Malcolm Gladwell on Finding Freedom in Abandoning Expectations

Follow us on Instagram (@slowdown.media) and subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive behind-the-scenes updates and carefully curated musings. 

TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Malcolm. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you.

SB: And thank you, I should say, for having us in your space to record this episode.

MG: No, no, it’s my pleasure.

SB: Let’s start on just twenty-five years—that amount of time—and what it represents for you. In the introduction to your new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, you write, “Twenty-five years is a long time. Think about how different you are today than you were a quarter-century ago.” So, how different do you think you are from a quarter century ago, and how do you view your life and work over that period of time?

MG: Oh. Well, let’s see. When I wrote The Tipping Point, the first one, I was in my thirties. I was living in Manhattan, in a little tiny apartment on…. Where was I living? In Chelsea, I think I was. It was my first book. I thought of myself as a…. Well, I really thought of myself as a newspaper writer who had transitioned into magazines. I still felt very young in the sense that I hadn’t kind of, like, settled down. And what else do I think about myself at that time? I am conscious of the fact that my thoughts about things, views are different, but I feel like I’m in constant motion, but I can’t summon the mid-nineties very well. I think the biggest difference would be a lot of things that I was thinking about in the mid-’90s I was thinking about for the first time, and those are things now that I’ve thought about for a long time. And that’s the big difference. I have perspective in a way that I don’t think I did back then.

SB: These twenty-five-year increments [laughs], not to just beat this dead, but these twenty-five-year increments, how do you think about, say, your first twenty-five years on earth and the more recent twenty-five?

MG: Well, the first twenty are some combination of England and Canada. It’s mostly dominated by a kind of very quiet, middle-class, rural Canadian upbringing and a very…. It’s really Canada in the seventies and then a little bit of Washington, D.C., on the back end of that. Canada in the seventies is a very quiet, calm, civilized place. There was never any sense, when I was growing up, of threat. It wasn’t a notion that entered into anyone’s mind. I don’t just mean that there was no crime, although there was no crime. It was just that everything seemed very stable—even though in retrospect, inflation was out of control, interest rates were sky high, unemployment rates were like five times what they are now.

It was a place in some degree of turmoil. It just didn’t feel like that to me as a kid. And then when I went to Washington, D.C., again—although that was when Washington, D.C., was the murder capital of America—it never felt like I was personally under threat. I felt like I was in a little bit of a bubble in my first twenty-five years. I feel less so, obviously, in the last— Now I feel like I’m in the world. Things seem a little more consequential.

SB: So age, if we’re talking the more recent twenty-five, it’s sort of a wisened view, a sort of more aware of certain—

MG: I think that’s normal. That’s what we’re just describing, what it means to—

SB: Age.

MG: To age, but also I’m conscious now that young people seem to have many more anxieties than I did as a…. I had my college reunion not long ago, and I met up, in many cases for the first time, with people I’d gone to college with in the eighties at the University of Toronto, and in talking to them, this confirmed my impression. I don’t remember our college experience as being high stakes or anxiety-producing in the slightest. On the contrary, it seems like it was just a kind of long party, interrupted with— 

SB: [Laughs]

MG: I don’t mean party in a sense of drunken debauchery. It just was fun and low-stakes, and everyone went on to have very, very productive careers, but nothing seemed contingent when we were in college. It just seemed like we were taking a break from the world, and that the world was actively engaged in allowing us to take a break.

The administration was there to protect us against all outside threats, like the cops. In Toronto, I don’t know if it’s true in America, but the Toronto police could not set foot on campus without getting explicit permission from the dean of the college. So, it’s like you had diplomatic immunity. That never really mattered, but it mattered symbolically—it was a sense of how we were in this protected space.

SB: Yeah, a little different than Columbia University today, or….

MG: Yeah.

SB: Or then, actually. 

So, take me back to the spring of 2000. You’ve published The Tipping Point, and this is your first book. You’ve noted that at your first reading at a bookstore in L.A., only two people showed up, so this was no indication of what was going to take place in the months and years after. But what expectations or hopes did you have at that moment, if any, for the book? What was going on in your mind when you were at that book reading in L.A. with two people?

MG: This is going to sound weird, but I don’t have expectations about anything. I just don’t. I never have. I’m not someone who thinks about the future, ever. Expectation is that you’re making a prediction about the future, then measuring to see whether real life matches your prediction. I don’t make predictions. I didn’t know what to think. I had never done a book before. I didn’t know whether that was normal. It didn’t strike me that I would always have two people. At the time, I thought it was kind of funny. I didn’t write the book…. To my mind, once the book was finished—I enjoyed myself writing it; I thought it was interesting—I sort of felt I’d done my part.

It struck me that it would concern the publisher that three people showed up—

SB: [Laughs]

MG: But not me. It’s not on me. I don’t know. [Laughs] But that’s sort of a way in which I have managed anxiety in my life. Everyone has a different strategy for managing the kind of inevitable anxieties that come from being a human being. Mine is just not to live in the future. 

SB: Yeah.

MG: It’s really simple. No good comes of that, so don’t.

SB: The Tipping Point, of course, became a bestseller, and it took off, maybe ironically enough, like the epidemics it was exploring. And the phrase became this, not even…. It wasn’t just part of the zeitgeist, it entered the mainstream vernacular and still is a term used frequently today. I read in researching for this that Bill Clinton, in a White House press conference, referred to “a kind of tipping point.” And even Donald Rumsfeld was taken to using the term in reference to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In hindsight, what do you think it was that made the book and this phrase so successful? And why did it catch on the way it did at that time?

