Malcolm Gladwell: Becoming Malcolm (2024)

[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

You're probably familiar with the work of Malcolm Gladwell. Perhaps you've read one of his New York Times best selling books like The Tipping Point or Outliers. Or maybe you listened to Malcolm's podcast Revisionist History.

But how well do you know the man himself?

All coming right up.[00:01:00]

I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

There's a fascinating scene in the TV show Ted Lasso, where Ted makes a huge bet on a game of darts to help out a friend. His opponent assumes Ted knows nothing about the game, as Ted makes a few less than excellent throws with his right hand. But that's when Ted reveals that he's not right handed and hits a bullseye with his left.

And while Ted is hustling his opponent, he says, "Guys have been underestimating me my entire life." But he continues that he'd come to realize that their underestimating him had nothing to do with him, but rather them. "They had failed," says Ted, "to practice that wisdom - be curious, not judgmental."

And just before he clenches the win, Ted says that If they were curious, they would have known that he played darts every Sunday with his father from age 10 until he was [00:02:00] 16, when his father passed away.

It's one of the great moments of television, this poignant moment of character development, granting insight that reveals new depth, new dimensions. This fundamental posture, to be curious, not judgmental, allows us to ask good questions and thereby get a glimpse into the fascinating journeys which have led another to become the person they are.

We try to do this in some way with all of our guests, but our interview today is an especially such poignant moment. You may think you know Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times best-selling author of Outliers, The Tipping Point, Blink. Host of the wildly popular podcast, Revisionist History. And when I first began to prepare for my time with Malcolm, I was first drawn into curiosity about the stories Malcolm tells so well.

But then I began to note the tendencies and habits and traits Malcolm exhibits in his storytelling, and that made me curious about why Malcolm is... Malcolm. How his family's inability to explain things made him want to explain things. How his dad taking him to a Mennonite [00:03:00] barn raising as a kid influenced what he thought was possible. And what regrets he may or may not have, including a year of Freudian therapy three times a week in New York City.

Today, our conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, taped in front of a small audience in Nashville, days before our annual Thanksgiving show at Nashville's Schermerhorn Symphony Hall, where Malcolm headlined.

Enjoy.

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, Canadian journalist and author. He's been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1996, wrote for the Washington Post for 10 years. Malcolm has published seven books, with at least five New York Times bestsellers. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011, and he is the host of the podcast Revisionist History.

Please make welcome Malcolm Gladwell.

Welcome to Nashville again!

Good to have you back, here in Music City. [00:04:00]

I understand that you've at least had a number of entertaining episodes. Certainly, those of us who've listened to your podcast a good bit know of fascinating conversations with fascinating Nashvillians. But you recently, like today, told me a very entertaining story about a Nashville experience that you once had that seems classic Nashville to me.

And you were running.

Yeah.

It's... I think it's July. It's probably 90 some odd, super humid. Still, the perfect Nashville story.

Which I can do.

So I go off and I climb that big road, I'm going around Percy Warner Park, and it's a little late, it starts to get a little dark, but I think, I'm fine... but I get lost. Not just mildly lost, like completely, a hundred percent, I have no idea where I am. I can't see any lights. I don't know what I'm going to do.

So I, I'm drenched in sweat. And I'm just wearing a pair of shorts. And I stand by the side of the road and I hitchhike.

Big, beefy guys in like, Ford F-150s, don't stop. Take one look at me and just not, no part of it.

Finally, a girl. And I say a girl because she was probably in her early twenties. A little battered Honda Accord. Stops, rolled down the window. "Can I help you, sir?"

And I said, first of all, you should not be picking me up. Are you nuts? Like, what are you [00:06:00] doing? It's like, strange dude in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. I get in and I said, "Why did you do that?"

And she said, "Well, I was coming from Bible study. And today we studied the story of the Good Samaritan."

