The Tipping Point Revisited: Live with David Remnick
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Pushkin. 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 my new book, now available everywhere. 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.

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. 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. It's been a while. Yes, yes. Malcolm, I have to tell you, the title of this book is so brilliant because it's like...

Revenge of King Kong. It's fantastic. Pink Panther. It's a Pink Panther. And I have to say that one of my fondest memories at the New Yorker, 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. 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. 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. LAUGHTER

What interests me is how you invented yourself and what you do, because we have a not dissimilar background. 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. 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. Oh, that was my finest work. It really was. 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 I...

They were uninterested in stories about New York at that point. I don't know why. 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. My county? Yeah. Because I decided that Bergen County was more interesting. I still blew this, the New York City. So I just every day I would read the Bergen County... Record. Record. That's right.

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. Where I was born. Were you born in Hackensack? 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. It's like a ravine. 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, and if they lose their appeals then they are euthanized. And they're there for biting people. 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, this is now all of these claims I'm making were subject to a great amount of litigation.

And had cut... So stipulated. So stipulated. 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. And I wrote for the Washington Post. I mean, it was thousands. It was impressively long. 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 the greatest thing anyone's ever said to me. And they were T-shirts. 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. That's the heaven. So my whole strategy...

of conceiving of Bergen County as being a kind of more fertile ground for journalism. But this was the rebellion, this was the beginning of the Gladwellian rebellion against the conventional, which is that New York, as I believe, is not only the most interesting place, but on certain days, the only interesting place. I'm a patriot. So, but when, 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? 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. 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. 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. And they were a lot, Woodward, Bob Woodward was, when I got to the West Coast, I was in the business section. Woodward was there. Yeah.

And I would watch, and like Steve Call, do you remember Steve Call? Steve Call 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, you know, when we had the push-button phones? Yes. 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, shh.

It was like a concert pianist. He'd play a chord. Yeah, like the White, he'd get the White House. 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. 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. And in fairness, the Washington Post did not prize weirdness. No, it did not. Although the key was... 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 up, you have to do what everyone else is not doing. So people around me were not writing...

5,000-word stories on death row dogs. No, no. 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. So I was writing these Talk of the Towns, and I went to see Chip McGrath. It was Tina Brown's deputy editor. Yes, and Chip said, I had written this little Talk of the Town, and he had some problem with...

He said, I want you to fix this problem. He said, why? And so I said, I took it from him. I said, okay. 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. I was like, no, I'll just move this here. Do that. And I realized that's

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. Right. Right? So I got there and I had to completely change. 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.

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Which piece would you say set you off? 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. Yeah. There must be some sense of self-examination about this. It was probably a piece called The Cool Hunt. Remember The Cool Hunt? I do. Where I...

I don't know how I found her. I found 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, 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. But the whole point of that piece was

the title, The Cool Hunt. Once you had the title, it's like... And there was, you know, someone wanted to make a movie out of it. Of course, nothing ever came of it. But it was the first time I realized 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. And...

Did the New Yorker never have that kind of thing before? Now this kind of story comes up. But was that an absence that you were filling, a vacuum? No, I didn't know anyone else in 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. No. I mean, 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. You just need it to stand out. And then you did The Tipping Point, which, you know, is now associated with you. 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. And how did you cast out what the book, what it would be, what shape it would take, what voice it would have? Well, I didn't. My agent came, Tina, who I knew socially. And then she became an agent. She worked in the admissions department of some... She'd been a graduate student in history. Yeah. Yeah.

I just knew she's friends of friends. And then she became an agent. 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. 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. I remember thinking that was really weird that a piece in New Yorker could...

So I thought, oh, maybe people are kind of into this. And Tina's like, yeah, you should do a book. So I knew the article in the New Yorker was clearly a chapter, a part of a chapter, and then I had to kind of

improvise. I'd never written a book before. I had to kind of... 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. 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. 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. How self-aware are you of it? How did it become itself? 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. You're forced to. I remember by the end of my time with 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. And back then the deadline was like 6.30. Yeah, right. So I get on the LIRR 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. And there's a shooting on the Long Island Railroad is a front page story in the Washington Post? It was a big shooting.

It was like serious. Well, I mean, my assumption was I was telling them, of course, it's a front page. That's the way it worked. This is huge. Hold the front page. 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 drill yourself many, many times. Oh, my God, yeah. And you could do it from Moscow and they all get nervous. 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. 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. Then there's a day three, oh, my God. Go out there. I'm on the LAR. And I remember this is when I was at the peak of my powers. Yeah.