MG: These are impossible questions to answer. And, to some extent, I think the answer is simply: luck. I do think that when we give explanations after the fact about a phenomenon, we’re engaging in a kind of narrativizing that’s probably uncalled for. Most of the time, it’s just luck. There’s a kind of vacuum, and certain ideas move into vacuums. When I listen to music, I’m always struck by how many of the songs I really love never became hits, which I think is typical for most of us. So, what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that probably the selection process for what becomes a hit is largely arbitrary—not wholly—but the universe of songs that could become hits is much larger than the universe of songs that become hits, right?

Similarly, there’s a vast number of ideas, books, phrases, whatever, that have the potential to move into whatever social vacuum exists. Mine happened to be the one that moved in. A lot of that is, like I say, probably just arbitrary. Some of it has to do with the fact that I was resuscitating a phrase. First of all, it sounds great. 

SB: [Laughs]

MG: It’s a phrase that’s self-evident. There’s a wonderful tension between the word tipping and the word point that makes it an interesting…. I have a whole theory that the strength of any title or phrase is a function of how oxymoronic it is. The classic example would be Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which I think is one of the most perfect book titles of all time. Spring is not silent—

SB: [Laughs]

MG: So you tell us that you have a silent spring and you have my attention, and I understand where you’re going. You have signaled to me that a tragedy has occurred, a spring has happened where there is no sound. That’s amazing. 

Another book from that era that has an amazing title is Unsafe at Any Speed, the great Ralph Nader book. Speed and safety are permanently conjoined in our cognition, right? We understand that going two miles an hour is fundamentally different than going fifty miles an hour, and he comes along and says, “No.” Wow. Grabs your attention. So, whenever there’s this tension between the words…. The point is not supposed to tip. The point is supposed to hold a kind of permanent status, and the idea that, “Oh, no, I can take the point of something and I can tip it over” is interesting.

But also I do think in retrospect, the end of the Cold War is more important on an unconscious level than we now realize, that society had been living with this anxiety for—a real anxiety—for forty years. And it goes away, and I think people were, on some level, in some way that they didn’t entirely understand, looking for some way to make sense of the fact that this thing that they thought was a permanent part of the way they made sense of the world just up and vanished. “The tipping point” is a very useful way of conceptualizing how that happened.

SB: It even entered the world of hip-hop. The Roots named their 2004 album after the book, in a way at least, or after the phrase. As someone who I know deeply appreciates music, that must’ve been pretty heady.

MG: I interviewed them. I went and I did a whole thing with The Roots right after that album came out. I forgot what it was for, but I remember meeting with them and we had a really fun conversation. Questlove, of course, as you know, is enormously entertaining.

SB: Your surname even became an adjective after that book: “Gladwellian.”

MG: Yeah, I suspect that was the PR folks at my publisher who were pushing that.

SB: [Laughs] So, I talk a lot about time on this show, and there’s a line in The Tipping Point that I wanted to bring up here that is about time. You write, “We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time.” And I was wondering if you still believe that today, given what’s happened since you wrote that book, with the internet, with social media, with this sort of flitty attention-span situation that we find ourselves in now. Do you think we’re all still gradualists?

MG: Yeah, part of me— I have a kind of old man’s truculence on this attention-span stuff because I feel like this is just a generation— Every generation says that the generation behind them has lost their attention span. We forget, for years and years and years and years and years, television stood in, in the culture, in exactly the same role that social media does today. “Television is rotting our children’s minds. Television is destroying their attention span. Television is all about images flashing by that make it impossible…” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Neil Postman wrote a famous book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which today, you would just write that about social media. There’s a certain point where the older I get, the more I’m rolling my eyes at this kind of thing. So, I think that both things are true, that we are fundamentally gradualists, and that the passage of time is the most important kind of marker we have for assessing change and such. But it’s also the case that we entertain these notions about how each generation has a successively smaller attention span.

Even though, by the way, the amount of evidence to the contrary is quite overwhelming. I’m right now watching, along with millions of other Americans, two TV shows where I’m required to wait a week for the next episode. Now, let’s not forget that, in the previous generation, that waiting was not that significant because it wasn’t a continuous story. If you really liked the TV show Dallas in the late 1980s, you kind of could be impatient about the next episode to drop…. but you could skip an episode and it’d be fine. There was once a cliffhanger that sort of held everyone’s attention, but really only once. 

But now, it really is a continuous story where you genuinely are in suspense every single week, and yet I quite happily wait seven days for the next episode of The Day of the Jackal, or whatever it is I’m watching. Is that evidence of my…? What is the most popular children’s book of the last generation? It’s Harry Potter, hundreds of pages long. How is this consistent with kids missing all attention?

By the way, the lack-of-attention thing is itself a contradiction, because in the same breath, we say, “The kids are glued for hours to their TikTok, and apparently they don’t have a good attention span any longer.” But wait a minute, how can they be glued for hours to TikTok if they don’t have an attention span any longer? So, now we’re saying, “Oh, well, those things have managed to capture their attention.” Oh, so we do have an attention that can be captured? I just thought you told me we don’t have an attention span anymore.

The whole thing, it makes no sense to me. It just seems to me nonsensical. We do podcast episodes that are forty-five minutes long. People listen to the end. How is that a no-attention span? When I was growing up, I listened to the news every night, it was over in fifteen minutes. Now, I listen to a Joe Rogan podcast that’s two and a half hours!

SB: [Laughs]

MG: This is not evidence of a lack of attention, so I find the whole thing ridiculous.

SB: [Laughs] I’m glad I asked that.

MG: Yes.

SB: I wanted to bring up critics because, across these twenty-five years— I was reading reviews of your books, and I feel like critics have been saying the same thing, more or less packaged in a different way, in terms of the criticism of your books. I was wondering what you make of these criticisms, why the consistent sourness about your writing style or anecdote-driven approach to bookmaking?

