[Applause] now most of my questions will be quite short but my first question will be really really long since everyone knows you and your work so well I asked myself who is Malcolm Gladwell and I tried to come up with an answer and I'll give you my answer and then you can correct me or
add to that and this will take just a little while so I think of you as a figure set really coming out of the post-war Caribbean enlightenment so I put you in a context with say Sylvia winter CLR James France fan and a common theme in their work is the notion that science is something potentially liberating and
emancipatory so you're picking up on that with one of the channels of influence being your mother who is herself a very well-known Caribbean writer and intellectual so there's that Caribbean background power of science to to liberate human individuals there's then you a menite influence both from your childhood and
your family where you grew up in Canada so my understanding of menites is they tend to stress the notion that in the scriptures there's not much talk of original sin so you see the possibility for goodness in people you then spent much of your life in Canada so there's a a kind of modesty that comes from
that of temperament and also intellectual modesty you then have a father who is a mathematician so there's the emphasis on data and you got your 10,000 hours of practice mostly at the Washington Post an early person behind the rise of databased Journalism so key themes in your work I think of them as
contingency optimism and volunteerism power of the individual your first book Tipping Point is about how small moves can lead to big changes your last book David in Goliath is about how David can beat Goliath in many contexts so again contingency optimism volunteerism the individual and whether it boils down to
is there a better way to shoot NBA free throws or could Elvis Costello have improved on his recording of Goodbye cruel world there's this consistently optimistic perspective so you're really a very systematic thinker with core themes running out your whole work that's my take on who's Malcolm
Gladwell how do you see it who is Malcolm Gladwell here well um it's a very flattering um interpretation um I don't know if I think that deeply about myself um uh I the only thing I would add to that is um um you know I I I really like to tell stories um and uh my desire to tell stories is not a product of my
background it's a reaction against my background because my family with all due respect to them I love them dearly are not good storytellers and so I you know that was the role I felt I filled in my family since everyone was um uh was so either uninterested this not the notion that you would sit around a dinner table and
tell and recount hilarious stories from the day was utterly absent from my childhood and I when I discovered much later on that there were families where this happened I was just in awe um so that was you know the uh so that's a you know there's two kinds of influences there's negative and
positive influences I you just left out the negative ones I think now I could imagine maybe your father the mathematician was not a natural Storyteller but if I think of your mother uh Joyce Gladwell I've been reading her book it was published in 1969 you even make a cameo appearance on page 178
it's called brownface Big Master it's a memoir and it's full of great stories and what I find profound in that is her notion of both the importance of struggle on issues of race and feminism and fighting for your family but also repeatedly being subjected to what she calls quote I quote the medicine of
acceptance and how you can combine those two things struggle and Medicine of Acceptance in a life that also finds God and she's full of profound stories on that so did you get your story telling well my mother from her is very quiet so she is a very a lovely writer and a great Storyteller when she writes but
she's not one to regil the room um so I there uh my the my mother wrote a book not as a you know some people will write books what they're really doing is they're just kind of um putting down on paper the story they tell in public my mother was putting down on paper the stories she would never tell in public um and
it's funny that this she's not unusualness you know there's this is why I always urge people to sit down with their parents while their parents are still with them and turn on the tap recorder and force them to tell stories because surprising numbers of people don't unless they're forced to don't or
unless it's a deliberate act don't tell the stories from their life that are meaningful so that was a that writing that book was a was I think a very was a very deliberate act on my mother's part to try and she was trying to make sense of um uh I mean one hesitates to call one's mother one one's own mother's life um
extraord it wasn't not that it was extraordinary it was just unusual you know she was a black woman trying to marry a white man in in um England in the 50s so it was you know they were a little bit of an odity um uh can I tell my favorite story about my father story era so my father they get married and
they move back to Jamaica my father is teaching mathematics at University at um University of West Indies in the early 60s 61 and he needs to get I love this story but way this is a story my father did not tell me until like three years ago which tells you something about stories and so it just three years ago
he somehow just comes out tells so at 61 he needs a particular textbook and this being 1961 you can't go online so he writes to all the libraries and turns out the closest library to Kingston Jamaica that has this book that he needs for his research is Georgia Tech so he writes to Georgia Tech and says can I
come and use their library and they say yes and so he makes preparations and it means sailing from Kingston to Miami and taking a bus from Miami to Atlanta cuz he doesn't have any money what he doesn't realize is that they said yes but then the person who said yes got in trouble for saying yes before they
figured out his race because all they knew was that a man from the University of West Indies was planning to use their library and of course their Library 1961 would have been um segregated um and so it set off this huge commotion at Georgia Tech as they tried to figure out whether my father
was white or black and so they look they try and find you know is there some they figured out where he got his PhD could they find some kind of yearbook they couldn't they tried to get in touch with his thesis adviser couldn't get his name couldn't just call him because of course you can't place a call to Kingston in
1961 and just s of asked finally they track him down through like long the day before he's about to leave he gets a call from like the dean of whatever at Georgia Tech um Mr Gladwell yes well we have a sort of slightly odd question he goes yes what is it are you white my father says yes and the guy
says swear to God oh thank God now to my point about stories like I said he told that story three years ago just happened to come out like who Waits until 2014 to tell a story like that from 1961 there's a discussion that Sylvia winter the Jamaican intellectual offered in your 2000 and I'd like your opinion
on this she said there's something special about the United States that in Jamaica or many parts of the Caribbean more broadly that being middle class can in some way counter the fact of Blackness socially and serve as a kind of offset but she said about the United States and here I quote the US itself is
based on the insistent negation of black identity the obsessive hyperv valuation of being white do you think that's an accurate perspective well yeah there is something uh under well I hesitate to say under theorized um but there is something there is something under theorized about the
differences between West Indian and and American Black Culture um and the particular uh the difference the psychological difference between what it means to come from those two places and the um you don't I think only when you look very close at that difference do you understand the heavy weight that
particular American Heritage um places on African-Americans um that there is something enormously you know it's funny about West Indians is they can always spot another West Indian right and you have to at a certain point you wonder how do they always know and it's because they're after a while you get good at
spotting the absence of that weight right um and uh it explains as well the well-known phenomenon of how disproportionately successful West Indian um West Indians are when they come to the United States because they're they seem to be better equipped to deal with this with the particular pathologies attached to race in this
country um you know my mother being uh a very good example um but of course there's a there's a million examples um you know I was just reading for one of my podcasts I was reading I've been reading all these oral history transcripts from the Civil Rights Movement I was reading one today and I
I'm halfway through and I had that completely unbidden thing I was like oh this guy's a West Indian he was a African-American attorney in civil rights lawyer in Virginia in the 60s I got half like a 30-page transcript I got to page 15 I'm like he's West Indian and then literally page 16 my father came
from Trinidad and Tobago with my mother and it's like you it's it's a there is something very very real there that's sort of not I feel like fully appreciated another difference that struck me tell me what you think of this is that the notion of freedom from much of the Caribbean it's in some way more
