Malcolm Gladwell: Are We at a National Tipping Point?

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Hi, everybody.

I think that today's episode is going to be very helpful to you.

If you like us are trying to make sense of things in this new world we are in post-election, if you are looking for explanations for what happened, if you are looking for a way of looking at all of this that offers a bit of hope and power, Malcolm Gladwell is with us today and Malcolm really helped us understand

how the Trump tipping point happened in this country.

Really just kind of illustrated in a way that made us see it differently.

He also used examples from our culture, like will and grace, to help us understand how a tipping point can happen again, in more in our favor, maybe.

And he kind of brought it all home by explaining to us why we should never, ever watch our children practice sports, which made us all laugh.

I think that this conversation might give you a bit of hope back.

It did for us.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers.

He also is the co-founder of Pushkin Industries that creates so many beautiful audiobooks and podcasts.

He's been included in the Times' 100 Most Influential People list, and his latest book is Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Super Spreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, which could not be a more timely thing to discuss.

Welcome, Malcolm Gladwell.

I'm really excited that you're here.

I've read all of your books throughout the years.

And your new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point,

it has some exciting new theories and ideas that I think are very timely in this American moment post-election.

And so before we get into that, can you kind of set the stage?

Like, what is a tipping point?

What are super spreaders?

What is an overstory?

Yeah, so the idea that runs underneath this book is the same idea that ran underneath my first book, The Tipping Point, which is that a really useful way to think about how ideas and behaviors spread is to use the metaphor of the epidemic.

And epidemics have very particular,

as we all remember from COVID, they're these weird little animals that have their own like rules and things.

One of the rules of an epidemic is that, not always, but most of the time, the work of an epidemic is done by a very small group of people.

An epidemic is something that affects us all, but is being driven by a tiny fraction of the population.

That's one sort of general rule.

So you have super spreaders who COVID was all driven by super, it was driven by a small number of people who just produced tons and tons of tons of virus.

Another thing that epidemics have in common is that they have these sudden changes in direction.

They hit these tipping points where they explode all at once or they stop all at once.

It's not slow and steady.

It's the opposite.

And a third thing is that they're very much influenced by kind of the ideas that are in the air.

The kinds of stories we tell each other and the environments we create for each other can be either very hostile to epidemics or very friendly.

to epidemics.

So those are the kind of three principles that I play with in both books and sort of return to with Revenge the Tipping Point.

Okay, so when we're talking about the super spreaders, I would love for you to talk about the story of COVID and the Biogen meeting at the Marriott and what that is about, because that was so fascinating to me.

And I think people will also feel the same.

Yeah.

When we were in the middle of COVID, we had COVID all wrong.

We thought that

the disease was spreading through the actions of all of us.

So anyone who we thought, we assumed that anyone who was infected was at risk for spreading the virus to somebody else.

It was a collective problem.

So we were all told to stay home.

We were all told to wear masks.

We were all told to act as if we were as much at risk of spreading the virus as anyone else.

Subsequently, we've gone back and we've realized, oh, wait a minute, that wasn't true.

And so I tell the story of this famous outbreak of COVID early on in the pandemic.

started at a company meeting in at a hotel in Boston.

Company was called Biogen.

And a particular strain of COVID spread from that meeting all over the world and ended up infecting 300,000 people.

And scientists were able to trace the spread of this particular strain because it was so distinctive.

And what they realized was it all started with one person.

One person stands up in this meeting, infects over 100 other people at this one particular meeting, and those 100 go out in the world.

and spread it to 300,000 others.

And my whole chapter is all about how this guy who spread it all at that meeting was different from everyone else.

He wasn't malicious or he wasn't, he didn't probably even know he was a super spreader, but there was something about his physiology that meant that he produced hundreds or if not thousands of times more virus than everyone else, right?

And it shouldn't be a surprise because, I mean, you guys know as well as anyone, we're very comfortable with the idea that other physiological traits are highly variable or asymmetric.

You know, there's only one LeBron James.

There's only one Allison Felix, right?

There aren't like 100 of them.

So it turns out in COVID, there's only one or a very, very small number of people who are kind of incredibly good at spreading virus.

And that's just an insight that is really crucial to understanding.

how epidemics work.

Because if you want to stop them, you don't focus on everyone.

You focus on a small number of people.

So tell us exactly, define tipping point for anyone who is not familiar with this.

What is a tipping point?

So this is something that all epidemics have in common, which is there's a moment when they explode.

So if you think back, COVID is a good example.