Well, I'm a strong believer in the idea that we have multiple identities, and that we have the right to rank them in the order that we choose. One of the things that irritates me about the world is that the world sometimes chooses for you how to rank your own identities.

I always think of my mom, who, to give you, for example, my mom is a Black woman, a Jamaican, a woman, a Christian, a therapist, a writer, a mother, and a wife, and a Canadian.

I mean, I could keep going. I would say that over the course of her life, the way she ranks all of those identities has changed. And I think it constantly changes. And I think she-- she's 92. I think they may change again.

But like, the world, you know, [00:08:00] various people in the world would look at her and say, she, maybe she's number one, a Black woman, and she would say, I don't know, I might've been number one, a Black woman when I was 23 and in England for the first time and being treated like, you know, less than a, than a full person, but I don't, haven't been treated that way in 30 years, why should I foreground that identity?

Um, anyway, I-- that idea that there are many parts of us, And we get to choose which part is most important is, I think that's what I picked up from all of those kind of shifting situations, environments, when I was a kid.

So two follow up questions on that.

One, will you unpack more why that sharply irritates you?

Well, because it diminishes... when we do that to people, we diminish their humanity. And we presume to understand them, when in fact we don't. [00:09:00]

And, so I had-- Did I tell you that I got in trouble? I'm part of a company, and we have these company meetings every now and again. I did an 'Ask Me Anything' with the staff. And, someone's asked in a relatively hostile way, did I think the company was sufficiently diverse?

And I said two things in response. One is, "Don't I count?" And the second thing I said, well, I said to the whole staff, "If any of you is a Republican, raise your hand." And no one did. And I said, "Well, if we're going to call ourselves a diverse company, shouldn't we have some Republicans?"

Now, this was treated like I had said some terrible thing. I'm serious! I mean, my definition of diversity encompasses a dozen different dimensions of human complexity. And I think, uh, I actually value diversity very-- I take it very seriously. And the book I'm writing right now has a lot about [00:10:00] diversity.

But my definition of diversity is broad. If I had my way, we would have more of every kind of person, and we would be a richer place for it. And I object to a definition of diversity that's super narrow. And that's why this is a kind of top of mind issue for me.

So, back to your childhood, and you said that you think that that experience allowed you to begin to pay attention to multiplicity of identities and the possibility of ranking those.

When you look back at that young Malcolm, what were some of the key identities for him at that time, being raised in Canada?

Well... so, I'll tell you another story.

My dad, uh, who passed, sadly, a few years ago, but who was a marvelously independent minded man. He had a big beard, he was a mathematician, and he always dressed in a suit and a tie... [00:11:00] even when he was gardening, which was his favorite thing.

But he, um--

He was an Englishman. Took it very seriously. But he loved... we lived in this Mennonite community. He loved the Mennonites and was-- sort of thought everything they did was kind of fascinating.

And they used to have barn raisings. When a barn burned down, they would all gather. These are mostly conservative Mennonites, so people who drove horses and buggies. They would all gather, you know, they would get together, like the next weekend, hundreds of them would descend on that farm, and they would rebuild the barn in essentially a day, right? Famous barn raising.

My dad decided, when I was a kid, once, that he would attend a barn raising. So, if you can imagine, we drove, you know, off into the middle of the countryside in our, in a Volvo, of course.

No, he's a Presbyterian with a big beard and an English accent. And wearing a suit and tie.

So we get in our Volvo. And he shows up, and everyone else, these Mennonites are clean shaven, and they're all wearing black [00:12:00] cloth garments, and they have their horses and buggies out front, and they all go to the same church, and they all know each other. And this Englishman with a PhD in advanced mathematics shows up in his Volvo with his three sons in tow and announces he'd like to join, right?

Now, they, they were fine with it. They gave him stuff to do and blah, blah, blah. But my point is, my dad was the kind of person who... it never occurred to him that that was a socially awkward thing to do. It just didn't occur to him. He was like, I'm your neighbor. I live down the road. I know some of you. I love farming. He wanted to be a farmer.

