Malcolm on No Small Endeavor

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Speaker 1 Hello, hello, Malcolm here.

Speaker 29 Today we're sharing something a little different on revisionist history.

Speaker 38 I'm bringing you back in time to my beginnings.

Speaker 39 I'm sharing an episode of the acclaimed podcast, No Small Endeavor, where I sat down with my friend, the host, and award-winning theologian, Lee Camp, to discuss some of my most cherished moments in my journey thus far.

Speaker 41 Produced by Great Feeling Studios and PRX, No Small Endeavor brings you thoughtful conversations with best-selling authors, artists, theologians, and philosophers like Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and civil rights hero Reverend James Lawson about what it means to live a good life.

Speaker 3 In my episode, we discuss some of my favorite stories from receiving permission from my mother to cut class to spending three days a week in Freudian therapy as a young adult.

Speaker 29 all of which contributed to who I am today. Be sure to check out No Small Endeavor wherever you get podcasts and tell them I say hello.
And without further ado, here is the full episode.

Speaker 45 I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

Speaker 45 You're probably familiar with the work of Malcolm Gladwell. Perhaps you've read one of his New York Times best-selling books, like The Tipping Point or Outliers.

Speaker 45 Or maybe you listened to Malcolm's podcast, Revisionist History. But how well do you know the man himself?

Speaker 36 There's a period in my life where I spent a huge amount of time in Freudian therapy.

Speaker 45 Today we learn what made Malcolm Malcolm, like what pushed him to get really good at explaining things.

Speaker 46 My father and my brothers were incapable of explaining things.

Speaker 45 Or how his dad influenced his curiosity.

Speaker 46 My whole childhood was spent listening to my father meet random strangers and him asking him questions.

Speaker 1 He had no insecurities about declaring declaring himself ignorant in an area.

Speaker 45 All coming right up.

Speaker 45 I'm Lee C. Camp.
This is no small endeavor exploring what it means to live a good life.

Speaker 45 There's a fascinating scene in the TV show Ted Lasso where Ted makes a huge bet on a game of darts to help out a friend.

Speaker 45 His opponent assumes Ted knows nothing about the game as Ted makes a few less than than excellent throws with his right hand.

Speaker 45 But that's when Ted reveals that he's not right-handed and hits a bullseye with his left. And while Ted is hustling his opponent, he says, guys have been underestimating me my entire life.

Speaker 45 But he continues that he'd come to realize that their underestimating him had nothing to do with him, but rather them. They had failed, says Ted, to practice that wisdom.
be curious, not judgmental.

Speaker 45 And just before he clinches the win, Ted says that if they were curious, they would have known that he played darts every Sunday with his father from age 10 until he was 16 when his father passed away.

Speaker 45 It's one of the great moments of television, this poignant moment of character development, granting insight that reveals new depth, new dimensions.

Speaker 45 This fundamental posture, to be curious, not judgmental, allows us to ask good questions and thereby get a glimpse into the fascinating journeys which have led another to become the person they are.

Speaker 45 We try to do this in some way with all of our guests, but our interview today is an especially such poignant moment.

Speaker 45 You may think you know Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times best-selling author of Outliers, the Tipping Point, Blink, host of the wildly popular podcast Revisionist History.

Speaker 45 And when I first began to prepare for my time with Malcolm, I was first drawn into curiosity about the stories Malcolm tells so well.

Speaker 45 But then I began to note the tendencies and habits and traits Malcolm exhibits in his storytelling, and that made me curious about why Malcolm is Malcolm, how his family's inability to explain things made him want to explain things, how his dad taking him to a Mennonite barn raising as a kid influenced what he thought was possible, and what regrets he may or may not have, including a year of Freudian therapy three times a week in New York City.

Speaker 45 Today, our conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, taped in front of a small audience in Nashville, days before our annual Thanksgiving show at Nashville's Scrimmerhorn Symphony Hall, where Malcolm headlined.

Speaker 45 Enjoy.

Speaker 45 Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, Canadian journalist and author. He's been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, wrote for the Washington Post for 10 years.

Speaker 45 Malcolm has published seven books with at least five New York Times bestsellers. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011, and he is the host of the podcast Revisionist History.

Speaker 45 Please make welcome Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 45 Welcome to Nashville again.

Speaker 44 Thank you.

Speaker 45 Good to have you back here in Music City. I understand that you've at least had a number of entertaining episodes.

Speaker 45 Certainly, those of us who've listened to your podcast a good bit know of fascinating conversations with fascinating Nashvillians. But you recently,

Speaker 45 like today, told me a very entertaining story about a Nashville experience that you once had that seems classic Nashville to me. And you were running.

Speaker 37 I went running.

Speaker 50 This is actually, now that I reflect on it after talking to you about it, I think this is the perfect Nashville story.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 50 If that doesn't raise the bar too high. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 49 I'm a runner, and everyone tells me I got to run in Percy Warner Park.

Speaker 36 So I make my way out there, get stuck in traffic, get there a little late.

Speaker 45 So far, it is the perfect Nashville story.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's,

Speaker 53 I think it's July.

Speaker 46 It's probably 90-some-odd, super humid.

Speaker 54 Still, the perfect natural star.

Speaker 20 And I decide it's too hot to go running with my t-shirt.

Speaker 24 So I just wear a pair of shorts, which you can do, right?

Speaker 45 I go running. Which you can do, I can do it.

Speaker 43 Which I can do.

Speaker 11 So I go off and I climb that big road.

Speaker 51 I'm going around Percy Warner Park.

Speaker 24 And it's a little late. It starts to get a little dark, but I think I'm fine.

Speaker 1 But I get lost.

Speaker 24 Not just mildly lost, like completely, 100%.

Speaker 46 I have no idea where I am.