I remember I was in December of 2019, I was in a hotel in Santa Barbara with my partner.

And we were, we ended up staying up all night in some bar chatting to other people who were there.

And we were talking about this virus that we'd heard about,

you know, that was in China, that was kind of scary, but like it was in China.

I remember I was, because I had started my journalism career covering the AIDS epidemic back in the 80s.

So I sort of knew a little bit about epidemics.

And I was saying, you know, I don't know, man, if it comes here, it could be a little scary, but it was all abstract, right?

It's still abstract in January.

It's still abstract in February.

And then there is literally a day.

I remember there was a day in March when everybody went home.

We all went into lockdown and we were terrified.

Yeah, March 13th.

Friday, March 13th.

Yeah, that was the tipping point.

And that's the way these things work.

Like it's boom.

It's all of a sudden you realize, you know, this is.

So you can look at any epidemic of ideas or.

behavior or of an actual virus and you can almost almost always locate a moment when suddenly everything changed.

That's the big point.

And this is the beauty.

Your Your work, I mean, your work predated

everyone

understanding epidemics in terms of social contagions and theories.

I mean, you were literally working on AIDS and then you transformed it to crime, et cetera.

And now we understand, you know, a meme is on the internet.

It's viral.

It has picked up enough steam to snowball forever.

But I think it's so interesting.

And I know we want to talk about it in terms of this moment that we're in because I feel like it's really new.

And I haven't heard you talk about it.

And I'm very excited to see what you say.

But

there is,

we got you, we got you.

Buckle up, buttercups.

Buckle up.

But it's a mathematical, it's kind of like what they say about bankruptcy, like gradually and then suddenly.

I was, I was going bankrupt, you know, slowly and then all at once, you know, white flight in the suburbs.

There is a particular mathematical equation where the white people won't move out until this percentage and then everybody moves.

So if we were to look at what is happening in the world right now, where we say it's very similar, I mean, I'll just speak for myself, and you don't have to out yourself on what you think.

But, you know, if we have a moment where this man, Trump, came on the scene down the escalator X number of years ago, and it was people were laughing.

It was a joke.

He wasn't going to be taken seriously.

This was

it was so outside that he would ever get the nomination.

And here we are

nine years later.

And

there's no denying the virality of the movement that is happening here.

So if you had to apply your theories about tipping point, how do you locate within our society the overstory, the super spreaders, what does it take to get, we were gradually and all of a sudden, this is where we are and people are shocked by it

i think i'd say a couple of things it's a super interesting question one is so i lived in new york in the i moved to new york in 93

and if you lived in new york in the 90s trump was a joke like we all knew this guy he was in the tableau's every day he was always bankrupt he was always making a fool of himself nobody took him seriously right so there is a moment so it's really hard if you were in new york in that period to understand what is going on now because you're like this buffoon who was just like partying with Jeffrey Epstein at one nightclub after another every with an endless string of models on his arm and going bankrupt every five minutes, just a rich kid from his daddy gave him a couple hundred million and he squandered it.

Like that's who he was, right?

So there's several things.

One is I do think the apprentice in retrospect.

is just way, way, way, way more significant than we realize.

Yes.

Because he reinvents himself on the apprentice in front of all of America as a guy who was like tough, decisive, charismatic.

He was none of those things.

He was just an asshole, right?

And I have two chapters in Revenge of the Tipping Point that talk about what TV could do in those eras, like the Will and Grace chapter and the Holocaust chapter.

And The Apprentice is absolutely, that's crucial.

I really, really think that,

and I, you know, we do bring it up from time to time, but I feel like the story begins there.

And a generation of people are introduced to this guy, and he gets to reinvent himself in a way that you rarely do in your 50s.

So that's tipping point number one, I think would be that.

And tipping point number two, I think, is those,

the first time around, the debates he has in the Republican primary, where it turns out that he's really good at.

that particular kind of public event, the debate.

I actually hate presidential debates.

I think it's a stupid way to choose a president.

I don't understand why we care whether someone's a good debater in that format.

Like, what does that have to do with being an effective president?

Nonetheless, all those things aside, he was really good at that, right?

He did that.

He could play that kind of like

dominant male role, alpha role, to a T.

It's almost like that whole system was invented for someone like him.

He's big, he's got a big personality, he fills up a room, he imposes his sort of will on people.

So I think those two things were sufficient to turn him from a buffoon to someone who people took seriously.

Wow.

So that's how I would kind of account for his rise.

