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Episode: The Tipping Point Revisited: Live with David Remnick

Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 01:02:32

Episode Shownotes

On the very first stop of the Revenge of the Tipping Point book tour, Malcolm sat down with David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, at the 92Y in New York City. The old friends and former colleagues discuss Malcolm’s past work, his new book and how he traces his

love of storytelling back to playing endless games of Monopoly as a child.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary

In this episode of Revisionist History, entitled "The Tipping Point Revisited: Live with David Remnick," Malcolm Gladwell converses with New Yorker editor David Remnick about his new book and his storytelling journey. He reflects on his career trajectory from a young journalist at The Washington Post to a distinctive voice in narrative nonfiction. The discussion also explores themes such as creative problem-solving from childhood experiences, the ethical responsibilities of journalism, and the nuances of audio storytelling. Gladwell emphasizes the importance of respect for subjects in journalism and critiques current trends in youth sports.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Tipping Point Revisited: Live with David Remnick) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_05
Pushkin.

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00:01:57 Speaker_05
Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners. This is Revenge of the Tipping Point Month at Revisionist History, where we bring you stories and snippets and tantalizing tales from a new book now available everywhere.

00:02:10 Speaker_05
And in this episode, we're bringing you the very first stop on my book tour, a conversation I had about my life and career with my old friend and former boss, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

00:02:22 Speaker_05
We did this at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, my home away from home. I first met David almost 40 years ago when he was a star at the Washington Post and I was a cub reporter who'd never written a newspaper story before.

00:02:36 Speaker_05
He's one of the people in the world who I admire the most. And our conversation was hilarious and fun. I hope you enjoy.

00:02:44 Speaker_03
It's been a while.

00:02:50 Speaker_05
Has, yes.

00:02:51 Speaker_03
Malcolm, I have to tell you that the title of this book is so brilliant because it's like revenge of King Kong. It's fantastic.

00:02:59 Speaker_05
It's a Pink Panther shout out.

00:03:03 Speaker_03
And I have to say that one of my fondest memories at the New Yorker, and we'll go back even earlier in a moment, but at the New Yorker, You're telling me, you know, I've written two pieces now, Cool Hunters and The Tipping Point.

00:03:18 Speaker_03
I have this idea for a book. You got an agent, the redoubtable Tina Bennett. And you thought, you know, if I could make just a small amount of money, I could help out my family. And let's just say by the end of the day, things went well.

00:03:37 Speaker_03
And now 23 million books later, things have gone really well. But what interests me most is not success, material success, however deeply jealous I am.

00:03:52 Speaker_03
What interests me is how you invented yourself and what you do, because we have a not dissimilar background.

00:03:59 Speaker_03
We were both at the Washington Post, we were both at the New Yorker, and I couldn't have, in many ways, a more conventional approach to journalism.

00:04:08 Speaker_03
I wonder when you look back and you were at The Spectator, you were at The Post, and then you came to The New Yorker, but something happened at a certain point that a more conventional story was left behind, and even a humorous story like the one at The Washington Post where you had a dog on death row and you treated... Oh, that was my finest work.

00:04:33 Speaker_03
It really was.

00:04:34 Speaker_05
There was a dog in Bergen County. Should I back up and tell that story? Sure. I became the New York correspondent for the Washington Post, and they were uninterested in stories about New York at that point. I don't know why.

00:04:49 Speaker_05
And then I decided to make my life more interesting and maybe increase my profile in Washington. I would only write stories from Bergen County.

00:04:58 Speaker_03
My county.

00:04:59 Speaker_05
Yeah, because I decided that Bergen County was more interesting. I still believe this than New York City. So I just every day I would read the Bergen County record record. That's right.

00:05:11 Speaker_05
And I saw a little tiny mention one day of a dog, an Akita named Taro. who had been confined to Doggy Death Row. Now, Doggy Death Row in Bergen County is in Hackensack.

00:05:23 Speaker_03
Where I was born. Were you born in Hackensack?

00:05:25 Speaker_05
You bet. There is, you know, you think I'm joking when I say this Doggy Death Row. No, it is actually Doggy Death Row. It's a, you can't get there. You have to, there's like a ravine.

00:05:35 Speaker_05
And if you want to, you're on the other side of the ravine and then you see a long string of cages. And that there's all these dogs who are there pending. There's all kinds of appeals, obviously.

00:05:45 Speaker_05
And if they lose their appeals, then they are euthanized. And they're there for biting people.

00:05:51 Speaker_05
And Taro, what had happened was he had been asleep, and a child, the nephew of his owner, had stumbled across him in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. And Taro had swiped the kid.

00:06:04 Speaker_05
Now, all of these claims I'm making were subject to a great amount of litigation. and had cut the kid's lip. And the result was like, there were like seven different lawsuits. And I became convinced that Tara was wrongfully convicted.

00:06:22 Speaker_05
And I wrote for the Washington Post. I mean, it was thousands.

00:06:27 Speaker_03
It was impressively long.

00:06:28 Speaker_05
And the editor of the Washington Post, the next day after it ran, came up to me and said, that was a very good piece on Tarot. It was, however, four times too long. It was just the greatest thing anyone's ever said to me. And they were T-shirts.

00:06:41 Speaker_05
The owner printed up T-shirts, Free Tarot. And they were distributed. And the story made the front page of the New York Post. That's the goal. The New York Post picked up my story.

00:06:56 Speaker_03
That's the heaven.

00:06:57 Speaker_05
That's the heaven. So my whole strategy of conceiving of Bergen County as being a kind of more fertile ground for Georgian enterprises.

00:07:08 Speaker_03
But this was the beginning of the Gladwellian rebellion against the conventional, which is that New York, as I believe, not only the most interesting place, but on certain days, the only interesting place. I'm a patriot.

00:07:29 Speaker_03
But at what point, as we know what a Malcolm Gladwell story is, the kind of sense of surprise, playing with ideas, exploring ideas, reading social science, when did that begin to click in?

00:07:44 Speaker_05
I think it starts at the post, because the problem You know, whenever I would take a job, take a job, you have to kind of conceive of what is the problem that you're trying to solve in this job?

00:07:55 Speaker_05
And the problem that I had when I got to The Post was that I was 23, and I had never written a newspaper story in my life. I had no idea how to do it. And I was surrounded by people who were the greatest, like yourself. Yeah, yeah.

00:08:07 Speaker_05
No, for those of you who don't know, David in his day was an absolutely legendary, one of the great newspaper reporters of his generation. Thank you.

00:08:17 Speaker_05
And they were, they were, Woodward, Bob Woodward was, when I got to The Washington Post, I was in the business section, Woodward was there. And I would watch, and like Steve Call, do you remember Steve Call?

00:08:29 Speaker_05
Steve Call, who went on to become, I mean, he's still around, but he ran the Columbia Journalism School. Call, when he, I think you told me, you pointed this out to me, when he, you know, when we had the push-button phones? Yes.

00:08:41 Speaker_05
He would, you know, when I dialed, it would be like, do, do, do, do, do. Call was like, that's too slow. And he'd be like... It was like a concert pianist. He'd go... He'd play a chord. Yeah. And he'd get the White House.

00:08:54 Speaker_05
It would take him, like, five seconds. I'm like, that was all... And I had Mike... The legendary Mike Isikoff was next to me. Anyway, my point is, I'm surrounded by all these people who are just better at daily journalism than I am.

