Malcolm Gladwell Doesn't Mind Being Wrong | From Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know

Malcolm recently went on the podcast of one of his favorite comedians, Hasan Minhaj. He enjoyed the experience so much, he wanted to share the conversation with you! Enjoy. On Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know, the two-time Peabody Award-winning comedian sits down with the biggest names in politics, culture, and tech with questions that are as thought-provoking as they are absurd. It’s a dumb show for curious people who are looking for answers but can’t find them, not even from their host. Because, ultimately, Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know! Find more episodes of Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hasan-minhaj-doesnt-know/id1756014574 wherever you get podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.

• 0:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on, and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet,

• 1:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners, subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC.

• 1:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com. These days, there are more people than ever telling you how to manage your health. Your social media feed is packed with wellness trends, telling you to cold plunge, protein max, and so much more. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated host Trace Dominguez talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  Pushkin.

• 2:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hey, everyone. I recently went on the podcast with one of my very favorite comedians, Hasan Minhaj, and we had so much fun together, I thought we'd drop our conversation into the Revisionist History feed. My only regret is that we didn't talk more about basketball, since he's a fanatic and I'm kind of a fanatic too. So have me back, Hasan, and we can correct the oversight. Here you go. Enjoy the conversation.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Last thing, and I don't know if you got your pep in your step to do this, but you are very famous for giving people blurbs on the back of their book.

• 3:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Now, first things first, what is a blurb? Because it sounds like a slur that you would hear in Harry Potter. You bloody blurb.

• 3:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Two-sentence, three-sentence endorsement goes on the back of a book, which says, "I read it, I liked it, you should read it too."

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Do you mind giving a blurb for this interview here, right through your camera?

• 3:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, my god.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  You're the master of blurb. I've seen your blurbs on many different books at Hudson's stand.

• 3:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hasan got me to cry. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't expecting that to happen. Anyone who can make their guests cry deserves a shout out. I would listen to Hasan Doesn't Know on a regular basis from now on. How are you?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Prepare to be dazzled.

• 4:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  Prepare to be dazzled.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Maybe no other writer epitomizes popular nonfiction like Malcolm Gladwell. He literally made nonfiction popular. Millions and millions of people have read his books, and that has gotten him in trouble with two groups. One, snobs who hate popular things, and two, people impacted by some of the ideas that Malcolm Gladwell helped make popular. So I sat down with Malcolm to talk about the incredible new season of his podcast, Revisionist History, and the profound impact that it had on him.

• 4:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Shook me. Shook me.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Why his books have had such a wide appeal.

• 4:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  What my books do is allow you to play with the role of ideas.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  And we get into his hot take on working from home.

• 4:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'll never live that one down.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  I also asked him about that Blink cameo in White Lotus. Was it a compliment or a sneak diss? I mean, Mike White, what are you doing here? Are you coming for my boy Malcolm? And more importantly, are you casting me in season four or what? Because I am available.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Do you prefer writing books or do you prefer podcasting?

• 5:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, I like them both because they're so different. It's like saying, do you prefer chicken to shrimp? I mean, I like them both, but they're, they're, it's hard to compare. Because there's things you want to do with podcasting that you can't do with writing and vice versa. The thing I got tired of in writing books, not tired of, it's too strong a word. But I wanted to get away from was I didn't like the insistence of my own voice. So the thing that's lovely about podcasting is, or the kind of narrative audio storytelling that I do, is that I get to recede. And what I'm doing is collecting other people's voices.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  I mean, your books have permeated culture in a way that is so, it's so Hudson News stand deep. Like, there is not a year that I have traveled where I have not seen a Malcolm Gladwell book at an airport in the United States of America. Did you see the cameo of Blink, you know, in season one of White Lotus?

• 6:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, yes.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  How did you feel about that?

• 6:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  That was hilarious.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Shane was reading it. This is a moment.

• 6:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  I did love that. I loved that show.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  How did you feel about the way Mike White described this moment? So this is what Mike White said about it. Blink just felt like such a normie book. It seems like he's stoking his curiosity, but it hasn't gone very deep. Gladwell is the kind of writer that makes you feel smart while you're reading it, whether you are or aren't.

• 6:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, I love that. That's a very sweet thing to say, don't you think?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Some people think of this as a diss.

• 6:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't think.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I see this as a compliment. So he was writing that, like, that's why Shane is reading the book in it. But I think I'm like, hey, you create egalitarian, accessible stories that people can read.

• 6:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, but it's, but it's, I think, if I might, maybe reading too deeply into that, but.

• 6:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  The way I would phrase it is, most people, as part of their daily lives, don't have a chance to engage in the world of ideas. People's lives are full. They have kids, jobs, responsibilities. They're not reading the Journal of the American Sociological Society at night, right? Or they're not getting exposed to the latest theory about this or that and the other. There's no place for it. They don't.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  And so, they don't get, they don't get a chance to quote unquote, if, if feeling smart means being able to play in the world of ideas, they have limited opportunities for that. What my books do is allow you to play with the world of ideas. I'll, I say, I'll go out and find cool ideas for you, arrange them, and let you just indulge in them, see whether you like them, try them on for size, reject them if you want, like, and that's, that, I think the books have been successful because people have a, they recognize the fact that, once you leave college, you don't have easy access to ideas.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Right, right, yeah, yeah. It's just hours and hours of kind of free, open, guided time to explore big ideas.

• 8:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  To explore big ideas.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  I have the luxury of doing that for others. And that, I think, is a, I think of that as a noble calling.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  How do you feel when people put what you do on this huge pedestal? That you go, these Malcolm Gladwell books are these seminal books for intellectualism? Do you feel like that's too big of a title? Because I had this with, with my Netflix show as well, with Patriot Act. People feel like these infotainment shows are the same thing as being deep experts. Like, if you watch Patriot Act and you see our episode about fentanyl, you're not a fentanyl expert. I'm not a fentanyl expert. Like, I'm literally reading off a prompter and I learned about this like a month and a half ago.

• 8:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I do think that's too much. But I think what I, what, to the extent that what people are doing when they say that is expressing their enthusiasm, I'm happy. Because what they're, what they're really saying is, wow, I got to play in this world of ideas and it is way more fun than I thought.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 9:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's what they're saying.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  And they don't, and you're capturing that a moment in time. Because usually what happens then is they feel emboldened to go on on their own and even discover other stuff. And so, the moment when they think that, you know... Outliers was the be all, end all. It passes because they then start to discover on their own other ideas that complement their understanding of the world and they fall in love with some other thing. I'm the gateway drug. I'm not the addiction.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Is your dream that it gets them on a path to being like, I need to access scientific research papers.