celebratory and it's more rooted in history and it may be because these are mostly majority black societies so history is in a sense controlled so it's much more commemorative does that make sense to you it's not a struggle to control the narration of history at a national level that's yes so you're in
charge of the narrative yes which is huge but you're also I thought of this because I wanted to do sorry my podcast is on my mind and I've been I wanted to do a an and I haven't managed to figure out how to do it but there's a Jamaican poet called Lise Bennett and if you are Jamaican you know exactly who this
person is and you're she's like the probably the most important kind of colloquial poet maybe that's the wrong word popular poet and she was she wrote poetry in dialect so she was a kind of um uh for a generation of Jamaicans she was an assertion of of Jamaican identity and culture so when my mother my mother
was a scholarship student at a PR predominantly white boarding school in Jamaica she and the other black students at the school as a kind of um Act of protest read Louise Bo Bennett poetry at the school function when she was 12 years old so she's that kind of and if you read Louise Bennett's poetry a lot
of it is this it's all much of it is about race but it's not it's about race where the Jamaican the black Jamaican often has the upper hand the black Jamaican is always telling some kind of Sly joke at the expense of the white minority right so it's very much it's poetry that doesn't make sense or it doesn't make
the same kind of sense in a in a society where you're um a relatively powerless minority it's the kind of thing that makes sense if you're you're 95% and you're not in control of major institutions and such but you are 95% of the population and you feel like you're G to win pretty soon and she has this
one my mother used to read this po poem to me as a child where Lise Bennett is the poem is all about sitting in a beauty parlor getting her hair straightened sitting next to a white woman who's getting her hair curled and the joke is that the white woman's paying a lot more to get her hair curled
than re band is to get her hair straightened like that's the point right it's like it's all this kind of subtle one-upmanship um that's very Jamaican now I ask about your podcasts I know some of them in the second season they'll be about the civil rights movement in particular the the 1950s
which are somewhat neglected time I'll throw out just a few possible forces that led America to start to become more integrated in the 50s and you tell me which you think are neglected or underrated one would be uh professional sports and Jackie Robinson starting to play baseball in the late 40s M another would
be entertainers and move toward having more black uh leads in movies and also music say Chuck Barry or even James Brown Harry Truman integrating the military or the desire for purposes of Cold War propaganda to actually show this country is making some progress on civil rights issues I mean which of
those or which other factors do you feel are the ones we missing in understanding this history I would put Army if I had to rank those Army one okay uh I would uh and I would say that the entertainment and sports uh I I would I would say that that had it was either neutral or worse than neutral why worse than neutral
because I don't think I actually think if you if we would have Take the Long View and we would look at this from 100 years from now we would say that the fact that that um so it is not unusual for minorities to First make their Mark in sports and entertainment right we see that every see it with Jews you see it
with Italians you see it with you know Irish but my thing the thing that's striking to me about uh those movements is they move in and out of those worlds pretty quickly so the Jewish moment in sports is really quite short sure um respect not that surprising uh boxing especially it's like that long um the
African-American moment in those transitional Fields is really long it continues to this day and it's almost to the point where you feel like that what happens is they move into those worlds and get stalled there and their presence in that World um uh accentuates and aggravates existing Prejudice about
their uh about their Community as opposed to um serving as a kind of um Way Station to a better place so if your problem is that uh you're facing a series of uh stereotypes about how you are intellectually inferior um how you have a kind of broken culture how you have you know I could go on and on and on with all of
the stereotypes that exist then why is being playing uh how does playing brutally violent Sports um help you right how is an association uh an almost a uh an over representation in these these these various kinds of public entertainments um Advance your cause um I I so I I I I kind of
um uh I'm for those areas when those those things when they're transitional and I'm against them when they're they seem like dead ends how important a factor was the research of M and Kenneth Clark that's some work that had there been in Malcolm Gladwell at the time would have been written up even more the
notion that when there's segregation people may value themselves or their race less it seems that had a big impact on the Warren court on other thinking what's your take on their influence well there's a I just it's funny I was just both read the Great Book on this is darl Scott's uh contempt and pity um who's a
he's a a very good black historian at Howard I believe yes he's the chair of history at Howard um and points out he has much to say so I got quite taken when I was doing my this season of my podcast with the black critique of brown and the black critique of brown starts with some of that psychological research
because the psychological research is profoundly problematic on many levels so what Clark was showing and what um so moved the court in the Warren decision was this research where you would take the black and the white doll and you show that to the black kid and the black kid you would say which is the good doll
and the black kid points to the White doll and which doll do you uh associate with yourself and they don't want to answer the question right and the court said this is the Damage Done by segregation um Scott points out that if you actually look at the research that Clark did the black children who were most likely
to have these deeply problematic responses in the in the doll test were those from the north who were in integrated schools the southern kids in segregated schools did not regard the black doll as as problematic they were like that's me fine it was and that result that it was kids from black kids
minority kids from integrated schools who had the most adverse reactions to their own representation in ad doll is consistent with all of the previous literature on self-hatred which starts with Jews it was originally that literature begins with when where does Jewish self-hatred come from Jewish
self-hatred does not come from Eastern Europe in the ghettos it comes from when Jewish immigrants confront and come into close conflict and contact with majority white culture that's when self-hatred starts when you start measuring measuring yourself at Clos quarters against the other and the other seems so
much more free and glamorous and what have you so the in other words the warrant Court picks the wrong research nothing this's nothing to do with with the problem caused there are all kinds of problems caused by segregation this happens to be not one of them so why does the Warren Court do that because they're trafficking this is
Scott's argument they are trafficking in a um in a uh uh an uncomfortable and unfortunate um Trope about Black Americans which is that the that black Americans black American culture is psycholog is psychologically damaged that there is something that the problem with black people is not that they're
denied power or that their doors are close to them or that no it's because that there's that something at their core um they family life and their uh uh uh and their psyches are in have some in some way been crushed or distorted or um uh harmed by their by their history right it personalizes the struggle so by
personalizing the struggle what the Warren Cod is trying to do is to manufacture an argument against segregation that will be acceptable to white people particularly southern white people and so what they're saying is like look it's not you that's the problem it's black black people are
they're they're harmed in their hearts and we have to like you know Usher them into the mainstream you know they're not making the correct argument which would which was you guys have been messing with these people for 200 years stop right like they don't want to they can't make that argument because they because
Warren desperately wants a a majority he wants a nine nothing majority on the court so instead they construct this in retrospect deeply offensive argument about how it's all about Black people carrying this um you know and using this using social science in in a way that's actually quite um deeply problematic
right it's not what the social science said this a more recent line of research some of it coming from Roland frier and Steve levit that at least claims that mixed race children growing up have a harder time and take more risks than just their socioeconomic status alone would predict do you agree with that
take issue with it mixed race mixed race really I yeah never never heard of that um doesn't apply to me certainly no no one has lived a more risk averse life than me so uh but um I don't know I mean you know we though I have enormous respect for both those um economists this isn't one