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 reporters. You dictated. 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. But I realized at that moment, I got nothing else to learn here. I have... They have... But that's what you learn. And that, 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. It's like, boom, boom.

Tell the story, tell it in a way that's compelling. 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. Woodhouse over and over again. That...

informs the texture of this tapestry. Who was that for you? Or was it just the newspaper business? Well, no, no, no. So then I get to... I think I have a little bit of that at the post, but it gets... My point is, you get pared down. You get rid of all your bad habits, and then you have... 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...

develop some kind of study but you have to do the compulsory you know work to get it and that's what the post is you it it it just you you get reduced to the simplest essence of how to tell a story and now you have the freedom and it come to the a lot of it was Adam Gopnik so I was reading Gopnik long before I joined the New Yorker and Gopnik is exceedingly

distinctive voice, right? And a beautiful way of expressing himself. And there's little kind of beautiful little frills. I mean, his prose sings, his little choruses and frills. And it's just like, and reading that, you know, I'm half a generation. But his move is, he has many, but what is the pop culture thing

or boomer pop culture, as he and I have discussed, but reference when discussing something like, you know, Nietzsche or the French Revolution. That's crucial. So this reminds me of something. When I was in middle school, I met my lab partner, who was a guy named Terry Martin, who I know of Terry Martin, now a Soviet scholar. 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 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. 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. 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. This is what so interests me. So play is what... You use 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. You used the phrase "playing with ideas" as if this is to them somehow irresponsible. What does playing with ideas mean? It begins with 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.

And his whole idea, our idea was, this is, 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? That's, 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 to

I land on Marvin Gardens. 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? That's absurd. So it's a little bit like inherited wealth. Yes, exactly. So we started with $1 and...

What could you buy with $1? You can't even get a slice of pizza. No, no, no. Much less Marvin Garth. So the first 10 minutes is just speed circling the board, accumulating capital. And then...

And then we had to come up with all kinds of ways to basically create systems for creating leverage. Did you have too much time on your hands? No, no, no. We played so much Monopoly. So what I realize now is that we would sell derivatives. So 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. And 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? So it's goods and services. Yeah. I have, you land on Vermont, you owe me 500 bucks. I have Broadway, I need Park Place. So I say, okay, pay me 100. But if you land on Park Place, I have the right of first refusal.

to buy their property from them, right? Now that's a simple example. We constructed these insanely elaborate, massive derivatives and we would play... Did they have no drugs in Canada? 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. And we'd just get together every morning and just play these games. But it was the same thing. It was like, you know, 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. He was like, what does Parker Brothers know about Monopoly?

And the self-confidence of that was so brilliant. 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? What's the difference between what you're doing...

and what an academic feels obliged to do. - Because they have stakes. - I remember reading a piece of yours, and there was a piece, and it was so mean to Ralph Nader, who I was-- - Still great. - 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. - I can tell you where that came from. So this goes to your point. - And then you blamed poor Ralph Nader for what? - Oh, so genius.

So on the sense of play, the first layer of play is understanding other people who want to play. 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 it. And if they were writing about it, they were writing about it in this really kind of rote, boring-- Right, right, right. So find someone who has an interesting take on auto safety. Now, where would that person reside? Well, not in academia. 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. 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. And he's been waiting for you all his life. He has been waiting for me his entire life. No journalist has ever called Leonard Evans. Of course not. 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. 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 this is in the mid-'90s, early, late-'90s. And one of Leonard's points was airbags are 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 can kill you, 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. 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,

what you should do is you should file a Freedom of Information Act request with the, whatever the automobile, whatever the transit automobile bureaucracy is, 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 I filed, I filed a FOIA request and like two months later, like seven people

Huge boxes show up at the Washington Post and it's all the case files. What did I do with that story? Nothing. 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. 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, sad. He did say it was sad.

Hashtag 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. I'm not deploying it as the ship of sale, but we'll do the Ralph Nader story. And then I go. 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...

Poor Leonard. He was unhappy. 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, 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. He was just like... And when you uncover someone like that, and he was just so thrilled with the idea that... 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...

are obsessed with access, right? You want to write a profile of LeBron James, 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, it's terrible, it's terrible.

