Malcolm Gladwell ON: How To Communicate Effectively During Overwhelming Situations & Mistakes You Make Reading People

You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. Jay Shetty’s favorite author is Malcom Gladwell. On this episode of On Purpose, the teacher and author chats with fellow book lover, Shetty, about communication, the power of humanity and what freedom looks like. Are you looking for fresh insight into events of the past or just a calm voice of wisdom for these uncertain days? Gladwell offers both. Malcolm shares deep thoughts with Jay about what it means to be human & how to listen effectively. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:29Jay Shetty?

  AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose.

• 2:16Jay Shetty?

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• 3:09Speaker 01

  Those two things exist inside of me. And my attempt to make sense of that apparent contradiction is what makes me a writer. You know, what makes me someone I think that other people want to read. And I don't, there's no, I feel under no compulsion to resolve that tension. Rather, the opposite, I should explore that tension.

• 3:39Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back to listen, learn, and grow. And I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out, and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eightrulesoflove.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book.

• 4:20Jay Shetty?

  And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules. Go to jschettytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. Now, it's not every week that you get to sit down with someone who's inspired you since your teens, and someone's books that really form so much of your decision-making, your psychology growing up. And someone's books who've had such a deep impact in my life that I know I've recommended a ton of them to each and every single one of you. And so today's guest is none other than Malcolm Gladwell. He's a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the

• 5:04Jay Shetty?

  Dog Saw, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers, which we'll be diving in today. Now, he's been a staff writer for the New York Times since 1996, and Foreign Policy has three times named him one of their top global thinkers. And he's been named one of Times' 100 Most Influential People. He's a co-founder and president of Pushkin Industries. And Pushkin Industries is an audio content company that produces the podcast Revisionist History. If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend it, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood. I'm so excited to discuss how to be a better communicator and revisit some history today. Welcome to the show, Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, thank you for doing this.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Not at all. My pleasure.

• 5:48Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, it's honestly an honor to have you here. And I'm a fan of, I believe, Laurie Santos's podcast sits under your.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Oh, right. Yes. She is one of ours. Most definitely. Yeah.

• 6:00Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. And Laurie and I've spent some really quality time together. And she was actually a big part of helping me research for my book. And I'm a big fan of everything you're doing over there. But I wanted to start off by asking you about something. And I'm going to dive straight in here. But I've heard you say that when you visit the Lincoln Monument, you're always moved to tears. And I wanted to know, why is that?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. So many reasons. I mean, part of it is just the simplicity of, you know, the, if you read the words inscribed on the wall of the monument, it's, I've forgotten how many words. It's an absurd, it's this almost absurdly short speech, right? His most famous speech, "It's over in two minutes." I don't even know. And yet it manages to say everything it needs to be said about one of the most, one of the gravest and most... Important moments in American history. And that idea that you could communicate so powerfully about something so important

• 7:07Speaker 01

  in such a small number of words, I just find overwhelming. And it's such a beautiful sentiment as well. I don't know. Yeah, it's true. I didn't, I'd forgotten I'd said that, but it is true. I find that monument extraordinarily moving.

• 7:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, that's beautiful. One of my favorite thoughts that I believe is attributed to Albert Einstein is that if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:35Jay Shetty?

  And I think the art of communicating with few words in a poetic way is super powerful. I think one of the things that I find, and I've visited before, but you know, never been moved to tears, but when I think about that, I often feel more moved to tears even beyond words, but by people's behavior. And it's in a positive sense. It's almost like when you're in this space of someone who embodies those words, that can definitely be something that's been seen and brought me to tears. I don't know if you've ever experienced that or been in the space.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Well, you may be picking up on the fact that I am a little weepy. So I think I can be moved to tears by that as well. So I may get moved to tears more than I'm, you know, would care to admit. So, yes, those kinds of, I am hopeless. He's sentimental in many ways.

• 8:28Jay Shetty?

  Well, I can very much relate. Maybe that's why I love your book so much. I could definitely connect to that. I wanted to, Schmitz to the other side, and I've always heard you say that you love spy thrillers. And I wanted to ask you, what is it about spy thrillers that you love so much or that get your mind engaged?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. You know, it's a really good question. I read enormous numbers of mysteries and thrillers of all kinds. And, but my particular love is for the spy thriller. I think I've never Gotten over the kind of dark romance of the Cold War.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  I don't know if I have a good explanation for it. About espionage and people creeping around undercover and pretending to be something they aren't and layering lie upon lie and deception upon deception that I find just incredibly engrossing.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  But I'm a huge, I don't read, you know, I read serious nonfiction, but the fiction I read is always of this, you know, it's all this genre espionage and thriller fiction. I don't read anything serious. You won't catch me reading Proust. It's, you know, I'm reading, the most serious stuff I'm reading is probably Jeanne de Cary. I mean, the rest of it is the kind of books you buy in airports.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  It's just, I suppose it's the way that I relax.

• 9:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I want to dive into a ton of different areas today. One is definitely, as you can already tell, I really want to dive into your mind and some of the decisions you make in your life. I want to dive into your incredible book, Talking to Strangers, that we'll be putting a link to available for everyone to grab as well. And the third and final thing is I want to grab, dive into your podcast because I think it's fascinating and I've been a fan of that for a while too. But the first thing I want to ask you is, I love what you've said about us on how, what we do as human beings is exploit our contradictions. Can you elaborate on that? Because I think that that statement in and of itself is just so like,

• 10:38Jay Shetty?

  it's kind of like a mind bend, but at the same time, there's so much to unpack there. Let's unpack that together.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I always find that when you get to know someone or when you listen to someone, really listen, what you discover about them and then ultimately about yourself as well, is that we're full of contradiction and that...