MG: Yeah, I don’t know. I know that the one thing I’ve learned is that it is not just that there is no correlation between critical reception and commercial success. There is a negative correlation that the nastier the critics are, the better the books seem to do. 

SB: [Laughs]

MG: So I, these days, have anxiety when I get a good review because I think this must signal some inevitable failure in the hands of customers.

There’s a broader thing here about what has happened to the critical enterprise in America—really in the West—but I think it might be quite specific, which has lost all of its steam and it’s lost its cultural significance. So there is no Pauline Kael or there is no…. When I joined The Washington Post, there was a TV critic called Tom Shales. Tom Shales was someone of real cultural significance. He was an arbiter of taste and people looked to Tom Shales or Pauline Kael or Siskel and Ebert for direction.

SB: David Carr.

MG: David, yeah. On and on and on for like…. Then in the books realm it was similar to the case that where Broadway—a bad review could kill a Broadway show. And all of that’s gone away. There is no critical infrastructure anymore that’s of significance. It’s not how people mediate their consumption when it comes to cultural products. So it’s just irrelevant. 

Now it’s just like I walk down the street and someone will come up to me and say, “Hey, I like your book.” So I get one positive affirmation there, and then I’ll read a review online, “I don’t like your book.” To my mind, they’re weighted exactly the same. So one person liked it, one person didn’t. In other words, my perception of any feedback I get—or any formal feedback I get—has no weight. It has no weight if it’s positive, it has no weight if it’s negative. So at that point, what do you do with it? It just becomes ephemera.

SB: I wanted to quote a review I was reading about your new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Anand Giridharadas. It’s in The New York Times Book Review, and I felt like, again, it was like this review from twenty years ago, almost. But he had this analogy that I did enjoy about your work as a farm stand. 

MG: Mm-hmm.

SB: He writes, “With truth under attack by some of our own leaders, millions of people live in idea deserts. For them, Gladwell is a farm stand.” This I agreed with. I actually thought it was pretty interesting. But then he goes on to say, “The problem is that he has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking.” And in the Financial Times in 2021, another author similarly noted your books are “easy to eat, like chips.”

MG: Mmm.

SB: I was wondering what you would make of these junk-food analogies. [Laughs] It seems like they’re trying to say your books are unhealthy or bad for people. Yet I think you’re actually bringing a lot of important ideas to the fore and making them accessible in a way that they probably wouldn’t be otherwise. So why does that make them salty or fatty?

MG: Yeah, I don’t understand the objection to the fact that my books are readable. That strikes me as an odd objection. But that goes to this notion that if something is accessible, it is somehow less worthy of intellectual acclaim, which I just think is nonsense. The truth is, if you look across…. Like, we’re here in a studio where I make Revisionist History, and then if you look at the things that we at Revisionist History or me in my books write about, it’s some of the biggest issues: crime, racism, police conduct, the meritocracy—I could go on. It’s not like I’m dodging. In Revenge of the Tipping Point, there are chapters on the opioid crisis, Covid. I’m not dodging the big issues of the day. So I don’t know where that comes from. 

I read that Anand Giridharadas review. The farm stand thing, I don’t understand—that seems like a positive thing. I’m glad I’m a farm stand. But my sense is—I’m actually familiar with his work, and I like his work, but I wouldn’t say that he tackles more consequential issues than I do. He seems to be dealing with quite narrow things of the sort that would bother people who live in a liberal enclave of Brooklyn. The book [Winners Take All] is parsing the complicated relationship between elites in American society—all right, that’s good, important. You’re not tackling more consequential issues than I am. So yeah, it seemed sort of peevish.

SB: Well, and I should say here that you’ve received plenty of praise over the years, too, including being called “the twenty-first century’s defining zeitgeist surfer.” And years ago, in a review of your 2005 book, Blink, “the most original American journalist since Tom Wolfe.” So there was some high praise.

MG: I’ve gotten, yeah. But again, I wouldn’t put weight on that, either. I just think we have to understand that this critical enterprise is just not the way the world is working now. I’m much more interested in the number of people who listen to a podcast episode. That strikes me as: Am I holding my audience? That’s a really useful metric. Do I make an emotional impact among that audience? Does it move them? Does it inspire them? That’s the appropriate way to gauge the significance of what you’re doing.

SB: You mentioned how Revenge of the Tipping Point focuses at least—it’s sort of bookended by the opioid crisis.

MG: Yeah.

SB: We’re talking about more than a hundred thousand deaths a year from overdoses at this point, which just to think about that number is astonishing. And in the book, you make a clear case how it is an epidemic driven by a tiny fraction of doctors, just twenty-five hundred or so were responsible for what has sort of—

MG: Morphed into—

SB: Yeah, hence the super-spreader concept of the book. But could you talk about that? How did you work on the opioid element of the book? Was that how the book began?

MG: A little bit. We had done it, Revisionist History, a couple of—was it one or two? I can’t remember—episodes on the opioid crisis. And the whole bit about triplicate prescriptions had been something we had done at Revisionist History. I had learned all kinds of things that I hadn’t really realized before. One, the idea that the epidemic was as localized as it was. I didn’t appreciate the fact that there was a huge difference between Massachusetts and New York or Illinois and Indiana. So that really, really piqued my interest. Also this fact that it’s such an American epidemic, which is really—you have to kind of grapple with the fact that there are countries in the developed world that had no opioid crisis.

That’s a very different understanding of the way an epidemic behaves than we’re used to. By calling it an epidemic and summoning the ordinary understanding of what an epidemic is, we are evading responsibility. Because an epidemic seems like the thing that sweeps over all of us over which we have little control. So actually, it is wrong to call the opioid crisis an epidemic. It is the furthest thing from an epidemic. Epidemiologists talk about iatrogenic epidemics. That is the epidemic that is created by the community that’s intended to solve the problem. I think that is the much better term, and that makes it very distinctive and much more insidious.