• 9:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to be the first thing.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Get me the full PDF.

• 9:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to be the first thing you read, not the last thing you read on that subject.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  I think one of your greatest gifts is probably your gift and ability to passionately tell a story.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I feel like you could tell a story literally about anything and get me engaged. Like, could you do a revisionist history about W2s and W9s?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Like, how would you attack that? Like, give us a little bit of that Gladwell juice of like, how do you take these very mundane topics and make them super duper interesting?

• 10:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  You know, that's a tough one. I have to look into it a little bit. I've been doing this, a version of this right now because I've been working on this project about American gun violence. And I want to tell a story about American gun violence and not talk about guns. Not at all. You got to talk about guns in some sense. I'm interested in exploring all the peculiarities of the way Americans think about gun violence that aren't the ones we normally think about. And so there's one where I do an entire chapter on the Second Amendment, which is all about the grammar of the Second Amendment and understanding in the 18th century, if you wrote a sentence

• 10:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  like that, which is, it's a sentence that begins with an absolute clause and then has the operative clause. And the absolute clause is what's called an initial being clause, a particular kind of absolute clause. And initial being clauses loom really large in the grammar of the 18th century in a way they don't now. And so the whole thing is all about 18th century grammar. And it is like, I don't know if I pulled it off because no one else has read it. It's just a draft. No one else has read it, but.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  But this is potentially, this is like a Funk Master Flex. Can we get a bomb on this? Can we get a bomb drop, a Hot 97 bomb drop on this? This could be the next, this could be the exclusive. This is your Jay-Z Hot 97 freestyle.

• 11:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is me.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  This could be the next book.

• 11:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, this is a chapter in the next book.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  We'll just drop a bomb on a flex.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 11:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Did a bomb just drop?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  We're gonna do it in post.

• 11:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Okay. But it's possible that I did not succeed in this. But I got so deep into 18th century grammar. And what's interesting about it is that you realize the whole point of going on this incredibly nerdy grammatical path is to make you understand that when the Supreme Court passes opinions on the Second Amendment, they are making shit up. They have no clue what they're talking about. And anyone who knows what they're talking about is like, oh, my God, this is nuts. To pass a ruling about gun rights based on an understanding of the Second Amendment requires that you interpret the Second Amendment because it's a sentence that actually makes no sense. It's a pre-modern sentence. It's like not a sentence we'd ever write today, right?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  And they presume to interpret the sentence without knowing anything about linguistics, in particular, without knowing anything about historical linguistics. That's ridiculous. You can't read a sentence from 1783 or whenever it was as a someone living in 2025 and make sense of it. You've got to talk to people who knew what the way people phrase things in 1783.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 12:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Right? And they didn't do that. They just thought, oh, I can pull out Webster's, the dictionary off the shelf, and just tell you what the words mean. This is... If you did this for a paper in college, you would get a C minus.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  You are very good at coining particular terms that catch like wildfire. Tipping Point, for example. Obviously, your super popular book that came out in 2000, Tipping Point, I read it. Many people read it.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  What is it about certain terms that make them just catch on like wildfire? Like, I'll give you an example. You know the term bucket list? Okay, that term came from this movie. There was a movie called The Bucket List with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

• 13:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  It starts with that?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  It starts with this. It was not used... It does not predate this movie.

• 13:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, really?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, like in

• 13:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  I remember that movie.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  social lexicon. Isn't that crazy? But my question is, is how do you know that something is going to catch like that?

• 13:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  You don't.

• 13:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  I mean, how could you know? I mean, you can, you can, it can sound good to you.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  But, but, but picking a title is pretty big. Like, picking a title, you know this, you're sitting with this PDF. You're reviewing it, you're revising it. It's like naming an album. You go, okay, this is, this is the phrase.

• 14:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  I mean, I have a theory about what a title, what, what the perfect title is, although none of my books have ever had the perfect title. The perfect title is a oxymoron. So there has to be some tension between the two kind of operative words in the title. So the famous environmentalist's book for the 60s, Silent Spring, is to my mind, a perfect title. Silent and spring are in opposition to each other, right? It's an oxymoron. No spring is silent. And she's giving us, she's, that with two words, we instantly know that there's stakes. Something has been, right? We, she's taken two very, very, very

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 14:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  familiar, simple words. And by pairing them, has just created this whole understanding of what's going on, right? So I've always, that's what I've always strived for. The title of my podcast, Revisionist History, is not quite that, but it's a, it is, the tension is that that term is something that's usually used as a term of disparagement. And so I am suggesting that it's something that's usually disparaging is actually worth listening to.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Can you help me coin some terms? These things that I've been feeling? As a comedian, I use comedy as a way to, in a healthy way, channel my ADD and internal feelings into something that is useful and possibly provides people joy and comfort. Can you help me come up with a term that describes the urge that men above 40 have to want to engage and devour history?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  You know how like dads who are like forty four years old and they're like, I'm super into Ken Burns now? What is that?

• 16:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  So true, by the way.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The bad term I have is dad nostalgia. But that like that, it's not, it's not singing. It's not singing, baby. Help me make it sing.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Do you know what I'm talking about though, right?

• 16:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  I know exactly what you're talking about. It never occurred to me till now. It makes me happy that you have identified this thing. And you're, what's right about this is that it is absolutely the case. That like, there's a moment when they're all, then when this species of dad is like, they're all, there's suddenly, it's all about general Patton.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  It's a species of dude, yes. It is a species of heterosexual man.

• 16:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Second World, Second World War is certainly all you think about.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep giving you the exposition. Hopefully this sparks something. I'm talking about a type of guy. See, here's what happens is, in your childhood, your teens, your twenties, your thirties, you're like, how does the world work? Okay, shit, that will hurt me. All right, what is a bank account? Wells Fargo, got it. This is a checkbook? Checks are stupid. Yeah. This is a credit card? Holy shit, interest rates are high. Finally got a job. This is how you talk to people. I think I'm awkward. I should probably go to therapy. You do all these things. Then you come of a certain age and you're like, whoa, I kind of get the world. And then you're like, how the fuck did we get here?