of those um highly imaginative use of correlations is it sometimes sometimes they lose sometimes economists lose me when they play those games higher education it's one of your passions in life so there's a recent paper by Raj chedy it shows that at least 38 colleges are taking in more students from the top 1% than from the
bottom 60% and many of those are IV League schools now take for instance Harvard Princeton Yale why are those schools not doubling the number of students they take in in your opinion why don't they do this I was going to say why are you asking me you're the one in the academy you must have a theory of
why the world is why well uh you know uh uh why doesn't uh Louis Vuitton sell a $59 bag um because Louis Vuitton doesn't want to be in the commodity bag business they would rather sell a small number of bags at $10,000 each um but Harvard could take in 2X and not lower tuition I
suspect Harvard could take in 10x 10x and not still have 40 billion left over um no I think it's I mean look there's no these guys are in the they're in the luxury handbag business they're not in the education business they're they are interested in in sustaining a certain brand equity and they see uh expanding
the size of their schools as diluting their brand equity in exactly the same manner as Louis Vuitton does Louis Vuitton is not going to open a Louis Vuitton store across the street right in that building over there next to the Starbucks and the they're not going to do it even though there may be people
right here who want to go and buy a Louis Vuitton bag right now um they're very conscious of maintaining that era Aura of exclusivity that's all Harvard is doing if you thought for a moment their primary motivation was in educating as many people as they could as well as they could then I think
you're living in a dream world right this is not there you know I was walking around uh this a tangent I was in DC this weekend and I went for a walk with this friend of mine and we went to uh to Dunbar Oaks Dunbar you know it's gorgeous facility and it's owned by was given to Harvard University in 1940 by Robert
Bliss would in its entirety um I happen to know that the for complicated reasons that I shouldn't go into that it the endowment attached to the Robert Wood to Dunbarton Oaks is has many many zeros let's just say that the endowment attached to Dart Oaks is larger than the endowments of all but atiny fraction of
American colleges and I also know that we all know that on the grounds of Dunbar NOS you know they have a museum where there's one of the great collections of pre Colombian art in the world so as I was walking around the grounds of dumb art noes I asked myself here we have this is a facility owned by
a nonprofit institution which receives enormous tax benefits from the American taxpayer and which has an astonishing sum of money attached to it why can't I see the art and why does no one get upset about this by the way I'm allowed to walk around the Rose Garden whoopy right there's lots of I
surely I should see the art I I am as an American taxpayer subsidizing this institution and yet it's like and where are the why are there no why aren't they bringing in when was the last time they brought in a busload of high school students to Dunbarton Oaks to walk them through the pre-colombian art
collection has it ever happened I don't know one economic puzzle one economic puzzle to me is why University such at Harvard have such high endowments now you've just raised some objections to endowments but if one is taking a you know somewhat cynical economic approach to this you would think actually they would spend more on
themselves from the endowment and they don't and that raises the question of what are they really trying to maximize I mean what's your theory of endowments and why they're so high and why don't the people at Harvard spend more on themselves because they're not all that rich right you you had a great post on
margin Revolution remember you very short in which you said that there one of you were giving a list of things you thought needed to be done in the world of economics and one of them was you said endowments are under theorized yes I read that I ha I'm going to steal that phrase um totally under theorized so uh
one of the greatest philanthropist of the 20th century was uh Julius rosenal uh the the guy who makes seers seers an enormously wealthy man in the kind of 20s and 30s and he starts the rosenal fund and what does a Rosen World fund do it sets aside a sum of money which in today's dollars would be I forgotten but
probably close to a billion and he decides what he wants to do is to go throughout the South and build uh public schools throughout the south in African-American communities and one of his rules is no endowments he said we're going to spend it to zero and they spent it to zero and
to this day there has actually been some really lovely economic work measuring the economic impact of the rosenal schools and it's it's not subtle it's if you look at the list of things that made a tangible difference in the south in the first half of the 20th century rosenell schools is way up there and why did he
get way up there because he went to zero right if he set up an endowment to fund the building of schools for African-Americans in the South we would still be building schools for African-Americans in the South we'd be it would be a hundred-year long project right you would instead of running
through a billion dollars you would run through 5% of a billion dollars every year so the very fact that you set up an endowment means that you have decided before you start to minimize your impact right I'm going to take your dollar and I'm going to commit to spending five cents of it every year right that's the
craziest thing I've ever heard who who does this like I don't know where it comes from like why would you not spend your money like har if you have 4 billion in your Harvard there are tons how many interesting educational things could you do with 40 billion if you gave yourself a 10-year time Horizon and by
the way given the track record of Harvard and raising money what why for why for a moment do they think they can't replace the 40 billion once they run through the existing 40 billion there's so they have proven over and over again that there's one thing at which they truly are world class and
that's raising money right so like the irrationality it's irrationality upon irrationality right they haven't even owned up to the one thing that they're truly world class at I'm pleased that we're holding this at George Mason a school which in the words of our president tries to be the best school
for the world and not the best in the world but let's say we put you in charge at Harvard yeah what changes would you make you appoint the board you are the board you and your mother oh man this is is such a great question um can I can I start at the beginning start at the beginning okay uh I would start by
going uh I would establish a set of Baseline criteria for admissions and then I would have a lottery after that uh so if you are someone who has you're in the top 2% of your high school class or whatever we can 5% whatever cut off we want following test test scores at a certain point whatever cut off we
want some minimum number of other things you do you just go into the pot and we're pulling out names uh I would uh I'd probably triple or quadruple the size in the next 10 years okay open campuses uh uh probably two other campuses in the United States one overseas uh I would uh you know I have
this idea that I'm not sure how you do it but where I think that it would be really really useful to um uh to ban uh graduates of elite colleges from ever disclosing that they went to an elite college and this you it's not a joke it's deadly serious because what it does is it wonderfully clarifies the decision for
the student of whether they want to go to an elite college so you want to you don't want the kid going to Harvard who just wants the brand name Harvard you want the kid to go to Harvard who genuinely believes that he or she can get an education there that they can't get anywhere else right I want that kid
so if I say you can come here and get a world class the greatest education in the world but after you graduate you can never tell anyone where you went then I'm I'm weeding out all the Louis Vuitton Shoppers right and I'm getting the true Scholars so I if there's a kid out there who says there's the certain
Professor one of my oldest friends is a professor at Harvard Terry Martin huge fan of yours by the way Tyler oh great um Terry if there's a kid out there who says I want to take a I read Terry's book He's wrot a couple books I want to do Soviet studies I want to study with Terry that's the kid I want right I will
and I don't actually I'm willing to go to any lengths to get that kid I'll give him a I'll cut him a break I'll keep them out of the lottery you know I'll do all kinds of things but you want that kind of you want if you're running a truly Elite College what you want to select for is someone who is the kid the
kids who are most powerfully motivated to Leverage The the institutional assets of the institution the oh I'm sorry the academ the intellectual assets of the institution not the brand assets of the institution and now a truly important question how would you treat the faculty well you know there's a really
interesting site and I forgotten to my eternal discredit who did it but um that looks at Trends in educational spending and points out that educational spending has gone like highed settings gone like that um the share of dollar higher ed dollars that goes to faculty salaries um when you do all the kind of it's