Speaker 51 I can't see any lights.

Speaker 1 I don't, what am I going to do?

Speaker 59 So I'm drenched in sweat, and I'm just wearing a pair of shorts, and I stand by the side of the road and I hitchhike.

Speaker 46 Big beefy guys in like Ford F-150s, don't stop.

Speaker 35 Take one look at me, just not, no part of it.

Speaker 51 Finally, a girl, and I say a girl because she was probably in her early 20s.

Speaker 1 Little battered Honda Cord

Speaker 36 stops, rolled out in the window.

Speaker 39 Can I help you, sir?

Speaker 11 And I said, first of all, you should not be picking me up.

Speaker 1 You nuts?

Speaker 1 What are you doing?

Speaker 62 It's like a strange dude in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat.

Speaker 48 I get in and I said, why did you do that?

Speaker 51 And she said, well, I was coming from Bible study.

Speaker 42 And today we study the story of the Good Samaritan.

Speaker 45 As a boy, you lived in like three countries, at least briefly. Is that what I understand?

Speaker 51 Born in England, spent some time in Jamaica.

Speaker 66 My mom's Jamaican, and then we moved to Canada, and then I came down here.

Speaker 45 So your father's Englishman?

Speaker 39 My dad is an Englishman.

Speaker 36 Yeah, my mom's.

Speaker 39 They met in college, University College London in the 50s.

Speaker 45 You have many memories of Jamaica at all?

Speaker 58 Well, we would go there regularly when I was growing up.

Speaker 39 And so eventually, most of my family there moved to Canada and the U.S.

Speaker 44 But when I was a kid, yeah, yeah, we were.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 45 All of those experiences,

Speaker 45 what do you think that did for your just sense of self or sense of identity?

Speaker 40 Well, I'm a strong

Speaker 46 believer in the idea that we have multiple identities

Speaker 57 and that we

Speaker 69 have the right to

Speaker 42 rank them in the order that we choose.

Speaker 68 One of the things that irritates me about the world is that the world sometimes chooses for you how to rank your own identities.

Speaker 39 I always think of my mom, who, to give you, for example, my mom is a

Speaker 36 black woman, a Jamaican, a woman, a Christian, a therapist, a writer, a mother, and a

Speaker 1 wife,

Speaker 66 and a Canadian.

Speaker 65 I mean, I could keep going.

Speaker 51 I would say that over the course of her life, the way she ranks all of those identities has changed.

Speaker 11 And I think it constantly changes.

Speaker 47 And I think she's 92.

Speaker 70 I think they may change again.

Speaker 42 But, like, the world, you know, various people in the world would look at her and say, she, maybe she's number one a black woman.

Speaker 44 And she would say, I don't know.

Speaker 42 I might have been number one a black woman when I was 23 and in England for the first time and being treated like, you know, less than a per than a full person.

Speaker 51 But I don't, haven't been treated that way in 30 years.

Speaker 37 Why should I foreground that identity?

Speaker 71 Anyway,

Speaker 10 that idea that there are many parts of us

Speaker 41 and we get to choose which part is most important is, I think that's what I picked up from

Speaker 42 all of those kind of

Speaker 56 shifting

Speaker 47 situations, environments when I was a kid.

Speaker 45 So two follow-up questions on that. One,

Speaker 45 will you unpack more why that sharply irritates you?

Speaker 35 Well, because it diminishes, when we do that to people, we diminish diminish their humanity.

Speaker 25 And we presume to understand them when in fact we don't.

Speaker 1 And so I had,

Speaker 44 did I get in trouble?

Speaker 42 I have part of a company, and we have these company meetings every now and again.

Speaker 14 I did an Ask Me Anything with the staff.

Speaker 65 And someone asked in a relatively hostile way, did I think the company was sufficiently diverse?

Speaker 46 And I said two things in response.

Speaker 65 One is,

Speaker 39 don't I count?

Speaker 50 And the second thing I said, well, I said to the whole staff, if any of you is a Republican, raise your hand.

Speaker 37 And no one did.

Speaker 51 And I said, well, if we're going to call ourselves a diverse company, shouldn't we have some Republicans?

Speaker 1 Now, this was treated like I had said some terrible thing.

Speaker 70 I'm serious.

Speaker 51 I mean, my definition of diversity encompasses a dozen different dimensions of human complexity.

Speaker 72 And I think I actually value diversity very, I take it very seriously.

Speaker 24 And the book I'm reading right now has a lot about diversity.

Speaker 72 But my definition of diversity is broad.

Speaker 11 If I had my way,

Speaker 62 we would have more of every kind of person and we would be a richer place for it.

Speaker 46 And I object to a definition of diversity that's super narrow.

Speaker 51 And that's why this is a kind of top-of-mind issue for me.

Speaker 39 Yeah.

Speaker 45 So back to your childhood, and you said that you think that that that experience allowed you to begin to pay attention to multiplicity of identities and the possibility of ranking those.

Speaker 45 When you look back at that young Malcolm, what were some of the key identities for him at that time, being raised in Canada?

Speaker 59 Well, so I'll tell you a little story.

Speaker 20 My dad...

Speaker 10 who passed sadly a few years ago, but who was a marvelously independent-minded man, a big beard.

Speaker 44 He was a mathematician, and he always dressed in a suit and a tie, even when he was gardening, which was his favorite thing.

Speaker 71 But he.

Speaker 45 He was an Englishman, I suppose.

Speaker 43 He was an Englishman. He took it very seriously.

Speaker 38 But he loved, we lived in this Mennonite community.

Speaker 35 He loved the Mennonites and was sort of thought

Speaker 49 everything they did was kind of fascinating.

Speaker 11 And they used to have barn raisings. When a barn burned down, They would all gather.

Speaker 51 These are mostly conservative Mennonites, so people who drove horses and buggies.

