Malcolm Gladwell on Running, Writing, and Storytelling

On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to Malcolm Gladwell about his new book The Bomber Mafia which is an exploration of how technology and good intentions collided in the heat of the second world war, their mutual love of endurance sports, the critical infrastructure that surrounds art and culture, and more. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. You can get Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. ***Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoicFollow Maclolm Gladwell:Homepage: https://www.gladwellbooks.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/GladwellInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/malcolmgladwell/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Bienvenidos a la edición de fin de semana del diario estoico. Cada viernes nos traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, algo que te ayude a cumplir con esas cuatro virtudes estoicas de coraje, justicia, temperance y sabiduría. Y aquí en el fin de semana, nos enteramos más profundo de esos mismos temas. entrevistamos filósofos estoicos, exploramos a largo plazo cómo estas ideas estoicas pueden ser aplicadas a nuestras vidas reales y a los problemas desafiantes de nuestro tiempo. Aquí en el fin de semana, cuando tienes un poco más de espacio, cuando las cosas se aceleran, asegúrate de tomarte un tiempo para pensar, para ir a caminar, para sentarte con tu diario

• 0:46Speaker 00

  y, lo más importante, para prepararte para lo que puede traer la semana que viene.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Hey, soy Ryan Holiday. Mi invitado de hoy es uno de los gatos de la ficción no ficción, el mejor periodista, escritor, orador público, podcast también. Es un hombre increíble, quiero decir, renaissance man, porque siento que todo se trata de la misma habilidad central. Pero es un increíble storyteller y pensador y alguien a quien mucho me he prestado atención durante mucho tiempo. Recuerdo que leí el Tipping Point, luego leí Blink, luego Elos, más recientemente su libro, luego David y Goliath, que también es muy bueno. Pero luego, cuando leí Hablando con los extraños el año pasado, en realidad antes del año pasado,

• 1:36Speaker 00

  lo leí cuando estaba en mi tour de libros para Stillness is the Key. Recuerdo que le envié un correo electrónico y le dije: Malcolm, este libro es como la definición de la maestría. Es como ver a un maestro en marcha. Tomó esta materia que debería haber sido tan difícil y francamente, no interesante. Y es fascinante. Y su nuevo libro, argumento, es una materia mucho más interesante que cualquier otro libro. The bombing campaign, the final days of the Second World War in the Pacific Theater, and again, manages to find a very counterintuitive read on it. And if that weren't enough, if you haven't listened to the Revisionist History podcast, so good, listen to his one about golf courses. Just a mind blowing episode. He always finds like the story inside the story, or where you didn't even think there

• 2:20Speaker 00

  was a story, and that's why he's Malcolm Gladwell. That's why people describe things as Gladwellian, because he's in a class of his own. It's a distinctive, style, tone, approach. And as I say, at the end of this episode, he also has a lovely, fascinating voice, and it's just a pleasure to listen to. So today, my guest is the one and only Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, Talking with Strangers, and now his new book, The Bomber Mafia. And of course, if you haven't listened to Revisionist History, you absolutely must hear my interview talking about history, philosophy, endurance, sports, critical

• 3:05Speaker 00

  infrastructure, like the infrastructure that criticizes art, culture, et cetera. And then we get into a little fascinating discussion about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy at the end. I loved this episode. I loved talking to Malcolm Gladwell. Enjoy.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  First question, do you run in the morning or do you run in the afternoons?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I run in the afternoon, always have, never in the morning.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Never, not even like when you're traveling?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Never.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  So do you write first and then run?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yes, right, morning is thinking time. And so it's creative time. And it seems crazy to put a run in the middle of the most cognitively valuable stretch of the day.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  I agree, except if I think it's unlikely I'll be able to run in the afternoon because the day is not sort of mine to control. Sometimes I'll get it done early, and then I've crossed it off the list. But do you find that when you go for a run, like, so let's say you spent all morning writing, whether it went well or it went poorly, do you find that running unlocks things for you creatively that takes you back to writing or helps you the next day? Or are they totally unrelated pursuits for you?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I imagine it does unlock things, but not in a conscious way.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it has to help, right? But um, I just don't know whether you can, you can ever know how it's helping. Any kind of extended time, like I typically run by myself and I run without music or any accompaniment.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Really?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, never. So it's, you know, I feel like it's just a, it's like, it's like a form of meditation. It's just letting my mind wander.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Is that what you, is that what you're doing is your mind wandering? Or are you thinking about very specific things? Like, are you in control or is, is it nothing?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  No, I'm usually daydreaming.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Or if I'm doing a really hard, like a track workout, then I'm a little more locked in. But if I'm just going,

• 5:20Speaker 01

  just for a kind of easy run, I'm letting my mind wander. Or I'm just thinking about various random things. It's very similar to the kind of thinking I do before I go to sleep. It's that, that's the analogy, I think.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  And do you, why don't you listen to music? Or, you know, some people, I'm sure you hear from people all the time that say, I know, I listen to your audiobooks when I'm running. I, I, I am baffled by people's ability to consume this podcast episode or any sort of conversation while they're running.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I'm with you. I had never figured out the logistics of it. I don't like, where would I put my, it's on my phone. Am I really going to carry my phone on a 10 mile run? That seems nuts. But also, I don't even know.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  You can do it on the Apple Watch. I think that's what a lot of people do.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It just never even occurs to me to, to, I mean, it's just like, there's so little time. Like when, even when I'm driving, I only ever listen to. Something on the car, in the car at the end of the day, never in the morning. Yeah, it's precious time you have with your own thoughts.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think for a writer, that's when you're sharpest, you know, is sort of in the morning before the crap of the day has entered your world. And so to willingly like mainline other people's thoughts or information strikes me as a bad idea.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's just disruptive.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Although I read that you write in coffee shops, probably not during COVID, but I can't be around, I don't want anyone in the space. I want kind of like a sacred, quiet space. So it's interesting.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I love the, I love the company and the noise. But remember, I began my career as a newspaper reporter in, at the Washington Post, in a big, loud, crowded newsroom. And that's what I associate with writing, you know, I love that energy. I fell in love with that energy. And so I try, I can, I recreate it as best as I can in, in, in coffee shops. So I like having, and also I like variety. So I'll move around over the course of the day and write in four different places, you know, my desk being one of them. But then I need that kind of to change it up a little bit.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Well, it's like, I imagine maybe it's a little bit like ambient noise, like someone who grew up in the city, listening to sort of city noises on a white noise machine, or someone who grew up near the ocean needs to hear waves.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's that, that kind of, and I, I, I, I've never had, the thing is, when I'm actually writing, so little of my life is actually writing.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  This is what people don't understand about writers, which is that, you know, our writing takes up a tiny fraction of, and I find that I'm very unconflicted about the writing part of my, so I don't.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  You know, I really never get writer's block, or it's very kind of, it's just so pleasurable to construct something for me that, you know, it's fine if there's things going on around me. I'm locked in. It doesn't sort of affect my process.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  So, let's say for scheduling reasons, or you're sick, or weather, whatever. I'm curious for you, what's more painful? Like, what leaves you more blocked up? Not being able to write, research, build stuff for a few days, or not being able to get out and physically exercise, like run or workout? Which one, if you had to sort of deprive yourself of one, which would you choose?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Oh, that's easy. Depriving myself of physical activity is way more painful than depriving myself of, because I, you know, if I always just took a little three-day holiday, I did some work, but mostly I just read books. That was like totally, I don't, I could have read books the entire time. I could not have not gone for a run in that time. That would have been painful.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  So what is that? Isn't it an addiction? Because I suffer the same thing. It's, I was talking to, do you know who Dean Karnazis is?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  That it's hard, we were talking about, it's harder for me to not go for a run because I'm sick, because I'm hurt, because it's somebody's birthday or something. It's harder to not run than to run. Like, it takes more willpower to not do it than to do it at this point.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, although, it's funny. Does it take, I mean, I enjoy my day, so I, because I'm old, I run, you know, two days on, at most three days on, and then one day off. So I'm, I have plenty of off days, and I don't, they don't, they're not painful for me. I'm quite happy. I mean, tomorrow, I'm not running. I don't have a problem with that. This doesn't make me, I'll just, so, it's not, it's not that. It's just like,