00:09:07 Speaker_05
And so the problem was, how do you succeed in an environment whenever... And you succeed in that environment by being the thing that they are not. Everyone else was fast and fluid, so I decided I would be slow and weird, right?

00:09:24 Speaker_03
And in fairness, the Washington Post did not prize weirdness. No, it did not.

00:09:33 Speaker_05
Although, the key was, I mean, the problem to be solved was how do you stand up in an environment where everyone around you is a total pro. So to stand out, you have to do what everyone else is not doing.

00:09:45 Speaker_05
So people around me were not writing 5,000 word stories on death row dogs.

00:09:51 Speaker_03
No, no.

00:09:52 Speaker_05
I remember the first time I wrote a story for The New Yorker, I was still at the Washington Post and I was writing the talk of the towns before they were signed, so that way I could freelance without them knowing.

00:10:03 Speaker_05
So I was writing these talk of the towns and I went to see Chip McGrath. And it was Tina Brown's deputy editor. And Chip said, I'd written this little talk of the town. And he had some problem. He said, I want you to fix this problem. He said, why?

00:10:19 Speaker_05
And so I said, I took it from him. I said, OK. And I just wrote in the margins my fix. And I remember looking at him, and he was astonished. Vulgarian. It was vulgar. It was vulgar. He expected me to go home and come back in a week with the fix.

00:10:34 Speaker_05
I was like, no, I'll just move this here. do that. At the New Yorker, you had to be that. Otherwise, if you wanted to be slow and thoughtful and weird, then you were competing with everyone else. I got there and I had to completely change.

00:10:51 Speaker_05
I had to work hard. I had to do all these things that I wasn't doing at the Washington Post. We'll be right back with more from my conversation with David Remnick. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are lots of phobias out there.

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If you ask someone to name a genius, virtually everyone would give you the same answer. Albert Einstein, the genius of all geniuses. He's most famous for his general and special theories of relativity. And even children today know his renowned equation.

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E equals mc squared. And yet there's one thing that even the great Albert Einstein would have trouble understanding today. Mattresses. Think about it.

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00:14:43 Speaker_03
You're now at this retrospective moment in your literary journalistic life where you're writing a piece that echoes your first book and you're no longer 23 years old.

00:14:54 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:14:55 Speaker_03
There must be some sense of self-examination about this.

00:14:58 Speaker_05
It was probably a piece called The Cool Hunt. Remember The Cool Hunt? I do.

00:15:06 Speaker_05
I don't know how I found her, a woman who's still a very good friend of mine, Dee Dee Gordon, who went around, whose business was going around America telling corporations what was cool. T-shirts and the like. T-shirts, and she was, and still is.

00:15:22 Speaker_05
Absolutely hilarious. Anyway, I wrote a piece about her, about this idea that she would just go around and she would declare something cool and she would tell you what was... Companies would hire her as a... Hire her.

00:15:34 Speaker_05
But the whole point of that piece was the title, The Cool Hunt. Once you had the title, it's like... And there was... Someone wanted to make a movie out of it. Of course, nothing ever came of it. But it was the first time I realized

00:15:49 Speaker_05
That was, you know, that kind of. It was something else. It was something fun about taking, being interested in pop culture for the New Yorker.

00:15:59 Speaker_03
Did the New Yorker never have that kind of thing before? Now this kind of story comes up. Yeah. But was that an absence that you were feeling? A vacuum?

00:16:09 Speaker_05
No, I didn't know anyone else in the New York. It was the same thing about trying to be different. So I didn't know of anyone else who was writing about Dee Dee Gordon was not the typical subject of a New Yorker profile.

00:16:20 Speaker_03
No.

00:16:21 Speaker_05
I mean, she, you know, she was this kind of strange, hilarious, she had this crazy crush on Keanu Reeves. She was obsessed with Keanu Reeves. But I just thought like, This is different in a way. This will stand out.

00:16:39 Speaker_03
You just need it to stand out. And then you did the tipping point, which is now associated with you.

00:16:48 Speaker_03
But as you've said repeatedly, what you were doing is taking an idea that was very much in the air in sociological terms, in terms of crime and much else. So what was the idea for the book? You had these two pieces.

00:17:05 Speaker_03
How did you cast out what the book, what it would be, what shape it would take, what voice it would have?

00:17:13 Speaker_05
Well, my agent came, Tina, who I knew socially, and then she became an agent. She worked in the admissions department of some.

00:17:21 Speaker_03
She'd been a graduate student in history. Yeah. In literature.

00:17:25 Speaker_05
I just knew she's friends of friends. And then she became an agent. And she's like, can I be your agent? I was like, I guess, sure. And then she's now like the powerhouse of powerhouses. But I knew her. And she said, you should write a book on this.

00:17:36 Speaker_05
But what is this? The article, The Tipping Point. Yeah. Because people got really interested in it. And I started like, someone in California flew me out to speak to their group about it.

00:17:49 Speaker_05
I remember thinking that was really weird, that a piece in The New Yorker could... So I thought, oh, maybe people are kind of into this. And Tina's like, yeah, you should do a book.

00:17:57 Speaker_05
So I knew the article in The New Yorker was a chapter, clearly a chapter, a part of a chapter, and then I had to kind of... improvise. I'd never written a book before.

00:18:08 Speaker_03
Before we get to the way you reconsider the idea, because it's a very interesting bridge, I want to know, it probably is not in the stack of cards here, I want to know how you invented yourself as a voice and how naturally or not that came to me.

00:18:22 Speaker_03
Because I can read a paragraph of yours or a page of yours and I know it right away, that's you. There's a certain cadence, there's a certain way that chapters end,

00:18:34 Speaker_03
There are moves that are as distinctive as somebody's, you know, a piano player or an athlete. You watch enough athletes, you listen to enough music. There's a Gladwell cadence, there's a Gladwell sense of humor. It's very, very distinctive.

00:18:55 Speaker_03
How self-aware are you of it? How did it become itself?

00:19:01 Speaker_05
Well, it's hard to say, you know. So I spent 10 years at The Post, and there's something, I think that's crucial, because what happens at The Post is you learn how to write, meaning you learn how to write without fear and self-consciousness.

00:19:21 Speaker_05
You're forced to. I remember by the end of my time at The Washington Post, I remember when I was, one of the last stories I wrote before I left for The New Yorker, there was a shooting on the LIRR, And it happened at like 4.30 in the afternoon.

00:19:39 Speaker_05
And back then, the deadline was like 6.30. So I get on the LAIR, and I go out to the scene. I get there at like 5.30. And it's clearly a front page story. And they're like, we need the story.

00:19:53 Speaker_03
A shooting on the Long Island Railroad is a front page story in the Washington Post?

00:19:58 Speaker_05
It was a big shooting. It was a serious, well, I mean, my assumption was, I was telling them, of course, it's a front page story. That's the way it worked.

00:20:07 Speaker_06
This is huge.

00:20:08 Speaker_05
It's never happened before. Someone got shot in New York City. Hold the front page. It's above the fold. You know, like, the whole manual. You know this. You did this show yourself many, many times.

00:20:18 Speaker_03
Oh my god, yeah. And you could do it from Moscow, and you could just, they all get nervous.

00:20:23 Speaker_05
Michael Spector used to, his colleague of ours was so good at this. He would do a kind of salami slicing, where he'd take a story and do 10 stories out of it, and each one would get on the front page, because he would be like, it's changed.