Speaker 55 They would all gather, they would get together like the next weekend, hundreds of them.

Speaker 35 They would descend on that farm, and they would rebuild the barn in essentially a day, right?

Speaker 39 Famous barn raising.

Speaker 10 My dad decided when I was a kid once that he would attend a barn raising.

Speaker 51 So if you can imagine, we drove, you know, off into the middle of the countryside in our, in a Volvo, of course.

Speaker 45 And he's not Mennonite, if this isn't. No, he's a...

Speaker 55 Presbyterian with a big beard and an English accent and wearing a suit and tie.

Speaker 1 So we get in our Volvo and he shows up and everyone else, his benefits, are clean-shaven and they're all wearing black cloth garments and they have their horses and buggies out front and they all go to the same church and they all know each other.

Speaker 72 And this Englishman with a PhD in advanced mathematics shows up in his Volvo with his three sons in tow and announces he'd like to join.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 54 they were fine with it.

Speaker 63 They gave him stuff to do and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 But my point is, my dad was the kind of person who, it never occurred to him that that was a socially awkward thing to do just it just didn't occur to him he was like i'm your neighbor i live down the road i know some of you i love farming he wanted to be a farmer i mean there was no part of him i'm you know he believed in the same god God what does the Bible say it says help your neighbor so he was there right that's the sort of that's what I grew up with now would I do that probably not but it's incredibly powerful influence on you

Speaker 36 to have as a father someone who does that without even thinking about it.

Speaker 47 I mean, he never even discussed it with us.

Speaker 1 He's just like, we're going. Get in.

Speaker 53 And came back and thought it was like the best experience.

Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 45 Were you bookish as a boy?

Speaker 76 I was. I would.

Speaker 66 My father would take me, take me out of school and take me to university and just deposit me in the library.

Speaker 41 And it was the happiest.

Speaker 35 It was like, those are my happiest childhood memories are playing hooky.

Speaker 34 It wasn't hookie.

Speaker 30 What do you call it when you are it's being done with your parents consent?

Speaker 46 I don't know what that is, but it was parental hookie that we played. And he I would just wander around the university library, but you know, it would be 10 or 11

Speaker 39 and and then I'd have, you know, have lunch with him and have a hamburger.

Speaker 44 And the cafeteria was fantastic. Never had hamburgers at home.

Speaker 45 I think I heard you say in some interview that maybe your your mother would sign fund.

Speaker 28 No, that was later.

Speaker 60 My mom then became deeply complicit in my truancy.

Speaker 69 She understood that I was going to seek to rebel as a teenager.

Speaker 72 And so she decided what she would do is just anticipate it and meet me there.

Speaker 1 So she, at one point, when she saw that I wasn't that interested in going to school, she would write notes, Malcolm is sick today and cannot be in school, and leave the date blank and just give me a bunch of them.

Speaker 45 Amazing.

Speaker 70 In retrospect, so genius.

Speaker 50 Like, how do you rebel against that?

Speaker 11 She's like, I already signed off on it.

Speaker 78 You know, like, it's fine, whatever.

Speaker 45 Did you rebel as a teenager?

Speaker 1 No, how could I? My mother

Speaker 64 foreclosed that responsibility,

Speaker 54 that avenue.

Speaker 45 If I were to think of one or two words and thinking about the kind of work you do, I think curiosity would be certainly high on the list. Where do you see that coming from your childhood?

Speaker 67 Well, my, I'm going to talk to my dad again.

Speaker 32 He was

Speaker 62 deep.

Speaker 51 I realized, it took me a long time to realize this was unusual in someone,

Speaker 47 but in his obituary, I wrote that he considered himself an expert in only three things,

Speaker 35 mathematics, gardening, and the Bible.

Speaker 68 And on everything else, he was open to suggestion.

Speaker 46 And that was really his position, that he just assumed,

Speaker 39 if he met someone, that they knew more than he did on their subjects of

Speaker 60 choice, and that he should just ask questions

Speaker 1 and learn.

Speaker 46 And my whole childhood was spent listening to my father meet random strangers, figure out what areas they knew more about than he did, and him asking them questions.

Speaker 35 I thought that was normal.

Speaker 52 I discovered later that that's not normal.

Speaker 28 So I had a kind of model of this kind of extreme. And a lot of it was grounded in he had no insecurities

Speaker 47 about declaring himself ignorant in an area.

Speaker 60 I didn't have a problem with that.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, I don't know how to go with that.

Speaker 72 Even on things he knew a lot about,

Speaker 65 if he met a theologian, he wouldn't even pretend to know more about them than the Bible.

Speaker 70 Or gardening, if he thought that you knew more about Delphinians than he did,

Speaker 69 all ears. Let's go.

Speaker 72 It's a kind of extreme version of curiosity.

Speaker 1 Again, I don't think I I can match that, but it's a really powerful model to be given as a kid.

Speaker 45 How do you think the virtue of humility, I mean, I would assume there's like almost a direct correlation or causative effect between humility and curiosity, but how do you think about that?

Speaker 44 Oh, I do think, I agree. I would agree to that.
I would think it's impossible without having.

Speaker 58 It's odd, though.

Speaker 68 So there's two parts of it.

Speaker 66 One is humility, that you don't presume that you know things you don't know.

Speaker 73 But you also have to to have a lot of self-confidence because

Speaker 61 you have to be completely indifferent to the consequences of letting the world know about what you don't know.

Speaker 54 You have to not care, right?

Speaker 73 And my dad was a supremely self-confident person.

Speaker 38 So that allowed him, I think, to

Speaker 42 kind of expose himself in this way as being, you know, he didn't have any kind of hang-up.

Speaker 42 Most people, the real reason people aren't curious, I think, is not so much that they lack humility, but that they lack confidence.

