency what we got. And then what destroyed us. In of those elements and with that mixed fantasy and reality. And that involved only real shelter. But in philadelphia as soon as they switched the street scene the kids lost all interest that was supposed to be the glue. And then the kids werent interested. We were getting crank credibly low attention levels. They were leaving the show. We can afford to keep losing like that. And then to promise a turning point we knew if we kept the street that way the show would die. Everything was happening so fast we would go on the air in the fall we had to figure out what to do so would we defy the opinion and decided to write a letter to all development of psychologist to say we know how you feel mixing fantasy and reality but we will do it anyway because if we dont will be dead in the water so they reshot all the Street Scenes jim henson and a coworkers created puppets that can walk and talk to live alongside the street. Now we now think of the essence of sesame street monsters and adults grow that desperate desire its a wonderful illustration of the theme of the book. Big bird saved sesame street without big bird that show as we know it all the revolution that we have seen may never have happened over the last 25 years. Not until they added an extra element the kids were interested in the part of the show they needed to be which is the Street Scenes with the adults. And how you dont know would make something work but a lot of the times that little extra critical element you cannot have anticipated. Sometimes the difference between being a failure and success is something incredibly subtle. In between a successor here is the big bird in the last section the first section is the idea behind this is the epidemiology epidemics turn out to be sustained by a small number of people. Like some case studies that demonstrated this. We think of epidemics as a function of the behavior of a large group of people and thats not true. Like with hiv it was commonly supposed aides hit among the gay communities of San Francisco and new york because of the high levels of Sexual Activity among many members of the gay community. That was the assumption but its wrong it is the extraordinarily high level of the tiny fraction and that observation is consistent with the way epidemics work they all have that function. So i said what amounts and epidemic or social epidemic with a piece of information of the virus lets suppose that is true a very small number of people who are way out there tracking these epidemics i decided it is three groups. So i find people who demonstrate these are wild and hilarious and weird people. So what im about to read is section of these people who are unusually persuasive and i try to figure out what makes somebody persuasive . And they play a key role in social epidemics . Summer on the sidelines. I didnt go to see titanic willingly but i was dragged there by somebody. That is true by many we join because somebody convinces us. People are incredibly persuasive represents an interesting and significant Personality Group so who is the most persuasive man in america it turns out it is a guy named tom gallo who is a Financial Planner and he is so good at what he does he spends most of his time hanging out he only works the bare minimum. In that world theres a world of people who are obsessed with charisma and he is a man they all worship i had to figure out why is he this extraordinary character . And at this point in the chapter i will not redo the whole section, but i will read im hanging out with him and talking about the idea that when people talk they engage in this elaborate and subtle dance if you so the videotape down if you are videotaping how they interact in this weird way. If i was talking to you we would start to synchronize our movements and as i moved my shoulders then your shoulder would move in harmony with me. And its a kind of rhythm. So people like tom gower persuasive because they dictate the terms of the dance. When Elvis Presley went on tour in the fifties as the extraordinary charismatic figure, it at his concert they would be in tune every move you made they would move with him. There are Elvis Presleys one to one and the same thing could happen in the course of an ordinary conversation. Im struggling my this man is not the kind of person to whom i would normally be john irresistibly. A Financial Planner in Southern California and wears cowboy boots and has a mustache after five minutes of meeting him i went to sign over my entire assets to him believe me. I came in with all of my cynical journalist impulses were front and center and still i was like tom. [laughter] so why does he blow me away . Im picking up in the middle of this discussion about the testing crazy and his powers when two people talk it is dont fall into harmony it is motor mimicry initial people of smiling or frowning face they will smile or frown back into so fleeting they could only be captured with electronic sensors. If i have a hammer most people would grimace they will mimic my emotional state this is empathy. And then we need to express support and even more basically as a way of communicating and in the 1994 book emotional contagion the psychologist go further and then by one of the means of which we infect each other with our emotions. If i smile and you smile in response it takes no more than several milliseconds is not just you militating on imitating but also a way to pass on my happiness to you emotion is contagious. All of us have had her spirits picked up if you think about this closely we think of the expressions on our face i feel happy so i smile i feel sad so i found emotion goes inside out emotional contagion suggest the opposite is also true if i can make you smile i can make you happy if i can make you frown i can make you sad emotion and a sense goes outside in if you think of emotions outside in it is possible to understand how some people can have the enormous amount of influence over others some of us are good at expressing emotions and means we are far more emotionally contagious centers and special personalities they report there are huge differences in the location of facial muscles and a situation there are carriers and people who are especially perceptible the mechanism is the same a psychologist at the university of California Riverside developed the Effective Communication test to have emotion be contagious. Thirteen questions related if you can keep still if you hear good dance music with you touch friends when you talk to them or if you are the center of attention. The highest possible score is 117 points what does it mean to be a high score with that fascinating experiment scoring very high on his test but scoring lower around 60 that is the question youre imagining how they felt and then to put all the high scores and compared each with two low scores they were told to sit in a room together for two minutes. They can look at each other but not talk then they were asked again how they were feeling at that instance in just two minutes he found the low scores ended up picking up the moves of the high scores if they started off depressed and the other start off happy by the end of the two minutes the other person was depressed as well but it did not work the other way only the charismatic person could affect the other with his or her emotions. Is this what tom gallo did to me . He had the range of an opera singer at times he was stern or drawl or chuckle as he spoke making the word sing with laughter his face would light up accordingly moving from one state to another and the ambiguity in this demonstration everything was written in his face i could see my own face but im guess it was a close mirror later i called him up to take the test to add to the list . Questionmark question he started to chuckle at question number 11 i am terrible at pantomime. He said im great at that. He scored 116. So there is a little taste of the first section. I can keep reading now i am undercutting your incentive that i would be delighted to take questions if anybody has any. What are the one or two things you regret much that didnt make the final edit that you really liked. I got carried away with one chapter and at one point it was a huge massive deconstruction of the phenomenon and i regret actually that some of that had to go. Where the cool things about sesame street is that jim henson was picked because he was an advertising he had the hottest ad shop on madison avenue so if jim hansen can sell a lot of the muppets were developed as corporate pitchman the version of big bird was the alleged way dragon adding grover was originally developed to work for ibm. But if he can sell soy sauce and he can sell the three rs in four minutes and thats why they wanted him on board so it is this obsession with the advertisement in the sixties and the show was the most effective way to reach a kid they were so carried away with advertising they were trying to make learning commercials which is why the beginning of sesame street its very short segments they are duplicating the commercials when the chapter is to talk about why blues clues is a better show than sesame street because it abandons the idea of the commercial going for continuous narrative and a return to more traditional storytelling. Sometimes i regret i could have a much more complete obsessive subject of sesame street. [laughter] an article in the new yorker . Its called the Tipping Point which was just about crime some trying to explain why a crime in europe had fallen so quickly that came out in 1986. That is now version of that article the much changed is a chapter of the book is a little bit in this but most of it is 85 percent new. I notice you have a website do you carry some of your writing cracks back everything i do is on the website. How did that work when it comes to selling your book . The book is not on the website. This is new. [laughter] how does that work to integrate your living as a writer . Nothing in the new yorker was on any kind of archive. I just think that i want people colleges use articles in the syllabus and its much easier if its on the website and they can tell people to go there that have a lot of people do stuff and it just helps to keep my articles down. I dont like them to just sit there. You think that would help the publicity of your book or to marketing . This is a good question because i think there is the usefulness of the internet the larger question is how useful is the internet for a message . From my own experience on my website, i learned as an actual mechanism you can buy my book to the site i havent sold any compared to the hits i get i get tens of thousands of hits that what it does do is build a general awareness of who you are. But i think thats generally true im skeptical of people who think the internet is a Magic Communications to all. Also as we get more familiar and the novelty wears off and gets colonized by people trying to sell you things, like me these lists begins to diminish and the excitement when i fascinated is with wordofmouth because these characters like tom gallo generate because they are our friends and the interest is all true a stick and disinterested. Altruistic but they are motivated by the desire to help but if they are financially implicated then the politics appears the reason i go to certain people for advice on what computer to buy is because in whats going on now with the internet they can take that mechanism and transported into a commercial environment without losing the effectiveness and i think that is a mistake and we will find out how much of a mistake that is. I read that you carry a notebook around and write down everything . This is an article it was alleged an article that i write down everything i hear. I do that sometimes i do believe the acquisition process is social and you get ideas from talking to people. So i do find myself often in conversations with people on the airplane just on the way over here in fact i was sitting with a guy because i didnt bring anything to read and people pester you. [laughter] so it turns out you would be amazed at how many totally interesting people are out there who can have all this money going to companies to say if you let me in, why am i telling you this . [laughter] it is interesting. Do you want to hear . [laughter] he says if you let me go in and reconfigure your lighting system i will split the savings with you. Apparently the amount of money people waste on lights is phenomenal if it saves 20000 per year kicks back to barnes noble is ten and then gets ten himself. [laughter] i feel like i am biased against as part. [laughter] what was your favorite process of writing the book . The most fun thing was the first part of wordofmouth with these people playing a role hanging out with those people was so much fun because part of the reason they are powerful it is true. Not to you hang out with them at length but i had so much fun and with this guy he is a know it all. And the whole field of research and marketing that concerns Market Mavens and by former grad students and at the end he was so weird there must be something in this. He is truly strange in a fabulous way. I essentially write stories that are always about the same thing about some remarkable cool person. What did you learn from writing the book that has changed your life for the way you do things . Thats interesting. I guess one of the things i learned is the notion that the small number of people that are remarkable that i never thought before you still mind blowing for me because one of the interesting things before i talk about these connectors the people who know everybody i found these people and hung out with them and to me what is revolutionary is we have so convinced ourselves at this moment in history the important people are those who are very rich and very smart and lived in the biggest houses with the fanciest cars were in love with the notion the influence is all about status especially economic status. When you realize you look closely at the dynamics of wordofmouth influence has nothing to do a status. It is a randomly distributed personality trait. There was a great moment in the book hang out these Public Health guides who had safe sex anti drug epidemic and they had identified within this community of people the most desperately poor bleak and depressing disadvantaged in this country they identified within the committee of heroin addicts those that were these charismatic peoples people, energetic altruistic people and made me realize we have to find a way to fall out of love with the notion that there was a moment a couple of years ago reason i got onto this whole thing and many of you are regular readers of the new yorker but i was writing about middleaged jewish women i have like five or seven in a row and if you read magazines they are all about old men and young women it is phenomenal. Go to the magazine rack and make a list of all the articles and at least 80 percent are about men over the age of 45 and women under the age of 25. Nobody ever talks about middleaged women if you think about it, as a group. A woman who was 65 in her lifetime has seen more change than any other almost any other demographic at any time in Human History it is an incredible moment and we never write about these people cited all the stories. The most fun was hair dye the women in the whole point of the article is there was a woman a totally amazing woman now in her nineties who comes to america in the thirties and start the holy of thinking on research and what got me when i visited her in the alps it is snowing i had to put chains on my car people were skiing next to me on my way up shes on an oxygen machine because the areas of then and shes 90 years old i flew all the way over there i got two hours with her. And she is still this brilliant woman and shows me a picture one of the great madison avenue ad firm she showed me a picture of a Christmas Party in 1948 everyone is in blacktie and a room full of 300 people 299 our men and one was a woman that speaks volumes about this woman. A completely closed mens world and she just busted in because she was brilliant and still is. Who is writing about her . No one everybody is writing about what were celebrating that then to become the head of an ad agency. Now im getting carried away. [laughter] but there are these amazing people out there we overlook them because they dont fall into the normal categories we have an obsession with incredibly, i think wrong and boring categories from what is interesting and important. How much did you uncover that people that become addicted to giving advice like the professor who was jewish like the professor who was jewish. People just dont want to say now and then he just answer is hes not sure that you have so much faith in him. Sure. If the advice can go too far . And part of being a maven is sometimes at times annoying. But i dont think we can live without them. And having people in these kind of persons, how can you make your way down in the marketplace without . Its impossible. All buying ads and yelling at you i cannot remember right now because im so overloaded but we need these people even though they are annoying. But i think we have much alternative. Your article about crime has anybody ever come to you to pick up on the observation that you made for Public Policy . You dont know it is the incremental improvement and the idea to develop the enormous amount of resources before you begin to see results. Have you picked up on that . Or what was as a result . This predates my observation in the academic world but these ideas and this notion picked up in the political realm. This is not a moment in american political history if we can determine the adequate level of social investment. Thats a hard sell. And thats a shame. The most obvious is headstart. We know certain kinds of interventions with preschoolers are effective. We know headstart is not as effective as we would like it to be but the difference between what we know headstart is not that great and there is a real opportunity there to find maybe there is a Tipping Point to look at what were spending now on headstart. I cannot imagine how anyone could go to washington right now for an increase of headstart funding. Thats hard to imagine. I think in some ways we been talking about the Tipping Point tipping toward something positive and i worked for four years on an internet site which was a Health Education site, really big. Because it was new there was a lot of change within the System People who monitor the sites, running it, absorbed it and took it over and everything. The people i was working with her people who had a certain kind of illness it wasnt recognized illness it was like a depression. They were always running into the issues of being anonymous and as a result to be invisible and anonymous as well as the radical quick changes they would go through these periods of real hostility towards each other and the whole system seemed like it would tip over and fall apart instead of tip in the direction to be more productive. I felt the people who manage the site were not aware of this and did know how to deal with it and i suspect this happens in all social structures but definitely was happening there at a rapid rate cycling in and out of hostility and on the edge of despair. Thats an important point. If you think of the lessons of thinking about change as an epidemic it is incredibly volatile. And occasionally we benefit from that because crime could literally plummet overnight it also means these changes could reverse very quickly. And this kind of volatility is something if we think we are entering a period where i do were social epidemics are more prevalent, we have to expect precisely what you are thinking about this kind of volatility and cycling between two extremes more and more often. Is not a model we are good at diagnosing or that makes us feel comfortable. One of the things i come away is testing is important. Do you think enough testing is locked away in graduate school . When the question is about testing in particular with assessing the stickiness of something, i think we do far too little attention to that. I tell the story in the book of the famous story at yale they play with every variable in a 20 minute course and what really made the difference if there was a map with the package how to get to the health center. Thats a classic example that was the Tipping Point a little thing that made the message sticky who would have known it was all about the map we were so obsessed with the big issue we forgot the little one is a very important lesson for any kind of communication come you cannot predict in advance what the Tipping Point is. In some cases you have to systematically search for it in the history of social epidemics is replete with the weirdest big bird who knew they needed a big bird . I can imagine if they did it without the big bird change and noticed that kids were learning they wouldve changed 1 million things before they bring a muppet onto the set maybe we think the fundamental premise of the show and question cognitive psychological assumption. But getting jan henson to dress up a guy in the bird suit is a lasting on their mind but that is exactly what happened. So with the anniversary of the new yorker, how did you end up at the new yorker and what is the culture of the magazine what has it done to change you in the way that you write since you have been there quick. I ended up there because i was working for the Washington Post and then they started to hire people systematically and she went down the list and finally she hit me. [laughter] how has it changed . In the fundamental ways they give you and the space. Its amazing that when they want you to have 7000 word its hard to write an intelligent 3000 word article is easier to write 7000 word article the in this culture the quality of editing is some amazing. You have no idea the difference of what a turn in and what appears. [laughter] i actually should have my editor right in fact this meeting was the embodiment of the culture and people need a translator later there it would be here and then was standing here whispering fix that. [laughter] there is an application to the notion of epidemiology to the infatuation with the internet that we are seeing currently. I steered clear of any kind of financial stuff in the book if he saw my own finances you would think thats a wide decision but there is a strong epidemic element to adjust these wild market swings. And this is the parallels and all this other stuff in this has the epidemic quality. But if you think back to that example i gave what epidemics do is create a reality. Thats the real danger. The weirdest thing of micronesia is that they were experimenting with suicide and then i look at all these kids who want to try it out in the middle of the epidemic the notion suicide to be lethal act was unhinged from the act itself that somehow in a place that was not a part of it. Epidemics do that to those that are caught up in them they can warp reality and thats my big worry about any kind of epidemic enthusiasm for the tech stocks that is simply reflecting the internal logic of the epidemic or something from reality . Any lessons from the Tipping Point you have acquired to help the Tipping Point that she the Tipping Point . [laughter] yes. We decided we would try to identify the book mavens in the country. We made up a long list mostly of people who run independent bookstores, the northwest, a lot of wordofmouth so we made this long list of people went out in january and sent them copies and bought them lunch and tried to turn them onto the book. The book is doing well. But i know that was our attempt to enlist the power of the wordofmouth. But its very hard to know there are some booksellers in that part of the world. [multiple speakers] plans for your next book . I have an idea. But i cant say what it is. [laughter] its better than this one. [laughter] [multiple speakers] there will be no kind of return to Tipping Point. [laughter] done 17 versions of the zone now on a week in the life of the zone. Like whats next . 