Malcolm Gladwell

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Speaker 1: The Quest Loft Show is a production of iHeartRadio. Good people, What's up? How you doing? Today's episode is actually the very first episode taped as the Quest Love Show. It was with author podcast hosts and my pal Malcolm glad Well. We did this live on stage at the iHeart Cafe in can France back in June, and you'll hear me explore with this format, asking some random questions to get to know people in new ones. Malcolm seemed to have fun with it, and along the way we discussed his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. So please enjoy this episode and let's go back live to the iHeart Cafe.

00:00:45
Speaker 2: All right, all right, who's excited to hear a great podcast tonight? About five years ago we hear it. I Heart had the chance to begin working with one of the great podcasts out there. By the way, I'm Will Pearson, President of iHeart Podcast. We are so happy to have Well was that what that was about? Just was great, guys. I'm just gonna sit down and chat for a bit. Thank you now. But I'm pleased to introduce one of our favorite podcasters, a true cultural powerhouse. Of course, he's a founding member of the legendary roots. Let's give it up for the roots. He's a best selling author. He's gonna do the wander up here. He's never patient. He's not a patient man. He's a historian, he's a creative visionary and as of three years ago, an Academy Award winner. Let's give it up for the Academy Award winner for Summer of Soul, about the nineteen sixty nine Harlem Cultural Festival. If you haven't checked out this year's documentary that he did about the brilliant sly Stone. Unfortunately we lost him just last week.

00:01:54
Speaker 1: It is a.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: Brilliant documentary as well. He's of course an incredible DJ. I don't know if anybody got to hear Him's not up at Hotel do Cap an incredible setup there, but we here love to celebrate his genre hopping podcast, where he gets the chance to chat with people such as Michelle Obama, Chris Rock, Shaka Khan. The list goes on and on and on. He's the ultimate multi hyphen it and he is interviewing someone also incredibly interesting. Please join me in welcoming the one and only Questlove.

00:02:32
Speaker 1: How's everyone out there? All right? I was handing to this le boo boo like five minutes ago. So I know most of you don't know who this is, neither do I, but I just learned what a lobuobu was. Well. First of all, welcome to can Lyon. Thank you for coming. Shout out to my iHeart family for organizing and putting this together. Shout out to the two one five family as well. So basically this platform is primarily known as where I dissect music or musicians. Occasionally an actor, director and author comes on the show, occasional politician. But we're going to do something different today pretty much. I'll say that our guests thinks different and probably specifically to me, but for a lot of us. He taught me how to think different and didn't think about the power of critical thinking probably until the beginning of the aughts in the early two thousands and whatnot. And I know he hates all this attention, but no, he's really changed my life as far as me understanding my personality for wanting to practice or knowing the science of what's behind things and whatnot. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Malcolm Gladwell to quest Love Support. How you doing, man, I'm good, Okay, delighted to be here. Well, let me start off asking because you know, when I first met to you twenty years ago, like both of us were arriving at a new place where you know, we kind of reached our prominence at the same time. Now that it's twenty twenty five years later, I'll just ask you just off the cuff, like, does it ever get exhausting when people are always running to you for answers or how to explain things?

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Speaker 3: Well, it'd be worse if they didn't do that, right, So you always have to think about the flip side of it. If you produce stuff and no one it never caused a ripple, that would be worse. Okay, So this is a problem I'm happy to have.

00:04:42
Speaker 1: Okay, I can accept that. Normally I start with a music related question, but I know that's not your forte, But I'm going to ask you anyway.

00:04:51
Speaker 3: It's unfair to say it's not my forte. I don't know next to you, I don't.

00:04:55
Speaker 1: Know what about it. Okay, Well, I mean you told me before.

00:04:58
Speaker 4: That, Well, I was worried you were going to start.

00:05:00
Speaker 1: You know, That's why I'm asking this question, all right, What was your first musical memory in life.

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Speaker 3: Oh, I know exactly what it was. We had just moved. It was nineteen sixty nine. We just moved to Canada from England. We did not have a television, but my parents decided to buy a record player.

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Speaker 4: But we had no records, and so I went.

00:05:25
Speaker 3: With my mother to the public library and we checked out two records Peter PAULA. Mery Greatest Hits, which I listened to once.

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Speaker 4: It was like EH and.

00:05:36
Speaker 3: Bridge over Troubled Water, which Simon and Garrom Simon and Garfunkle.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: I know, the a Wreatha Franklin version, so.

00:05:43
Speaker 3: Which you know, if you think about sort of serendipitous moments in your life, if that was really the the first album I ever listened to, really the first mut We didn't listen to the radio except for like news radio, and we didn't have a TV. I had no exposure, your zero to popular music. And the first popular music I was ever exposed to in a concentrated way was one of the greatest albums of all.

00:06:07
Speaker 4: Time, which is pretty over Trouble.

00:06:09
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:06:10
Speaker 3: That's like if the first novel you read was War in Peace, or the first scientist you met was like Einstein or you know what I mean, it's like incredibly lucky and that I was. To this day, I remember exactly what it was like to listen to all those songs.

00:06:27
Speaker 1: Well, I was going to ask you, what was it about that record that spoke to you at the time, it.

00:06:32
Speaker 4: Was It's funny because I didn't.

00:06:34
Speaker 3: Later forty years later did an audiobook with Paul Simon, who I interviewed him for like forty hours, and which was this great sort of full circle. But I think it was I hadn't realized how much joy there could be in pop music. Remember, I had no exposure to it, and if you have no exposure, you have no emotional context for it. So I didn't know what pop music was supposed to be. Was it supposed to be? All I knew was church music. I knew music that was supposed to be kind of ceremonial and formal and kind of waited with moral meaning. I didn't know joy in music. I knew Nursey rhymes, but they were silly, they weren't joyful. That album is you know Cecilia and that drum solo and on and on, and then the kind of in the middle of it they dropped the bomb of Bridge over Troubled Water, which is like a full on gospel song sung by two Jewish guys from Queens, and like, even then is genius. You discover the genius of a backtrack. I grew up in a household that was a cultural contradiction, a black mother and a white mother and a white father, and I was aware of the fact that was a discordant idea in the culture. I didn't know anyone else who had that combination. And then I come across this record which has a similar discordant thing. I know, I know what gospel music was, and this was a gospel song sung by two Jewish guys and queens.

00:08:05
Speaker 4: Like that's in if.

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Speaker 3: You're seven six, that's really interesting and you're kind of a student of this.

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Speaker 1: So even at the age of six, you had the wherewithal the bandwidth to sort of differentiate emotion or well.

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Speaker 4: Remember I was well churched.

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Speaker 3: So I've been growing up in the evangelical churches of Jamaica, the you know, the formal churches of England.

00:08:34
Speaker 4: The so I knew if you if you're.

00:08:37
Speaker 3: Well churched, you you quickly become acquainted with a whole range of kind of cultural forms.

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Speaker 1: Was the air quotes secular music not allowed in the household or did they frown upon it or not.