And I think part of it, tell me if I'm wrong, was your antipathy to that. Yeah. 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? Oh, that's one of my favorite pieces of all that I ever did. The guy who did the Showtime rotisserie. That's really, right, the rotisserie chicken guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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. You couldn't get a job? No, no. Why did you want to be in advertising? 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.

And the idea that they can make you laugh or cry in 30 seconds while they're selling you something is just, the degree of difficulty on that is just off the charts. And I wanted to do that. - Hence, what was his name, the Ronco Jar and Vodka? - So Ron Papil. - Ron Papil. - Remember he used to do the late night infomercials. He was the infomercial king. 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. 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. 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.

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. And they would do the spiel and, you know, the chop, chop, chop. They'd have all the vegetables and they'd be sitting on the boardwalk and they would show you the knife and they'd go chop, 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... You have a... He taught me this. He's like, you've got the carrots and the potatoes, and you've got the pineapple. You can't ever chop the pineapple. Why? Because it's so expensive. It's just there. 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 to turn. So the people come close, they gather around you, you're going chop, chop, chop, chop. And you got to sell them

the knife and they got to get out of there because the news one new people have to come in that's the key 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 that's the and ron was battle tested on the board he was the greatest of all the boardwalk 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. And I talked with the guy who he collaborated with on the Showtime Oven. I actually got a... For years, I used to cook my chickens on the Showtime. It was amazing. No more? No more?

I think, I don't know what happened. It got really squeaky in like year six. You had a squeaky rotisserie. I had a squeaky one. And Ron told me that I had to fix it and I... You threw it out. But his big thing was... You threw out the oven. I did. His big thing that, you know, a lot of the, back then in the old days, the rotisseries, they went like this. This is the spit. Vertical.

They were vertical. And Ron's like, why do you do it vertical? It makes no sense. The juices flow to the bottom. Crazy. It's got to be horizontal. He's the guy who starts the horizontal rotisserie. 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, and 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, my editor, your dear friend, Henry Finder, 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. You have to genuinely, he's a hero. Mm-hmm.

If the reader thinks for a moment you're mocking the man, you've failed. That is the single greatest advice. I'm 100% with Henry on that. 100%. 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 is the hero. And you have to find your job. There's 10 ways to write that. Ron Papil had a very complicated life. Except in political reporting, but okay. Yeah. But Ron had a... There's 10 ways to write the Ron Papil profile. Nine of those ways you make fun of him. Thank you. And one way you look for what is... 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. That's a fantastic. He cared about whether the chicken was vertical or horizontal. We'll be right back.

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We're back at the 92nd Street Y with David Remnick. You are no longer 23, and you've just had a couple of kids. They're how old now? I got a toddler and a baby. I'm forbidden to give the real name. And you're 60? Are you out of your old age? You look like you're 14. First of all, good luck. Second of all... Second of all...

and you once told me, you know how you did one of your moves about college admissions. I love that. It's crazy. They're getting in, and then 92nd Street, why kindergarten, and Ivy League this, and da-da-da, and Canada, we just filled out an application the night before, and I, da-da-da. Okay. All right. No, no, not even the night before. Well, you the morning of. Day of. Day of. Day of.

David, my parents weren't even involved. My father asked me, were you applying to college? I was like, well, I'm just doing the form now. And what did you put on it? Monopoly? No, you just send the form in. It's like a page. You just send it in. 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... Which I've been doing for years. Which is, it's one of the most perfected rants of all time. I got a new rant, by the way. I got two episodes of my podcast. It is, so I've been working on this rant, you're right, 15 years. I have perfected, I got two episodes of my podcast coming out, I think next week. It's called The Georgetown Massacre.

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. 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 towards, it's so genius. And it like, by the end, it's just like, and it has twists and turns and it's just, it's. Would you like to preview it? No, I don't want to give it away. You got to listen to it. So I'm not giving it away. So good. This is why I have to work for a living. No, I know what you're saying. Am I going to be a hypocrite? Yeah, of course.

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? SAT prep? No, I'm not making the call. Oh, okay. You mean the call to the... You know. The Macher call. You call in, I know the guy who knows the guy who knows the guy who's on the board. Not doing that. Okay. I say. Okay.

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. 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. 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. Well, there's certain kinds of stories. So, for example, the story I was just telling you about, the Georgetown Massacre. You could write it, but it's not nearly as fun.

in written form. Right. 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. There's no critical infrastructure. So it's like, no one's going to... I don't understand. You could be more full of shit. No, no, you couldn't be like... You have to be, you're careful. I mean... No, no, we're not making stuff up. Right. What I'm saying is...