• 17:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  And then you dive into Civil War.

• 17:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  By Ken Burns, nineteen ninety.

• 17:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's right. It's, it's like, but also it's about, the nostalgia thing is crucial.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  What's that word?

• 17:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Because it is, you're also harkening back to, at the moment that you're beginning to lose your grip on your own masculinity, and to kind of physical force, you're harking back to a time when those were the things that mattered the most, right? It's like, it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's testosterone gone. It's like,

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 17:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's, I don't know how to, I don't know what to, it is, but that's part of it. It is longing for, not just longing for a lost era, but it's a longing for a lost version of yourself. At the time when you could no longer be a soldier. You are starting to indulge the stories and lives of soldiers, right? You don't do it when you're 25 because you realize, oh, that's me. Like being slaughtered in the trenches, whatever. But when you're 45 or 50, it's safe. It's like, oh, no, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be called up if we went to war. So now I can kind of, I can stay home and watch Saving Private Ryan for the third time.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm just like, I'm just still dwelling on testosterone.

• 18:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Go on.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Okay, let's move on to the next concept because I don't want to dwell on this. What I love about you is that you are willing to be proven wrong. And you talk about this in Revenge of the Tipping Point. Dude, your TED Talk was nuts. How did you feel about that TED Talk where you basically were like, my bad?

• 18:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't, the thing is, it's the flip side of what I was saying earlier.

• 18:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Because I don't have it, because I get such delight in, personal delight, in finding out that something I thought was one way is another. It never occurs to me that there's any public cost to speaking about that out loud, right? It's like, it's fine. Like, and if you're someone who likes my writing, you're used to that. And you're, you understand that what the game we're playing here is, we're playing in the world of ideas. Ideas change, so we're gonna, every now and again, we're gonna pull up stakes and move them around.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  You know, I gotta give you credit, man. It was really, it's very cool of you to say, hey, I was wrong about this.

• 19:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  And then also add that into the blockchain. Because we also live in a society where it's deny, deny, defend, deny, deny, deny, die.

• 19:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't understand this because my understanding, there's a whole series of cases where the, the perception of people at the kind of, who have public roles and the perception of the rest of society are completely at odds. I honestly don't think the average American is at all distressed to learn that an author whose books they've read would stand up and say, you know what, that 25 years ago, and I wrote about that, I've changed my mind. I think I was wrong. I think most people are like, oh, that's great. You know why? Because the common experience of most people in the world is that you have to change your mind all the time. Anyone who's had kids, all you do is change your positions. Used to be, you're going to bed at 7:00.

• 20:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  Then all of a sudden, it's 7:30 and you're forced to confront the fact that the body of work that was devoted, of parental work that was devoted to 7:00 PM is a bedtime, has gone out the window and like, there's no going back.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's it, right? So we're, but like, but this, there continues to be this perception among people in the public eye that if I do that, I'm somehow jeopardizing my credibility, which is so nonsensical to me. Why? Wouldn't it jeopardize your credibility if you refuse to change your mind in the face of a rapidly changing world? Like, that's credit, that, someone who's like saying the same thing today as they said 25 years ago, that is a threat to their credibility.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  I think that is a byproduct of people saying, in, in certain particular circles, you cannot say you're sorry. It will fuck up with your credibility. That's because I think people have noticed some of the most powerful people on planet Earth are psychopaths that do not apologize. And we live in their ecosystem. The shrapnel of their ideas affect us.

• 21:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Elon Musk, Donald Trump, et cetera, right? It's their ideas that they then push notification to the entire world and we have to deal with it.

• 21:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  I interviewed these two people, two of the most impressive people I've ever met the other week. Former Secretary of the Air Force and former Chief of Staff of the Air Force. So Secretary is a political appointee, Chief of Staff runs the place. They knew each other, they were friends. And when they were both running the Air Force, there's a mass shooter, I forget where, Oklahoma, somewhere like that, goes in and kills 25 people in like a church.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  They get a call early in the morning. That guy is a ex-Air Force person. And then they get another call. And by the way, he was drummed out of the Air Force dishonorably for committing some kind of act of violence involving a gun. And it was your responsibility to notify the FBI so that he would be on a list that wouldn't allow him to buy a gun and you didn't do it. Right, like shit, my institution screwed up. And as a result, this guy went out and killed 25 people. So they have a meeting and everyone in the meeting, all the top brass in Washington there, tells them, go slow, let's work this out, there's maybe a way, some loopholes.

• 22:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  And they're like, no, we screwed up. We're gonna just hold a press conference and say we screwed up. And so they go, they say we screwed up. They go towards Congress and they say, we blew it. We made a mistake. Like, we've got to have better, we're gonna find you out. All the people who were accountable, we're gonna fix this thing, blah, blah, blah. And then there's a funeral for some of the people killed by that shooter. And the guy who's the chief of staff of the airports puts on his uniform, flies down, was it Texas? Flies down to Texas and attends the funeral of the people who were killed because of an error by his institution. And I said to him, Jesus, like, did you, what did you think was gonna happen?

• 23:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  He said, I didn't know what was gonna happen, but it was my responsibility to go. And I was so, it was so antithetical to everything about the way public servants behave, popular expectations and popular culture. And it was two, these two incredibly decent people, who by the way, they weren't personally responsible, it wasn't like they personally didn't report it, it was like something, they run an organization with like 100,000 people. But they took responsibility, they took the heat before Congress. And then the guy puts on his uniform and flies to Texas and goes to the funeral and goes up to the guy who just, there was one guy there who lost six children, goes up and gives the guy a hug, right? Just like.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  And so you were blown away by the empathy, the humanity.

• 24:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  And by the fact that he didn't.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 24:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  He was not afraid to say I fucked up, right? And he said, at the end of the day, they were way better, uh, they were way better off for doing that. He said, when they went toward, for Congress, everyone was expecting them to deflect, deny and delay. And when he said, no, no, we screwed up, as the first thing out of his mouth, he's like, they were completely shocked, right? And it, it's like, sometimes the hardest thing.

• 24:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Is not just the best thing.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  And maybe it's so refreshing because people, and especially adults in corporate American and their day to day life, hear it, never hear that from those who are in power, from their manager all the way up to the sitting politician or bureaucrat.