24 hours in the zone . [laughter] did tina brown carry on the better qualities of the new yorker tradition . Im a big tina fan because she hired me. [laughter] inasmuch as i represent i would like to think part of that process, i think so. I think tina would restore to the purpose of the magazine which was the dna of the magazine was to be something that was vital and on the cutting edge and concerned with what was going on now as opposed to i think it got too far in the i think what she did was very important. Along the same line, can you share with us the response to the new editor since i can ask your opinion of it. Im interested in the response thats public knowledge. I happen to like the magazine a great deal more. I think david has gotten a really wonderful response. He such a match. Hes different from tina. Those differences i will say, hes different from tina and those differences manifest themselves in obvious ways. Whos in charge . [laughter] i guess we can take a couple more. And im sure im stretching peoples patients here. How come it took so long after your book was announced for it to come out . It got delayed for just born technical reasons. Should i take one more question mark. Do find yourself since writing the book, seeing or predicting to Tipping Points left and right, as i do after reading it . You can get kind of, its what i referred to as grad student disease. When youre in the middle of the dissertation the entire world fits into the ideas you have formulated about 17thcentury english their poetry. Yes, in fact, i do see them everywhere and hoping this particular pathology will come to an end. [laughter] before all my friends disowned me. Thank you very much. [applause] i guess i will sit here and sign books. We might need some more. I would like to thank mr. Gladwell for being here tonight. Thank you all for coming. We will see if we can get more seating next time. Have a good night. [inaudible background conversations] [inaudible background conversations] [inaudible background conversations] [inaudible background conversations] you are watching booktv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Tonight we are looking at programs with the bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. From 2005 he talks about his book blink the power of thinking without thinking which looks at how people make splitsecond decisions. Hello . If everyone can hear me my name is henry center, editorial director of the new yorker magazine i would like to welcome to you to the fifth annual new yorker festival. The message here to say please turn off any cell phones or pager devices. Malcolm will be speaking for about 40 minutes, we will have 20 to 30 minutes of q a after that. During the question period there will be microphones down the aisle and we request that you would speak into the microphone during that time. Malcolm gladwell has been a staff writer for the new yorker magazine since 1996, before that he was a new york bureau chief for the Washington Post. At the new yorker he very quickly made his mark establishing a new genre of story, the Malcolm Gladwell story. Theres very few people like that in the 80 years of this magazine stop editorial meetings the subjects abcome up and say thats been done to that. Someone else will say, yes but if we have a Malcolm Gladwell take on it. Its a great conversational trump card. Malcolm has really a peculiar genius for exploration. Sometimes very peculiar. Its tempting to try to explain what makes him such an important writer. I think a lot of it has to do with certain originality of mind a certain distinctiveness of voice and both of those qualities were on display in his bestselling book the Tipping Point which is a book thats been quoted by at least one u. S. President , by joint chief of staff, by ceos, philanthropists, also the title of new album by the hiphop band the roots which is an homage to the intellectual hero. [laughter] his new book is coming out in january its called blink the power of thinking without thinking. Ive never actually seen malcolm when he wasnt thinking so im curious to see how hes gonna pull it off. Please welcome Malcolm Gladwell. [applause] thank you henry. In nine years of editing me thats the kindest youve ever been. [laughter] im very happy to be here and happy to see all of you. Im guessing most of you are here because you couldnt get into the site hirsch evening last night. Think i got assigned to overflow. Which is fine although i should say if any of you are here expecting to get some major blockbuster earth shattering revelation on American Foreign policy are in the wrong place. It was sometimes into dinosaurs and cartoon dinosaurs and. I was told us posted talk about my new book which is blink, coming out in january. I hope all of you buy it in triplicate at that point. [laughter] its about the power of thinking about thinkinr of thin without thinking what happens the first two seconds and in the counter in a person at a person or person an idea or person and situation. So far the book has been reviewed twice one of which said was quite good and the other of which said it was utterly forgettable piece of juvenile you. The question of its merits is still up in the air. This is one of my favorite stories in the book. I think its a pretty good introduction to what this book is about and the kinds of questions trying to address in blink. Something that happened five years ago that i think something story all of us in new york remember but i think not all of us particularly at the time in new york absolutely understood. Its a story of amity diablo. Diablo was from guinea, a recent immigrant, 22 years old and he was short. About five foot five or five foot six. I tell you those facts because not because im warming up to tell a story but because these kinds of facts, the smallest details of the case are absolutely critical in understanding what happened that night and one of the faults i have with the way we came to learn about that story and understand that story is that it was interpreted as a story about grand themes, racism, Police Departments, status of the law a story about grand themes. Its a story about details. These Little Details i start with as i said absolutely essential to understanding what exactly happened that night. Diablo lived in a part of the bronx called soundview. Soundview is in the southeastern bronx and in the late 1990s it was a pretty bad neighborhood and major open air drug markets had just been shut down about two or three blocks over from one diablo lives. Wheeler avenue is one of the streets that comes down off the made thoroughfare which is western oliver. Its a very narrow street two story red burke road house built around the turnofthecentury and theyre very close to the street the sidewalk, there is no graph strip in the sidewalk, street, sidewalk, two quick stops and then you have these buildings, these two story building. He lived in one of the secondfloor on the night of february 3, 1999 he comes home from, he was a peddler he sold, one of those guys and 14th street he comes home around midnight and goes upstairs and talks to his roommate and the reasons we dont know he comes downstairs maybe he wanted to have a cigarette maybe he wanted to take in the night air, maybe he was feeling claustrophobic, we dont know. The vestibule of his building is very small, probably no more than this wide and no more than from the top of the stage back to about where i am now. He standing on the edge looking out in the street and as he standing there a car drives by down Wheeler Avenue, ford taurus unmarked for people in it, for Plainclothes Police officers part of the nypd street crime room unit which is a special unit set up in the late 1990s basically to break up open air drug markets. Who all in the mid20s and early 30s. They are green. These are not experienced Police Officers. All dressed in jeans and sweatshirts they got bulletproof vests and just kinda puffed out and they have baseball caps and regulation nine millimeters handgun. Cruising down Wheeler Avenue and they cruised by and they see diablo and carol says whos that guy what is he doing there . Carol says later he thought diablo was one of two things maybe he was racist they been looking for in that area for some time because thered been a racist very active about a year before they never caught them. The Second Thought was that he was a lookout for a pushing robber, pushing robbers of the guys to come to an apartment building, hit all the buttons, until someone lists them in and they go in and knock on the door and basically if someone answers, pushed in. They often had a lookout on the ground floor to alert them to the presence of other people coming in the building so he thinks its one of those two things. They drive by and stop the car and backup. In carol and mcmillan get out of the car and carol opens up and shows his id and says Police Officers, can we have a word. He doesnt speak much english. A very recent immigrant from america. He also has a very bad stutter. Hes inclined to never talk at all. Thirdly, one of his friends several months before had been robbed by a series of people by a group of people posing as a Police Officer. He is terrified by these guys. Hes on a dark street sitting there taking the night air in front of his house for big guys, way bigger than him with big puffed out chest, white guy in the middle of the south bronx. Speak in a language he may or may not completely understand. He standing in a small festival he sees these guys and turns around and goes back to go back into his house turns around put his hand on the door. Carol and mcmullen who were standing there say, show us your hands. Put your hands up. We dont know if he even understands what that means at this point but he turned his body away from them ever reaching for the door and seems to be doing something with his right hand. This starts to get carol and mcmillan a little bit nervous because they think, why is he turning his body because he wants to conceal what hes doing with his right hand . They start to run after him, their mo sidewalk and go up the steps to go out to see what he is doing. They are thinking this is getting a little strange. Then they looked closer and they see that what he is doing with his right hand is his pulling out an object out of his coat. They see the subtle thing coming out. They start to get even more and they see the top of this black object and its shiny and their thinking, my god, guns. Carol yells out, hes got a gun he just keeps going pulling it out. Until hes actually pointing towards them like this. Mcmillan says hes got a gun he panicked. He is on the top step of the vestibule and pushes back and jumps back and gets terrified he pulls out his gun and starts firing. Carol is standing right there any season flow backwards and thanks hes been hit. My well sweetie fall backwards. He sees the bullets ricocheting around is very small vestibule he thinks, diablos firing gun he pulls out his gun and starts firing. Back in the car you got boston murphy and Lacey Mcmillan flow backwards a they think hes been hit. In the end carol and mcmillan fire 15 to 16 bullets each. Is there firing at abhes in the corner of the vestibule is back straight and knees are bent there thinking classic shooters crotch. This guy has been trained, thats what theyre thinking. What hes trying to make himself a small as possible. Theyre all going bang, bang, with their backs up against the vestibule. How do they stop . Hes down. Can boss gets up and walks toward diablo he looks down at his right hand to find out and see the gun. Hes got the gun. Palms open he looks down and theres no gun just a wallet sitting on the ground. He screams, where is the gun he starts running up Wheeler Avenue because he completely forgot where they are hes got to call the ambulance. He is just running up and down Wheeler Avenue screaming out, where is the gun he looks down and sits down on the steps next to him and starts to cry. Thats what the ambulance finds when they arrive. What happened that night . I was attracted the story when i wanted to write this book because its an unusually complicated and ambiguous story and all the ways i think we have for explaining it at the time were deeply unsatisfactory. Think back to when that case was in the news, there were two sides to the story the way it was told one side said these cops are racist, see a black guy you see a criminal, bang, bang. 41 bullets. Bruce springsteen writes a song called 41 bullets how you can get shot for just for living in your american skin which was this reductive notion that that was all about this incident was all about same color. aball about skin color. To say this is about the open and shut case of racism is absurd. Everybody in the south bronx is black or hispanic. Theyre not shooting everybody. Didnt tell us why they single out the sky. Theres no evidence whatsoever that these four guys are bad eggs nothing in the past to suggest dervishes are angry. This isnt like the cop who attacks, throughout his name with the plunger. Nothing like that case. These are good kids, the people who knew them. There like good solid honest, not a blemish on their record. On the other side there was the whole line adopted by the jury which later acquitted these guys of all charges. The line adopted by nypd which was just one of those things. It just happens. Its called police work. Get a situation sometimes and its really sad but you make a mistake and theres nothing much we can do about it. Thats also deeply unsatisfactory. This isnt just some kind of routine thing. The guy goes up to take in the air maybe have a cigarette and gets shot 41 times by four cops cruising up and down the street. There is nothing normal about that particular event. Something actually went wrong. What we need is a kind of third understanding of what happened that night. The only way to get that understanding is to break down that little incident second by second and until we can see all the moments the decisions that went into that particular tragedy and try to understand how it came about. Think about that, this case for a moment. There are three particular moments in that instant i think our worthy of discussion. In that instance decides hes suspicious. State number one, hes innocent, you think you suspicious any backup and one of things carol said that was very interesting that when they backed up they saw that diallo was Still Standing there. Didnt move. Carol would say later that that amazed him. Why did the sky move. If youre standing out there on a Street Corner in the middle of the night four cops in an unmarked car backup toward you you run. Thats what everybody else did. Point number two they think, hes really brazen. This is hes completely undeterred by the side of four monstrous cops. Hes not a bad guy is not brazen, hes curious. Hes from africa. Hes only been in the country a couple months. He sees four white guys in the car backing up toward him and says what is this. Mistake number two, confusing curiosity with brazenness. Then Carolyn Murphy are put down standing on the vestibule and they watch diallo turn to his side and start to pull something black out of his coat in the instant they decide hes dangerous, but he is not dangerous. Hes terrified. Mistake number three, the mistake terrified for terrifying. Ordinarily in the normal course of our lives we have no problem with these distinctions. We are really really good as human beings at making a distinction between innocence and suspiciousness of making a distinction between brazenness and curiosity and most of all making a distinction between terrified and terrifying. He walked down the street the middle of the night you make those judgments every moment when you see somebody. Im scared of him, that person is scared of me. Nothing we are better at than doing that. We been good at that for millions and millions of years. Thats whats interesting about this case. In that moment on that Street Corner on that street that night they make three really basic errors they should have made. Three errors that most of us would make very rarely in our lifetime but they compound them. Why would they do that . What is it that happened that night that caused them to be somehow fundamentally incapable of reading diallos mind because thats the failure here. They did it correctly understand his intentions in that moment. As a result they completely misinterpret what that social situation is all about. They put their own construction on it about a crime and a criminal instead of being about the person outside getting some night air. I call this kind of failure momentary autism. The idea is that i use that phrase because the simplest definition of autism is that autism is a neurological condition that renders us incapable of reading someone elses mind. The british psychologist a refers to autism is simply my blind. People with autism can listen understand your words but they cannot understand any of your intentions. You will what im saying is there are certain situations when otherwise normal people become effectively autistic. Just in that particular moment. Not the chronic condition but acute condition and a handful of cyclists when there are moments of extreme stress. I think thats actually a surprisingly common kind of failure. If you look at the way the world works or more accurately does not work we see the pattern repeated over and over again that lots of mistakes happen because there are certain situations abto read other peoples minds into a temporary state 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 of momentary autism. Theres a really wonderful researcher and yelled called a has done some really fascinating work in trying to explain what happens when someone has autism. He has this patient, a guy named peter and been seeing peter for many years and peter is 40s or 50s. Has a job thats on his own but he has autism. To try to demonstrate precisely how peter makes sense or does not make sense of social situations. He put a pair of goggles on him and these are the special goggles that trick who your eyes move. To show somebody something put the goggles on and actually their eyes will draw a line on the screen you can see precisely where their eyes have fallen and given time. They give peter these goggles and, whos afraid of Virginia Woolf, the movie with Elizabeth Taylor. He shows that will be for a reason which was at first of all its one of his favorite movies but more importantly its a movie about a very complex social situation. Its three people in the room, for i forgot who the other actress was. Thank you. [laughter] its for people in a room having this incredibly fraught interaction over the course of an evening, getting really drunk, getting upset at each other. Theres all kinds of complex dynamics. He said he was in a show terminator two where the actual gun was the hero. But this would be really interesting test and extraordinary sophisticated interaction among four people how to peter make sense of this . He shows in this movie peter said youre on the print of the movie we are seeing where peter eisen moving at any given time and he does the same thing with people who dont have autism and watches where their eyes go. The scene where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are kissing when you and i watch the scene where residue is heres burton, heres taylor, arise go back and forth between their eyes, thats what we do and watch people kissing in a movie. We look at their eyes because the truth is in the eyes. I want to know what kind of kisses this. Whats happening with the kids are they happy . Excited . All the information or much of the information is contained in the eyes. What did peter do . He looked at the light switch behind them. Why did he do that . Because for someone with autism there is no special meaning attached to eyes. He cant make sense of the information he finds in someones eyes. Because he cant read intentions. He cant mind read. As a result, theres no particular reason for him to look at the eyes in the given scene. The thing thats equally interesting for him to look at the light switch, turns out hes very mechanically minded. So it really interests him. He was looking the whole time at the light switch. Another scene george segal poinsettia painting on the wall and says, who did that painting . And Richard Burton hands it to them. When we watch that scene our eyes follow the line of george segals hand until we see the painting. Then arise go over to Richard Burtons eyes and get the answer. Then arise come back to george segal to see how he reacts to the answer. We form a triangle really quick in a millisecond. What is peter do . Hes listening to me is watching, he hears, who did that painting . Painting he doesnt follow the line of the finger of george segals finger because he cant make sense of his gesture. Hit this gesture Means Nothing to someone who cant read minds. To know what im pointing at and why am pointing at you have to be able to inhabit my mind for that moment. It was a why would malcolm do that whats the purpose of that . Peter cant do that. All he has is the information who did the painting come he looks at the wall where the painting is but theres three paintings on the walls, not one. What peter does is go back and forth frantically among all the paintings trying to figure out which painting is being referred to. Meanwhile, the conversation has moved on. Hes behind. He missed the whole meaning of that particular encounter. In the background Richard Burton is getting angrier and more jealous and angry and more jealous. Its really cool to look at the way normal viewers look at scenes because you doing the triangle thing at breakneck speed. Its building and building its incredibly powerful scene of movie. Its gripping. Whats Richard Burton gonna do, how does abhow dare she flirt with this man in front of her husband. What is peter do . Peter looks at george segals mouth for a little while and then he looks at the drink in george segals hand and he spent a lot of time looking at this really cool brooch that Elizabeth Taylor is wearing. He cant understand the social context. The words in that scene mean nothing. Its about the meaning of the three people interacting and he misses all that. Because he cant mind read. That shred of literal evidence is being said is wholly insufficient for making sense of whats happening in the movie. Disappointed that scene work climaxes with Richard Burton, takes out a gun and points Elizabeth Taylor and pulls the trigger. If you sit in the Movie Theater watching that theres a kind of shocked stunned silence because you are thinking, oh my god, then the umbrella comes out you are like abone peter saw that, burst out laughing. Because it slapstick to someone who doesnt understand the social context of what has gone 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 a very long way of saying i think its a very useful and powerful model for understanding what went on with those abthey get to that scene with diablo and they are completely incapable of extracting the necessary and critical social information from it. They are missing all the cues. They are like peter seeing some objective facts. Black guy, young guy come up bad neighborhood, shiny black object. It misses all of the whats going on. All of these interpretations that might cause you to think twice all that is somehow pushed aside. They locked in on the extremely narrative interpretation and that moment they are effectively autistic standing and driving the car 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 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 the Tipping Point. [laughter] i will give you a sense of them things to understand what autism wouldve descended on the four guys at that moment. The first issue is the issue of abthat is what affect does being physiologically aroused having our ability to mind read . This case we have two guys convince the person in front of them is trying to kill them. 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 a kind of everyday occurrence. If you read through testimony of particularly Police Officers who have been fired upon. Of completely bizarre things that happened to us in that situation. For example, almost everyone has been fired on a firing gun describes an extraordinary moment of television. Basically you only see whats immediately in front of you. Everything else is gone. And then overwhelmingly people 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. The empty their gun to somebody afire once or twice always comes up why did you fire 16 bullet. This is always not taken seriously as an explanation but its a completely serious explanation they keep firing because they cant hear their gun going off and they think their gun is not working. Absolutely the case. Part of our sensory system shuts down to that kind of stress. Theres a guy named david clear wrote into the kill zone. Im going to read from one of them which i think is really interesting about the Police Officers partner, a guy named dan, is wrestling with the criminal. The officer is like this criminal is trying to kill his partner danna trying to kill the criminal before he kills dan. This all happened real fast in milliseconds. At the same time i was bring my gun up dan was fighting with them and the only thought that came to my mind was, oh dear god, dont let me hit dan. Fired five rounds. My vision changed as soon as i started shoot. It went from seeing the whole picture to just the suspects head. Everything else disappeared. I didnt see dan anymore, didnt see anything else. All i could see was a suspects head. I saw four by five rounds hit the first hit on his left eyebrow and opened up a hole in the guys head snapped back and he said, oh, like all youve got me. I fired another round. It hit on the outside of his left eye and his left eye exploded just ruptured and came out. My fourth shot just just hit just in front of his left ear. Thats a really weird explanation because of course hes describing something thats not physiologically possible. You cant actually observe the actions of bullets in real time. 