basically been flat for 50 years um so you'd pay us more oh yeah I absolutely would pay you more I mean I don't say that because I'm at a university talking to a professor and I'm the son of a professor um I say that because uh uh because it seems crazy to to have to put academics in the kind of
professional firmament it seems crazy to have them losing ground to other professions when you would think that the importance in a in a a modern society of having um worldclass faculty would be greater and to the extent I mean I'm not saying that if you pay academics properly more you're going to
get better academics necessarily but I do think it's not a bad idea if you want to reward um people going into that profession now human potential and talent that's a key theme running throughout a lot of your work let me ask you two or three questions on that do you think that today we're actually
working too hard to measure and bought Talent very early and thus we're branding and marking people and actually telling a lot of people they shouldn't do activity X because they're measured too quickly yeah so this is my friend David Epstein who wrote Sports Gene is really really interesting on this subject with it with respect to
sports and points out that uh what what really makes for successful Elite athletes is a broad early base so the last thing you want to do is to overp specialize too soon with a uh with a kid for a number of reasons one is you know the phenomenon of you know baseball pitchers um having um all kinds of arm
problems in their teens is a product of kids simply pitching too much too soon but you can generalize that we think that an awful lot of injuries that Elite athletes are suffering in their late adolescence are due to the fact that they have been doing the same repetitive motions from an early age we think that
burnout is also a function of this but there also is a very interesting argument Beyond those to say that there is a body of skills that you only learn if you have a broad early base so the basketball analogy would be you know uh hakee elijan being a soccer player or Steve Nash being a soccer player or in
tennis uh federa being a soccer player that there are extremely valuable things about basketball that are most usefully learned on a soccer pitch when you're very young um that kind of now that is a beautiful analogy for academic work as well um or for any sort of intellectual
work that the best preparation for something over here when you're very young may be something over here um and then the third thing is that the most important and the thing you're alluding to is that we do a really bad job of spotting early Talent simply because you can't spot um you know I'm a Runner and you
every Runner knows this the kids who were the Great runners in their early teens and I was one of them are not the ones who end up being the world class athletes sometimes they are but there's a huge change over in the ranking of Runners between 12 and 18 at least when I look at the ranks of
world class Runners and you look at their times at least half of them um had mediocre times in there you know I was at the age of 13 the fastest Miler uh for my age in Canada uh by 21 I was useless and washed up and no longer and the kids there was a kid who I used to destroy when I was 13 um
he went on to be essentially world class um right on the fringes of R classus I used to kill him I mean it was just not even close and and anyone looking at the two of us at 13 would say gladwell's the talent this other guy is like Bo he should take up he was you know he was terrible he he ended up running 335 for
1500 meters right let's say you're giving advice to the parents and grandparents in the room you can't reshape the system you can't even control Harvard but you can tell them what to do for their children what's your advice given all of what you just said uh well you should delay specialist ation as long as
possible uh you should uh uh because of all of those yeah for because prediction is poor and burnout burnout is another is as big an issue as poor prediction early prediction um uh and I would avoid um I think the other parallel problem which I get at in David and Goliath is I think that um overly competitive
environments uh at too early an age are really deep deeply problematic so I thought about this the other day when I was I I um I live most of the time Upstate New York very close to Bard and I go and I work out at The Bard gym and I was watching so Bard has got I don't know how many students I mean is is it 2,000
I don't even know some tiny number and I was watching The Bard lacrosse team workout and I don't know anyone I don't want to offend anyone who went to Bard they're not allowed to say by the way they did that's right they can't say they can't say they're terrible the I was just you know eyeballing the across
te I was like good Lord I mean I off I felt that I could go down there at 52 and make this team and then that was my first thought and my second thought was that is so fantastic because what it means is you can be an ordinary Joe at Bard and play lacrosse right now think about that in every different thing it
so in a school that small with the exception of the things at which they are I mean there's probably two or three things apart at which they genuinely do excel I'm sure the the drama program or the music program is formidable but let's accept though their special any non-specialty item at Bard is going to
be it's wide open it's totally accessible you know you want to be in the physics Club at Bard you can be in the physics Club aboard right and that is a massively underrated thing so the in other words the there's there's a Continuum here and uh exclusivity is at one end and opportunity is at the other
end and people constantly are confusing these two things and thinking that in in exclusivity and in in in um Elite status is opportunity false eventually that's where the opportunities lie they don't lie there when you're 16 or 17 and you when what is NE what is required of you is is experimentation if you want your
17-year-old to explore the world send your 17-year-old to a place where the world can be explored the world cannot be explored at a super Elite University right it's impossible I had to I talk about in David and GL the phenomenon of very very very very good science and math students going to Elite colleges
and dropping out at enormously High rates because they're in the 99th percentile and they're in a class full of people in the 99.9th perc and when you are in the 99th percentile and you're up against someone in the 99.99th percentile you feel stupid right even though you will never again in your life unless you want to be
an academic at MIT in physics be surrounded by people that's smart right SN it's over after that then you go back to the real world and you're smart again so why would you artificially put yourself in a situation where you feel so dumb that you stopped doing the very thing that you went to school to do
that's just that is bananas that is like and why this isn't a fact that people like when I when I was in college what I went out for the University of Toronto newspaper and they could wouldn't give me a job it was too hard to get in they were the brilliant people so what did I do I wrote for
my pathetic joke of a we get a Residential College we put out this kind of joke thing every couple weeks and it was insanely fun it was like but I could do whatever I wanted nobody cared we made up all kinds of crazy I mean in the end I had a way better experience than I would have had if I was at the highly
competitive newspaper I've never forgotten that right by virtue of being this kind of lame forgotten thing I got to do more fun stuff and have a much better time than I would have at the proper newspaper um you know that there this this drives me well it clearly drives me crazy I me to say it
drives me crazy now you've argued that in the NBA more players should shoot their free throws underhanded it would take them some time to learn but it would turn poor Shooters into somewhat better Shooters and that would be worth a lot in terms of performance now you are yourself a teacher in some way in
the broad sense so what is it that we other teachers are doing wrong what is for us the underhanded free throw we're not doing enough of oh that's interesting uh H Wonder are you not doing enough of well I mean I suppose I could expand on this notion of kind of um that to encourage experimentation and
open opportunities one must also be much more tolerant of mediocrity um and that the the notion that there can be something lovely in mediocrity is uh to borrow one of your favorite phrases and now mine is under theorized um and I wonder whether sort of um making the world safe for mediocrity is not a very worthy goal of
um of uh of teaching um because in you know not only because in order to the people who will one day be good need to pass through mediocrity on their way to being good but also that uh that you know that it's it's that uh like I said it's the gateway to experimentation kind of um and I I don't know where one sort
of how that practically translates um in a in a teaching set in a teaching session but um but I think it's that's a very Tok villian answer uh what is it that long-distance Runners are not doing correctly what is their equivalent of the underhanded free bro oh uh well there's so many I mean
there's there's there are so many different arguments going on right now about L distance running um I suppose the the the best way to sum sum them up is that like all uh highly competitive sub Specialties um everyone wants to believe they have an answer that works for everyone when in fact the truth is that