People are more accepting of a kind of playful outlandishness. So part of the Georgetown Massacre episodes, the tongue is in the cheek, right? Even as I'm making a substantive point. And you feel you can do that more than in Caslon type in a certain magazine? 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 like, I don't, it's hard to explain because a lot of what's playful about audio is stuff you're doing with your voice, right? So you're, you know, I can adopt a tone of voice that says we're messing around. We're having fun. We're playing with ideas. Yeah. Like there's a character in the Georgetown Massacre. There's, it's, part of it is a turn and we meet the, there's a 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 Shrevnik, these two guys in Miami. And we meet Roy and Howard. Now, the first crucial thing is, if I'm writing a print version, you'll meet Roy and Howard. I describe them, I...

You've got to hear... When you hear them, it's just so much better. 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 going to hear their voice. Right? I can't explain it better than that, but there is something about... 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 direct examination of the defendant's daughter that is just so masterful. 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. We only write because we've interviewed somebody. It's really interviewing. You think of it that way? Oh, yeah. Really? Yeah.

Oh yeah, the whole game is interviewing. It's not... 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. So when you... A defense lawyer is... Just to stipulate, that's the fun part for you? That's the juice of it, above all? Well, I don't find the writing part hard. I find the writing part is 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. 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. 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. 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'd forgotten how many hours, 10, 15, 20 hours with this woman. It was a psychologist and it was incredible. 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. That hurts me very much. I'm not telling you.

I'm telling you. And it was the same thing with the Paul Simon thing that we did. Yeah, I've heard of him. Where he, you know, he sat for 40 hours and the whole thing, the trick, not the trick, the...

What's interesting, what's hard about that was not writing it up afterwards. All those problems were solved in the interview. The trick was when we were talking to him... And I... Sorry to interrupt, which is the worst thing you do in an interview, but I've interviewed Paul Simon. He's not immediately easy. No, he's not easy. And you had him for, you know, on and on and on, and it got richer and richer and richer. 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. I don't understand why he was so... He was... I kept on saying, I'm done. And then he would say, no, when are we meeting again? Me and my friend Bruce did it together. Bruce and I would look at each other. Bruce Hedlum. Yeah.

Bruce would look at you like, he really wants to do it again? And he would always do it again. And then I couldn't believe it. 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. 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. 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, and he got up and walked outside. It was like... Wow. It was, there was something really deep, and the idea, it's so interesting, and it's, that thing, that moment when you're interviewing somebody, first of all, it never gets old.

when you tap into something. So we tapped into something that was real about him, that his relationship to his father, he's a man in his seventies. His father's been dead for 30 years. He eclipsed his father in every conventional way by a million miles. And yet, and he was still, you realize he was still writing about his father. He was still dreaming about his father. His father was still like with him, you know, 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 the way you look? You're now at this... You're moving forward, but it's 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? 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. Psychologists, when they use the 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 it could care less. The idea of standing out and being different was just second nature for him. It wasn't that he relished that being different. He didn't care. He just did what he wanted. How was he different? He taught math. He taught math. He was a kind of... I've told this story many times, but we moved to Canada. We were living in rural Canada in kind of

Mennonite country was always old auto Mennonites people who are like the Amish they're in driving buggies and a barn would burn down and they would do a barn raising 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 would you know have huge spread of food and they would just it was incredible to watch actually if you go to a barn raising and

hundreds of them, putting up a barn. And my father decided to join. And he, see, so this one car, a kind of, you know, his Volvo, with like a hundred horses and buggies. And he's like an English guy. They're all like clean-shaven, wearing black pants and like these, you know, and

straw hats, and he's got a big beard and a tie, and he looks like a mathematician, an English mathematician. He drives up in his Baldo with his kids in tow, and not an ounce of self-consciousness. It didn't even occur to him to ask permission to show up. He shows up and says, basically, put me to work, and they're like, okay, and he doesn't know what they're doing, so he's doing the most manual labor. No one knows

None of the hundred people 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. Or my other 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.

He's teaching at the University of West Indies, where one of his students is Kamala Harris's dad. Kamala Harris's dad. 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. And so he's going to go to Georgia Tech and write.

So he writes a letter to the professor 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." Guy says yes, and he's preparing to go. And he learns later that it 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.

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. And finally, there's no telephone, 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 or whatever. You know, Professor Gladwell, yes. This is so-and-so from Georgia Tech, yes. Are you white?