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Being contradictory is the, one of the defining traits of being human.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  So, you know, I was just talking about how I'm incredibly sentimental and weepy. But I'm also, I'm the son of a mathematician. I am, at the same time, hyper rational. You know, do I think of those two things as being contradictory? Of course. But that's, that's me, you know? And in the same way, I can point to, you know, if I, I'm sure we could do the same kind of analysis of you. And I can do the same, I can say the same of nearly all of my friends as I get to know them. I understand what parts of their character are formally in conflict. But they're not actually in conflict. That what we do as human beings is we navigate our way around those kinds of things. We get pulled in one direction or another.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And we kind of split the difference. So we figure out, when do I want to be this and when do I want to be that? You know, another version of this is, in my case, it's more, there's all kinds of interesting dimensions to this. I am the son of, uh, my father is, was English. My mother is Jamaican. I am biracial. I belonged, had my foot in two very different heritages. And people ask me, well, which way do you identify? And the answer is, I don't. I'm both. And being both is, it's a contradiction, you know?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I see both sides of, when we, you know, I write, I've written a lot about racial issues in my books. And one of the reasons I'm drawn to them is, I see, I feel I see both sides of them. You know, I have a, there's a part of me that's white, that sometimes sees the world through the, through the lens of a privileged white man. And part of me is... Black and, you know, sympathizes with the other side of the equation very easily and readily and appreciates it. Those two things exist inside of me. And my attempt to make sense of that apparent contradiction is what makes me a writer,

• 13:16Speaker 01

  you know, what makes me someone I think that other people want to read. And I don't, there's no, I feel under no compulsion to resolve that tension, rather the opposite, I should explore that tension. And I, you know, so that's, that's what I meant by that statement. I think all of us at our best do that.

• 13:34Jay Shetty?

  It's actually extremely reaffirming to hear you say that. And to do the analysis on myself, as you mentioned, I obviously spent three years of my life living as a monk. And I spent my time, majority of it, in India. And now I'm in the world of media and I live in L.A. and I, I feel completely at home being a content creator and producer in so many ways. And I love embracing those polarities. Like, it excites me and it energizes me to tap into my monk mind and then my media mind and try and connect dots and see patterns where others see anomalies. And I've genuinely embraced that.

• 14:17Jay Shetty?

  And I often get asked the same question, that how can you still claim to have monk elements in your life when you live such an, in one sense, externally driven life? But to me, I don't see them even as transitions. I see them as, I love being a paradox. And, and I enjoy the paradoxical nature of how my mind can go between the two and find connections. And, and I've only seen that present me with more opportunities. And, and what you said there was like to engage with that, you know, to, to actually connect with that. But, but I feel like our minds like to simplify and box. And that's why we see contradiction as controversy, or we see it as a weakness, right?

• 15:02Jay Shetty?

  It's almost like what you just said is that if you are teary eyed and sentimental one moment and you're mathematical the other, it's almost like one of them is a weakness. Why is it that we have this propensity to judge a contradiction or a paradox or someone who embraces polarities as, as a weakness or a character flaw?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  There's a strain in the current climate which makes this worse, which is this idea we have now that we can reduce people's identity to something singular. So we say if someone, you know, we see it in the political realm, someone is a Trump supporter and we, and we believe when we say that, that every other fact about them ceases to be of significance. On the other side, we say there are lots of people, you know, there is a very active, I'll give an example, and I don't mean this in any way, in a derogatory way, but there is now, there has risen a real activism in recent years around the trans movement.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And these are people who define themselves by their sexuality in the public, in public debate. And my question to both of those, in both of those cases is, I accept that identity of yours, but I also want to know more. And I want to, I want to see all of you, because even the most ardent Trump supporter is much more than that. I, you know, I had a discussion with someone the other day who's a stepmother. And she was talking about how her identity as stepmother is really, really important to who she is. And every time she meets a stepmother, she's reminded of how in many cases, everything else pales in comparison to the complexities that come from being a step parent.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  When I meet people, trans people, I, the thing that strikes me is how there is a million other sides to them that I want to know, that are equally as important as their sexual identification. And I think we do them a disservice when we have a discussion about trans people in which all we do is talk about that aspect of their lives and neglect the other parts. It's a kind of a way in which we allow ourselves to pigeonhole and dehumanize people, is to reduce them to a single thing. Now, why do we want to reduce people to a single thing? Because, as you say, we have this weird desire to want to have this

• 17:30Speaker 01

  single, non-contradictory understanding of someone. It's crazy, you know, I was, I was trying to, I'm a big runner. Yes, yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. And I was talking to someone who's just started running. And I was trying to explain the fundamental contradiction of running. Because I observed her, she's my neighbor's wife. And I observed her running down the road. And I was like, she needs my help. And she was, she hadn't understood the contradiction of running, which was, you are exerting yourself and pushing yourself at the same time as you are required to be relaxed, right? And at peace. The only way to exert yourself is to be at peace.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And I saw her exerting herself and she wasn't relaxed. She was tense. And I said, I stopped her and said, you can't run that way. Right? You have to understand the fundamental contradiction of running. The only way to push yourself is to be so relaxed in your upper body that if I touch you, you should fall over. If I jostle you, you should fall over. That's how relaxed you should be. She didn't, she didn't get, she hadn't gone that far, right? She hadn't to understand that fact. That's true in so many different aspects of our life. Um, that's a very long-winded way of answering that question.

• 18:47Jay Shetty?

  No, no, that's, that's great. That's so true. It's, it's, it's funny. I literally said that to someone about meditation two days ago. So I've been meditating for a long time. And it was the same thing around how so much of meditation is where people are forcing themselves to concentrate or forcing themselves to meditate or to empty their mind or whatever it may be that they're attempting or aspiring to do. And so often it's actually the exact opposite is that the point of focusing is to let go so that you can allow yourself to be more present and be more aware. Whereas we're trying to force ourselves in a direction which, which so aligns to running. And, and I know I've heard a lot of people describe running as a meditative state, uh, for, for some people at least.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:29Jay Shetty?