there's probably 10 different ways to run a train effectively for a long distance and um uh we we're just slow to understand how variable Runners are the one interesting thing the most interesting thing happening to right to me to in distance running right now is the rise of
uh uh the of Japan as a distance running power and what's interesting about Japan is that Japan does not have any one Runner it's particularly marathons does not have any one marathoner who is in the top 10 in the world or even the top 20 in the world but they have an enormous number of people who are in the
top 100 and so are your notion of whether Japan is a distance running power depends on how you choose to Define distance running power so we have one definition that we use where we say we recognize a country is being very good at distance running if they have lots and lots of people in the top 10
but that strikes me as being incredibly arbitrary and it goes to my point about um we're not encouraging mediocrity um why all that says is okay so Kenya's got you know nine of the top 10 fastest marathoners right now why is it why is that better than having uh uh 300 of the top thousand right it's purely arbitary that
we choose to Define greatest as just the the the country that most densely occupied the 99th percentile why can't we Define it as the country that most densely occupies the 75th through 100th uh percentiles right now there's always a segment in the middle of these chats called overrated or underrated okay so
I'm going to list a few things you're free to pass uh overrated or underrated ketchup you're first famous article on ketchup I I'm on record is saying underrated massively massively underrated and which is the best ketchup hin has to be William F Buckley uh well uh in his day appropriately rated now underrated I
mean you're talking about someone who was a massive um willing about Buckley is my childhood he was obsessed with him until I was I had entire works of his seemingly memorized so under who is the most underrated figure in Jamaican popular music past present either everyone knows Bob Marley but
who's the Hidden Gem oh my goodness that's a really really really really uh I'm GNA pass on that one I'm only to get in trouble I would say Desmond Decker or Lee Perry if you're curious but why are they under I mean I feel like there There Are Places pretty anyway we only to get into it but in Jamaica but I don't Millennials
don't seem to know very much about who they are is my sense or even toots in the my TS or Keith Hudson or King tubby I think they're somewhat not in Jamaica forgotten because there there's a more celebratory notion of History right yeah but in the United States to me that's sad and the notion that the leading
figures in electronic music in the 70s would come from Jamaica not a high-tech country that's an extraordinary story that seems to me so you don't get need to get me started on Jamaican trism it's a David versus Goliath story The Jamaicans win uh my colleague Steve pearlstein oh is he my he's not here is he he used
to be of the Washington Post of course my former editor former editor Steve uh uh underrated absolutely I have lunch with him every week his father uh owned that great clothing store in lisis of Boston Lou Louis of Boston that's right and he was always Steve I remember as a young
reporter of the Washington Post I was very badly dressed and Steve you know a highly intellect ual guy who cut his teeth in a high-end men's clothing store in Boston would have always come up to me and like you know adjust my suit jacket and say what are you like a 36 short you know was that I always love that this
reminds me by the way can I do a little sure sure my f one of my favorite things I the trans one of the things about the Jewish immigrant experience in America that I have never gotten over that always Thrills me to bits and I don't know why is the transition from Merchant to intellectual class that generational
move which is just so fantastic and my favorite one there's many many great ones is the speaking of Boston and Retail is uh that uh filin's basement right was uh started by the or filines rather it was started by the fen brothers and one of whose name was Lincoln Lincoln fene and their kind of
manager the guy the CEO of their store was a guy named Kirin and Kirin had a son who he named for his boss Lincoln who is Lincoln Kirin the great giant of American Ballet and is uh and so you see in Lincoln Christine in the name of this extraordinary cultural figure Echoes of uh
of of bargain retail from Boston like the idea that one person's name summons those two worlds simultaneously it's just so it's so beautiful it's the similar version of this is the fact that some of the people who were of the people who were saved by um during the Holocaust by uh Shindler then went on moved to New
Jersey became real estate developers did all these subdivisions and would always name a street after Schindler yes and then would bring him over for the opening but once again you have the this incredibly moving and Powerful uh tribute that's grounded in the prosaic right it's the reverse of
Lincoln kirstine right it's the but that move of moving back and forth between these worlds I just find that I find it really beautiful and sort of moving anyway what's the most underrated Johan lar novel oh wow uh so many right well the very small town in Germany uh the pre um uh spy came in from the cold ones I
really like and I also really like um you know I thought I've Al a little drummer girl is um really fantastic uh but I I think maybe the pre the really the super early ones are um are remarkably good and L Car novels gladwellian in their worldview or do you enjoy them so much because they're not are they offset or
confirmation I didn't know there was such a thing as clellan um are there why do I enjoy them is to us why do I enjoy I enjoy them because uh I enjoin them for a very specific reason that has that has to do with the fact that I uh you know I spent I was born in England and my father is a English and
he's a product of uh of my father's essentially John L's age so they come from the same world kind of Bleak middle class post-war English um and I have as such an affection for that particular era and world and when I go back to London I was just in London I find myself I gravitate
to those parts of London that still look that way yes um because to me that's what London is London is not the shiny Rich London of today and London is not the gorgeous historic what's London to me is kind of 1950 um and that weird moment when you're walking down a Street in East London and there you see a a block that
was clearly bombed and they built something in 19 clearly in 1948 that just AB buts something that was built in 1820 that thing whenever I see that I just it just gets me every time and John lari particularly well spy from the cold is just about to me it's just about that the kind of unrelenting bleakness of that world and
that how all of the kind of every all of the the the material niceties of their world were I mean it was just tea and biscuits that's as good as it got right that's what you looked forward to every day and the it was always raining and no one no one could say I love you and you know it's just
all part of it it's just like it's fantastic it's just and when I'm in that world I feel so normal I just feel like I am this this ray of sunshine what's your favorite non-current movie you know I don't go to the movies anymore I haven't been to a movie in years I don't even I can't do it I don't know why I just they lost me
but old movies Michael Powell if you like older England no I don't even uh I can't remember the last movie I saw to be honest overrated or underrated the idea of Early Childhood Intervention to set societal ills right uh overrated because it's in to my mind it's just another form so it became
politically impermissible to say that certain people in society would never make it because they were genetically inferior so I feel like that group it's like all right we can't say that anymore we'll just move the goal poost up two years and we'll say well if you don't get or three years if you don't get the
right kind of stimulation by the time you're three basically it's curtains so it's like why is why is that argument which we decided we didn't like it when they set the goalpost at zero and somehow it's like super important and and legitimate and you know chin stroking worthy when it's when they set
when they move the goalpost to three truth is like people it's not over at three anymore than it was over at zero like there are certain things that would be nice to get done by the age of three but if they're not the you know the idea that it's that it's that it's curtains is preposterous it's the same kind of
fatalism that I thought we had defeated you know and uh I mean you could make a really you know if you want to say that the goal post should be at 30 then I'm I'm open to would you settle for 55 55 I'm very glad to hear that answer now I looked back there was an article you wrote actually in the 1990s for the
Washington Post it's not online but I can confide to you all that it was leaked to me and it's called 10 things DC could learn from New York City and I know it will be very hard for this crowd to believe but you actually evince an Ever So slight preference for New York City over Washington DC at that time and one
of the things you thought Washington needed more of this is number three and I quote more adventurous celebrities do you still feel that we need more adventurous celebrities pretty pretty sure my opinion would change if I was doing that today your number one however was shame