00:20:38 Speaker_05
Yesterday I said, there's another wrinkle. They'd be like, oh my god. And they'd put the first wrinkle on the front page. They'd put the second wrinkle.

00:20:44 Speaker_06
Then there's a day three, oh my god.

00:20:47 Speaker_05
Go out there. I'm on the LAR. And I remember, this is when I was at the peak of my powers.

00:20:56 Speaker_05
So I interviewed all these people, I don't have time to, there's no laptops back then, there's no like, and I did the thing which I had heard, you know, hard bitten newspaper reports.

00:21:07 Speaker_03
You dictated.

00:21:09 Speaker_05
I picked up the phone and I called it in. I remember that feeling of like, I dictated a 1500 word story into the phone to someone typing on the other end, straight through. And I was so pleased with myself.

00:21:25 Speaker_05
But I realized at that moment, I've got nothing else to learn here. But that's what you learn. And you never lose that fluidity. So in other words, every bad habit you have as a writer gets beaten out of you at a newspaper. Because it's just discipline.

00:21:47 Speaker_05
It's like, boom.

00:21:49 Speaker_03
you know, tell the story, tell it in a way that's compelling, a symbol of... Yeah, but something happens to your prose, and I won't linger on this too long, but if I read Anthony Lane, for example, I can read him, and I know that, obviously, Anthony is an incredibly erudite reader and writer, but I know that he did not get through life without reading P.G.

00:22:10 Speaker_03
Woodhouse over and over again. That informs the texture of this, this tapestry. Who was that for you? Or was it just the newspaper business?

00:22:22 Speaker_05
Well, no, no, no. So then I get to... I don't think... I think I have a little bit of that post, but it gets... My point is, you get pared down.

00:22:30 Speaker_05
You get rid of all your bad habits, and then you have... It's like a... It's like, you know, in playing a musical instrument, you spend the first 10 years mastering the fundamentals, and then you're free to

00:22:44 Speaker_05
develop some kind of, but you have to do the compulsory work, and that's what The Post is. You get reduced to the simplest essence of how to tell a story, and now you have the freedom, and you come to the, a lot of it was Adam Gopnik.

00:23:02 Speaker_05
So I was reading Gopnik long before I joined The New Yorker, and Gopnik has an exceedingly distinctive voice, right? I mean, a beautiful way of expressing himself. And there's little kind of beautiful little frills.

00:23:21 Speaker_05
I mean, his prose sings, his little choruses and frills. And it's just like, and reading that, I'm half a generation.

00:23:32 Speaker_03
But his move is, he has many, but is the pop culture or boomer pop culture, as he and I have discussed, but reference when discussing something like, you know, Nietzsche or the French Revolution.

00:23:45 Speaker_05
That's crucial. So this reminds me of something. When I was in middle school, I met, my lab partner was a guy named Terry Martin, who I, you know of Terry Martin, now a Soviet scholar.

00:24:00 Speaker_05
But he, by happenstance, in our little town in Canada, he was my lab partner. And Terry was an absolutely brilliant guy. And we were in biology together, and we would do these experiments.

00:24:13 Speaker_05
And he would always refuse to do the experiment the way we were supposed to do it, like as a matter of principle. And I remember at first, utterly horrified, because we would never, we couldn't finish anything. Nothing was ever handed in.

00:24:26 Speaker_05
We would always get terrible grades. And then about, like, by kind of November of seventh grade, I realized it's genius because what he taught me was that you have the freedom. I mean, he wasn't being destructive or nihilistic.

00:24:45 Speaker_05
He was like saying, okay, so they're all going to do it this way, but we don't have to do it that way. There's another way to learn what's going on here. He was deeply interested in biology.

00:24:55 Speaker_03
This is what so interests me. So play is what... You used the word, and I think it even causes some people alarm, or they're offended intellectually or otherwise, or they're jealous or whatever it is.

00:25:10 Speaker_03
You used the phrase, playing with ideas, as if this is to them somehow irresponsible. What does playing with ideas mean? It begins with...

00:25:20 Speaker_05
Terry in seventh grade. Because Terry and I, then we developed this deep friendship, and we would play endless games of Monopoly, and we then deregulated Monopoly.

00:25:31 Speaker_05
And his whole idea was, this is, our idea was the rules, at that point we were like, well, the rules make no sense. Like, the game as, it's a brilliant game, but for example, why do you start with $1,500?

00:25:44 Speaker_05
That is, by the way, if you're interested, this is the great flaw with Monopoly. Because the point of Monopoly is, when you're playing it, it should be a question of what can I afford? It should be a difficult question. I land on Marvin Gardens.

00:26:01 Speaker_05
Do I want to buy Marvin Gardens? Should be a question that you have to entertain and come up with a serious answer to. If you give each player $1,500 to start and you land on Marvin Gardens, you just buy it. How is that interesting?

00:26:13 Speaker_03
That's absurd. So it's a little bit like inherited wealth.

00:26:16 Speaker_05
Yes, exactly. So we started with $1.

00:26:24 Speaker_03
What could you buy with $1? You can't even get a slice of pizza. No, no, no, no, no.

00:26:28 Speaker_05
Much like Marvin Gardner. So the first 10 minutes is just speed circling the board, accumulating capital. And then we had to come up with all kinds of ways to basically create systems for creating leverage.

00:26:43 Speaker_03
Did you have too much time on your hands?

00:26:45 Speaker_05
No, no, no, no, no, no. We played so much Monopoly. So what I realize now is that we would sell derivatives. I would say, like, if I landed on your property, you had improved, you know, the blue property, you know, Vermont and Oriental and whatever.

00:27:05 Speaker_05
I owe you 500 bucks. We'd never pay the $500. That's silly. Why would you pay the $500? Instead, it should be an invitation to a negotiation about, there are clearly, I owe you 500 bucks. All right, so how can I be useful to you in some other way, right?

00:27:24 Speaker_03
So it's goods and services.

00:27:26 Speaker_05
Yeah. You land on Vermont. You owe me $500. I have Broadway. I need Park Place. So I say, OK, pay me $100. But if you land on Park Place, I have the right of first refusal to buy that property from you. Now, that's a simple example.

00:27:43 Speaker_05
We constructed these insanely elaborate, massive derivatives. And we would play.

00:27:48 Speaker_03
Do they have no drugs in Canada?

00:27:52 Speaker_05
We would play with Terry's cousin, Fred, and we would play like three or four games an afternoon, and we would play hundreds of games a summer. We'd get together every morning and just play this game. But it was the same thing.

00:28:09 Speaker_05
It was like... And each... Over the course of the summer, we would create ever more elaborate structures around... But that's the origin of play, because Terry's assumption... This is what Terry taught me.

00:28:19 Speaker_05
He was like, what does Parker Brothers know about Monopoly? And the self-confidence of that was so brilliant.

00:28:26 Speaker_03
Fair enough. But when you're dealing with auto safety, medical tests, all the many subjects, in other words, at what point do you feel grimly responsible toward the set of ideas and the facts? And how does that interact with playing?

00:28:50 Speaker_03
What's the difference between what you're doing and what an academic feels obliged to do. I mean, I remember reading a piece of yours, and there was a piece, and it was so mean to Ralph Nader, who I was... So great.

00:29:04 Speaker_03
Who I was brought up to think was just an incredible hero for all of... Okay, he lost the election at one point, but never mind.