• 25:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why is it, I listen to that story and I was like, how can you listen to this story and still believe it's a good idea to?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this is such an inspiring thing that you're describing, just so our listeners are aware, can you describe what you talked about in Revenge of the Tipping Point and in your TED Talk in regards to the broken windows theory that you had in the 2000 book?

• 25:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  In my 2000 book, 25 years ago, I made, I was trying to describe why crime fell in New York City so dramatically in the 1990s. And I spent a lot of time arguing that it was the result of what was called broken windows policing, which was this idea that relatively trivial signs of disorder are, send a signal to would be criminals that behavior, misbehavior is possible, more than that, almost welcomed, right? No one's in charge. That idea was then taken by the NYPD and that was the basis for the stop and frisk program, where the NYPD went out and over the course of many years, stopped hundreds

• 26:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  of thousands of young black men on the street looking for weapons, because that was broken windows policing. It's like, all right, if we crack down on gun carrying, we'll send a message that people will. I, at the time, like many people in New York, thought that stop and frisk was a really good idea. It's like, yeah, that's a good extension of this idea. That's the way we keep the crime rate down. A court stepped in and threw out as unconstitutional stop and frisk policing. NYPD went from stopping hundreds of, if not millions of young black men every year to almost none. And what happened? Crime continued to fall.

• 26:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  So if you wrote, if you endorsed stop and frisk, and then you were suddenly faced with the empirical reality that once stop and frisk went away, things did not get worse, but rather better, you have to reexamine your position, right? Got to. Wait, it doesn't work the way I thought it was gonna work. In my heart, when I read that court case that threw out stop and frisk, I've forgotten when it was, 2000 and something, like many New Yorkers, I was like, this is the end, it's all coming back.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Oh, you thought New York would turn into Gotham City?

• 27:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, my God, I thought the crime was coming back. And so did, I mean, if you read editorials in all the papers in New York in the early aughts, when that court decision went down, everybody was like, gloomy and dooming. We're bringing back the bad old days. Didn't happen. The reverse happened. Crime acceler-- the crime drop accelerated.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  So I just gave a TED Talk when my book came out, my last book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, where I talk about this, where I just said, I was wrong. You know, and I, I have to, I have to take ownership of this. And here's the thing that I have come to understand about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York. I was wrong. I wrote a book that was read by a ton of people, millions of people in 2000, arguing that the way to explain New York City's crime drop was essentially some version of aggressive policing.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  How did you feel when you found out that, oh, the NYPD used your book as literary or intellectual justification to stop and frisk?

• 28:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, I mean, there were many. I wasn't the sole source of there, but--

• 28:30Speaker 02

  But it was in the bibliography, right?

• 28:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. But no, my book became part of this kind of zeitgeist-y--

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Discussion.

• 28:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  Discussion about how aggressive policing was the way to cure crime. I mean, I think, if I think back to that time, I think I was flattered. How could you not be? Because we were in the middle of this extraordinary urban experiment where New York goes from being one of the most dangerous big cities in the world to one of the safest. And the idea that I was part of a movement that kind of helped justify this crackdown on crime was like, made me feel good. And then-- Find out, oops.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  At the end of the TED Talk, a woman comes onstage and thanks you for your mea culpa. And then you guys get into an interesting discussion about the way your work was interpreted.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Before, did you ever think about, what if they got it wrong? What if it was wrong? And innocent people were gonna have to experience this? What were your thoughts about that back then?

• 29:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, I wasn't thinking about that.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  After that experience, how do you now see your work in the way it's received by others? Do you want to put addendums that, hey, this could change? Or has it fundamentally? How has it changed the way you approach your work?

• 29:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, the, over the course of my career, I think one of the changes that I've made is, I have slowly come to the understanding that if you are gonna play this game with ideas, you have to not temper your enthusiasm, but temper your certainty. You have to make it clear that this is what we're talking about right now. And that ideas by their very nature are based on evidence, and evidence changes. We, we learn more things. Criminology is a great example. Criminology, the last 25 years, the field of criminology has, I mean, so much has happened. We know so much more.

• 30:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  I mean, we were, in retrospect, primitives in 2000. We know like, that a hundred years of advances in understanding have happened in the last 25 years. So we need to be, remind people, this is a, knowledge is a moving target. And I think I need to do, I've realized I need to do a better job of communicating that just because I'm saying this now, doesn't mean it's gonna be, I'm gonna be saying the same thing a generation from now, or five, or even next year.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  By the way, by the way, hey, I've been caught in comedy crime before as well.

• 31:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  As a grifting charlatan.

• 31:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  And I think the adjustment that I've made is you have to lead with. I don't know. That's what I do. I make it very clear in our little microphones here. Just in case if anyone is using micro content as a way or vessel to truth. I just want to make it very clear that the title of the show is "Hasan Minhaj Doesn't Know."

• 31:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Don't get me started on what happened to you, which I'm still angry about.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  No, don't, don't.

• 31:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Nothing is more tiresome than people who fact check stories. These are not like, you weren't writing a history of your life that was going to be published by Harvard University Press.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I was condensing many stories into 70 minutes.

• 31:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  Like, that's, you're a performer. Forget to say, do we forget what a performer is? Like, part of what's funny about comedians, like, the universe of good comedians, is that when we are listening to you, the thing that's, that draws us to you is, is the idea that you guys have a distorted lens. Like, it's, that's what we don't have. We don't have a distorted lens. We don't see the comic possibilities in looking at the world from a slightly different angle. And the delight we get from listening is, oh, that person's not looking at something straight on. They have this completely, you know, this surprising, wacko,

• 32:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  never would have thought about it in a million years perspective. That's the punchline. That's what a punchline is.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 32:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Right? So like, to sit, to, to fact check a story like that is to essentially undermine the very basis of what we want in a comedian. And if you're getting your history from a, from a, from a comic's routine, then you're so intellectually impoverished, I have no time for you.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Malcolm, don't do this. I already put out a 23, I put out a 23 minute YouTube video about this. You can see it in the link below, but it's, it's fine. It's okay. We don't have to believe it.

• 32:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  It drives me crazy.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Malcolm, it's okay. I'm a race baiting, grifting charlatan. It's okay.

• 33:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Meanwhile.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  You can, you can, and then you can make funny, you can make funny jokes about it, and then you can sell out any of that. It's okay.