Speaker 66 And they're not willing to kind of show themselves to the world as not knowing things.

Speaker 45 You're listening to No Small Endeavour and a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. I love hearing from you.

Speaker 45 Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee at no smallendeavor.com.

Speaker 45 Recently, for example, received a lovely email from Anna Wildey writing in from New Zealand, retired teacher of literacy. Ms.
Wildey, it's so very nice to have you joining us.

Speaker 45 You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen.

Speaker 45 These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes and a full transcript.

Speaker 45 We would be most delighted if you'd tell your friends about No Small Endeavor and invite them to join us on the podcast because it helps extend the reach of the beauty, truth, and goodness we are seeking to sow in the world.

Speaker 45 Also, Malcolm joined us for our big end-of-year blowout show at the Skirmerhorn Symphony Hall. We will be releasing those interview segments on NSC Plus.

Speaker 45 If you're not a subscriber to NSC Plus, you can do so by going to our website at no smallendeavor.com and click subscribe.

Speaker 45 Coming up, Malcolm and I discuss tactics for explaining things to people, the moral and practical importance of storytelling, and his rather

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Speaker 45 So, fast forward to your vocation. You said at one point, I just want to explain things to people.

Speaker 53 Yeah, so this, we're talking excessively about my family, if that's okay.

Speaker 45 Is that okay? We're going to move on in a minute.

Speaker 22 There are two things.

Speaker 46 So, my family's divided down the middle.

Speaker 42 There's my mom and me on one side, and then there's everybody else, my brothers and my father.

Speaker 39 My father and my brothers were incapable of explaining things.

Speaker 35 So my father would just go,

Speaker 46 and then my brother, Jeff, who I love dearly, just would talk endlessly and not get anywhere.

Speaker 68 And as a kid, this drove me...

Speaker 52 crazy.

Speaker 46 So you know how you're constantly playing games as a kid and there's always a moment where you've got to teach your cousin how to play hearts.

Speaker 60 And so

Speaker 42 my father would be incapable and my brother would give this incredibly long explanation of a going over and then finally in frustration i would just say okay everyone shut up this is how you play hearts and the mistakes people make in explaining things this would drive me as i can remember as like an eight-year-old being driven crazy by this the thing you start with is what is the point of the game start with that the point of monopoly is to amass as many properties as you can and put everyone else bankrupt right you don't explain the the game before you explain the point, right?

Speaker 74 Like people would start without doing, and I would read the Parker Brothers instructions and I would say, why didn't you tell me what the point is in the first sentence?

Speaker 45 You were speaking my love language.

Speaker 24 This would drive me.

Speaker 47 To this day, this drives me nuts.

Speaker 74 Explain it properly, right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 51 I think that was where my career as a journalist was born.

Speaker 51 I was like, I grew up in a household where 60% of the members of our house, my household, could not explain the simplest thing to anybody else.

Speaker 45 So before we go on from just a note about your father in higher education, I want to ask one quick, I don't want to talk long about this, but you certainly in your career as a journalist, you seem to have a pretty strong love-hate relationship with higher education.

Speaker 68 Oh my God, don't even get me started.

Speaker 22 Lee.

Speaker 12 You said we only have 90 minutes.

Speaker 71 I have just, I'm running.

Speaker 45 But give us a three to four minute excursus on that.

Speaker 1 I mean, I can't can't. No, yeah, you can't.
I can't even.

Speaker 45 Okay. I'll ask follow-up questions.
Okay.

Speaker 43 I'll tell you,

Speaker 40 I just wrote, I'm writing a sequel to my first book, The Tipping Point.

Speaker 68 There is literally a chapter called

Speaker 39 Why Does Harvard Have a Women's Rugby Team?

Speaker 50 Which is 6,000 words of explanation.

Speaker 46 for why the school would do something that otherwise makes no sense.

Speaker 35 So it's not that I'm fine with them having a club rugby team.

Speaker 42 They don't have a club, they have a varsity women's rugby team and they go to like New Zealand to recruit people for it.

Speaker 72 They got like multiple coaches.

Speaker 65 They fly around the country.

Speaker 51 They destroy other teams by the score of like 105 to nothing.

Speaker 5 They have like a pro-rugby team.

Speaker 71 They introduced this in 2013 and they already, you know, Harvard already has more varsity sports than any other college.

Speaker 1 In the world. I did not know that.

Speaker 64 Oh yeah, by far.

Speaker 35 Ohio State doesn't even come close or Alabama.

Speaker 62 Harvard's way off there.

Speaker 65 So I have a whole grand theory about why they're doing it, which I'm not going to go into because we don't have time.

Speaker 51 But my point is, yes, I am obsessed with even the smallest details.

Speaker 37 I have read stuff about particularly Ivy League colleges, which I think are completely and utterly morally bankrupt and should be shut down tomorrow.

Speaker 71 And the idea that Americans stand by...

Speaker 45 You can't just say that without asking a follow-up.

Speaker 45 What's the root of the moral bankruptcy?

Speaker 10 Harvard is a school that educates, what, 10,000 students max, and has an endowment of 45 billion,

Speaker 51 which is subsidized by the American taxpayers.

Speaker 62 Can you think of a more absurd situation where a handful of schools, the total endowment of the Ivy League and Stanford is north of $100 billion.

Speaker 11 Collectively, they

Speaker 56 educate 100,000 students a year, a tiny, tiny drop in a bucket.

Speaker 40 Meanwhile, they're hoarding $120 billion,

Speaker 28 getting tax benefits, all of which is subsidized by the American taxpayer, and further, the government's channeling, funneling all kinds of cash towards them.

Speaker 74 And it's absurd.