00:29:14 Speaker_05
I can tell you where that came from. So this goes to your point.

00:29:16 Speaker_03
And then you blamed poor Ralph Nader for what... Oh, so genius.

00:29:23 Speaker_05
So on the sense of play, the first layer of play is understanding other people who want to play, right?

00:29:31 Speaker_05
So I got, I like cars, and I thought it'd be fun to write about automobile safety for the New Yorker, because nobody was writing about automobiles.

00:29:37 Speaker_05
And if they were writing about it, they were writing about it in this kind of really kind of rote, boring. So find someone who has an interesting take on auto safety. Now, where would that person reside? Well, not in academia.

00:29:49 Speaker_05
They would work for a car company. Right? Turns out there's a Scottish guy called Leonard Evans who ran the safety department at General Motors. And Leonard wrote a book called Traffic Safety in America, which is so genius.

00:30:02 Speaker_05
And I read Traffic Safety, I was like, oh my God, Leonard, you're a genius. So I call up Leonard. And he's got this whole Scottish brogue accent.

00:30:10 Speaker_03
And he's been waiting for you all his life.

00:30:11 Speaker_05
He has been waiting for him, for me, his entire life. No journalist has ever called Leonard. Of course not.

00:30:17 Speaker_05
And Leonard's sitting in his office in like Dearborn, wherever the hell he is, and he doesn't even bother to clear it with General Motors, Public Relations, because he's never had a journalist call him before. He's just on the phone with me.

00:30:27 Speaker_05
And Leonard does something. The first story Leonard gives me, he goes, in his Scottish accent, which I can't do, he says, you realize, we're talking about airbags. And one of, this is in the mid-90s, early, late 90s.

00:30:43 Speaker_05
And one of Leonard's points was, airbags were suddenly a big deal. Everyone was in love with airbags. And his point was, the airbag, if you're not wearing your seatbelt, the airbag is, can kill you.

00:30:55 Speaker_05
Particularly if you're very young, or very old, or very small. And Leonard said, the reason we don't realize this is that, the reason we have airbags is because of Ralph Nader.

00:31:06 Speaker_05
And Ralph Nader didn't understand this fact and he was promoting the airbag without, he thought it was an alternative to the seatbelt as opposed to an accompaniment to the seatbelt. And then Leonard said, and I never wrote about this, he said,

00:31:19 Speaker_05
What you should do is you should file a Freedom of Information Act request with the, whatever the automobile, whatever the transit automobile. Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is.

00:31:31 Speaker_05
And ask for all the cases of people who died because they weren't wearing a seatbelt and the airbag went off. And that's the blood that's on Ralph Nader's hands. And I was like, oh my God. So file.

00:31:44 Speaker_05
I file the FOIA request, and like two months later, like seven huge boxes show up at the Washington Post, and it's all the case files. What did I do with that story? Nothing.

00:31:58 Speaker_05
And then, so I remember this, and I remember Leonard, and I get to the New Yorker, and I'm filled with shame that I never wrote the story. I would have won the Pulitzer Prize.

00:32:06 Speaker_06
I would have won the, Leonard gave me a Pulitzer Prize. It was all there in the boxes. It was like hundreds of people. I mean, it's sad. He did say it was sad.

00:32:20 Speaker_05
Hashtag sad. Sad. And Leonard is not happy with me for not doing a story about this. So then I say, okay, Leonard, I'll do the Ralph Nader story. Just, I can't, I'm not deploying the ship of sail, but we'll do the Ralph Nader story. And then I go

00:32:37 Speaker_05
So then, for some reason, I go to Detroit, but I don't hang out with Leonard. I hang out with his competitor at Ford. And I think he got very concerned about that. He was unhappy.

00:32:47 Speaker_05
But the guy at Ford had this whole thing about three-point belts, and we crashed all these cars. It was so much fun. And then I came back. But the point, it all starts with Leonard. Leonard was a guy who wanted to play. He was an iconoclast.

00:33:01 Speaker_05
ignored sitting in his office in Dearborn and nobody was listening to him and he was writing these books that were read by seven people and he was just great.

00:33:10 Speaker_05
He was just like and when you uncover someone like that and he was just so thrilled with the idea that.

00:33:16 Speaker_03
I think another thing that thrilled you is that all the rest of us slobs who are writing about politics or show business or sports or obsessed with excess, right? You want to write a profile of LeBron James.

00:33:31 Speaker_03
You want to write a profile of Kamala Harris or whatever. And you have to go through these tentacles and seaweed of handlers and no and no and can we have quote approval and photo approval? And the answer is no. Okay, we're not, blah, blah, blah.

00:33:50 Speaker_03
It's terrible. It's terrible. And I think part of it, and tell me if I'm wrong, was your antipathy to that.

00:33:58 Speaker_03
I mean, the closest I think you might have done to a true celebrity profile, one of my favorite pieces, was the guy who was the Ronco, what was it called, the Ronco jar and bottle cutter?

00:34:09 Speaker_05
Oh, that's one of my favorite pieces of all, yeah, that I ever did. The guy who did the Showtime rotisserie.

00:34:15 Speaker_03
That's really, right, oh, the rotisserie chicken guy.

00:34:18 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:21 Speaker_03
And, but what I gleaned from that also, you had a very early interest, and here we're going back a little bit. Before you were in journalism, you were in advertising. What was your? I wanted to be in advertising. I couldn't get a job.

00:34:35 Speaker_03
You couldn't get a job?

00:34:36 Speaker_05
No, no.

00:34:36 Speaker_03
Why did you want to be in advertising?

00:34:39 Speaker_05
Well, because I liked the idea that someone can tell a story in 30 seconds. I just thought that was fantastic. And I was in awe of, I thought the greatest achievement was A well-told 30-second story was the hardest thing in the world.

00:34:53 Speaker_05
And the idea that they can make you laugh or cry in 30 seconds while they're selling you something, it's just, the degree of difficulty on that is just off the charts.

00:35:01 Speaker_03
I wanted to do that. Hence, what was his name, the Ronco, Jared, and Volk?

00:35:05 Speaker_05
So Ron Popiel. Ron Popiel. Remember, he used to do the late-night infomercials. He was the infomercial king.

00:35:12 Speaker_04
Right.

00:35:12 Speaker_05
And he made a number of things, but his showpiece product was the Showtime rotisserie oven, which was, I claim, dollar for dollar, the finest kitchen appliance ever made. And I still believe that to be the case.

00:35:24 Speaker_05
And I went out to LA, and I hung out with Ron, and it was... I decided to go deep on Ron. And it turns out he's from... like Asbury Park or somewhere in, his people were all, they were tumblers. They were salesmen. On the boardwalk in New Jersey.

00:35:44 Speaker_05
They all sold like knives and stuff on the boardwalk. And Ron was the, you know, another guy, Ed McMahon was part of that circle.

00:35:52 Speaker_05
And a guy named Kidders Morris, who was Ron Popeil's grandfather, was a legendary guy from the old country who came over and was selling kitchen gadgets on the boardwalk.

00:36:02 Speaker_05
and they were they would do the spiel and you know the chop chop chop they'd have the they'd have the all the vegetables and they'd be sitting on the boardwalk and they would show you the knife and they go chop chop chop chop and the whole thing was the turn this is a crucial thing that he learns back then which is so the crowd gathers around you and you've got the ginsu knife and you're chopping the vegetables and then at a certain first of all you can't

00:36:25 Speaker_05
You have a, he taught me this. He's like, you got the carrots and the potatoes and you got the pineapple. You can't ever chop the pineapple. Why? Because it's so expensive. It's just there.