But I mean, you're right.

It's totally weirdly improbable.

I mean, what is going on?

That's a great question.

That's a great question.

Nobody who works for him likes him.

Like, that's, to me, is the real tell.

I know.

And the irony of the only reason he could do do The Apprentice is because he was constantly available because he literally had nothing else going on.

I mean, they talk about that's why they made the show.

He was like, I have all the time in the world.

Nothing else.

I can't tell you, if you read the New York Post in the 90s, every single day in page six, the gossip page, it's just Donald out.

He's just out.

He's just partying.

Like, it's just

incredible.

Anyway.

What is an overstory?

So this is this thing that I got really and i got into it because i was so fascinated by the gay marriage thing the marriage equality thing which is really really really interesting because if you guys remember this there's this moment in like 2004 2005 when it looks like it's never going to happen when one prominent politician after another standing up and saying not only am I made uncomfortable by this, but I want to pass a constitutional amendment that says this could never happen.

And the movement, which has been 20 years in the making, is losing one state battle after another.

It looks grim.

People in the movement don't think it's going to happen in their lifetime.

They're talking about 40 years, a 40-year battle.

And then it just crumbles.

Like the opposition just goes away.

And to everyone's surprise, we have this big breakthrough less than 10 years later.

And the question is, why?

This doesn't happen.

This didn't happen with integration in the 60s.

Integration, we're still fighting that fight it's been 50 years right 60 years it didn't happen so i can list i can make you a list of five hot button issues that did not tip like that but we just fight them you know abortion did abortion abortion never went away abortion's just been bubbling along with a level of hostility on one side and a level of support on the other side since the 70s right so like why does this happen with so i was trying to understand something happened in the story that as a society that we told ourselves.

And so the question is, what is the story that we're,

what was the crucial story?

And I think this is the argument that Evan Wolfson makes, who was the kind of guy who led the gay marriage fight.

It was not a story about gay people.

It was a story about relationships.

The battle wasn't for straight people to accept

gay people as

people.

That's not the battle.

The battle was for straight people to understand that it was possible for somebody who was queer to have a real relationship.

And that was the part of the story that was missing, that we could grant gay people their selfhood, their identity, their respect, their dignity, but we just didn't believe they could have a real relationship.

That's not what you can't be gay and have a real relationship.

That was the story for decades, decades.

And something happened to change that story where people said, wait a minute, just because you're gay, doesn't mean you can't have a real relationship.

I wanted to explain that.

And I thought that it was the crucial thing there, not the only thing, but one of the crucial things was something changed in the story that Americans told each other about marriage and gay people.

So why did that change?

In the chapter, if you guys read it, you'll know that I really take Will and Grace seriously.

I really do.

I don't think that's a joke.

I know people talk about Will and Grace as like, oh yeah, it was Will and Grace.

I'm dead serious.

I think it's dead serious.

It's a huge part of that is that someone who'd never even thought about gay marriage before, who just had it in their heads that gay people couldn't do relationships, watched that show

and saw Will

and saw that Will could love Grace.

He was someone who was capable of a real relationship.

And that is...

That is so groundbreaking.

That had never been done on TV before, never been done in the culture.

So it's like, that's what I mean by an overstory is that we tell each other these stories that are really, really important.

And we're not always aware of what's in the stories, but those stories have a huge impact on how we behave.

And people can know, people know that.

So there are people who use

that idea that you can tell a story that changes hearts and minds and therefore changes civilizations.

And you can do that in ways that you find beautiful to improve inclusion, to make our ideas of humanity be wider.

Or

you can use that truth to be a super spreader for ideas that are divisive and scary

or aren't even related to your actual motives.

Like when you talk about that, you mentioned abortion.

And I'm thinking about, I come from the evangelical side of things.

And I know.

that

super spreaders often happen in meetings.

There was a meeting where Jerry Falwell and some people sat down and decided how do we get a voting block so that we can keep our schools segregated.

And they thought of the idea of abortion that could activate, they could pull on heartstrings by talking about life and death and babies

and they could motivate people to get to the voting booths using this idea that previously the evangelical church was very up in the air about where life started.

They were very hands-off.

People that now,

that overstory of life and death, of this being what God wants, has changed the landscape of our entire country because of a meeting.

Because then that idea is planted.

And in my mind, what happens is it's like this exponential situation where they make a decision that this is our issue now.

And then those people go spread it to the pastors.

And then the pastors go spread it to the altars.

And now nobody knows where it came from.