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Speaker 3: It's not that we was frowned upon, it was we never got around to it.

00:08:54
Speaker 1: You just never knew existed.

00:08:56
Speaker 4: My mother, the first.

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Speaker 3: Movie she ever watched in its entirety was the movie remember the Melanie Griffith movie Working Girl. Yeah, my mom watched that with the sound off.

00:09:11
Speaker 1: Because she did that was like late eighties.

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Speaker 3: My mother was born in nineteen thirty two. The first movie she saw, It's full was on a plane and she didn't realize she could buy the sound so she just watched it, right, And her comment was, so we didn't have a TV, so she was really encountering a movie that form for the first time.

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Speaker 4: She was completely blown away by it. And I remember as a kid thinking that is deeply hilarious that.

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Speaker 3: She thought, this is this is magical without the sound mind you right, this is magical. Welcome that was an extraordinary film. It is the is the comment that she goes. But like, we didn't have a rule against it. We just we just didn't do TV and we didn't go to the movies, and we didn't buy records.

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Speaker 1: Okay, so I have a theory that boredom is necessary. Oh yeah, wait, I said I had a theory about You're the one that showed me that theory. I think your own theory.

00:10:15
Speaker 3: No, it's my mom's theory, because I would say to my mom repeatedly, I mean, I'm living in this what I consider to be a cultural desert in the middle of rural Canada. And I would say to my mom every day on bored and she would say, Malcolm, that's a good thing.

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Speaker 4: Your mind needs a rest.

00:10:33
Speaker 1: I agree. Did you agree with her at the time.

00:10:35
Speaker 4: Or I do now. I was aware of.

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Speaker 3: How I was forced to manufacture my own fund and I grew to really, really love there was a kind of, in a wonderful way, a pressure to make my own fun and I would the hijinks I did as a kid were so elaborate and so complex and so ironic in kind of many layers that it was the result of that.

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Speaker 1: So no cousins or siblings on the other side of the town you never knew about, or.

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Speaker 4: We're living in the middle of rural Ontario.

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Speaker 3: In our neighbors are Old Order Mennonites who drive horses and buggies and don't have electricity, And like I said, we have no TV, and we don't.

00:11:23
Speaker 4: Go to the movies.

00:11:24
Speaker 3: We don't really ever go to restaurants. We go to Jamaica once a year at Christmas, and we read a lot of books.

00:11:33
Speaker 4: That's what's going on.

00:11:35
Speaker 1: So give me an example of how you would entertain yourself in your childhood.

00:11:38
Speaker 3: Well, my best friend was a guy named Terry Martin, who I was again, just as I was lucky to have encountered Bridge over Trouble Water as the first real record, my first really close friend was this guy Terry Martin, who was another Neither of his parents went to college. He grew up his dad was a chicken farmer, he grew up down the road. He's now, by the way, a tenured professor at Harvard. But that's the luck. He happened to be the guy I ran into in elementary school. And he's genius, okay, And he had a sense. He thought that all rules should be broken. And we convinced our moms that this was true because our moms knew each other, and so our moms basically let us do whatever we want, including not go to school and wait.

00:12:26
Speaker 1: You would tell them that you're cutting school.

00:12:28
Speaker 4: Oh, my mom was complicit. We had a thing.

00:12:32
Speaker 3: Terry and I decided that it was too easy. We were recompetitive. It was too easy to compete on who could get the best grades, because like, how hard was that? Because no one my school, like ten people went to college every year from high school. So we decided what we would do is we would create I never forgot what we called it. But the number we cared about was your average times a number of absences you had that year, and the winner was the one with the highest number. So we competed not only to get good grades, but to see how many days of school we could skip. It was fantastic. That's an example of the kind of shit that we were doing. And so you seem like it's no, but it's not. The genius was it's rebellion, but it's highly constrained, institutionalized rebellion, because the point was to excel at school while never going there. Right, that it was the contray that interests That's what interested it.

00:13:26
Speaker 1: I'm so smart that I was.

00:13:27
Speaker 3: We're not gonna we're not blowing off school. On the contrary, right, we're like, we intend to ace out while never showing up, and then I terry won that. But then I decided what I would do is skip a year of high school basically without telling anyone. So I just enrolled in one year ahead classes in my senior year and no one appeared to notice, which tells us about Canada in the seventies.

00:13:56
Speaker 1: And wait, Charlotmagne's face right now, like, I'm that, how is this scientifically possible to happen?

00:14:03
Speaker 4: Well?

00:14:03
Speaker 3: No, So the key I thought about this a lot when I was a kid. I realized that the only subject matter where this was going to be hard was math because math was sequential, right, So if you were going to skip junior year math is what I was intending to do, then you might have a problem.

00:14:21
Speaker 4: But then what's my ace in the hole?

00:14:24
Speaker 3: My dad's a mathematician, so I just had him like whenever I had a problem, I was like, Okay, what am I missing here?

00:14:30
Speaker 4: And he'd say, oh, yeah, it's just this, this, this.

00:14:32
Speaker 3: I don't know why I'm going on about high school years, but they were such fun. I also realized you didn't have to graduate from high school once that in Canada at the time you did, they were loopholes which I was too boring to go into. But I had this insight at fifteen that I didn't have to get a diploma to go to college. And once I realized, I was like, well, all that's are off. That means why I don't have to show up for school. I don't have to take my junior year. It all kept skated.

00:15:00
Speaker 1: But did you generally just not like school?

00:15:03
Speaker 3: Like?

00:15:03
Speaker 1: What about the whole social angle of it?

00:15:05
Speaker 4: All came later?

00:15:07
Speaker 1: Nevermind I didn't like it, So what would you consider your first foray into this cold world we have outside? Like if you're inside of an isolated bubble where yeah, you know, you're allowed to cut school and without repercussions.

00:15:24
Speaker 3: Or yeah, you know, I think I'm still inside the bubble. I don't think i've ever I'm not. You have to to backtrack. I was raised to believe and it was a correct belief, and my greatest frustration with people in my positions they don't recognize it, which was I was a middle class male growing up in a developed country in the seventies who had came from a healthy, happy home life. The world was constructed for me. The whole architecture of western society was constructed so the people who were like me would succeed, Like you had to really work hard not to That was my I think that's the correct positions. Why I have such frustration with like people in my position who whine about their lives. It's like, I'm sorry, Like the whole world was built for you.

00:16:21
Speaker 4: You have no business whinding about anything.

00:16:23
Speaker 3: Ever, there were no obstacles, like institutionally every obstacle. All around me were people who faced obstacles, but not me.

00:16:32
Speaker 1: By three, I had a fight or flight situation, you know, like growing up in my neighborhood where you instantly had radar of which route was safe to go to school, go home, Like growing up in crack Era West Philadelphia. Yeah, so you never had a fight or flight existence.

00:16:54
Speaker 3: My mom was like friends with the principal, and if I got in trouble, she would lecture in about like wait wait what oh yeah, she would call him up.