00:36:39 Speaker_05
It's the thought that he might somehow one day chop the pineapple that keeps the people coming. But no, no, you chop the carrots. The carrots are like five cents a carrot. But the key thing is the turn. So the people come close to get around you.

00:36:52 Speaker_05
You're going chop, chop, chop, chop. And you've got to sell them. the knife, and they got to get out of there, because the news, do people have to come in? That's the key.

00:37:02 Speaker_05
So that anybody could do the thing, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, people gather around. But it's turning that crowd and bringing in a new one in a seamless fashion. And Ron was battle tested on the board. He was the greatest of all the boardwalk.

00:37:16 Speaker_05
And then he goes to LA, and he takes it up a notch, and he starts doing late night infomercials. And he was so good. And I hung out with him. And I was out there for like two weeks, mostly goofing around.

00:37:29 Speaker_05
And I talked with the guy who he collaborated with on the Showtime Oven. For years, I used to cook my chickens on the Showtime. It was amazing. No more? I don't know what happened. It got really squeaky in like year six. You had a squeaky rotisserie.

00:37:47 Speaker_05
I had a squeaky one and Ron told me that I had to fix it and I... You threw it out.

00:37:51 Speaker_03
But his big thing was... You threw out the oven.

00:37:54 Speaker_05
I did. His big thing that, you know, a lot of the, back then in the old days, the rotisseries They went like this, like this is the spit. They were vertical. And Ron's like, why do you do it vertical? It makes no sense. The juices flow to the bottom.

00:38:11 Speaker_05
Crazy. It's got to be horizontal. He's the guy who starts the horizontal rotisserie.

00:38:16 Speaker_05
And he was so, it was so, and getting into the family history, and at one point he takes me to the gravesite in New Jersey where all the whole, there's three generations of these legendary pitchmen who worked the boardwalk.

00:38:30 Speaker_05
they're all buried in this thing and he starts to cry and it was just like it was just unbelievable but the move there and this Meitner your dear friend Henry Finder was very he was another very formative figure in this he's like everyone the standard move is to make fun of Ron Papil do not make fun of Ron Papil

00:38:55 Speaker_05
You have to genuinely, he's a hero. If the reader thinks for a moment you're mocking the man, you've failed. And that is the single greatest advice. I'm 100% with Henry on that.

00:39:08 Speaker_05
And to this day, people make this error, journalists do, they think at some point they have to demonstrate their superiority to the subject. No. The subject, the subject is the hero. And you have to find your job. There's 10 ways to write that.

00:39:26 Speaker_05
Rompapeele had a very complicated profile.

00:39:28 Speaker_03
Except in political reporting, but okay.

00:39:31 Speaker_05
Yeah. But Ron had a, there's 10 ways to write the Rompapeele profile. Nine of those ways you make fun of him. Thank you. And one way, you look for what is,

00:39:44 Speaker_05
What was fantastic about this guy, which is he devoted his life and his people for three generations devoted his life to making working in the kitchen a happier, healthier, easier, more efficient.

00:39:59 Speaker_05
That's a fantastic, he cared about whether the chicken was vertical or horizontal. We'll be right back.

00:40:15 Speaker_05
Congratulations to the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine for the first-ever Malcolm Gladwell Tipping Point designation at this year's Unconventional Awards by T-Mobile for Business.

00:40:27 Speaker_05
The university used integrated IoT devices and 5G solutions from T-Mobile to enable multiple synchronized health monitors, allowing for real-time remote data collection and analysis.

00:40:40 Speaker_05
The initiative will shape patient care moving forward, and for that, T-Mobile congratulates the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

00:40:49 Speaker_05
Picture this, you're in the garage, your favorite room in the house, and you're tuning up your engine with parts you found on eBay. Every piece is locking perfectly into place.

00:41:00 Speaker_05
You step back to admire your work, hands covered in grease, and because you're committed to driving that thing further than the odometer can even handle, you start thinking to yourself, You know what?

00:41:11 Speaker_05
I could probably also use some new brakes, some shocks and struts. This baby deserves a new air filter. So you head right back to eBay. You can find any part you need there. It's unreal.

00:41:25 Speaker_05
From wipers and headlights to cold air intakes, exhaust systems, and even that turbo you've had on your mind. eBay is the stocked garage of your dreams. and you've got eBay guaranteed fit.

00:41:39 Speaker_05
Because eBay knows DIY fixes can be major, and mods are always intense, so you need to know those parts are guaranteed to fit every time. Before you dive in, wrench first. And in the off chance you order a part and it doesn't fit, send it back.

00:41:55 Speaker_05
Simple as that. You know what you love more than your car itself is driving it. You're serious when it comes to engine maintenance and locked in when you're headed into a build. And that's exactly why you start with eBay. Minor fix or complete overhaul.

00:42:09 Speaker_05
You want to get your ride back on the road. And you've got eBay Guaranteed Fit. So eBay created My Garage, where all you have to do is add your ride's info to get the exact parts that fit.

00:42:22 Speaker_05
When you see that green check, you're a click away from that part clicking perfectly into place.

00:42:28 Speaker_05
So now that you know all that, imagine standing at that open garage door looking at that car you love more than anything, knowing that anything is possible.

00:42:37 Speaker_05
Whether it's keeping it on the road forever or turning it into something that's never been on the road before. Because with eBay, your garage just got a whole lot bigger. Get all the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time.

00:42:54 Speaker_05
eBay. Things. People. Love. As I'm reading this, I'm about to go on a trip to California, leaving tomorrow, renting a convertible at Los Angeles airport, heading up the coast top down, turning my cell phone off.

00:43:09 Speaker_05
I'm sure some of you have something similar planned, or at least have dreamt of doing something similar. And if you pull it off, you know what you could do to make it a little more affordable? consider hosting your home on Airbnb.

00:43:22 Speaker_05
It could be for a few weeks if it's a long trip, or just a few nights. Now, think of the possibilities. While your home is sitting empty as you're away, you could be making some extra money that you put towards your next big trip.

00:43:34 Speaker_05
Or, while your kid is away at college during the semester, you could wisely host your spare bedroom on Airbnb while it would otherwise sit empty. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host.

00:43:52 Speaker_05
We're back at the 92nd Street Y with David Remnick.

00:43:57 Speaker_03
You are no longer 23, and you've just had a couple of kids. They're how old now?

00:44:05 Speaker_05
I got a toddler and a baby.

00:44:08 Speaker_03
I'm forbidden to give you a real name.

00:44:10 Speaker_05
And you're 60? Are you out of your element?

00:44:13 Speaker_03
You look like you're 14. First of all, good luck. Second of all, Second of all, famously, and you once told me, you did one of your moves about college admissions. I love that stuff. It's crazy. They're getting in, and then 92nd Street, why kindergarten?

00:44:38 Speaker_03
And Ivy League this, and da, da, da. In Canada, we just filled out an application the night before, and da, da, da. OK. All right.

00:44:46 Speaker_05
No, no, not even the night before.

00:44:48 Speaker_03
Well, you the morning of.

00:44:49 Speaker_05
Day of.

00:44:50 Speaker_03
Day of.