And everybody thinks it's been since the beginning of time.

And that's the TV show, right?

Instead of a will and grace on TV, you have every Sunday show for an hour where I go and watch the TV show that tells me that I can't love God and support Democrats.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, you're getting that.

The version, the smaller version we went through during the election was.

the thing about, which I think in retrospect will be considered to be really important, was the thing about Haitians eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, which is,

I mean,

it sounds like the punchline to a bad joke, but it's an incredibly powerful story because the point of that story was these people are not

human, right?

They're animals.

They're like, they're eating pets.

They're like, they are.

And it was that really, really simple, powerful way of taking an entire group and demonizing them and justifying a level of response to them that that was that's a story.

It was, by the way, an incredible story that to this day, I cannot understand why that, how that possibly spread the way it did with candidates for high office repeating it.

Like, it's so ridiculous.

And it was flatly contradicted by all people who live there.

I mean, it was just like, but that's what a story can do.

That's an overstory.

That's a way that a story that allows people to to reorganize the way they make sense of the world and permits an idea to spread in a contagious fashion.

What is the point point of that story?

How does that serve MAGA's ultimate goals?

Planting a story about dehumanizing Haitians.

Yeah, it justifies.

And in order to justify wrenching people away from their families and communities and jobs and whatever, you have to diminish them, right?

In our eyes.

We have to believe that they somehow deserve it, that they're less than fully human.

And so these kinds of stories serve that intent.

If you don't prepare the ground, then people are going to be properly horrified.

I think people will be properly horrified, but that's what they're trying to do with that is set the stage.

You have to do it.

It's the same thing during enslavement.

You had to tell people that black people were subhuman.

You had to have people at least portend to believe that.

You had to tell the story that black people did not feel physical pain.

on the level that white people did.

Like there are necessary things to get people to get over or give them cover to get over what they're going to see.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's true.

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I keep thinking about the overstory of freedom here, the idea that

MAGA has co-opted all evidence to the contrary with the rights over bodies and

our self-determination, this idea of freedom

that somehow they exemplify that.

I honestly can't figure it out and I'm wondering what your thoughts are here.

Is it the freedom

of

white men to continue to say whatever they want and be whatever they want and be special?

Because if these other people get equal standing, they're not special anymore.

Is it because they need to continue to be mediocre and get all the good jobs and this is a threat to them?

Like, what is the thing under the freedom over story?

Well,

I think you put your finger on it.

I think the freedom over story is really a, the meaning of that is I would like to to have the kind of privilege and authority that I have always had.

I'd like that to stay.

It's an appeal to the status quo.

I think that word is just a convenient way to describe they don't want things to change.

If you're a white guy, you've had a pretty good run.

It's been

whatever, a couple thousand years.

No one's in a hurry to have that end, right?

So you create some pretty powerful psychological mechanisms for justifying keeping that in place.

And it is, you know, I will say, and in no way, of course, am I defending them, but like, it's pretty disconcerting if you're someone who had it your way for thousands of years and all of a sudden there's a chance you're not going to have it your way anymore.

That triggers some pretty powerful responses.

I think that's what they call backlash.

Yeah.

So I want to talk a little bit about the Florida Panther story, because I think that that is really interesting as it kind of relates to what we're all experiencing right now.

Can you talk about that story?

And I want to read this quote that was in your book that I just think is so incredible.

In order to be saved, it had to become something else, a hybrid of Texas and Florida.

The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture.

Can you tell us about that story, about the Florida Panther?

Yeah.

I heard about this

school in this fantastic, wealthy little enclave somewhere in America That was the perfect community.

It was gorgeous.

It was, I mean, I went there and it was like I would move with my kids there in a heartbeat.

Everyone loved each other.

This best high school in the state, you know, incredible facilities, you know, no crime, gorgeous lakefront homes.

And they had a problem, a suicide epidemic at their high school that they couldn't shake.

That was really, really, really serious.

Kids who did not seem to have any kind of obvious reason to take their own life life were taking their own lives.

So I started talking to people who had studies two psychologists who had studied what has gone on there, Anna Mueller and Seth Robertson.

And one of their diagnoses for what had gone wrong in this town was the town was a monoculture.

It was a place where there was only one identity for kids to embrace.

And that is the identity was the incredibly athletic, incredibly socially successful, really smart kid who was on their way to an Ivy League school.

That was what the town was all about.

There was one pathway at that high school.

And if that pathway didn't work for you, then there was nowhere for you to turn.