00:17:04
Speaker 4: Same was Roger Millican. She knew Roger. She'd call him up and say what are you doing?

00:17:08
Speaker 3: Like you have bigger problems than worrying about Malcolm, which I think was a correct position. Wow, she's now in a nursing home. But she's still like doing battle with the Nursing Home administration. Still, oh yeah, you can't like the West Indian Lady is an is an indefatigable and implacable.

00:17:27
Speaker 1: Force for you. What were your aspirations of did you know from the gate that you wanted to be like in the social structure?

00:17:50
Speaker 4: I didn't think about it.

00:17:53
Speaker 3: Never occurred to me to think about the future in that way, and I still don't in a I'm not someone who I'm not a plan and I'm not a I don't really think beyond next week.

00:18:04
Speaker 4: I assume or even tomorrow. I assume.

00:18:07
Speaker 3: I'm optimistic enough that I assume things will work out.

00:18:12
Speaker 1: So you've always lived in the present, Yeah, I don't.

00:18:14
Speaker 3: I'm not someone who once the day is over, it is erased.

00:18:18
Speaker 1: From my living in this administration, Yeah, forced me to start living in the present like right now. Ever, since November seventh, my only goal in life is to have the best June seventeenth, of twenty twenty five that I can have. So will mean I'm not doing it, no, no, no, no, I'm not doing a four polow some thank you. But previously my thing was literally strategic planning, like professionally, as Questlove, my life is planned in three year increments, where I at least know that I still have work booked until twenty twenty eight. But like living day to day, like the undoing of waking up every morning thinking like financially, like my bills, my staff, growth, my survival, and so for you, is this always like twenty four hours a day.

00:19:16
Speaker 3: I probably have, on an unconscious level all the same anxieties you do, but I have, as a psychologist say, I'm probably better defended. Living in the present is my way of warding off those anxieties. If I open that door and start thinking about next year, I worry that an avalanche of things will bury me.

00:19:38
Speaker 1: So when you release a book, you're not instantly thinking what's my next project in two years?

00:19:44
Speaker 4: Or no I have I know what I'm working on now.

00:19:49
Speaker 3: But what I know is that the process of inspiration is so serendipitous and unpredictable that it's just foolish to try and plant it out. It will always like I was doing this thing this, I'm doing this big podcast right now, which is this long series about a true crime thing about a murder in Alabama, And I thought I was going to do it one way. And then I go and make a reporting trip to Muscle Sholes. It'square the stake place in the Quad Cities. Muscle Sholes is Alabama. Yeah, Florence, Discumbria. And I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Florence, Alabama, and a guy comes up to me and says, hey, you're Malcolm Melalla.

00:20:32
Speaker 4: What you What are you doing here?

00:20:33
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm doing this thing about this murder took place forty years ago. He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, you know you should talk to my friend Grant. I was like, okay, So I call up Grant. He's like, oh yeah, I know all about that. And Grant fixes me up with like fifteen people who knew everything about this murder. And then I go back in the second time and I meet some of those people, and then one of the guys says, Oh, my friend Ricky, who I have breakfast with every morning, he actually investigated murder.

00:21:01
Speaker 4: I thought everyone who investigated with dad.

00:21:03
Speaker 3: So I just like get in my car and drive one mile and there's Ricky and Ricky tells me everything like if that's your that's to my mind, is the way not just the world works. But it's the way that creative process works is you just put yourself in harm's way of something and things will hit you. And I kind of, on some level have a confidence. The reason I went there is on some unconscious level, I knew that I would have an encounter like that one in the coffee shop. Maybe it was I didn't inveage in that particular thing, but I knew if I went there something would come out of it.

00:21:40
Speaker 4: So I went there without a plan.

00:21:42
Speaker 1: I like, what's your creative ecosystem, Like, are you just a circle of one? Or do you least have someone that bounce ideas off of someone that says that's not a good look?

00:21:53
Speaker 3: Or I have Informally, I think I have a fair amount of that. I'm operating within and Pushkin my audio company, where I have a built in ecosystem of editors and when we have you know, table reads where we and where I read stuff alout and get feedback.

00:22:12
Speaker 4: And I've realized how valuable that is.

00:22:14
Speaker 3: What I've always believed is that if you have an idea, what you should do is talk about it obsessively. So the minute you have what you think is a special idea, the first thing you should do is share it with as many people as humanly possible, which is counterintuitive, right, because your instinct is to hold on to something that you think is special. But you have to fight that instinct because only it's not just that there is value on.

00:22:38
Speaker 4: People tell you when they hear the idea, but there is value in you.

00:22:44
Speaker 3: Iterating on the idea in conversation because you will. You won't explain it the same way twice. The tenth time you've explaining it to someone, you realize you're explaining it in a totally different way, because it's the same way up a stand up comic does for months of practice in comedy bys before they do their Netflix special, right, because it's incredibly valuable to say something to somebody and to listen to their pauses, and to a musician is the same way, right, And so I think you had to.

00:23:16
Speaker 4: You have to if you're a.

00:23:17
Speaker 3: Writer, you have to build that into your sort of practice. And so I have a really good friend who's a very successful screenwriter and my best friend, and I tell him everything.

00:23:30
Speaker 4: I just watch his eyes and he will.

00:23:34
Speaker 3: Let you know if he just didn't work for him, or if it's why are you doing it?

00:23:38
Speaker 4: That, like, he's really honest, you know.

00:23:40
Speaker 1: And I was going to say, are people lowed to be honest with you? Even now that you're Malcolm glad Well You're past You're an adjective. People now just say glad Wellian or like in describing.

00:23:51
Speaker 4: Usually in disparagement. But yes, they do.

00:23:53
Speaker 1: Use that glad Wellian theory.

00:23:56
Speaker 3: No, because the older and more successful I've gotten, the more willing I am to accept criticism because like I don't have any the stake so lower, right, Like.

00:24:09
Speaker 1: When's the first time you got pushed back for one of your theories?

00:24:14
Speaker 4: Oh? Well, I mean so often I can't even keep trying.

00:24:17
Speaker 1: When's the first time you took it personal? I'm only asking this simply because the irony is, of course, you know, I read your book in two thousand, right when the height of my recording career was just starting. And you know, the one album in my canon that's kind of like the Redheaded Stepchild is The Tipping Point, which that's the first time, you know, as someone that was a straight a student with critics and always on the top ten lists at the end of the year and all that stuff, that's the first time we got pushback and so wow, when people are like, but we're still friends, We're still no non playing, No, we are. But for you, though, what now? I have a good relationship with what they call failure one. I don't take the undesirable result as personal as I used to. And you know, it's depressing, like I'd have many times. I've had panic attacks, and you know, artists are always in their head and all that stuff. But for you, though, you just you knew out the gate ped No.

00:25:29
Speaker 4: It's I don't.