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I don't know, it's hard to describe the place. I had a, the son of a friend of mine came, was passing through and stayed overnight at my house yesterday and I, we went for a run in the afternoon. I've never run with him before. Typically, like I, because I'm way upstate, I run, do my most of my running by myself. It was a beautiful day and we went on this kind of, there's this new trail near where I live, this beautiful, you know, crushed stone trail that goes for miles. And, you know, we started really easy and then we just decided to pick it up on the way back. It was just like so great. I mean, it's just no other.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  You know, we went from, started just over eight minute mile pace, ended up at six minute mile pace. And it was just like, I don't know, there's just nothing beats that. I don't, I just, I was just happy for the rest of the day. It was just so satisfying.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  I think it connects to something very primal. It's like, you're sort of like, this is what the body was meant to do.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yes. And for some reason, I'm aware, as I've, actually, I was going to say, it's always been this case. I've been, and maybe, I have no idea whether this is true of all runners, maybe it is. I, my running is incredibly variable, so I can have days where I'm on fire. And I have days where it's a real slug. And I don't, I can't point to a rational reason why, in both those instances, I may have had a full night's sleep. I may be perfectly happy in my life, I may, but you know, sometimes it's a struggle. And yesterday was one of those days where it was not a struggle. It was just, I could have run forever. I mean, it was, um, when I was

• 12:15Speaker 01

  a kid, there was a period where, uh, when I was 15 years old, which was the best, I stopped running competitively at 15. Um, but, uh, right before I stopped, I was in, there was a stretch of about two weeks where I was in the greatest shape I'd ever been up to that point. And I've never been in that kind of shape again. And I had that feeling every day. That I nothing, I could just run forever as fast as I wanted. I've always remembered that it was like the most magical period of my entire life. I think back on some of the workouts I was doing in that window. It's incredible, like it just, I was just in a state of physical flow.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  What's weird is that writing and running are kind of on opposite trajectories. So, running, you kind of get worse at it as you get older to some degree in that the body is rebelling and breaking down as you get older. But writing is unique, I would imagine, I would, I would argue, unique among the artistic or cultural pursuits in that you, not only do you tend to get better at it the longer you do it, but also society and the market accepts the output of your work longer. So, a musician, you know, you, you start, you hit your mid 30s, musicians start to be irrelevant culturally, the, they're moving on to the younger person.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  But, but a writer could hit their stride at 40 or 50 or 60. I was just reading about Janet Malcolm, uh, who, who died yesterday. It's like her first book was published at like 40 or 45 or something. It's, it's, they're kind of opposite pursuits. I like that writing, you know, you could be, you could be at your absolute peak at Robert Caro's age and it's a, it's a very forgiving pursuit in that sense.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, um, it, that's the, I didn't realize that when I started and now I realize, oh my goodness, the best possible profession to age, to aging. Although writing, running, I would quibble with your, I find running to be far more pleasurable now.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Now, the only, the, than I did when I was a kid, the only problem is you, I guess you're more likely to get injured when you're older, although I was injured all the time when I was young. So, I'm not even sure that's true.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  It's more forgiving than basketball, I just mean. Uh, it's, it's probably more pleasurable as you get older, but it's not, you, you can do it as, and, and even some of the best runners in the world are competing at an elite level later than a lot of the other sports, but.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think it's, I mean, I hope still to be shuffling around when I'm. Eighty, I mean, assuming that my joints all hold up. I think I should be able to do this for a long time.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  Do you feel that with writing as far as aging into the profession? I mean, I think I messaged you this when I read Talking with Strangers, and it just felt like this was watching a master at work. Not that the other books weren't good, they were very, very good. But I would argue that the subject matter of Talking with Strangers, and then also with the bomber mafia, these are much... The other subject matter, it was easier to make a great book out of. You were dealing with harder material. So for it to be at the Malcolm Gladwell level, or to just be at the readability level that they were with the raw materials you were working on on these harder books, it struck me as really watching the culmination

• 15:53Speaker 00

  of a person who'd done this a very long time.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do feel like I've gotten... I do feel that. I do feel like there is some cumulative benefit of my experience now that I can see. I have a lot of confidence now. Particularly the podcast. You know, I'm in my sixth season. We're just finishing up our sixth season now. So that's 10 episodes a season. That's 60 episodes in six years. Each episode is roughly, let's say, 7,000 words. That's like a lot of words.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  And I feel like that kind of has sped up the process of mastery.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  And I just have a lot of confidence now that I can find... And also, because I'm in the podcast world, you have more help. So I just, you know, it's now much more of a team activity. And that, and in combination with my own kind of experience, it feels a lot different and it feels a lot easier.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  And I'm not, you know, I enter these seasons and I'll have... I have to be done by the end of June. And in January, February, I'll have no ideas. Like, I couldn't have handled that at 30. I can sort of handle that now.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Even though you're not interacting with the audience the same way, I think there's also something empowering and educational about working at scale. Like, I think this podcast has done 50 million downloads. I could write my whole life and not reach 50 million people. I mean, that's like an insane number. And so you do learn something also by like putting stuff out, hearing from the audience, seeing what's working, not working. But like, even a book that sells a million copies is like, you know, an album that sells 15 or 20 million copies, right? It's so rare to reach that scale. And so books have always been this kind of, I don't want to say a ghetto, but it's a smaller niche that you