That's what it meant.

Normally in a high school, we have multiple identities, right?

We can all find a little niche.

There were no niches at this high school.

There was one identity.

The parents had chosen that place because it was a monoculture, because they...

They thought that was the best chance for their kids to succeed.

And the problem with monocultures is that they are incredibly susceptible to epidemics.

Epidemics love a monoculture.

If you can infect one person, you can infect everyone.

So that chapter is in it, makes this analogy to what happened to cheetahs and panthers, which are two cats, two breed of cats, who we discovered in the last 25 years have been incredibly imperiled.

They're incredibly sickly.

And they're prone to all kinds of epidemics because they are identical, basically for a complicated set of reasons it's as if every cheetah and every panther in the world is an identical twin so when if one cheetah gets sick and dies they're all susceptible to getting sick and dying because they have exactly the same gene pool it's an the animal version of what i was describing in this little community and to me it was really interesting because

I think our arguments for diversity, and I say diversity of all kinds, not just ethnic diversity, but are sometimes all wrong.

We make it sound like diversity is medicine, that like got to do it's the right thing to do morally.

And we forget, no, no, there's a whole other reason is it makes us stronger as a community, right?

It gives you, by creating different places where people can feel comfortable, by creating differences in the way people express themselves and think and over, it serves as a kind of wall against viruses sweeping, epidemics epidemics sweeping through and infecting an entire community, right?

So this idea that diversity makes us safer, I don't find that, why are we making this argument?

This is the reason, right?

If we're different and we understand our differences and embrace them, then that protects us and makes us more resilient.

It's an evolutionary advantage.

It is an evolutionary advantage, right?

It is absolutely the case, right?

Isn't it also a disadvantage, though?

Because

like when you're saying that, I'm thinking that is why the progressive groups that I am a part of, whether it's progressive Christianity or the left, or

why it's so easy to move the other side, why they're so united, why they're so like they one story and go.

And we're over here like arguing about every damn thing, which makes us strong in one way.

We are not going to get knocked over one way or another, but it is very difficult to galvanize us, to unite us around one thing, to get us moving.

That is why progressive churches just fall apart while the mega churches move into more and more, or the left, it is hard for us to unite around a story.

That's what everyone's talking about with this election.

Like, what was our story?

And so, yes, it strengthens us,

but also in the culture we are in, where it takes consensus to get shit done or to gather more power, doesn't it leave us out of that game?

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

So there's a price you pay for everything.

So on the upside, we get resilience.

On the downside, we lose cohesion.

And that just means we have to work harder.

If we want to kind of find some sense of common purpose, we have to pay way more attention to the stories we're telling and the language we're using and finding and looking.

I think there is common ground there, but you have to hunt for it a little bit and work a little harder.

Absolutely.

But I feel that's a very small price to pay for the kind of dynamism that comes from,

this is a really, really obvious point.

But if you go to some of the most, let's just pick companies, if you go to the most dynamic, innovative, creative companies in America right now, what do you see?

You see exactly the same thing, which is you see more difference in the room.

than anywhere else.

You see people from all over the world.

You see people who think all kinds of, I was just out in a, on my book tour, I did a couple of stops in Silicon Valley.

And like, you look at this room, it's like people from all over the world.

You've got crazy libertarians.

You've got fundamentalist Christians who are, you know, grew up in that community from the South who are there.

Everyone's there.

And why is everyone there?

Because that's what.

What they're about is about, they want that kind of difference, dynamism, creativity.

They want the conflict that comes from the good conflict that comes from people with different backgrounds and ideas.

They understand that that's how you grow and get dynamic.

We're always going to have that in our diverse communities.

And that is worth, if the price of that is, it's hard to mobilize us around a single message or a single campaign.

I'll pay the price.

I'm happy to pay the price.

That's so hopeful.

I feel grateful that just for that moment.

So thank you.

Go ahead.

And it also feels hopeful about there's so much about your book that's like, God damn it.

And then there's so much that's very hopeful because it's like, if we are in the, even in this moment we're in, I mean, we are anguished and enraged and grieved.

And it feels like those people who are fighting for marriage equality and it's not going to be in our lifetime.

And so there's something so fascinating about your work is that when it's all tipping points, you can't measure progress linearly.

It's not, okay, 2% more and then we're there.

So like we could be on the precipice and we don't even know it.

It looks like failure and all of a sudden it's not.

If this macro world where we're like, okay,

we got two black women in the Senate for the first time ever.

Hallelujah.