I mean, there was no part of him-- I mean, you know, he believed in the same God. God-- what does the Bible say? It says help your neighbor. So, he was there, right? That's the sort of, that's what I grew up with.

Now, would I do that? Probably not. But it's incredibly powerful influence on you to have as a father [00:13:00] someone who does that, without even thinking about it.

I mean, he never even discussed it with us. He's just like, we're going, get in. And came back and thought it was like the best experience. So...

I was. I would... my father would take me, take me out of school, and take me to university and just deposit me in the library. And it was the happiest... it's like, those are my happiest childhood memories, are playing hooky.

It wasn't hooky. What do you call it when you... it's being done with your parents consent. I don't know what that is, but it was parental hooky that we played, and he-- I would just wander around the university library, but you know, I'd be 10 or 11--

Oh, that was later. My mom, then, became deeply complicit in my [00:14:00] truancy.

She understood that I was going to seek to rebel as a teenager. And so she decided what she would do is just anticipate it and meet me there. So she, at one point when she saw that I wasn't that interested in going to school, she would write notes - "Malcolm is sick today and can't attend school," and leave the date blank and just give me a bunch of them.

If I were to think of one or two words in thinking about the kind of work you do, I think curiosity would be certainly high on the list.

Where do you see that coming from your childhood?

Well, my... I'm going to talk about my dad again.

He was... [00:15:00] deep-- I realized, it took me a long time to realize this was unusual in someone, but in his obituary, I wrote that he considered himself an expert in only three things: mathematics, gardening, and the Bible. And on everything else, he was open to suggestion.

And that was really his position, that-- he just assumed, if he met someone, that they knew more than he did on their subjects of chosen, of choice, and that he should just ask questions, and learn. And my whole childhood was spent listening to my father meet random strangers, figure out what, what areas they knew more about than he did, and him asking them questions.

I thought that was normal. I discovered later that that's not normal, but... So, I had a kind of model of this kind of extreme-- and a lot of it was grounded in, he had no insecurities [00:16:00] about declaring himself ignorant in an area.

He didn't have a problem with that. It's like, oh, I don't know anything about that, right?

Even on things he knew a lot about. If he met a theologian, he wouldn't even pretend to know more about them than the Bible. Or gardening, if he thought that you know more about delphiniums than he did, all ears, let's go. It's a kind of extreme version of curiosity. Again, I don't think I can match that, but it's a really powerful model to be given as a kid.

Oh, I do think, I agree, I would agree to that. I would think it's impossible without having... it's odd though. So, there's two parts of it.

One is humility, that you don't presume that you know things you don't know. But you also have to have a lot of self confidence, because you have to be completely [00:17:00] indifferent to the consequences of letting the world know about what you don't know. You have to not care, right? And my dad was a supremely self confident person.

So that allowed him, I think, to, to kind of expose himself in this way, as, as being-- you know, he didn't have any kind of hang up. Most people, the real reason people aren't curious, I think, is not so much that they lack humility, but that they lack confidence. And they're not, they're not willing to kind of show themselves to the world as not knowing things.

You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Malcolm Gladwell.

I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.

Recently, for example, I received a lovely email from Anna [00:18:00] Wildey, writing in from New Zealand. Retired teacher of literacy. Miss Wildey, it's so very nice to have you joining us.

You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, and a full transcript.

We would be most delighted if you'd tell your friends about No Small Endeavor and invite them to join us on the podcast, because it helps extend the reach of the beauty, truth, and goodness we are seeking to sow in the world.

Also, Malcolm joined us for our big end of year blowout show at the Schermerhorn Symphony Hall. We will be releasing those interview segments on NSE+. If you're not a subscriber to NSE+, you can do so by going to our website at nosmallendeavor.com and click 'subscribe.'