SB: What would you call the pandemic then? We don’t ultimately know how it started, but—

MG: Yeah, I haven’t delved deeply into the lab-leak thing. It strikes me as there’s sufficiently plausible explanations that this was a naturally occurring thing that I think it’s probably…. Yeah, I am satisfied with that explanation.

SB: Well, I ask you in part because you also get into Covid-19 in the book, and particularly around this March 2020 Biogen meeting in Boston.

MG: Which is a great, fascinating case study.

SB: Spread to three hundred thousand people. This one meeting at a hotel in Boston, this corporate gathering.

MG: Yeah, no, because I was interested…. I think it is almost always the case—not always—that epidemics have this asymmetrical structure. I had written about this in Tipping Point, about what I call “the Law of the Few.” I had sort of suggested that there were elements of the AIDS epidemic that were asymmetrical, where certain people played an outsize role in transmitting the virus. If you read, there was a really interesting book by an epidemiologist writing about this who kind of disputed this and said, “I think correctly that actually H.I.V. is not a good example of an epidemic that spread through asymmetrical means. There were these occasional cases of people who infected twenty-five or thirty other partners, but they weren’t the norm.” Much of the spread was, for a sexually transmitted virus, the spread is really kind of one-to-one. That’s the most useful way.

But Covid is not that way. Covid is actually the way better example of an asymmetrical phenomenon. And once I realized how profoundly asymmetrical it was, and how there was this small group of people who’d been making this argument all along and nobody was particularly listening to them, I thought that was really interesting. This idea that two out of a hundred of us are doing all the work of spreading the virus is a kind of—

SB: Makes you think differently about the whole thing we experienced, masks—the whole thing.

MG: Deeply subversive, fascinating, disruptive way of thinking about a pandemic.

SB: I would say, especially your new book—all of your books do this on some level, but I think that the new book…. I have to bring up chapter seven, which looks at the term Holocaust and how it entered the mainstream, first through memorialization and then this NBC miniseries. How did you come to write that chapter and discover this? I imagine most readers—or many readers, anyway—probably for them this is the most surprising or revelatory chapter.

MG: For me it was the most surprising and revelatory.

SB: Yeah.

MG: I was going for a walk with my friend Michael, and I don’t know why he brought it up, but he said— He was talking about the fact that Josef Mengele came to the United States in I think the early seventies, on a trip. And I was like, “Wait a second, Mengele was just here as a kind of tourist?” And yeah, he’s like, “He came in, didn’t seem to bother anyone.” He did note that fact. And then he was talking about the fact that he had some relatives who were Holocaust survivors, and he said that they never talked about their experiences, which I thought was odd. And he said, “Well, but then nobody did.” I was like, “Wait, really?” And then he mentioned, he said, “Oh, you should read” something or other.

I forgot what it was, so I just went and read it. Turns out there’s this whole literature on this very fact. Really, really amazing book called The Holocaust in American Life, written by…. I’ve forgotten the historian’s name [Editor’s note: It’s Peter Novick], but it’s the kind of classic work in which he talks about the fact that we did not talk about the Holocaust until the end of the 1970s.

SB: Or name it, really.

MG: Or name it. It wasn’t that we were in denial about it—we just didn’t talk about it. Then I went out and got history books, textbooks from the early seventies and sixties, of the sort you would’ve read in college about European history to see what they were saying about the Holocaust. There’d be like five chapters on World War II, and there would be one sentence on the concentration camps. It was the most bizarre thing. Today, of course, it’d be a whole chapter on— We would understand it to be at the center of the Nazi project, and for some reason not at all. Then I was like, wait a second, when did we start getting Holocaust memorials and museums in this country? The answer is: in the eighties. There was one Holocaust museum in the entire country prior to 1980.

SB: Yeah. And I’m sure you could chart a map year by year, and then in the nineties it’s like—

MG: Yeah, it explodes. So I begin my story with the story of how the first—

SB: The Martyrs Memorial Museum in L.A.

MG: In L.A., and how this singular thing that was just not of practice to anyone else in the country.

SB: Then this show in 1978, where a hundred and twenty million people, so half the country, tuned in to watch this miniseries called Holocaust.

MG: Yeah, no, it’s this extraordinary story. Those of us who were old enough—I didn’t have a television in the seventies, so I don’t remember this. But it’s funny how many people have subsequently come up to me and said, “I remember watching that show.” It’s this miniseries, runs on NBC, half the country tunes in, called The Holocaust. And that is literally the moment that the culture starts to take notice of what had happened to the Jews during the war. It’s an incredibly powerful graphic four-episode miniseries starring Meryl Streep and James Woods. It’s this moment where we wake up. I had no idea about this. I just assumed the Holocaust had been a permanent part of our conversation all along. But it’s a really interesting case study in these kinds of cultural tipping points.

SB: We haven’t even spoken about overstories yet. So I wanted to bring that up because it is a core part of your book, but I also wanted to ask, do you think overstories, in some sense, are your life’s work? That’s the project, is you finding the overstories and bringing them to us listeners, readers?

MG: Yeah, I think that’s true. If I had to sum up the central theme of most of my writing over the last twenty-five years, thirty years, it would be that human beings are best understood outside in and not inside out. I have very little interest in people’s internal states, and very little patience for the idea that the way we conduct ourselves is largely a function of our internal states. To my mind, the real story is the extent to which we are driven and influenced by the world around us. Now, does that mean I am indifferent to our inherent characteristics? No, of course not. You are who you are because you have the genes of your parents. Same with me. So it’s not irrelevant. 