00:25:32
Speaker 3: My feeling is it's you know, I'm a distance runner and that has really powerfully shaped my perspective on life. And I really, I mean it sounds corny, but I'm running a very long race. So somebody disliking a critic attacking something that I've done is like someone pulls ahead of you in lap two and my position is well, but the race is fifty laps, so like, who care? I mean not, who cares? It her at sea will sting. But it's not a terminal, it's not devastating. I once read years ago this thing that has always stayed with me, which I think is incredibly interesting. It was a guy named Dean Simonson who studied creativity he was trying to figure out what distinguishes highly created people from people who are not as creative, and his initial thought was a creative person, a successful creative person, a genius is someone who has a higher hit rate. So for every ten ideas they have, eight would be good, whereas someone who was mediocre, they'd have ten ideas and they'd have two of them would be good.

00:26:37
Speaker 4: That's what he thought.

00:26:39
Speaker 3: He does this long, complicated analysis of like two hundred geniuses, and he realizes he's totally wrong. The hit rate is exactly the same, except that the genius has ten times as many ideas. So like by definition, the genius has more failures than the mediocre person because their output is just greater. Right, I thought that was It's so interesting Einstein has a jillion bad ideas, but he has so many ideas it doesn't matter.

00:27:07
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you them, because, uh, kind of in my field of work, you know, oftentimes, especially in music, the word genius is completely overused. And you know, I'm also in a field of entertainment in which those that put numbers on the board are often rewarded with accolades and that sort of thing, and oftentimes people that I really think that are making artistic strides and whatever they do don't get hits whatever. So in music especially, I tend to think that the geniuses are often overlooked and under celebrated, as opposed to oh, I had a good idea and it works. I mean, do you agree with that or yeah?

00:27:56
Speaker 3: I'm not what I'm talking about success in this context, I'm not necessarily necessarily talking about commercial success. Like to go back to my Paul Simon, one of my favorite artists. I thought his last album, which was done when he was whatever, eighty seven seals, it might be my favorite Paul Simon album.

00:28:16
Speaker 4: So that's in his repertoire. What is that number?

00:28:20
Speaker 3: I don't know, eighteen, I don't know how many albums he's done. But to my mind, what qualifies him as being at the very top of the pinnacle is sustained excellence over a very long period and an unwillingness to accept the notion that he he didn't stop, He didn't sort of accept the fact that his commercial decline was somehow indicative of his own creative failure. He persisted, and I think seven seals, seven seals like it took me like five listens by the fifth listen, I was like.

00:28:58
Speaker 4: This is unbelievable.

00:28:59
Speaker 3: This is such a mature, complicated, brilliant more than a summation of his previous work, but a departure in this really beautiful way. And that's what I'm talking about that he had he'd be the first time. He's had some crappy albums along the way. But that's my point that the truly creative person is defined by their productivity and not by their success rate.

00:29:25
Speaker 1: I call it the Thriller effect. So the Thriller effect to me was, you know, when Michael Jackson's previous album, Off the Wall came out, it was critically acclaimed and it was a success. It sold eight million copies. He thought it was a failure because he only got two Grammy nominations and basically had his joker, what way they get a load of me? Like that was his Thriller is going to be his revenge. Now, the thing is, as an artistic statement, Thriller is a success, but what happens is people the conversation of Thriller was the first time, especially music in which the quantity was at focus and not the quality of it. So in other words, it won eight Grammys, it's old sixty four, blah blah blah, a million, it made him hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. So and then suddenly that became our north star. And I understand the need for survival and security, especially for black artist is important. But suddenly that to me is sort of when the conversation changed with art, where now it's like how many units did you sell? How many?

00:30:40
Speaker 4: Yeah?

00:30:41
Speaker 1: Do you think that's problematic? Like can we ever get to a place where people genuinely judge art or just get taste? I think taste is kind of the I don't know if we still have good taste and are chasing success.

00:31:01
Speaker 3: The kind of thought experiment is, would your cultural consumption be different if you were unaware of any of those indices of creative work success? So if you never knew where a song charted when you listen to the song, if you never knew whether a book was a bestseller or not when you read the book, or on and on and on. I kind of think our choices and our preferences would be quite different. And I'm guessing in a really lovely way.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: That is correct. So often my friends laugh at my rock choices because my rock knowledge is coming from that standpoint that I will get something without me knowing the history or the background of it. In other words, the first Dylan record I like was Self Portrait, which was like the Christian phase of Dylan, which critics were like, get out, you know, they didn't like it, and I dug it because I didn't have the knowledge of it. Or even with the the Stones releasing an emotional rescue, or when rat on Hum came out from you like, if it's critically bad, then that's the album.

00:32:16
Speaker 3: I like, well, you were seeing it. It's like my mom with Working Girl. You were seeing it with fresh eyes right exactly.

00:32:23
Speaker 1: And only then like years later, I was like, oh that Almo was critically planned or people think that that's his worst album. Yeah, Dylan fans hated that record, but one I liked it because as a hip hop artist, it's just like at least four gems on there that I hear music different than you know, the average person. So but I believe that's true if you don't have the knowledge of Yeah.

00:32:48
Speaker 3: A lot of this also has to do with the kind of failure of the critical function cultural function in society. So in its original sense. The role of critics was to help us understand the intention of the artists, right. It wasn't to kind of pass judgment on whether we thought we it was in my I mean I mean, I don't mean when I say original, I mean in the best sense of what criticism was supposed to do.

00:33:18
Speaker 1: I thought, after like Lester Bangs and seventy three, like the whole point of critics was just a flex for each other, like watch this take.

00:33:26
Speaker 3: Maybe I'm talking pre seventy three then okay, But when I say original, I mean original, original, or at least how.

00:33:34
Speaker 4: We would like criticism to work.

00:33:37
Speaker 3: Is it someone who knows more than us about a cultural subject helps us to understand the intention of the work of art and whether the art succeeds it by its own and according to its own intentions.

00:33:51
Speaker 4: Right.

00:33:52
Speaker 3: In other words, the critic has to be faceless and selfless in their evaluation. That notion has gone out the window, and with the result, it has corrupted.

00:34:02
Speaker 4: Our appreciation of a lot of art.

00:34:05
Speaker 3: And instead of helping me understand, well, why is you know, pat sounds a great album. I listened to that and I think I can't what is this about? I need someone to help me. I feel the same way about I once trod something about Norm McDonald, who was the Comedians comedian, and I would listen to all these routines and I would be like, you know, I don't find I.

00:34:27
Speaker 1: Never even get a file.

00:34:29
Speaker 3: It worked for me, but I knew that people who knew a lot about comedy thought he was a genius. And what I wanted was someone who knew a lot about comedy to tell me why they thought he was a genius. My first thought it was like, I don't like this, but people who know more than me do, and so my first thought was curiosity about Okay, what am I missing? So the critic's role is to explain to me what I'm missing it. Maybe he doesn't get me to the point where I love Norm McDonald, but it gets me to the point where I receive spect normal right. But when critics have abandoned that role and they're simply saying I hate this, it didn't work for me, or this art is violating some ideological predisposition I have, it's like, well, what's the point of your criticism? Like why don't I just walk down the street and like ask some random person what they think of it.