  No, it's, it's not a long-winded way. It's, it's, uh, very connected to, to some things I can see, I guess. I guess, yeah, for me, it's always just, how do we, or, or is there a way of training our minds to entertain and engage in opposing ideas without feeling the pressure to choose or define ourselves by them? Is there a method that we can expand our minds so that we can have both of these ideas coexisting without needing either of them to reflect the whole of us or the truth in us?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think of that as, that's my definition of what, um, Tolerances. Hmm. What does it mean to be accepting and tolerant of others? And I think it is allowing their, giving them room for their contradiction.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  So allowing them to be, I mean, I was talking about the trans, you know, the trans movement and the trans identity, allowing someone to be that and whatever else they choose to be, right? If they also want to be a Republican and they also want to be a rocket scientist and they also want to be a stepmom, you know, to be whatever they want, that's, to me, that's what, um, tolerant, and accepting the fact that those may be a group of identities and responsibilities and roles that we may be unfamiliar with, that may trouble us, that may discomfort us, that may strike us as weird. It's our job to get over that.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  That's what it means to be a tolerant person, is to kind of embrace people and their complexity. I think that's the, um, and I'm actually struck, one of the big differences between my generation and yours, I'm a generation older than you, and your generation and the one below you, is I, I am struck when I meet young people at how much better they are at navigating or accepting those kinds of differences than I was at that age. I think a lot of our issues in this society are a holdover from a much kind of more rigid

• 21:45Speaker 01

  way of appreciating people that comes from earlier generations. You know, the, in my company, the, I'm amazed, the 25-year-olds at Pushkin, my audio company, our audio company, they sometimes blow me away. They're just so much, it's so much easier for them to kind of wrap their, you know, to accept people in all of their, um, you know, glorious contradiction. Um, it's harder, it's harder for someone of my age.

• 22:17Jay Shetty?

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• 23:01Jay Shetty?

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• 23:46Jay Shetty?

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• 24:30Jay Shetty?

  That's a great definition of tolerance. Tolerance is a word that I don't hear that often, apart from in certain spiritual circles and traditions, but that's definitely a great definition for tolerance. And I really think that it is truly allowing people to... When we say that we want to live in a world where people can be authentically who they are and express every part of them, it demands what you just said, because without that, we're almost trying to place them in just another box and a new set of boxes that we're creating. So, no, that's refreshing to hear. It's very refreshing to hear. I want to dive into talking about the book, Talking to Strangers, because what I find

• 25:12Jay Shetty?

  fascinating is you wrote this book before everything happened. And it almost, when I say everything happened, I mean everything that's happened in 2020. And it almost seems like it's been written perfectly for this time in so many ways. There's so much about the book. I remember first coming across it when it was first released, and I think I missed an opportunity to interview you at Facebook in New York briefly. And I was thinking, when will I get a chance to interview you? But it almost feels like this is an even better time, because there's just, these questions have become so much more compelling and in front of mind. I wanted to ask you to start with, because it's called Talking to Strangers, how do you define, or how can people define who a stranger is in their life?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  A stranger is just, I think, anyone who is not a member of your intimate circle. So, I don't have trouble, I mean, we all have some trouble communicating with our loved ones, but we have enormous advantages when it comes to communicating with loved ones. And in many ways, as human beings, we're built to communicate effectively with those in our intimate circle. That's how we evolved as a species, when we have context, when we understand people's... I remember when my dad and I used to be able to, we spoke in this weird language where he would start a sentence and I would know exactly what he meant, and he wouldn't have to finish it.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  And, you know, he could do the same with me, and we would literally talk in two-word sentences. And that's the, that is the beauty of intimacy, right? My mind was structured like his. We had, we shared the same world. And I knew what he was getting at, and he knew what I was getting at. You don't have that luxury with someone outside your circle. And so this book is all about what happens when the tools that we were given by evolution to deal with our intimates are used on strangers. And the answer is they fail, not all the time, but often. And I wanted to kind of navigate that failure and try and figure out, well, what, what should

• 27:19Speaker 01

  we do then if these, these time-tested strategies for communicating with others no longer work? Because what the weird thing is, you know, and I talk about this in the book. The idea that we would have regular conversations with people we don't know is such a modern notion. Like, until 100 years ago, or 150 years ago, the odds that I would be having a conversation with you were zero, right? Zero. I would never have had a conversation with someone of your background. You'd never have a conversation with someone of my background. Wouldn't have happened. Like, you know, so it's like, and so if you think about that, are the, in a very, very

• 28:03Speaker 01

  short period of time, we've been asked to do something as human beings that we never had to do before. And I began talking to strangers with this, an account of one of the most high-profile of the encounters between African-Americans and police, the Sandra Bland incident in Texas, where a young black woman is pulled over by a Texas, a white Texas cop, and she ends up hanging herself in her cell a few days later. But what's interesting about that, interesting, what's singular about that encounter is...

• 28:38Speaker 01

  For most of us, the idea, like I grew up in a small town. If I was pulled over by a police officer, I knew the police officer and he knew me. And he knew my parents and I knew his kids. And I went to, you know, the cop in my small town growing up, he went to my church. The odds that, so the conversation between if I was doing something I shouldn't be doing and he pulled me over, he would say Malcolm, first thing, first thing he would say was, Malcolm, what are you doing? And then he would say, do I have to call your parents? Right? It's a totally different conversation when you know the person and they're from your community and he would know whether I was a bad kid or a good kid or a, did I have

• 29:22Speaker 01

  a, did he pull me over three times before for drinking or not? Or was I a good kid who just did something stupid? In the case of that officer and Sandra Bland, he doesn't know anything about her and she doesn't know anything about him. And that requires of him principally, a wholly different set of behaviors and strategies. All of a sudden, what things he's holding in his head and what assumptions he's using to understand her and what biases he's carrying are super consequential. And that's what I was trying to get at in the book.