Speaker 37 And at the other end of the equation, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of students in this country who are holding enormous amounts of debt because the schools that they went to couldn't afford to give them financial aid.

Speaker 61 Who would construct such a system?

Speaker 78 It makes no sense.

Speaker 42 If you're going to have $45 billion in the bank, the very least you should do is educate 100,000 students a year, at minimum.

Speaker 11 You should educate

Speaker 11 10 times as many students as you do.

Speaker 51 In Canada, where I come from, the most prestigious school in Canada is the University of Toronto.

Speaker 74 It has an undergraduate population of 70,000 students, as it should.

Speaker 74 Your most prestigious school should be your biggest school, right?

Speaker 46 Like, if you really do have the best faculty and the best facilities and the most money and the greatest reputation, you should try and help the maximum number of students.

Speaker 43 This is like saying, if I were to build the greatest hospital in the South, and I said, Lee, I'm going to open it in Nashville.

Speaker 44 It's going to be the greatest hospital in the world.

Speaker 77 And here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to let in 100 patients a year.

Speaker 47 You can bring in people on a stretcher and

Speaker 54 50 a day, have the ambulances line up, and then I will spend the next two weeks assessing them.

Speaker 76 And I will choose one for admittance to my elite cardiac center, and one for the neurosurgeon.

Speaker 42 I'll take in one, I'll have a neurosurgeon, and he'll do one operation a day just to make sure it's the absolute top notch.

Speaker 74 If they did that, we would think that's bananas, right?

Speaker 37 Yet, that's exactly the system we tolerate in American higher ed.

Speaker 10 It's preposterous. And by the way, I'm not done.

Speaker 46 What do rich people in this country do?

Speaker 6 They look at that state of affairs and they write increasingly large checks to the schools that already have the most money.

Speaker 42 That's even crazier, right?

Speaker 62 The marginal value of a dollar given to Harvard University is zero.

Speaker 70 There's literally nothing they can do with that.

Speaker 42 Like they're already, every base is already covered.

Speaker 52 If you gave a million dollars to this college, I mean, we could talk all day about what that could do, what you would do with that.

Speaker 1 If you gave a million dollars to Harvard, you might as well just burn it in front of Harvard in Harvard Square.

Speaker 1 It's just crazy.

Speaker 10 And literally, not a week goes past when some hedge fund guy doesn't write a check for $200 million to Harvard University.

Speaker 1 And every time I see that, I just think, you are a moron.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 45 Well, I'm glad that we found something that you're passionate about.

Speaker 45 I want to move to moral philosophy just a second.

Speaker 45 And actually, I'll do a quick callback to something you said a moment ago about roles and multiplicity of identities, which is something that narrative theology and moral philosophy that takes narrative and story seriously talks about that a lot.

Speaker 51 But

Speaker 45 it strikes me that, you know, since the Enlightenment, Moral philosophy typically has much more focus on rules and principles. Just tell us the right thing to do, rules and principles.

Speaker 45 But prior to the Enlightenment, a lot of ancient moral traditions they focused very much more on story because storytelling was fundamentally a morally formative practice in helping people think about their sense of self about what they saw as beautiful and true and good

Speaker 45 and obviously this wasn't moralistic storytelling but it was story as a moral practice. And it seems to me that that's the kind of storytelling you like to do.

Speaker 45 That is, that you're trying to tell stories that invite us to a different sense of self or a different way of seeing the world that is then an invitation to be changed in some way.

Speaker 45 Do you resonate with that or does that seem to be

Speaker 1 so?

Speaker 10 Going back to that story I told about my Nashville story.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 50 does the girl stop if at her Bible study they talked about how we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than us.

Speaker 1 That's one option.

Speaker 68 That's what they could have studied if they were just interested in rules and principles. But they didn't.

Speaker 42 They studied a story, a very concrete story, about

Speaker 24 a member of a despised minority who goes out of his way. He disrupts his routine and puts himself to a lot of trouble to help someone he doesn't know.

Speaker 10 Very concrete story.

Speaker 40 It's in her head. She's driving down the road, and and what does she see?

Speaker 30 Someone in distress by the side of the road, and she has to put herself in some kind of jeopardy to stop and help.

Speaker 74 And she has that story in her head, so she does it, right? Like, that's what a story can do. I don't think she stops if it's just an abstract thing.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 74 there is some kind of, in the specifics of the story of the Good Samaritan, there is something...

Speaker 46 really powerful that moves people in a way that the abstract discussion does not.

Speaker 55 Which is not to say the abstract discussion is without value.

Speaker 73 Sure.

Speaker 55 But there's a particular power attached to the story that, and I've always loved that.

Speaker 36 And I did the six-part series on guns for the revisionist history this year.

Speaker 47 In the last episode, I went to the University of Chicago and I was interviewing someone there for, and while I was there, she said, oh, you should really talk to my colleague Abdullah.

Speaker 38 And so this is a totally random thing.

Speaker 35 And I went, okay.

Speaker 44 And I go and meet this guy who's an ER doc at the University of Chicago, grew up in the south side of Chicago, black guy,

Speaker 46 who chose to practice emergency medicine in the same neighborhood he grew up in, which is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country.

Speaker 46 And he was describing the experience of on any given day, he will see someone brought in on a stretcher who's been shot who's someone he knew.

Speaker 60 And there's a moment in the conversation where he talks about, I ask him how many friends he's had who

Speaker 35 have been killed.

Speaker 75 And he actually has this, he said, do you mean like people I was close enough to that they were in my phone?

Speaker 51 Like I'd been texting with him?

Speaker 77 I go, yeah. And he goes, 15.

Speaker 1 Oh. Right?

Speaker 35 And the whole conversation is, and I had framed it in the, the episode is framed by this comment that this

Speaker 77 I had done a couple of seasons ago, this whole thing about the Jesuits, thinking like a Jesuit.