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 had slowed down to the point where he could see the entry of his boots 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 physiological process is. If we are in a position of extraordinary danger, it makes total sense our body would just say, look, anything extraneous, were not to worry about. I want you to focus just on the thing in front of you. Go to slow things down im going to cut off things like noise you dont need at this moment, i just want you to one of the things people find actually in shootings and particularly in war times is an extraordinary number of people who were fired upon lose control of their bowels. Unpleasant but true. For the simple reason is that when your body is confronted with a lifeanddeath situation is nonessential. Focusing instead on the problem at hand 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 various parts of the body. In any case. Think about that taken to an extreme. In the beginning that kind of reaction is enormously useful but lets push it out a little bit further. Your body starts to shut down and according to people studying this, between about 100a50b45 all the kinds of processes are really really useful. They help us zero in on whats going on. When you get beyond that starting get to 150a75, 200, it starts to become a real problem because you start to get incapable of any kind of rational thought and your hearing in your eyesight shut down to the point we are essentially blind and deaf. Your motor coordination starts to really seriously deteriorate and your behavior becomes extraordinary but aggressive number access to do any higher cognitive control. This is why Police Officers will always 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. They cant hit the buttons on the phone because they have no coordination left because their heart rate is 200, and they cant remember 911. The number of people who dial 411 is extraordinary. Its gone. The other spot people forget to press the send button on the cell phone. They dial something and then look at their phone, its not working. All that stuff god in that moment under that extraordinary abthis is why Police Departments recently, very lately have started to ban highspeed chases. But the problem with highspeed chases is what happens during the chase. You kill innocent bystanders. Thats a serious consideration. Not the only consideration. The other, and in some ways more important consideration is what happens after the chase. If you have someone driving at 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 then no longer humid in a certain sense abno longer human in a certain sense. Think about rodney king, i had long discussions when i was writing my book with former lapd officers, they would say them everyone said that was about race and lots of lots of things have 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 is been white as snow at exactly the same thing would happen. This was about what happens when you have a group of eight young men chase another young man the residential area of 100 miles per hour. Get out of the car in your heart rate is at 200 and you go and find this guy and go crazy on them. There was a moment when stacy kuhn said told him to stop and they dont. A huge issue in trial. Its because they dont hear him. The hearing is gone. The first thing that went was hearing. Completely oblivious to anyone shouting any direction or instruction because in that moment there out of their mind. One of the cases really broke my heart like this is the case a couple years ago in chicago guy name roscoe ross was a kid he was a college student. Hes driving to chicago and he makes illegal uturn the cops see him and come after him. But he doesnt stop. So they have a chase. Gets on to the dan ryan. Finally they cut him off and hes on the side of the road. Cops jump out and they say get out of the car. The cop starts running toward the car. Smashes back window of the car, sticks his gun in and says that russ went out for his gun. Shoot him, russ is dead. 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 involve that situation must engage in a kind of mind reading he must understand this whole situation from russs perspective. Russ is a kid. Russ did something really stupid and illegal uturn in front of a cop then the cops came after him and what address do . He panicked. He goes in this chase and finally they cut him off. His heart rate is going crazy. They yell, get out of the car. He cant hear them. He sitting there terrified and this cop comes up behind him, smashes the window and sticks a gun at his face. He is dead. What that cop lost in that moment, what 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 at the moment when he smashes the window and sticks his gun in, his effectively autistic. I think its very important lesson in trying to understand what happened. Theres another key element here, the element of time. I think we lose our ability to mind read when we run out of time to step which is very obvious point but ethic its worth getting into more detail. 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 in Television Show, theres two cops, their firing and talk to each other and the victim the person they are firing at shots off some challenge in a fire again and the whole thing takes 20 minutes. , this never happens in the real world. A guy named gavin the becker who wrote this wonderful book a couple years ago. He runs a bodyguard Security Agency and i had a long talk with him because he studied assassinations. He became a student of assassinations of history. He has all these tapes. He showed me the tape of the ragged assassination and 81, outside the washington hills, ragan coming out of the speech he waves to the crowd, they go, ragan, ragan, this kid robert hinckley, 22 in his hand leans in six shots. Hits the Police Officer, hits the secret service guy. Hits james brady in the head. Hit the car. Its ragan. The question with that is how does he get six shots off . Ragan is surrounded by bodyguards. This guy pokes a gun and shoot 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 a blink of an eye. You know how long that whole incident was from the moment hinckleys gun is visible to the moment hinckley is on the ground, 1. 8 seconds. Do you have any time to make sense of that situation . To mind read hinckley to look at the crowded think whos a threat whos not a threat whos terrified . No time whatsoever. 1. 8 seconds. Shooting assassination attempt to the president of south korea a couple years ago. The assassin stands up, takes his gun out, he so nervous he starts by shooting himself in the foot. Then he goes and points at the president and fires a shot and mrs. And hits the president s wife in the head. She fools over dead. The bodyguard gets up, shoots, hits a sixyearold kid sitting next to the assassin. The crowd grabs the guy they wrestled him to the ground. Beginning to end, 3. 5 seconds. Its over. Who can make sense of that . Everything happens too fast. When things happen too fast we lose our higher faculty mood lose our belief to make due to any sophisticated reading of whats going on a psychologist named keith payne who did a beautiful little aba couple years ago inspired by the diallo shooting he sits you down in front of the computer he flashes a black face, base of young black male and then says to you, he says im going to show you this black face and its going to be one of two objects appear on the screen either a ranch or gun. If its a wrench they wanted hit this, the question is, how often do you make the diallo do you hit the button for god when its the ranch . The answer is can you make quite a lot. You can do all because of cool things if you flash of white face first they dont make the diallo error quite as easily. So it plays a role. Thats not the interesting finding, the interesting finding is the more that you speed the process up, the last time you give somebody to think about their choice. It doesnt matter how many times they will always say gun. When you speed things up people no longer try to make sense of it they just retreat to the most basic most simple and most destructive function. Only to say, its a blackeyed chances are hes got a gun. You see how the element of time erodes our ability to do any kind of clearer and more sophisticated analysis of the situation. This is why Police Departments you look at the way they train Police Officers are obsessed with time. All about time. When you train Police Officers they talk endlessly about the need for cover and concealment. Confronting a suspect the first thing you do is to look for some way either to be out of the suspects line of sight or obscure in some way. But more importantly, it buys you time. You never in a situation of standing in front of that person and having to make a decision in a millisecond of the weather to fire or not. Thats why in the case of traffic stops theres a whole procedure of traffic stops when the cop pulls you over and then he walks up and parks his car slightly outside of yours he walks up on the driver side and stops behind your head. Have you ever noticed this. Not supposed to stop in front of you. I do. Shined his flashlight over your shoulder, why is he doing that . Because hes got a gun. He slowed the situation down. In order to shoot him you have to take the gun twist around to see if you have a seat seatbelt on abif you standing in front of you just go boom. By doing that hes helped save your life, in a certain sense. He tried to introduce an extra couple of seconds and allow him to make a much more sophisticated analysis of whats going on. There was no whitespace in the bodyguard business there wasaround ragan. You must have a protective protective area where there is no people of 10 or 15 or 20 feet the greater the amount of space there is between any potential assailant and target the more time any kind of action aggressive action is going to take end time means safety in that situation. Time gives the bodyguard the ability to scan the crowd and get an understanding of who might be dangerous and who might not be. This is also why its been such a push in recent years and Police Departments to replace two man cars with oneman cars and that seems really kind of counterintuitive people look at this and say theyre just trying to save money. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with time. If you do all kind of research that shows two officer cars get into far more trouble end up shooting far more innocent people and theres all kinds of bad things far more the officers traveling by themselves. The reason is when youre with someone else you speed things up. You have the kind of social courage to rush in it if you buy yourself you never do it in a million years. You stay behind and call for help. As a result, something that mightve been accelerated gets decelerated. The significance of all of this is that its a reminder of how impoverished our vocabulary is for describing failures or describing disasters for accidents. We have this very simplistic way of trying to make sense of why things have gone wrong. We look at rodney king and say its about a bunch of racist cops. Actually, no, its about what happens when you chase someone for 100 miles an hour. Thats far more useful way of understanding that particular problem. We look at the cop who rushes up after rocks and bangs window and sticks his gun and says what a terrible awful person that cop is. He should be in jail. While he is a terrible awful person but maybe he was really bad to train maybe at some point in line he was not trained that when youre in that kind of situation you stand by your vehicle undercover and call out to the person that has the car. Is that training or false appraisement . Maybe a little bit of both. Most of all, when we look at these kinds of social blunders, all the pieces ive been describing our social blunders. When we look at these things people go wrong at the kind of cues they miss we forget the kind of skills we have to make us human that allow us to function intelligently in the world are really really fragile. Theyre not always there with us. There are times when these very powerful Critical Skills can be obliterated. To take us from being sophisticated to being extraordinarily unsophisticated. To go back to diallo, there they were, sean carroll, can boss Eric Mcmillan and Richard Murphy. Its late, theyre in the south bronx, they see a young black man, he seems to be behaving oddly. Their driving they cant see him that well, theyre cruising barbot right away they can start to system, rigid system. Black guy, late, 12 30 a. M. , cant be good. He small too. Five foot six inches, what a small mean . At 12 30 a. M. At night in the south bronx. It means you got a gun. Hes not out there by himself at that size unless hes packing. Thats the first thing they are thinking. Hes got a gun. Then they back up and he doesnt move. Now they are thinking, not only does he have a gun come this guy is a bad ass. Hes fully not scared by the cops. Now they are abup even more. Now they are like they get out of the car, mcmillan says, Police Officer, may we have a word. Gail turns and runs back in the building because hes totally and utterly terrified. Four big white guys in the south bronx late at night coming after him with their chest puffed out with bullet proof vest. But they dont have time to think through all of this because its a pursuit. Hes running back into the building. Chase. What happens with chases start . Your heart rate source. These guys arent seasoned professionals who done this before. They are raw, new to the bronx. There harboring ghosts from 100, 150, 200, bounding up the steps. Diallo is at the door at the back of the vestibule. He turned his body and tugging at something in his waistband. They have no way to slow this down. Did right in front of them and its a narrow vestibule. Knows chance to try to figure out what is that . Things are getting faster and faster. Its a wall its not a gun but think about it, diallo is black and were measuring this in milliseconds. Whenever you have to make a decision about a black person in a few milliseconds, you think its a gun. You always think its a gun. Everyone in this room will say gun. In that situation. He is completely autistic, he is locked in on this object the same way peter was locked in on the light switch in that scene. He yells, hes got a gun mcmillan panics and jumps backwards and starts firing. Someone jumping backward in that situation means only one thing, hes been shot. So can boss and Richard Murphy jump out of the car and they start firing too. The next day the paper for months afterwards a huge amount was made on the fact that 41 bullets are fired. 41 bullets could be fired by people with semi automatic pistols in two seconds. Three seconds. If youre in that degree of excitement. In fact, the entire incident probably takes place from beginning to end no more than about six or seven seconds. They stop the car and call out to diallo. Diallo turns runs back in the building they jumped toward him, 2002. He reaches into his pocket to get something, comes up, 1003. Carol says hes got a gun, 1004. Shooting starts, 1005 from 1006. Silence. Can boss gets up walks to diallo on the ground looks at his hand and tries to see where the gun is and he sees a wallet and he goes, where is the gun . 1007, 1008, he runs up the street because he forgot where they are. Sean carroll goes and sits down the steps and starts to cry. 1009, 1010. Thus the end of chapter 8. Thank you. [applause] thats the end of diallo. Thank you. [applause] [applause] such a downer. [laughter] what is this information tell us about, im not trying to make this political, but what does it tell us about trying to win the war in iraq with 19yearold kids in a foreign culture . [laughter] well. I hesitate to give any kind of global interpretation of this because im not interested, in grand themes, i will say that it can teach us a lot about those instantaneous moments when things go wrong in war. Theres a moment in this war where theres a lot of cases where the checkpoint is. 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 at that moment whether the people in front of them are car bomber this innocent family out for a drive that dont understand the instruction to stop their car. Do you o address Law Enforcement or military groups with this information . No. I hope is a necessary. But if people would like me to i would love to. Im not telling them something they dont know. There has been a lot of work on this in the lost few years in the Law Enforcement community. There is a reason why shootings are lower today than they were in the past because people took these lessons to heart and training for officers has changed dramatically. Its far from perfect and not as good in other parts of the country as new york city but its getting a lot better. Talk about people are raised in a culture of fear. So i remember when fear was a common response and as an adult i had to slow down. So i wonder if looking into this applications to less dramatically extreme moments and to meditate . As of all things when sure finish people to you all kinds of ideas the way you ought to have written the book. [laughter] and you have just done that. [laughter] you describe the ability to interpret the scene of who is afraid of Virginia Woolf happening in milliseconds but the viewer can do this because they are not adrenaline loaded im wondering if the application of your thesis is only two or there is no application is not adrenaline fueled order to speed up that capacity due to mindreading . Its interesting in the chapter in the book on mindreading and limit myself to thes very stressful situations. Thats where the application is clearest. You can do this in all different types of context. But there are far more cases where we are in the stressful situations than we think. Not just Police Officers anyone in a car has a moment in a situation where things have sped up at adrenaline is racing. So there is that applicable that he to everyday life and that is enormously important because they are culturally significant events how we talk about things like race and address Law Enforcement. They really impact the way we construct society. I like the idea of that momentary autism but what you describe is the inability to read another person basically through the eyes. Wasnt there something about the darkness of the vestibule and to see his eyes . And how does that hide with that artistic response . Absolutely. Two things. Realize and never had a minute. So tempting. The way they teach Police Officers. There is a little bit of training in many ways they are taught to what could tell them a lot and there is a reason where you ought to be looking in those critical moments they should tell you if there is a weapon but as you can see itself is ambiguous if a wallet can look like a gun then maybe but it was dark so even if it was perfectly light out they would have makes the evidence but in this case it was dark with the driving path the first time. And its something we interpret from a lot of things. Peoples demeanor of where they are standing they dont have a lot of these visual cues to make that initial assessment of somebody is a threat are harmless. So the darkness plays a role it doesnt help them jump to that conclusion but its 1230. I read blink already and i loved it and one of the things that sounds so interesting is that the artist can spot the forgery immediately. And in a way its almost the opposite example where somebody can make the right decision very quickly and unconsciously because of their expertise. Yes. The more eight talk about the book the longer i diminish or incentive to buy it but the two sides that it is extraordinarily good i told this story they spent 10 million on and it turned out to be fake they analyze it for 14 months but they it was a marble greek statue of a boy and was given theres 200 around the world and they are in poor shape this is a beautiful shape. Just starting off as a museum and a that this is extraordinary. They took it said very clear its not a fake wheel taken alone for one year to put it through the paces. There is a paper published in Scientific American by a lead geologist proving why the marble was 2000 years old and they were so happy they bought it 10 million it was in the basement one of the worlds foremost experts on great Greek Culture is visiting so the curator says i have something to show you. Come with me. They go into the dark room the statue is standing there 7foot high. Look at that. Is that is ours in two weeks. She says thats fake. No. Two weeks later thomas hoven also a greek expert comes to visit and he says tom has something to show you. Takes him down and he said is the check cleared . Is it too late to stop it . So then they take it to greece. [laughter] a room full of all the top greet guys another sculpture they take the cloth off and they all say where did you get that . [laughter] it was intuitive repulsion. [laughter] oh my god. It turns out its make. One fake they find a plastic cast that is exactly like this and is not 2000 years old it actually dates malign 1979. Today you look in the catalog the pictures says either 636 bc or 1980. [laughter] thats my favorite. So thats when its really good. So goes back and forth when are they good and when are they bad . What are the things that destroy this that is inherently a very powerful tool that we have. When does it break down . Because normally they have no problem if you structure that situation right they look and say what you doing out here . And says we dont want your wallet under normal circumstances that works in that is concerned with this normally extraordinary faculty to fall apart. Talk about the situations were really good cops in that moment of making extraordinarily sophisticated judgments and i have a story about a cop who confront the kid and he pulls a gun on him. Kid has again. Says dont pull the gun on me. Hes pulling in and hes pulling it and then he waits that is someone who is extraordinarily well trained and experienced. And i really enjoyed the stories talking about indicators to focus on to make that snap judgment. So talk about the Tipping Point and then eventually what did not make it in . You mean you want to know about the outtakes . I have been publishing all of my outtakes. [laughter] thats not true. So use your entire notebook. So the thing im going to do is magic and i will write something for the new yorker on that. I have a lot of stuff that was left out. I was is having an problem with the term mind reading. It plays a prominent role it seems to me its not really the mind we are reading and those with mild autism. And then to learn about that. Its not really the mind we are reading. You are right. We cant read minds literally but what are the intentions its a phrase that is used to describe so pointing at the camera can you look inside my head and see it says camera pointing . Know that you can logically infer that from the hands and the eyes in my tone of voice. And then to make sense of a whole group of external cues. Its important to distinguish between those inferences in the evidence of language. And peter has an iq of 119 150 that people cannot make this to interpret this something as simple as this gesture. It does go to something about his inability to put himself in the mind of someone else. And thats what they cant do. And then the experiment but in fact this is fundamentally about racism and then to be deeply ingrained the First Response type doesnt make it less troubling. Then the kkk. And then by better training to fundamentally change the way you think. So in that chapter and another chapter. That there are two kinds of racism and to figure out your levels and the family disconnected phenomenon to be at a conscious level on the extraordinarily unbiased person and my behavior of discriminatory impulses it is a powerful contributory factor in that situation but that whole sequence they construct the fact he is a young man, howr it does not speak to the central factor. And then we cant stop. But it is this send the sand this. Is not black it is park avenue. 