• 29:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and, and of course, he completely misread in that situation. There was.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  He botches it, yeah.

• 30:02Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. What are those things that we then are, what are like the biggest pitfalls in our assumptions and biases when we're first meeting a stranger? Where is it that we naturally go wrong? Because in the example you gave of speaking and communicating with your father, it's almost like you're on the same algorithm and the Google auto fills there. And you know, it's, it's like Google reading your mind and knows what you've typed in or what most people type in. And sometimes I think we think we can do that, like we almost have, I feel like, and maybe it's just me, but I feel like we have an intuition where we sometimes feel like just by meeting someone, we know whether they're right for us to marry, date, do business

• 30:44Jay Shetty?

  with, collaborate with, like we almost try and, we almost trust ourselves enough to figure that out in one meeting.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:52Jay Shetty?

  But, but in this book, you're almost telling us that it's, it's not that easy. We're, we're often making mistakes. What are those key mistakes?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the most, the three I talk about, but.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  The one, I'll start with the second that I talk about, and it's this, what I call the illusion of transparency. And that is this, um, uh, this idea that, what can I tell about you from observing your facial expressions, your body language, um, how you carry yourself and hold yourself? We, as human beings, place a great deal of emphasis on that kind of evidence. We use that evidence to send people to jail, to judge guilt or innocence, to figure out whether someone likes us or doesn't like us. And if you ask us, we're pretty confident in the judgments that we make based on that kind of evidence.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And, but the truth is, we're terrible at decoding people's emotional states from observing their, the outward manifestations of those states. I cannot look at you right now, Jay. Observe your facial expressions and have the slightest clue what you're thinking. You could be, you could think, I can't believe this guy. He's such a moron. You could be thinking, this is so much fun. You could be thinking about what you're gonna have for dinner tonight. I have no idea, right? I can certainly try. I am looking at your face right now. And I'm, you know, some part of my brain is saying, okay, is he interested, is he not? I think he is. I'm drawing all kinds of conclusions. Um, but if I am completely honest,

• 32:28Speaker 01

  I have to own up to the fact, admit to myself, that almost all of those conclusions are false. Or at least, I have, I'll put it better. I have no way of knowing whether my conclusions are true. Right? Um, so that's a, if it's my, if you're my dad and I've known you for my entire life, I'm, I'm not bad at making sense. I know that when my father is, looks a little puzzled and perplexed, it's not that he's angry at anyone, it's just that he's daydreaming. Or I know that when he hems and haws about something, it's not that he can't make up his mind, it's because he's just weirdly inarticulate sometimes, right? I know that about my dad. I don't know that about you.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Right? And until I've spent all that time with you, I can't be drawing conclusions from that kind of stuff. And we, it is astounding how many mistakes we make because of this simple assumption that we think we, you know, what's the whole job interview based on? You meet someone, you ask them a bunch of questions, and mostly what you're doing is you're looking at their body language, and you're looking at their facial expressions, and you're trying to decide, ah, this is a nice person? Is this an honest person? You can't tell that from looking at them, right?

• 33:42Jay Shetty?

  Right?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Right? So it's like, that's a kind of, that's a big thing that I explored in the book, and that's what happened in the case of Sandra Bland. The cop observes her behavior, and he thinks that she's behaving in a way that is suspicious and dangerous, is the furthest thing from dangerous, and she's not behaving suspiciously. She's upset. She's mad because she got pulled over for no reason, and he doesn't understand that. He confuses, you know, her, uh, being upset with her being dangerous. Those could not be more different, right? That is a, if you're a police officer about to make a consequential judgment about

• 34:24Speaker 01

  how to deal with someone, if you confuse those two emotional states, you're making a huge error.

• 34:30Jay Shetty?

  And I guess in that situation, of course, the, the police officer or someone in that role has the pressure of feeling, or there's a feeling of a pressure to make a decision in a short period of time. But in, in some areas of our life, we don't really have that. We almost place a false pressure on ourselves, because we don't really have a window to decide. Just with the hiring example, I was recently reading a, a leadership and recruitment book, and it, there was, there was a theme in it that was called, uh, hire slow, fire fast. And, and it was just talking about, like, the, the hiring process needs to be much slower, because what we usually do is hire fast and fire slow. And so it's saying that there needs to be that shift, but we almost put a pressure on ourselves of like,

• 35:13Jay Shetty?

  but if I don't know if he or she's the one in this meeting, then I'm going to be single forever, or whatever it is. So is it time? Is it more interactions? Is it, what, what is that, that's, that's going to allow us to improve that?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Well, time, I mean, time's obviously a big part of this. And funnily enough, you know, in the wake of the George Floyd case, a lot of, there was a lot of really interesting things that I, I mean, I listened to a number of people who've studied law enforcement, law enforcement in the United States. And one of the most interesting thing I heard was there are an awful lot of police departments in this country that place very strict time limits on officers in, when they're dealing, when they're out dealing with the public. You are required to wrap up your encounter in a given amount of time. And you are applauded and rewarded when you deal with people quickly and you are penalized when you're slow.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  That's crazy, right? You can't do that. Similarly with doctors, we make doctors, you know, insurance companies make doctors. They give them clear incentives to be as quickly, to deal with patients as quickly as possible, to the point where doctors feel like they're on an assembly line. That's also, that's a way to create misunderstanding and mistakes, right? You cannot speed up some of these encounters. So time's a big part of it. A lot, another big part of that is empathy, is you need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone else for a moment. And that is both, in order to do that, you need to, you need both more information about that person, but you also need to be trained in the capacity

• 36:58Speaker 01

  of, of sitting outside your own perspective. And, you know, I can't believe I'm saying this to someone who spent time as a monk. I mean, a lot of what you do when you are in that environment and when you do things like meditate, is you train yourself to do that kind of thing, right? To, to step outside your own consciousness. And, you know, a police officer has to be, in a way, a, a, a social worker, a psychologist. And all of us have to play that role. And that, that requires, that's a real act of humility to do that, to set aside your own feelings and instead ask the question, what would I be thinking if I was in this person's shoes?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  And what are the range of possible reasons why this person is behaving the way they are?