• 33:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  The people for whom this stuff does matter, get a pass.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Right? The politicians who are telling bullshit stories, they're not comedians.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  They're, I didn't vote for you to look at the world from a 45 degree angle.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  It's okay. Malcolm, you can put me in comedy jail. It's fine. I accept my sentencing and I'm sorry.

• 33:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Get worked up about this. I do not want my comics to be like, drily relating the facts of the day.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Okay, understood.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  You want your comics spicy? You want your comics lying to you? And that's okay. You know, I gotta give it to you, though.

• 33:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  What?

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Again, you and I, we love a hot take. Literally, in your, in, you know, you, you, you have Revenge of the Tipping Point? And then CBS Sunday Morning does a story on you? And you've got even more spicy takes. Let's take a look.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  You should never go to the best institution you get into. If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  This is nutso.

• 33:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, no, that's, that's part of a complicated argument from my book, David and Goliath, which just says you should never, if you're interested in succeeding in an educational institution, you never want to be in the bottom

• 34:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  half of your class. It's too hard. So you should go to Harvard if you think you can be in the top quarter of your class at Harvard. That's fine. But don't go there. If you're gonna be the bottom of your class, no. Doing STEM? You're just gonna drop out.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  I get it. I get it. Now you're triggering me because I was pre-med and I, and I was in the bottom third of my class. They did the whole thing. Look to your right, look to your left. Two of you won't make it.

• 34:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  You were one of those?

• 34:36Speaker 02

  I was one of the two. Yeah. And, and we don't have to get into this because now you're triggering me. But let me just say, Malcolm, if you do get into Harvard, you gotta go to Harvard. You have to.

• 34:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  No, you don't.

• 34:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  If my daughters, knock on wood, get into Harvard, and I don't think they're gonna be in the top third of their class, I'm gonna say, don't go. It's too hard. It's crazy hard. Do you know how smart those kids are? I know people who went to like elite public high schools, like, you know, Stuyvesant in New York.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  And everyone in Stuyvesant basically has an IQ of 180. So the dumbest person in a math class in Stuyvesant can have an IQ of 100 and whatever, 70. So they think they're dumb because you measure your, that's how you measure your intelligence, by looking around the room. They're not dumb. They're in the top 99.999% of humanity, but they are misled by the fact that they happen to be in the most extraordinarily selective group of individuals in the city of New York. Don't do that to yourself, right?

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Or you should, because I'll tell you why.

• 35:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Both Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz went to Harvard?

• 35:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hmm.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  And then Donald Trump went to Penn. So my point is, is that there are idiots that go to these institutions. And if they can spin it into a win, so can you. If you get into Harvard, go.

• 35:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Take your shot at going to the league. If you get drafted, if David Stern gives you the call. I went to UC Davis, unfortunately. And the crazy part is, is I got into UCLA, but I didn't go. I went to Davis instead. This is a longer story for another time. I got scared.

• 36:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  Your family's from Sacramento, were they?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Sacramento, Davis. I grew up in Davis and I went to UC Davis.

• 36:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  You got, you did want to go to UCLA?

• 36:15Speaker 02

  I met my wife there and so it was the biggest blessing of all and it was wonderful, but.

• 36:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  UCLA is like summer camp. It's like.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Malcolm, I get it.

• 36:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  What were you doing?

• 36:25Speaker 02

  I know, I know. I got, I got shook. I got shook.

• 36:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  That is madness.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  That I didn't go to UCLA.

• 36:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  I know, I know. It is a regret.

• 36:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Were you like an ag major? Like what were you?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  I was a pre-med major and I ran into somebody when I did my campus visit that said, hey, STEM at UCLA is really hard. You shouldn't go here.

• 36:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, I see what you were thinking.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  And that's what got me to not go. Now, look, again, I met the love of my life, the mother of my children at UC Davis. Let's take that reality to the side. Everything else, UCLA, the Wooden Center, the history, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

• 36:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you're in the middle of LA.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  And Westwood.

• 37:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  You're in the middle of LA.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  I should have gone. And so Malcolm. If you get a call from Adam Silver that says, we're calling you up to be one of the 400 players to play in the league. You got to go to the league and if you can't cut it, fine, but you gotta go to the L. Let's look at another one of your crazy spicy takes that I don't know how you thought this was cool. Let's take a look.

• 37:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's not in your best interest to work at home. I know it's a hassle to come to the office, but like, you know, if you work, if you're just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom. Is that the work life you want to live?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Is that the work life I want? Answer, yes.

• 37:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  I've got so much trouble for that. I'll never live that one down. Can't believe you dredged that one up.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  It's one of the top videos of you, Malcolm.

• 37:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  What am I wearing? Am I wearing like some sort of t-shirt?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  You're wearing like a great t-shirt. So the irony here is that you're telling people to not be bums, be in their pajamas and work at home and you're wearing a goddamn Hanes tee here.

• 37:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here's what I should have said. I should have said two things. No, one thing. It depends who you are. If you're, if you're 25 and you're trying to, entering a new field and trying to master it. You shouldn't be at home. You gotta go to the office. Because you gotta learn from other people. And it's way, way, way, way easier to learn from other people when you can see them face to face. If you're 50 and you got three kids at home and you got an hour and a half commute and you're really good at your job and experienced, why are you coming in? That don't make any sense. You can be way more productive at home. Depends who you are. What I was reacting to, I think, in that was this widespread belief that everybody is better off just working from home. I don't think that's true.

• 38:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  I do think, if I had worked from home in my twenties, I would not be here. You would never have heard of Malcolm Gladwell.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Here's my subway take. I'm Kareem now. I 100% disagree. I'm not here to tell anybody how they should live their life. I used to work at Office Max for many years. I'm not trying to brag, but I wasn't a great employee. And I truly did not care. Because my first name isn't Office and my last name isn't Max. Whatever you can to do you, protect your own, get the bag and take care of your family, do your thing.

• 39:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. No, that, yours is a much more evolved position than mine. But I do, I was simply trying to explain, if you've never, if you're young and you're trying to, like I said, master something complicated, it can be hard to understand how much richer the learning experience is when it's in a social setting. Right? That's all. If you're trying to be a journalist. So when I started out in journalism, I got a job at the age of 23 at the Washington Post. And I was within 10 feet of four or five of the greatest journalists of my generation. And I didn't know anything about journalism. And I

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Who were you around? I mean, man, this is a tough time.