that this was a city that needed more shame really yes I have no memory of this number five was the Nicks so clearly you have no memory of this but over time how is your view of Washington DC changed there's a 2000 radio 2007 radio show you did with your mother it's actually my favorite of all
your outputs I love this podcast I recommend it to everyone but there you said that you and also she did well because you were always serial Outsiders M now do you feel that in any way Washington DC with its culture that is in some ways fairly Bland passively pushy nervously ambitious and just too full of politics is this has
this now become a city where it's a good place to Be A Serial Outsider or simply not uh wow uh that's a really good question what was particular about so I was in DC from 85 January of 1985 until July of 1993 uh [Music] and uh the city obviously has gotten a lot wealthier and safer and wider sure and
more more dver immig the area a lot more diverse since I was there uh has the you know I came here in Reagan years uh when an upheaval was going on politically I suppose that's happening again in some sense um I don't know whether um you know the thing that's peculiar about DC is that is is the particularly if you're
in your 20s is the turnover right so there are uh very few places and you you actually make this point in complacent class about how the move Americans are a lot less mobile than they used to be strikingly less mobile than and that this has this is has huge consequences for society I actually think you're
absolutely right it's a really really important Point DC if you're in your 20s is this Grand exception is massive turnover everyone not everyone but when I think of the cohort I was with when I was 23 in DC none of them are in DC anymore all gone um with a few exceptions and I feel there is that kind
of churning and that churning um is really really useful in terms of giving people opportunities to look at what's going on from an outsider perspective because you're not a you're not committing to the city you're outside of the there's there's permanent Washington and in your 20s you're not part of
permanent Washington you're you know you're skipping through from you know in this kind of you know you're in you're kind of ringing the permanent City and um that was really that was what made my time here so special if I had stayed I feel like it would In My Memory have diminished a little bit by the way in
the 90s you also wrote a profile of Pat Buchanan which I would encourage you to reread you may be surprised by your own pressence you would have to change a few words in the article but much of it would apply today do you think New York City and Manhattan in particular is that still a good place to Be A Serial
Outsider and what is it that you do in general to keep yourself as a serial Outsider well I leave Manhattan uh where do you go uh well there's two things I mean there the one problem that I have there's as a writer you have a series of problems one problem uh a serious problem is that I'm old uh
and I don't mean that in a you know I'm decrepit what I mean is that uh the it's very important if you are a writer um to remain kind of current and the greatest danger you face is this sort of fossilization of your positions and Views one of the main reasons that I wanted to do a podcast is that a podcast
forces me out of my age cohort and puts me back in the land of people in their 20s and 30s primarily um and that's you know I'm not being Peter Pan I'm I'm trying to kind of rejuvenate my thinking um because I be you become aware in you're you know you have a kind of many professionals have a kind of
professional peak in your 40s and then you're you can feel yourself your views hardening um and you feel yourself closing off to new ideas and you the minute you see yourself rolling your eyes at something that's oh that's what the kids think then you realize the end is nigh um and you have to take so part
of what I do is try and even when I'm writing I don't write in an office I write in coffee shops why I don't particularly think coffee shops are amazing places to write but I do think that simply just being around people who are not my age is really useful um uh and I travel a lot um and that's a
really really useful way of breaking out of um bad intellectual habits um and to remind yourself about what the rest of what is like now I also try to be intellectually flexible and let me tell you about a worry I have maybe you can talk me out of my worry I worry that in so far as one is intellectually flexible on any
particular thing it becomes a way actually of protecting some broader and more hidden edifice that there's a kind of kind of oddly hidden desperation or even pessimism embedded in certain kind of flexibilities and there's something to be said for erecting a quite rigid structure which people tend to do more
when they're young and then it can be toppled so one becomes quote unquote wiser more flexible more willing to revise you've written about how different columns you know they're just they're opening questions so to get people to think and I worry in my own writing when I try to do this that in some ways it's a
deeper dogmatism than erecting the highly dogmatic structure which can be toppled you do you have that same worry or how do you see those trade-offs do you see what I'm saying we're at the point in the conversation where you reveal yourself to be much smarter than I am um I don't I've never thought it
through that deeply uh I think well because I don't think of myself as having a edifice so I have a series of positions and feelings about things so you said early on that you thought of my work as being optimistic so that's not I feel that's a feeling and not an edifice I don't have a formal reason to
be optimistic I'm just an optimistic person um I have a physiological optimism as opposed to intellectual optimism um and also I don't understand what the point would be if you weren't optimistic like why would you get up if you well many I know people who enjoy their own pessimism in a strange way also I don't
think you could be an a a run I mean I'm come to come back to running you can't really be an athlete and be a pessimist why the whole point of being an athlete is You're Building towards something right you don't just work out to work out you work out because there's something out there that you're trying
to anyway that's the side point but um but I sort of think of uh my like here's a good example on the Affordable Care Act I have changed my mind six seven times um and I'm not toggling back and forth between pro and con I feel like I'm jumping around I'm eminently persuadable on it um and what
that has done is it has it's been very very useful now because now it's very fashionable for liberals to be super into the for Care Act because it's under Fire um and I feel myself being sucked in that direction but then I remember wait a minute I've been kind of you know I've been bouncing around for five years
on this why am I suddenly just because it's politically expedient running to defense of this thing which literally a year ago if you quoted me at a party I would be the guy saying and here's another problem with that and right and you know this still the best book I uh read about uh about the on Healthcare
was an an out and out attack on the on Obamacare So like um uh so I kind of that that to me is that's really useful to kind of turn over your and accept the fact that so 50% of the time you're going to be wrong on these kind of things but that's fine like now it's been said that satire sometimes
reaffirms power while poetry affirms only its own power you have a podcast where you express a worry that Tina Fay by mimicking and starzing Sarah Palin actually made her more acceptable and more likable in doing so so fast forward to the current moment we have Saturday Night Live Alec Baldwin and Donald Trump is
that useful satire is it not sufficiently negative should we be deploying poetry or is that the effective medium for social commentary well I don't like the Alec Baldwin Donald Trump uh I don't think actually it's I mean if you compare it to the um to the Sean Spicer uh it's not as good and it's not
as good because the truly effective um satirical impersonation is one that uh uh finds something essential about the character and magnifies it something buried that you wouldn't ordinarily have seen or have glimpsed in that person and draw so with the Spicer personation why that's so brilliant is that it it draws
out his anger he's angry at being put in this impossible position right that's that is the essence of that character so what is a how does a how does a person respond um to this it's almost an absurd position he's in right and he he has this kind of it's not sublimated it it it's there this kind of Rage like I mean
in every one of his utterances is like I can't believe that I am in this and so that Saturday night life impersonation gets beautifully at that thing it satures that and so when I forgotten the name of the woman who does it yes when Melissa mcarthy when she picks up the podium and back you know
that's an absurd illustration of that fundamental point but the the Alec Baldwin Trump doesn't get at something essential about trump it simply takes his mannerisms and exaggerates them slightly but he hasn't mind Trump and there's so there many directions you can go with Trump I mean the kind
of uh extraordinary insecurity of the man which I you know that like I said there are many things you could pluck out but that for one the idea of doing an impersonation where you really um thought deeply about what it would mean in a comic way to uh um to represent this man's um almost kind of