• 18:16Speaker 00

  don't, you don't get the sense of what's working for large amounts of people the same way I feel like you do in audio.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. At least they're very, they're so, I had thought when I started that what a podcast was, was simply a book that you read. Like my kinds of podcasts, narrative podcasts. But now I realize it's a completely different animal. That's experienced in a different way, that it's a different kind of storytelling. It's remembered differently. It's, you know, it's much, I don't know, I can't, I'm still kind of fumbling with my appreciation of, of how different it is. But the more I do

• 19:07Speaker 01

  revisionist history, the more I, I just think this is like a, this is a whole different animal than I was doing before. All that, all that has in common is that I'm doing it. But that's it. Other than that, it's like, it's like, I mean, I feel like I'm, I'm a, you know, a guitar player who, who took up the trombone at 50.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  It's a unique medium too in that it's long form and yet not viral. So you're not worried about how it spreads in the same way that you are with an article. Even a book, you want sort of word of mouth. There is something special about like you have an audience, they subscribe. You push it out to them. So it really can kind of be whatever you want. There's a large audience, but you're not subject to the pressures of the internet or even like the, the, the, the best seller market. And, and I think that's why such good content comes out of podcasts for the most part is that it kind of exists in one chunk as opposed even like talk radio is like sort of live.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  And, and if you're not holding the attention, they turn off or switch to a different channel. It's kind of immune from these wicked incentives that I think have ruined some other mediums.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also it's this wonderful, so there's no critical infrastructure for a podcast. Right? There's no, uh, there's not even a really a bestseller list. I mean, it kind of is, but not really. There's no.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Nobody knows what it means, what, what the ranks mean, how many downloads it is. Nobody knows.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  They're not podcast critics who publish regular things that everyone reads. There's no, and what we're getting is a kind of a little case study in what happens to creativity in the absence of criticism. And the results suggest to my mind as well, at least that, um, the, the, um, the contribution of the critical infrastructure to writing, to publishing may be greatly overstated. That the world would actually be, if there were no movie reviewers, maybe movies will be better. If there were no book reviewers, maybe we'd be, people would take more chances.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  I'm not, what the kind of creative flowering you see in, in this new medium, in the absence of some kind of institutional reviewing function suggests to me that maybe these reviewers were screwing things up. They weren't helping.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  I mean, I would totally argue that they are, even to go back to publishing. This is always something I've noticed about your books. Your books appear on the New York Times nonfiction list, whereas almost all of the rest of us operating in very similar spaces get jammed in the advice how to nonfiction ghetto where we're competing with the Guinness Book of World Records and, you know, the no belly fat diet books and all this other stuff. And like, what is that distinction? Who decided that, you know, what Malcolm Gladwell writes is highbrow enough to be nonfiction and then basically anyone else writing nonfiction that has, you know, even

• 22:24Speaker 00

  a sliver of advice in it, you know, gets put in the miscellaneous bucket? And yet that determines so many other things. And it's just like some random person probably made this decision all these years ago. And the downstream consequences of that is it sort of has to do with rankings and all this other stuff. It is interesting, even the bestseller list, I always find it funny, like if you look at the fine print of the New York Times bestseller list, it excludes like books that are assigned in school. It excludes like perennial sellers. It excludes things that should be on the list every week or every month.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  And so people end up inevitably trying to gain incentives, right? And I think your point about there not really being anything to game with podcasts means all that energy gets focused on just making stuff that people want to make.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, this kind of like the existing publishing infrastructure is super creaky. It's just like it hasn't people, even something as dumb as, I mean, we're sort of getting in the weeds here, but the New York Times list is a list of print books and then they also have a list of ebooks. They don't fold in your audiobooks.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  But audiobooks, in my case, I sell more audiobooks than print books.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  It's like 30 or 40% of sales of most books.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  In my case, it's 60% of sales. So like, I don't understand, like, why does the New York Times think that they should count my print book but not my audiobook? I mean, I just don't, I mean, it's just like dumb.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Or why is Amazon weighted, underweighted, but independent bookstores are overweighted? Meanwhile, I think, you know, independent book sales, and I have an independent bookstore, is like 1% or 2% of my total sales. So, so, yes, somebody decided that because they love indie bookstores, that's going to be disproportionately weighted on the list.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  You have an indie bookstore?

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have a small bookstore in this small town here in Texas.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Really?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was, I'm talking to you from my office, which is above the bookstore. I needed like an office space to write. And so I bought this small building and beneath it is a storefront and I opened a bookstore.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  What town in Texas do you live in?

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Bastrop, Texas, which is right outside Austin.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I know Bastrop. Oh, wow. I go to Austin all the time. I should come and...

• 24:56Speaker 00

  You should.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I should come and check out your bookstore.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  We have, we have all your books. They're very popular.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's funny.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  But, yeah, it's, it's strange how, you know, again, the sort of arbitrary criteria, which is, I guess, kind of the, the, the through line of a lot of your books. What is the underlying hidden logic of how a lot of systems or people or assumptions operate? And it's not usually what people think. There's usually something going on.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's, it's funny. Yeah, I am, that, that kind of side of it always has fascinated me. I'm doing a, the next big project I'm doing is on the LAPD. It's a kind of history of the LAPD, but it's a different kind of history of the LAPD. I'm trying to describe how did one of the great American institutions go wrong? And it's really at the, you know, when we talk about police...

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Problematic police behavior in this country. We often talk, not always, but we often talk about it in terms of bad people, you know, like, uh, like the guy in Minneapolis, you know, um, uh, you know, who's just a bad actor and we think we need to get rid of the bad actors. But the focus of my book is not on bad people, but on bad systems.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And how if you look very closely at the history of the LAPD, you realize that there's a kind of an original sin in the way the, the institution was set up in the 30s. And the results, the consequences of that warped the way the city was policed for two generations. And it took a heroic effort to change that. And it's like, it's such a kind of like, and it, people's, almost no one talked about this for 60 years. I mean, just never came up and they were always talking about, well, is there something wrong with the cops? Is there something wrong with the, are the people just who complain about the cops just complainers?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Are they, you know, there was a million, maybe this problem doesn't exist. There was a million explanations given for what was for the, to try and identify the dysfunction in Los Angeles. And the, the truth was like there in plain sight, but it just was in a form that no one, no one wanted to think about. It's, it's all about this, the way the city charter is written. It's like the nerdiest thing, but that, that's it. That's at the core. It's set up a system which perpetuated itself for 50 years.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  That, that was my favorite part of the new Michael Lewis book, the, the premonition where, um, I don't know if you, if you remember this part, but like, they were trying to find out some, something about droplets and what size droplets were. Uh, and, and there'd always been this assumption in epidemiology that had come from a very specific thing. And someone was like, well, let's go find what study that's based on. And nobody could, they found, ultimately it was traced back to like, This obscure book, and it might have been a typo, you know, i- i- it's always interesting that it was like, one guy, because it's usually unfortunately a guy, some guy laid down a rule or a law, as you said, like 60 years ago, and everything is descended from that. It's all fruit from the poison tree. But it doesn't feel like that because nobody