00:35:19
Speaker 4: Right, So it's like the failure of that.

00:35:22
Speaker 3: That's why I say that when we remove evidence of something's marketplace power, essentially what we're doing is we are removing a kind of criticism, right, a bad criticism, and allowing us to see the art with fresh eyes.

00:35:37
Speaker 1: Side note, has anyone ever sent you Norm McDonald's chorus Leachman roast?

00:35:44
Speaker 4: Duh?

00:35:45
Speaker 1: Okay, this is what I gotta tell you. So this is what I thought was genius because you've seen those like celebrity roasts that they have on Comedy Central. So Chlorus Leachman is getting roasted, and or McDonald decides early that he's going to fall on his sword, but not in that the Aristocrats way. Are you guys familiar with the Aristocrats joke? It's a joke where if a comedian is having a bad set on stage, he will somehow signal to his friends in the back, his fellow comedians, that I failed, and he'll tell this Aristocrats joke, clearly freaking out the audience. But you know, he's again performing for the eight people in the back. So McDonald decides that he is going to tell not even flat jokes, but horrible jokes, but he's not going to wink, like there's a way where you're going to give a bad performance. Yeah, but maybe thirty seconds suit and to it, you'll like win to the audience, like I'm doing this on purpose.

00:36:54
Speaker 4: Like he would not portray that dude the way.

00:36:57
Speaker 1: The first of all his set was like ten minutes and the collective look of horror on the people in the audience, like you know when you're forcing yourself to laugh at somebody like I was normally that I was funny, but they were all looking like he lost it or but he did it on purpose, like he never once let up, like psych I was reading these jokes from a nineteen forty joke, that's what he was doing. He got a joke book from nineteen forty to see if I could work in the new millennial and it didn't. And he literally didn't care. And you know, at the time when I'm in therapy, one of the things I had to learn was you have to care so much that you don't care, you know, like that's zero Fox times twelve billion, where you just operat in life where you literally don't care what people think. And yeah, once I saw that, then I looked at his.

00:37:57
Speaker 3: It's a classic thing that insiders do for other insiders, which is, for the outsider, what you're interested in is the quality of the spectacle, without absent any kind of larger context. What the insider's interested in is that plus degree of difficulty. So the reason the comedians are laughing at Norm McDonald is they understand that what he's doing is insanely difficult and courageous, and they know they could never pull it off themselves, and it's hilarious to them that they know someone who would attempt it. Right, you have to have done stand up and bombed to know why that's genius. And I've not done stand up and bombs, so I don't know that feeling right. So that's why it's inaccessible to me. But I still understand why it's appealing to the insider.

00:38:50
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you, Ben, could you pull off a children's book, a book for a three year old where you're limited to just if that sixty words? Yeah, do you think you can pull it off?

00:39:05
Speaker 3: Well? I have a three year old and I tell her I make up bedtime stories. Does that count?

00:39:15
Speaker 1: Well? I mean, but that's that's in the safety of your your your own bubble, Like, yeah, could you release a children's book and be as effective in thatgy?

00:39:24
Speaker 3: No?

00:39:25
Speaker 1: You know't think so?

00:39:26
Speaker 4: No, I think, actually could I do it?

00:39:28
Speaker 3: I mean, now that I know children's books because I have a three year old, I'm aware of that eighty five to ninety percent of them are really terrible. So I'm aware of how hard it's really hard to make a good look. Really, I don't I'm not dissing children's books writers, but the genre is fiendishly difficult, it is, and so I don't think absent like a good ten years of immersion in that. Like even when I'm telling a story to my daughter. I told her story for like a couple of weeks and now she's like no, no, no, Daddy, Like she gives me the story. It's like, we're going to do a story by cat Is called Biggie Smalls. So she says, Biggie Smalls is going to be, you know, out at a party with his best friend something like go.

00:40:13
Speaker 1: So she doesn't even premise.

00:40:15
Speaker 4: She doesn't even.

00:40:16
Speaker 3: Trust me anymore. Like basically she's saying, Daddy, you're set up, suck. I have to step in here, and like this is how it's gonna do it. Like for me, so I've already you know, the market has judged me, and it's judged me harshly.

00:40:28
Speaker 1: Maybe she'll teach you. You know, I think you could do it. I know that you're a passionate runner. Yeah, And I believe that in order for someone to be creatively successful, there has to be an element of breathing that sort of releases the endorphins or whatever it is that our brain gives us. And at first I thought people who were obsessive joggers did this just for you know, health's sake. But I didn't realize that, Oh, at the end of jogging, you're doing a lot of breathing, which for me meditative breathing or DMT breathwork or advanced level of breath work. It's kind of how I do it. But what was it about running? Like, did you at any point in life dream of professionally running?

00:41:32
Speaker 4: Like?

00:41:33
Speaker 3: I was quite a good high school runner, but very very early on I realized that I was, you know, one massive tier below the great You know, even at thirteen and fourteen, you recognize the kids you're running with who are going to the Olympics. You just I mean they're just on a different level, right, So I never had that. That fantasy lasted a very very very short time, but I found it.

00:42:00
Speaker 4: It's funny.

00:42:00
Speaker 3: It is valuable to me as an adult in a way that it wasn't as a kid, for that exact reason that I don't have any other escapes, right, I mean, every other aspect of my life is and I have no the kind of opportunities just to let your mind wander are so limited, and I think creativity begins in that kind of free association.

00:42:25
Speaker 1: So what is it creative process with the tipping point versus your creative process for revenge at the tipping point? And that twenty five year gap, like what walked me through? Like do you use music? Do you like?

00:42:42
Speaker 3: There's usually a story that I want to tell. That's the It's not the beginning of the book, but it's the heart of the book. And the first tipping point it was just I was living in New York and New York suddenly got safe and I didn't understand why that was as simple. I just wanted to explain that how that could happen? This one I was thinking a lot and writing about COVID and this idea which people couldn't understand in COVID, which was COVID was spread by one person in a hundred. In other words, if everyone in this room had COVID right now, only one of you would pose any substantial risk of transmitting your virus to anyone else. And that's because, for reasons we don't understand a tiny fraction of human beings, you spread COVID with what are called aerosols. In this room, there is someone who produces one hundred or a thousand x more aerosols than the rest of us. Again, we don't know why. It's just a random genetic thing. That person gets everybody sick. The rest of us do not. And nobody during COVID would appreciate this fact, like we're scientists saying it's not every one of us, it's one in one hundred. If you understand who they are, you could stop this thing cold. No one was interested in that message, and I was fascinated by that, and to me, it was this beautiful illustration of one of the fundamental principles of epidemics, which is they are profoundly asymmetrical.

00:44:09
Speaker 4: Right, small number of people.

00:44:10
Speaker 3: Do all the work, So that kind of rekindled my interest in the idea, and I just then I started to build on that. Why do we have trouble with that? What would the implications of the fact we overlooked it? What are other examples of this?