tragic level of insecurity that's an interesting and Al Balwin is not uh he he's a little too glib to be able to and that's the problem with Saturday Night Live the larger problem and I was trying to get out of that podcast episode on satire the problem with doing satire through the vehicle of show like like
Saturday Night Live is they're they're not incentivized to do that kind of deep thinking the Melissa McCarthy thing is an exception it's not the rule really what they're incentivized to do is to use for the actor who is in many cases as famous or more famous than the person they are impersonating yes um
it's the actor is using the character to further their own ends Tina is infinitely more popular uh more accomplished more whatever than Sarah Palin will ever be and so she's using Sarah pal to further her own ends that's backwards right she's not inhabiting um the character of sailor
palale in order to make us make a point about Sarah Palin she is inhabiting Sarah Palin in order to make a point about Tina Fay right and I feel like so long as satire is done by uh a television show which has such a lofty position in the cultural hierarchy it's always going to be the case that that is going to that's
what's going to drive their impersonations they're always going to be sitting on their hands right remember they're making fun of trump six months after they had him on the show right after they were complicit in his rise right I mean and after Jimmy Fallon ruffled his hair on camera so I mean
these are people who I mean you can maybe that's fine my point is you can't be an effective saturnist if you are so um deeply complicit in the object of your satire my last question before we have a few audience questions I was very struck by what I think is your latest New Yorker column where you wrote about
what is parallel and not parallel between the cases of Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers case and in my reading of the Pentagon papers case here's what really struck and astonished me and I'd like your your view on how it's changed when the Pentagon papers became public in I think
1971 uh course they were incredibly boring but when you did read them or R excerpts one thing that startled so many people is it came out that there were Accords dating back to 1954 where it turned out America had broken the Accords and not North Vietnam and this shocked people and caused them to reassess their whole sense of the
Vietnam War and that's 1954 which was then from 1971 a long time ago so there was a sense of History embedded in how people understood that episode that seems to me entirely lacking today to get someone to care that much about something done under other administrations you know 17 years earlier seems virtually
impossible and what is it about America that's changed yeah so that history now doesn't matter the way it did then yeah this so this is this is you you've touched on the thing about the Pentagon paper's controversy which is in retrospect so unbelievable it makes viewed it through a present-- day lens
the whole thing is bananas it makes no sense whatsoever it's the most hilariously wonky e nerdy exercise so even step back what is the Pentagon papers it is Robert mcamera saying in whatever 69 or 68 whatever um what we really need is to get a bunch the smartest historians in a room to write me a 10 volume set on
historical analysis going back 20 on this conf were involved in so right from the start we're in a kind of uh rarified academic realm and he gathers a bunch of phds who slave away on this thing and produce this massive turgid you know and you have ellsburg who is the central player in this whole thing and what is
ellsburg he is the wonkiest of the wonks so he is he wrote a a bit of it and his great complaint as he takes he gets a copy of the Pentagon papers he's trying to get every to read it and by reading it he means I need you to go away for however many months it'll take you and work your way
through all 10 volumes and there's these hilarious uh conversations he has with Kissinger where he's trying to get Kissinger just wants a summary it's like no you can't do a summary you got to read the whole thing you got to get a couple thousand words in before thousand pages in before it makes any sense you
know and it's it's just like the there's no contemporary I mean it's like like history something it's not just 2017 and 1971 viewed through the lens of the Pentagon papers controversy they belong on different planets I mean we're not even the the whole and when the New York Times gets the copies I
mean remember and it takes them like a year or whatever to photocopy all of it because it's it's enormous and the copies are really slow um and the great you know the great story which is the the woman who uh is now Linda Resnik who's now a billionaire and lives in a great you know when you're driving down
Wilshire in Beverly Hills there's like those massive houses to your left as you drive into Beverly Hills she lives in one of those houses she's the one who has the pomegranate juice Palm juice anyway she was the boyfriend the girlfriend of urg's best friend and she ran a Ad Agency on Beverly Boulevard and
she had a xerox machine which is a huge deal in 1971 so he does it he goes she has the she's the one who provides which I just think is up I once R end heard at some event in La I was like you had the Xerox machine what a great role to play in history but every part of it is all about people
who took history so seriously that they were willing to spend all night photocopying for months on end and then ellsburg took copies he went around the Capital also trying to get Senators to read it and you know I mean it just his long and his big and over and over again the complaint that drove him to leak it
to the New York Times was that no one's taking this seriously and what does the New York Times do when they get a cop when they get the copies they rent a room two rooms in the Hilton like right next to the New York Times headquarters put a guard out front and then spend months reading it again months reading
it months like it's it's just this kind of thing that it's just I mean imagine today if this thing dropped I didn't even know how we would people would have to do takes that would come out within six hours I mean there isn't they' have to do an an executive summary of the executive summary in order to be able to
like yeah the whole it isn't it belongs to a different era I almost feel like it's the last it feels like the the it is the final act in a uh in a um an A A an intellectual era in American life when um institutionalized government was expected to comport itself according to um uh to standards and Norms that came
from the academy right that's what's the whole thing is about people who came out of elite schools and had a certain expectation about what it meant to be a public servant and what your intellectual responsibilities were as a public servant and They Carried those Norms with them from graduate school to
Washington right and that's the whole and the fact that ellsburg is a PhD in decision sciences and wrote papers with Thomas shelling is not a peripheral fact it's the Core Fact right that's who they were right so when you we go fast forward and you have Edward Snowden who is a Community College
Dropout which I don't say is a snobbish thing I'm contrasting him to his predecessor who was a PhD from MIT right and snowden's intellectual understanding of what he was engaged in is just it is a fraction of you know he he used a search engine just to pluck stuff at random from the NSA files and hand it over to
people that's not what ellsburg was doing and you in the gap between those two figures is is the story of you know the last 50 years of of the changes of the last 50 years in American life before we move to a very brief Q&A let's have a big round of applause for Malcolm Gladwell we have have two microphones
just to be clear the purpose is for Malcolm to answer not really for you to ask so if you make a speech I will cut you off please ask a brief to the point question and we will start at this microphone yes hi I just wanted to know when we're going to get more podcasts ah I'm I'm doing them uh I'm
writing them as we speak I'm actually doing some interviews tomorrow in the DC area for one of the shows they're uh and they'll come back out in in June awesome thank you next question over here hi good evening thanks again uh what tools should we use to discover Talent within ourselves and
others question it's a great question um impossible to answer in time that I have but um well you know I if I can use my favorite subject of running as an example um the uh the amount of if you look at uh times in the marathon and today and compare them to times from 30 30 years ago uh we are radically slower today I'm
not talking about the elite level I'm talking about at the subelite level the number of Americans for example who can break three hours in a marathon today is a fraction of what it was in 1980 or 1985 um and that goes to this point that our tools of our are uh in order to extract running Talent from the general
population um you need to have a a really really broad base and the broad base is gone there is still Elite running that produces really good fast Runners but in 1980 there was this many people running the kind of mileage necessary to run a marathon properly and today there's this
many and all of our attention and focus is on the 95th per and but what we don't understand is we'll never find the next great marathoner until we rebro the base when we had a base this big of mediocre marathoners we had the two greatest marathoners in the world now that our base is this big we got nobody in the top