• 39:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bob Woodward was greatest investigative reporter of the 20th century, was as far away from me as you are. There was, there was just a series, a guy named Steve Call, who was like a legend. There was a guy next to me called Mike Isikoff, who was another legend. And I spent like six months, my first six months, almost doing nothing but sitting there and just eavesdropping. And like, it was a masterclass. All these things, I had no idea how to ask a question, how to get, how to interview someone who didn't want to be interviewed, how to frame idea, how to, I could go on and on and on, how to process things on the fly, how to write. I just watched them.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  You picked up a ton of game from these people in person.

• 40:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Exactly. And no, by the way, no athlete would ever say you can master a sport by yourself, ever. They would, they would never say, oh, I, I got drafted by the Knicks and here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to work from, work from home over the offseason. No, they would never say that. Like, no. If LeBron wants to spend the offseason by himself, absolutely, he's the top of this game. But if you're a rookie, if you're 19 and you just got drafted out of wherever, Kansas State, no, you show up with your peers and learn from them. That's, that's all I was saying. I don't think that's, I do not think that is a controversial take. And I was speaking from my own personal experience

• 41:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  because I had become aware, acutely aware in later life, just how much I learned in those early years in journalism.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  You know, Malcolm, you were able to pick up game from some legends at some great institutions. But a lot of people who have jobs, their coworkers are a bunch of bums. And so they just want to say, peace out, Carl.

• 41:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  I'm going home.

• 41:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't know. You're, you're more of a cynic than me on this. I, I actually think that if you're, if you're motivated, you can always find in any setting, somebody from whom you can learn. And, and that's part of, that's another thing that is useful about going in your early years and going to the office.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  And immersing yourself.

• 42:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Is making those kinds of social calls, right? There's 10 people around here. Who are the, who's the one that matters and that I should be attaching myself and learning from? That's a really, really important skill that you can't learn by yourself.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  We've had an amazing conversation, but we haven't even gotten to, I think, one of your best pieces of work. I'm talking about the podcast Revisionist History.

• 42:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Season 11, ladies and gentlemen.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Season 11 of Revisionist History is about the Alabama murders. Now, that's the title of it. But give me the details of what launched this story about this particular situation in Alabama.

• 42:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  A friend of mine named Stephen, I was talking to him about a year and a half ago, and he goes, "I have a friend named Kate, who has the most interesting job in America. You should talk to her." I was like, "Okay." And I did this thing, which I've started to do more and more and more, where I find someone interesting and I just sit down with them for as many hours as they can tolerate and just talk to them with no agenda. So Kate was someone, Kate Porterfield, was this really extraordinary woman, whose job it was, she's a trauma expert. And she started out by treating people who've been, started working at the torture clinic in Bellevue, treating people who've been tortured around the world. I'm this world-renowned torture clinic there.

• 43:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Then she went on and she spent a lot of time in Guantanamo Bay, working with people who've been tortured by the CIA. And then she got involved in criminal cases, capital cases, where she was brought in by, usually by the defense, in a death penalty case, to try and understand the life and the trauma of the convicted killer, right? And so incredibly interesting. So I sat down with her, we met five times, each time for about three hours. And in the fourth time, fourth visit, fourth session, she started talking about a case she'd just finished working on, about a guy named Kenny Smith.

• 44:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  And I was just floored. I was like, "Oh, my God." That's what I... So in hour like 20, I was like, "Oh, that's what I want to talk about."

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Kenny Smith was a guy from Florence, Alabama, in the northwestern corner of the state, who had been convicted in 1988 of murdering the wife of a preacher.

• 44:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  And it was a murder for hire. And I'd been sentenced to the, to death by, in the state of Alabama. And I'd been living on death row for forty odd years. And she got involved in that case as, just as Kenny was about to be executed. And so I just said, oh, I wonder why, tell that story. And it is the most, I think it's the best thing I've ever done. It was the most emotionally powerful thing I've ever done. We ended up doing seven episodes. We ended up expanding it. So Kate, who plays a central role in the story, doesn't even appear until episode five or six.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Isn't it, it was two men that were?

• 45:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  Two men.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  Another guy as well.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  So the whole premise of this thing is so interesting. It almost sounds like a prestige show for FX, which is there's a wife, there's a husband, there's a murder for hire. The men assault and beat said wife, but then the husband kills the wife.

• 45:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  We think.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  We think.

• 45:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  And then it's specifically about the two men that were part of this murder for hire that are then given the death sentence. And what's really fascinating about it is you, you think this is almost like true crime, but it's actually an analysis about how crazy Alabama judges are. Why are they so crazy?

• 46:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, why is Alabama crazy? I mean, Alabama is the weirdest state in the Union. I think that's beyond dispute. Also, one of the most fascinating, I love, I mean, I say that, I actually love Alabama. I go there, I've done so many stories there, I go there all the time. I find it absolutely riveting place. The great curse of the United States is of course the legacy of slavery, which has persisted. That curse has lingered longer in some parts of the country than others. And Alabama is a place that is still kind of.

• 46:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  Um, struggling under the weight of that legacy. Now, this case involves, everyone's white in this case. So it's not explicitly about the relationship between black and white people. But what we're describing is a brutal and unfeeling system of punishment that arises in response to the kind of racial realities of the state. So we have this, what we're documenting in this series is the unrelenting, tireless, relentless desire on the part of the state of Alabama to find a way to murder these two guys,

• 47:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  to execute these two convicted murderers.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  What's so interesting about it is this is an analysis on capital punishment.

• 47:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  So the jury is actually against the death sentence. The judge is for it. But just for our audience, before they dive into the season, can you give me the history of capital punishment in America? What's the history of capital punishment in the United States?

• 47:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, so it's, compared to our Western European peers, America was very slow to kind of dial back capital punishment. It's a pretty big deal in this country up through the 70s. And then the Supreme Court says, "We've looked at the way capital punishment is being used in the states, and we think it clearly shows signs of racial bias and arbitrariness." You know, you get two people convicted of the same crime. One's, one's getting executed one's not. You can't do that. You gotta have some kind of rigor. They put a pause on it, on death penalty. Public support for the death penalty plummets, and people think it's going away. And then it comes roaring back.