00:44:24
Speaker 1: You know? On it?

00:44:24
Speaker 3: You just kind of like build out from a lot of that's just kind of very random musing about what you're learning as you as you write about that phenomenon.

00:44:36
Speaker 1: So, in the pandemic, in which I always say seventy five percent, other people were faced with a challenge of a pivot or a tipping point or a change in their life, which basically, I mean, unless you're under a rock, your life, whatever your life was before March of twenty twenty, was not the same after twenty twenty, whether you regressed even further for the worst or thrived in a whole nother area. Was that true for you, Like, how was twenty twenty or twenty twenty one different from you as opposed to what was now in your rear view mirror.

00:45:17
Speaker 3: It's a really interesting question, and I'm going to cop out in a sense that that's the kind of question that I don't think I have.

00:45:24
Speaker 4: I totally agree with you, Okay, but I.

00:45:26
Speaker 3: Also think that I don't think I will really know the answer to that question for a long time. I think we forget how recent all this was. And not only is it recent, but also we did a spectacular job of burying this phenomenon. So it's this weird combination of something catastrophic happened, which we then very successfully swept under a rug like a million American deciderer close to a million American size, the hell of a lot of people, like an insane amount of people. Yeah, and then around the world. You know, we just kind of like decided we weren't going to talk about it anymore, and we weren't going to So it's like, under those circumstances, how do I know what the impact? Well, how do I know now what the impact was? It's just give me another five years.

00:46:16
Speaker 1: Well, since you live in the present, and I consider you a historian, like, how does that work?

00:46:23
Speaker 3: Well, I live in the present with respect to myself, which is why I'm struggling with this question, right because I.

00:46:27
Speaker 4: Don't like to think about I'm one of those people who buried it.

00:46:30
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, Well, for you, then, is your infamous ten thousand hour equals perfection theory still relevant in twenty twenty five, or are we playing with a new set of.

00:46:44
Speaker 3: Rules with my version or the version that people mistakenly took when.

00:46:49
Speaker 1: They Okay, so what's I was going to ask you, what's the one fact about you that people get wrong all the time? And well, are you tired of the ten thousand hour theory? No?

00:46:59
Speaker 4: I mean it's like whatever, but it's you know, let.

00:47:02
Speaker 1: Me make clear, ten thousand hours of practice equals genius.

00:47:08
Speaker 4: That's that's not the theory.

00:47:09
Speaker 1: Okay, Wait, so is that Am I doing a Mandela effect right now?

00:47:14
Speaker 3: Like?

00:47:14
Speaker 4: No, no, No.

00:47:15
Speaker 3: The idea was ten thousand It takes a long time, I e. Something like ten thousand hours for talent to be manifested. I could spend ten thousand hours on a golf course and I'm not turning into Scotti Scheffler.

00:47:28
Speaker 1: Okay, right.

00:47:30
Speaker 4: But the idea was that.

00:47:32
Speaker 3: It's about the insufficiency of talent and it's about the duration of practice. It's those two ideas in combination. And what people wanted to the way that idea was misunderstood was that people thought I was saying that with practice, any kind of excellence is accessible. And no, that's nonsense. Who would think that? That's like nuts? Do you think if could I turn myself into you? Tend to know you have some god given thing which you have carefully cultivated over time, But it begins with you having some God given thing. I could have if we had a conversation as five year olds, I would have said, there's.

00:48:15
Speaker 4: Something going on with you.

00:48:16
Speaker 3: That's really I mean, if I was a sophisticated five year olds, I would have said, and you've had this. Now that I'm in the world of kids, it's always astonishing to me. Like you meet kids and you and one in a hundred you realize, oh, they've got that thing. I don't know what it is yet, but oh, this kid, you can see it right, like something's going on there. And then you pray that they're going to be able to nourish it and access it and get support for it. But it's clearly there, right, it's some I was at the my daughter's pre K graduation. The idea this is a pre K graduation, by the way, it's like that is like how preposterous our society has become. It's pre They they barely know they're at PreK. How do they know they're graduating. Nonetheless, this is an opportunity to shake down the parents. But there's this kid my daughter's playing. My daughter is like clearly has a crush on this kid called THEO. We've been hearing about THEO for months, and THEO like pushes her over and she's constantly reporting on some new indignity that's.

00:49:25
Speaker 4: Been visited on her by THEO.

00:49:27
Speaker 3: We're like, well, why are you hanging? She goes and THEO should come over for a play date. Well, THEO is white. So finally I meet THEO with the play date. I'm like, oh, Theo's just God charisma, Like he's three, and it's like, I get it. If I was you, I would be hanging out with THEO like he's in a world by himself.

00:49:48
Speaker 4: It's magical. But can I make another comment?

00:49:51
Speaker 3: I'm just can I do this incredibly tiresome thing that parents do? This is the beginning of cultural I'd never I never figured out where cultural discernment comes from. How do you learn to decide what you like and what you don't like?

00:50:10
Speaker 4: Write? It's a mystery to me.

00:50:13
Speaker 3: So I drove my daughter to preschool every morning and we listen to some kids music collection on Spotify, and in the beginning, it's all the same forty songs on rotation. By the way, Spotify, surely there are more than forty children's songs like let's get our act together, right, right, But the first time round she listens to them all, and the second time round she says, oh, no, no, like for like two of them, don't play that one. The third time round she's rejecting six of them. And now she's basically rejecting two thirds of them. And I'm realizing that what I'm witnessing is the rise of discernment, right, Like she's figured out that it's okay to have a position on a work of art, right, and that her position. She's not asking me, daddy, do you like it? She's not deferring. She's affirmatively saying, like she has turned on Raffi.

00:51:16
Speaker 4: No more Raffi.

00:51:17
Speaker 1: Wait, Raffi is still a thing?

00:51:19
Speaker 4: They play them on Spotify.

00:51:21
Speaker 1: Oh, there is way more kids, There.

00:51:24
Speaker 4: Is way more way.

00:51:25
Speaker 3: There's a genius guy called uh a Randy Kaplan. Randy Kaplan gets two thumbs up every one of his songs. Don't fill up on chips.

00:51:35
Speaker 1: This is a masterpiece, masterpiece, don't fill up on chips.

00:51:39
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:51:39
Speaker 3: Then the chorus is kids going, why Mom, why Mom?

00:51:44
Speaker 4: Salsa, m guacamole, They're just dips. They're just dips. Goes on like that.

00:51:49
Speaker 3: But but I'm realizing that, and there's a lot I'm also detecting the beginnings of a logic in her choices. She's steadily rejecting the ones that don't have extra level of cleverness or and it's like fascinating.

00:52:04
Speaker 1: Like is she your case study? Now? Like are you?

00:52:08
Speaker 4: I think you're gonna do.

00:52:08
Speaker 3: The thing that's so tires in, which is people have a kid and then they all to do is right about their kid.