Coming up, Malcolm and I discuss tactics for explaining things to people, the moral and practical importance of storytelling, and his rather, [laughs] strong opinions on Ivy League schools...

Okay.

There are two things. So, my family's divided down the middle. There's my mom and me on one side and then there's everybody else. My brothers and my father.

My father and my brothers were incapable of explaining things. So my father would just go, "Um..." And then, my brother, Jeff, who I love dearly, just would talk endlessly and not get anywhere. And as a kid, this drove me crazy.

So, [00:20:00] you know how you're constantly playing games as a kid, and there's always a moment where you've got to teach your cousin how to play hearts.

And so, my father would be incapable, and my brother would give this incredibly long explanation that would go nowhere, and then finally, in frustration, I would just say, "Okay, everyone shut up. This is how you play hearts."

And the mistakes people make in explaining things, this used to drive me-- I can remember, as like an 8-year-old, being driven crazy by this.

The thing you start with is, what is the point of the game? Start with that. The point of Monopoly is to amass as many properties as you can and put everyone else bankrupt, right? You don't explain the game before you explain the point, right? Like, and people would start with that, and I would read the Parker Brothers instructions, and I would say, why didn't you tell me what the point is in the first sentence?

This would drive me-- to this day, this drives me nuts. Explain it properly! Right?

So, I think that was where my career as a journalist was [00:21:00] born. I was like, I grew up in a household where 60% of the members of our house, my household, could not explain the simplest thing to anybody else.

Oh my god, don't even get me started.

Lee, you said we only have 90 minutes. I have just, I'm writing--

Okay. I'll tell you, uh... I just wrote, I'm writing a sequel to my first book, The Tipping Point. There is literally a chapter called, 'Why does Harvard have a women's rugby team?'

Which is 6,000 words of explanation for why the [00:22:00] school would do something that otherwise makes no sense. So, it's not that-- I'm fine with them having a club rugby team. They don't have a club, they have a varsity women's rugby team. And they go to like, New Zealand to recruit people for it. They got like, multiple coaches, they fly around the country, they destroy other teams by the score of like 105 to nothing. They have, like, a pro rugby team.

They introduced this in 2013. And they already, you know, Harvard already has more varsity sports than any other college in the world.

Oh yeah, by far. Ohio State doesn't even come close. Or Alabama. Harvard's way off there.

So I have a whole grand theory about why they're doing it, which I'm not going to go into because we don't have time.

But, my point is, yes, I am obsessed with even the smallest details. I have read stuff about, particularly Ivy League colleges, which I think are completely and utterly morally bankrupt, and should be shut down tomorrow, and the idea that Americans stand by--

Wait, you can't just [00:23:00] say that without asking a follow up.

What's the, what's the, what's the root of the moral bankruptcy?

Harvard is a school that educates, what, 1, 000 students max? And has an endowment of 45 billion, which is subsidized by the American taxpayers.

Can you think of a more absurd situation, where a handful of schools-- the total endowment of the Ivy League and Stanford is north of 100 billion dollars.

Collectively, they educate 100,000 students a year - a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, they're hoarding 120 billion dollars, getting tax benefits, all of which is subsidized by the American taxpayer. And further, the government's channeling, funneling all kinds of cash towards them, and it's absurd.

At the other end of the equation, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of students in this country [00:24:00] who are holding enormous amounts of debt because the schools that they went to couldn't afford to give them financial aid. Who would construct such a system? It makes no sense.

If you're gonna have 45 billion in the bank, the very least you should do is educate 100,000 students a year, at minimum. You should educate 10,000-- 10 times as many students as you do.

In Canada, where I come from, the most prestigious school in Canada is the University of Toronto. It has an undergraduate population of 70,000 students. As it should! Your, your most prestigious school should be your biggest school, right? Like, if you really do have the best faculty and the best facilities and the most money and the greatest reputation, you should try and help the maximum number of students.