• 28:25Speaker 00

  even remembers who that person was and that they would have had so much power at that time.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's fascinating. Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  So you mentioned Upstate earlier. I meant to thank you. I, I, I believe your neighbor up there, Charles Randolph, is, uh, you, he told me that you were the one that recommended that he do the screenplay about one of my books. I wrote a book about Peter Thiel and Gawker.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  And he said it was you that recommended it.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  He may be being overly generous, but I, um, he, Charles is one of my best friends. Yeah, he's, he, he, he lives 100 yards from me. He's a, um, uh, that was, yeah, that was, that was a really, really interesting book. Yeah. And they're, they're, um, uh, I don't know where the, what the status of the movie is at the.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  I have no idea either.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, Charles is a genius. Very brilliant guy.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, the screenplay he did was amazing. Hopefully, hopefully it ultimately gets made. But, um, all right. So a couple more questions. So the knock against you, uh, when, when, when usually sort of jealous academics are, are mad at Malcolm Gladwell, uh, you get something that I get as well, which is, is to go, oh, he's just a popularizer. This strikes me as a preposterously complimentary insult. Uh, why do people think that that would be a bad thing? Isn't that the whole job of writing?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never understood that. Um, it's, it's like, uh. Well, you know. It's funny, I think that that there is something else going on here, which is in part legitimate, which is, and I'll use a running example. Every now and again, there'll be an article about running, written for a popular audience by someone who you realize half of the articles not themselves, a runner. And there's always a moment when I read an article like that, when I get so angry. How did they, what are they talking about? How could they possibly say that? What did they do? And then I stop and I say, oh, no, no, no, Malcolm, don't get angry.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Because this is a structural feature of journalism. That is, the insider is always going to be unhappy with the account of their world written by the outsider, necessarily. One, because the outsider can never get all the nuance. But also, the outsider who's writing about your world is not writing for you. I should remember this lesson. If there's an article about running in the New York Times Magazine, don't read it, Malcolm. It's not for you. It's not for you. Like, if they're writing about, I think there was maybe some article years ago about Mary Kane, that there was just so much stuff that annoyed me about it.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  But then I realized, it's for people who don't know about Mary Kane. Or there was an article about, one that I always remember, drove me so crazy. There's an article about whether trans, it was that whole argument, the thing about whether trans athletes should be allowed to compete alongside, you know, in conventional gender categories. And at one point, they were talking about, well, what role, what is the added benefit of having higher male levels of testosterone? And the person writing the article said, you know, it's trivial. It's only about like 2% or 3%.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  You know, and as a runner, so then I was like, oh my God, 3% is everything. It's the whole, it's the difference between being first and last. It's between making the Olympic team and not even making the final. That could be several minutes in a marathon. Yeah, it's like huge. But I, you know, that is an egregious mistake. But at the same time, The same rule applies. It's not to the kind of person. It was otherwise a very intelligent article, trying to introduce people who'd never thought about this issue to this issue. And it's fine if not everything is perfect. It's not the point, you know, the people reading it are not going to be the ones passing judgment on this very complicated issue.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  This article is simply saying, here's your introduction. If you're, and if you're interested in this, you'll read more, right? And you'll correct, you'll understand eventually that three percent's a lot, right? You'll get there. But like, so I think of what's happening with you, people like you and I, is that the same thing. The insider's reading it, and of course, they're going to see a nuance that we didn't see, but they should just like chill. Not for them.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Well, you'll, you'll see it. Someone will go like, don't read Ryan, go read the original Stoics. And to me, that would be the equivalent of like, don't read Malcolm Gladwell, go read hundreds of scientific journal articles. Nothing could make you or I happier than millions of people deciding to be as nerdy and dedicated and, and detailed about their, what they read as that.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Also, realistically, that's never going to happen. If, if, if everyone loved journal articles, we wouldn't have books. We just all read journal articles. Like there, I think people struggle with the idea that not everyone has the time or energy, or frankly, the ability to go as in-depth as a topic. And they have to start somewhere, just as you didn't start with journal entries. And I, you know, everyone has to start with a general introduction to something. And why would, like, I always, I always get mad to, not mad, people go like, you know, people in Silicon Valley are reading Ryan Holiday's, you know, books about Stoicism. And it's like, of all the things they could be reading that you would be upset about,

• 34:19Speaker 00

  it seems like an ancient philosophy would be like, the least bad thing for them to be consuming. Like, for, of all the things that you could be popularizing, it's not like you're popularizing QAnon, or, or, or, you know, the law of attraction. You're, you're popularizing science and, and research. This is a good thing. Why, why be upset about that?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, I kind of stopped paying attention. What are the blessings of? Of experiences, you know, you stop paying attention to dumb criticism and you realize it just doesn't matter. It's not like the but the rule I always have is if you if you if you imagine as a hypothetical scenario that let's stipulate that 90% of the people who read your books love your books and 10% hate them. That's a very, very generous. I'm going to give you that.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you sell 10 books, then you have one critic and nine people who love your books. No one's even going to notice that one critic, right?

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  If you sell a million books, you're going to have 100,000 critics, right? All we're going to be inundated with the critics of Ryan Holiday. But you sold a million books and you have 900,000 people who love them. Now, which of those two which which which of those two scenarios do you want? Right? Do you want to sell one? Do you want to have one critic or 100,000 critics? I want to have 100,000 critics, right?