He goes, yes. And they go, oh, thank God. So then, but this is the story's not over. So then, now they're going to roll out the red carpet, right? But 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, and halfway through the meal, he pulls out a large,

8x10 photo of my mom. He says, yes, my wife. I was going to bring her, but I said it again. Hands around the room. To him, that was a fantastic moment. Show these guys. Never mentioned a word about that story for 40-some-odd years. 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 my dad's like, oh, that's so funny. It wasn't always that way. And then he told the story. But his, that was so him. He just like, he just, it was like he just liked, he loved nothing more than like poking the bear. But he didn't, you know, he didn't make a big deal about it. He just wanted to go around poking the bear. Before I ask about your mom, you mentioned that your dad was taught Kamala Harris' father. Yeah, 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. But yeah, they were, Kamala, Donald Harris, my mom knows Kamala.

Donald Harris is from Brownstown, which is where my mom went to school. 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 the pew at the age of the degree of excitement in. Well, all I mean, first of all, what's hilarious is 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. So the level of excitement among the Jamaicans over her is... My mother literally...

She's 93. There is zero chance she will exit this world between now and the election. It's just zero. It's just not happening. The degree to which... Her defense, I call her up. The first time, it'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. How can she have positions before she's started? My mother's whole thing is this should unfold over the passage of time. 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... Yes, she is a very refined, dignified woman.

Jamaican lady. Yeah, you don't... Nobody messes with... She was... She also... You know, she loved also confronting authority and did it endlessly and to great effect in our little town. They had never met. How did she navigate rural Ontario? 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... They're not racist. There's no racism. There was no racism. 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. How do you mean? We'll actually talk about this in my book. Um...

an outsider is not threatening in those numbers, right? 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. But she's very... She would never register... Even if something untoward was done to her, she would never register that in the moment. You know, she would...

to hold it back, and she would tell you about it maybe later, but it was in a... And also, there's a... A lot of us Indians will tell you this. It's very different to come from a culture where you're in the majority. You know, a story actually I told in Outliers, when my mom was in

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. And so she's like 11 years old and she reads in the Encyclopedia Britannica that black people are genetically inferior to

to white people when it comes to intelligence. And she can't comprehend this because in her world, all the smart people are the... This is in the Britannica. Yeah, this is from 1900. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's there, it's still in Jamaica in 1930, whatever. But in her world, all the smart people are black and the dumb ones are the plantation owner's daughters. You know, these white kids from... They're like, what are they doing here? So it's like, if that's your mindset, when all you...

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. Malcolm, I want to thank you deeply for your work and your friendship. I miss you. You live in, like, God knows where, in upstate New York. I wish I saw you again.

much more often. Your idea of upstate New York is like awesoming. That's about as far as you go. You're like...

Esther and I are going away for the weekend. Where are you going? Yonkers. We're going to Yonkers. What was your theory there? What was the mountain Jews? I'm not a mountain Jew. You're not a mountain Jew. No, I'm really not. No, no, no. You know, I'm an environmentalist because I want there to be a wonderful and healthy environment for you. For you. No, you're an environmentalist because you've been told there is an environment out there. I'm...

I check in with Betsy Colbert and Bill McKibben and others. Yes. And I'm told... Like the other day, I was walking into my building and I heard this racket. Yeah. And I said, what is that? And the door guy said, those are birds. LAUGHTER

Evidently, this is a bad attitude. I want to close by asking you a very crucial question. You have an ambivalent relationship with sports. 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. Yeah.

I remember. In what era of my... I think you were... You're an annoyance with professional sports. 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 didn't run for 30 years, and started again, and became a kind of... Slightly better than mediocre. Better than that, but okay. But not...

When I was 16, I was up here. When I was 50, I was down. 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. And it has made me realize that you actually, you 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. But the

The idea that the rest of us should be pursuing that kind of athletic excellence is a mistake. And what's happened, 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. And this is, I think, one of her...

This is 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.

Right. By this kind of professionalizing of youth sports. 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. And that's heartbreaking because I love running more than almost anything else. And I...

I recovered my joy of running only when I was coming in 28 in my local 5K. 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 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. That should be a rule, right? Right.

Malcolm Gladwell, thank you. It's been a pleasure. 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. Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Ben-Nadav Hafri and Nina Byrd Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Echo Mountain. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luc Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix. And as always, El Jefe, Greta Cohn. I'm Malcolm Glapo. ♪

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