This is like saying, if I were to build the greatest hospital in the South, and I said, "Lee, I'm going to open it in Nashville. It's going to be the greatest hospital in the world. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to let in a [00:25:00] hundred patients a year.

"You can bring in people on a stretcher, and 50 a day, have the ambulances line up, and then I will spend the next two weeks assessing them. And I will choose one for admittance to my elite cardiac center. And one for the neuro-- I'll take one, I'll have a neurosurgeon, and he'll do one operation a day, just to make sure it's the absolute top notch."

If we did, if they did that, we would think that's bananas, right? Yet, that's exactly the system we tolerate in American higher ed. It's preposterous.

And by the way-- I'm not done.

What do rich people in this country do? They look at that state of affairs, and they write increasingly large checks to the schools that already have the most money! That's even crazier, right? The marginal value of a dollar given to Harvard University is zero. There's literally nothing they can do with that. Like, they're [00:26:00] already, every base is already covered.

If you gave a million dollars to this college, I mean, we could talk all day about what that could do, what you would do with that. If you gave a million dollars to Harvard, you might as well just burn it in front of Harvard, in Harvard Square. It's just crazy.

Literally, not a, not a week goes past when some hedge fund guy doesn't write a check for 200 million dollars to Harvard University. And every time I see that, I just think, you are a moron. Right?

Well, I'm glad that we found something that you're passionate about.

I want to move to, um, moral philosophy just a second. And actually, I'll do a quick callback to something you said a moment ago about roles and multiplicity of identities, which is something that narrative theology and moral philosophy that takes narrative and story seriously talks about that a lot.

But it strikes me that, you know, since the Enlightenment, moral philosophy [00:27:00] typically has much more focused on rules and principles. Just tell us the right thing to do. Rules and principles.

But prior to the Enlightenment, a lot of ancient moral traditions, they focus very much more on story, because storytelling was fundamentally a morally formative practice in helping people think about their sense of self, about what they saw as beautiful and true and good.

And obviously this wasn't moralistic storytelling, but it was story as a moral practice. And it seems to me that that's the kind of storytelling you like to do. That is, that you're trying to tell stories that invite us to a different sense of self or a different way of seeing the world, that is then an invitation to be changed in some way.

Do you resonate with that or does that seem to be right?

Yeah. So, going back to that story I told about, my Nashville story.

So, does the girl stop if [00:28:00] at her Bible study they talked about how we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than us? That's one option. That's what they could have studied if they were just interested in rules and principles.

But they didn't. They studied a story, a very concrete story, about, you know, a member of a despised minority who goes out of his way, he disrupts his routine, and puts himself to a lot of trouble to help somebody he doesn't know, right? Very concrete story. It's in her head.

She's driving down a road, and what does she see? Someone in distress by the side of the road. And she has to put herself in some kind of jeopardy to stop and help. And she has that story in her head, so she does it. Like, that's what a story can do.

I don't think she stops if it's just an abstract thing. But, there was some kind of... in the specifics of the story of the Good Samaritan, there is [00:29:00] something really powerful, um, that moves people in a way that the abstract discussion does not.

Which is not to say the abstract discussion is without value.

But there's a particular power attached to the story that-- and I've always loved that.

And... I did this six part series on guns, this-- for Revisionist History this year. And the last episode, I went to the University of Chicago and I was interviewing someone there for-- and while I was there, she said, "Oh, you should really talk to my colleague, Abdullah."

And so this-- totally random thing. And I went, "Oh, okay." And I go and meet this guy who's a ER doc at the University of Chicago. Grew up in the south side of Chicago. Black guy. Who chose to practice emergency medicine in the same neighborhood he grew up in, which is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country.

And he was describing the experience of, on any given day, he will see someone brought in on a stretcher who's been shot, who's someone he knew. And there's a moment [00:30:00] in the conversation where he talks about-- I asked him how many friends he's had who had been killed.

And he actually had this-- he said, "Do you mean, like, people I was close enough to that they were in my phone? Like, I'd been texting with them?" I go, "Yeah."