• 35:50Speaker 00

  The other feature of that is that the haters always hate more than the people who are fans. Of the 90% who like you, most of them were like, oh, it was okay. Or, you know, I read that I, you know, outliers, that's the one with the 10,000 hours. That's what I took away from the book, right?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  But the hater is the one who's obsessed that on page 62, you made an, you know, you made an assumption that they don't agree with. And therefore, you know, you are the devil and they were going to spend all their time on the internet letting everyone know.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I tried a couple of years ago, I realized this. I realized that I was, like everyone, far more free with my criticism than my praise. And I decided to make a concerted effort to be to equalize that. So to and so I started, you know, Janet, you just mentioned Janet Malcolm died yesterday. Janet Malcolm was She was the most important influence of my own writing. I read every one of her books, some of them more than once. I was obsessed with Janet Malcolm. And I realized, oh, you know, I need to start telling the world this. So, starting about five years ago, maybe even longer, whenever I was, had an opportunity, I would say, and my favorite writer is Janet

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Malcolm. And then finally, last year, I got a little note, a little handwritten note from Janet Malcolm, saying, I heard you say on some, some friend of mine alerted me to some, you know, interview you gave, where you said you, I was your favorite writer. I'm so touched, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, you know, that, I wish I'd started doing that 30 years ago.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  That, you know, she has been trapped in a world, she was in her 70s or 80s by that point. She'd been in this world where her haters were much louder than her, than her supporters. And the only way that's ever going to reverse is if people like me who like her work speak up. Right?

• 37:43Speaker 00

  And, and better that you speak out while she's alive and she could actually hear about it.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the sweetest little note. I was like, I think I brightened her day. Like, it was like, I was so, I was so thrilled to get that little note from her.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  No, that's a great rule. Okay, back to the insider thing, and then I want to talk about, about the new book. Well, I think one of the things you, you kind of just described there, and I might be pronouncing it wrong, but what is it, the Gal Amnesia Effect, or the Gel Amnesia Effect? Do you know about this?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  I actually heard about it from Michael Lewis. But it's basically that whenever you read an article about something that you are in fact an art, an expert about, you immediately see that the journalist, or journalists in general, have no idea what they're talking about, and that you can't trust it. And so you read this about running, or, or, or, you know, something in the market, because you run a hedge fund, or whatever it is that you're an expert about, you read it, and you're just disgusted with how inaccurate it is. And then you turn to the next page, or you click the next article, and they tell you about an upcoming ruling of the Supreme Court, and what it means, or what's going on in the Middle East, or the latest news about this scientific breakthrough, and you absorb it and trust it completely, as if it is not.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Just as inaccurate to the insiders, but you are unaware of your own ignorance.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, that's so true. That's exactly what I'm talking about because, you know, I will eagerly, you know, I'll be throwing my hands up over the Mary Kane article, and then I'll, you know, eagerly read every other article in the magazine.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, that's true. Well, so I thought the new book was fascinating. Again, it seems like maybe you're trying to challenge yourself to write about something that you must have known the vast majority of people were going to be upset about you for daring to talk about and for not sort of taking, I don't want to call it the party line, but, but the sort of, let's call it the, the sort of liberal consensus about, you know, this part of the Second World War. Were you trying to challenge yourself? Or were you just, you just compelled to tell this story?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  I mean, I was, I didn't think, it's funny, I, from my perspective, I have never gotten such positive reviews on a book in my life. I'm used to getting, I have on many of my books run the table and gotten not a single major positive review. So that's my baseline. So this one, you know, I had, I've just been flabbergasted by how positive the response has been. I wasn't trying to do anything controversial at all. I was, but I was trying to stretch myself in this, in the kind of story that I was telling. I wanted to tell a single narrative, which I've never done before at book length. I always have a book that has multiple narratives. And I was like, you know what?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Can I, why can't I tell a story from beginning to end? Because I've always been in awe of someone like Michael Lewis, who does that. And I don't understand how he could do it. So that was the first thing. And I wanted to write a book that didn't, that withheld a conclusion. I wanted people to make up their own mind about.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  What we should have done at the end of the Second World War, or whether what Curtis LeMay did over Japan in the summer of '45 is a good or a bad thing. Because I'm not sure I know what to make of it. And so I just thought I would lay out the two sides and let people interpret it as they may. And I think that in Bynum, that's what people have done is they've just accepted the fact that war presents you with a series of impossible choices. And they're no less impossible with the passage of time. I mean, it's not any easier to make sense of what they were doing in '45 today than it was in '45.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  So that was what I was trying to get at. You know, I feel like, this is the thing I've actually begun to feel quite strongly about in many, this idea of degree of difficulty is the thing we have the hardest time with. And, you know, I've seen this, you know, I've done a ton of writing about police and law enforcement in my life. And the thing I always come back to is, most people who are not in law enforcement underestimate how difficult that job is. Similarly, you know, I think the same is true of teaching. I think most non-teachers underestimate how difficult it is to be a good teacher.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  It's really hard. You know, I had a brother who was an elementary school principal for many years. And so I got a kind of insight into that world. Man, like, you, you know, to do, to walk into a classroom of eight-year-olds and keep them interested and entertained and learning, day in, day out, for nine months, that's like, there is nothing I do that's that hard. So that's sort of, and I wanted to give that same appreciation for people who fight wars. It's just like...

• 43:26Speaker 01

  It's really easy to judge after the fact, but man, walk a mile in their shoes. And that's really what the bomber mafia was an attempt to do.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  I have, I have a theory that, you know, you study something like the Civil War, or you study something like the Second World War. We, we have these very, very simple historical narratives, right? The Civil War is about slavery. You know, we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to save millions of casualties from the invasion. And then, you know, then you do a little bit more research. You actually, you realize, oh, wow, this is very complicated. There's all these factors. There's a bunch of stuff you weren't told about. You know, it turns out, hey, Lincoln, you know, wasn't, was opposed to slavery, but not really opposed to slavery. And look at all these horrible quotes. And then you go, yeah, but actually, maybe it wasn't going to be a million people who died in the invasion. And actually, Japan was almost going to surrender.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  You, you start to hear that stuff, it gets really complicated. But then you research, you do another level of research, and you really get into the minds of the people who were there at the time. You read the primary sources. Weirdly, it kind of becomes simple again. You're like, oh, the Civil War really just entirely was about slavery. And really, they were looking at the horrendous human costs of invading Japan after all of these island invasions. And that's why they made the decision again. So it's this weird thing where it's simple, then hopelessly complex. And then weirdly, what comes out of it is a kind of simplicity, but it's a different kind of simplicity. It's not the patriotic propagandistic simplicity,

• 45:03Speaker 00

  but you do kind of end up getting to roughly the same place.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. There, it's the layers. It's funny how different levels of kind of experience and expertise give you dramatically different perspectives on the task that you're, and you have this. It's like a, what you're describing is a U-shaped curve, right? That, and you start out in

• 45:34Speaker 01

  At baseline somewhere, you, the curve goes up and you're moving on and then you just come back to baseline. It's like, there's a lot of, I, which book, there was one of, one of my books where I talked a lot about U-shaped curves and how, how, how commonly they describe our experience and how infrequently we understand that we're just rotting this curve and it's going to be confusing. You know, the, the classic U-shaped curve is, I remember, that's, it's right, I was talking about this with respect to class size in education. Large classes are bad. We all know that. Then you make the class, as you make the class smaller, the task of learning gets easier and easier and easier. But then