1 00 oclock at night 2 00 oclock in the night. And then they see a guy. And then he turns around you can construct the scenario regardless of the color of the mans skin. Its much more likely to happen with a black person but it could happen without. Same as rodney king. That could very well be. That happens with white people all the time. I do think its important to stress it is a powerful contributory factor and not a sufficient factor for what you think could happen. I kept waiting for you to address the issue of the role of desire of the Police Officers in the case or the idea that we see what we want to see to see those realities over and over. So there is a little more of that in the book so with that analysis what is the context those four guys are operating . They are in the midst of the most rampant season in the nypd history to conquer crime in new york. And have been told correctly the way they have conquered crime have been far more aggressive and active. You cannot do that if you are passive in the Police Department and then you have to be aggressive so that part of the nypd. Is proactive you go into the community then you stop and say whats going on with that so what the hell is that guy doing . That was not the culture of the Police Department so there is that institutional desire so what we are seeing is the flipside and then gets her into trouble if you dont correctly observe the proper way to approach a suspect they are not well trained. So of that overall environment. I loved it. So when i read page 53 a started crying and when you know you know it is so powerful. And then to come out of the intellect more into a spiritual realm. And then when she talked about medication and then we have to be very quiet. How do we get quiet and not speed up that time . And even know if you know what youre doing. [laughter] thats been said many times. But i want you to know that i know you probably dont even know it absolutely love you. [applause] thank you very much. And then to become infatuated and then to become dismissive. In then and then to dismiss it as a second order. Its every bit as critical and rational is the thinking that we are doing with that conscious to liberation. So at least five of you. And this five chapter what you describe today was more reactive and then that was a proactive way to use quick judgment. So how did you choose the term . So it describes the process to reach those conclusions so if you look at those complicated decisions people make is possible to reach that sophisticated conclusion were information then you would think going in who is able to diagnose with uncanny accuracy when a couple will be together or not 15 years in the future based on 15 minutes of conversation. A tiny thin slice of that couple allows him to make an extraordinarily accurate and meaningful prediction. That is not an anomalous situation. Time and time again if you look at how predictions are made you can see there are very small number taking place over a short period of time to be enormously predictive of any kind of future outcome. Read the marriage is formal but we do this constantly making searching and reaching conclusions. You need and then you go on the date you have a Job Interview with someone any think youre making a decision based on five or six hours and then you make a decision. And a senior at harvard for those random processes everyone was trying to hire and then its like this kid from harvard. We really like this kid nolan myers from harvard. So that i just had lunch with him in Harvard Square brothers people wanted a higher including Steve Ballmer to microsoft. So not the best at harvard. Solid student really nice guy then after talking to him i wanted to hire him. [laughter] so why do you want to hire him so much . How long did it take you to desired you want to hire him . Pretty much right away. [laughter] thats the way we operate. For better or worse extraordinarily dependent on information gathered and that i spent time trying to figure out and where that is justified. I spent a good deal of time talking about them. How does your own intuition or thin slice operate as a writer and reporter . Im the least intuitive person ever. I am constantly missing things. So when someone else says what about that . My father is a mathematician with that deliberate professional side. So this book was written from that perspective i have in the land of the intuitive i am a tortoise. [laughter] i nearly got a hold of the book if i had it would have read it. [laughter] theres so i did take this little drug and then it makes the heart rate very stable. And then i will choose to blame on the drug so have you looked into the drugs and judgment because i didnt feel even though i was physically calm and for people who need to be calm. Interesting. Do we want to put our Police Officers on beta blockers at all times . [laughter] when it comes to pharmaceutical pharmaceuticals. [laughter] maybe we ought to try that. All the pressures on you for the last question. With people navigating those right i dont know the answer to that. But i suspect the visual cues that we get on the part of that intentionality. 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] every saturday evening we take the opportunity to open the archives with one wellknown author and tonight we are featuring bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell hes appeared on the tv and coming up is his book outliers looking at why certain people succeed. 2008. [applause] if my mother knew i was standing in front of a church with her to the people she would have a heart attack. Very happy to be here my editor is here who is primarily responsible for the success of my first two books. [applause] if you write a book about the collectivity of achievements i would give you a choice. I could do a short synopsis of my book or i can tell you a story. So a lot of the book is about culture and how that matters and by that i mean where we are from and ancestors make a difference of how we do our job and how good we are what we choose to do for a living as a whole second half of the book and sometimes a difficult thing to wrestle with. One of the examples i use in the book illustrates the point of how much culture matters. There is a whole chapter on plane crashes. But now i will warn you i will tell the whole chapter. And its also a good deal scarier. And then he will be flying in a plane in the next month . Im sorry to hear that. [laughter] so with this plane crash isnt scary because its unusual but scary because it is typical. So the plane it takes off from columbia january 25, 1990 bound for jfk airport in new york. Columbia is not that far from the United States. Just on the other side of the caribbean sea. And then you go up the east coast of the United States that this is january and there was a noreaster on the east coast. All kinds of planes were delayed that night. So here they were on a relatively routine flight and the copilot then they start to get held up by air Traffic Control. And they are held up because of high wind and then with Atlantic City for 30 minutes and then 40 miles an additional 30 minutes. After one hour and quarter of delays they are cleared for landing and they come down to the runway at jfk and then have a severe windshear 500 feet above the ground. That is where the wind blows very heavily in the face of the aircraft to add power to maintain speed and then the wind just drops now youre going too fast. So normally in that situation the autopilot will adjust. But as it happens for reasons we dont understand it was turned off possibly because it wasnt functioning. So then you pull up and circle around and then we approach for a second landing and as a fly towards jfk the Flight Engineer cries out flame out on engine number four. One by one the engines are flowing the captain says show me the runway because if we are close enough to jfk and it wont matter we are losing all of our engines but they cant see the runway they are nowhere near jfk there still 14 miles away from the airport. And so they crash they actually crash in the backyard of John Mcenroes fathers estate on oyster bay long island. Seventytwo people die by investigators time go to the records what is the wreckage and retrieve the black box typically these can take weeks but in this case it doesnt take weeks they know but the next morning what caused the crash. Has nothing to do with the plane they werent with the weather nothing to do with air Traffic Control it was simple. It in the aviation world it was feel the exhaustion. So this was a not a typical crash like they ran out of fuel what i meant was it took the form it was a catastrophic. And in the sense to be flown back and that is a mental image of what a plane crashes. Plane crashes really take that form at all but they tend to be far more often is a subtle process and then to gradually over takes the pilot until the plane is in the irredeemable crisis. But just that the weather is bad enough. If it is under some degree of stress. Is not enough behind schedule to cause them to hurry. Then we know you start to make mistakes when you hurry. And then the two pilots have never flown together before. They dont know each other well so they are not comfortable especially when things get difficult theyre not good at working together yet. So they are associated and then with seven consecutive errors. And that is enough to bring down the plane. And that the pilot turned left and then should have turned right pull left or down but overwhelmingly communication. Or he tells them something in a form that allows them to understand so if you look closely they are not technological phenomenon they are social phenomenon. And why that so typical it is a social accident. One of the things they did trying to understand this plane crashes i out with this marvelous pilot and an expert with the technology and humans which is what the plane crashes are and then to walk me to the accident and then to describe before the bad weather and then has the plane behind schedule as they almost always have. And then you have the minor malfunction of the autopilot that something that adds to the stress of the pilot. And then to make the point that is very clear with that plane crash to fly a boeing seven oh seven that is the previous workhorse of the aviation world. But for those all generations they are actually connected with pulleys to the sheet metal flying seven oh seven is like rowing a boat now you just have a joystick. And then to circle around the east coast and its hard work. And like the size of copy cups. But in his case and with those various controls. And then he starts to ask for things to look at the flight transcript. And you cant process things as easily and as quickly. And then to be translated into spanish form even of is a fluent english speaker. And then to start to shut down. And then we have to make mistakes on the first landing called the ground proximity Warning System if youre coming into low. But it goes off 15 times. And a good hour before and can see the plan so thats the one thing that goes on. But the other thing is what strange that is going on is like how quiet it is. And the pilot who was responsible for all the communication he is supposed to be coordinating to bring this plane into landing. In the way that seems very peculiar so he doesnt tell air Traffic Control they are running out of fuel is unusual and then to say for what we thought they were saying allowing to go to the front of the line of all the planes that were circling around jfk and that would prove fatal for that particular plane and never went stops and say every talking about the front or the back of the line . It doesnt bring up the subject of fuel again for another 30 minutes. So i kept coming back so trying to understand what went wrong that night, he tells me a fascinating story about what happened to him that day. He had just wanted to jfk that morning or that afternoon. He finds that the huge airbus but then you go north if you go to dubai you go up over moscow and then you come down. When they were over moscow a woman in the back, an indian woman traveling with her husband had a stroke and she started to vomit have seizures. The doctor don back and said she only has an hour to live we have to get her medical attention. At that point he was over moscow and had to make a series of decisions about what to do to save this womans life. I cant land in moscow here is an elderly couple no money dont speak english permit tiny village and if i plopped down in moscow they will be eaten alive will never see them again. We have to find a first world country. So he thinks helsinki. The next problem is he is 60 turns overweight he just took off from dubai they are not supposed to land with that much fuel youre supposed to use up all your fuel get to your destination and then you land now he has 60 tons of extra fuel and the electronics are not calibrated to land the plane that heavy so he has a decision to make do i go for the baltic sea and dump the fuel . That will take 40 minutes nobody is happy when you dump 60 tons of fuel in the middle the baltic sea. I will land heavy that means you to turn off the electronics and land the plane yourself light as a feather that you dont structurally damage the plane these are 500 million each. Its a huge airbus so immediately he has to start dealing with a crisis with the window a 40 minutes to figure it out. And then with the superiors in dubai to say is it okay i land heavy i will risk your brandnew plane and then get on the phone with helsinki with an airport they dont even know if they can handle the plane to learn everything we can about the airport. You come in over the water not over the city because they dont want planes coming in over the city for noise reasons so he is heavy he cant be landing into the wind so then i have to tell him but into what youre not supposed to do but to come in over helsinki and then talk to the doctor exactly how much time do i need . Has to have an ambulance waiting on the ground right or he will land to get the woman off the plane and get the flight attendants to communicate to the people in the back we are not going to crash we have a woman who was very sick. I could go on but if you think all of the things he had to do to prepare for that landin landing, that meant for that 40 minutes he never stopped talkin talking. Hes talking the entire time. What we are talking about what it means to be a good pilot. He is being a really good pilot in that moment, he needs to be able to land heavy but mostly what we are asking of that pilot in that moment is that he can communicate. Get on the phone and talk them to land the plane coming on the phone with helsinki to land into the wind and get them already and get on the radio with the people in the back on and on and on we think what it means to be a good pilot with those Technical Skills and that he conducts voice iconic voice but that has nothing to do with what it means to be a good pilot. It means to do what they were doing which means talk to all different kinds of people in the open and honest and persuasive way to talk your way out of this crisis. So with that in mind lets think about whats going on in the cockpit. I will redo the transcript from the flight recorder. Flying into jfk for the first aborted landing they are in heavy fog and he says the runway where is it . I dont see it. And then they realize they cannot make it and they pull up and the captain asks to air Traffic Control for another air traffic pattern and then ten seconds pass almost to himself we dont have fuel. Seventeen seconds left. Just to get a sense of this with the crisis that was this much. In just ten seconds of silence. So to understand what this is like so it is on empty you just botched the landing. Nothing. And then he says i dont know what happened with the runway. I didnt see it. So they cant move on they are not even thinking about how to land the plane the thinking there botched the runway then finally the one that says clock the one is supposed to communicate says i didnt see it in air Traffic Control says make a left turn and he says told her we are in an emergency and then says thats right and we will try again we are running out of fuel. They have the fuel gauge on empty, they know there is a long line of planes in the sky waiting to land. They are in crisis mode somewhere out over long island in the captain says tell them we are in the emergency he is properly panicking at this point. He says thats right on the heading once again and we are running out of fuel. That has no meaning in the role that navigation. As you are coming out on coming into land you will run out of fuel they all run out of fuel it doesnt mean anything so to hear that is the air Traffic Controller you dont check any boxes or sparks interest. Now think about the structure of the sentence he starts a critical sentence with a routine acknowledgment of the instructions in the second half he puts his concern we are in crisis. It would be as if you are in a restaurant to say i would have a refill on that coffee and im choking on a checking on chicken bell. [laughter] they would say youre funny. Thats not the way we talk when we try to communicate about a situation even the sound between the two sentences is important so to undercut the seriousness of what he is saying. In fact later during the inquest the air Traffic Controllers that were communicating they all said the same thing we had no idea they were in trouble. It sounded like like he was totally nonchalant talking to us. Nothing in his tone of voice to suggest or the structure of a sentence to suggest that something was seriously amiss with the plane. Now there is an actual term that linguists used to describe what was going on it is called mitigation. It is the word we use to describe situations where people undercut the seriousness of what they are saying. If you are desperate for your boss to read something you have written to get back to you dont say i need you to read this now get back to me say if you have time this weekend if you can look at this. Not a big deal that is mitigation. [laughter] and you do that for a reason. If you say i need this to read this now you would be employed much longer is an appropriate use in that situation of this social tool for communicating. Normally thats fine but in the aviation world people realize this was a cause of a lot of problems in the cockpit thats a place where mitigation was not an appropriate strategy. Let me give you an example so supposed you are the pilot and copilot we are flying along and we see on the weather radar see theres a big patch of thunderstorms they are telling us about the choppy weather ahead but you despise straight into it with no attempt so i want to communicate to you the fact we should find a way to go around it so how do i do that . There are many different strategies i could use the difference in terms of their mitigation so the first thing i can say is the real medication would be a command turn 30 degrees right. That is wholly inappropriate because what i am saying is i am the boss not you and your are not a good pilot. So that i cut it down to make an obligation statement and Say Something like i think we need to deviate right about now. I think and then i say the word we set of 30 degrees deviate right around now thats a little more acceptable. So that is also too much and i can use a suggestion and say lets go around the weather. You and me. Together on a plane lets go around. Maybe that is too hard. May be a simple question and say which direction do you want to deviate . Im assuming youre going to sooner or later you going to go right or left . Maybe thats too strong. If it was up to me i would go left. And that is the hint. And to say that looks mean up there. [laughter] there is a world of difference between turn 30 degrees region boy it looks mean up there ahead. But in one case i command an action or a response from you and the last is something so soft its easy for you to ignore it. This is what people in the aviation world became obsessed with mitigation because they looked at the transcripts of the black boxes in the minutes and hours before a plane crash what you sow is a lot of mitigation that is whats going on in the cockpit causing all the errors. People were too often relying on hints and infrequently using the language that would compel action so the air florida crash in the 1980s and then creeping forward and then i. C. E. The answer reform on the wings. Hyphen one bad weather quite a lot. And the first thing he says is like how the i. C. E. Is hanging back there. Do you see that . And that the captain fills in the blanks. And now the i. C. E. Is getting thicker. See those icicles . Now icicles but he wraps it up a little bit. It still a hand. And then a couple more minutes passed and now the copilot is getting concerned as they are fit for takeoff and he says this is a losing battle trying to deice those wings it gives you a false sense of security. Thats all that does. A little stronger but it is still a hint. The pilot is ignoring him. Now they are number two and he is starting to get really really worried. So what does he do . He goes from a hint to a suggestion and now he actually says weve been sitting here a while now the captain responds and says i think were good to go in a minute were next for takeoff. Now were first in line and they take off at washington reagan and when i. C. E. Forms on your wings it diminishes your left so they take off in the plane cant make it the potomac is right below they clipped the 14th street bridge and as they go down the copilot turns to the captain and the first moment of on this conversation Honest Communications is that you got into the cockpit and the copilot says larry we are going down and the captain says i know. Now mitigation has in the Airline World when you look at why they have dropped so dramatically over the last 20 years because of the success to retrain pilots and how they talk to each other so for example this is never the case before but now very often they are required to call each other by the first name if youre talking to someone captain smith if you say jack youre more likely to communicate openly with him. Sometimes some airlines have done away with captain and first officer entirely. It is the attempt to find openness and communication. They also they give freshman boys all those instructions how to make out with a girl . [laughter] can i place my hand here . Yes or no . [laughter] can i move my hand 6 inches lower . Is that a yes . Sign here. [laughter] they do that with captains they give you a script if you are copilot having trouble with your community on a captain then you read off the thing. It is surprisingly effective to create more open conversation in times with a social context makes open communication difficult. This is one of the Great Success stories in the world of aviation. So now lets go back in the terms of mitigation. They just blew the first landing they are circling around long island and they are on the phone with air Traffic Control figuring out when they command again. Said what did air Traffic Control tell you . He says irony advised him we are going to attempt again because now we cant and then four seconds of silence. He says advised him we are in an emergency. Former seconds go by. The captain tries again. Did you tell him . He said yes or i already advised him. Then he starts to talk air on air Traffic Control with routine details and said 150 maintaining 2052 heavy the captain starts to freak out and says advised him we dont have fuel. He gets back on the radio and says we maintain 3000 and we are running out of fuel sir. There again does not mention the word emergency. That is the word you are trained to listen for. And then it says emergency you act. He does not use the he just as we are running out of fuel which every single plane over jfk was also doing. He is mitigating. Now one minute air Traffic Control says i will bring you about 15 miles northeast then turn you back into the approach. Is that okay with you and your fuel . And the copilot says i guess so. Thank you very much. They are about to crash. Now what is going on here . One thing you have to know about kennedy is air Traffic Control is famous throughout the aviation world. They have run one of the busiest safety record. And also the most of noxious air Traffic Controllers in the world they are famous and are bullies and the one that i heard is jfk is so crazy that once you land its really easy to get lost a pilot said on once got lost finding his way to the terminal and finally she turns to him and air Traffic Controllers says shut up. Stay there. Dont move i will get back in touch with you. Then the pilot says man, was i married you in an earlier life . [laughter] so this is what they are like. [laughter] they push you around and the only way to get what you want you have to play their game and they will only respect you to say this is my issue then they will respond. He is intimidated. I guess so thank you very much because we can understand intimidation and mitigation when what you are trying to do is avoid the thunderstorm 25 miles ahead. We could possibly understand