10 um this side next question thank you hi my name is Jesse riffkin big fan uh my question is in your when you were interviewed by Ezra Klein recently you said that you and some friends used to run a publication titled homonym a journal of slander and political opinion uh in a world where you know
academics and quality journalists and intellectuals so often fail to connect with the public and at least if November's any indication at homonim attacks do should we bring that or something like that back no no this was just a this was a Zen that had a unnecessarily provocative title um we were we felt that there was
a qual we were all obsessed with William F Buckley and we thought that there was a quality of high-end invective that he personified that we were trying to emulate um I don't think that is a necessary exercise in 2017 I I think it was uh it might have been it was more useful in a more Gentile era um but uh I
don't I think it's a bad well screw you next question hi I uh so I've heard you talk about kind of systematic inequalities and how we identify students in education do you think the same exist in small business and if so what could a small business do to identify kind of an undermined pool of talent that isn't
being reached yeah um that's another interesting question I don't know if I have a kind of um uh a useful answer to that I mean I was struck recently by looking at a set of numbers I may have been on marginal Revolution um that about how uh the rate of startups in this country has
been falling has fallen quite the80s since the 80s which you know like most people I was surprised by that I thought I sort of bought the Kool-Aid that thought we were in this kind of great age of new business formation um and the thing about uh that that's so worrying is I would have thought that I would
imagine that um an awful lot of what it takes to encourage someone that takes for someone to start a new business is some kind of direct knowledge of someone else who started a new business in the same way that it's very hard to get people uh to want to go to college if they don't have someone in their life
who has gone to college right or to understand the importance of it unless they have some kind of personal connection that so when you have these so the when you see a trend line that's going down in something like that I wonder whether it it will accelerate over time that you know the less business start get
started the less business get started right because there's no one with any kind of connection of you have to have some glimpse of this as a potential possibility um and that would result I think in a lot of uh business Talent being um uh squandered I mean I will say parenthetically to this that um the
number you know I'm someone who's self-employed when I worked for before I was self-employed I worked for large organizations and if you would ask me when I worked for the Washington Post say would I ever want to be self-employed I would have said reacted with horror I would have thought I can't
understand how you could do that don't you wake up every morning in a cold sweat knowing where your next dollar is coming from turns out I'm way happier self-employed than I was working for but I getting there took and you know it took 20 years it took all kinds of Lucky breaks it took all kinds of there was no
one in my life who I didn't know any self-employed people I didn't know how to make that kind of jump and I you know I wonder what how many people are in a similar position of not realizing they have the ability to be do something entrepreneurial and would be happier doing something entrepreneurial but just
have no example two more questions next over here hi thanks for being here um something that surprised me about what you just said earlier in the conversation was that you feel you're a very risk adverse person uh can you expand on that well I'm a product of one of the greatest welfare states in the
history of welfare states Canada in the 70s I have come from my home with two happily married people who were you know the sweetest kindest no most non-threatening parents of all time I went to genial Canadian Public Schools where I was treated with respect at every turn uh and then I got out of
college and was almost immediately given a job by a very very well healed Fortune 500 company where I was cited and given every opportunity without ever asking for it so like where where's the risk taking in my in my my my bio is just one long you know effortless riskless frictionless um you know I've gone from
one it was a wonderful phrase that uh um that Chuck Lane Charles Lane who went uh once used to describe the Washington Post he described it as the furlin Rat Hole um and I have gone from one furlin Rat Hole to the next over the course of my life so yeah I've never had to really take any risks final question hi as a Canadian
and uh you know Jamaican background can is it can you explain your take on uh the anti intellectual movement in the United States is it just that we have big guns big religion and uh you know um we're we're not afraid to to throw that around or or what what what do you think yeah uh well is it any different I mean
a different first of all I don't know whether uh well let me back up uh the role that uh uh Evangelical Christianity plays in this country's culture is very different from um other Western countries so that's clearly a consideration that's been a force not for anti-intellectualism that's wrong it's
been a force for a particular approach to intellectual life you know Christianity and I say this as someone who comes from a emical Christian background um is is a deeply intellectual culture on many levels but there are certain questions on which um the religious perspective uh orients um
thinking a little differently from the secular intellectual mainstream so that's been a prominent part of this country I think for um a long time but also I think that there's a I would say I would phrase a lot of what's going on now not in terms of intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism but um a
kind of I've said this before that uh the most striking thing about American public life to me as a non-american is the extent to which it's dominated by backlash um I think of the the history of American Life over the last 150 years as just one period of prolonged backlash after another there are these you know
you have a backlash to the Civil War that basically lasts 75 years then you have the brown decision then you have backlash of the brown decision that lasts 25 years and then you have you know uh a little moment for uh feminism in the 70s and you have a backlash that lasts until I mean might still be going
on um you have a little I mean there's a gay rights backlash which dwarfs the little moment of gay rights pops its head into the public discourse and the backlash goes on for years and like and you know chases every Democrat out of Congress and distorts you know two election Cycles I mean so it's like and
I feel like we're getting we're in the middle of another one of these I don't I don't know why American backlash Cycles it's a kind of one step forward four steps back that I don't maybe I'm naive I don't see that in other um cultures I've just been I only been thinking this because I've been doing these podcast
episodes on the 50s and 60s and on civil rights movements in those and the backlash you know the backlash to Brown is so phenomenal I mean it's it's so great that you have to seriously ask yourself whether Brown was worth it I mean there's a great paper written on the brown backlash thesis by a historian
whose name sadly is escaping me right now uh uh clar Is It clar Michael clar maybe I'm ready claran Michael claran thank you um which you should read because although he doesn't take this tack but as I read that paper he just points out you know the backlash is sort of 10x what brown is distorts the politics
of the South for two generations Etc you read that and you have to think Jesus maybe it wasn't worth it I mean maybe we should have just done something a lot more subtle and not risked this and I feel like what's going on now in American life is a backlash that maybe one reading is that there was a the
dominant kind of liberal intellectual culture in this culture in this country went too fast maybe we went too fast and we just have to learn to slow down you can't you can't do everything you want in one generation and my current take on I'm currently Pro Obamacare here this will change but um my current take is it
was a good idea but you know what maybe it was a bridge too far maybe it just was the thing that maybe we should have done a little tiny smaller piece of it and just Mell it out because in part that's what we're seeing now like the the the centrality of Obamacare in the current backlash narrative is so weird
right make any sense many of the people who are against it are beneficiaries of it the this this law is not this kind of pox on American life it's managed to bring down I mean there's tons of from a perfectly rational stpoint if you were an Ardent right-winger this is not the
thing you would go after right there's a ton of other battles the fact that they want to fight this battle first is really strange and can only be interpreted in terms of it's the backlash it's like it's the symbol of what you of of the thing that just drove you crazy and appalled you over the last
couple of years and you just want to banish it from your site you know um and that's so that's I think it does that answer your question two announcements there is book signing outside and second you can subscribe to this podcast just Google conversations with Tyler iTunes many other ways again a big hand for malol Gladwell