Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell would start a writing class by teaching students how to ask questions. Everything begins with knowing what a question is for, where it comes from, and what is interesting in the other person. The work is to be generous. The interview is about them, not the writer.

David Perell asked what Gladwell would teach in a semester on writing. Gladwell would send students home to interview their parents, record about 45 minutes, bring back a transcript, and turn that transcript into a short article. An article about someone is a version of the interview, with the blanks filled in. A 14-year-old freezes because they think the story has to come from them. Other people already have the

Malcolm Gladwell finds the story by talking with no plan until one detail clicks. He sets meetings with no agenda, about every three weeks for two hours, and keeps going until he has 15, 20, or 25 hours of tape. He has done this four or five times. It started with Paul Simon, who kept asking when they would meet again, and each visit turned up something Gladwell had not come looking for.

He understood the point of the practice around hour 12 with an ICU doctor he already knew from another story. He had no idea where the talks were headed. In that hour the doctor said he had testified in a murder-case lawsuit: the prosecution called 50 expert witnesses, the defense called one, he was that on

Malcolm Gladwell fell in love with broken windows in Tipping Point, and he has regretted that choice many times. In year four of the New York City crime turnaround, he backed a horse. He was in his 30s and had plenty of time to wait. In retrospect, he was an idiot. Backing the idea so early was just dumb.

The penalties associated with premature conclusions are just so large. A fast judgment leaves a person defensive, protecting something in the back of the mind. The same rush shows up when someone seems distant and hostile. The normal reaction is to take umbrage. Delay it. What turns up invariably is that something terrible has happened, and it has nothing to do with the person who felt the

Malcolm Gladwell finds the moment a story turns on by listening back to a long interview and building the piece around the line that turns one case into a pattern. In The Alabama Murders, which he calls the best podcast he has done and which came out last year, that moment is in the eighth episode.

A woman who tried to save a man on death row in Alabama learns he has been executed. She is at home in Brooklyn when death row calls to say he is gone. She says she does what she always does: she lights a candle and says a small prayer. She told him that in about hour 15, after he had sat with her for like 12 hours. Seven episodes, about three hours, lead up to the call. The prayer shows she has

Malcolm Gladwell says writers who do his kind of writing have an obligation to give people tools to organize their experience. An overarching why makes the material much more powerful. It helps people make sense of the world and retain the information. He does less of that superstructure now than he used to, because he overused some of it.

David Perell asked how specificity should sit with general observations and broad points. A writer who is nervous that a viewer, listener, or reader will abandon them should try harder to offer something to hold on to, a place to file the information. The superstructure that explains the larger shape is a crucial part of ensuring the work is heard.

Malcolm Gladwell says Day of the Jackal reads like a how-to, and he calls it the most important book of its genre. The book stays on the logistics of how the jackal plots and carries out an assassination. As far as he understands, no one had done that before. It is not a how-to, but it is close.

The book takes pleasure in the details: the weapon, how to take it apart and put it back together, then a minute-by-minute account of the man moving across Paris, France. The genius is that logistical lens. Lee Child is the king of specificity. The same standard shows up when a fight is written so the reader begins to believe it is possible for someone who knows what they are doing. A television sho

Malcolm Gladwell says writers should interview the person who can bring the most specificity to a topic. The most important person does not help. In nonfiction the writer sets up the context, and the subjects supply the granularity.

He once spent two hours with one of the guys from Vampire Weekend, and at least half of the interview stayed on one line in a song. The musician used an incredibly specific bit of music and lyrics because he happened to want to focus on that line. Cardiac surgeon John Puskas, one of the pioneers of minimally invasive cardiac surgery, gave a 99th percentile interview. Puskas is Canadian, grew up in a mining town in Northern Ontario, and is now a fancy surgeon in

Malcolm Gladwell gets lost when he stands up from deep writing because he uses the same part of his brain for writing that he uses to make sense of direction. He very often does not know where he is once he goes outside. It takes him like two minutes before he realizes where he is.

Knowing where you are going means visualizing a series of steps, and writing exhausts that module, so he cannot do it again right away, even in a more trivial way. Very little of his life is given over to writing, much less than he would have thought. Most of his days are spent reporting or arranging to report, and logistics consume an enormous amount of the background work. Writing is not rare, but it is relativ

Malcolm Gladwell's book says he got Life magazine and read it. In the interview he said the magazine was Time.

After Malcolm Gladwell leaves, Dax Shepard and Monica Padman catch the mismatch. The book says Life. On the interview Malcolm Gladwell said Time. They call the slip comforting because Malcolm Gladwell's recall usually feels daunting. Time and Life are not the same magazine. The same person created both, and the same company published both. They offer Time Warner, then say probably. Time is a news magazine. Life is a general interest photojournalism magazine. They remember Life from the book and heard Time in the interview. They bet it was Life, and they are recording a fact check.

Dax Shepard says you should not test drive a Ferrari you cannot buy. Personal decency, he says, means you should not make salespeople spend their limited eight hours trying to sell a car to someone who cannot buy it.

When Dax Shepard was 18, he had no money and went to a Ferrari dealership. He says he would be a shithead to waste a salesman's hour and to take on the liability of driving an expensive car he could not replace if he smashed it on the ride, only to experience a Ferrari for a half hour. He asks where his personal responsibility is if he feels entitled to drive a Ferrari only because he wants to. A dealer will let him test drive now, he says, because he can buy one and can replac

Dax Shepard and Monica Padman turn to a Kelly Clarkson story that feels light because the world is so depressing right now. The algorithm needs a cleanse. Geopolitics and politics are a mess. Inflation is through the goddamn roof. Everything is bad. Personal stories feel heavy on the heart, including a horrible story about a man who fell off a roller coaster and was a dad.