• 37:48Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and, and today we have Such an incredible ability to do that because like you said, a hundred years ago, a hundred fifty years ago, we wouldn't be talking and and people wouldn't be listening to this or wouldn't have the opportunity to listen to this. And because of that, we're today exposed to more ideas, more cultures, more backgrounds, more walks of life, which means our compassion and empathy should actually be increasing because we have the ability to hold more knowledge and depth about a number of backgrounds and walks of life, which we wouldn't have had before, which naturally closes our mind. But it seems like sometimes the more exposed we get, the more judgmental we can become too

• 38:30Jay Shetty?

  because of the differences. It's almost like you said before, like a hundred, a hundred fifty years ago, or the town you grew up in where your police officer knew your name, which is which is insane for me to think about. I was born and raised in London. That was definitely not the case. But from going from that where you feel like you know everyone, you trust everyone, you know everyone's parents, you know where they live, that creates somewhat of a safety net, whereas whereas there's so much more fear in today's society because there is so much of an unknown.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:59Jay Shetty?

  And you're gone.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I would say, I would say that I think you're right that we're get we're better at this than we were. And that's what I was talking about earlier. But the problem is that the the the task is harder.

• 39:13Jay Shetty?

  Hmm.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  That's sort of what it is. Like fifty years ago in the workforce, virtually everyone I would have dealt with would have been a college educated, white male. Right? From, I could probably go further. If it was seventy five years ago, a college educated, white Protestant male. Um, you know, it's not when everyone is cut from the same, coming from the exact same slice of, and middle class to upper middle class. In the media world, that's what it was, right? I'm a journalist. At the Washington Post in nineteen seventy, everybody is a white, pretty much everyone is a white, upper middle class male,

• 39:59Speaker 01

  either Protestant or Jewish, who went to one of ten colleges. Right?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Now it's not that way, right? And that's so that just that it's just harder now. Um, and we're, we're better, but we're the, I think the difficulty of the task before us is accelerating faster than our own abilities, you know, it's, um, I think that's probably the best way to, to make sense of the dilemma we're in.

• 40:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I think that's been accelerated even more today in digital communication. Like obviously we're not sitting next to each other right now and, and everyone listening and watching us is not sitting next to us, us right now. And everyone's been, you know, forced into this Zoom conversation or digital conversation that they're having right now. And I wonder what your thoughts are on digital communication and how that's. And, and hey, let's, let's be totally honest, even before this, when you were referring to my generation or the generation after, especially the generation after and the one after that, most of the communication is happening digitally and potentially not even through face. Uh, and it's happening through text and it's happening through words.

• 41:10Jay Shetty?

  Where, where does that leave us to really feeling like we understand people? And, and that they understand us and that feeling of feeling understood and understanding.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I guess what I would say is, I mean, let's talk about this conversation we're having over.

• 41:28Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Um, what is it we can't do over Zoom? Well, um, I can't see you, what is that we're, we're probably going to hang out less than if I had come to your office. And so we might've chit chatted before, we might've chit chatted afterwards. We might've, if we'd gotten along, we might've had a meal. Um, imagine if we'd gone for a walk and instead of talking face to face, we'd spoken side by side. Now that sounds like a. A trivial thing, it's not a trivial thing.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Different conversations when you walk with someone, because you're not looking at them. And all of a sudden, like, people always talk about how they took these, you know, with their best friend, a wonderful car trip across country when they were nineteen years old. And what amazing conversations they had. A lot of that is about being in the same place with someone for hours and hours and then. A lot of that is like, side by side and not face to face. You could have a different conversation. And then when someone is eating, they're relaxed and you see a different side of them than you would. And you learn something new, like, even something that may seem trivial, like what someone chooses to eat, and how they eat it, what they say about the food they're eating. I mean, these are all like, they just help you fill out the picture a little bit.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  And I think what it does is it softens.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Like, I was listening, I took an interview with a guy who's a journalist, who's made his living doing really, really confrontational interviews with people. And he was being interviewed about his technique. And the interviewer asked him, "Do you prefer to do these face to face or on telephone or online?" He goes, "Oh, always on the telephone, never, ever face to face." Because he knows he can't be mean face to face, right? So it's often, I think it softens the encounter when you can spend time, unstructured time with someone. And I think that's what, what's what we see in social media, is it's the harshness of the tone has to do with the fact you're never meeting the person that you're attacking.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  You wouldn't say that if they were sitting next to you, right? That's my worry about these times. I worry that too much of this digital thing is going to remove the possibility for,

• 43:54Speaker 01

  but I'm going on another tangent. I've been interviewing for a project, the singer Paul Simon. Spent many, many hours with him. And I've decided my favorite Paul Simon song is a song which is called "Tenderness", and the chorus is, "Just try some tenderness beneath your honesty." And my argument to him was that that's the story of his.

• 44:23Jay Shetty?

  Life in some way. He's someone who is trying to convince people to not to be dishonest. Keep your honesty, but put a little tenderness in it. And I think that what meeting face to face about is all about is it doesn't change the honesty of the conversation. It means his

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• 45:39Jay Shetty?

  Tenderness.