it when were in the plane on the ground at Washington National because it is possible its a judgment call about deice. One guy had a risk threshold that was higher but it is really hard to understand mitigation when you are in a plane and your fuel gauges on empty and you know you will crash unless you do something now. Thats the puzzle so why is he doing that under the circumstances . The answer, i think to use the work of a fascinating psychologist and works for ibm in the sixties and was multinational all over the globe and goes around the world and gets all of the ibm officers a detailed psychological question how should we behave differently in different cultures . Is it same intake down as copenhagen . So to try to get a read and he organizes the enormous database its called these dimensions that are now famous in psychology of ways to understand the cultures of the world differ. He comes up with a series of dimensions and then to categorize. So one of them is individualism all of the countries in the world exist so the most collective culture in the world is guatemala the most is to the United States why are we the only industrialized nation in the world not to have National Health insurance . Because we are individuals one of the definitions of individualism is to what extent do you feel responsible for the welfare other than yourself . We feel less responsible than any other country in the world. Another dimension is uncertainty avoidance how tolerant is that culture of ambiguity . When things go hairy with a crisis are you willing to be flexible or do you adhere to the rules of the principles they lay down before hand . And there are wide differences along that dimension those are the most keen to stick to the rules of the circumstance are greece and portugal guatemala uruguay and belgium. The five countries of the world on the other end of the spectrum the most tolerant of ambiguity are hong kong, swede kong, sweden, denmark, singapore and then jamaica. It is important its a value judgment is not saying its better to be here or there but this is one of the ways cultures differ and a way for us to understand when dealing with the culture with the frame of reference. And these two are pretty specific they have dramatic differences so when we look at that list telogen is the least tolerant and denmark is one of the most tolerant. Belgium and denmark they are pretty close together live in democratic an awful long time see you would think and then its actually different but on this dimension denmark has more in common with jamaica and belgium has more in common with guatemala. That is an interesting insight. Now at of all of the hostilities the most crucial that he calls power distance which is the measure of a countrys orientation toward hierarchy and asking questions like how likely in your culture is it for a superior were subordinate to express disagreement with a superior . Because they are older or have more experience have higher social standing with positions of power to accentuate there is a huge difference. And then we see them to hide their power. You have to see the Prime Minister of austria taking the streetcar to work. And once he was on holiday from spain and saw the Prime Minister of the netherlands in a vacation trailer park. That is what you do when you see the Prime Minister of the netherlands you act as normal a person as you can so as a what are the odds this completely helps us to understand and to combat and then that concept says even in the culture is as a high power distance that respects hierarchy will be a lot harder. So it should be possible to understand the likelihood of a plane crash looking at the level of that culture. There is a very famous paper done in the eighties to list all the countries of the world and with the power distance of the pilot and this is the most powerful way to understand the likelihood of a particular airline. And that is what you would expect and then australia. Israel. Can you imagine the israelis subordinate having difficulty expressing disagreement with the superior . [laughter] somebody was telling me one of the big problems with the islamic on israeli patrols late at night is the leader just cant get the people who are supposed to be subordinates to shut up. [laughter] so one of the countries that has one of the highest levels in the world . Columbia. In fact the kennedy crash is not the first time the National Airline has had this accident in fact after that crash now they have the investigation they had four crashes in six succession all took exactly the same form where the plane is in perfect working order the pilot was not sick not a massive mistake from air Traffic Control but still they crashed because of the social breakdown between the pilot and copilot. There was a crash in madrid the two lines from the report conclusion it was a case of the copilot saw something trying to bring it to the attention of the pie the and failed. The report said the copilot was right. But they died because when the copilot asked questions the implied suggestions were very weak. The captains reply was to ignore him totally. That is the endemic problem so that night in other words it wasnt the inability to communicate effectively it was the airlines problem of copilots to communicate and even more than that the sense of culture to allow subordinates to open the question are superior. That could not be understood or just individually but to be part of a much larger role context so its very easy to find this offensive. And we find that kind of language and argument to be problematic and with good reason with that culture stereotyping is used to harm but one of the arguments i make there are times we have to talk about cultures in that way how we behave and how we think we want to make People Better than we have to be willing to confront our cultural legacy and say this is an area where culture does not do a good job and this is not the culture where it does. So now we have all kinds of problems on the table. You have to understand where he is from. So to understand the plane that night he comes from a culture that is very hierarchical difficult to speak to a superior leaders are supposed to lead. The man he was supposed to be in charge is exhausted and can barely listen he is being repeated to he is at the end of his tether. So claude is on classes all by himself. And then the kennedy controllers totally low powered of noxious bullying new yorkers and is trying to tell him he is in trouble but hes using his own cultural language. The kind that says when you try to say that kind of thing you litigate. And then coming from a different cultural context. That they think that person doesnt have a problem its an incredible moment in that transcript with that cultural disconnect between the two that its painful to read. The last exchange and the crashes minutes away and he says i guess so they give very much and then the pilot turns and says what did he say . What did the controller tell you . So understand again this is the very end of the flight somewhere over long island the fuel gauge is an empty one of the flight attendants knows the story because she survived comes into the cockpit at that moment to ask what is going on and she asks and he just goes like this. They know its over. And then classes that wits and using his own cultural language to communicate the seriousness to air Traffic Control and he realized he had completely failed. The only way he can make sense of that is to assume he has offended air Traffic Control. So the pilot says what did he say . He answers in a small voice i guess hes angry and says flameout on engine number four and then he thinks he can bring the plane and he landed because they are miles away than the flight transcript after that nothing but two minutes of static and the last thing you hear air Traffic Control comes on to say do you have enough fuel to make the runway . Thank you. [applause] i think we have time for a few questions. Back to outliers talk about the 10000 hours i dont call yourself the outlier but what is the cultural background . There is a section in the book talking about what it takes to be good at something and how something psychologist have come up in a large number of cases it seems in order to accomplish a task after practice 10000 hours which is four hours a day for ten years so do i have the 10000 hours. But outside of that . Im not good at answering autobiographical questions. But i grew up in a house or i guess my parents were borderline workaholics. So maybe growing up in that atmosphere that looked at work in that way. So one of the examples used in your book the favorite rock band the beatles im curious how they increase their Technical Skills but it strikes me longterm success was more from their ability to innovate in a sustained way does that come from practice or Something Else . This is a reference along the same lines with the extraordinary the soldier and then they play eight hours sets seven days a week. So the question is with the apprenticeship to innovate you can accredit a lot. And then to master the field well enough to understand the possibilities. But if you dont know whats wrong with the existed paradigm. As broadband go a well educated rock band. Its much easier to understand how to innovate when youve got that kind of background. I recently discovered and started devouring the podcast on the ted website and immediately when you seeit you want to become part of the event. What i started to realize is its probably easier to get invited to speak than it isto get a ticket in the audience especially with a 10 year waiting list , i could spend 10,000 hours and perfect a skill and get invited. I was curious if you had any tips on how toconvince the members of ted to invite you to a talk. I havent even beeninvited back. Im in the same predicament as you are. If i hear anything from them ill be sure to pass it along. I enjoyed your book and i hope you keep writing them and my question is about women or the lack of them in the first half of outliers when you profile individuals whove had success they are male examples which is not surprising because they are those who had access to success in our society and except for notable exceptions. When you talk about kind of the ideal year for a male who wants to own a fortune in america in 1835 do you think that the age of the woman is before us and is that in our decade, is it ahead of us . What do you think about female success . Youre right theres an absence of women in the first half of this book and it would have been dishonest to put them in. My whole argument in the book is excess is a function of opportunities that have been, that are granted by society and we have i should point out over the last going back as long as theres been Human History i hugely disproportionatelygranted those opportunities to men. And i think one of the ways we gloss over that fact is by when we tell stories about success pretending theres as many women out there as men and their art because we just havent, success is not a simple function of peoples ability. Its a function of ability plus fees what do i think that will change . I certainly hope so and i hope if i were to write another version of this book in 40 years. I would, it would tell a very different story but when i was, its so interesting. I told the story of jewish lawyers in new york for example. You cant find any in that cohort. There are no women. Its amazing. Theres this beautifully group beautifully poised to take on a profession for reasons i explained and yet all those opportunities were granted to 50 percent of the groups population and its sort of like, what it is is a reminder of how tragically we have under use of utilized the talents of the population. Even bill gates schoolwas an all boys school. Iq. Hello. I havent read your most recent book yet so you may have already answered this question but theres a theorist named Robert Travers who writes a lot about self self perception and i think he cited the same story about the guys with the deicing on theirwings. And his idea is that we can deceive ourselves into believing everythings okay when its not really i was wondering if you think that concept works with your cultural ideas about how people can deceive themselves into taking off and then crashing. To apply that to what im talking about, maybe part of whats happening in highpowered culture is part of the deception is that the hierarchy will take care of you. The person higher up the chain knows more than you so you dont have to assert yourself in that way whereas the assumption that lowpower culture is that being hard in the latter is a more random fact that a fact that speaks to ameaningful difference in ability or judgment. So theres that element, and additional elements of selfdeception that goes on in highpowered institutions in the world but that being said its important to point out that highpowered is not always abad thing. Like that chapter of my book is concerned with career which is a very highpowered culture. You can make and which has had all kinds of consequences for korean aviation that struggled with this issue in the air all kinds of other areas of Creative Life the highpowered notion has been enormously useful. The country does not go from being in ruins at the end of the korean war to being one of the most powerful economic or system in the world in the space of half a century. Unless it has cultural ideas that support this enormous organization and effort and order. So i hesitate to kind of describe hierarchy entirely in negative terms and it can be a wonderful thing, just not in that way. It seems that a lot of what youre talking about here are things that are out of peoples control. The role that wealth lays in success, the culture we come from and where wevebeen raised, we are at. Given the other factor, the amount of practice we had to work on our ability is something we can choose to engage with, is there anything we can choose to do to deal with the culture that we come from and how it interacts with other cultures. This is a good question. To my annoyance, some reviews have accused me of being a social determinist. In fact im theopposite. So the culture that we come from is only deterministic of our behavior if we choose to ignore it. If you never addressed, so the chapter that i wastalking about in my talk , the plane crash chapter is really about korean air and how korea goes from being an airline that almost gets pushed out of business because it has so many plane crashes to being what is now today one of the earlier airlines in the world they transformed themselves over the last 10 years precisely because they say they decide at long last to confront their cultural legacy and deal with it and what they discover is if they are honest and open about the fact in this particular instance acting like you are a korean is not a good idea you canchange it and they do. They take that airline from literally it was this close to not existing anymore and its now an absolutely worldclass airline and one thing they show and icontinue this theme in the second half of the book. Once we can talk about and confront culture we can change culture. Were only prisoners of it if we pretend it doesnt exist and thats my great objection to the way we deal with socalled cultural stereotypes in this society. We have decided it is always better to ignore them in the interest of avoiding those few cases where there is misused and thats a shame because theres another chapter in the book which talks about math, learning math and asian schoolchildren vastly outperformed their western counterparts in math so now sit the question. If they can learn from about flying planes can we learn from that about doing math and the answer isyes we can. Western culture is efficient when it comes to getting kids the emotional equipment necessary to achieve high school calculus. We do a terrible job and they do a good job and does that mean we are prisoners of that notion in the west . Number we talk about how there are schools, these Charter School movement, kids academies are essentially an attempt to set up an asian school in the middle of the inner city. Its like can we get disadvantaged hispanic and africanamerican kids to behave like korean schoolchildren and the answer is yes you can. Its not that hard. You have to be determined about it and honest about it and say we havent prepared these kids culturally for what theyre doing so what id like to do is i think we should look upon cultural legacies as a big smorgasbord and we should saylook , these people do this well and these people do this well and lets assume that everyone has something to teach us. And that way we can get around the trap of assuming that there is a kind of hierarchy of cultures. [applause] thank you for joining us tonight. Mister gladwell will be signing for us at the front of the hall. Form a line to my right, youre left. Again, thank you for joining us and have a good evening. Youre watching tv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Were spending this saturday evening with bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell hes the author of six books and a longtime staff writer at the new yorker. Coming up next from 2013 , its a look at his book david and goliath. Its about underdogs and how they succeed. Here is Malcolm Gladwell. I brought some of my colleagues and friends here to see malcolm black gladwell and one of them i handed the ticket to himand he said that guy with the crazy hair . Well, hes known for a lot more than that. Despite having written a book called blink the power of thinking without thinking i think one of the beauties of Malcolm Gladwells works is that he makes you think. His work uncovers truths hidden in strange data and as a marketer and a philosophy major, things that are strange and uncovering hidden truths are really something dear to my heart and what another reason why i like malcolmgladwell. His Academic Research and critical analysis and fascinating style provides astonishing and useful insights about our world and our place in it. His bestselling books travel avenues of science, reason and anecdote and include the Tipping Point, outliers, blink and how many people have read a Malcolm Gladwell book . Thats a lot of you. That explains why Malcolm Gladwell is the number one bestselling author in amazon on the business section and i think he ranks 19th overall in history on amazon. Com. [applause] so his new book which he is here to talk about is called david and goliath underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants. Philadelphia i think is an appropriate venue. To be talking about underdogs for many reasons but then rocky of course, a bigger underdog than he. This book, in this book Malcolm Gladwell challenges conventional notions of obstacles and apparent setbacks. Demonstrating the beauty and progress often arrives from what looks like suffering and adversity. His singular gift is animating the experiences of his subjects says david to coming in the seattle times. Gladwell has an uncanny ability to simple by without being simplistic, clinging to vivid striking pros in the service of storytelling. Ladies and gentlemen please welcome join me in welcoming Malcolm Gladwell. [applause] thank you. Its a real pleasure to be here. I think this is my third time at this library. Im on the middle of my book tour and it occurred to me when i was coming here that the first stop on my book tour was the 92nd street y in new york is the jewish y and then i went to la and i did an evening the synagogue on wilshire, that new fancy when and then i went to San Francisco and i did the jcc. Then i went to washington and i did the synagogue six and then nine. I think you cansee where im going with this. This explains why i managed to come tonight because its shabbat. Its the one night of the week that im free to talk to nonjewish audiences. Very glad that worked out. So im not going to talk about my book tonight. Or at least im not going to tell you a story from my book as i figure most of you are going to buy the book. So i thought i would talk about a story that is related very directly in one of the big themes of the book. And one of the big themes is why do people, why do underdogs fight. Why do people who are outgoing and outmanned and overmatched continue to keep on fighting against much largerand stronger opponents . What fuels that kind of resistance. And so i thought when i do is tell a story about someone who i think reflects on this question in a very important way. Its a story about a woman named al smith who was one of the most important figures in the Suffragette Movement in the early part of the 20th century. And shes interesting is if you look at miss right there is very little in her life that would suggest or portend to a life of radicalism. Shes the most unlikely radicalimaginable. And if we understand how she came to take up the position of radicalism i think we will get some insight into this crucial question of why it is that People Choose to battle giants. So alice smith actually has three names. Albert belmont is the name that she dies with. Out of vanderbilt is the name that she became famous with. Now the smith is the name she was born with. It was the daughter of a my prosperous businessman. She grew up in alabama and then her family moved to new york city. And she was even from a young age a piece of work. She was domineering. Dictatorial. Bossy. Bad tempered. Egomaniacal. She was picks fights, she even from the youngest age he was this little kind of fireplug with a face that a friend of hers trying to be nice said it resembled a dennys but i think actually to be more accurate it would say she looked like a lot like a pitbull. You had some sense, hes one of these indomitable people who walks into a room and take it over. So there she is in new york and she has had a distance for herself and she decided the only way shes going to make her mark on the world is if she has access to some kind of money. And so he doesnt have any herself so she cant take away from new york society and settled on a man named willie vander who was a charming, handsome playboy who just happened to be the grandson of the richest menin the world. Though she married him. And she bears him a daughter named greta and two sons and then she sets about on a course to become the greatest conspicuous consumer in the history of conspicuous consumption and like all of us who visited the last 15 years realize what an extraordinary compliment that is area the first thing she does is 500 acres on long island and instructs the greatest architects of the time to build or something in shingles overlooking the bay. Then she buys a block at the corner of 52nd and fifth. And builds a french style chcteau which costs in 18 90 3 million which is a couple of hundred Million Dollars todays money. And to give you a sense of what this chcteau was like im going to read to you an account of it from one of the many books that have been written about all vanderbilt real estate portfolio. All of which are exercising what might be called real estate pornography. So heres the description of her house. Everything was everywhere. Walls of red african marble, walls hung with blue silk brocade, with red velvet embroidered with leaves, flowers and butterflies enriched with crystal and precious stone, mahogany and brass, colored glass and bamboo, wainscoting of road would, ebony and ivory, polished have any and set wood and grecian oriental elizabethan english renaissance french and victorian touches. In crowded rooms bursting with bronze, stainedglass, marble andmosaic. Then she decides she wants. And not just any yacht the biggest yacht of all time. 285 feet which she christens the alpha. Then she decides she wants a country cottage area she does one in Newport Rhode island and i wont bother to go into a description except to say that the construction of this cottage requires for the construction of a russell harbor in newport big enough to handle the 500,000 cubic feet of white italian marble she was importing just for the facade. So now she has a country house, a city house and a country cottage, they got and her attention turns to her daughter consuelo and consuelo is this shy girl. Painfully shy has been raised in the strictest of fashions by her mother. She is required to speak only french to her parents. On friday nights she must recite a poem in german memory in front of her mother. She has to wear a corset at all times with one of those steel rod in the back. She if she made the slightest misstep in public she would be immediately ridiculed and corrected by her mother. And as consuelo enters adolescence, alpha get the idea that what she really wants to do is to marry her daughter off to some english aristocrat. This is not an original idea at that time. In this era of American Life was the fashion for the wealthy daughters of american