That's wonderful.

Everything else looks for shit.

So if we take it down to the micro

and can you talk about the boardrooms?

If I am one woman in a boardroom versus another and it feels like Nothing is changing.

What good is this anyway?

Take us to the tipping point there.

So this is this thing I got really fascinated with when i was writing the book which is this question about group size group proportions rather and you're right the the women's boardroom is a great example of this so let's assume we've got a board corporate board of nine people and they're all men and they decide to represent

malcolm safe assumption safe assumption safe assumption they decide to bring in one woman right does bringing in one woman to a group of nine of eight other men change the fundamental nature of that group right the answer is no I had all these long conversations with women who've been in that position, and they would tell you they were ignored, no one listened to them, but they also weirdly stood out and they were like, they stood for all women, they felt scrutinized, but not her.

I mean, it was just like a kind of a nightmare.

They were telling crazy stories like this woman was saying, she'd make a point at the board.

She was, this is on a Fortune 500 company.

She's the only woman on the board.

She'd make some point.

you know, what she thought was a guerrilla good point.

And then everyone would go, okay, okay.

Then a guy would speak up and make exactly the same point.

And everybody would say, oh my God, that's brilliant.

And she'd be like, wait, I just said that.

Like she was invisible.

So then I would say, okay, so what happens?

Were you on that board when a second woman was pointed?

And they would say, yeah, I was.

What happened?

And this woman said, it was a little bit better, but not really.

And then it's, okay, what happened when a third woman was on the board?

And she's like,

boom,

everything changed.

All of a sudden, we were heard, we were seen, we felt comfortable, we could be be ourselves, we felt we were changing the nature of the board.

This is an observation that has been made, supported by a lot of psychological research, that says there are tipping points in groups that when outsiders reach a certain point, the way in which they are perceived and the way in which they behave and feel changes all at once, all at once, right?

So to your point about the Senate.

When women, and I call this the magic third, but basically it's somewhere around a, when outsiders reach somewhere between a quarter and a third of the total group the group changes to meet them right

so

we're not that far away in many aspects of american public life from women getting to those quarter third range it could happen in the senate in the next five ten years uh well 10 years it could happen in a variety of you know there'll be a point where women are governors of more than a certain number of states where the supreme court is, what's the Supreme Court now?

It's three women or forgotten.

Don't hold your breath, Gladwell.

We're losing two in the next couple weeks.

Yes, we are losing.

Yes, we're going to lose.

I don't know.

So I'm, so the point is, you're absolutely right.

This is a powerful argument against pessimism because

you can't extrapolate from where we are now.

You can't just say, oh, it's been this long, steady slog, nothing much has happened.

and we don't see much change.

No, no, no.

There is a point when change reaches a certain crucial moment when everything happens happens all at once.

That's what we're, it happened with gay marriage, right?

It was boom.

And it wasn't 50 years, it was 10.

So I think after this election, everyone's been talking about how many Hispanic voters

moved right and voted Republican.

You can't assume that's a permanent change.

It's just not the way these dynamics work, right?

You have to assume that the world is highly volatile.

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Do you have any like ideas at how we can actually like as a nation get ahead of and maybe change some of these over overstories for our benefit and i want to know what you think the left's overstory is what is it and what is it

i wish it was

i wish it was something

why you left because i'm just trying to figure it out i've been trying to i've been trying to plant it i've been trying to make one i'm not clearly

investing some posters

well you know one thing is is, if we look at the other side for a moment, I find the anti-abortion movement to be really interesting.

So these guys got destroyed in 1973.

They were left for dead.

Public sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of Roe versus Wade.

And everyone thought that we're never going to go back to...

And these guys

didn't give up.

They changed strategies.

a whole bunch of times.

They played the long game like I've never seen.

They realized that they weren't going to win at the ballot box ever.

and they realized it's going to be the court system and they set about methodically over decades to reshape the court system around a single issue right and they waited two generations the people who started that strategy were not around to see the victory because it was 50 years yeah so like part of that so one of this i do think we have to

be prepared for the long game i mean it may not take 50 years, but we need to be prepared.

We have to have patience.

That's point number one.

And two, they were super super single-minded and i think we have to be really really clear about what our priorities are if you had to pick

two things

or three things what would they be right and really really really go after what those things are and that's where i think the storytelling the storytelling you can't have an amorphous story the story has to be about something very clear and simple that we're trying to communicate.

You know, the gay marriage thing was brilliant because it was about dignity.

It's just about dignity.