Speaker 47 And this one Jesuit said to me, sin is the failure to bother to care.

Speaker 35 And the whole episode is all about what does it mean to bother to care.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 46 sin is the failure to bother to care.

Speaker 24 It's the abstract rule.

Speaker 68 This guy, Abdullah Price's decision to forego a much easier, more lucrative life, practicing as an ER doc in a suburb someplace, to go back and practice in his own

Speaker 42 neighborhood.

Speaker 28 and run the risk of this traumatic thing where it's kids he knows coming in, in, right?

Speaker 70 That's a story, it's real about his choices, and it's just emotionally moving.

Speaker 11 And it makes that principle come to life, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 42 Suddenly, you get what's the Jesuit mean when he's saying sin is the failure to bother to care.

Speaker 75 He means that.

Speaker 62 He means you have to make the same kind of choice that that guy made.

Speaker 45 We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, Malcolm's definition of happiness and what quality he values the most in people.

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Speaker 45 I want to talk about happiness in a second. So in this kind of school of moral theory that I've raised here,

Speaker 45 happiness

Speaker 45 defined a particular way is seen as the point of life.

Speaker 45 And I wanted to do a little short experiment here. And I wanted to read you a short passage from a Catholic theologian whose work I like, Paul Waddell.

Speaker 45 And I've used his book in a number of my ethics classes. It's a book called Happiness and the Christian Moral Life.
And I want to see what you make of it. So Waddell says this,

Speaker 45 the trajectory of our lives can be read as an endless pursuit of whatever we think will satisfy us, content us, and fulfill us.

Speaker 45 All of that reveals what we believe will bring us happiness and satisfaction. The trouble, however, is that we are often confused and easily misled about what will really fulfill us.

Speaker 45 Then, he's talking about Aquinas and Aristotle.

Speaker 45 He says, for Aquinas and Aristotle, happiness does not reside in having my wants and desires satisfied unless I have learned to want and desire what is best.

Speaker 1 That's lovely. Isn't that lovely?

Speaker 45 I think it's lovely.

Speaker 45 Why do you find it lovely?

Speaker 35 Well, first of all, I like it gives us a definition of the purpose of a religious life that's

Speaker 47 different, that it adds to our understanding of that.

Speaker 46 And I like the idea that I love any kind of notion that says that our that left to our own devices, we often get things wrong.

Speaker 40 I like that. That's an important reminder.

Speaker 68 We just willy-nilly follow what's in our gut,

Speaker 35 as often as not, screw up, right?

Speaker 47 I, my book, Blink, which was misinterpreted as a book celebrating gut instincts, when in fact it was the opposite, was about this.

Speaker 62 Like, unless you're an expert, your instincts lead you astray.

Speaker 11 You need to educate them in some way.

Speaker 46 And the idea that one of those civilizing institutions in life is the church is a really good one.

Speaker 35 That's like a,

Speaker 24 I love the way he phrased it.

Speaker 45 You're 60?

Speaker 38 Don't remind me.

Speaker 45 Are you happy?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 69 I mean, I don't, yes. I do think I'm happy.

Speaker 71 It's funny.

Speaker 51 I never asked myself that question.

Speaker 65 That comes to mind in very, very discreet moments.

Speaker 10 So I am much more comfortable saying, I was happy doing X, or I was happy when, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 10 I fixed a problem in a chapter I was working on this morning in a little coffee shop in Nashville.

Speaker 41 I was happy when I realized I'd fixed it.

Speaker 35 Or I will go running this afternoon afterward.

Speaker 1 It'll It'll be this, I will be happy in the middle of that running.

Speaker 53 That's how I like to think about happiness.

Speaker 67 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 45 What about, when you think about being 60, what

Speaker 45 regrets or hardest lessons learned, to whatever degree you want to talk about those?

Speaker 1 I don't.

Speaker 44 Do I have? I must have regrets. I have a ton of that.

Speaker 42 I suppose I have a lot, but they're not like.

Speaker 35 The problem is that very often the mistakes you made or the failures you have turn out to be so important in

Speaker 57 educating you and

Speaker 65 that in the end you don't think of them as mistakes anymore.

Speaker 38 Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 37 Like, so I do firmly believe that you learn way more from your failures than you do from your successes.

Speaker 44 I don't think success teaches you much at all.

Speaker 10 The only thing that prods you to dig deeper is when something doesn't work or when something fails.

Speaker 42 And

Speaker 68 so after a lifetime of that, can you really look on your failures as being,

Speaker 60 can you classify them as

Speaker 68 regrettable?

Speaker 51 They're not regrettable because I came out different than I.

Speaker 68 I get confused by that question because I don't know how to categorize.

Speaker 36 Like I, there was a period in my life where I spent a huge amount of time in Freudian therapy, right?

Speaker 61 Three days a week.

Speaker 45 You were receiving therapy.

Speaker 43 I was receiving it.

Speaker 1 I was in Manhattan.

Speaker 40 I was new to Manhattan.

Speaker 1 I was like, all right, that's what they do here.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 65 and I had a job that wasn't that demanding.

Speaker 1 You can't have a demanding job.

Speaker 10 You can't what? Have a demanding job and be in three days a week for audien therapy.

Speaker 51 Because it just wipes out the whole day, right?

Speaker 54 There's something that happens, by the way.

Speaker 35 So I have this whole thing in my new book.

Speaker 39 It's top of mind.

Speaker 51 I have this whole thing on the magic number three.

Speaker 41 Three is a magic number.

Speaker 62 So you do one day a week.

Speaker 11 It's like fine, whatever.

Speaker 49 Lots of people do one day a week.

Speaker 58 You do two, it's like a lot.

Speaker 68 You do three, it completely takes over your life.