But I just think that the emphasis is all wrong, that we invest so much time and attention trying to understand what’s going on inside someone, and precious little in trying to understand the influence of people’s environment—particularly when it comes to pathology. It’s why most of my most radical beliefs have to do with crime, and I simply don’t believe that, for example, most murderers can rightfully be held responsible for their actions. I just don’t. I find that argument to be…. Because once you take a look at their circumstances of their life and their environment, you find so many compelling explanations for why they would’ve behaved the way they did that I think you can no longer hold them. You can no longer believe in personal responsibility the way that you do.

Now, that’s not something I— I rarely go that far in my writing, but I do find much of our rhetoric around criminal justice is just completely unpersuasive. I just think it’s bad psychology. Do I know exactly what to do with that fact? No, but I think we should just be honest and say we have this illusion that we believe in very strongly—because it’s really socially convenient—that says that people should be held responsible for their own actions, and punished accordingly. It’s not actually based in any real understanding of how human beings work, but it does make sense for our society. So, we’ve been doing it for a couple thousand years. I mean, I’m fine with keeping to do it. Just admit it’s bullshit. Just admit it.

SB: Well, and I think so much of it, the world around us, and then also the world we’re brought into, our parents, how we’re raised, and this is a good transition, because I did want to go to your upbringing. You touched on it very briefly that you were born in England, in Fareham, to a Jamaican psychotherapist mother and a British mathematics professor father. When you were 6, your family moved here—or to Canada, anyway—to America, to this small, conservative town of Elmira, Ontario. There, you were part of this Mennonite community. You’ve previously said that your family didn’t read the newspaper, didn’t watch TV, never went to the movies, so, secluded, and you mostly read—

MG: We were not secluded. Secluded from, apart from popular culture, but very much of the world, but not of that world. It’s an important distinction.

SB: Right. Well, you read books.

MG: Yes.

SB: Books were a big part of it. Your father was a gardener, so definitely interacting with nature. You’d go for these long walks with your family’s dogs. But looking back now, what aspects of this upbringing stand out to you as early markers for who you’ve gone on to become—to your journey and as a writer, journalist, editor, storyteller, podcast host?

MG: Well, it was an environment that allowed me to pursue what I wanted to pursue. There were very, very few expectations or rules, and the idea was if you wanted to do something, you did it for yourself. You wanted to play. You weren’t going to get…. I was completely unscheduled as a child. I never had any lessons of any kind. If there was an attempt to— I lasted in piano lessons for like two weeks, and violin for one week. The only thing I went to was track practice, and my mom’s perspective was, and my dad’s, “You have all the time you want to play, but it’s up to you what you want to do in those hours, right? Make it up.”

That idea that the world is yours to exploit is very, very central to how I’ve pursued my…. Effectively, what my parents were saying is, “You can do what you want.” Within reason, of course, but we’re not going to provide you with some kind of road map for what it means to have a “childhood,” how you fill your…. I don’t remember ever having homework. I just came home, and I did my own thing. I played with my toys, or I constructed all kinds of crazy things, or I read books, or I hung out with friends. It was a very pre-twenty-first century childhood in the classic small town, which I think is, for someone like me, an enormously useful way to live your childhood.

SB: I was a kid of the eighties and nineties, so I think I got the very tail end of that. 

MG: Yeah.

SB: But, this unscheduled thing I think is interesting to think about, because I feel like there’s…. Maybe it’s an overgeneralization, but parenting tends to be very overscheduled these days. It’s a very—

MG: Yeah. I can see it creeping in the lives of my own kids, the tendency to line them up for one thing after another…. I think we’re going to fight that as best we can, but the burdens at a certain point, you would just wonder where your childhood goes if you’re constantly loading your kid up with one thing after another. It all goes back to this question of expectations. I just think expectations are a burden, and wherever possible should be abandoned.

SB: So, skipping forward, you go on to graduate from Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 1984. You were searching for a job in advertising, but landed in journalism, and by ’87, you’re working at The Washington Post. You worked there until ’96, and famously, this time there was your own personal “ten-thousand hours,” which you later popularized in Outliers. Could you talk a little bit about that, those ten-thousand hours or those ten years, and how you think about that time now, how that ten-year period set you up?

MG: It was the most important apprenticeship. It was the most important period of my career. It was my apprenticeship. It was a kind of thing that, sadly, does not exist in the same way today, but a newspaper is a place that thinks of writing as a craft—not a profession, a craft—a thing that has rules that need to be understood, rituals that need to be honored, and skills that need to be acquired. They will teach you all those things. Very subconsciously, I got there. I was 23, if that. I had never written a newspaper story in my entire life. I did not know what it meant to report, to write on deadline, and they taught me all of that. They were patient with me while I was learning, and at each point, when I mastered some skill, they gave me another one, bigger one to master, and I was surrounded with people who were superb practitioners of that art. It was incredible. I realize it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 

If you look at the people who wrote The Washington Post when I was there in the late eighties, early nineties, it’s astonishing. The total number of New York Times bestsellers written by people from the Post in that era, it must be fifty. It’s everyone from… It’s Rick Atkinson. It’s [Bob] Woodward. It’s [Tony] Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. It’s David Ignatius. I could just go on. It’s Michele Norris. It’s David Maraniss. It’s David Hoffman. It’s incredible. Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning, I could just go on. They’re all in the same room. It’s the same. They’re all within twenty feet of me. All those names that I’ve mentioned are within twenty feet. David Remnick, Michael Specter, I could go on. I’m 23, and I am within hearing distance of every name I’ve just given you. I haven’t even given you the complete list. I’ve given you the incredibly partial one, and including a bunch of people who never wrote books but could have. They just were satisfied with their career.