Dax Shepard and Monica Padman have not both watched the video. The one who has been with Kelly Clarkson knows the details. The other saw there was a video, did not have time to watch it, and has only heard about what happened. That side still calls the Kelly Clarkson story light and inconsequential. The reply is that it c

Dax Shepard was embarrassed to be nominated for a Golden Globe while Malcolm Gladwell was left out. He says he has said so publicly and to Malcolm Gladwell's face, and he used every interview to call the nomination ridiculous.

Dax Shepard thinks only shows that aired every week were nominated. He does not think limited series were included. He says otherwise Malcolm Gladwell would have won and swept it. Malcolm Gladwell tells him there is no reason to diminish his own considerable contributions to society in order to uplift Malcolm Gladwell.

They still went. Talk of what Dax Shepard wore jumps from an Italian dinner jacket and shorts to a full suit and nice shoes. He says he wears a tux pr

Malcolm Gladwell says the Sir John Knight gun case used to read the Second Amendment is completely made up. The version courts like says Sir John Knight took guns to a church, raised hell, was tried, and was found innocent. Gladwell treats the acquittal as real. What the research overturns is the church story: Knight did not bring his guns into the church.

Courts want the historical antecedents of the Second Amendment, because the founders' thinking is supposed to explain the sentence they drafted. Sir John Knight is offered as a 17th century English case in which a man accused of carrying guns illegally was acquitted, and as proof of a rich history of defending gun rights. The citation run

Malcolm Gladwell says New York State's suicide rate has historically been half the national average because a handgun law kept for a hundred years made a handgun hard to get. Most people who try to kill themselves would take a second chance if they survived.

The law followed a famous murder in downtown Manhattan, where a prominent writer was killed by a crazed fan. The outrage was enough that New York kept the rule for a hundred years. Gladwell says the law did not really affect the homicide rate, because most homicides use illegal guns smuggled in from out of state. It did affect suicide. He calls an attempt an expressive act of self-violence: a handgun nearby makes death likely, and witho

Dax Shepard says liberals and conservatives split on guns for the same reason: fear. One side fears the other person who has the gun. The other side is scared enough to want the gun.

A friend from the South gave him that framing, and Dax says it broke his own polarization. In one election it hit him that people are not voting for what they want. They vote to address what terrifies them. For liberals, that includes global warming. Conservatives are afraid of other things. Seeing both groups as afraid made him much more compassionate toward people he disagrees with, because he sees they are afraid, 100 percent.

He says confrontation and anger are the worst strategy for dealing with someone w

Malcolm Gladwell says Baltimore stops the next killing by talking a likely avenger down before he acts. Much of homicide, he says, is young men settling beefs with violence, so prevention means intervening and training them to resolve conflicts in a more peaceable way. The visits work. They involve no arrests, no action on guns, no National Guard, and no show of force.

He describes a Chicago program in his book that teaches conflict resolution to teenage boys for a year-long class. Studies showed dramatic decreases down the line. Baltimore, which has had a dramatic decline in homicides, took the idea further. Each week, 25 people sit with a slide deck of every crime from the week. In the ex

Malcolm Gladwell says the Second Amendment debate in Virginia was about slave patrols. At the Richmond ratifying convention, Virginians argued about militias the whole time. They feared the federal government would take state militias away, and when they talked about militias they meant slave patrols: armed white men.

The Constitution was proposed in the 1780s, and all the states had to ratify it. Virginia was the most important state. Gladwell says the American Union was not happening unless Virginia joined, which is why George Washington had to be president and why leaders constantly appeased Virginia. Perfect transcripts show the Richmond debate stayed on militias. In many parts of Virgi

Malcolm Gladwell opens the audiobook with Drew Holcomb singing Troubles because a mass shooting is one of the rare moments when the reality of gun violence in the country hits home to the majority of people. Gladwell says in the book that mass shootings are a tiny part of the problem, and he still wanted the song for that reason.

Drew Holcomb is a singer in Nashville and a friend of Gladwell, and Holcomb is adopted. Holcomb had read the book. Gladwell likes music in audiobooks and asked Holcomb for any music that would work. Holcomb sent a song written one morning after driving kids to school and hearing about a mass shooting at a school. Gladwell calls Troubles haunting and beautiful, and

Malcolm Gladwell says crime and violence are two completely separate things. They involve different people, and they have different roots, different causes, and different cures. America is not a high crime society. By the standards of the Western world, America is a medium to low crime place. What sets America apart is violence.

Robbery, car theft, and a house broken into are the crimes he means. A car is far more likely to be stolen or broken into in Montreal than in New York City, and the gap is not even close. A home is much more likely to be broken into in Paris or London than in Chicago.

When politicians say they are going to get tough on crime, Gladwell says the question is what they

Malcolm Gladwell learned about American crime from Time magazine, in a childhood with no crime of his own. He grew up in rural Ontario with no television and no newspaper. Books and Time were what came into the house.

Time arrived every week, and as a kid he read it from beginning to end. Around eight, in rural Ontario, the magazine was his picture of a country he had never visited, only 100 miles away. He grew obsessed with America and later read enormous amounts on American politics. The articles were full of people getting shot and murdered. His town had one police officer, the husband of his mother's friend, who would stop kids and say he would tell their parents. Gladwell had never see