00:44:51 Speaker_05
David, my parents weren't even involved. My father asked me, where are you applying to college? I was like, well, I'm just doing the form now.

00:44:57 Speaker_03
And what did you put on it? Monopoly?

00:45:01 Speaker_05
No, you just send the form in. It's like a page. You just send it in.

00:45:06 Speaker_03
All right. So your kids are going to not stay toddler and baby for very long. I promise you that. This is one area where I know more. How are you going to feel about college admissions when they get to be 16, 17, 18? Because your rant about Ivy League.

00:45:26 Speaker_05
Which I've been doing for years.

00:45:27 Speaker_03
Which is, it's one of the most perfected rants of all time.

00:45:30 Speaker_05
I got a new rant, by the way. I got two episodes of my podcast. So I've been working on this rant, you're right. 15 years. I have perfect, I got two episodes of my podcast coming out, I think next week. It's called The Georgetown Massacre.

00:45:48 Speaker_05
It is, when I say this is, This is like... It is my Beethoven's Fifth. It is my... It is my White Album. It is my... Everything else I have done... This is what's going on.

00:46:02 Speaker_05
It's just like chump change compared... This is two parts, two parts on one case involving a tennis player who goes to Georgetown. And every single, everything I've done as a writer has been building, building towards, it's so genius.

00:46:24 Speaker_05
And it like, by the end, it's just like, and it has twists and turns and it's just, it's.

00:46:35 Speaker_03
Would you like to preview it?

00:46:37 Speaker_05
No, I don't want to give it away. You've got to listen to it. I'm not giving it away. It's so good.

00:46:41 Speaker_03
This is why I have to work for a living.

00:46:44 Speaker_05
No, I know what you're saying. Am I going to be a hypocrite?

00:46:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, of course.

00:46:53 Speaker_05
The one thing I will not do, though. Yeah, what? There was one place where I believe— Where are you going to draw the line?

00:46:59 Speaker_03
SAT prep?

00:47:00 Speaker_05
No, I'm not making the call. Oh, okay.

00:47:05 Speaker_03
You mean the call to the maher call?

00:47:08 Speaker_05
You call in, I know the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy who's on the board. Not doing that, I say.

00:47:19 Speaker_03
We talked about voice before, and one of the reasons I think that your podcast is so successful and so seductive and I don't miss them, is that it has a real human voice.

00:47:34 Speaker_03
It doesn't feel read, even though I know damn well that you've worked on them really hard. Similar to your prose. It feels, your written prose feels spoken and vice versa, which I mean is high praise. Podcasting is a relatively new form.

00:47:52 Speaker_03
Why did you gravitate toward it in such a complete way. This is not some avocation. In fact, at a certain point, you've done work where the book is an extension of the podcast, as with the Bomber book. So tell me about that and your attraction to it.

00:48:08 Speaker_03
Well, there's certain kinds of stories.

00:48:10 Speaker_05
So, for example, the story I was just talking about, the Georgetown massacre. You could write it, but it's not nearly as fun in written form.

00:48:19 Speaker_05
So there's a certain kind of story which lends itself beautifully to audio, where audio permits you, you could be more playful, you can get away with stuff. What does that mean, get away with stuff? Yeah.

00:48:34 Speaker_03
There's no critical infrastructure. So it was like, no one's gonna. I don't understand, you could be more full of shit?

00:48:41 Speaker_05
No, no, you could be like. You have to be, you're careful. I am, no, no, we're not making stuff up. What I'm saying is people are more accepting of a kind of playful outlandishness.

00:48:52 Speaker_05
So part of the Georgetown Massacre episodes, the tongue is in the cheek, right? Even as I'm making a substantive point.

00:49:04 Speaker_03
And do you feel you can do that more than in Castle on Type in a certain magazine?

00:49:09 Speaker_05
You would not let me write that for the New Yorker. You take it out. Because I would feel what? It wouldn't work. It's hard to explain, because a lot of what's playful about audio is stuff you're doing with your voice.

00:49:22 Speaker_05
I can adopt a tone of voice that says, we're We're messing around.

00:49:32 Speaker_03
We're having a fun. We're playing with ideas.

00:49:34 Speaker_05
Yeah, like there's a character in the Georgetown Massacre.

00:49:39 Speaker_05
Part of it is a turn, and we meet the guy who's charged in a case, and he takes as his lawyers the two legendary, two greatest defense lawyers in the country, Roy Black and Howard Schrebnick, these two guys in Miami. And we meet Roy and Howard.

00:49:57 Speaker_05
Now, the first crucial thing is, I could, if I'm writing a print version, you'll meet Roy and Howard. I describe them. You gotta hear, when you hear them, it's just so much better.

00:50:10 Speaker_05
And you realize, like, and then when you're describing them, I can describe them in a much more colorful way when I know you're gonna hear their voice. Right? I can't explain it better than that, but there is something about

00:50:24 Speaker_05
I can, like Howard has got long hair and rides a motorcycle in the early morning hours and looks like a movie star and does this, in this trial he does a he does a direct examination of the defendant's daughter that is just so masterful.

00:50:49 Speaker_05
I mean, it's just, it's like, and I was reading, you know, you read the transcript and you come to this thing and you're like, someone, because people like you and I, you know, our business fundamentally is not about, we're not in the writing business, we're in the interviewing business, right?

00:51:03 Speaker_05
We only write because we've interviewed somebody. It's really interviewing. You think of it that way? Oh, yeah. Really? oh yeah, the whole game is interviewing.

00:51:12 Speaker_05
It's not, writing is, I would never write something without, the idea of writing something just without having sat down first to talk to someone is unthinkable to me.

00:51:23 Speaker_03
So when you, a defense lawyer is. But just to stipulate, that's the fun part for you? That's the juice of it, above all?

00:51:30 Speaker_05
Well, I don't find the writing part hard. I find the, the writing part is just, it's just a matter of sitting down and. Wow, don't tell any writers that. No, but that's the gift of being at the Washington Post for 10 years.

00:51:43 Speaker_05
It used to be hard and it wasn't. By the time I was done there, I was on the phone dictating the story. Like, they solved that problem.

00:51:49 Speaker_05
The hard part is, can I sit down with somebody and can I understand who they are and what they're trying to say and represent that in a way that's meaningful and powerful? And all of that is stuff you get from the interview.

00:52:05 Speaker_05
You don't, you can't make it up after the fact. So you have to, like I was doing, this summer I spent, I spent like 20 hours, maybe, I've forgotten how many hours, 10, 15, 20 hours with this woman, who's a psychologist, and it was incredible.

00:52:23 Speaker_05
Like, she agreed, thank God, to sit with me for that long. Who is this? I'm telling you, steal it. You're like the competition, for goodness sake.

00:52:34 Speaker_03
That hurts me very much.

00:52:37 Speaker_05
I'm not telling you. I'm not telling you. It was the same thing with the Paul Simon thing that we did. Yeah, I've heard of him. Where he sat for 40 hours, and the whole thing, the trick, not the trick,

00:52:53 Speaker_05
What's interesting, what's hard about that was not writing it up afterwards. All those problems were solved in the interview.

00:52:59 Speaker_05
The trick was, when we were talking to him... And I... Sorry to interrupt, which is the worst thing you can do in an interview, but I've interviewed Paul Simon.

00:53:08 Speaker_03
He's not immediately easy. No, he's not easy. And you had him for on and on and on, and it got richer and richer and richer.