• 46:17Speaker 01

  when the class gets too small, learning gets harder again. And people don't understand this. They think, they think it's just a straight line. It that, and you'll hear fancy schools say, we have, you know, one teacher for every eight kids. Well, I'm sorry, a class full of eight kids is a bad learning environment. You're only learning from seven other kids. That's crazy. Why would you cut yourself off? In a class of 25 kids, you learn from 24 other kids. What's better? Learning from seven or learning from 24? Right? How do you have a meaningful discussion about anything with seven kids? Seven other kids? You can't, like, I could go on. Teachers hate teaching, I talked to all these teachers,

• 47:00Speaker 01

  so fascinating. I was like, what's your ideal class size? I never met a, a single teacher who thought an ideal class size was less than about 18.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Really?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  They, they were, they were just like, particularly when they were teaching hard subjects. They were like, you, you try and teach history to, to seven kids and man, you will have a lot of, and they also talked about how hard discipline is, which I thought was so counterintuitive. This one's really hard with thirty five kids. It's also really hard with seven, right? Because one kid, one kid can just dominate. And you cannot get away from that one kid. And there's no way to cancel out the effect. It's like the three kids in the backseat of the station wagon driving across country. You're screwed if they don't get along.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  I kind of feel like your books actually kind of apply to this too, where it's like, you know, here's the theory behind the tipping point, or here's the theory behind, you know, it takes ten thousand hours to become a master of something. And then people are like, but look at all this research that says it's much more complicated than that. And then you keep researching and then maybe you try it yourself and you're like, sure, but it does take thousands of hours to be good at something like it's, it's, it's, you get back to the same place. And I think people often hear this, that sort of conclusion and they assume that you have disregarded all this information. And it's like, no, that was integrated into the conclusion. And of course there's edge cases and exceptions that prove the rule.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  But generally, this is a pretty good hypothesis or theory for going through the world. And by saying, no, no, no, no, it's more complicated. You're not actually proposing anything different or arguing against it. You're just pointing out what, what actually exists. Like I have this book, Ego is the Enemy. And, and people go, but, but sometimes ego is a good thing. And you're like, you think I didn't think about that once writing, you know, a three hundred page book about this topic? Of course. But generally, as a rule, this is something that I feel strongly enough about to have tattooed on my arm. Okay, like I, I, I, I did the work.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fascinating, yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  I feel like with the, the bombing of Japan, this is probably very politically incorrect. But I've, the more I've read about World War Two, the more I've read about like MacArthur, for instance, and just how brutal a lot of these campaigns were. I almost wonder if there's kind of a perverse racism at play where it's, it's like, nobody feels as strongly about the bombings of Europe, right? Because we have this sense of who the Nazis were, how real and threatening that was. And I think there's also just like, The image we have of the Nazis is one thing. And then when we think about Japan, we have trouble getting ourselves into the headspace

• 49:58Speaker 00

  of where the world was in regards to Imperial Japan in 1940. We have trouble conceiving of people being very scared and taking the threat of the Japanese Army as seriously as the people who actually fought it in those jungles came to take it. Do you know what I mean?

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there, well, there's two, there's a whole series of things that are playing into this. One is that there was legitimately a very, very wide swath of racism in our attitudes towards the Japanese in during the Second World War. So did, if you just read, you know, the letters and statements of military leaders during the Second World War about the Japanese, they didn't think of them as human. Now, simultaneously, there is an observation that is accurate, which was the fighting between

• 51:06Speaker 01

  the Japanese and the Americans was far more vicious than the kind of fighting that was taking place in Europe. That, that, you know, if you just read about like the Pacific Theater and what was going on, I mean, insane casualties and a complete unwillingness on the part of the Japanese to surrender, even when all was lost. I mean, so that's the mindset heading into the 1945 is that these guys never give up. And if you are fighting an enemy who has shown no sign that they will ever give up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, you have a very different problem on your hands. Right?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I mean, the Germans, they were factions of the German Army that tried to, remember that broke away from Hitler and tried to make an independent approach to the Allies in 40, I don't know, it was 42 or 43, you know? So it's like the German, you know, a whole bunch of Germans wanted to give up, you know, years before the war. Nobody on the Japanese side was trying to break away and petition for peace in 1943. So you've got these two problems. One is that we do have a genuine, you're racist attitude. And two, we have this, this really difficult experience in fighting in that theater. And those two things come to a head in 45.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And again, it's just a, yeah, that's part of, that's sort of the backdrop for the story I was trying to tell in Barra Mafia. This leads to this just impossible set of decisions.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  And what I'm saying is there's almost a soft bigotry today where we have the inability to conceive of Japan as a dire existential threat that people legitimately felt it necessary to drop an atomic bomb. It seems like we see ourselves as America now, Japan today. And we go, how could Truman have been so, so cruel? How could he have been so awful? Because we, we, we can't conceive of what the dynamic was in 1945.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's, I think that's, I mean, this is why, this is why we read history. You know, you, it's just insanely valuable to get a kind of course in how differently people thought about whatever the subject of the history is in the period you're under. Like you can't, you cannot extrapolate back from 2021 to 1945. You just can't, right?

• 53:49Speaker 00

  I feel like there's also an analogy to the US Civil War where sort of the breakthrough of the US Civil War is Sherman realizing that the backbone of the Southern Army is the Southern people. That, that there is this war machine that's being sustained by an entire culture that is in line with the aims of its army. Now, there's certainly an element of that in Germany, but there's also a degree to which Germany is sort of captured. By the Nazis, which were always a very small minority. And sort of they they take hold of the levers of the state and use them for these horrible aims. So the the population is guilty in that they don't rise up against it.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  But but it's not it's not quite the same as Japan, which seemed to a certain degree to be a culture in line with an entire, maybe I'm generalizing a little bit, but there there was a there was a need to take the war to the enemy in the Pacific theater that, for whatever reason, was not quite as necessary in the European theater, or am I incorrect?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think you're incorrect at all. I mean, I think that, you know, the at the heart of the bomber mafia is the argument that logistically, the war also, you're trying to fight an enemy who is who is on an island thousands of miles away. And like, that's, you know, my story is all about these pilots and who are given this assignment to bring Japan to its knees. And it's an assignment very different from the assignment given the Air Force or the Army in Europe. It's, you know, you're just in it when you're bombing Berlin and you're flying from airfields in southern