Speaker 65 Nothing, everything else fades into insignificance.

Speaker 51 You are someone who does therapy.

Speaker 1 That's what your self-definition is.

Speaker 35 By the way, astounding how it takes over your life. I've never been through anything equivalent to this.

Speaker 45 How long a period of your life was this?

Speaker 39 I probably wasn't three days a week for, I don't even remember, probably was a year.

Speaker 38 It was traumatic.

Speaker 62 It was like,

Speaker 35 couldn't function, stopped being productive at work, had the most horrendous nightmares.

Speaker 51 Everything I was, my unconscious, because all the Freudians carry bodies are unconscious.

Speaker 43 My unconscious basically took over my life for a year.

Speaker 11 It was a massive amount of time and a massive amount of money was spent on this.

Speaker 10 It's the last year in my...

Speaker 35 So you guys say, was that a regret?

Speaker 44 No, because actually,

Speaker 68 I didn't, it didn't solve any of my problems, but it was, in retrospect, a failure that was deeply fascinating.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 38 That taught me something really extraordinary about not really my mind, but about the human mind.

Speaker 38 Man, there is a thing called your unconscious, and it is ginormous.

Speaker 11 It sits in your brain wanting to get out.

Speaker 52 And if you even so much as crack the door, it will rush out and take over your life.

Speaker 58 It's a, we are scary, right?

Speaker 54 Human beings.

Speaker 74 That was a really interesting thing to learn.

Speaker 54 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 62 I mean, a very costly lesson, but you you know, who knows what book I could have written in that year, that last year.

Speaker 36 But

Speaker 54 I'm glad I did it. Yeah.

Speaker 45 Well, and that reminds me of you reframing the notion of the regrettable that another theologian I've learned a lot from and is now a friend, Stanley Hauerwas.

Speaker 45 And when he talks about this way of thinking about our lives, I once heard him do a lecture where he was talking, I don't remember who it was, but it was a man who went to Oxford, got trained in literature and was a poet.

Speaker 45 But then after some time, he decided he wanted to go back home and be a shepherd.

Speaker 45 And so he was a shepherd, and he was a shepherd who would write poetry. And at some point on into his life, near the end of his life, he wrote this essay in which he

Speaker 45 examined the ups and downs of his life.

Speaker 45 And then he came to the conclusion, this is my life. I want no other.

Speaker 45 And then Harawas said, that's the meaning of a happy life,

Speaker 45 is that you can look back on your life, whatever's happened, and say,

Speaker 45 I want this life.

Speaker 44 My friend Bruce has this wonderful corollary to that.

Speaker 35 He had problems with jealousy.

Speaker 44 He was open about it.

Speaker 28 And he cured his problems with jealousy by saying, you can no longer be envious of a piece of someone's life.

Speaker 39 You have to want the whole life.

Speaker 52 So you say, okay, I wish I looked like Brad Pitt.

Speaker 39 You're a little envious of Brad Pitt. He's a handsome dude.

Speaker 52 Then you have to say, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 24 You can't just have his looks. You've got to have his whole life.

Speaker 42 You really want his whole life?

Speaker 44 No, you don't want his whole life.

Speaker 26 You want Angelina and Jolie, like, you know, like

Speaker 75 filing suits against you. And like,

Speaker 72 you can't go to the store and get like a pint of milk because you'll be mobbed.

Speaker 62 I mean, you're a prisoner, right?

Speaker 74 It's a horrendous life, right?

Speaker 54 And you think about it.

Speaker 62 You're living in some grotesque house in LA and you can't go out without, some guy's got to pull up in a suburban to take you in, you know, a black suburban with tinted windows so you can, you know, go to the movie.

Speaker 35 I mean, you don't want it, right?

Speaker 6 And if you go down the list, you realize you actually don't want anyone's life except your own.

Speaker 24 It's really, really a useful.

Speaker 45 Yeah,

Speaker 45 it's striking how timid you are about saying what you think.

Speaker 45 Okay, I want to shift. I want to shift the conversation.

Speaker 45 Another phrase that I know I've heard you say repeatedly

Speaker 19 is

Speaker 43 a weeper.

Speaker 45 He'll say, This is a real real weeper.

Speaker 76 Yeah.

Speaker 45 So

Speaker 45 getting ready for you coming to Nashville, I was listening to your episode, The King of Tears,

Speaker 45 which I would imagine a lot of people in Nashville listen to. It revolves around Nashville and country music.
And it's woven together with all these beautiful layers of storytelling about.

Speaker 45 Bobby Braddock, famed Nashville songwriter who you're calling the King of Tears because he's written all of these amazing songs that are just weepers. And you're especially weaving it together around

Speaker 45 his song, He Stopped Loving Her Today, which George Jones made famous.

Speaker 1 Saddest song of all time. Yeah.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 45 so while listening to this episode, I was down on the floor in my house scraping baseboards, getting ready for the painters to come.

Speaker 44 Did you start crying?

Speaker 45 Don't get it.

Speaker 1 That's my story.

Speaker 71 I can't believe you did that.

Speaker 70 I would never do that to one of your stories.

Speaker 45 So I'm down on the floor scraping bassboards, getting ready to rotate.

Speaker 45 And you come to this climactic moment of recounting George Jones' funeral.

Speaker 45 And then you weave into Vince Gill singing his own weeper, Go Rest High.

Speaker 45 And there I am down on my hands and knees sobbing

Speaker 45 as Vince Gill himself breaks down at George Jones' funeral and cannot get himself through his own song, Go Rest High. And so I'm sitting there

Speaker 45 sobbing, tears running down my face. And then you say something like,

Speaker 45 And if you're not crying, there's nothing I can do for you. I can't help you.
I can't help you.

Speaker 53 I can't help you. I can't help you.