• 45:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and that's and that's definitely something that's missing today. I think you're so right that we're that that we've obviously been talked about before, the accountability of when you're in front of someone versus when you're when you're behind a keyboard. But I think tenderness is such a great word because we are so much more equipped to communicate in a way that we think we're accountable to and accountable for when we're face to face. And I've definitely found that I remember one of my managers saying to me that, oh, whenever there was a conflicting conversation to have, it was better to walk together. So you felt you were walking in the same direction, even if you had opposing views. And so that ability to not sit, you know, across from a table, across from each other.

• 46:25Jay Shetty?

  That's lovely. That's exactly what I was talking about. Yeah, no, that's so lovely. I actually had never thought about. That's the that's a beautiful illustration.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Or use of that side by side principle.

• 46:37Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just, you know, side by side, walking in the same direction, same vision, even if you have conflicting ideas, because when you sit like this, of course, we're not being confrontational, but an interrogation would always be like this. And therefore, I think so many people feel interrogated in interviews or on dates for that matter. And I agree with you on the side by side. I remember some of my best conversations with my friends growing up were both of us playing video games together. And so like our mind, like our, our almost conscious mind would be, you know, completely switched on to the game. And then our subconscious mind could actually connect with each other because we were just, you know, so wired in to this game that we could play without even having to think about it, that, that we were able to let go and kind of get beyond

• 47:22Jay Shetty?

  a barrier that, that guys may never have done if we were sitting, having a drink together or juice together or something like that. It just wouldn't have happened.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:32Jay Shetty?

  I've definitely experienced that over video games, or at least I can remember a lot of great conversations that happened over lost games of FIFA and, and other video games. But.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, well, what games you play, FIFA makes sense. You grew up in London? Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of FIFA.

• 47:46Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, my, I'm, I'm, I'm big into sports games of FIFA, NBA 2K. I, I played a lot of Assassin's Creed growing up.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:57Jay Shetty?

  Which is, I don't know if I could, I could handle it anymore. But FIFA, football's a big love of mine, having grown up in England and.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:05Jay Shetty?

  You can't not love football. So, yeah, you never, did you spend any time in England growing up?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Well, I was born in Kent and we, we left when I was six.

• 48:15Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Uh, but we would go back. I mean, and I've been, I've been, I go to England, you know, once or twice a year and have done so for 30 years. So I'm very, and I feel very at home. You know, going back to the contradictions, some part of me, um, there's a, there's a part of me that feels very, very, very at home in England.

• 48:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. Talking, talking about going home and revisiting, I wanted to talk about your podcast, Revisionist History. Again, as I said to everyone, it's, it's an incredible podcast. And a big part of what the podcast is, is about looking to history and looking at the overlooked and the misunderstood. Uh, if, if you had to do an episode on a past event in your life, uh, what do you think could be misunderstood or overlooked by you if you were to reflect on it?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Oh wow, that's a really, really, really good question.

• 49:06Jay Shetty?

  Take your time.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I guess I would go back. If I was gonna do something all my life, I would do a lot of what ifs.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  I'm not someone, I'm very happy with the path that my life has taken, but I'm not someone who thinks this was the only path my life could have taken. And so, I really wonder, and I'm conscious of the fact that there were crucial moments in my life when I could have broadened my experience and I didn't. Instead, I chose to stay where I was and burrow deeper. And I, as I've gotten older, I've, I have, I'm more and more convinced that was the wrong strategy. So when I was in my late twenties, I was working at the Washington Post, I had an opportunity to go to Europe and be the Germany correspondent, basically the European correspondent for the Washington Post, based in Germany.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  And this is early 90s, just after the wall fell. And I, I didn't do it.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  And similarly, I thought after graduating from college that I, I had a notion that I would go to graduate school in Jamaica.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  That it would be a really interesting way to explore that part of my heritage and broaden my perspective and live in a very different culture. And I didn't do it. And part of me regrets both those decisions. Because I look at myself now and I say, what, what is lacking from my life? It is a little bit of that breadth. You know, I have, so that's, you know, those are, those are, I would go back and I would reexamine those decisions and I would try and figure out, was I scared? Was I, what was going through my mind that kept me making much more conventional decisions than I perhaps should have?

• 51:02Jay Shetty?

  Thank you for opening up, by the way, and thank you for sharing that. It's always a... It's always fascinating, and I didn't think that you had anything that you regret or that you're not happy with where you are. So that was definitely not what the question was aimed at. It was definitely just an intrigue. I think that, especially with how you talk about things being misunderstood and overlooked, I think that's what I love about what you do on the podcast. It's not so much about this is wrong, or, you know, it's so much of history. And we always hear that, you know, history is always told from the winner's side, and history is always told from the people that benefited from what, you know, with the events that took place. I guess, how do you find, how do

• 51:44Jay Shetty?

  you think that history can be most usefully used? Because I find that because, in the past, I think hindsight was such a gift, but it almost feels like, what's that beautiful statement by Mark Twain, you know, "History never repeats itself, but it always rhymes." And, you know, it's that kind of feeling of like, I feel like hindsight was such a gift, but it seems even now that because when we do hindsight, we actually realize so much was misunderstood and overlooked, that now we focus so much on that. How have you find history and reflect on history, how is it actually practical and useful in today's world, seeing as you do it so much?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Well, it goes back to what I was saying before about the importance of empathy in understanding another, and how you have to be trained in that particular art. And I think that history is one of the ways in which you train yourself in the art of empathy. Because the great luxury of history is you have, time has passed, and usually many, many, many people, serious people, have weighed in on the events that you're interested in. So what you have is a breadth of perspective, a rare breadth of perspective, on the actions of others. And if you do it right, you...