00:52:12
Speaker 1: But I will bore you, Oh you know you are.

00:52:14
Speaker 3: So I will bore people in a setting what you can't leave. I will bore you with stories about my daughter. So now that I'm in conversation with you, I'm gonna guess that at three and four you were doing that exact same thing with even more sophistication.

00:52:33
Speaker 4: I didn't convinced of it.

00:52:35
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So here's the deal. I grew up in a three thousand album household. But here's the rule. Yeah, don't touch my stereo or else. And you gotta put a lot of emphasis on those last two words. Yeah, and if you see what my dad looks like, you know that or else it comes with a heavy price to pay. So as a result, I think between the ages of two maybe fourteen, like I did not have a cynical bone in my body, and to grow up in a household where Glenn Campbell's ron Stone Cowboy and the Jackson five Dancing Machine are getting equal time. You know, Rita Coolidge and Natalie Cole are getting equal time, the Hudson Brothers and Tavars are getting equal time. I didn't know what discernment me I didn't have. The first time I heard my dad panned something, he left music altogether. So we were waiting for Stevie Wonder to release his follow up to Songs in the Key of Life Now my household. Stevie Wonder records were like events, like to think of War of the worlds Orson Wells nineteen thirty where we're sitting as a family, staring at the turntable and putting on side one of the songs in the Cave of Life and listening into all six sides of that record, going through the liner notes and I'm five, and like, I've completely had an adults understanding of music. And he takes three years to do his follow up record, and of course he does the departure album, which, for those of you don't know, if you release an established classic, oftentimes when you have fear of follow up, and Stevie will deny that Still Cows Come Home, you do an album that's the complete opposite of what you were known for. And some say it's a psychological exercise of not wanting to face a fear. So don't make an album that's even remotely close to songs than Cave Life. Do a classical album, which is what he did without warning. So my dad was, I mean, he was so heartbroken over that record where and defeated. Then I could touch the stereo like he just stopped listening to music.

00:55:04
Speaker 4: A broke you wonder broke your dad.

00:55:07
Speaker 1: It totally broke. But I mean he was also forty at the time, which I think in the eighties forty might as well have been sixty. So the whole point was that I never knew what I didn't know what cynicism was until.

00:55:23
Speaker 3: So you didn't have the ability to do what my daughter does, which is skip that song.

00:55:28
Speaker 4: But yeah, but you're.

00:55:29
Speaker 3: Getting actually an even better at education, which is he your father is implicitly forcing you to find what is beautiful in an incredibly wide variety of music, which is that is the education that allowed you to be you?

00:55:43
Speaker 1: Right it is. But I do wonder if there's an alternate Earth version of me that listens to all these albums completely without skipping, without the fear of I will get hit if I do this to go to the next gong or skip to the next By.

00:56:00
Speaker 3: The way, you mentioned Stevie and Glen Campbell, I trust I watched this maybe a thousand times, the YouTube of the two of them singing the Blown in the Wind, which is like so un believable, and it it's for so many reasons, but like the sheer delight. Glen Campbell, by the way, because you know, is a legend in his own right, like a brilliant guitar player, like an incredible voice. Is the absolute The look on his face, it's like he's saying, this is I am sitting on a piano bench next to Stevie. Wonder it's never going to get better than this. It's like it's just it's and Jack Ben Campbell is like a Church of Christ guy from Alabama wherever he's from. It's like he could culturally that this has been him and Stevie is It's thousands of miles of cultural difference, and he to see the look in his eyes when like, none of that matters.

00:56:57
Speaker 4: I'm sitting next to Stevie, I see it like and egging them on, Like.

00:57:03
Speaker 3: I mean, if you've never watched this on YouTube, it's like, this is what you should watch when you go home.

00:57:07
Speaker 4: It's so magical.

00:57:20
Speaker 1: So wait, because you told me that my theory was wrong, which was ten thousand hours equal genius. So the thing is, until this moment, I will accept that that's not what you meant, but in my mind, that's what you meant. So that said, I've made a decision. Maybe seven months ago, I had a life redo and I decided that I'm going to be an amateur and with a child's mind of everything I do creatively. Now this is coming from someone that's a studied obsessive. I gotta figure out like everything about the thing that I'm interested in and do all this thorough research to it. And now I believe do you believe that the opposite can be true. Now, like someone that doesn't put in ten thousand hours, someone that just walks into a type rope situation and successfully gets to it. Do you think that it' seemed impossible to sort of wild the same results of.

00:58:24
Speaker 3: Well, what you can get is a different, but in many ways just as beautiful experience. So this is something that I thought about when I was running as a kid, and I was a very competitive runner. I liked running and I enjoyed it, but I was also aware of how stressful and difficult it was. And then I came back to running as a much older person and was no longer an elite runner. I was now a good runner all right, and I found running as a good runner to be in every way superior to running when I was an elite runner. And I realized that there was a there's a category of enjoyment that is only open to you if you're not an expert. If you're encountering things. It comes back to the my to my mom and working girl. Seeing things with fresh eyes and being unencumbered by all of the kind of contexts that comes with the steady acquisition of expertise allows you to enjoy things in a really kind of simple and pure way that maybe would be impossible if you were immersed in something like my friend Charles is a screenwriter.

00:59:40
Speaker 1: All right.

00:59:41
Speaker 4: You have a number of screenwriter friends of mine.

00:59:43
Speaker 3: If you go with them to the movies and you say, and I'll say that's a great movie, they'll say, actually, no, no, you don't understand. Act one was all wrong for the following reasons. If I was doing it, I'm like, they didn't enjoy the movie. They knew too much. I just thought, I don't know, I thought it was great. I'm done right. And so I think that we underestimate those the kind of simple joy that comes from an amateur's perspective, and we overstate I think, the pleasure, not the value, but the pleasure that comes from being an expert.

01:00:20
Speaker 1: All right, So I have a last question. I'm gonna do quick lightning around with you. So my final question is, because twenty twenty five is defined by I guess what I dub research versus research? Is it frustrating to you to live in a time in which having an amplified microphone doesn't necessarily mean that you're saying anything factual at all? Like, as a person who's like creative existence is doing research and gathering. Do you trust the next generation of writers to continue what you started twenty five years ago?

01:01:10
Speaker 4: I mean, yes, I do find it frustrating.

01:01:13
Speaker 3: I did a podcast episode of Revision's history basically going after Joe Rogan for being a terrible interviewer and letting like, yeah, who's on his show and like never calling them on anything. Right, that's frustrating because he's someone with a lot of cultural authority. On the other hand, like we're always going to have that there was an equivalent to him in some other form twenty five and thirty and fifty years ago. So, and I think these things are self correcting. You can't persist indefinitely with that level of intellectual laziness and still be a part of the conversation. So there's so I have some I don't. I'm not a gloom and duomer about that question.

01:01:56
Speaker 1: Okay, However, I mean, as far as the future of storytelling and research, especially with not the obsession the discussion of AI technology and whatnot, do you have any concerns as far as the value of what we used to know as facts.