I was just insanely lucky to have landed at that place. Really, the Post was at the height of its cultural and financial dominance in those years. It was an insane money-making machine, and it was— Every word I wrote at The Washington Post was read by tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. It’s incredible.

SB: This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. I very fortuitously also had a ten-year journalism apprenticeship period that really was formative for me, but now, it’s like this ten-thousand-hour thing…. I’m imagining in your case, you’re, say, 23 to 33, and all the wealth of knowledge and wisdom and everything you got to learn. What happens now in this moment with A.I. and with…. Because all those sorts of jobs, a lot of the jobs, a lot of the…. Maybe not so much in journalism—that’s a whole other conversation, probably, because the business of journalism we could go off on, but I’m just curious about jobs that require a certain craft, let’s say.

MG: Yeah.

SB: You’re in your twenties, and a lot of the steps that maybe become redundant with A.I. are important steps. How do you then learn? How are you going to take those leaps?

MG: I don’t know. I mean—

SB: I’m not saying it throws your ten-thousand-hour thing out the window, although it kind of does, because it’s like there’s nobody there to help teach those ten thousand hours, right?

MG: Yeah. I don’t know. These are all good questions. If you look at the…. This would be a really useful experiment. I don’t know what the answer is, but if you look at the bestseller list, is it older today than it was twenty-five years ago? Part of me thinks it is. Part of me thinks that there’s a generation that has dominated, and that there are not new fresh names being added to the list in the way that you would expect, that there’s this break. I don’t know. It would be useful to look at that.

SB: Well, and since we’re on the subject of your ten-thousand-hour rule, I wanted to ask how you’ve seen it take on a life of its own over the past fifteen years since you also brought that—that term had its own tipping point in the culture. I think it’s probably one of the most pronounced time theories in popular culture, up there with Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek.

MG: I think most people understood the spirit in which that idea was being presented, which was simply to say that expertise in cognitively complex fields requires an enormous time commitment. That was the point I was making, and more than that requires a team, a community. Once you conceive of expertise that’s taken that long, you understand, “Oh, you can never do it by yourself. It would be impossible.”

I always give the example of…. I was chatting once with this guy, a chess grand master, top-ranked, who grew up in White Plains. I asked him about how he learned to play chess. He’s like, “Well, I used to come down from White Plains into New York, and come to the Village and play in the chess clubs in Washington Square Park.” I was like, “How’d you get there?” He goes, “Oh, my mom would drive me.” Exactly my point. It doesn’t work without his mom. He’s not a world-class chess player unless his mom drives— Back then, you couldn’t play online. This kid grew up in the nineties, whatever, eighties or nineties. He made it because his mom drove him into the city. So, she devotes hours and hours and hours of her time fighting traffic back and forth after school from White Plains into the city. What does she do when he is playing chess? She just walks around. You can’t tell his story without—

SB: [Laughs] I’m sure. Behind every tennis, golf, sports star, whatever—

MG: Exactly. That was what I was getting at.

SB: There’s a mom or dad driving.

MG: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was trying to get at, which was for a surgeon to become a great surgeon, there needs to be a system that tolerates that surgeon while he or she is learning how to be a good surgeon, tolerates their mistakes, their…. You could do this a million times, right? I think people understood that, but then there were people who thought, who took that idea and oversimplified it. Instead, I was talking about anyone can become a champion sprinter if they do it for ten [thousand hours]. No, it’s nonsense. I wasn’t ruling out the importance of talent. I was saying that talent requires some community support to be expressed.

SB: Yeah, talent, drive, community. There’s more to it, but I think if you put it in the right context, there is some truth to it. 

I wanted to go back to The New Yorker. There’s so much we could get into there, but you joined as a staff writer in ’96, and one of the first pieces you published, titled “The Dead Zone,” was about the 1918 Spanish flu.

MG: It was.

SB: I think it’s worth noting that, while we’ve certainly talked about that a lot since Covid, back then, it was really overlooked. It was overlooked before Covid. I mean, we were in this sort of amnesia about it. There’s not really any memorials to the 1918 Spanish flu. Other than a book that you referenced in that piece, Alfred Crosby’s ’76 book, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, it had not really been explored enough. In the story, you write, “With luck, we’ll be able to anticipate the next Spanish flu before it does much damage. The problem is that we’re not really sure what to look for.” [Laughs] How prescient.

MG: Yeah. I had been covering H.I.V. at The Washington Post, so I knew the world of virologists and epidemiologists really well…. I was familiar with their work, with their preoccupations. I was reading the right journals. So in that world, the 1918 pandemic was of enormous interest, and what had happened was that we didn’t know…. This is pre a lot of DNA sequencing. We had no idea what the virus in 1918 looked like. We had a vague idea, but… and so someone had found a grave of people in the North Pole who had died of the 1918 virus.

The idea was that, because they were in the permafrost, the virus would be preserved. So, this epidemiologist leads an expedition to Norway, to the gravesite. I convinced The New Yorker to send me to Svalbard or whatever it’s called.

SB: Out of time.

MG: It was—

SB: The town actually was called Longyearbyen.

MG: Longyearbyen, yes. That’s right. That’s right. I remember going there. I had fun. It was a great story. It was a little…. In retrospect, I’ve thought about that story. During Covid, I was like, “Oh, God, that’s twenty years ago I was writing about this time.”

SB: Well, in looking across your three decades of writing at The New Yorker, you’ve written on everything from office design to french fries, to dog fighting, to Steve Jobs, governmental whistleblowers, and more recently, marijuana. What do you think ties these subjects together, if anything? Is it just your innate curiosities, or is there….

MG: I don’t know. I’m very interested in the mechanics of things, as many writers are, but maybe me more so, even. I’m very interested in people in the middle of problems, not at the top of problems. It’s why I like academia so much because the academic is analyzing and observing, but they’re not heading the assault on the problem, they’re trying to understand the problem. They sit at a remove, which gives them, makes them much more interesting as observers.