And he goes, "Fifteen."

Right? And the whole conversation is... and I had framed it in the-- the episode is framed by this comment that this, uh...

I had done, a couple of seasons ago, this whole thing about the Jesuits, thinking like a Jesuit. And this one Jesuit had said to me, "Sin is the failure to bother to care." and the whole episode is all about, what does it mean to bother to care?

Now, sin is the failure to bother to care, is the abstract rule. This guy, Abdullah Price's decision to forego a much easier, more lucrative life, practicing as an ER doc in a suburb someplace, to go back and practice in his own [00:31:00] neighborhood, and run the risk of this traumatic thing where it's kids he knows coming in, right? That's a story.

It's real, about his choices, and it's just emotionally moving, in-- and it makes that principle come to life, right?

We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, Malcolm's definition of happiness, and what quality he values the most in people.

I want to talk about happiness a second.

[00:32:00] So, in this kind of school of moral theory that I've raised here, happiness, defined a particular way, is seen as the point of life.

And I wanted to do a little short experiment here, and I wanted to read you a short passage from a Catholic theologian whose work I like, Paul Waddell. And I've used his book in a number of my ethics classes. It's a book called Happiness and the Christian Moral Life. And I want to see what you make of it.

So Waddell says this: "The trajectory of our lives can be read as an endless pursuit of whatever we think will satisfy us, content us, and fulfill us. All of that reveals what we believe will bring us happiness and satisfaction. The trouble, however, is that we are often confused and easily misled about what will really fulfill us."

Then, he's talking about Aquinas and Aristotle, he says: [00:33:00] "For Aquinas and Aristotle, happiness does not reside in having my wants and desires satisfied, unless I have learned to want and desire what is best."

Well, first of all, I like... it gives us a definition of the purpose of a religious life that's different. That... it adds to our understanding of that. And I like the idea that, I love any kind of notion that says that our, that left to our own devices, we often get things wrong.

I like that. That's an important reminder. We just willy-nilly follow what's in our gut, as often as not screw up. Right?

I, my book Blink, which was misinterpreted as a book celebrating gut instincts, when in fact it was the opposite, was about this. Like, unless you're an expert, your instincts lead you astray. [00:34:00] You need to educate them in some way.

And the idea that one of those civilizing institutions in life is the church is a really good one. That's like a-- I love the way he phrased it.

Yeah. I mean, I don't... yes, I do think I'm happy. It's funny, I never ask myself that question.

That comes to mind in very, very discrete moments. So, I'm much more comfortable saying, "I was happy doing X," or, "I was happy when...." Do you know what I mean?

I fixed a problem in a chapter I was working on this morning in a little coffee shop in Nashville. I was happy when I realized I'd fixed it. Or, I will go running this afternoon after we do this. I will be happy in the middle of that running.

That's how I like to think about happiness.

Uh, I don't-- do I have... I must have regrets. I have a ton of-- I suppose I have a lot. But they're not, like... the problem is that very often the mistakes you made or the failures you have turn out to be so important in educating you and... that in the end you don't think of them as mistakes anymore. D'you know what I mean?

Like, so I do firmly believe that you learn way more from your failures than you do from your successes. I don't think success teaches you much at all. The only thing that prods you to dig deeper is when something doesn't work, or when something fails in the--

So, after a lifetime of that, can you really look on your failures as being... can you classify them as regret, as regrettable? They're not regrettable, because I came out [00:36:00] different than I--

I get confused by that question because I don't know how to categorize.... Like, I-- There was a period in my life where I spent a huge amount of time in Freudian therapy. Right? Three days a week.

I was receiving it.

I was in Manhattan! I was new to Manhattan. I was like, alright, that's what they do here. So, and I had a job that wasn't that demanding. You can't have a demanding job.

Have a demanding job and be in three days a week Freudian therapy. Because it just wipes out the whole day, right?