01:02:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, AI is actually a pretty useful corrective to a lot of nonsense. So if you type do vaccines cause autism into chat GPT, chat GPT will tell you that they don't, because chat GPT surveys the whole literature and doesn't take something out of If you ask RFK Jr that you'll get a different answer. So do I in a world without chat GPT and only RFK Junior.

01:02:45
Speaker 4: We're in trouble.

01:02:46
Speaker 3: But at least now there's a corrective to the nonsense of people like him. So not in that sense, I'm optimistic.

01:02:55
Speaker 1: About Okay, rapid fire time. What was the first job you ever had?

01:03:01
Speaker 3: A dishwasher at the Stonecock restaurant in Elmira, Ontario.

01:03:05
Speaker 4: Fifteen years old? Fourteen years old?

01:03:08
Speaker 1: Favorite cereal?

01:03:11
Speaker 4: Don't eat cereal, never.

01:03:12
Speaker 1: Have, never have. You don't know the joys of Captain Crunch.

01:03:19
Speaker 3: I will add to the list of things I did not grow up with cereal.

01:03:23
Speaker 1: Really doing to cereal? Okay, by choice or by just not happen, it's.

01:03:30
Speaker 3: Not I mean, I can conceive of the utility of a bowl of corn flakes, but it's like dessert.

01:03:37
Speaker 4: It's not breakfast food. Right way?

01:03:40
Speaker 3: Did you offer me corn flake crisp after a nice dinner. I would say, yeah, that's appropriate, But why would I have it at seven in the morning?

01:03:48
Speaker 1: Cereal at nighttime?

01:03:50
Speaker 4: Okay, it's sugar, it's.

01:03:52
Speaker 1: A delivery system for sugar. Okay. For you, what artists do you wish that you discovered earlier?

01:04:00
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a really good question. When you say artists, you mean very broadly.

01:04:05
Speaker 1: I'man you know, I'm a music platform. But for you, acting author.

01:04:14
Speaker 3: I think the greatest nonfiction writer of my generation is was she died, Janet Malcolm, And I wish i'd been reading Janet Malcolm from the beginning of Janet Malcolm. I discovered her in my fifteen years ago. I wish i'd discovered her much before then, because she's influenced by writing a.

01:04:33
Speaker 1: Law okay, and what is next for you?

01:04:38
Speaker 3: My big Alabama true crime thing. And then I've been working forever on this book about Tom.

01:04:47
Speaker 1: Bradley, mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, and what's your angle?

01:04:52
Speaker 4: I'm really interested in the uses.

01:04:54
Speaker 1: Of anger, the uses of anger.

01:04:57
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:04:57
Speaker 3: The idea is that people who are disenfranchised are angry inevitably, but they have a series of choices about how to express that anger. And he was part of a cohort of people who grew up in South Central in the thirties who all made very dramatically different choices about what to do with their anger, and his was the most stark, and he was the one that went furthest and he was the one who makes the least sense to us today. And so I want to tell that he grew up with Jackie Robinson, Right, Jackie Robinson goes this way with his anger. Tom Bradley goes this way with his anger. Super interesting.

01:05:39
Speaker 1: That is interesting because I think historically Black people and anger, There's like I grew up in you weren't allowed to be angry in my household without paying a price for it. And even today, you know, for black people to walk around, no one wants to get tag, you know, the angry black person at work or exactly. You know, for me, so many years of unexpressed emotions, I fear that that anger might result into something else, which is why I like, maybe I chose music to.

01:06:15
Speaker 3: So Tom Bradley, the central drama of his life is that he honestly he joins the LAPD in the nineteen forties, okay, and honestly believes that he could be the first black police chief of LA because in his own eyes, he's the smartest, he's the he's the biggest, he's the handsomest, he's the best, and he's that all that is true. The guy was like a super star like you cannot imagine, and he naively believed that would be enough to allow him to be chief of the LAPD. And he gets this far and they they shut him down, and he spends the rest of his life dealing with the consequences.

01:06:59
Speaker 1: Of that rejection, despite being the mayor of Los Angeles.

01:07:03
Speaker 4: Mayor is the consolation prize.

01:07:06
Speaker 1: He'd rather be Oh my god.

01:07:08
Speaker 3: That was your this is the this is the thing about him that's so fascinating.

01:07:12
Speaker 4: Mayor is the consolation prize.

01:07:14
Speaker 3: It's what he did because he couldn't be LAPD chief and Rodney King is his. He waits thirty years for his revenge and keeps his anger in check until Rodney King allows him to go back and eviscerate the LAPD. It is like that. It is all about revenge. Is a dish best served cold. That's his whole life. He like didn't let anyone see how absolutely devastated and furious he was over.

01:07:40
Speaker 1: That regispite being mayor.

01:07:43
Speaker 3: It was it was not it was all about. It was all about. It's an incredibly, incredibly and there's this story.

01:07:51
Speaker 4: Okay, we're going on, but I can tell you one last Braddy story.

01:07:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's the first black guy to move into a neighborhood in in our which was previously a redlined, all white neighborhood.

01:08:05
Speaker 4: And they change. The Supreme Court has out ruling.

01:08:08
Speaker 3: It allows a lot people to move in, and it still has his resistance. He gets a white person to buy the property forum and then they switch the.

01:08:16
Speaker 4: Thing and he drives with his family.

01:08:20
Speaker 3: Through the streets and all of the other people in the neighborhood come out on the sidewalk to watch the first black family move in, and.

01:08:26
Speaker 4: They are, you know, screaming at him and yelling.

01:08:30
Speaker 3: And remember he's six foot six two point fifty and like he parks his car in his driveway, gets out, and out emerges this enormous man in his policeman's unique form. He takes out his gun and he holds it up like this. He turns and faces everyone and marches his family into his house. And then this is the best part. The next morning he knocks on his neighbor's door, the neighbor who is the most upset about him moving in and says, you know, ma'am, I see your lawn needs mowing. I'd like to mow your lawn. And he mows her lawn every week until she does. That's Tom Bradley. Think of that out.

01:09:09
Speaker 1: I need you to write this book. Ladies and gentlemen. Malcolm Gladwell, thank you for joining me on QLs and I'll see you all the next go around. See y'all. Quest Love Shows hosted by me Amir quest Love Thompson. The executive producers are Sean g Brian Calhoun and Me. Produced by Britney Benjamin and Jake Paine. Produced for iHeart by Noel Brown, Edited by Alex Conroy. iHeart video support by Mark Canton, Logos Graphics and animation by Nick Lowe. Additional support by That's Covid Special thanks to Kathy Brown. Special thanks to Sugar Steve Mandel. Please subscribe, rate, review and the share the Quest Love Show. Wherever you stream your podcast, make sure you follow us on socials That's at QLs. Check out hundreds and hundreds and QLs episodes, including the Quest Love, Supreme Shows, and our podcast archives. Quest Loup Show is a production of iHeartRadio