SB: From a time perspective, you’re actually doing the opposite of trying to be first. You’re almost trying to be last.

MG: Yeah. I think being first is massive…. I once gave this speech, I forget where, it was all about the power of being second. People get way too…. The big winners are rarely the people who are the first in. You want to take a step back, but I think that people in the middle of things, who are close enough to the problem that they are engaged in its nuts and bolts, are the most interesting observers. So when I was at The Washington Post, I must have learned this, that if you wanted to know, I was covering H.H.S., Health and Human Services, F.D.A., and N.I.H., all those places. And the interesting people were not the people running the show. If you wanted to find out what’s going on at the F.D.A., the most important person to talk to was not the commissioner. The commissioner knew everything, but he couldn’t tell you. And also, he was himself removed from some of the most interesting details.

What you want is someone who’s high enough to have some perspective but close enough to know the details. Then this person called me and said this, or you have no idea what a mess this was. That’s what you want. Is that kind of granular— A lot of journalism, inevitably you get preoccupied with going as high as you can on the food chain, but in fact, you don’t want to go as high as you can. So I’ve always been one who never wants to— I’m not interested in going as high as I can on the food chain.

SB: Yeah, it’s the overstory actually, the overstory is actually what you find in the middle and the—

MG: People who are kind of like…. I wish I could think of a good example of this in action.

SB: Well, how do you choose to write a book versus a magazine piece versus a podcast episode? Are there certain rules you have set or ideas anyway that you sort of like, this would definitely not work as a book. This is perfect for radio or this one…?

MG: A good example would be we did that podcast miniseries on the firebombing of Tokyo. And, in the course of doing that, I came to realize that that story was embedded in a larger story about how do you most successfully prosecute an air war against your enemy, which was a huge debate in the Second World War. And so we started with the podcast where we talked about the narrow question of what happened in Tokyo in March of 1945, what happened to Tokyo in ’45.

And then I was like, “Oh, there’s a whole bigger story here about this conflict between Curtis LeMay and Haywood Hansel and the Bomber Mafia about how you fight an air war.” And once I realized, oh, so what I’ve done in the podcast is I’ve got the kernel, but now I have two characters to frame a much larger story, then I was like, “Oh, that’s a book.” That’s what you need. That’s what a book is best understood as. It’s that kernel of an idea which you put into some larger context that has character and plot and all these kinds of things.

SB: So one can become the other.

MG: And I think one of the things we’re trying to do at Pushkin is to be more aggressive in understanding when we’ve got a kernel that can be at the center of something larger.

SB: Before I finish, I wanted to ask about Revisionist History because I think its approach to time is really interesting. You recently said in an interview with Monocle—and I loved this—that “We’re still sorting out the seventeenth century…. Hundreds of years have passed, and we still haven’t figured it out.” The show is essentially about shedding light on past events, and in many respects, it’s about time. It’s a form of time travel.

MG: Yeah.

SB: So how do you think about this time element in the work you do in Revisionist History specifically, and what have you learned about time over the nine seasons that you’ve done?

MG: What have I learned about time? Well, I am struck repeatedly by the distance between the way we make sense of something in the moment and the way we make sense of something after the fact. That distance is so great that it makes me not even care about the reactions in the moment at all. They’re meaningless. It goes back to our early discussion of why the critical enterprise has failed. The most effective critical appraisal of a creative work would be two or three years in. When you’ve seen how it was received and understood and what impact it had, then the critic is really useful. They’re engaging at the wrong end.

Imagine encountering [John] Grisham on the occasion of his first book before a copy has been sold. You would dismiss it. Now imagine encountering Grisham twenty-five years in, when he sold three hundred million books and now you’re forced, as a critic, to account for the fact that this man has done something extraordinary. Also, when you look at not just in the way that he’s consistently managed to appeal to a very large number of people, but then you also, when you read— I’ve read lots of Grisham.

Grisham’s books, novels, are about real things. They’re about the death penalty, they’re about corruption, and you realize, Oh, wait a second. After you’ve read a whole bunch of them, you’re like, “Oh my goodness, this guy has been one of the leading moral voices in America for almost two generations now.” You have a completely different appraisal of him. So given how the distance between “he’s just a hack,” and “he can’t write dialogue to save his life,” “all of his characters are cardboard.” That’s what you would think after whatever the first one was, The Firm or A Time to Kill or whatever it was. [Editor’s note: Grisham’s first book was A Time To Kill, published in 1989.] And then twenty-five years later you’re like, Oh no, this guy’s like…. So when I look at that, I think, why would you bother with the first time?

Don’t review the book at the beginning; review the book at the end. The only ones I care about now are the other ones. So that’s really where I just have lost faith in our ability to make sense of anything. It’s like, I was talking— On my book tour, I was talking to some guy at one of the tech firms who dealt with their version of social media and stuff, and he mentions offhandedly, “Oh, Facebook’s in a death spiral.” It’ll be over and whatever. Now, is he right? I have no idea. But the idea is this notion we think of when we talk about social media, we’re talking about Facebook as the center of this whole universe of things. Meanwhile, this guy’s like, “No, it’s a blip and it’s going to go away soon. And ten years from now, we might not even remember what it is.” So I’m like, Oh, so are we just premature in our whole analysis of social media? Should we just be waiting? What’s so wrong with just waiting to come to, that’s my….