• 48:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Not everywhere, but particularly in the South. And one of the states in which it comes roaring back is Alabama. And Alabama does this thing to ensure that they will, to retain their right to execute whoever they choose. They give the judges what are called, what is called override. So there's only one other state in the Union that does anything remotely like this. But in the state of Alabama, if you are convicted of a crime and the jury votes for life without parole and not the death penalty, if the judge Wants, it's not been changed, but for many years, if the judge wanted to, the judge could override the jury and just say, I know you wanted life without parole, but I think this person should be killed.

• 49:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  And, which is like a really, really weird thing where they basically throw out.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  A judge basically gets to have a superveto on a jury, which is nuts.

• 49:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Nuts.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  But there's, I have two questions, follow up questions. The first is, is that up until the seventies, they were like, no, we cannot kill people. We are against the death penalty. What was it about the Supreme Court that lifted that ban?

• 49:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  So everyone's doing it. The Supreme Court says, stop. And then the Supreme Court comes back a couple of years later and says, you can proceed so long as you ensure, they're speaking to the states, that there's some rigor to the process. You gotta have standards. You have to say, you know.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  And what are the, and what are their standards here? They're like, look, you can't, the guillotine's gotta go. We can't have a firing squad. Some states, by the way, have the firing squad, right?

• 50:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's a big, we, I didn't get into it, but I interviewed all these people about,

• 50:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  you know, one of the standards is the method of punishment must be neither cruel nor unusual. And so you get into these big definitional things is, is lethal injection, for example, cruel? And there's a big argument that it is, because you suffer, actually. You think you're not suffering, lethal injection, you are. Then, the electric chair was clearly cruel. You did suffer. So there's a big argument, one of the reasons that Utah brings back the firing squad is that there's an argument that it's more humane than lethal injection. Actually, if I had to be executed,

• 50:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  I would choose the firing squad over lethal injection.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  It's that bad, lethal injection?

• 50:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, we talked about that in one of the episodes.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  So, take me through the mechanics of lethal injection. How does it work?

• 50:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's three drugs.

• 50:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  It was dreamt up by this doctor in Oklahoma in his seventies on the back of an envelope. It's never been subjected to any kind of scientific protocol or medical analysis. It's a random dude in response to a request from the Oklahoma State Legislature, which wanted to start putting prisoners down the same way they put down horses. And so the guy says, okay, here's what you should do. Give them a sedative, like a barbiturate. Then hit them with a paralytic that basically kind of freezes you.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  And then hit them with potassium chloride, which will stop their heart. I think basically his position is that should work. And everyone's like, okay, let's do that.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  And Reagan, fun, funny enough, was a big proponent of lethal injection.

• 51:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  A big proponent of it. And so lethal injection, which spreads throughout America and then throughout the world. So in, you know, in many countries now that have euthanasia, legalized euthanasia.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  They're using the lethal injection protocol. Well, we have a whole episode of the podcast where this really brilliant anesthesiologist from Atlanta named Joel Zivit, does all these autopsies of people who've been executed. He finds that their lungs are filled with blood, frothy blood, and realizes what's happening is that the barbiturate that they get at the very beginning is given in such a high dose that it's turned their blood acidic and it's burning up their lungs. So what happens is your lungs are on fire, which is, as you can imagine, quite painful. Because you've been giving a paralytic, you can't cry out in pain.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  I mean, the way you describe it in the podcast is horrifying. This is the pull quote. The last thing that you may know is that you're on fire from the inside and the blood is filling up your lungs as you die.

• 52:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's nasty. The whole point of this is no one who's involved in the death penalty game is even remotely interested in trying to prove that this is a quote unquote humane method of. They don't, you, when Joel Zivit did the analysis of autopsies to figure out what was going on with lethal injection, lethal injection had been used in American prisons for close to 50 years. So for half a century, we've been doing this and no one bothered in 50 years to ask the question of how exactly lethal injection was doing its work. That's the level of kind of moral callousness that we're talking about.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  It just felt like it was common knowledge when Reagan was like, look, they use it on horses, but now horses are people. So it'll be the same.

• 53:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah, and we go into this in some detail and it's the most horrifying part of what is a very long and horrifying story is just like, nobody gives a shit.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Well, there's an interesting philosophical discussion to be had here with, I call them the revenge heads, the petty police. There's two camps. There's one camp that's like, there has to be a more humane way to have justice and to understand that you cannot just kill human beings. Then there are people that are like, good.

• 53:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Good.

• 54:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  There's a lot of that.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  No, but for real?

• 54:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Good.

• 54:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. There is that strong, which I don't understand.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  How do you react to that sentiment?

• 54:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  It seems peculiarly American. It seems peculiarly medieval. It's part of this weird thing about this country, which is that we are simultaneously the most sophisticated country in the world and also the least. The larger point about this is that if you compare the US to say Western Europe or parts of South Asia, East Asia, that we're very interested in the severity of punishment and they're interested in the certainty of punishment. So if you think about deterrence, about the attempt to dissuade someone from committing

• 54:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  a crime, the certainty of punishment, how likely are you to get caught? The severity of punishment, how much you'll suffer if once we catch you?

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 55:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  And the celerity of punishment, how quickly it happens. In Europe, they're super focused on certainty. If you murder someone in Europe, it's almost 100% certain you will get arrested or someone will get arrested for that homicide. Certainty is super high, but they go really easy on severity. Prison sentences are fractions long. Most people don't go to prison. We do the opposite. We're, we have very low certainty. The chances of getting arrested for a homicide in this country are less than 50%. In parts, in certain neighborhoods in this country, they're below. On the south side of Chicago, it's like 15%. But if you get caught, you will throw away the key, right? So this is part of that same dynamic.

• 55:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  We've decided we're going to put all of our eggs in the severity basket and make, we want to make punishment as horrifying as it sounds to try and dissuade you from committing a crime. The Europeans say that's, don't put your emphasis there. Put your emphasis on certainty. I happen to believe the European approach is far superior.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Why do you think in America, there is this obsession, particularly with the severity? And the feeling of, hey, look, if you kill these bad people, we're talking about criminals. We're talking about murderers. If you kill them, now you just have good people left.

• 56:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  That was kind of the conversation I had, I had with different friends and people at the office before you came in. Hey, how do you feel about this? And there was, again, a camp of people that were like, this is barbaric. All of this is barbaric. The Green Mile, electric chair is barbaric. Firing squad is barbaric, lethal injection. This is nuts. It's all crazy. I'm not with this. And then there's people that are like, yeah.