robber barons to be married off to penurious sons of english aristocrat. In fact they had a name for the process, it was called cash for class. But consuelo somewhat typically decides to, that she only wants the very best for her daughter. And her eyes falls on Charles Richard john churchill. Otherwise known as sonny who was the ninth of marlboro, the lineal ancestor of interest i and the first cousin of Winston Churchill and the air to what palace and then as now one of the largest homes in the world. The main buildings of which encompass seven acres and made alves chcteau on the corner of 57th and fifth look like some kind of ranchstyle bungalow. Albert does her homework and discovers the palace is falling down and sonny churchill hasnt gotten the funds to fix it up and she realizes there is my opportunity. Theres two problems with this idea. The first is that sonny is not in fact sonny area she is perfectly miserable as the english would say to give you some sense of what she would like her second wife believe he can use to sleep with a revolver by her pillow in case her husband shouldcome to her in the middle of the night. The second problem with this idea is that consuelo is madly in love with someone else area young man named Winthrop Rutherford otherwise known as three, the psion of the fabulous new york family, a handsome dashing man who played happily, a fabulous dancer and on consuelos 18th birthday she gets a single rose in the mail no note attached and she knows its from wintry. And not long after that she goes for a bicycle ride with wintry and her mother. , of course is coming along as a chaperone and as they approach a quarter in theroad , entry and consuelo look at each other and speed up ahead and as they turned the corner on out of sight of how the, which returns to consuelo and proposes to her area and she says absolutely. And alpha of course realizes something is up and tries to catch up as fast as her little legs and carried her she looks at her daughter and she looks at wintry and she realizes what just happened. So she whisks her daughter away the next day to parents. And wintry sends letter after letter. Love letter to his beloved and in each one is intercepted by alpha and then wintry on the boat and goes to paris to try and meet her. Alva bars the door to wintry area and then alva takes consuelo to the college in newport. And locks are of like rapunzel in the castle and when she comes to try to see her once again he cant get there and finally consuelo has had enough and she marches up the thick marble staircase to her mothers grand bedroom to plead with parents holding shields and blazoned with the letter a. And she turns to her mother and she says you cant do this to me. Im in love with this man. I have a right to marry the man i choose. The mother turns to her in a kind of cold rage. Absolutely not. Youre going to be a statue. Do you know what that means . Consuelo simmers and doesnt say a word and looks at her mother with a kind of defiance and at that point alva just turns into rage. Because no one ever defies her. Shes Alpha Vanderbilt and she starts to scream at her daughter and calls wintry every name under the sun and she realizes whats the point, theres no way she can defy her mother. He has to give up on this man she loves. So on november 6, 1895 new york sees the grandest wedding in its history. The daughter of one of the richest men in the country marries one of the grandest aristocrats in all of england at st. Thomass church on fifth avenue. And alpha hired 80 decorators just to work on the Church Sanctuary and she marches up the aisle with her two young sons and one other side of her wearing this extraordinary blue satin dress with a border of russian sable and outside there are every reporter in the country is there taking photographs and the crowds are thronging, held back by Police Officers and the streets are lined with these grand carriages and alva stands at the front of the church proudly awaiting her daughter and she waits and she waits. First five minutes, then 10 minutes then15 minutes. And she doesnt show up because shes at home we came weeping inconsolably into the arms of her father. Finally she pulled herself together and all of the maids and attendance clean her up and she gets in the carriage and she goes to church and the priest the minister pronounces them man and wife and out immediately whisks her daughter and her soninlaw into a room behind the sanctuary and the cleanup is done. Sonny gets 1 million upfront guaranty of 100,000 a year for life. And gets into a carriage with his bride. And a drive off down fifth avenue and sonny turns to consuelo and says i think you should know that i dont love you. And i will never love you. Your responsibility is to fix up the castle and bury me an error. And standing on the steps of the church, is alva. There she is in and tear comes to her eye as she watches the carriage received down fifth avenue. Its the greatest moment of her life. A little girl from mobile alabama is now the mother of a duchess. It is the fulfillment of all herdreams. Or so she thinks. Because they are about to get alittle complicated. Now i said earlier i think of alva as an unlikely radical and i think you can see why. Its not typically the case that wealthy people with lots of homes and fancy clothes turn into radicals. It would be like one of the kardashian sisters joining occupy movement. A little unlikely i think we would all agree. So how do we account for this . What happens to outlook to cause this transformation . I think the best answer is to take a step back and think about in general about the question of why it is that People Choose to rebel against Authority Area this theres a number of answers to area one of the leading theories or many years has been a simple one. That People Choose to break the law or rebel against authority or disobey when the costs of disobedience are lower than the benefits. We weigh in our minds but its worth it. And if it makes more sense. To fight back and it does to succumb, we fight back. This is whats called deterrence theory. And it seems like common sense. Theres a famous example of the deterrence theory is in 1970 the police in montrcal went on strike for 19 hours and in that 19 hour tranny montrcal descended into bedlam. Because the cost of disobedience were zero. People started robbing banks and there weregunbattles in the street. This is canada that were talking about. I didnt even know he will have guns in canada. The problem with this idea is that there are all kinds of cases deterrence theory is not explaining our behavior. So a simple one would be looked at people whether its the decision people make about whether to pay their taxes, example of lawabiding behavior. Anyone in the developed world has to go through. There are huge differences from one country to the next in honest people are on tax day. If you go to greece or italy, the cheating on tax day is rampant. The size of the underground economy in those countries is enormous. Whereas if you come to a country like this, theres very little cheating on taxes. This is probably americans, we are more honest on taxday and anyone else in the world. So the question is if the deterrence theory works that would suggest that these were cheating on your taxes must be greater here than in greece or italy. The cost of breaking the law must be greater in this country if we are so well behaved on tax day. Is that the case . No its not. The penalties for cheating on your taxes are lower here than anybodyelse. Basically we dont have penalties. The irs if you dont pay your taxes and you may find out will tell you to pay them a small penalty and the rates are a fraction of what they are in other countries. If you cheat onyour taxes, you probably wont get caught. I dont mean for any of you to take that to heart but the fact is that tax day behavior in this country does not ally with the deterrence theory. Doesnt make any sense. Heres another example. If deterrence theory works then countries or jurisdictions that dramatically increase their penalties for taking the law must, should see a decline in crime. So lets look at the best example and that california area 20 years ago california enacted the most dramatic increase in the severity of criminal penalties that we have seen almost anywhere in the western world over the last hundred years. Three strikes, the three strikes law was an unbelievable increase in severity. So what happens to deterrence theory is correct crime should have plunged in california. Did it . It did then it also plunged at the same time in every other state in the union even those that didnt change their laws at all and in when in subsequent years as weve looked closer what weve discovered is no one can figure out what happened in california. Some people say the crime went down a little bit, some people say Nothing Happened and other people say crime is higher today than it would have been if they had passed that lawin california. Once again , theres legitimacy theory doesnt seem to explain why people do or dont behave or obey the law. So in response to these problems, a bunch of people have come forward and said the real issue is not that, its not the costs and benefits of breaking the law. Its really how the law, how laws are enacted. And a group of scholars led by comp tyler and said what really matters is whether people perceive the laws that they govern them to the legitimate. And by legitimate we need three things. One is that people will obey the law when they feel like they are treated withrespect. When they feel that if they speak up they will be heard. Do they have a right to speak up and will someone listen when they do . People will perceive a lot to be rigid legitimate when they feel like its their. Is there one law for me and one law for you or are weall being treated the same. And they also will obey a law when they feel like its consistent. Its going to change dramatically tomorrow . So in these examples, think back to the puzzle of why americans pay their taxes. We pay our taxes not because there are huge penalties, we pay because we believe the american system is legitimate so we grumble about it all the time but the truth is if you stand up and complain about your taxes will you be heard . Of course youll be heard. Theres an entire party in the political system devoted to hearing people grumble about theirtaxes. Is the tax system fair . Its not perfect but its pretty fair. There isnt a whole different set of rules for a certain kind of people except if you are a hedge fund activist the amount of unfairness in our system is a fraction of the unfairness in other systems around the world and is our system consistent . Yes it is. We dont make arbitrary changes from one year to the next. We make changes in our tax code after a lot ofdiscussion. We know whatshappening. Compare that to greece. Greece fails on all three counts. You cant speak up in that system. People are cutting special deals and it changes from one year to the next and treats one class different from another class. If our system looked like greece is we wouldnt pay our taxes either. Its completely illegitimate and wide and three strikes have a discernible effect on the crime rate in california . Maybe if you lock everyone in sight which is what california did maybe people in those communities come to think of the system as illegitimate and lets not forget california in the 10 days after three strikes was casttheir prison population doubled. On a per capita basis and that was seven times as many people in resin as canada or western europe. Thats an astonishingnumber. Do you think that the people from those communities that saw essentially an entire cohort of black men picked up and shipped off to prison in the space of five years, do you think that they perceive the system as legitimate . Do you think they thought they could speak up and be heard . Do you think they thought there was a same set of rules governing White America as was governing their community . Do you think they saw the system as being consistent and trustworthy as opposed to arbitrary . Of course not. What happens in situations where people perceive the system as illegitimate . A rebel. A get angry. They steal under no compulsion to obey the law. Nothing serves as a bigger engine of defiance then the condition of that youre under some kind of disrespectful on for the arbitrary system. Which brings us back to alva. Because she lived in a society that did not treat her with any legitimacy. At hard to believe because here we have this insanely rich woman running around building these towers and it seems like she would have no complaint in the world but the truth is you live 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 were allowed to vote rid of it couldnt have jobs. They couldnt go to college. They couldnt participate in any meaningful way and the public life of the society in which they were apart. They were told to stay at home, take care of the children and the servantsand put on dinner parties. The men meanwhile could do whatever they wanted. They could go to college, start businesses, run for public office. Under the laws of that time a man could divorce a woman simply by alleging infidelity. A woman to divorce a man she had to prove infidelity and physical cruelty. One set of rules for women, one for men. The men in that circle she was a part of it in dollars every when they wanted. They would get on the j. P. Morgans yacht and go out to see and filled it up with call girls and have mistresses andapartments , with whom they ultimately consorted. Meanwhile the women, they had to stay home and keep up respectable appearances. And willie vanderbilt, alvas husband was no exception. He was this spoiled playboy. He didnt work for a living, he inherited this gigantic fortune and he was handsome and charming and had one of theirafter another. Openly. In front of all the people in the social circle. Meanwhile, was required to keep her mouth shut and be the dutiful hostess. She looked from the outside like she was a woman in command of her world but she was desperately unhappy and she would later describe the years leading up to consuelos wedding as the worst of her life. She really had begun to argue. She had begun to feel trapped and dissatisfied and she meets a man Oliver Belmont with whom she falls in love but she cant have an affair with him. Theres no way a woman of her situation and standing could do what all the menwere doing. And she finally in an attempt to save her marriage turns to willie and she says can we take a Family Vacation so they go off as a family to paris but its a complete disaster because the minute they get to paris willie starts an affair not just with her best friend but also with this prostitute, hard plastic prostitute called nelly newsletter and runs around paris with these two women completely humiliating alva. And she feels she has no choice and so she kicks him out. She says thats it. And everyone in her life says youcant do that. The lawyer with whom he tries to file divorce papers against her husband says no, it wont do it for her. Dont be ridiculous. All herfriends are up in arms. The tabloids can you imagine, they descend on her. Here we have the one of the wealthiest couples and allamerica having this very public falling out. Cant imagine what a press circuit it is and she comes out of the church in newport where she has been attending her entire adult life and all these people who she considers her friends turn their back on her. They wont talk to her. Theypretend she doesnt exist. But she feels she has no choice. Later in her life when she writes her memoirs she writes this incredibly point passage about what it was like to be a woman in that era and she says was considered religious unified and correct or the wife to withdraw into the shadows while her husband paid the family respects to the sunshine. The woman was supposed to get her sunlight by proxy to her husband. Here we have this brilliant and vicious driven woman and todays world you would be an entrepreneur and she would have started her own company to be running something. Shed be running for public office. He would be taking on the world on a grand scale every one of those avenues is denied to her and whats the only thing he cando . What did she do, build houses. On the grandest most ambitious scale she can. Because she has no other outlets her extraordinary energiesand extraordinary creativity and intelligence. Shes frustrated. Society in which she lives will give her a chance to do anything meaningful. It also makes sense if her inexcusable behavior around her daughter and her daughters marriage. Her daughter may be in love with winthrop but when front it should be remembered was 33. At the time that consuelo was 18. He was this handsome man from a family that was described by one of the tabloids of that era as best known for wearing expensive clothing. Hes a dilettante. He plays golf and polo at the Newport Country Club all day long and when she looks at him she sees just another version of her own useless husband. Some guy, this kind of idol decadent lander is going to condemn her daughter to a lifetime of misery. By contrast what does the new of maribor offer . Old missouri sod is a little miserable sought in another country. In a place where she can be called a duchess and have real standing in society and stand up under the listen to when she wants to and have a place in the Public Affairs of the world and live in a society is free from the kind of dreadful strengths of new york high society. To us that sounds like a dreadfully cynical calculation because consuelo was generally, genuinely in love with wintry and we think love to be the basis for marriage hundred years ago in the society of which alva was a part love seemed like an impossible luxury. Consuelo was her 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 slaughtered. So in that moment when consuelo and sonny are pulling away in the carriage this here comes out was i not hear of joy. Its, this is an incredibly tragic moment for her. This is a woman who has had to alienate her own blonde beloved daughter in order to save her. This is a woman is trapped in the most horrible and loveless and united of marriages. This is a woman who is a witness to society of which shes a part, turned against her. Because she dared to stand up to this jerk that she was married to riyadh shes a woman whos living alife of indescribable hell. But she doesnt turn back. Or back down and why not . Because she does not perceive the authority of those who shun her as legitimate. They havent given her standing. They havent allowed her to speak up about whats gone wrong. They havent even treated her fairly. The lawthat governs her is arbitrary. Its not trustworthy. Shes supposed to stay at home and be quiet while her husband runs around town with a french prostitute. At that moment when alva is in that position shes undergoing a moment all radicals undergo. Shes angry. One of the things that i try and figure out is, try to answer in my book is why it is that people in positions of power fail to understand thesignificance of anger. Why dont we understand just what a powerful emotion it is. For people who appear to be on the outside and appear to have no obvious resources. To hold in their hearts. I have a chapter in the book about the troubles in northern ireland. And i went and spent a good portion of one summer in belfast, not something i would recommend that anyone do i once that summer i went to a meeting that was held in a neighborhood called bella murphy, a neighborhood in belfast and it was to commemorate the anniversary whats called the gala murphy massacre when british troops opened fire on a group of catholic civilians killing several of them. And in england, no one think about the bella murphy massacre. It was 30 years ago. Theyve moved on. Not dwelling on it. Theyre worried about other things. A thing that is something that happened in the past if you stood in that auditorium as i did, just like this with as many people as best as they were talking about events that happened three decades ago, you would have thought that the shooting had happened yesterday. The emotions were that law. People were collapsing in hears and crying out in their grief and being polled screamingfrom the room. It made me realize that long after weve forgotten the consequences of our actions the people who have been oppressed and abused continue to nurse their rage and their anger in their own hearts. It made me think about what people think iraq and pakistan and afghanistan. Were going to move on from those conflicts and were going to about them and think its all done and dusted but thats a mistake. If the people who we were fighting against did not do not perceive our authority as legitimate, they will carry anger in their hearts for generations. And we will bear the consequences. And that was exactly the situation with alva. No one around her understood the consequences of her anger. No one understood what it meant to have a ticking time bomb in their midst. Who was Walking Around with a grievance. Because the consequences would be great. In the greatest of virus, the person who sets off a ticking time bomb that is alva is her daughter consuelo. In the years after her marriage to sonny, consuelo is transformed area that she bares them two sons who she would thereafter refer to as an air and despair. And then she leaves him. Of course she does and when she leaves him shes so respected by her peers in English Society and she hands herself with such grace and everyone knows what a complete jerk her husband is that London Society rallies around her and lifts her up 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 1908 she returns tonew york for the first time. This suddenly tall and beautiful charismatic woman and she gives the famous speech towards which all of the assembled Society Ladies of new york at the world of astoria and what she has discovered in her time in england which is england is a different place in america. England is a place where women couldnt stand up and speak out. England was a place where a woman like her could play a real role in Public Society and what consuelo does in her speech to all those assembled society of ladies is to chastise them and to say youre wasting your life. Youre a slave to your husband. You have all kinds of resources and an opportunity to make a difference and youre not taking it. You are a disgrace and sitting in the front row of the audience is alva and you can imagine how she feels. 