• 53:00Speaker 01

  You you get practiced in the art of empathy. You can look at everyone involved in any consequential moment and see it through their eyes. Now, you may not agree with everyone, but you still have this opportunity to revisit something from another perspective. So, you know, I've been working on this huge project. I did it in four episodes of my podcast were about the Second World War, this decision made by a general in the Second World War to bomb Tokyo with firebombs in March of 1945. And I've then subsequently gone back and I'm now turning it into a much larger book. And, you know, there's all these different characters in that time, all of whom have very different perspectives.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  And you think when you start, that guy's wrong, that guy's right. This is outrageous. And then, six months later, you don't think that way anymore. You you you don't even you don't use that language. You still have a moral perspective, but the language you use is different. What you say is, I understand why that person made the decision that they made, even though I think I disagree with it. That's the way you phrase it. And that's such a much more evolved, an important way of phrasing your your feelings about someone and their actions.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  It's if we could all somehow use that perspective in the way we made sense of each other, I feel like the world will be so much better. That's about that's, I think, what the function of history is.

• 54:39Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's such a great answer. That's a brilliant answer, actually, because, yeah, if history was used in that way, like you said, it's such a rare opportunity to dive into something when it's not being defined as we're in it. Most decisions we have to make are, at least again, the false pressure or the illusion of pressure that it has to be decided today, but history gives you this complete, you know. Kind of stillness of time and just slow down in pace to just re-observe. And I love what you said about that transformational, changing perception. Our instinct or intuitive initial understanding is so much about love or hate, black and white.

• 55:21Jay Shetty?

  And it's so divided, even in our reaction and response. But you're so right that you can almost weave it together more as you let it settle. I wanted to dive into this season's theme, which is attachment. And I think, you know, I talk about attachment in different ways in my podcast, considering my monk background too. But, you know, sometimes, obviously, attachment hurts our perceptions of what really is. And, you know, we've heard it before, that we get more lost in what if rather than what is. And this distortion of reality that exists because of our attachment to illusion or ideas or hopes.

• 56:03Jay Shetty?

  Can you give an example that you've seen where attachment actually hurts or potentially even benefits us? If it does in any way?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I was focused on the, on this season, on the downside of attachments. And by attachment, I was talking about attachments really to ideas and practices that become, you know, so much of the reasons for the why we do what we do are unexamined. And I was trying to examine them. So, you know, I, one of my favorite episodes this season was about a guy. It was the second episode of the year about a, this guy goes to Bolivia and tries to convince high school students in Bolivia. Why he's in Bolivia is not crucial story, but he happened to be in Bolivia.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  He wants, he wants high school students to elect their student councils by lottery.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  To choose their leaders by lottery. And he makes this very compelling argument about how you get better leaders when you choose them randomly. That more people are involved, that they have a much broader, those who you choose have a much broader perspective on, on what issues they want to address. And most of all, what you learn is that there are all kinds of people who are capable of good leaders, who you would never have thought before. And so what the current, what the current system does, what democratic elections do, instead of opening up possibility to everyone, they actually close possibility to many people. And what was fascinating about that is,

• 57:41Speaker 01

  that's an incredibly incendiary idea, that you would do away with an election and we would be better off with a lottery. Why is it incendiary? Because we have this attachment to this particular ritual of choosing our leaders. And we've had it for a couple hundred years, and we've told ourselves it's the best ever, and we won't look at any other alternatives. And we have kind of, all kinds of myths have grown around this particular ritual, which we don't look at either. One of the myths is that we, we're good at predicting who's going to be a good leader. We are not. We're terrible at it. And we won't, and by the way, there has been a mountain of evidence as to how bad we are at it. And yet we refuse to revisit that question.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  We're overly attached to a particular way of choosing our leaders. That's a beautiful, a really good example of how we get in, how our attachments get us in trouble. And what I would like people to be is to be freer when it comes to thinking about possibility in the world.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Okay. No, no, please, please, go ahead. Another of my favorite episodes was called Hamlet is Wrong. And

• 58:54Speaker 01

  That's this notion of a famous economist, and that was his favorite slogan. And what he meant was, Hamlet was someone who was paralyzed by his choices, right? To be or not to be, that's the question. He couldn't decide what to... And this guy said, actually, Hamlet had it backwards, that when you don't know what's gonna happen, you're free to do whatever you want, right? So, you know, that's another way of saying the same thing, that freedom is being able, is detaching yourself from this desire to predict the future, or this phony sense that you know what's around the corner. You don't know what's around the corner.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  And that means you should be, you should be free to follow whatever course you want. And that's like such a powerful liberating notion.

• 59:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I think so too. I think, I think sometimes we feel more confined by systems than their effect. And so, one of our excuses to ourselves around questioning ideas or beliefs that we have is because we feel that they are already predefined and predetermined by the world we live in. And, and so it's almost like a, an excuse that, oh, well, I can't question this because it sits within a bigger construct that won't actually allow me to exercise that freedom. And I'm guessing you're saying that that's actually, to some degree, false.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always had this conversation. I have a lot of friends with kid, high school age kids, who are all thinking about going to college. And I always say exactly the same thing to them. They, I say, well, where are you thinking of going to college? And they list the same names you always name. And I always say, well, why wouldn't you go abroad? What? Why don't you go to the, why don't you apply for, you know, I don't know, some school in Johannesburg? Or, you know, or Serbia? Or, I mean, there are English language universities all over the world you go to. Why would you confine yourself to, you know, Brown or Williams College? Or whatever the favorites are of the moment? And they, they never have a good answer, right? They're like flummoxed by that question.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Or I say, you've applied to the colleges that you think are the quote unquote best. What, if you went to...

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  You know, a big public school in the Midwest, instead of some fancy elite coastal private school, you would meet lots of people you would never otherwise meet. It might really expand your horizons. You're still the same person. Plenty of brilliant professors at those schools, but just like you're gonna meet kids, just a wider range of... Why wouldn't you go to a place where you'd meet the widest range of people? And they don't have a good answer to that question. They're 17 years old, and they're already powerfully attached to two notions, which have no intrinsic validity, right? And it breaks my heart. By the way, I was the same way at that age, and it breaks my heart, right?