It wasn't about,

you weren't asking anyone to be comfortable with the prospect of what gay people do behind closed doors.

I mean, all of that stuff that like really weirded out some right-wingers.

We didn't ask them to accept any of that.

We just said, this is about dignity.

And people responded to that.

So I'm wondering if we can find something.

The dignity thing, by the way, still works as a lot of what we're going to be going through over the next 10 years is about the attempt by the other side to strip Americans of their dignity.

Correct.

Right.

Yeah.

That's a really powerful story.

If we can stand up and say we embrace everybody.

But what if that story feels mutually exclusive to the overstory of the other side?

Like it feels to me like we did just run on dignity.

Right.

That was one of the major overstories of, you know, freedom, joy, dignity, love for all,

inclusion.

That was the amalgamation of the overstory of the left this time.

I feel afraid that what is happening is that when we say dignity for all, the other side hears that as at the cost of us.

Are these two opposing

overstories?

The problem, I am wondering, looking at this, if it is no longer, we should not focus on

that.

We should

go into what people are afraid of in their homes and families.

Is the fact that Trump came from all this, blew it, gets to reinvent himself no matter what, even though he's a bit of a moron, is a symbol of alpha maleness.

Is that overstory that makes us sick, the very overstory that makes the other side relate and want that?

that I too might not have anything, but I too could make myself into a star, that I might be an idiot, but I can still have power over women.

Is the overstory that we find shameful?

Are there people that want that to be their mini overstory too?

Yeah, no, I think there's something to that.

There's going to be kinds of battles at that level.

There's going to be warring stories.

But the thing about that, no marketplace is more efficient than the story marketplace.

best story always does win, right?

That's the, you know, Hollywood, if Hollywood has taught us anything, it is that, right?

You can have the movie made for $5 million that can sweep all the Oscars if it's a great story, and the one made for 400 million can bomb if it's not a good story.

So, I mean, the question is, can we come up with a better one than that?

And one that appeals to enough of Americans that we can find a way to kind of move forward.

I mean, a lot of this comes down to whether you believe that fear is a more powerful force than hope.

And I think we have to have the position that hope is more powerful than fear.

And I'm not even terribly interested in whether that is true.

I think it's true in my heart.

It has to be true.

That's the problem.

That's the thing.

You have to believe at some level that if we can put together a hopeful message, that it's going to win out over something that is nasty and venal.

Do you think that there's hope for a melded, unified overstory?

Or is the

effect of the silos we're in due to social media and not having we don't sit down and watch Walter Cronkite anymore, we don't have a unified

overstory,

is this going to just continue and we will be two Americas because the overstories will be solidified in different silos?

Or is there any hope for a reunifying story?

You know, this goes back to the conversation we were having about about super spreaders.

If you look at online, let's just talk about online, this notion that we are divided that comes from observing what's going on online.

So, I read this really fascinating paper a couple of weeks ago by people who looked very closely at this phenomenon of super spreaders online.

97% of political content comes from 10% of social media users.

30%

of all information online is toxic, and that is generated by 3% percent of users 80 of fake news comes from 0.1 percent of users right so first off right there what does that tell us it tells us that most of us are not playing that game most of us are not even interested in that and that what we're observing online is an illusion that is feeding a perception that's fundamentally false right so i suspect we have way, way, way more in common than we realize and that part of our job is to uncover what those things in common are.

I play this game when I'm on the road and I'm chatting with people and I run.

This happened actually like a couple of weeks ago.

A guy comes up to me at some reception, some business guy, and he's like, you know, I like your writing, even though I'm pretty sure we don't see eye to eye on most things.

He's like a guy in his, white guy in his 60s, maybe 70s, very wealthy business owner.

This is in Florida.

And I said, they sure

say, let's talk.

I'm not sure we we do don't see eye to eye on anything.

I think we probably agree on more things that we disagree about.

So we had a conversation.

And it turns out, yeah, it was the easiest thing in the world for us to talk about the things we had in common, right?

Really kind of basic stuff.

My point is that I talked to him for 20 minutes and we effortlessly found a whole series of things that we really, really agreed on, right?

We spent the whole time talking about housing.

He clearly had business interests in building houses.

We're talking about how,

this country is, we're killing each other because we don't build enough housing, right?

Housing is, to my mind, the number one issue this country faces.

And a lot of what we are arguing about is really, we're arguing about the fact that a whole series of people can't buy a house.

And that's really, really problematic for a society.

And he and I saw 100% eye to eye on this.