00:53:18 Speaker_03
And something you did, something about you, your patience, your interest, your silence, whatever it was, drew out a guy that I think it's fair to say is not immediately thrilled with the process of being interviewed.

00:53:36 Speaker_05
I don't understand why he was so... He was, and he kept on, I kept on saying, I'm done. And then he would say, no, let's, when are we meeting again? And we would, me and Bruce, my friend Bruce did it together. And Bruce and I would look at each other.

00:53:49 Speaker_05
Bruce Hedlund. Yeah. Bruce and I would look at each other like, he really wants to do it again? And he would always do it again. And then I couldn't believe it.

00:53:57 Speaker_05
And I think that, you know, if I was kind of reconstructing why he was so kind of generous with his time, that would be part of it. Part of it was, I think, We were uninterested in the parts of his life that he felt had been picked over.

00:54:12 Speaker_05
So we're not interested in your marriage to so-and-so. In relationship with Art Garfunkel. But we were really interested in his dad. And I remember there was one moment we were- Who was a musician. Who was a musician.

00:54:22 Speaker_05
I remember there was one time where Bruce and I asked him some question, and I asked him some question about his dad. And he went, he talked straight for like half an hour, got incredibly emotional. And then he said, I have to stop.

00:54:36 Speaker_05
And he got up and walked outside. It was like, wow. There was something really deep. And the idea, it's so interesting. That thing, that moment when you're interviewing somebody, first of all, it never gets old.

00:54:53 Speaker_05
When you tap into something, so we had tapped into something that was real about him, that his relationship to his father. He's a man in his 70s. His father's been dead for 30 years. He eclipsed his father in every, conventional way, by a million miles.

00:55:09 Speaker_05
And yet, you realize he was still writing about his father, he was still dreaming about his father, his father was still with him.

00:55:17 Speaker_05
It was just such a kind of like, but that, when you get there, and that took a long time for us to get there, when you get there with somebody, like I said, the writing is not hard when you get that kind of moment. How did your parents affect

00:55:36 Speaker_03
the way you look, you're now at this, you're moving forward but slightly retrospective, you have kids, your life has changed. You look back on it, how did your parents inform who you are in your work?

00:55:53 Speaker_05
My dad was, he was a mischief maker. He was someone who had no interest whatsoever in any authority, in any, he did not, the psychological term that best describes him was disagreeable.

00:56:19 Speaker_05
Psychologists, when they use that term, they don't mean obnoxious. He was the furthest thing from obnoxious. Incredibly gracious man. In psychological terms, disagreeable means you are uninterested in the approval of others. You know, could care less.

00:56:33 Speaker_05
Just the idea of standing out and being different was just second nature for him. It wasn't that he relished that being different, it's just he didn't care, just did what he wanted.

00:56:44 Speaker_03
How was he different? He taught math.

00:56:45 Speaker_05
He taught math. He was a kind of...

00:56:51 Speaker_05
I've told this story many times, but we moved to Canada, we're living in rural Canada in kind of Mennonite country, with all these old order Mennonites, people who are like the Amish, they're driving buggies and a barn would burn down and they would do a barn raising.

00:57:05 Speaker_05
They'd all gather the next day and they would raise the barn in one day. Hundreds of Mennonites would come in their horses and buggies from miles around and they

00:57:14 Speaker_05
you know, have huge spread of food, and they would just, it was incredible to watch, actually, if you go to a barn raising.

00:57:21 Speaker_05
Hundreds of them putting up a barn, and my father decided to join, and he see, so there's one car, a kind of, you know, his Volvo, with like 100 horses and buggies, and he's like an English guy, they're all like clean-shaven, wearing black,

00:57:38 Speaker_05
pants and like these, you know, and hats, straw hats, and he's like got a big beard and a tie, and you know, he looks like a mathematician, an English mathematician, and he drives up in his Volvo with his kids in tow, and not an ounce of self-consciousness.

00:57:56 Speaker_05
not even from did it even occur to him to ask permission to show up he shows up and says you know basically put me to work and they're like okay and they he doesn't know what they're doing so he's doing the most manual labor no one

00:58:11 Speaker_05
None of the hundred people at this barn raising had more than a sixth grade education. He has a PhD in advanced mathematics, and he's the happiest man there. That's so my dad. He was just like, and like went home and then never spoke about it again.

00:58:29 Speaker_05
Or my favorite story about my dad, a story he told me when he was in his 70s. I don't know why I never told him this before. He's married my mom. My mom is Jamaican. They're in Jamaica.

00:58:42 Speaker_05
He's teaching at the University of West Indies, where one of his students is Kamala Harris's dad, Kamala Harris's dad.

00:58:49 Speaker_05
And he decides he wants to write, he's writing some paper, and back then, if you needed a book, you would, it wasn't, there's no, the book he needed was not in the University of West Indies library. And he figures out it's at the Georgia Tech library.

00:59:03 Speaker_05
And so he's gonna go to Georgia Tech, and so he writes a letter to the, a professor, a friend he knows at Georgia Tech. My name is Graham Glabel. I'm a professor at University of West Indies. I would like to come to Georgia Tech to use your library.

00:59:14 Speaker_05
Guy says yes, and he's preparing to go, and he learns later that he kicks off a panic at Georgia Tech, because it's 1960. Georgia Tech is segregated, and they don't know whether he's white or black.

00:59:28 Speaker_05
They just know he's a professor from the University of West Indies. God knows he could be a black guy coming to our campus. We just invited a black guy to the campus. Holy shit. And like, they go nuts.

00:59:38 Speaker_05
And finally, there's telephones, but there's no direct line. They try and find out. Finally, they reach him on the phone before he's about to come. And, you know, he's called to the switchboard, whatever.

00:59:51 Speaker_05
You know, Professor Gladwell, yes, this is so-and-so from Georgia Tech, yes. Are you white? He goes, yes. They go, oh, thank God. So then, but this is the story's not over. Now they're gonna roll out the red carpet, right?

01:00:10 Speaker_05
So he gets on the boat, sails from Jamaica to Miami, gets on the bus. That's how you did it back then. Takes the bus from Miami to Atlanta, goes, they have a welcome dinner. They're all sitting down, all like these white men.

01:00:23 Speaker_05
And halfway through the meal, he pulls out a large eight by 10 photo of my mom. Says, yes, my wife. I was gonna bring her, but I decided against it. Hands it around the room. Like, now, to him, that was a fantastic moment.

01:00:41 Speaker_05
Like, show these guys, never mentioned a word about that story for 40-some-odd years.

01:00:51 Speaker_05
And then he's like, oh, I went to Georgia Tech, and I had interviewed some guy there who was the head of the political science department who was a black guy from Atlanta. And I told it to my dad, and he goes, oh, that's so funny.

01:01:04 Speaker_06
Wasn't always that way. And then he told the story. But that was so hammy.

01:01:11 Speaker_05
It was like he loved nothing more than poking the bear. But he didn't make a big deal about it. He just wanted to go around poking the bear.

01:01:21 Speaker_03
Before I ask about your mom, you mentioned that your dad was taught Kamala Harris's father.

01:01:28 Speaker_05
Donald Harris was a student of his. We knew him somehow. Donald Harris told me this, not my dad, because my dad obviously had passed by the time Kamala became a big deal.