15 years ago she had sent her daughter off in tears to take her away from the only man she had ever loved because she felt that was the only way to save her. Now her daughter is back in new york and what happened . Her daughter has been saved. And alva and consuelo have a talk after the speeches over and consuelo turns to her mother and says in spite of everything im glad i married an englishman. You can imagine its like a weight has been lifted off alva is back and all the guilt shes been carrying along for so long is absolved. Not long after that alva accept an invitation to hear a speech on the Suffragette Movement and women of course in america and around the world in those years couldnt vote. They had been denied thatmost basic of human rights. And that period in america only for american states were women given limited Voting Rights. Wyoming and idaho and colorado. But the movement for nationwide Voting Rights and installed. Was going nowhere. And alva listens to the speech and she realizes this is theonly way to bring legitimacy to women. Its only by winning the vote can we create a system in america that gives women voice. At treats them fairly and treats them without trustworthy and nonarbitrary matter. And she looks at the state of the Suffragette Movement and she realizes that its in disarray. Its got no drive. It got no strategy. It got no energy, theyve got no money. All of those things are things that ally has in spades. So what did she do mark does the same thing shes done her life. He barges and takes over. And the headquarters of the Suffragette Movement in the era was in warren ohio. And, heres this and rolls her eyes and says are you kidding me . Were in ohio and she moves it into abuilding she buys on fifth avenue. And she says my country cottage in Newport Rhode island. Thats going to be our convention headquarters. And they start to have the meetings of the national Suffragette Movement amidst the grandeur of alvas house while her fancy neighbors by the way look on outrage. And when a group of female immigrants garment workers go on strike in protest against the appalling conditions under which they work and start on march through downtown manhattan, whos at the front of the march. Al is and when they get arrested and are being held in by a judge in some prison in downtown new york, who stands in the courtroom all night long eyeballing the judges . Alva does and who stands up and says wait a minute, black women of america belong in this room. Until that point there had been a group of black suffragettes but they had been off on their own because like and what didnt mix but alva said there women just like us. They belong with us. And when the movement was perceived by some as moving too quickly and many projects stood up and said if we continue to be this aggressive going to start antagonizing men, she stands up and says wait, men dont worry about antagonizing men, when should we and then the First World War starts and lots of suffragettes say this is no time for us to be pushing for this kind of radical reform. We should take down the picketers outside the white house and alva stands up and says over my dead body. This is exactly the time we should be pushing for this kind of radical reform and she made sure that the tickets stayed up there until the end of the war. What happens during this period . You can imagine. She was roundly denounced and ostracized and pushed outof polite society. She was teen as this domineering dictatorial unit egomaniacal woman who had barged into an organization and let it on some radical but the other thing that happened is on august 18, 1920 the 19th amendment to the United States restitution was passed giving women for the first time in American History the right to vote area and the lesson of all this great victory is as pertinent today as it was hundred years ago. And that is that if you deny people legitimacy, they will one day by one means or another come back and if you area one last thing. Alva dies in the spring of 1933 on a stroke and her funeral is held at st. Thomass church on fifth avenue, the same churchwhere her daughter was married so many years ago. And everyone shows up. The limousines line the streets and reporters from every newspaper in the country, and the crowds wrong and are held back by police and the 20th and the most prominent feminists in the country serve as her pallbearers. And at service, the crowd sings three hymns. First is a famous him by. Beecher so. The second is the suffragette battle, the march of the women and the third is a him composed by alva herself which is the greatest of all tribute to this remarkable and extraordinary woman. And the hymn is all about when alva gets to heaven he will be damned if shes going to let a man stand in judgment of her. And begins, no waiting the gates of paradise. No tribunal of men to judge. The watchers of the tower proclaim. A daughter of theking. [applause] i think we have some time for questions. Ive forgotten how they work if i can repeat the questions. Where in the world you see the greatest legitimacy right now . Been so many places large and small. In any country where the way women 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 or i could go on and on. Except i think that even within, we dont even have to look on a global level. We could go into Numerous Companies and you could see how underlings are treated by their superiors. I think this is a lesson for all of us. To be fair and impartial and consistent is the obligation of those in power. Just because you have all of the resources doesnt mean you can behave as you wish. You have its the old me shea. With power comes responsibility and we need to be reminded of that every day because everyday we forget. I realize im sounding like im on my warhorse. I sound so grim and forbidding area in this country and Company Quality is great. What is amazing to learn how close this country came to masses social investment revolution is too far but we came this close to having a real breakdown of social order. We have forgotten that now its very peerless positioned between rich and poor it is not sustainable we were saved last time by the depression in a very courageous man named fdr i hope we have a similar politician of courage who can write the ship close the gaps we have a chance to have a fresh start. You are well known for weaving together Many Disparate facts and theories. So what is your world like . I feel like im giving away trade secrets. [laughter] its like Colonel Sanders telling you about herbs and spices. [laughter] nothing happens a lot veil is drifting a lot of time has been spent wandering through libraries hoping to stumble on something amazing. Which is why im a selfprofessed library nerd. [applause] but what none of us all of us have interesting stories to tell the what we dont know is which of our stories are interesting. We have no perspective on it. One of the things you learn to do as a journalist is is probe and ask questions until you find whats interesting. My father waits until year and a half ago to tell me the following story that people did not know their most interesting stories are. Exhibit a. He tells me the following story. Its long that there with me. My father marries my mother 1958. My mother is jamaican my father is english to. A mildly radical act at that time they moved back to jamaica teaching at the University West indies and he needs to get access to a library book for his research. Mathematical taxes not in the library he campuses United States to find that it is in the library of georgia tech. He writes georgia tech can use your library and they say yes. That then he realized the permission was granted too hastily a georgia tech then is sent into a panic because now its 1959 and georgia tech is a segregated institution and they realize to their horror that they have granted permission to use their library to someone who teaches at the university of questions ds on west indies in kingston jamaica i thought what if he is black. [laughter] it starts a frantic attempt by the administration of georgia tech to discover if my father is black. You cant tell from his name it can go on the internet and image google him so they start to call around america and send letters. He is in jamaica. So my father has a voice yes this is professor smith. I have an odd question. Are you white . My father says yes and they said thank god. [laughter] at which point the full dimensions of this the hilarious and obscene story unfolds. So my father puts a giant photograph of my mother in his traveling case waits until he gets to georgia tech he is a visiting professor and taken out to dinner they are so relieved to see he is pale skin and midway through dinner he pulls out a picture of my mother and says gentlemen of a newlywed i want you to see a picture of my bride. [laughter] now thats an interesting story. I knew my but my my father 40 years before he told me that story. It never occurred to me to sit down and ask him questions you did marry my mother and 58 it mustve been interesting. And i think everyone has versions of that but we dont understand because they are our stories we dont understand how great they are. One of the simplest tasks of a journalist is just to keep asking questions until you get to those stories. I had the privilege of proposing to my future wife last week and wondering why in the context of your story we dont have the same champions today that we did 100 years ago. And how they got of van injustice will this be 80 or 100 years from now. It has taken is a very long time. That barrier has now fallen and to bring about some kind of change. Why are we only now maybe on the cusp of getting a female president . Why is the title the turning on the realization of gay marriage . And with that practical demonstration of that insight can be decades and then to shrink the gap. If you look at of those major countries in the world are one of the few. And that would have been us to the punch. You have already accomplished such an impressive body of work. I am curious if there is one particular work you are most proud of for one and you may have structured differently . Are you asking me if i have regrets . [laughter] if you want a few. I wont say them. [laughter] yes i regret virtually everything i have ever done. [laughter] so it doesnt stop with my writing. I havent read Tipping Point since i wrote it. And im not scared to in the same way Tipping Point was written in 1988. Think about what our lives were like and ask yourselves if we were suddenly transported back in time when you feel comfortable with our choices at that moment . [laughter] would you be happy with the way your hair looked in 1998 . Or the clothes you wore . Or the color the furniture in your living room there are things deeply embarrassing to me in retrospect that im quite sure that if i were to re read Tipping Point i would wince in pain. All human beings have things that they are not proud of. And that question invites you to say everyone in the world hated this. Have done things they have hated. I think a little limerick that you wrote for someones Birthday Party that fell flat that you actually thought they were sly and ingenious. And so i will just look back on my efforts and hang my head. Sure that is inevitable. If you talk about the legacy during your talk if you dont reconcile with those over the years in the International Community . Thats a good question. I tell a story in my book and im finally mentioning my book after one hour 50 minutes into my book talk perhaps i will mention i wrote a book. [laughter] i tell a story in david and goliath about a woman a woman whose ask you job it is to police the housing projects of new york. And ask that exact question. She gets a job and said police are not considered legitimate in the poorest neighborhoods of new york with good reason not because they have misbehaved but because its really hard if you live in a community where the cops are omnipresent you only see them interacting in a fraught to emotionally and physically fraught away with all the young men in the neighborhood, its hard for you to think of them as legitimate. And the percentage of black men born in the 1970s who did not graduate college a black High School Dropout men, 69 percent have spent some time behind bars. If you are from one of those neighborhoods there is no way you perceive the law as legitimate. I am now in charge of those neighborhoods. So she embarked on a policy and she basically had to go to the families and storage bring them turkeys on thanksgiving. I know you dont trust us but i am here. I know your kid is a delinquent. Cops are always coming around to harass you im here to say im on your side. Here is a turkey. She has gradually won over the trust of the families and the crime rate began to fall because people realized a lot to the underside. But that took years of hard work. She hired Police Officers who cared about kids. And then they say f you to be the person you could say now i like to talk to you. There still a grand way to do it but only in a person to person painstaking way. And look at the crime in that neighborhood is mindboggling. I thought so many of the stories in your book were some moving there was one part with Martin Luther king i had trouble with because it seems to me all of us respond to it we see on the radio or on tv. And what we have been taught to believe happened. I was so surprised. Down give away the surprise. It is a surprise ending. Spoiler alert. Cover your ears. Let me say i was very surprised at what you drew out of his experience and i found it very upsetting. It is supposed to be upsetting. I dont disagree with your reaction. I will give away the ending but i will say how do they went over overwhelming odds . Make a very uncomfortable at the time with widespread criticism along the way of mlk and continuing to make people uncomfortable today you and me. The trick is openly admitted to by why it walker mlk number two man he played a trick after it succeeded was frank about what he did. It is no secret he did many many interviews in the sixties he described precisely how they set about to pull the wool over the eyes of the press. So this guy named walker was a strategist a brilliant guy and the author and if you read the book now i can keep talking about it. But i am with you and i appreciate that response. And to do everything and challenge authority versus my catholic friends and you have and mentioned that religious factor yet and is that significant at all . And the last two chapters in particular and the civil rights chapter as the consequences in part it is all about extraordinary things that faith makes possible. I and on that note because i came to understand that the most significant weapon and the power you get from your belief in god. Nothing can beat that. A woman on the strength of her faith forgives the murder of her daughter. The last story of the book is about a village in the mountains of france who openly takes in jews during the Second World War and complete defiance o and there is no mystery about two people with no material advantage, no formal power, no money. They have nothing. What they have is something in their hearts that says i am empowered by god to do the right thing. And that is enough. And it is very uplifting and also writing this book moved me in a way that writing my previous books did not and that is the fact. To sit in the backyard of the bungalow in winnipeg and talk to a woman whose daughter was murdered by a sexual predator and who stood up on the day her tortured body was found, stood up in a press conference of 100 people waving microphones in her face and said without knowing who her daughters murderer was, whoever he is i am on the path to forgiving him. To hear her say that was the most it floored me then and it flows me still, you cant not have offered that power when you hear it. [applause] our look at bestselling author Malcolm Gladwells programs includes the most recent appearance on cspan. This is from 2019 on our q and a program when he spoke about talking strangers which examines how we misread strangers words and actions. Here is Malcolm Gladwell. Book number 6 out this week, talking to strangers. What is the premise of this book . Your latest book . The premise of this latest book is we are not good at talking to strangers. I was struck by how many of the kind of high profile controversies we find ourselves income down to the same problem, the two people who to know each other very well attempt to communicate and fail or attempt to understand each other and fail. Bernie madoff, never understood who he was, the case of penn state, brock turner Sexual Assault case, these are failed communications and the one the book starts in ends with, the signature case is the sandra bland case, one of those high profile encounters between africanamericans and lawenforcement that was so much in the news a few years ago which was a conversation between a young black woman and a Police Officer who pulled her over and the conversation goes off the rails and i wondered why is it we fail in these conversations with strangers and that is where the book comes from. Each of your books as an aspect of communication, what is it about this topic that keeps coming back, why is it so important to you . I dont know. No one loves the transcript more than me and im keenly interested in how people express themselves and how they succeed and fail at that and i am one of those people who if someone is articulate i am all in. I find myself one of the people who interviewed me, i was interviewed by the actor russell brand, apart just in england, i knew him from the movies and he starts to talk and i realize he is one of those astonishingly articulate people and i was just kind of it and trying to figure out how is it this man has so commanded my attention . I was having a difficulty answering his questions because i was so focused on thinking about i cant believe the brilliant way he phrased that and then i have to answer. Im just drawn to that whole aspect of human nature. For our conversation we pulled some clips to illustrate the things you talk about in the book. I want to start with the sandra bland story. This is a very available video. Lets watch and come back and talk a little more about it. You okay . You are running around you seem very irritated. I am. I really am. I move over and you stop me. Mind putting out your cigarette please . I am in my car. I dont have to put out my cigarette. You can step out now. Step out of the car. You dont have the right. Step out of the car. Dont tell me. Dont touch me. I am not under arrest. Youre under arrest. For what . I am going to drag you out of here. Drag me out of my car . Get out of the car. Failure to signal . You are doing all this that interaction ended in tragedy. 3 days later she is imprisoned for resisting arrest and then hangs herself in herself. A tragic and unexpected results but the whole that exchange we saw which goes on and on. We only saw a small snippet of it, when i first saw that online i realized was i wanted to write about because if you break that exchange down moment by moment you see multiple failures of understanding, of empathy, of 1 million things. In the segment we just saw, she lights cigarette and we in our now sandra bland struggled with the emotional problems, she had a failed Suicide Attempt a few weeks earlier, she is upset and has several thousand dollars in outstanding traffic fines so being pulled over by a Police Officer is consequential for her. This is happened before and she is deeply in debt because of it so she is upset when she gets pulled over and light a cigarette to calm her nerves the way many smokers will tell you that is why they smoke, to calm down so she is trying to stay under control and in an unconscious way trying to signal to the Police Officer i dont want this to go awry. Im trying to calm down and he wont let her. He sees the cigarette as an act of defiance so if you watch the entire video tape you constantly see the two of them talking past each other and he is reading her disquiet and distress as evidence of something sinister, being dangerous or malicious or criminal in some way. It is this kind of epic misunderstanding and i tried to break it down and by reference to other stories try to come to an understanding how it is very straightforward conversation can end in tragedy. You had been thinking about these concepts for a while and you watch this video countless times and kept find yourself getting angrier and angrier. Line is a process question. It has been 6 years since you produced the book, what is a crystallized this is the topic . I had been kind of drawn to all of those problematic encounters between africanamericans and Police Officers beginning with ferguson because they all seemed to me extraordinarily multilayered. On the one hand they were deeply personal. They were about Police Officers confronting someone and something going wrong, someone getting shot but on the other hand ferguson is an excellent example when the department of justice report comes out on ferguson there is 2 reports, one report is about the actual conduct of the Police Officer and what happened between the officer and Michael Brown in that report explains why the officer is not being indicted on civil rights charges because it is unclear he did anything, an obvious violation of the law. The other Second Department of justice report which is perhaps more important was one about the ferguson Police Department and pointing out the Police Department had been essentially a predatory force on the Africanamerican Community of ferguson, using their power and authority to levy fines on as many people as they could in order to fill the citys coffers. The city was running itself on tickets so cops were encouraged to write tickets for everything. When you see the things police were engaged in your job drops. This is a town where the Africanamerican Community was so alienated from the police force because of the way the police force was behaving, that is the context for ferguson so really you have, if you only look at the encounter you miss the real story, the real story is what happened before, years and years of the police force using the black Community Like an atm in the way now police was supposed to do and one of the reports that was exculpatory, the other was such a devastating critique of what had happened in ferguson and they sat sidebyside. To understand this, that struck me as incredibly interesting because we have a tendency sometimes when we look at these encounters to only do the first look, the personal look, to look at the interaction between the cop and think we can settle the issue if we can say what happened in that interaction but ferguson reminds us that that is just the beginning of your job. You then have to step back and say what were the environmental conditions that surrounded and predated that encounter and i wanted to do Something Like that with sandra bland only go broader and start pooling in all the other cases i talk about as a way of shedding light on that encounter. Three years on this project and if you look at the notes, lots of documents, never read a transcript you dont like and lots of travel and i guess people wonder, who follow you with the limitless vignettes or examples, case studies you bring to bear on a topic, how do you collect the ones that say yes, this helps me prove this point . There is no procedure. It is an art, sometimes you are successful at it and sometimes not. You look, i like to tell a variety of stories to remind people what the stakes are. If every story i told in this book was a story of an encounter between a young africanamerican and Police Officer people would think malcolm is just talking about interactions between Police Officers and black people and i dont want that. I want to give people reason to pigeonhole this. Im trying to Say Something that is quite broad that we all of us talk to strangers. It is funny that i honestly dont believe many of us could have made the same mistake the Police Officer made. I dont think he is an unusually inapt or incompetent or biased i think he is inexperienced and over his head. We all do that. That is the point of the book. We are making our mistakes in lowercase situations. We are just not stopping people on the streets. When i screw up in my understanding of a stranger what is the consequence . Someone doesnt like me or i feel uncomfortable. No one is dead. That is an important thing to keep in mind. This book is meant to make us all complicit in some of these tragedies. Host one of the concepts we all do is default to truth. Whats that mean . s guest this goes back to tim levine his work i rely on a lot, he is trying to understand why it is, a puzzle that has accessed him for a long time, why are human beings so bad at detecting deception. Basically my ability to tell whether you are lying to me is scarcely better than chance. We are terrible at it. Almost all of us. A few exceptions. That is puzzling because you would think we would be good at it, something evolution would have selected for. His explanation is evolution does not select for the ability to detect lies but the opposite. It selects for people who are willing to believe implicitly believe what they are told because if you do that, if you trust, if you default to truth then your life is so much easier. You can start companies, form groups, send your kids to school and not worry, things you can do if you believe what people tell you. You can go into a store and buy 100 items and be satisfied that the bill way give you at the end is accurate. There are 100 opportunities in your shopping cart for someone to cheat you but how often do you see someone in a Grocery Store say wait a minute, i dont believe it. The only time ive seen someone do this is my father who is a mathematician who had a gift, would count along with the checkout person and only if they under charged him with the correct them. This was before stennis and i would see him doing that and say actually i owe you a nexus 0. 