• 55:44Speaker 01

  England, you're, you know, it's you're crossing the English Channel and a couple of hours in, you're trying to come home. Japan is like, we couldn't even touch it until we until we took Guam in the summer of forty four, we couldn't even get there. Like, it's just too far away. I mean, we forget now you can go wherever you want. I mean, now the B two takes off from Kansas and gone bombs Kosovo and then comes home and the pilot has dinner.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Right, that night.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  It was, you couldn't do that back then. So you have this in the whole that whole part of the war is consumed with this logistical question of how do I get close enough to Japan to do damage to their war making machinery, right? And it's just like getting, I mean, I just found getting into those questions and into that world to be so fascinating. I mean, it's just like the insane amount of effort that went into that war is just it's just mind blowing.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  So is LeMay a genius or is he a hammer and a nail? As I wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis a lot in my last book. And it was fascinating. You can listen to the, they recorded a lot of the discussions between Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs. And you listen to LeMay and you're like, has this guy lost his mind? Like, he thinks we're just gonna bomb Cuba off the map and Russia's not gonna respond. And then you sort of go, where was this guy's head, you know, 10, 15 years earlier? Was he, did he lose his mind? Did he, did he learn the wrong lesson from Japan? Or was he crazy the whole time? And it just lined up with what the horrible job that needed to be done.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  There's a, one of the pilots, one of the Air Force historians I talked to, talking about LeMay, said, he's like, Curtis LeMay did not stick his landing. Meaning the second half of his career is pretty bizarre. And I think it's pretty clear that he goes, I talk about in the book, LeMay goes rogue in the summer of 45. You know, he has, he starts out with this, the firebombing of Tokyo in, in the, in the spring. And then he keeps going and he firebombs basically every big city in Japan with the, with the exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, which are being reserved for another kind of bombing.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  And it's really, I read this fascinating paper by a historian who points out like, he's not, he's on his own. He's not, he's not carrying out orders from Washington. He just kind of goes rogue and just starts burning, napalming everything he can. And he never, something happens to him. Early in the war, he is this brilliant. Tactician, who is largely responsible for the effective bombing of Europe in forty three and forty four. By the time he gets to Japan, something happens and then his career after the war takes off and he becomes head of the Strategic Command and then ultimately

• 59:00Speaker 01

  he becomes Chief of Staff of the Air Force. And I think you're right, I think he's nuts by the end. I really do.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  I wonder if it goes back to the the distance thing you were talking about. Have you read the William Manchester biography of MacArthur?

• 59:15Speaker 01

  No, I haven't.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  It's incredible. But he basically argues that never before in American history, and maybe going back not until the Romans, do you get like an analogy where MacArthur is basically a pro consul of the empire. He just rules the Pacific Theater because it's so far away. Like Truman has to go and visit him, but it's like Truman is visiting another head of state. Like MacArthur just has his own universe over there because it's so inconceivably far away, so far from our preconceptions of, you know, our shared culture with Europe, for instance, that that the guys just kind of were on their own and they

• 59:58Speaker 00

  did, I don't want to say lose their minds, but they just, it's like, you know, they were so far upriver that they just, they just went, went crazy.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  So apocalypse now, yeah.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  Yes. All right. So last question for you. This is going to touch the third rail, I think, because I love the new book, but go back to what we were talking about with athletes. I am fascinated by sports. You have these athletes who are always, who are willing to do anything that will give them the slightest edge. They'll put, if they can get away with it, they'll put the most obscene things in their body, you know, they'll do anything for an edge. And then also, they're always into like nonsense, you know, like whether it's those, those cups or, you know, they'll do the most experimental treatments you can imagine, even if the results are not there. How does one explain vaccine hesitancy in professional sports?

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  I think it's, it's the, if we can unlock this, it might help explain vaccine hesitancy in the rest of the world.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Oh, well, so are you talking about Jon Rahm?

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  I'm talking about Jon Rahm. Cole Beasley, who, who, who plays for the Bills, just came out with a big thing. He was like, you know, the odds of me getting COVID are lower than the odds of me making the NFL. I'm gonna, you know, I'm just gonna continue my streak. There's a bunch of players who are opposed either to vaccines or, or protocols. Only like two thirds of, of Major League Baseball is at 85%, you know, vaccinated. So, so what's interesting for sports is not just the individual advantage, like for Jon Rahm, like he loses $2 million, but like a team that's fully vaccinated can relax protocols and then function more effectively as a team. They could have meetings together, they can travel together, they can go out and, you

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  know, there's so many incentives lining up to get athletes to vaccinate, aside from your sort of basic civic duty as a human being, I would argue. And yet it's, it's, it's perhaps less widespread in sports than other, other domains.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Well, you're, you're going up against the, the, you're dealing with young men in almost entirely here who are, had been raised to feel physically not just superior to all those around them, but also invulnerable.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  If you're playing football and you're worried about the riskiness of what you're doing, you can't play football.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  So I don't, you know, it's a difficult thing for them to grapple with an unseen threat, particularly when they're, you know, their whole identity is wrapped around their, their physical prowess. Jon Rahm is a harder one for me to understand because it's like.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  You do the rules like Yeah. Dude, I mean, he even could have run out and gotten vaccinated after he was up by three shots after the first day. Like, you know, it doesn't really make a lot of, I agree with you, it makes no sense whatsoever. But there is this kind of macho thing too, that like, you know, F it, man, I can deal with this. I'm, you know, I'm a tough guy. I'll be fine. By the way, you know. They probably will be fine. Probably will be fine. Only people, I worry about football. I mean, I do think that linemen in football are precisely the kind of people who are very vulnerable to Sure, sure. If I'm a big right tackle and I'm not vaccinated, man, am I taking a risk?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And then I, and also, what I also adding to your point, the, you look at the NBA players who had COVID, like Jason Tatum was on the sideline taking oxygen, like it seemed like months after he had COVID. I mean, you have to look around you, you see like Jason Tatum is, as, you know, spectacular and, and an athlete as exists in the world. I mean, if you talk about an invulnerable, perfect physical specimen, that's Jason Tatum. And that guy was laid low by COVID. Like, so I don't understand why they wouldn't look at Tatum and just say, oh, okay, I thought I was, thought I was gonna be fine, but man, like, I don't want to, I don't want that to happen to me.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  This, I mean, maybe, maybe if Tatum had stood up and been really, really, really vocal about it and said to all of his fellow basketball players and fellow athletes, guys, this is crazy. Don't go, don't do this. Maybe that would have made a difference, but there, there is also a, a level of wimpiness here that I don't understand. I, everyone I know in the business world has had this problem that some portion of their employees haven't gotten vaccinated. And they've all just laid down the law. They've just said, Right. Sorry, you have to get it. And it works. People just go. Right, this, I don't understand why, you know, why the NBA just doesn't give a deadline and say,

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  you're vaccinated by this deadline, or you're, you're, you know, it's it.