SB: What dominates one era or moment in time could be meaningless the next. But I think what’s interesting with Revisionist History, too, is you’re digging through the trenches of time in some ways. You’re spending a lot of time doing deep research to unpack, uncover, retell, reimagine, re-envision stories that occurred centuries, decades ago. I wanted to quote from this 2019 profile of you in The Guardian, which notes, “One senses every hour in his working day is geared toward maximum efficiency.” I laughed at that. I was like, I actually have a hard time believing this because research is anything but efficient and the work you do requires so much of that. So I wanted to ask, could you talk a little bit about your day-to-day approach to time? How you think about time management in relation to this research?

MG: So much of thinking and researching and understanding stories is about organization. You do have to pay a lot of attention to the logistics of understanding something, finding out who you need to talk to, figuring out when you can talk to them, reading in preparation for talking to them. I’m doing a big story right now, and I’m in that stage where only this morning did I start actually reading in depth. But I’ve spent a bunch of time; I talked to one person at length, and then I spent a lot of time figuring out who would be the next group of people and where are they? Are they alive, are they…?

That’s very, very important because it helps you weigh the importance of various elements. And if you can never talk to someone, then you have this question, what do I do with what they could have told me? Can I find it elsewhere? They can’t be a character. Or maybe they can be, can I recreate? So there’s a lot of that, and that is something that takes up an enormous amount of time. The writing does not take up a lot of time. If you’ve done your preparatory work properly, the writing is quite easy. Writing is only hard when you haven’t done your reporting properly. It’s a function. Writer’s block is a function of a badly conceived idea.

SB: I’m so glad you’re saying this. [Laughs] I’ve always thought that and people are like, “No, writing’s hard. Writing’s hard.” I’m like, no, it doesn’t have to be if you, it’s all what you do up front that makes the other part easy.

MG: I was—in the story I’m working on now—I was watching this bit of tape online. I was like, “Oh, that’s the beginning.” There was a press conference. This guy’s talking and the guy says something. It’s like, wow. You’re like, “Oh, that’s how it begins.” When I sit down to write this thing two months from now, I know how it begins. I might change my mind, but right now I know how it begins. I got the first thousand words right there. It’s like the press conference where this guy says this nutso thing and you realize, “Oh my god, that’s the journey we’re off on.” It’s easy because I found that guy and I thought about it, what he said, and that piece of the puzzle is complete.

And another interview I did just before I went off on my book tour, I was like, “Oh, that’s the ending; that clearly is the ending.” I mean, I did eight interviews, and I finally did in the eighth, got to this guy, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s it. So that’s done.” So I now have the beginning and I have the end. You’re just filling in. By the time I’m ready to write, I will have filled in sixty percent of those blocks.

You’re not going to get writer’s block, because I’ve already got sixty percent of it done before I even sit down. That’s what working at a newspaper teaches you, by the way. Newspaper writing is that, it’s building blocks, and you painstakingly, over the course of whatever it is, three hours, assemble as efficiently as you can, all the blocks you need and you can’t do the thing without everyone…. Did you talk to this person? No, I didn’t get them. Well, you can’t run the story unless you do, right? So you don’t have that. Did you get this? No. Well? Have you read that?

SB: It’s this balancing act of efficiency and inefficiency. You’re building the blocks. That’s the efficient part. But the inefficient part is everything in between. The things you can’t control.

MG: The number of times I would observe around me at The Washington Post people whose stories had not run for months, because they hadn’t gotten something yet, because they were waiting on this. They hadn’t convinced someone to talk to them. Then you realize, yeah, you’re right, they’re incredibly efficient, but they’re also, they have this incredible patience with the emergence of the story.

SB: So, final question: I read in People magazine that you would love to write a biography of a living person in the future. So I wanted to ask if you could name a few—people who are alive now who you think would be an ideal biography, somebody whose life is fascinating to you in its richness or complicatedness.

MG: That’s a fun question. It would be really fun to write a biography of a megachurch pastor. A serious one, that talks about what leadership feels like, means in that kind of world. It talks about the way you take a set of religious beliefs and you translate them for an audience, talks about how they’re building a business in a really interesting way. I don’t know, that struck me as being— I’ve never seen anyone do something like that.

I’d like to do a similar one of a military leader in a similar context. I got to know this guy who was chief of staff of the Air Force when I did my Bomber Mafia book. I always thought that someone from that world would be really interesting because the technology and understanding technology and its uses is so central. At the same time, they’re rooted in an institution that goes back thousands of years. That idea that they’re both at the cutting edge and in this most traditional kind of high-stakes set of obligations that they have, that balancing act and the constraints. When people attack, all of the things that we attack the military for are things that are necessary for its functioning, which I find really fascinating.

In the current environment, all the people are attacking the military for being “woke.” And you talk to them and they would say, “Well, we can do nothing unless we can convince young people to sign up for us. So you try it.” What does it take to appeal to a 20-year-old these days? We’re trying this because the job is really difficult. It’s not that they’re woke. It’s that the job, the nature of the institution depends on convincing 20-year-olds to make a commitment to them. So what does it take in 2024 to convince a 20-year-old to make a commitment to you? They’re open for ideas.

Again, it’s like the very thing we attack them for is the thing that they have to do. And there’s example after example of that kind of paradox. I find that’s really, really interesting. I had a conversation with some guys at the Air Force about how they have a problem with—like all institutions—with mental health. They have a suicide problem. They are as focused on that issue as any institution in the entire United States. Why? Because that’s their world. If people start committing suicide in Air Force bases, huge issue, morale. Just that idea that in the same institution and in the same person they would be dealing with drone warfare and “woke” and mental illness and mental health. I don’t know, that would be— Capturing that in a biography of someone who walked through all of those issues would be really super fascinating.

SB: Malcolm, we’ll end there. Thank you so much.

MG: Thank you so much. Spencer.

This interview was recorded in the Pushkin Industries outpost in Hudson, New York, on December 3, 2024. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Diego Mallo based on a photograph by Shannon Greer.