Speaker 45 So, what's behind your fascination with weepers?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 65 it's too easy to make someone laugh.

Speaker 77 People were just laughing now, right?

Speaker 42 Super easy.

Speaker 38 Making someone cry.

Speaker 34 So, under what circumstances could I make some portion of you right now cry?

Speaker 71 Really hard?

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 14 So I'm naturally attracted to the more difficult of the narrative tasks.

Speaker 45 So what do you think is the line between kind of manipulative

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 45 mawkish sentimentality on one side and

Speaker 45 emotion that somehow is speaking to the fullness or the richness of life or the possibilities of living life well? What's

Speaker 58 that? It's simple.

Speaker 38 There are Hallmark commercials that can get you a little weepy.

Speaker 11 But that's not real.

Speaker 77 You know that. And then

Speaker 60 you stop. And then there was a famous,

Speaker 53 I say famous, famous to me.

Speaker 1 It was an ad for Google, for Google chat or something.

Speaker 53 It was a TV commercial.

Speaker 42 And it's, you see the daughter who's just gone off to college and you see the dad who's chatting with her.

Speaker 66 And

Speaker 61 it's like the dad's typing in the chat line. I miss you so much.

Speaker 42 you know, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 10 It's been, and then you realize, you know, it's been so long since mom left us or something.

Speaker 41 And you realize she's his only daughter.

Speaker 39 His wife, the mom, has died.

Speaker 49 And as he's typing that thing about mom to her on Google chat,

Speaker 41 the cursor slows down.

Speaker 44 So you realize he's choking up, right?

Speaker 77 It's insanely manipulative.

Speaker 47 If I showed it to you right now, we're all in tears.

Speaker 58 But that's not real, right?

Speaker 62 I want it real.

Speaker 35 They're like, you think about them and

Speaker 51 you ask questions about your own life.

Speaker 35 Like,

Speaker 38 would I have done that?

Speaker 11 Should I be doing that?

Speaker 38 Why am I not doing that?

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 68 Why am I not the Good Samaritan? Like,

Speaker 68 that's the kind of story that's important and powerful.

Speaker 45 I've got one last question. It may be one that's easy for you to dismiss, but let me ask you to dig for a potential answer to it.

Speaker 64 What

Speaker 45 is there about Malcolm Gladwell

Speaker 45 that you've not given us any glimpse of that you would

Speaker 45 be happy for people to get a glimpse of?

Speaker 44 That's a good question.

Speaker 30 I think a lot about

Speaker 1 work

Speaker 57 and

Speaker 1 effort

Speaker 44 and how important

Speaker 38 effort is to me in my own life and in my estimations of others.

Speaker 60 That what I want to see from myself and from the people around me is

Speaker 73 I want to see some level of

Speaker 66 commitment.

Speaker 44 And that what I, as I get older, what I'm, I'm going to sound very, very 19th century when I say this, I've become less and less tolerant of idleness.

Speaker 51 I mean that in a very, very kind of

Speaker 53 specific way and that is you have to care about something.

Speaker 40 I don't care what it is.

Speaker 60 You have to care about something and you have to make a sacrifice in pursuit of that thing you care about and you have to try,

Speaker 69 right? And if you're not caring,

Speaker 42 putting some effort towards something and making a commitment to it, then I honestly, I don't have any way to relate to you anymore.

Speaker 44 I don't.

Speaker 1 I can't.

Speaker 38 I don't have room in my life for people who aren't, who don't have a connection to whatever it is.

Speaker 69 Like I said,

Speaker 40 I don't really care what it it is.

Speaker 59 I want someone to find something that they apply themselves to because if you're not doing that, I don't understand why you're here, right?

Speaker 42 I don't think we were put here to twiddle our thumbs.

Speaker 51 I just don't, I wouldn't have said that at 25, because at 25, I think I was, in some sense, twiddling my thumbs.

Speaker 35 I look back on that with a little bit of horror.

Speaker 51 In my 20s, I did what people in the 20s do. I partied a lot and I would sleep in until one o'clock on a Sunday.

Speaker 39 and I would, I don't understand that anymore.

Speaker 69 I don't know.

Speaker 30 I'm not sure this is, I'm not sure this feeling I have is correct.

Speaker 24 I worry that it's ungenerous and whatever.

Speaker 35 And

Speaker 55 but it just is.

Speaker 60 It's just like that's what I, when I think about the people I surround myself with now,

Speaker 68 I've kept the people who care about something and

Speaker 60 I have not kept the people who I think don't.

Speaker 52 Like I said, I don't know whether that's fair, but it just is, you know.

Speaker 45 Well, we thank you for the way that you have cared and that you have sought to make a contribution.

Speaker 42 And we're grateful for that and grateful for your presence today.

Speaker 45 Thankful for your sharing your real self with us today. So please show your thanks to Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 45 You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Malcolm Gladwell, journalist, New York Times best-selling author of multiple books, and host of the podcast Revisionist History.

Speaker 45 We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.

Speaker 45 And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.

Speaker 45 Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible.

Speaker 45 Christy Bragg, Jacob Lewis, Sophie Bayard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hayes, Mary Evelyn Brown, Carriot Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osborne, and Tim Lauer.

Speaker 45 Thanks for listening and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together. No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media LLC, and...
Great feeling studio.

Speaker 30 If you enjoyed this episode of No Small Endeavor, there are plenty more where that came from.

Speaker 29 No Small Endeavor releases new episodes every Thursday. Follow No Small Endeavor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now.

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Speaker 2 Yet, here you are, making excellent hydration choices.

Speaker 2 I do feel more sophisticated. That's called having a taste for taste.
Huh, a taste for taste. I like that.
Smart water. For those with a taste for taste, grab yours today.
This is an iHeart Podcast.