01:01:41 Speaker_05
Yeah, they were, Donald Harris, my mom knows, Donald Harris is from Brownstone, which is where my mom went to school.

01:01:50 Speaker_05
She knows, she went to school, she went to church at his father's church, and like, they clearly must have seen each other across a few at the age of, the degree of excitement in, well, all, I mean, first of all, what's hilarious is,

01:02:09 Speaker_05
There's one group that says Kamala Harris is black. Then there's another group that says she's Indian. Then there's the Jamaicans who are like, she's Jamaican.

01:02:17 Speaker_05
So the level of excitement among the Jamaicans over her is, my mother like literally, she's 93, there is zero chance she will exit this world between now and the election. It's zero. It's just not happening.

01:02:36 Speaker_05
The degree to which... Her defense, I call her up. The first 10 minutes, she's just defending Kamala against... They were attacking her for... Her big thing is... attacking her for not revealing her positions. She's just started.

01:02:52 Speaker_05
How can she have positions before she's started? My mother's whole thing is this should unfold over the passage of time.

01:02:59 Speaker_03
I remember I had the privilege of meeting her a few times, particularly in Washington, and she struck me as a very proper... My mother is a very, very...

01:03:11 Speaker_05
Yes, she is a very refined, dignified Jamaican lady. Yeah, you don't, nobody messes with, she was, she also, she loved also confronting authority and did it endlessly and to great effect in our little town. They had never met.

01:03:28 Speaker_03
How did she navigate rural Ontario?

01:03:32 Speaker_05
She just sailed right in. She met all the kind of power brokers in town. charmed them, got on all the right committees, and I mean, it was Mennonites, so the Mennonites are, there's no, they're not, they're the opposite end of the, they.

01:03:49 Speaker_05
They're not racist. There's no racist, there was no racist, you know, it was nothing, and also, it's a very different, now that I understand this, it's a very different story when you're the only black person in town. What do you mean?

01:04:03 Speaker_05
We'll actually talk about this in my book. An outsider is not threatening in those numbers, right?

01:04:09 Speaker_05
Particularly an outsider who is, and she was, this is a deeply Christian town, and my mother is a very devout woman, and so she read very, she seemed very familiar to them, even if she was, at the same time, in some sense, exotic.

01:04:24 Speaker_05
But she's very, she would never register, even if something untoward was done to her, she would never register that in the moment.

01:04:34 Speaker_05
know she would hold it back and she would tell you about it maybe later but it was in a and also there's a lot of us Indians will tell you this it's very different to come from a culture where you're in the majority um you know a story actually I told in outliers where my mom was in

01:04:54 Speaker_05
She was a scholarship student at a boarding school in Jamaica. And all of the scholarship students were black, right? They would be. And they were all there because they were really good students.

01:05:06 Speaker_05
And so she's like 11 years old and she reads in the Encyclopedia Britannica that black people are genetically inferior to white people when it comes to intelligence.

01:05:16 Speaker_05
And she can't comprehend this because in her world, all the smart people are the... This is in the Britannica.

01:05:21 Speaker_05
yeah this is like from 1900 yeah yeah yeah it's there still in Jamaica in 1930 whatever but in her world all the smart people are black and the dumb ones are the you know the plantation owner's daughters you know these white kids from you know one they're like what are they doing here you know and so it's like that's the if that's your mindset when all you

01:05:45 Speaker_05
So you come to Canada and you have no comprehension of the basis. You think of racism, you think of racist tropes as absurd as opposed to being malignant.

01:05:59 Speaker_03
I want to thank you deeply for your work and your friendship. I miss you. You live in, God knows where, in upstate New York. I wish I saw you much more often.

01:06:13 Speaker_05
Your idea of upstate New York is like Austin-ing. That's about as far as you go. We're, Esther and I are going away for the weekend.

01:06:22 Speaker_06
Where are you going? Yonkers.

01:06:23 Speaker_03
We're going to Yonkers. What was your theory? What was the mountain Jews? I'm not a mountain Jew.

01:06:32 Speaker_05
You're not a mountain Jew.

01:06:33 Speaker_03
No, I'm really not. No, no, no, no. You know, I'm an environmentalist because I want there to be a wonderful and healthy environment for you.

01:06:41 Speaker_05
For you. No, you're an environmentalist because you've been told there is an environment out there.

01:06:48 Speaker_03
I check in with Betsy Colbert and Bill McKibben and others. And I'm told, like the other day I was walking into my building and I heard this racket. And I said, what is that? And the door guy said, those are birds. Evidently, this is a bad attitude.

01:07:16 Speaker_03
I want to close by asking you a very crucial question. You have an ambivalent relationship with sports.

01:07:27 Speaker_03
You once said, and you're a huge sports fan, Buffalo Bills, running, you're a terrific runner, but you've also said that sports are a moral abomination. Did I say that? You did. Yeah. I don't remember.

01:07:42 Speaker_03
In what era of my... I think you're annoyance with professional sports.

01:07:50 Speaker_05
Well, I do, you know... So here's my, in a nutshell, my current thinking on this. I was a very good high school runner, and then I quit, and did run for 30 years, and started again, and became a kind of... Slightly better than mediocre.

01:08:09 Speaker_05
Better than that, but okay. When I was 16, I was up here. When I was 50, I was down here. And I had way, way, way more fun when I was 50 and mediocre than I did when I was 15 and a national champion.

01:08:27 Speaker_05
And it has made me realize that actually you want to be mediocre. You don't want to be mediocre. You don't want to be good. Aside from the very, very small group of people who genuinely, if you're LeBron or you're Usain Bolt, fine.

01:08:41 Speaker_05
But the idea that the rest of us should be pursuing that kind of athletic excellence is a mistake. And what's happened,

01:08:50 Speaker_05
There is, I think, in the audience, a woman named Linda Flanagan, who wrote this book I adore called Taking Back the Game, which is this critique of what's gone wrong with youth sports.

01:09:01 Speaker_05
And this is, I think, one of her central arguments in this wonderful book, which really changed the way I think about it, which is that we've destroyed the very thing that made sports fun. Play. play by this kind of professionalizing of youth sports.

01:09:20 Speaker_05
And I realized that was my problem when I was 15. I was caught up in a fantasy about that I was going to go to the Olympics. And it ruined running for me. And I didn't run for 30 years.

01:09:31 Speaker_05
And that's heartbreaking because I love running more than almost anything else. I recovered my joy of running only when I was coming in 28 in my local 5K.

01:09:42 Speaker_05
And so that's what I mean by like this, we shouldn't be telling, we shouldn't be, Linda would tell you, why are you taking a 13 year old and putting them through the- Torturing them.

01:09:54 Speaker_05
The torture and getting in a car and driving for three hours for like a soccer match, why? The drive should never be longer than the match.

01:10:03 Speaker_06
That should be a rule, right?

01:10:08 Speaker_03
Malcolm Gladwell, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

01:10:19 Speaker_05
Thanks for listening to that conversation with David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y. You can find Revenge at the Tipping Point wherever you get your audiobooks. Next time on Revisionist History, an update on broken windows theory.

01:10:35 Speaker_05
Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Ben Nadaf-Haffrey and Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

01:10:44 Speaker_05
Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Echo Mountain, engineering by Nina Byrd-Lawrence, production support from Luke Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix, and as always, El Jefe, Greta Cohn.

01:11:00 Speaker_05
I'm Malcolm Glapow.

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