If I was a politician running for public office, and I made an argument that said, I care about this more than anything else, I think that a huge part of where American dignity comes from right now is about you should be able to afford a house for your family.

That shouldn't be impossible in the richest country in the world.

That that guy would vote for that.

He really would, you know, because that would trump a whole lot of other things that are in his mind right now is political issues.

So I think we just have to work harder to, I have a, there's a woman who wrote a fantastic book about youth sports, Linda Flanagan is her name.

I always bring her up.

And her whole argument, she's trying to fix what was wrong with girls' sports.

It's a really interesting book and what's interesting about it is that she has all these arguments about what went wrong if you make those arguments to parents with kids who are involved in sports which by the way is incredible percentage of parents i don't care what how they voted in the last election they will say oh my god that's true why are we doing that That's an issue that an incredible number of parents would rally around, regardless of their ideology.

So I think we just have to do a better job.

One of Linda's arguments, she makes this argument about how, like, it is crazy that we're professionalizing sports at way too young an age, right?

And that's just not good for anyone.

No one's having fun anymore.

She's this great argument about how parents should not be going to practices and all the games.

Abby doesn't let me.

She says, absolutely not.

You will not watch the children practice.

Yes.

Yes.

I 100% agree.

Sports belongs to kids.

When your parent shows up, the parent is trying to make it about them.

No, it's the one chance a kid has.

You don't want to like give them, allow them just get, they're 14 years old.

Can they not have a little moment by themselves to play the game with their peers without some crazy parent screaming at them?

That's right.

That's right.

Like, that's not a treatment.

That's a real thing for people.

For a parent to be able to think, someone who is thinking in a thoughtful, compassionate way about what it means for your child to have a real childhood, that's an issue that matters.

Why can't we talk about those kinds of things?

It feels hopeful to me, though, to consider what is an issue.

And then how do we make a story about that issue that says this is the dignified option for everybody?

Because for me, it feels like if we're running on dignity, we're the party of dignity, then that by default means you are not the party.

You are not dignified.

If we're for love and joy, you are not that.

If there's something that's very divisive and condescending about that, you know, I'm reading so much now about the, Malcolm, I am, it's taken 48 years, but I've officially been humbled.

I am willing to admit that I don't know anything.

That's what the election did to me this time.

Like I have to start over.

I have to.

try to see the other side in a different way, not out of the goodness of my heart, but for sanity, for new strategy.

And I'm reading a lot about, you know, the advertisements that said,

women, you can vote differently than your husband's, like, go into the election and you can, he'll never know.

And how our side thought that was freeing or something.

And the other side, I'm reading so many reports of them feeling that was the most condescending

bullshit.

They felt more condescended by us

than by

the sexual assault rapist that is running.

We have to find a different way that includes

everyone in the dignity of each issue, as opposed to continually running on, we are the party of love and hope and joy and freedom.

I'm with you on that.

This is a little controversial, but I think part of giving everyone the dignity is giving everyone the dignity of the consequences of their actions.

And I think part of the reason why 53% of white women voted for this man is because white women are used to eating all of their cake and having all of their cake.

And we think I can vote for this person because of my taxes, because of my whatever, because of my church, because this is what I believe.

And I will never have to pay any kind of interpersonal price for it because we have agreed to the civility.

Where we respect everyone, where we say we can all vote for whatever we want.

We can still be friends.

We can still have a beer.

We can can still whatever.

Great.

Great.

That's great if you believe that.

For me, that doesn't work for me.

If you aren't looking out for me in rooms that I'm not in, including the voting booth, I don't want to hang with you.

And so I think until we get over the civility

thing, which is very strategic, vote however you want and keep whoever you have.

I know a lot of people are like, let's lean into each other.

I'm like, okay.

Or what happens when we lean out?

What happens when we're like, you can have that, but then have it?

If the freedom of choice goes both ways, you choose that person, I choose you're not safe with me.

And when people start paying interpersonal price for that, maybe they're going to weigh something against whatever it is they're weighing on the other side.

I like the fact that we're having these.

This is the right kind of conversation to be having, right?

We got to figure out what our story is.

Absolutely.

I just feel so grateful for you, not only just for your work, but to come on and appeal to the kind of thing thing that's happening right now and utilizing your work in ways that give us different things to talk about.

So thank you so much for coming on.

We really appreciate it.

Super fun.

Yeah, appreciate you, Malcolm.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

All right, Pod Squad.

See you next time.

Bye.

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