There's something that happens, by the way... So I have this whole thing in my new book, it's top of mind, I have this whole thing on the magic number three. Three is a magic number.

So, you do one day a week, it's like, fine, whatever. Lots of people do one day a week. You do two, it's like a lot. You do three, it completely takes over your life.

Nothing, everything else fades into insignificance. You are someone who does therapy. That's what your self definition is.

By the way, astounding how it [00:37:00] takes over your life. I've never been through anything equivalent to this.

I probably was in three days a week for... I don't even remember. Probably was a year.

It was traumatic. It was like... couldn't function. Stopped being productive at work. Had the most horrendous nightmares. Everything-- I was, my unconscious, because all the Freudians care about is your unconscious, my unconscious basically took over my life for a year. It was a, a massive amount of time, and a massive amount of money was spent on this. It's the lost year in my life.

[Lee laughs]

So, you might say, was that a regret? No, because actually... I didn't, it didn't solve any of my problems, but it was, in retrospect, a failure that was deeply fascinating.

Yeah.

Well, and that reminds me of you reframing the notion of the regrettable, that another theologian I've learned a lot from and is now a friend, Stanley Hauerwas, and when he talks about this way of thinking about our lives.

I once heard him do a lecture where he was talking, I don't remember who it was, but it was a, it was a man who went to Oxford, got trained in literature, and was a poet. But then, after some time, he decided he wanted to go back home and be a shepherd. And so he was a shepherd. And he was a shepherd who would write poetry.

And at some point, on into his life, near the end [00:39:00] of his life, he wrote this essay, in which he examined the ups and downs of his life. And then he came to the conclusion: this is my life, I want no other.

And then Hauerwas said, "That's the meaning of a happy life."

My, my friend Bruce has this wonderful corollary to that. He had problems with jealousy, which he was open about. And he cured his problems with jealousy by saying, you can no longer be envious of a piece of someone's life. You have to want the whole life.

So you say, okay, I wish I looked like Brad Pitt. You're a little envious of Brad Pitt. He's a handsome dude. Then you have to say, no, no, no, no, no. You can't just have his looks. You gotta have his whole life. You really want his whole life? No, you don't want his whole life.

You want Angelina Jolie, like, you know, like, filing suits against you, [00:40:00] and like, you can't, you can't get, you can't go to the store and get, like, a pint of milk, 'cause you'll be mobbed. I mean, you're a prisoner, right? It's a horrendous life! Right? And you think about it, you're living in some grotesque house in L. A., and you can't go out without, some guy's got to pull up in a Suburban to take you any-- you know, a black Suburban with tinted windows, so you can, you know, go to the movies. I mean, you don't want it, right?

And if you go down the list, you realize you actually don't want anyone's life except your own. It's really, really a useful, uh--

That is very useful, yeah.

It's striking how timid you are about saying what you think.

[Audience laughs]

Okay, I want to shift, I want to shift the conversation. Another, another phrase that I know I've heard you say repeatedly is, "a weeper."

Which I would imagine a lot of people in Nashville listened to. It revolves around [00:41:00] Nashville and country music.

And it's woven together with all these beautiful layers of storytelling about Bobby Braddock, famed Nashville songwriter who you're calling the King of Tears because he's written all of these amazing songs that are just 'weepers.' And you're especially weaving it together around, uh, his song, 'He Stopped Loving Her Today,' which George Jones, you know, made famous.

Don't get-- that's my story. I can't believe you did that! I would

never do that to one of your stories.

So I'm down on the floor, scraping baseboards, getting ready for the painters. And you come to this climactic moment of, you know, recounting George Jones' funeral.

And there I am, down on my hands and knees, sobbing, as Vince Gill, himself, breaks down at George Jones' funeral, and cannot get himself through his own song, 'Go Rest High.'

And so, I'm sitting there, you know, sobbing, tears running down my face. And then you say something like, "And if you're not crying, there's nothing I can do for you."