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Why was I that way? Why was I conservative at 17? There is the one time in your life when you don't have to be conservative in your choices. Particularly, these kids, by the way, their parents are, you know, comfortably off. Their parents can afford to back them if they want to go somewhere weird, and their parents can afford the plane ticket to Johannesburg. Get on a plane! You know, like, it's so fascinating to me that like, it's weird that as a teenager we are, we're terrified of like, doing something, you know, out of the ordinary.

• 1:02:42Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  You did something... I don't know your story, but you did something completely out of the ordinary. That's super interesting to me, right? That decision that you made.

• 1:02:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I was 22, and I decided to... I thought I was gonna be an investment banker or a consultant, because that was the 18-year-old me, kind of. I wanted to be in art, and, you know, I wanted to be an art director or something like that, but I didn't realize... I didn't believe that could be a real career growing up. And so, I settled for business and thought, okay, I'll go and, you know, make money and be safe. And then after having interned at companies every summer from 18 to 22, but also spending the other half of my... Holidays and vacations, spending them in India, training with monks, I decided at the end of my degree that I should go off and live as a monk instead of joining a company. So that's what I did and we can talk about that separately.

• 1:03:38Jay Shetty?

  But, but yeah, I was really fortunate that I got, I got to meet a monk at eighteen that planted a new seed of an idea that I wasn't exposed to. And I think that's the challenge, that one side is exposure, we're, we're highly exposed to similar ideas, the same thought processes and the same things being rewarded in a culture. And I think reward is so important that if you're only seeing financial fame and powerful reward being around certain areas of society, then we naturally gravitate there, whereas no one is giving me any awards for becoming a monk or no one is giving me any, you know, there was no incentive to go off and become a monk.

• 1:04:20Jay Shetty?

  But I, I always feel like if I wasn't exposed to that person, it wouldn't have happened. And I remember a study that MIT did, which was, which was on creativity and productivity of employees, but, but they showed two charts and one chart was employees where they knew people who knew people who knew them back. And then the second chart was an employee who knew people who didn't know each other. And they found that people who knew people who didn't know each other were more likely to be creative and innovative inside an organization because going back to how we started, they were able to hold opposing views. And, and that to me fascinated me. And then when you look at some of the most brilliant minds in innovation or tech or

• 1:05:01Jay Shetty?

  I'm sure journalism, but anyway, it's all people who did really random things, or at least were exposed to very disconnected random ideas.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Jay Shetty?

  And, and that's, yeah, I get fascinated by that stuff too. So I'm glad. But I want to be mindful of your time, Malcolm. I could talk to you for, for a lot longer, but we're going to dive straight. And I've got so many questions I wanted to ask you, but, but we'll save them for a part two when you write your next book. Hopefully you'll come back on, but this is. Yeah, this is something that we do at the end of every episode. It's called the final five. So these are answers in one word or one sentence maximum. I have been known to break rules when I feel like it. But I urge all of our guests to answer in one word or one sentence. So the first question for you is, what do you know to be absolutely true

• 1:05:53Jay Shetty?

  about human behavior that many people disagree with you on? Or would have an opposing view?

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Oh, uh. That even the worst of us are redeemable.

• 1:06:09Jay Shetty?

  So you believe that even the worst of us are redeemable? Right, okay, great, wonderful answer. Okay, second question. What's something that's socially acceptable that you don't agree with?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Smoking pot.

• 1:06:30Jay Shetty?

  Great answer, okay. We have to save that for part two, too. Question number three. The hardest recent change that you've made in your life? The most difficult?

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Wow. That's a hard one. Starting a company.

• 1:06:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I'm sure that's super hard, okay. Question number four. What was your biggest lesson that you've learned in the last 12 months?

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  That we are. I mean, since the pandemic started, way more resilient than I would have imagined. I would have thought we were in chaos by this point, and we're not. I mean, we've come close a couple of times. But man, we have been through a lot of, in this world and in this country over the last seven months, and we are, we're hanging in there.

• 1:07:41Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. Okay, question number five. If you could create a law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  I'm gonna steal an idea that a friend of mine said the other day that I loved. Keep in mind, a friend of mine who told me this is very wealthy. She said, "I would like to pass a law that everyone in the world has to put their name in a hat and everything about your life stays the same, but you have to switch homes with the person who you draw out of the hat, permanently."

• 1:08:17Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  That would be amazing.

• 1:08:23Jay Shetty?

  Permanently.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Permanently.

• 1:08:26Jay Shetty?

  Wow, that's incredible. That is a first on purpose. We've never had such a low bid passed or named, so I appreciate you sharing that with us. Anyway, Malcolm, that was your Fast Five. Everyone, Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers is the name of the book that we've been discussing today. Go and grab a copy. We'll put the link inside. And like I said, I would have to say this categorically, and I'm very comfortable saying it, Malcolm Gladwell is my favorite author of all time. And so, without a doubt, Malcolm's books have been a huge influence in my life and probably were part of me becoming a monk in some way or the other, anyway. So I'm very grateful to Malcolm. I would check out any of his books,

• 1:09:08Jay Shetty?

  not just this one, but this one's a great one. Please go and check it out. And his podcast, Visionist History, as we mentioned before and discussed as well. Go and take a listen. And Malcolm, thank you again for coming on the show. I hope this is one of many, and I look forward to getting to know you better as well. And I hope we can do dinner or walk sometime.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  That would be lovely. Thank you so much.

• 1:09:28Jay Shetty?

  Thank you so much, Malcolm, and look forward to everyone getting to check you out more.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Wonderful.

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