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  Like, it's also kind of revealed our insane attitude towards illness generally. I was talking to someone with the Yankees, who, you know, they were talking about the COVID, the vaccine breakthrough cases that they had there. And so obviously, most of the players have been vaccinated, they reached the level. But he was like, what happened is a coach came in who thought he just had the flu or a cold. Right? And, and so obviously, that's insane to do in the middle of the pandemic. But it's, it's interesting to me that a guy who works for a team that has, you know, elite racehorses essentially, like elite, you know, machines that have to be taken care of,

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  was fine just introducing germs that he knew he was carrying into this small space. Like, our attitude of like, I know you travel a lot, and where you're just like, oh yeah, I'm sick several days a year. This is just a normal thing that we do and go out in the world. I think the pandemic has kind of reminded us like, oh, hey, that's like a really selfish and stupid and self-defeating thing to do, that we just go around getting each other sick instead of like, taking a day off.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe we have massively undersold this vaccine. That's also part of the problem.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  It's magic. It's akin to the moon landing.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  It's, it's unbelievable. I mean, we have just witnessed one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of our lifetime. I mean, this is, I mean, it's insane. I don't think, that story should have been told aggressively. Instead, we were telling all of these kind of like, weird, like, I don't know, it's like, I don't know why we suddenly got shy about tooting our own horn here. Like, this was, this was a chance to stand up and say, for the last two generations in America, we have invested billions of dollars into building the greatest scientific

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Institution infrastructure, institutional infrastructure in the history of mankind. Guess what? It just paid off.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Right? And it was with these guys in the main. I mean, there were some, obviously, some of these people are not from America. But, you know, there's, you know, all of these mRNA stuff, you know, NIH and American schools are all complicit. You know, this is your tax dollars educated these people, right? This is why we have government. Like, we could have sort of said, guys, I know you complain about you're paying taxes and you complain on government. But it, dude, look just what happened. You produced a miracle, miracle. You produced it. You paid for it, right? And we promised you when you did that, that one day it would paid off. And guess what? It just paid off, right? Why did no one make that argument?

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  Well, and I would also argue is after I do this, I'm going, I volunteer at this vaccine clinic in the town that I live in. Like, logistically, also a miracle. Like, we've given out 160, 70 million shots to 300 million people, a lot of whom were, you know, located in extremely rural or, you know, difficult to reach areas. And it wasn't the federal government that did it necessarily. It was this massive, distributed, you know, interconnected network of giving a, you know, they're injecting a shot that has to be kept at an insane temperature and done just the right way. And that how few side effects there have been and how rarely it's gone wrong. Like, also, logistically, like, we did an incredibly hard thing together.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's been, I'm, I think we'll, you know, I think we're gonna get there. I also think that when we come out with patches, I mean, a lot of problems, a lot of people are scared of needles and just don't want to admit it.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  It's a huge part of this. When we started, you know, these transdermal patches are actually a more effective way of delivering the vaccine. And if I just told you, can you slap on this patch for a day? I feel like we could get up to, you know, we, that would make a big, big difference. I was, it was, I started asking my friends about this.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  You know, all people who ended up getting vaccinated. And the number of them who said, I have a pathological fear of needles. It was really hard for me. It surprised me. It's not a trivial thing.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  I think that's why we give them to kids because they don't have a choice. So you get it done early and then you can't overthink it.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  To go back to your point about there's a wimpiness where we can't just mandate it. When you look at like how they solved tough problems in the Second World War, for instance, I struggle to think that they'd be like, hey, this vaccine is voluntary. Let's just see if like, don't you think logistically we would have figured out a way to?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  You know, think about how we we we did mass polio vaccinations in the 60s. They the, you know, a group of nurses would show up at your school, set up shop in the auditorium and they would march every single kid in line through, and you would get your shot like there's no kind of consulting with parents and getting to sign forms and taking notes and like considering objections. You lined up, you got shot and then got rid of one of the scariest, you know, diseases

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  of that era. That's, you know, for better or worse, we're much more cautious these days about it. But I just wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far and we just we're overthinking this. Just, just like, just go to schools and just do every kid in the afternoon and then go to the next school and do every kid the next morning. I mean, that's, that is the way to do it.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's like even voluntary in the military right now. And the military only has like a 50% vaccination rate. It's like, it's crazy to me that the one place where the government does have essentially complete control over people, it's wavering. It's a strange, it means something. I don't know exactly what it means. It could mean a good thing, but seems like it's probably a bad thing.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's troubling.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  Well, I love the new book. It's amazing. I love all the books. One other complaint, I feel like it's unfair, both you and David McCullough, to be both great writers and then also to have very interesting voices. It's an unfair, it's an unfair advantage that I very much enjoy listening to revisionist history.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Ryan, when I'm next in Austin, we should go for a run, although I suspect you're much faster than me.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  I don't think that that's true. I think your mile time recently was my mile time in high school, so that's pretty impressive. But I would love, I would love to run with you or in New York, or if we're both in DC, let's run with David Epstein.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yes, that'd be really fun.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  Have you run with David, have you run with Rich Roll?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  No, I haven't. He's, but he's, I mean, he's serious.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  He's very serious, but, but.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would love to. I mean, I think this kind of, the great thing about Strava now is that sometimes when I travel, I'll post a run and then locals will see it. And I was in Phoenix and I posted a run in Phoenix. All these guys like, come and join us Sunday morning. And I joined it. It was like, and it was so much fun because, you know, they knew, you know, this insane route through the foothills of Phoenix, past all these incredible, you know, houses and down this wonderful trail. And it was just like, I was like, oh, this is like, this is actually what the internet's for. We think the internet is for, you know, X, Y, and Z. No, it's just not. It's, what the internet's for is finding people to go for a run on a Sunday morning in a city you don't know. That's the best.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  The only downside is you are like telling people exactly where you live because it's like, oh, conveniently Malcolm seems to be leaving and coming back to the exact same.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  I don't post those runs. I don't.

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  Okay. You, so you only do, because I only do it when I'm traveling for the same reason. I just don't do it from my, from my house.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  I rarely run to my house because I have to go. So, you know, the general area, but you can't figure out where I live from my Strava.

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  That, did you see that study where they found that they were accidentally like revealing the locations of secret military and CIA bases through Strava? I love that so much.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  I love Strava. Strava is just the best.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  It totally is. Well, Malcolm, thank you very much. Can't wait to meet you someday. And I appreciate all the books.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference, and of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.