"I can't help you."

So what's behind your fascination with weepers?

Well, it's too easy to make someone laugh. People were just laughing now, right? Super easy.

Making someone cry? So, under what circ*mstances could I make some portion of you right now cry? Really hard. Right? So, I'm naturally attracted to the more difficult of the narrative tasks.

So what do you think is the line between, kind of, [00:43:00] manipulative or mawkish sentimentality on one side, and emotion that somehow is speaking to the fullness or the richness of life or the possibilities of living life well?

What's, what's, what's that--

Well, it's simple. It's whether it's-- you know, there are Hall-- there are Hallmark commercials that can get you a little weepy. But that's not real, you know that. And then you, then you stop.

And then, I remember there was a, a famous... I say famous, famous to me. It was a Google, an ad for Google, for Google chat or something.

It was a TV commercial. And it's, you see the daughter who's just gone off to college, and you see the dad who's chatting with her. And it's like the dad's typing in the chat line, "I miss you so much," you know, blah, blah, blah. "It's been," and then you realize, you know, "it's been so long since mom left us," or something. And you realize she's his only daughter, [00:44:00] his wife, the mom, has died.

And as he's typing that thing about mom to her on Google Chat, the cursor slows down, so you realize he's choking up, right? It's insanely manipulative. If I showed it to you right now, we're all in tears. But that's not real, right? I want it real.

They're like... you think about them, and you, you, you ask questions about your own life. Like, would I have done that? Should I be doing that? Why am I not doing that? Right? Why am I not the Good Samaritan? Like, that's, that's the kind of story that's important and powerful.

I've got one last question. It may be one that's easy for you to dismiss, but let me ask you to dig for a potential answer to it.

What is there about Malcolm Gladwell that you've not given us any glimpse of that you would be happy for people to get a glimpse [00:45:00] of?

That's a good question.

I think a lot about work and effort. And how important effort is to me, in my own life and in my estimations of others. That what I want to see from myself and from the people around me is, I want to see some level of commitment. And that what I, as I get older, what I'm-- I'm going to sound very, very 19th century when I say this. I've become less and less tolerant of idleness.

I mean that in a very, very kind of specific way, and that is, you have to care about something. I don't care what it is. You have to care about something, and you have to make a sacrifice in pursuit of that thing you care about. And you have to try, right? And if you're not [00:46:00] caring, putting some effort towards something and making a commitment to it, then I, honestly, I don't have any way to relate to you anymore.

I don't, I can't... I don't have room in my life for people who aren't, who don't have a connection to whatever it is. I don't, like I said, I don't care, I don't really care what it is. I want someone to find something that they apply themselves to, because if you're not doing that, I don't understand why you're here, right?

I don't think we were put here to twiddle our thumbs. I just don't... I wouldn't have said that at 25, because at 25 I think I was, in some sense, twiddling my thumbs. I look back on that with a little bit of horror. I, I, you know, in my twenties, I did what people in their twenties do. I, you know, I partied a lot and I would sleep in until one o'clock on a Sunday. And I would-- I don't understand that anymore. I, I don't know.

I, I'm not sure this is... I'm not sure this feeling I have is correct. I worry that it's ungenerous and [00:47:00] whatever. And... but it just is. It's just like, that's what I, when I think about the people I surround myself with now, I've kept the people who care about something, and I have not kept the people who I think don't.

Like I said, I don't know whether that's fair, but it just is, you know?

Well, we thank you for the way that you have cared, and that you have sought to make a contribution, and we're grateful for that and grateful for your presence today. Thankful for you sharing your real self with us today.

Please show your thanks to Malcolm Gladwell.

[Audience applauds]

[00:48:00] You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Malcolm Gladwell - journalist, New York Times best-selling author of multiple books, and host of the podcast Revisionist History.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.

And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.

Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.

Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.

No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, [00:49:00] LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.