• 56:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a total digression, but my brother was a principal in an elementary school. And he was, his great struggle was ensuring the quality of his teachers, right? Because it's a big difference. And he would always say, you cannot fire your way to a better school. Meaning that like, you think, your first thought is, oh, I'll just get rid of my bad teachers and hire good ones. And he's like, it doesn't work that way. You can't, you, you, if you're, if you're just getting rid of the bad ones and quote unquote, hiring good ones, you're not solving the problem that made the bad teacher bad, right? You have to look at yourself and say, am I developing people properly? Am I supporting them properly? Am I putting them in the right place?

• 57:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Those are the questions you got to start with. You can't just like go in there and willingly get rid of people. And I think there's a version of that with, that's what's not happening in people who are obsessed with killing off murderers. They're not asking the harder question, which is, well. It doesn't help. You're just gonna, if you don't solve the underlying conditions that create this, you're just gonna get another crop taking their place.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  You have, obviously, a high level of empathy and curiosity. And one of the ways that you showed that is the way you end season 11. There's this really powerful moment where you speak to the therapist of the man who was sentenced to death, and you do something that is extremely rare in podcasting. You literally are quiet and choked up and silent for a minute. Now, remember, this is a medium where you have to keep yapping. But you are so emotionally moved that you cannot even speak. Why did you choose to end the podcast in this moment?

• 58:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  Because we'd been on this, I'm gonna get emotional about it all over again.

• 58:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  That, doing that show was the single most, there are a very small number of events that I've been a part of in my life, experiences that have shaken me emotionally.

• 58:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Death of my father, number one by far. I'll never get over that.

• 59:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Birth of my children, in a positive sense.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  Doing that show is like, up there in the, shook me, shook me.

• 59:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  And still does.

• 59:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  It was incredibly hard to write, to report, to like, the number of times I found myself after a conducting interview where I couldn't function for the next like, and it seemed the most honest thing to do at the end of the show, to communicate the fact that

• 59:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  This tore me apart, right? Like, because what I wanted to do was, the whole idea was it was a show about people who looked at these two kids from this little town in northern Alabama, who do something insanely stupid when they're 19 years old. And were written off by the state of Alabama and by the rest of society. And a series of people come and see in them some element of humanity, go to the trouble of investing in these kids who society has thought were worthless, and finding something of value in them,

• 1:00:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  and learning how to love them, right? And, I mean, in one case, this guy, we talked about in, I think, episode three, this lawyer visited this guy in prison, drove two hours each way once a month for 20 years to visit this kid in prison, one of the murderers in prison, just to spend time with him. And that, like, just tore me apart, right? I just, it just... And I needed, at the end of that, of the show, to kind of... just to tell people that, like, it's okay to, like...

• 1:01:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's okay to... It's okay to feel...

• 1:01:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  It is okay

• 1:01:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  to open your heart to someone whose society

• 1:01:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  to someone whose society has given up on.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Thank you for sharing that. Appreciate it, man.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  It's a very powerful moment and something to think about. And it's a very...

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  What I thought was so amazing about it is a very real thing, that there are people, these two men obviously did something wrong.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  But for you to explore the complexity of, despite the fact that people make mistakes and do things that are horrible.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  We're still human beings and we're so much more than what the state was thinking, where they would literally kill people from the inside as if they were animals. And so I just thought that was a really powerful moment and thank you for sharing how those interviews moved you.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Do you hope that it makes us as a society more empathetic? Or it makes perhaps America reflect on our own internal empathy?

• 1:03:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's always, that's always the hope with these things, you know? It's very difficult to measure the impact, but I think all you can do is like

• 1:03:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  is just join the chorus, right, of people who are are insisting that we be more human.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  I gotta somehow end on a positive note. We gotta button this thing. How do we do this?

• 1:03:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't know. I did bring this down a notch. My ability to kind of like inject a downer note to any room I

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  No, I appreciate it. It was a, it was a rare podcast moment. And I think an amazing counterweight to the never-ending blabbering that we have through laugh mics. It was just a really human, beautiful moment. And so, like I said, everyone, please. Listen to season 11 of Revisionist History. Last thing, and I don't know if you you got your pep and your step to do this, but you are very famous for giving people blurbs on the back of their book.

• 1:04:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Now, first things first, what is a blurb? Because it sounds like a slur that you hear in Harry Potter. You bloody blurb.

• 1:04:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Two, two sentence, three sentence endorsement goes on the back of a book, which says, I read it, I liked it, you should read it too.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  Do you mind giving a blurb for this interview here right to your camera?

• 1:04:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  You're the master of blurb. I've seen your blurbs on many different books at Hudson's stand.

• 1:04:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Hassan got me to cry. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't expecting that to happen. Anyone who can make their guests cry deserves a shout out. I would, I would listen to Hassan Doesn't Know on a regular basis from now on. How about you?

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Prepare to be dazzled.

• 1:04:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Prepare to be dazzled.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  Can you also add a parentheses that I didn't bully you into crying?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time. Because guess what? You can listen completely ad free. Plus, you'll unlock exclusive bonus content like Halle Berry on how to be a good partner during menopause, or Mehdi Hassan on the dumbing down of media, clips you won't hear anywhere else. Just tap that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe on any other app. That's lemonadapremium.com. Don't miss out.

• 1:05:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  For I don't know how long, maybe 12, 13 years, I've worn a Whoop band on my wrist. I started doing it because I met the founder of Whoop at a conference. He heard that I was a runner and he said, oh, you'll love this. It's perfect for athletes. And he was right. I've worn one ever since. Every time I work out, I see how hard I worked, how long I need to recover. I wake up in the morning and I get a complete picture of how my sleep went, which helps me understand the kinds of things that lead to a bad night and the kinds of things that lead to a good night. It's sleek, long lasting battery. And now with AI looking at all my numbers and coaching me. Whoop is a winner. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership.

• 1:06:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's whoop.com for your

• 1:06:19Speaker 05

  Free month of whoop. Let's talk about something everyone has an opinion on: healthcare. We all know it should work better than it does. Optum believes that too, and they're trying to improve it. They're helping healthcare teams and pharmacy services work together, like bringing primary care and prescription drugs straight to your home so you can stay on top of your health. Optum's also building technology that connects the whole healthcare system so it can better take care of the whole person: you. Optum is making healthcare work as one for everyone. See what Optum's up to at optum.com.

• 1:06:54Speaker 06

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule so you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com.