75. He wasnt doing it because he mistrusted. The point is the reason we are able to do this, build this type of working societies is we trust implicitly and automatically and if you understand that you realize there is a cost of that and the cost is we will occasionally be deceived. We are not good at spotting scam artists. That is why Bernie Madoff exists. Not because he is some kind of genius but because if you set out to systematically lie to people you get away with that at least in the short term. They are not going to catch you. We are not thinking great returns, heres 1 million, that is the way we operate. Host speaking of Bernie Madoff, in the Video Archives we have a video of someone who also is in your book, henry coppolas. Lets listen to what he says about Bernie Madoff to the sec. I giftwrapped and delivered the largest ponzi scheme in history them and somehow they couldnt be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. A 50 billion ponzi scheme doesnt make the secs priority list that i want to know who sets their priorities. Guest you call them harmful. Is not the only one but almost the only person who saw the truth in Bernie Madoff ten years before Bernie Madoff was busted. Accomplice going to be as easy saying this guys running a massive ponzi scheme and no one would listen to him so he is a rare example of someone who does not default to truth and i refer to people like him as holy fulls which is a russian term to describe the kind of crazy person who nonetheless has access to truth, the child who is not constrained by social convention and pointing out the truth, the kid who says the emperor has no clothes. He is fascinating because the question arises do we want to be like at . He could see a fraud the rest of us could not see. He had insight the others did not have. Do we want to be like him . What our society be better . I say no. You dont want to be like him. And he will tell you this, he is someone who is extraordinarily suspicious and paranoid. He thinks there is a scandal under every rock. He goes around the world every day of his life filled with the fear that hes being scammed. He goes to the doctor and lectures the doctor on all the ways dont do this to me or dont do this to me i am aware of all your tricks, he was so paranoid that after madoff was finally busted he came to believe Bernie Madoff was going to send his men to kill him and he became convinced the sec was going to send a squat attackers to break into his house and steal his files and stayed up all my with a gun at the front door of his house. You dont want to live like that. There is a cost to having that kind of insight. That insight is the cost of that insight is too hi. Youre much better off being gullible or default into truth because liars like Bernie Madoff are rare. Everyone gets sheeted once in a while and that is rare. Host should we be better at listening when someone says the sky is falling . Guest depends. The unknown question is how many times did he say there was a fraud and there isnt one . A few weeks ago he came out announcing he thought General Electric was engaged in one of the largest accounting scandals of all time. I dont know yet but lots of people just shrugged and said you are off the mark in this case. So i dont know. Certainly we shouldnt ignore them but we have to understand the difference in the way most of us are calibrated and probably a good thing to be trustworthy or certainly one should not take from Bernie Madoffs candlewick conclusion that we need to be more heavily regulated. If you reduce everyone in a complex industry to a state of suspicion and paranoia you destroy the thing you are trying to save. Host next example from your book is a different kind from Michigan State and penn state. Lets watch the video and come back and talk about that. It comes to me with a concern. Somebody talked to him about inappropriate behavior. And you told him . I told him it didnt happen, and there wasnt inappropriate behavior. The court said differently and hes long prison sentence and what should we take from this and the Michigan State situation. What interests me is not sandusky himself but what the prosecutors did after they convicted sandusky. They went after the leadership of penn state for failure to act earlier to prevent sanduskys this behavior, coauthor why the prosecution was asking people in positions of leadership to do things they should not do, essentially, the president of penn state was supposed to resign and still ten years later in the same cell fighting a legal battle to stay out of jail. They were convicted and sentenced to jail is always a scandal. In my opinion they did nothing wrong except they did what human beings do which is defaulted to truth. They were presented with incredibly vague questions about Jerry Sandusky and chose to interpret them in a way that was most favorable to sandusky, defaulted to truth when it came to this man who was in their employ, it sounds like maybe he is engaging in inappropriate behavior. That decision, in prison or on the verge of going to prison if you examine the case closely you discover this is a classic example of the kind of thing as human beings we are inclined to shrug off. When you default to truth you believe in the truthfulness of what you are told until the doubts rise to a level so high you can no longer abide by the original position so there is a high bar. You see that with Bernie Madoff. Lots of people had doubts about them but not to the point they were willing to concede, make the enormous step to say he is a ponzi scheme or. With sandusky there were all these whispers and he was seen showering with young boys but what we see was incredibly vague and even the football coach who spotted sandusky in the shower went home that night, told a medical doctor about what he had seen in the medical doctor who had a legal duty to report child abuse didnt report it because he was too vague, people couldnt throw out what he saw, look to the weird, he was upset by it and the same coach waits and tells joe paterno about the leadership the next day in their response is if this is so pressing why did you wait so long to tell us and he doesnt actually say he saw a sexual act being committed but something that made him feel weird, what do we do with that . Default to truth. That is what we do with human beings and the last thing we want to do is tell people in positions of running major institutions that they should start being paranoid about all their employees, you cannot run an effective intellectual community if you are deeply suspicious of every act of inexplicable behavior by your employees, you cant do that, in the same way you cant run a Regulatory Agency if every single even mildly digression from the absolute straight and narrow triggers a massive ends investigation. What you do is you act when there is overwhelming amount of evidence. There was not overwhelming evidence in that case and it is easy in hindsight to get on your high horse and say all should have been truth tellers. Pedophiles go to extraordinary lengths to hide what is in their heart. Host you had to be working on this during the immediately revelations. How did that figure into your thinking about this . Guest the problem, a good way of discussing this is to make reference to the other case which is a more straightforward case where here was a doctor at Michigan State who was treating young gymnasts and was sexually abusing them over and over sometimes in the presence of their parents and it took 15 years for him to be brought to justice not because people in the case of Michigan State unlike penn state, were being told wrongdoing was happening and they chose to disbelieve it or shrug or look away. Some of the leadership does belong in jail. There was the condition of there being overwhelming evidence was met in Michigan State. In the context of me too, how long it takes people, even parents of children who are being abused to take the charge seriously. It takes years and years for people intimately connected to these victims to kind of accept the fact that something as heinous as a sexual crime has occurred and that to me is a lesson that runs through me too that this kind of behavior has been going on for millennia but in our society it has been going on as long as the workforce or there wouldnt have been it has taken until now to take it seriously. Bill cosby or better example would be harvey weinstein. I live in new york, i know people in the film industry. It has been an open secret for years and years that he was his behavior was unconscionable. I heard people talk about it ten years ago. The New York Times 6 or 7 years ago tried to do a story on it but couldnt get people to speak on the record. This wasnt something that popped up in 2018. This was an open secret in these worlds for a decade or more but takes an extraordinarily long time for people to come to grips with the enormity of this crime and to kind of find a way to do something about it and that to me is the intriguing lesson. Guest our time evaporates quickly. Another person in the news, Khalid Sheikh mohammed. S Military Court justice set his trial date for january of 2021. Lets watch a piece of video and help us understand how it relates to what you are talking about. Ive dealt with 13 or 14 of the worst ones. The call bomber. I dealt with a lot and none of them refused to identify what they had done. We werent looking for confessions because confessions wont stop attacks. What stops attacks is actionable intelligence in the way you get the actionable intelligence dealt with is by getting through these enhanced interrogations, get them working with you so you can use social influence after that to get the information that you want. I talked to him as well, i found an interesting and fascinating person who was asked to do an extraordinarily difficult job to interrogate the most hardened terrorists in the world and what he was doing is a very good example of he had to talk to strangers. The enhanced interrogation of 9 11 is a textbook example of what my book is about which is the difficulty of seeing the truth or truly understanding what a stranger is saying or telling you. In his case he resorted to some enhanced or i say extreme measures to try to facilitate the communication with a stranger, with a terrorist and the question i raised in the chapter is what happens when you do that . Faced with the same problem all these cases i talk about are faced with which is you have someone you dont believe, youre tasked with getting the truth out of them and we see how the Police Officer botches it with sandra bland, totally misunderstands what she is about, we see that in other examples so in this case the added element is there was coercion, physical coercion and emotional coercion added into the mix to try to enhance the truth discovery process and in that chapter the point of it is to say that is not without its cost either. The issue with using physical coercion to get someone to talk, is in using coercion you change their memories, you affect the information you are getting. The crucial question and its impossible to answer with certainty is the cost of coercion is its benefit so i can make you talk, but in the act of waterboarding do i affect your ability to remember what there is to talk about, do i harm the conversation, in the process of facilitate the conversation so you have this tradeoff and is it a good one . That is a question i dont think proponents the proponents of enhanced interrogation ask that question differently than the opponents of it and my feeling, my conclusion in the book is opponents tend to believe the costs of coercion are really high, higher than we realize and i talk at length to a psychiatrist who has studied this question and he is quite convincing you are in uncharted territory, you dont know what to make of the information you retrieve through physical coercion because it is so compromised i that act of coercion. Just being able to skim the surface, bring it all. Go. What do you want readers to understand about what they are thinking and what they should be thinking about conversations with strangers . I want to end with a call for caution and humility, i want people to slow down, to understand the task of getting to know a stranger is very difficult, cannot be done quickly or easily, some of the things you do to speed it up make the problem worse, and we need to be devising systems that can account for that is the last quarter of the book is all about policing and Law Enforcement strategies and what does Law Enforcement look like if you take the task of talking to strangers seriously and the answer is police behave in a different way and are far more selective in how they use the most proactive tools of Law Enforcement. The lesson of sandra bland is not that the Police Officer needs to be better but it is an issue that shouldnt have stopped. When there is an overwhelming reason to believe a criminal thing might be taking place. All he had was he drove up behind her and she didnt do the turning now and she was a black person without state plates, not sufficient reason to set into motion a potentially dangerous conversation. You exclude from your book social media. Guest that is the situation does the world need another book about social media. I just thought of course that important and lots of books talk about it. It is unnecessary for me to weigh in. When you are writing a book you have to ask where do i contribute to the conversation and i dont think id contribute by duplicating what 1000 other books have been written, 200 in the last year and a half. Host your book debuted watching the reaction and many conventional media critics, Los Angeles Times loved it, at a time in the world feels intractable he polarized, examining the ways we misinterpret or fail to communicate with one another could not feel necessary. On the other side i was interested in the graphic in the New York Times, and show it to your audience. It basically said gladwell is turning to dark topics and wondering whether or not your readers would respond. Are you turning darker in thinking about the world . Guest this book is not dark in the sense that it is trying to make the world a better place and ask a question what we can do differently to make sure people like sandra bland dont have the same fate. I have a long chapter on the brock turner case, about how we can prevent sexual abuse cases like that in the future. Those are dark topics but the goal of the examination is positive, trying to make the world work a little better. Dont know whether i do think readers in these days, dark times, people are perfectly happy to talk about spies and fraud and Police Shootings and things like that. Host when you started to dive into the stanford rape case were you surprised the statistics on alcohol abuse on american campus . Yes. I wanted to write about sexual abuse as a classic example, campus sexual abuse cases, many of them dont follow the trajectory of violent rapes, stranger rapes, it is a party under relatively benign circumstances, have a conversation and something goes wrong. They start in a different way. This would be an excellent thing to include in my book, i go to campus and talk to people who study this issue and discover to my surprise they only talk about alcohol and to people, many people, too many people who study this problem feel they are dealing with drinking, that this at the core of this is the abuse of alcohol on campuses and the consequences of drunkenness. You cant talk about sexual abuse without talking about drunkenness and they came to convince me of that. This is a story of two drunk people who meet on the dance floor and in the case of brock turner his drunkenness contributes heavily to him engaging in criminal behavior and in the case of these victims, her drunkenness contributes very greatly to the fact that she was victimized so you have it is impossible to talk about how to prevent this in the future without asking how do we prevent people from being so drunk that on the one hand they greatly increase their chances of being a, and on the other hand increase their chances of being a victim. Host i want to put some statistics from the National Institute of alcohol abuse and alcoholism, drinking by College Students age 1824 contributes to an estimated 1500 students at the year. In addition an estimated 696,000 by students who have been drinking and 97 annual cases of Sexual Assault on campuses. The numbers are astonishing and many people of our generation. I will lump myself we forget because when we were of college age drinking was quite different and has changed dramatically over the last generation. The amount of hard alcohol is way up, hard liquor gets you drunk or more seriously and more quickly, binge drinking his way up and most importantly the amount of drinking by women is way up so that, whereas in my generation it would be unheard of for a woman to match a man in a social setting that is closer to the norm and that has profound consequences for drunkenness because for a variety of reasons women do not process alcohol as efficiently as men and get much drunker on the same amount so this the numbers you told me are astonishing. Im struck by the absence of meaningful conversation about how dangerous drinking patterns are and by the facts, i focus on the booklet when you talk to young people, people in college they dont see the link between sexual abuse and drinking, they see them as being disconnected and that is madness. Host you have been exploring a number of these topics in the podcast. We just finished. So i want to play a clip from one of your podcasts, one of the chapters in the book and get a sense of how you do that. Listen. Tensions rose coming to a head on february 20 fourth 1996. That afternoon three planes took off from the florida straits. As they neared the cuban coastline two Cuban Air Force make fighter jets shot down two of the planes out of the sky killing all four people on board. The response to the attack was immediate. The United States Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the cuban government. a president clinton held a press conference. Ladies and gentlemen, i have just been briefed by the National Security adviser on the shooting down today in broad daylight two americans billion airplanes by cuban military aircraft. Host what podcast, this is also going to be your audiobook, put real video and audio into the subject matter. How does that enhance the experience for your intended audience . Guest i will speak first to the audiobook. Ive been doing a podcast for four years have learned about it until it storytelling aid in the podcast form. Much more emotionally immediate and the idea that you can hear once you can hear someones voice i feel they are summoned in a more visceral way than reading about them on a page and it wasnt obvious to me when i started that that is the way it would be but with a podcast you can move someone to tears whereas it is quite hard to do on page, much harder to do in print. People are so emotionally connected to the things that come in that channel. When it came time to doing the audiobook for talking strangers because so much of the material is so emotional we decided to make the audiobook like a podcast that we just listened to a clip of one of the chapters of my audiobook. You heard the excerpt from bill clinton. Throughout the book if im interviewing someone you hear the person i am interviewing. When i describe what happened to sandra bland, you hear that tape we just saw. When he does his deposition at the end of the book, walk through his deposition when he keeps explaining his behavior you hear it in his voice. All of that means the experience is a lot more powerful, people who have listened to the audiobook and read the book, small number but there are some it is almost like two different books. You are drawn to Different Things and your reactions are different. Host do you have more fun working on the podcast that writing the book . Guest because the podcast, you can do a really goofy thing. I do goofy things in the podcast. I have a podcast episode on the two chutzpahs . They have different meanings and pronunciations and it is a lark. There is a kind of playfulness that comes with the podcast format that is not available in serious nonfiction. Host there are 750,000 podcast, 30 million Episodes People can avail themselves of. How do you see the podcast market shaking out over time . Guest the vast majority of those podcasts dont earn any income for the creator and dont have any listeners. We are talking a phenomenon that has a very long tail much like the book does but it is longer because the cost is smaller than producing a book. Anytime you have an industry where the cost of entry are essentially 0 you are going to have tons and tons of entrants. That doesnt have to shake out because it is like people do podcasts for all kinds of reasons, having listeners and making money is not central to a lot of those people in the long tail. The issue is about a small number of podcasts that command a decent amount, the issue is are those numbers going to grow. A podcast like joe rogans podcasts gets 5 million downloads per episode. Are we in the next 20 years, will there be five times as many podcasts or will joe rogan, the interesting thing is what happens to the growth at the far end of the tail. The sheer number of podcasts is not terribly meaningful. Host someone you had a long relationship, a game changer for you in your journalism career. Talk about what he brings to the table. Guest in washington dc in 1985, a roommate on the house, on mount pleasant. Taking a year off from school, take a break between junior and senior years. I began to freelance there. Starting in journalism, remains Close Friends ever since, he ran a state group, state magazine and all the podcasts as part of the Washington Post companys digital arm. Unlike me he knows how to fund business. We started this congress company, the ceo, i am serious heavy lifting. The name on the mast head. Host do you have Something Else . Guest i had many things, and subsequently, we named our dogs after russians. I used to call my apartment guest sure. I am english. His garden carts. And Second Nature for me. They petitioned host for people who dont know. Guest the most famous literary figure in even russians love him. The late eighteenth century poet and writer and intellectual, he was part black as i was. A wonderful role model. Host the last dip into our our lives, the earliest clip we have of you, wanted to show you a little bit of this from 1996. Black a personal history. What is this about . It was a very good example what i was talking about. Talks about what this means. Tell us about racism. Host i wanted to show that. A bit to talk about your parents a little more. In your acknowledgments you tell us two things. Your mother taught you how to write and you lost your father. Would you talk about the contributions each of them made to you . Very different mathematician, rational, physically fearless gogetter. My mother is with family therapists, much more kind of contemplative, soulful type but in some ways very similar, very independent minded and selfsufficient and my father had a great sense of mischief and i have inherited his sense of mischief. Never took himself or the world too seriously. He was playful in the way he thought about ideas. At my best i am playful about ideas as i try to be so that is part of the contribution. She is a writer and extraordinary, speaks in perfectly beautiful sentences that i have admired as long as i had speech. Host you described how she says things . Guest she doesnt say much so she expresses i marvel at it. There was an enormous outpouring of words to analyze a sentence and a half. Host where do you do most of your writing . Do your writing your aforementioned apartment . Guest a coffee shop obituary. Host one thing that has changed in the course of your writing career is your celebrity. Speaking tours, top 10 podcasts, also made a lot of money over the years, celebrity and wealth changed your life. Host i never really did. Celebrity celebrity is an odd word. I am not a celebrity. If brad pitt were to walk down the street people would mock him. What happens to me is somebody will say your podcasts keep walking or at the most someone saying take a picture. It is not the kind of celebrity offing but i am familiar to them. I think of celebrity as someone who is there so people who talk to me are related to me as a p a. I heard you on your podcasts. Almost like you are in your life. Back to like they have known me forever. It doesnt feel like fame. Guest podcasting speeches and the like. What do you want your body of work to do for society . Guest encourage people to look at things differently. I am to step out of their mindset for a moment. Consider the problem from this perspective. Just pause for a moment while you read this chapter or listen to this podcast and imagine what it would be like to think about this issue in a different way the way someone else does. That is something i try to do in my own life and any kind of art would improve the world winning encourages people to adopt different perspective. Host thank you for spending the hour with us, thank you for your time. All q and a programs are on our website or as a podcast on cspan. Org. Thanks for being with us this saturday evening with Malcolm Gladwells program. He has a appeared on booktv 20 times and you can watch any of those. Type in his website and type in the top of the page. You are watching booktv on cspan2, the latest nonfiction books and authors. Created by americas table Television Company is americas Public Service and brought you by your television provider. Booktv on cspan2, 48 hours of nonfiction artisan books every weekend, television for serious readers. Programs to watch out for today and tomorrow in our Author Interview program after words. Deputy assistant attorney general of the george w. Bush administration john you. Programs from our archives with toni morrison. For more schedule information, visit booktv. Org x. Now we kick off the